. . . my .fivwwmmwmnrw' v “WWW. A 34,- ‘ my v ‘a, ‘A4 . in “Ta “h k .. ar 5 1.. It. fit 1» ‘I ‘ ~ K1 2,4“? @1551.‘ _ 1?! . .r \ ‘0.: . J.» V a?» , a . Qmei kw? .... .,. my 5' . ‘9: JJUM'JLIDJIJLLBJB 1919MB!!! ."..l!|.|!|.|l|.".|!|!|.|!|!.l lulu!!!‘ ’ v _‘_0 film" LIEU!!! "§’;~'f~\5f muuusuungug!" ‘ ‘ ~ "uugiguumuluuauuwmay ' i‘) oonnonooQncncoaonc lfii'mlllllllilflfllllilllil .v - E .- = .- =0 - .- I’ — - I - WIQcq-o-u.-u‘on-u-.‘cunognoaoaono'wuunndvcno ilmlflnfllliihlllflllllllllIllllllllilflllllllllllllllllllill I I - mg, Snail I . c ',- | _l' a; '~-, I iii-:2’; ,_ ’ < . ._ ,- .. . A, ‘1, ‘I’ r(. H 9 I’. , \, \ , J .~-,'- ' 1¢4»~ \"_’\J ,-.. ‘ _ W»‘ > :- .. - ., ‘:éb .I!!-_i__;i.é ' A“ . “My . .A- ‘'“*'“k NON I CIRCULATING --..._v~ ._ ‘Tm—hm“- ’ ’" “"‘ ' "1 ' “ ‘V y .1 :- v—vh AA.“ / . . ~ ~ 1. , » ~_, z~~ ~ .\ ' k ; fl - ~ ~ I ‘ 0 EDGAR SALTUS ‘ ‘ ‘t I! 4 _ __ b ~ , 11: 1 X p ‘ ‘ \ 1 a r r I. ‘ aw‘ :r ‘ N : mq‘nl 1' r. ,h w” > .- 1:5, g, m“ 7,113 x ~ zfiP-I “x3; ' “a- (A - *1‘ WM‘? ' ‘k I (5“ ‘,C-rjn .- ~,, 1 “ + NEW‘ YQRK COMPANY‘. PuplléneRség 185.22 EAST 18TH STREET ,I'r'umglsngns 9F mgnFoim‘s MAGAZINE] The B‘slfpfd American :‘ilovel'Serias. .Vol II. No 9. Annual Subsm ‘tigg,-':$15zg0. Issnéd week] ‘ Entered at. the New York Post \ _ I fflce as :eeqnd-c ss ma'tter. July 28. 1890. I v ' I' it ~ ' a i ' ' ‘ - ~ ‘ ' Y * Y . a H‘ A - ‘ ‘ 1 - \ ~ .y \ \ , , k \' ~ ' L ,5 a, Q ~ . _ , .ngwnféf', ‘I, ~ ’ ’ t‘ - ' v :>“l;-*'-'1,w‘~"-:<"-’:1n ‘ ~‘ ‘ ~ ‘ emiawmaqm . ~ D LORE ” LOVE AND LORE. ' EDGAR SALTUS’ WORKS. The Pace that Kills. A Transient Guest. A Transaction in Hearts. The Truth about Tristrem Variok. Mr. Incoul‘s misadventure. Eden. \, The Anatomy of Negation. The Philosophy of Disenchantment. LOVE AN D LORE BY EDGAR _S_ALTUS NEW YORK BELFORD COMPANY, PUBLISHERS x8-22 EAST 18TH STREET Copyright, 1890, BY EDGAR SALTUS. TO 1509a: atawcett, PERFECT PoET—PERFEoT FRIEND. NEW YORK, 1st july, 1890. 294930 CONTENTS. PAGE THE CoURTs OF LOVE, . . . . . 7 AKosMIsM,_ . ; . . . . . . . 20 THE CANONS OF PURE COURTESY, . 21 FIAT Nox, . . . . . . . . . 35 TIIE FUTURE OF FICTION, . . . . 36 IivIERos, .. . . . . . . . . . . 49 WHAT PESSIMISM Is NOT, . . . . 50 ARCADIA, . . ._ . . . . . . _. 62 MORALITY IN FICTION, . . . . . 63 u I ‘ I I Q o n o a u 8 I ‘FABULOUS ANDALUCIA, . . ." 82 CAROLLING AzURE, . . . . . . 105 THE HEIREss, . . . . . . . . Io7 LOVE AND LORE. THE COURTS OF LOVE. IN years when the world went slower, civilization had a mother—Mary, and an offspring—Love. Beneath the angel there was man, in the cherubim was Cupid. The Crusades, failing in Islam, had made men conquerors of them- selves. In place of the barbarian ‘was ‘the paladin, where the boor had been had come the knight. Worship was a tender dialogue, and manners were gentle and refined. In according indi- viduality to woman, the Church ‘had dowered her with a conscience; in giving her. duties, it gave her rights. And woman, hitherto unversed in the subtler science, found means in her new equipment to take the brute from pas- sion and~make it the divine. She made her own tribunal too, her statutes, her 7 8 LOVE AND LORE. pandects, and her rule. In losing her bonds she gained a scepter. Where ‘she had been servant, now she reigned. When the prison opened there emerged a judge. In Provence, in the middle ages, her code was law. '‘ Of the provenance of that code a word maybe not amiss.~ It was Arthu- rian and, as such, prettily Spangled and fringed with myth. According to Nos— tradamus, a vavasour—guz'dam miles—- youthful, courteous and fair to see, in short the prince of the fairy tale, ad- ventured once upon a time among the flowers and ferns of the forest of Broceliande, where, as every one knows, the palace of the Blameless King reared its enchanted turrets to the sky. And in that forest he encountered a maid of surpassing charm -—f0rm0sa paella—- mounted on a milk-white steed. “I know your quest,” she lisped. “The lady of your choice exacts that you bring her the falcon that dreams in Arthur’s court. Take this palfrey, none other can lead you there.” The cav- alier took the palfrey, a kiss as well, and LOVE AND LORE. 9 journeyed on. After days and nights of escapades, each more marvellous than the other, at last the magic domain was reached, the falcon bearing in its claw the holy writ of love fluttered to his wrist, and the cavalier returned to the lady of his choice, who, after rewarding his valiance—plenz'us- suo remzmaram't amore—convoked a parliament of lords and dames, to whom, with the volubility peculiar to her sex, she communicated the canons of the sacred code, and be- hold, a Critique of Pure Courtesy was given to the world. At exactly what hour this occurred chronology is dumb. Presumably it happened about the time when Roland was sounding his ivory trumpet from Saragossa to Toulouse. In any event, Nostradamus testifies that Courts of Love flourished before Salahaddin did, and Master Andrew avers that they lasted till the papacy moved to Avignon; in fact, to the days when Petrarch was besieging Laure. In a matter of this kind it were pedantic to be more pre- cise. IO LOVE AND LURE. But to return to the point. The code so neatly filched from Arthur was pro- mulgated through the length and breadth of meridional France. Its articles, thirty-one in number, met with instant approval. Of them the follow- ing may be cited : Whoso is indiscreet is unworthy of beingloved. No one can be constrained to love two people. Love should con- stantly increase or constantly diminish. Without exceeding good reason no one should be forbidden to love. In the ab- sence of an irresistible impulsion, there can be no sincerity. Love never lingers in the neighborhood of greed. It is not seemly to make love to one whom it would be unseemly to marry. A lover should have heart for nothing which might displease his dame. True afiec- tion is heightened by the memory of the beloved. Marriage is not an ob- stacle to pleasure. These articles, however joyant they seem to-day, were pertinent to the moment. Love was beginning to be. It was not so much that previously it had LOVE AND LORE. II been in bondage; it was that it had not existed at all. Whoso reviews the parade of antiquity will not meet a heroine in it. Helen, whose name runs off the point of the pen, was the per- sonification of passive beauty. Her eyes set the world on fire, her lips were ice. In Dido, Vergil put some forerunner of the sentiment of later ages, but history descends to Heloise before it can point to a woman who could have answered Cherubino’s question. After the Re- naissance love was superseded by gal- lantry. To-day, if we are to believe the critics, it has become purely platonic. But during the middle ages it reached the altitude of a science—exact at that. The doctors of its jurisprudence were peeresses of France. In ordinary cases of tort the lord of the fief, surrounded by his chief vassals, dispensed justice from his own halls. In the same manner, over the more delicate controversies of private life, the wives of magnates, assisted by the fore‘- most ladies of the county; and weap- oned with the Arthurian Code, erected 12 LOVE AND LORE. tribunals of their own. Their strength was in their weakness. Culprits un- summoned sought a sentence at their knees. The laudations of the trouba- dours had given them authority, their- sex coerced respect. They were not venerable, perhaps, but they were ador able and adored. ' The principal courts were those es- tablished in Aquitaine, in Champagne, in Anjou and Provence. Over the first presided Aliénor,she who was so rich in beauty that when she journeyed she was waylaid not by robbers but by kings. Over the second presided Marie, her daughter, haughtier. than her own closed crown of state. Ermengarde, who was so fair and yet so tall that you would have said a fairy on stilts ruled in Anjou ;and in Provence was Doulce, whose eyes reflected Paradise. At- tended by gentlewomen whose names are music, Mabille, Ysoarde, Briande, Adalarie and Jausserande, garmented according to the season, now' in samite now in zibeline, their trains upheld by pages, their hair garlanded with violets 1:0 VE AND LORE. I 3 and'with rose, at stated intervals, amid the blare of fanfares and the swirl of plumes these ladies opened court. Be- hind them were the insignia of office, a .pedestalled Eros, gold and blue, crowned with a tiara of eglantine and willow, Before them were attentive groups, chatelaines and troubadours; damsels and youths of rank, knights of high de- gree, and dames whose lips were worth the grave to kiss. Sometimes a clerk happened there, sometimes a king. The disputes over-which the judica- tion of these courts was recognized as competent were numerous and quaint. “To Marie “of Champagne and her assist- ant counsellors the following case was submitted : A lady forbade her lover to praise her in public. One day, however, when the lover was in numberous com- pany, it so happened that the name. of ~ the lady was lightly taken. At first he contained himself, but at last, unable to resist the temptation of defending her honor and fair fame, he threw the gauntlet down. Thereat the lady pre- tended that in having contravened a 14 LOVE AND LURE. condition imposed he had lost all claim to her favor. Requested to render judgment in this matter, the Countess of Champagne after due deliberation declared: That the lady was too severe; that the con- dition imposed was illicit; that no one should reproach a lover for defending the object of his choice. And it was ordered that the lover be reinstated in favor and rehabilitated in grace. Which, the prothonotary avers, was done. In the decisions of Doulce of Pro- vence the same sagacity is displayed. A troubadour came before her with the vfollowing complaint: He had fallen in- love with a maiden at a time when the maiden was still a child. A little later he declared his affection, and the maiden promised him a kiss when next they met. A year or two elapsed. Then the maiden, child no longer, re- fused to fulfil her promise, alleging that when it was made she was ignorant of its import and its weight. Now mark the wisdom of Doulce of Provence. . LOVE AND 1.022. 15 She ordered that the fair defendant be at the mercy of the troubadour, who should give her a kiss, which kiss, how- ever, mzgfit 6e at once returned. In another complaint, brought in this instance to Aliénor of Aquitaine, a con- fidant charged by a friend with messages of love found the lady so much to his liking that he addressed her in his own behalf. Instead of repulsing him this early Priscilla encouraged his suit. Therewith the injured swain brought action before the court. The decision of the Countess of Aquitaine was im- mediate and severe. The traitors were sentenced to be debarred the friendship of honest people. It was ordered that neither the one nor the other should in any circumstance be admitted again into decent society. And it was pro- claimed that any knight or lady, how- ever exalted in rank, that dared to fre- quent their company or receive them, should be excommunicated in turn. In a series of complaints brought be- fore' Ermengarde of Anjou other ques- tions were examined. For example : 16 LOVE AND £0125. what should be done if a lover break his faith? and what if the first infidelity come not from him but from his dame? And how shall it be if one discover that afi’ection has reposed on an object un- worthy of it? Parity of indulgence being manifestly impossible, the coun- tess decided that a woman should per- sist in her choice until all hope of regaining her lover has to be abandoned, but that from a man less perseverance should be asked. . It was .in such weighty matters as these that the Courts of Love claimed competence. Marriage then was not a question of happiness but of jointure. On one side of a lady was the cowl, and on the other that arch-seducer, the maker of rhyme. Her natural defend- ers, her husband, her brothers, were rarely at hand. Crusades were perma- nent institutions, the robber barons ag- gressive and over-bold. Of necessity a lady was left, more or less unprotected, to her own devices, and it was over the beatings of her heart that the Courts of Love constituted themselves tribunal. LOVE AND LORE. I7 In a land ‘where the duel cut every dis- pute, the equity and tenderness of their decretals must have calmed many an efiervescence. Moreover, they were supported by public opinion. In the absence of sheriffs and jailors they had chivalry and breeding for aids. There is today many a misdemeanor that the law cannot reach, but which civilization reproves. Society is ever a despot; though it cannot imprison, at least it can expel. Whoso violates its canons goes forth an outlaw from its realm. It was much the same way then. A mis- demeanant lost not liberty but caste. In the case of a woman, presto! the drawbridges were up, in all the land . there was not a chatelaine to receive her. When the culprit happened to be a man—and it usually so happened-— the penalty was an inhibition to love, an inhibition one might think at which he was free to snap’ his fingers. And so he was, only he snapped them all to himself; any lady that listened to him was dishonored for ever. He was ex- cluded from the company of his peers, IS LOVE AND LURE. he could no longer serve a mistress or bear her colors in tourneys and in jousts, But matters rarely went as far as that. Culprits were docile. They made amends for wrong doing, and the anger of their gentle judges was easily ap- peased. They were charming, too these jurists of love, and not capricious either. Not a decision did they render that was not in accordance with prece- dent and the Arthurian code. They were not just alone, they were clement. And they gave their courts such pres- tige that princes and sovereigns deemed it an honor to sit in éanco with them at their sweet debates. That indomitable Richard who was surnamed the Lion'- heart was passing proud of such a favor. .To Alphonse of Aragon no joyance pleasured more. From out the Teuton mists stalked Barberousse, and so en- chanted was he by these subtle sessions that he endeavored to establish them among the‘burgraves of his Rhine. But to certain soils courtesy is indigenous, and that of Germany must have been inapt. In any event Barberousse failed LOVE AND L085. 19 in his attempt. Might we not do better here P At the present moment our social atmosphere has in it the opacity and heaviness of a room long closed. It lacks ozone, it is infected with ennui. Even the debutantes are bored, only the mom smiles, but her smile is that of one who says, Now come what tedium may. Amateur theatricals have lost their grip, tennis does not always al- lure, only puppets dance without fatigue, the hunting-field is rarely filled, and as for the average dinner-party, Retro me, my hostess. In truth, there is a manifest need of something so old that it shall seem quite new, something that shall have a fra- grance and a harmony of its own, some- thing archaic yet novel. And if a few of the young and gracious women who preside at Assembly Balls would under- take a revival of the Courts of Love full surely their competence would be at- tested, and our fair Fifth Avenue might know one day at least of sheer and per- fect joy. W'w AKOSMISM. As one who to some long-locked cham- ber goes, And listens there to what the dead have said, So are there moments when my thoughts are led To those dull chronicles whose pages close Epochs and ages in the same repose That shall the future as the past o’erspread; And where but Memory may tend the dead, Or prune the ivy where once grew the rose. And as there to me from their pages streams The incoherent story of the years, The aimlessness of all we undertake, I think our lives are surely but the dreams Of spirits dwelling in the distant spheres, Who as we die, do one by one awake. 20 THE CANONS‘OF PURE COURTESY. IT is an axiom in law that for every wrong there is a remedy, for every in- jury a redress. And that the verity of that axiom may be manifest we have Courts of Sessions, Courts of Oyer and Terminer, and courts of final appeal. We have judges, chancellors, recorders; we have sheriffs, we have constables, and we have attorneys and counsellors galore. Clearly the provisions we have made for own security are in no wise lacking in amplitude. Does an enemy threaten, presto! he is under bonds to keep the peace ; does he assault us, there on the corner is a policeman who will club him off to jail; is he defamatory, a summons is readily procured; and should our pockets suffer by his enter- prises, we can land him in the Tombs. Nay, does he commit so much of a trespass on our enclosed grounds as can be evidenced by a bruise on a blade of grass, we are free to construe it into a Y 21 22 LOVE AND LORE. tort, and bring action there and then. In spite ofthe dictum about the prophet, it is easy to foresee that when the New Zealander, after jeering at the vestiges of London, shall meditate on Brooklyn Bridge, he will swoon with admiration at our codes of civil and of criminal procedure. On coming to his senses, however, it is permissible to predict that he will marvel at the awkwardness which our legislators display in dealing with the subtler relations of sex. In a language of tormented polish he will murmur—“They, too, have never loved.” For this reproach we have but our- selves to blame. We are essentially a commercial people. There were days in the history of the world when the poet was considered an oracle of the gods. In this year of grace he is a tradesman. He will manufacture and sell a sonnet precisely as a tailor will manufacture and sell a coat. The one difference between them is that the poet allows no discount for cash. Now our legislators, who are not a bit stupider than they look, have gauged the trend LOVE AND LORE. 23 of the age with the nicety of geometri- cians. Taking for corollary to their theorem that gold is the one motor- force, they have lumped all dealers in the ideal into the same class, and de- creed that any injury to the finer sensi- bilities which dollars and cents cannot relieve is not an injury in the eye of the law. It has been said before, and with such wisdom that the saying will bear repetition, that revolutions are created not by the strength of an idea but by the intensity of a sentiment. At the present time there is a distinct agitation in favor of a change in the order of certain existing things. Sweethearts and swains decline to bring their differ- ‘ ences before the same magistrates that sentence the felon at the dock; they demand a tribunal of their own, abench to which they can plead without fear of the reporter, a judge who will not glower at them through inquisitorial spectacles, a jury that will not compute their grievances in coin of the realm. Their cause of action being always delicate, they pray that a light and kiss- 24 L0 VE AND LORE. able hand may hold the scales. If the prayer be unheeded, who shall say what may not occurP—difi‘idence where con- fidence should be, fear instead of trust’ faith displaced by apprehension, buoy- ancy by gloom, and in the garter of the débutante the dagger- of the contadina. In view of these possibilities it has been suggested that Courts of Love modelled after those of media‘eval France, should be established here. Our sky -—this winter, at least—is just as fair as that of Provence, our women fairer still. i In Gascony, in Aquitaine, and in Anjou, recalcitrant lovers were sentenced by dames of high degree; the gracious ladies that preside at Assembly balls are better bred, and it may be, better versed in love than they. For in those days love was beginning to be; to-day—it is. Our maidens have more experience than their cloistered sisters of long ago, and when the buds bloom into flower there are those among them at ‘whose feet Arnaldo Daniello, past master in the lore of love, might sit and learn a lesson. That such a tribunal is pertinent to LOVE AND LORE. 2 5 the hour, and practicable, too, no one , but the old person that lives in the country will venture to deny. Like a sewing-class in Lent, it could move from one house to another, and like any fashionable charity, it could elect its own executive. The duty of the presi- dent would be similar to that of our district attorney; it would be her office to take cognizance of offences occurring within the bailiwick without preliminary complaint from the injured party. The judges, three in number, should be chosen for their competence from among the ranks of married women, while spinsterdom could provide the jurors. The injured party being represented by the president, need not appear save only when direct evidence is necessary to the furtherment of justice. The de- fendant, on the other hand, should be compelled'to argue in his own behalf, and permitted, in the case of extenuat- ing circumstances, to throw himself on the mercy of the court. For deputy- sherifi there is Johnson. He and his minions could serve a summons as 26 LOVE AND LORE. readily as they serve a “bid.” Should the culprit evade service, the summons could be posted in l_is club, and if he then failed to appear, judgment in con- tumacz'am could be rendered. As for the code itself, it could be framed after that of King Arthur, precisely as Black- stone is the base of Kent. By way of the illustration of the working of that code, and of the offences which the court might be called upon to consider, the following instances, all of which occurred within the memory of our youngest matron, may be cited. A young man about town pretended to be enamored of a certain young woman. He visited her, dined with her sister-in- law, talked politics with her father, in fact displayed every indication of being violently in love. He asked, and it was given. The engagement was duly chronicled, the usual malicious remarks were made, the usual congratulations extended. In short, the engagement was precisely like any other. Presently the young man's attentions decomposed and decreased. Instead of dropping in LOVE AND LORE. 27 on his fiance’e every other evening, he contented himself with every other week. Called to account by the big brother, he alleged that he was tired of sitting in the same chair, and, as a mat- ter of fact, never did he deign to sit in it again. The young woman is now happily married to another, but at the time being what redress had she? Her friends might possibly have forgiven her if she had run off with her coach- man, particularly if the coachman turned out to be the presumptive heir to an extinct title; but if she had sued the faithless one for breach of promise every door of the Upper Fourdom would have shut with a bang. Had a court of love existed then, the president could have dealt with the culprit in accordance with Arthurian precedent and the code. Every girl in his set would have been warned against heark- ening to his vows, and, in the event of disobedience, the insubordinate would have been excommunicated in turn. In another case, less heinous perhaps, yet equally recent, a young man about 28 LOVE AND LURE. town wandered from a ball-room into a conservatory, accompanied by a certain young woman, and there, without wait- ing for so much of an invitation as can be conveyed by the quiver of an eyelid, kissed her full upon the mouth. The approach of her mother fortunately prevented a repetition of the assault. “I will never forgive you,” said the young woman. “Oh, but you must, though,” he re- plied. “Well,” she answered, “I may for- give, but I will never forget.” The young man eyed her for an instant and adjusted his cravat. “ I,” he announced—“I both forgive and forget,” and with that and a cir- cular bow to her mother and herself, he turned on his heel and sauntered away. In an instance of this kind it would clearly be the duty of the court to sen- tence the offender to be banished from ball-rooms for the space of a year and a day, unless of course since the com- mission of the ofience he had made the LOVE AND LORE. 29 proper amend by asking the young woman to be his bride. In another instance, one more deplor~ ably frequent than is commonly sup- posed, a young man about town hovered about a certain young woman. The young woman, however, would have none of him. In earlier days the hope~ less lover took to drink, or went forth and died for his country. But this is a subtler age. The young man communed with himself, and as a result of that communion made up to the young woman's dearest friend. The friend, shyly willing, fell presently head-oven heels in love, and to the young woman alluded to harped and exulted over the young man’s charms. This exultation gave the young woman food for thought. . It occurred to her that if the young man- was as fascinating as all that, it was stupid to have let him go. At once her vanity was piqued; her mirror told her that of the two she was the fairer, far. With the charming casuistry of her sex she decided that her friend was false, and determining that she laughs 3O LOVE AND LORE. best who laughs the last, she smoothed her plumage and rebeckoned the young man to her side. The result Whoso runs may read. The friend was prompt- ly jilted. Of three young people, two were made happy and one forlorn. In the Arthurian code no offense of this nature is reproved ; presumably it is one due to the disintegrating effects of modern civilization, and as such un- known in the more guileless days of the Blameless King. But for argument's sake let it be supposed that a modern court of love was called upon to take cognizance of a misdemeanor of this kind. In the absence of precedent, and in view of our national inhibition against ex post facz‘o laws, the court could admonish but not chastise. The culprits would go free, and while they went it would be the ofiice of the presid- ing justices to decide what measure of punishment should be meted out when a like ofi'ence was next committed. In yet another instance, one which ind1rectly bears on the foregoing, a young man about town endeavored to LOVE AND LURE. 31 cloak a flirtation with a married woman by pretending to be in love with a certain young girl. 50 artful was he in pretending, and yet—to the maiden and her people—so unaccountably slow in coming to the point, that one day the stern parent brought him to book. At first the young man was civilly non- committal, but being warmly urged to state his intentions, he picked up his hat and stated that his intention was to leave. The article in the Arthurian code beginning Non decal‘ amare is a direct inhibition against an offence of this kind, and in a precedent cited by the prothonotary of the court held by Doulce, Countess of Provence, the cul— prit lost the privilege of ever serving a lady, or of bearing colors in tourneys and in jousts, a sentence which to-day would be tantamount to expulsion from the field. It' is over misdemeanors of this kind that a court of love could claim jurisdic- tion. The enforcement of its edicts would be as practicable to-day as in the age when Doulce reigned in Provence. 32 LOVE AND LORE. on.‘ 00 1. (O. .Q...’ 000*’ Society is, always has been, and, pre- sumably, always will be, a despot. No statutes ever codified are rigider than its laws. Though it has no dungeons, it can banish. It is’a matter of conven- tion, no doubt, but conventionality is a force of such power that it has exiled emperors and swept queens away. A little while ago, last year or the year be- fore, a young man boasted of the kisses he had culled. He even declared that he had documentary evidence which he was willing to display. A little later, every one whom he met seemed afllicted with that dread disease‘which is known as 1201:’ me tangere. No court of love had convicted him of treason, but in the judgment of his peers he had been weighed and found wanting. Today he is an ambler in the side-scenes of life. And it would be that same sense of what is seemly and of what is not which shuts our door on many another malefactor whom the law of the land is incompetent to reach, that would en- force the sentences of a court such as this. Whoso has marked the subtle LOVE AND LOEE. 33 process by which a fashion is tabooed, and a bonnet, a frock, nay, even the arrangement of the hair, is instantly adopted, will appreciate the potency of the sway which our social leadersexert. They are something more than rulers—— they are legislators as well. And it would be a matter to be grateful for, if they would consent to arbitrate in the delicate controversies of youth, and frame again for us a pandect from the lore of love. Then, indeed, would the questions over which we all of us have puzzled, be ultimately resolved. No longer would Adolphus admonish him- self that he who loves and runs away may live to love another day. No longer would Angelina be forced to braid St. Catharine’s tresses. Chivalry would teach a lesson in good breeding, and fealty become innate. Women, sure of themselves and of their lovers, would mount toa higher niche, and men, knowing that perjury meant dis- honor, would be loyal to their troth. It would not be the millenium nor yet the Golden Age, but it would be a return to 34 LOVE AND LURE. the tenets our ancestors held sacred, the Canons of Pure Courtesy, and with them would be restored to us that aroma of blithe confidence which we are learn- ing to forget. Surely, if we could profit by an amateur circus, what good a court of love might do! ‘ FIAT NOX. MY heart a cemetery is, wherein Three furtive phantoms ceaselessly unite And toss the gauntlet, and prepare each night To battle each with each till one shall win. Beautiful as an uncommitted sin Is one, with but an arrowed tioyv hedight; And one is armed in flame and mailed in light; The third bears the swift scythe, curved keen and thin. The restless combat for my heart, their Prey’ Began long years ago, yet still they brawl, Though Love—the first fair phantom-- faints for breath, And soon will falter, weary of the fray; Then Fame will drop the sword, and both will fall, And leave the triple victory to Death. J 35 THE FUTURE OF FICTION. IT seems but yesterday that the nov- elist succeeded the troubadour. It was the duty of the latter to amuse, to be— guile an idle hour, to compliment and to please. But with the passing of the fantasist it has been discovered that the art of pleasing is the secret of mediocrity, that the scalpel is more useful than the lute. And as the old order changes, song and story change as well. Their mission is no longer to entertain; it is to cure. To Madame de Chateauroux—and to any one else, perhaps, who happenend that way—the fifteenth Louis of France was accustomed to assert that an at- tempt to overdress human nature was nothing less than high treason. This quip has since fossilized into an axiom. If in other countries, our own for in- stance, it has not taken root, may it not be that the soil is at fault P They have truffles in Périgord; there are none in Westchester. But there is aébetter 3 LOVE AND LORE. 37 explanation; we are succeeding in an attempt to complete a civilization which shall be distinctively our own. This effort, which, despite details that jar, is grandly manifest in the political, com- mercial, and social aspects of the hour, is yet in certain departments of literature,in fiction principally, still stumbling in un- lighted paths. Now, fiction is in no sense the trivial thing which it is popu- larly considered. It is an educational factor of peculiar importance, one Whose influence may be salutary or the reverse; moreover, it is the complement of a nation's annals, that insight into daily life which the ancient monarchies neglected to prepare for us, and through which neglect the volumes that treat of past grandeurs and decadence are hand- somely bound and never read. In view, then, of the progressive tendencies of the hour, it is curious to probe the de- fection in this unique respect. In this connection it will seem trite to say that no one begins to fresco a wall before the house is roofed; home- spun must precede satin; utility, grace; 38 L0 VE AND LURE. as a nation we have been so fully occupied in attending to foundations that the need of festoons and astrogals has kept very few people awake. Those whom it has tormented have, generally speaking, been travellers from other shores. They have declared that we are lacking in traditions and ignorant of art. With the traditions we can dis- pense, at least for the present. Time, in which all things unroll, will fill that gap unprompted. But with art it is different. From whatever stand-point it may be considered, art, in its essence,is atheory ; a corner of the universe, some one has said, interpreted by a tempera- ment. With its trans-Atlantic achieve- ments every one is more or less familiar. Impresarii bring with them applauded scores; the masterpieces of foreign painters we have usually achance to examine. Yet in either case the theories that presided at their parturi- tions remain remote. The accusation, then, of the casual traveller is not with- out foundation. We are ignorant of art precisely as we are ignorant of LOVE AND LURE. 39 truflles. ‘ We appreciate, we consume, but we do not produce. This defect, like that of the absence of traditions, Time, it is not utopian to suppose, will one day efi’ace; we will have theories of our own and astonish the world with our conceptions. Yet that which in regard to music and the brush lends excuse to our present lack of enterprise is the fact, already noted, that Europe sends its masterpieces by express. Bar- ring the question of national gloryfwe have no absolute need of composers and painters of native birth; we can enjoy Wagner without understanding a word of German, and a picture signed Millet may be admired without the in- terpreter’s aid. In regard to literature, however, and particularly in regard to fiction, it is permissible to strum a different guitar. We have the liberty no doubt, if we Wish it, to digest English novels, but as a matter of fact we don’t. Save in ex- ceptions rare, yet happily existing, we leave them to the housemaid and the spider. The British author of to-day, 40 LOVE AND LORE. ’--.x d.‘ II‘ as is the case with his German and his Italian brother, exists on the very thing we lack—traditions. He can, and does, with pardonable pride refer you to writers Who Came Before. When our country becomes as old as his, we can, and doubtless will, be able to do very much the same thing; but meanwhile we cannot delight ourselves with the other existing schools of fiction, the French and the Russian, for there is the Tower of Babel looming its inhibition at the very wish. The scores and paintings which Europeans produce may continue yet awhile to pleasure both ear and eye, but as for fiction translated, it is like a pressed flower—the charm, the aroma and life, have gone. It may not, then, be impertinent t0 the purpose of this paper to assert that such fiction as we happen to have, while admirable in many respects, is native only in that the coloring has more or less of a local tint. Eliminate that tint, give it another, and the characteristics difi‘er not at all from those to which the English novelist has accustomed us; LOVE AND LORE. 41 I ._-,....-._._ they perfectly express a relative im— pression of What Should Be and What Should Not; they rarely express What Is. In the home manufacture the action may be a trifle more rapid; in the last chapter there may be fewer births and obituaries and a finer regard for the reader's privilege to take this and that for granted; but in the main the model is the same, and it is of this model that the public is getting weary. What it wants is something else. Less of the magic lantern, perhaps, and more of life; not, that particular phase which ought to be and is not, but life in its pettiness‘ and occasional splendor, and displayed, too, with so little ink that at the last page the reader may murmur, “I would recognize those people on sight.” In view, however, of certain conditions of thought, an attempt of this kind is less easy than might be supposed. To give a novel that interest which shall differentiate it from a disquisition, a plot is necessary. In that plot there may be a murder, a forgery, some mis- ; ,_._.4.L _ __ H“ 42 LOVE AND LORE. adventure, the loot of an illusion—all of these elements, if need be, and more of the same kind; but there must be love, and therein lies the difliculty. The murder may be committed in cir- cumstances of such atrocity that the reader will scream with fright; the forms of villany exposed in the forgery or in the misadventure may rival any- thing in the Newgate Calendar; but love, in this country at least, must be treated from the Puritan stand-point. There would, of course, be no difficulty in so treating it were the Puritan stand- point the only one from which it could be viewed. Unfortunately for human nature, there happens to be many an- other one than that. In a novel, then, which aims to portray life not as we want it to be, but as it is, why should the various phases of the lever of exist- ence be omitted? Why, indeed? It cannot be because of the Young Per- son, for ignorance has never preserved a virtue yet. Nor is it because of any conviction that woman is always either Vestal or monandrous, for we are aware LOVE AND LORE. 43 that that is not the case. It may, then, be due to some conventional idea con- cerning the limits in which ornamental literature should move. In that event we may wonder whence it came. Cer- tainly not from the British classics, nor yet from those which we regard as our own. Perhaps, then, it is a secretion of the mind, a category of the intellect which, like the concepts of time and of space, has no existence outside of our own imagination. To choose one argument from an hundred, consider Shakspere’s suavest romance, “Romeo and juliet.” It is true that plot and characters are a transferrence from a story which Luigi da Porto fabricated out of a Veronese legend, and it is equally true that, the other day, somebody announced that Shakspere never wrote a line in his life. But let it be admitted that the tragedy in question is the work of another man with the same name; the beauty of the lines exist, the interest in hero and heroine remain unchanged, the drama is as palpitating as before 44 LOVE AND LORE. and yet the central situation, the one which lends it its charm and allure- ment, is not seduction, for in that case 1721122’! would be a victim to the wiles of Romeo, and the moralist might have his little say. But it is not that; it is a portrayal of that emotion which stirs the pulse of every youth, however noble, and every maiden, however pure, and one, parenthetically, without which the world would cease to be. And now, by way of example, let it be sup- posed that the legend of Romeo and jl'ulz'et is adapted and localized; that, instead of being the children of inimical robber barons, they are the children of rival jobbers in stocks; divest them of the magnificence of myth; put them here in New York; make them talk prose instead of melody, but preserve the central situation, and from where you sit you can hear the appeals to Comstock. To this it may be objected that the ability which Shakspere, or his namesake, possessed is overlooked, and upon that hypothetical objection the point of this paper may safely turn;— LOVE AND LORE. 45 there is no criterion by which a story can be judged as moral or the reverse; there are but to classes of fiction— stories which are well written and stories which are not. The latter classifica- tion no one is ever forced to consider, but in the former are to be found the!’ elements of that future branch of liter-) ature which may not be fiction, perhaps? or, at least, not fiction as we now usej that term, but rather a sentiable psy-i chology for the use of the idle, one that is dictated by the heart, one that whispers to the reader and disturbs him, and leads him unconsciously into that temple which Marcus Aurelius erected to compassion, to human kind, ness and abnegation of self. vx/ To surprise the reader in this fashion is well-nigh impossible with the methods now in vogue. The ambitious writew \ i has on one side of him a corpse still warm, in whose features he recognizes Romanticism; on the other is that silk stocking filled with mud which is the / emblem of the Naturalists. But some-i‘ where near at hand are tombs marked 46 LOVE AND LORE. Dostoi'evsky, Flaubert, Eliot—names that tell all yet nothing save disinter- estedness, charity, and forgiveness of sin. Should he hesitate, he is lost, for romanticism has guiles and philters, the revery in the moonlight, the kiss of women, the shock of swords, all the luridness of melodrama enveloped in sonorous periods, round and empty, And naturalism, too, has its promises, the indignation of the critic, and coffers that overflow. Between allurements like these many have halted and will \ halt and conjecture, but presently, to- morrow perhaps, some hero of letters will brush them both aside and pass, with lip austere, straight to the tombs and kneel there and commune. When he rises, it will be with that novel which you and I await. Concerning the possible elements of that work suppositions are not wholly idle. In any event it is permissible to fancy that the author will be too wise not to be occasionally stupid. He will leave conventionality in the skirts of the sur- plice; Goethe demanded more light—— LOVE AND LURE. 47 he will need more air, not the atmos- phere of a seraglio, but some broad plateau where the lungs are invigorated He will study the crowd and its manations, the unit as well, and then, from his knowledge of nature and his knowledge of man, he will be able to explain the multiplicity of the ego, the variable influence of surroundings, the change of views that ensue. Behind the visible act will be the analysis of the invisible cause, the coordination of contradictories, the inevitable deduced from chance. And this so clearly, yet so objectively, that the reader who picks up the book as he might enter a fancy ball, suddenly, through the mere force of accumulated trifles and unobserved effects, will find himself among men and women who no longer seem, but are, who appeal to him, for whom he sufiers, and for whose miseries he would devise a cure. It is this that the coming novelist will do. In the perspective he may leave the nothingness of creeds, but in the fore- m, nature her-W 48 i LOVE AND LURE. ground will be the majesty of that Un- known which our intellect has been impotent to grasp. He will do this, more perhaps, for always in his ears will be the mutterings of the Sphinx propounding the eternal riddle. And by way of reward, a year or two after his death one publisher will confide to another that Soandso is beginning to sell. IMEROS. MY heart a haunted manor is, where time Has fumbled noiselessly with moulder- ing hands ; At sunset ghosts troop out in sudden bands, At noon 'tis vacant as a house of crime. But when, unseen as sound, the night winds climb The higher keys with their unstilled demands, It wakes to memories of other lands And thrills with echoes of enchanted rhyme. Then through the dreams and hopes of earlier days A fall of phantom footsteps on the stair Approaches near, and ever nearer yet, A voice rings through my 1ife’s deserted ways ; I turn to greet thee, Love— The empty air Holds but the spectre of my own regret. 49 s \v WHAT PESSIMISM IS NOT. WHEN a man does away with him- self his necrologist avers that he was tired of living. Lexicographers of the future are invited to take note that a necrologist is a poet. No one has ever been tired of life. The man that does away with himself really wants to live. What he does not want are the miseries attendant on his own particular exist- ence. Abolish them, and he will swear \nnst.~~~--~»M-wv To the average mind it is the pessi- mist that makes use of the bare bodkin. The pessimist does nothing of the sort. Neither does he pull wry faces at the inevitable. To his thinking everything can happen, ay, even to the things he desires the most,-—serenity of spirit, for instance, or the absence of pain. With these gifts he is contented as though he were dead. Posterity having done by Methuselah nothing for him, he does absolutely ' nothing for it. But he will share a 50 LOVE AND LORE. 51 paradox with the first comer, and he is so friendly to his neighbor that had‘ they been jilted by the same woman they could not be on better terms, The charm about the pessimist is that he declines to take himself seriously, or, for that matter, any one else. Dreams, we know, are true while they last ; and to the pessimist we live in dreams,— occasionally in nightmare, but always in something impermanent and evanes- cent as the colors that striate a'mist. To one mailed in a creed like that, come what sorrow can. The Stoic was never more placid. And yet, through a vagary of the understanding,—a vagary, be it said, that contains all the elements of libeL—the pessimist has been con- founded with the optiriiis . is the latter that takes everything amiss. He has any number of big dolls, and their sawdust disconcerts him terribly. He is in earnest, too ; it tries him to be balked, and of all things that he dislikes ~——and alist of them would defy an index—failure heads the list. Now, failure is very salutary, much more so But it a “i. -\ 52 LOVE AND LORE. than success, but the optimist will have none of it, it does not enter into his scheme of existence; when it visits him he dashes his head in the pillow, and then it is that the necrol- ogist has his little say: Ooz'z‘ anus, aoz't onus, {drrr/Phnistinia to the contrary, the pessimist is the most contented of men. He holds that nothing is as bad as it might be. Do him an injury, and a canary-bird could not bear less malice. Do him a kindness, and he is afloat in a sea of surprises. He is civil, too. Albeit sceptical as a rag-picker, he will agree with you on every subject. He will admit anything—that there are lands where two and two make five, that there are others where fluids are solids. He will even consent to the possibility of moral substances. He denies nothing, except one thing,——to wit, that happiness exists. In this, the negation is not due to belief, for that is an affair of temperament, but to reason, which is 19gi_c_.____W/,- w- -e / mplaying that logic he has at LOVE AND LOEE. 5 3 Pleasure a passing fling. And if the microscopic eye be brought to hear, what is pleasure if it be not this,—a cessation and alleviation of pain? Of the enchantments of this world,—-and this world has many,—the uniquest perhaps of all is the easy-chair after prolonged fatigue. Or, if it be not that, then is it the feast after fasting, the fanfare of the revel and the swirl of plumes, the pressure of the hand we yearned to touch. Or, if it be not any of these, then is it the strophium of the victor, fame’s laurel, the bank-accounts of wealth, or, last and best, the sheer and perfect peace of conscience at rest. Pleasure, when acute, is the accom- plishment of the thing we desired most. But the antecedent desire is pain; satisfied, it is lulled, and for one that is satisfied there are many unappeased. Desire, too, is long drawn out, pleasure brief and narrowly measured. Pleasure, moreover, is a transient guest. In that hostelry, our heart, it is succeeded by another. The first is an apparition, the second an illusion that lingers still. 54 LOVE AND LURE. The easy-chair in which we dozed,gthe cup we drained, the lips we would have balked the grave to kiss, the feast, the festival, have all been ours. In place of a longing is the cessation of a want. Unless a new one presently arise, inthe centre of our delight will surge that spectre whose name is Ennui. So much for Pleasure. If you hearken to the pessimist, he will tell you that it swings like a pendulum between bore- dom and pain. He is wrong, of course. It is, however, a fact, curious, yet well attested, that the blind, who of'all people are pitied the most, possess the serenest visage. This phenomenon serves the pessimist as corroboration of a pet paralogism,—-to wit, that the narrower the circle of vision the greater the contentment, and, conversely, the wider the circle the greater the discon- tent. Over this- theory he flaunts a standard. For your personal view in the matter, or for mine, he cares not a rap. From the activity of an age like our own he turns as from an orgy. Geographers assert that the happiest LOVE AND LORE. 5 5 land is the one which has the least need of importations. The pessimist affirms that the most contented man is he who suflices to himself. Wealth, he is fond of noting, consists in the limitation of desires ; and, as a consequence, the fewer the desires, the serener the mind. Truly the idiot is more to be envied than we thought. But it is against happiness that he has his merriest fling. Pleasure we have already recognized as a transient guest, but happiness is even less than that, it is a fiction of the'non-existent. In es- sence it is intangible, the desire for it is insatiable, and as such never fulfilled. So at least he asserts ; but we who have clearer ideas have the right to assume that happiness is not intangible, that it consists in what we desire most, in beauty for instance, in genius, esteem, wealth, health, glory, and power. Only a sophist with a cold in the head would affirm that these things are intangible. Nor are they, he answers. They may be obtained in two ways—congenitally, as in the case of a poet-prince, or after 56 LO VE AND LORE. prolonged endeavors. In the first case they are taken by their possessor as a matter of course. They are as natural to him as the air he breathes. Their absence would cause discomfort, their presence brings no joy. On the other hand, if their reunion be accomplished after prolonged efforts, the possessor, on obtaining them, finds himself as poor as before. When they represented hap- piness it was when they were afar. It must be stupid to be wise all alone, but these views which the pessimist shares with no one but himself have not rendered him in the least down- hearted. In his blithe misanthropy he is even consistent. In denying that happiness exists to-day, he denies that it will exist to~morrow,—in that char- less morrow which evolution has in charge. According to his idea, the golden age is not behind us, but beyond. The earth, one day, will be a garden. Poverty will have vanished. There will be but one caste,——Equality; but one ruler,—-Love. Diseases will have been vanquished. Superstitions will have LO VE AND LOEE. 57 faded. Even Envy will have disap- peared. In that blessed era, when man journeys it will be through the air. And not in an elevated, either. He will have abolished time and sequestrated space. He will enchain a comet, meas- ure the Infinite, and visit Mars. He will have new harmonies, solid horizons, and larger life. And in this fairy-land where Muhammad’s paradise is realized and his prophecy as well, where quail fly roasted from the spit and turkeys bone themselves, where there is neither toil nor labor, where pain has ceased to be, humanity will be bored to death. Of the thousand-and-one sultans and sul- tanas of these newer nights, some will cut their own throats, some the throats of others. For pain is the inevitable concomitant of life, and as necessary to mankind as the keel is to the ship. If it were not, the pessimist asks, why should it have been given us? Once upon a time a satrap offered a vast reward—a shower of smaragdine, the legend says—to whomso invented a new delight. Had this sorry fellow ad- 58 LOVE AND LORE. ventured that way, one may fancy that his career would have been brief. That he kept out of harm's reach is to be deplored. Society has no use for a man who perpetrates paradox in cold blood. Were it in self-defence, passe encore. But without even the excuse of an at- tack, without any one even noticing him, he commits overt acts of violence on our faith, and to make matters still worse he commits them under an assumed name. or truly the man that greets disaster with a smile does not resemble the pessimist with whom literature has made us familiar. In the rogues’ gallery of fiction his face is pitted with despon- dency; he is a self-acting complainer; he would carp at anything—at the sunlight, at E. P. Roe’s novels, at the sorceries of spring, or bi-metallism. There is nothing sacred to his snarl: he would point to a lily of the field and declare that it needed dusting. The chronicles of his deeds and days have the monotony of the infernal regions: they are' made up of groans. Into the ,eyes of beauty he will gaze as though LOVE AND LORE. 59 some small tooth had mined his heart from a revel he will rise with disgust~ He rants a little, too, just as Hamlet does. But the individual with the paradox strums a different guitar. He is on such good terms with the world that he‘ could not be blue if he tried. To him] life is a howling farce : he sits in his stall’ and enjoys it. At the typical pessimist he jests as a master may jest at an over1 zealous apprentice. In no other respect has he the slightest affiliation with him. He is a pessimist, indeed, but not a. miserabilist,—-a logician, not a dolt. i In its widest expression theflcree which he holds is one of universal con- tentment. In the matter of ancestry it can look back through the terraces of time and claim more quarterings than the most baronial of Austrian barons. It was born before history; its founder was Buddha, a sage whose existence is lost in the magnificence of myth,— there let it rest. To-day pessimism is a mosaic of the lore of Orient and Occident, an estray clean as the ocean 60 LOVE AND LORE. and unstayable as the wind. It is based on a truism: Whatever will be, is. That proposition once grasped, the jocularity of its theoretic exponent is easily understood. He sees no rhyme, and less reason, in making faces at a chain of necessity in which we are all interlinked. “We may rejoice,” he announces, “and repent, We may form good resolutions; but the joy and the repentance and the good resolutions come to us of themselves, and not until it is appointed that they shall do so. When they do come, however sincere the repentance may be, however superb the resolutions, the course of things moves on unchanged and changeless as before. Should nature destine one man to be wise and to be brave, wise and brave he will be. Should she destine another to be scatter-brained and imbecile, scatter— brained and imbecile he will become. There is no merit, no blame, to be ascribed to her or to them. The wishes that throb in our heart may rebel, but the great mother snuffs them out like LOVE AND LORE. 61 a candle. She is governed herself, her laws are ours.” Such is his theory. Forgive him it. _ Nature presumably destined him to be scatter-brained, and scatter-brained he has become. No blame can be ascribed to her or to him. And yet, in spite of the hilarity of the impolite, pessimism is a gentleman still: its foremost tenet, a tenet, parenthetically, which it bor- rowed from the Moors, a tenet which founded courtesy, is abnegation of self. It teaches that it is small to remember, great to forgive. It is a doctrine of charity and good will to all. In its prescriptions there is not a single tear. And as to its one negation, that of the attainment of happiness, let us be lenient. We have had an eternity be- hind us, and if in that eternity we found no Utopia, why should we expect it in the days to be? ARCADIA. THERE is a land that stretches far away Through c'andors of unviolated dreams, A land that to the vagrant fancy seems A paradise of sempiternal May. And it is called Arcadia, they say Within its flower fields are quiet streams ‘ And green and cool retreats, and beauty beams On ev’ry side while Pleasure lords the _ daY— ' O lovely land! thou liest far away, Too far, indeed, for laggard steps like mine; Yet I have heard returning travellers say, That on thy frontiers they had marked a sign Telling to each that happiness was his, Where pain is not, and ' not where pleasure is. 62 MORALITY IN FICTION. IN the publishing world it is conceded that the average man, occupied as he is in pursuits more or less fatiguing, will not accept literature at any price. What he wants is twenty-five cents’ worth of distraction. His wife, however, and his daughter possess a wider leisure, and not infrequently afiner taste. They are as attentive in the selection of a novel as in the choice of a gown. The mater— ial is almost as important as the cut. Inasmuch, then, as the writer who de- clines to provide diversion must look mainly to women for recognition, it is important to know whether, in fiction, it is the moral element that they prefer or its opposite. On this point there is a delightful an- ecdote which admirably pictures the exact shading of the feminine mind, and which in this matter is decisive. Unfortunately, this is not the place to tell it. To get at the question, then, through another gate, an understanding 63 64 LOVE AND LORD. of what is meant by morality cannot be amiss. In nature this i o criterion. One may review the parade of history, the search for a standard is vain. From the synoptic gospels the student learns that distinction is made between what is right and what is wrong, and to this assuredly, it would be pleasant to hold, were it not that ideas of right and of wrong vary with the latitude. There is barely a tenet that is universally re- ceived. And what is still more note- worthy is the fact that what is reproved in one locality is applauded in another. But even were it otherwise the general acceptance of a tenet is not a proof of its validity. Once upon a time it was a universal belief that the earth was flat, it was once a universal belief that the earth was stationary, it was once a uni- versal belief that the earth was the top of all creation, and that the sun, the stars, the moon, shone solely for its benefit. . We have changed all that. In view, then, of the divergence and con- volutions of opinion, perhaps it may not be indecorous to regard morality as a LO VE AND LORE. 65 matter of local option, controlled by the climate. That our climate is suited solely to pastorals and fairy-tales we have the amplest testimony from the critics. The query, however, which naturally arises in the mind of even the most un- aggressive of novelists is whether he should permit the climate to affect his own individual pen. Frontiers are cer- tainly admirable in their usefulness, but Thought will often decline to be de- tained. It is restive under conventions, and its restiveness is increased by the prescience that Time, who is at least a gentleman, will bring it its due unsought. Meanwhile. the novelist whom he favors with its championship should think, not of the climate, but of the ladies, and ask himself, as good breeding, dic- tates, what manner of tale they prefer. In endeavoring to answer this ques- tion to his own satisfaction and to theirs, he will probably remember that fashions change, that the feminine eye is pleasured by the latest, and that it is for‘ him, as Bachelor of Taste, to be one 66 LOVE AND LORE. season in advance of the prevailing mode. Let him be ridiculed to-day, to-morrow’s ample hands are full of rewards. At the critic he can afford to smile; it is a more gracious court to which he turns. And from the know- ledge of his judges which life has brought, may he not safely infer that what they want, first and foremost, is a plot of sustained interest presented with the best possible effect? Now, to be interesting is, admittedly, to say the opposite of what is expected. The best effects—witness Rembrandt— are due to an almost total absence of light; and as for the plot, from'whence may it come, if not from life P Yet here ‘ is the rub. It'is not given to every one to pass his existence in the society of Anthony-Trollope heroines; nor does every one converse exclusively of edelweiss and myosotis. The critic may it is true, but in that case it is difficult. to imagine him as a man of the world, or even of its neighborhood. His home is the Ideal, which we of coarser clay may admire, yet never approach. Young LO VE AND LURE. 67 women do not always act as though- they had stepped from a ballad, and young men do not always comport themselves after the fashion of German sentimentalists. In real life they are seldom so well-behaved. Adolphus, for instance, is sometimes overheard invit- ing Angelina to dance with him the waltz from “ Faust.” That he should do so is manifestly unconventional, and it is unseemly of Angelina does she accept. But the fact that the invitation is extended does not necessarily render its potrayal in fiction immoral. In the opinion of grave thinkers it is exactly the contrary. It offers the novelist possibilities in homiletics which are not at all to be disdained. There are per- haps a few who will not agree to this. But what is there that is not con- tradicted? Are there not (376’ par la momie people illiberal enough to deny that the upper notes of the flute are blue? The statement which passes un- challenged is a platitude. In this particular, then, it may be serviceable to define in what immorality 68 LO VD AND LORD. in fiction consists, and this perhaps can be best accomplished by means of a few examples. The novels of the un- lamented Marquess of Sade turn wholly on the invitation alluded to, and that invitation is the basis of half of the Comédie Humaine. But where the marquess is lascive as a faun, Balzac is severe as an ancestor in oil. To the one virtue represented stupidity, to the other it represented the sublime. The author of “justine ” was wholly Cartha- ginian in his views, the author of “ La F ille aux Yeux d’Or ” thoroughly logi- cal. Balzac degraded his reprehensible characters, de Sade ennobled them. It is true the latter was crazy, but then the same thing has been hinted of Balzac. This, however, by the way, and the point of which the conveyance has been sought is this, that if the novelist in handling that invitation and in deduc- ing its rigorous results has the ability to show that, independent of geography, it is conscience which makes the sinner, not the sin, he is deserving of the LOVE AND LORE. 09 thanks of every guardian, be that guard- ian but ad Zz'tem. On the other hand, when the novel- ist imitates de Sade, as has Mr. Mallock in the “Romance of the Nineteenth Century,” and sends his heroine on the clear level flight of angel wings straight up to Paradise, instead of leaving her to prowl a wanton in the purlieus of the parish, then indeed we have the immoral in fiction, the apotheosis of vice. It is presumably due to a mis understanding of these distinctions that the “ Scarlet Letter ” and “Adam Bede " are thought unsuited to the Young Person. Admittedly, the novelist who goes about kicking down screens and pulling curtains aside is ill advised. No one save the Quaker maiden of history ever really wanted to be shocked. A hint is easy of digestion, and if the novelist know his art he can send out that hint masked to the teeth and yet pregnant with suggestion. Of the critic he need not concern himself in the least, unless it be to hope for his disapproval; for 7o LOVE AND LORE. the average reviewer, in love with a past of which he knows nothing, and afraid of a future in which he will have no part, is a very amusing individual. Does he condemn a book, it succeeds. Does he praise it, presto! it is dead. It is of the ladies and of their finer sus- ceptibilities that the novelist should take most heed. And what healthy- minded woman is there that would ob- ject to a novel because it happened to turn on that archaic duo which has been sung since time began and which at each repetition seems an original theme? If objection there be, it is the accompaniment that jars, not the aria itself. In Paris, a year or two ago, the suc- cess of the season was the “ Immortel,” a series of anecdotes so acrid in odor that they would upset a ragpicker, and yet so artfully interwoven that they could safely pass into the hands of the Young Person. Elle verraz'z‘ Que du feu. In our more immediate neighbor- hood the success of the year was Miss Rives’ novel, a work well calculated to LOVE AND LURE. 7: bring the Young Person dreams, but not at all of a nature to keep her guardian awake. In the one you mark the assur- ance of a'man that knows whereof he speaks and does not hesitate to be loqua- cious. In the other you feel the influ- ence and the charm of an imagination at war with the commonplace, an imagina- tion at once turbulent and refined. These two books have caused much pain to the critic, and what has completed the critic's distress is the fact that both of them are masterpieces. In noting this incident, the present writer refers of course merely to the reviewers in this country. In France they strum a dif- ferent guitar. A little while ago, a few ‘decades at most, Stendhal was pleased to say, “La moralité américaine me semble d’une abominable vulgarité, et en lisant les ouvrages de leurs hommes distingués, je n’éprouve qu’un seul désir, c’est de ne jamais les-recon- trer.” One may fancy that his very ink would blush did he encounter the gen- tlemen who took Miss Rives to task. But then it is such an easy matter to 72 L0 VD AND LORD. find fault. And that easy matter is made the easier in that the impeccable exists only to the genius and his peers. At the time when Voltaire overshadowed the majesty of two kings, he was ac- cused of not knowing orthography, “ So much the Worse for orthography,” said Rivarol. Truly there are few among us that can wear our wrinkles, as did Ninon de 1’Enclos, on the heel. The masters of ornamental literature have shown as much unconcern in this matter as we do of the state of the weather in Fiji. They occupied them- selves in dissecting the human heart, in voicing nature, in displaying man. The question of morality they left to the casuists. To refuse them countenance“ on that account is like putting cotton in the ear: a possible influenza may be avoided, but hearing is dulled. Yet few are illiberal enough for that. i In Boston, that city which the wanderer from the West described as a place where respect- ability stalked unchecked, an audience of exceeding refinement sat out “CEdipus Tyrannus,” of which the central situa- LOVE AND LORE. 73 tion is barely mentionable in ordinary speech. And, what is more noteworthy, the audience applauded that stupen- dous tragedy with a full understanding of its meaning, and with no other thought than one of admiration for Sophocles and the power which that giant displayed. Shakespeare and Mo- liére, to cite the higher names, possess a magnetism that is sentiable even by the indifferent; the science of life was theirs by right of intuition; they put no ink in the veins of their characters, they made them of flesh and of blood, sometimes noble, often the reverse, but always real. They did not paint exist- ence as we would like it to be, but as it is. To call them immoral on that account is to be a paradoxist indeed. The effect of such writers on an impressionable adolescent is that of a bugle blown sud- denly through the quiet of a dawn: he awakes with the thrill of larger life. Yet give him Thackeray, against ‘whom the charge of immorality has yet to be brought, and he will consider debts the 74 LOVE AND LORE. appanage of a gentleman, and the bilk- ing of tailors an amiable pursuit. The question, then of morality in fiction is seemingly a q estion of liter- ary ability. An author may handle any topic, however sca/zreux, provided that he seek less to entertain than to in struct. “ Ich scriebe nicht zu gefallen," said Goethe. “Ihr sollt was lernen.” Any one can map a plot of such lanci- nating interest that were it put on the stage the audience would rush from the theatre screaming with fright. Any one with two cents’ worth of imagina- tion and a cigarette can do that. And as for pleasing, why, that is the whole secret of mediocrity. But to be artistic l.‘ is a different matter. Art in fiction 1 iconsists in the detention of the evan- lescent. And in detaining it the artist l ishould be as unaffected by local caprices as the mathematician is unaffected by the ‘color of the pencil with which his equation is solved. It is in the powder that the danger lurks, not in the fuse. The difference between Dr. jekyll in the play and Dr. Jekyll in the novel is a LO VE AND LO/eE. 75 case in point. In the novel the feminine element is absent. The action of the play turns on the murder of a man who thwarts the would-be ravisher of his daughter. The instant transformation of the perfect lover into the perfect beast is perhaps not one which Mr. Steven- son would feel himself called upon _to depict, and yet an opportunity richer in the evanescent, in retroacting emotions and hatred of self, it is diflicult for the artist to devise. Had Mr. Stevenson availed himself of it, it is permissible to suppose that, as a lesson in life, it would have been of a benefit as- ap- preciable as the admonition which he actually gave. It is in this pinning of the evanescent that such artists as Mr. Howells and M. Bourget excel. Indeed, the one differ- ence between them is that where Mr. Howells is handicapped by the prudery of Anglo -American prejudices, ‘VI. Bourget is in possession of an untram- meled pen. To the one the question of conventionalities is paramount, to the other it does not exist,--a state of af- 76 LO VD AND LORD. fairs which may perhaps account for the fact that where Mr. Howells lulls his reader with minor chords, M. Bourget brings him a succession of little thrills that are comparable only to those which the visit of the unexpected wasp con- veys. M. Bourget represents the toni- fying element in fiction, Mr. Howells the sedative. Moreover, in this question there is the relativity to be considered. Not to every one is it given to disentangle threads of silk from the refuse of the barn. If every maker of rhyme stood on the same pedestal as Victor Hugo, Victor Hugo would cease to be a syno- nyme. And, by the same token, if every novelist spawned upon the public the same quality of mud as the author of “La Terre," Zola would be as indis- tinguishable from his brethren as one ballet-dancer is from another. That matters are otherwise we may indeed be thankful. There are hours in which Hugo is stupid as an anonymous land- scape, and Zola inartistic as a Wesleyan chapel. And yet both are deserving of LOVE AND LORE. 77 vivas. Both declined to abide by canons that others had made. With that dower of common sense which is the appurtenance of makers of epochs- each from his individual‘ tower discov- ered that high-roads are sterile. There, upon Hugo entered the drawing-room of letters attired in a new theory; Zola opened a kindergarten and gave his scholars facts. From the one came the watchword of Liberty in Art; and we all remember how demoniac Gautier was in itsdefence. On the standard of the other is the rubric, Down with Dream. Latterly Romanticism has been relegated to the provinces, and Naturalism has ceased to appeal. As a consequence, the pickets that guard the literary outposts are alert for the earliest signal that shall rumor a new manifesto. It is evident to them as to us that our fiction, if not next door to a pauper, lives practically in the same street. The reader is tired of whipped cream and filigrees; he has an indiges- tion of pemmican. Well, then, may the pickets bite their thumbs. It com- 78 LOVE AND LORE. i l l l l l eth not, they mourn. Yet even as they do so it has passed the sentinels unchal- lenged and crossed the lines unseen. The Exact Representation of the Fugi- ' tive Impression is the name it bears. That it may be recognized on sight, the present writer begs the indulgence of a moment more. _ The pleasure which comes of a novel should be physical. It should put the reader in a state of tension sufficient to cause an evocation of fancies which without that influence would decline to appear. ‘The author who affects his i i reader as an easy chair does may be com- forting as easy chairs are,but there comes an hour when he is relegated to the gar- ret. The first duty of a novelist is to irri- tate the reader. The second duty is to be able to bone the dictionary as readily as a clay‘ bones a bird. The third duty is to have emotions, and to be so prompt in detaining them that the reader shares their effect. But, paramount of all, he should let no work go from him that does not instil some lesson and make men, and women too, the better and LOVE AND LURE. 79 "‘ "‘\vs~m the wiser for his prose. If he fail in any one of these duties, then the Exact Representation of the Fugitive Impres- sion is not his to convey. / Already the day of lullabies is gone; gone are the pastorals of our youth; gone, too, are the harpists we were wont to hear. The skies are less neighborly than in days of old, the earth is larger, and literature of quicker breath. Of the charmers of earlier years, some have not left their names, some have faded into myth, while others have passed even from mythology itself. To be authoritative to-day the novelist must learn to forget. In his grasp are newer tools and methods of such cun- ning that with them he can paint the impalpable and chisel a dream. On the subject of morality he should still be cautious. Yet does he possess those finer fibres of which refinement is the woof, he needs no rememoration to di- vine that the secret of morality in fiction consists less in situations suggested than in the sentiments which those situations arouse. \ ../' ,..- _-.. - M‘. >,,,-.-...,__‘4 80 LOVD AND LORD. There are, it may be, a number of es- timable people who will not be able to feel wholly sure that the foregoing statements are true. But then there are people who are not sure that it is cold in winter, or that Vergil is a bore, unless they read it in print. There are even people who gauge the value of a book by the number of its editions. You, sir, and you, madam, who do the writer the honor to read these lines, are assuredly better informed ; yet have you a lingering doubt, then let him pray you, take a glance through the dust-bins of fiction. WALDEN. IN swift and sudden dreams each night I greet The host of friends that in my heart I bear; I chat in paradox with Baudelaire, I talk with Gautier of the obsolete-— My absinthe and de Musset’s brandy meet: And by some special favor here and there, Now with Elaine and now with Guin- evere, I pass the day in some serene retreat. Heine’s malicious eyes have gazed in mine, And I have sat at Leopardi’s feet, V And once I heard the lute-strung songs divine That Sappho and the Lesbian girls re- peat, But yet, what night have I not sought in vain To meet and muse with Emerson again. 81 FABULOUS ANDALUCIA. THE history of Andalucia is a by-path through the history of lore and of love, the forgotten link in the chain of civil- ization. Its beauty was such that among its enchanted uplands Strabo placed the Elysian fields. Its primal laws were in verse, and framed, so runs the legend, six thousand years before the beginning of Time. To mediaeval makers of chronicles, Tubal, fifth son of japhet, was the first to set foot on its shore. But earlier historians ignorant of Noah's descendant and, it may be, better informed, hold that after the episodes connected with the Golden Fleece, the Argonauts, guided by Her- cules, sailed the seas and loitered a while in Spain, where they were joined by refugees escaping from the totter and fall of Troy. Black was their national color. You can see that black in the mantillas of to-day. After the Greek 82 LOVE AND LURE. 83 adventures came the Phoenicians : when the latter took their leave, their anchors were of gold. At that time Pygmalion was King of Tyr. The gold interested him, he wanted more, and presently at Gaddir (Cadix) a colony was established and a temple too. It is out of that temple that it is possible to get a clew to the civiliz- ation of the world. By way of proem it may be noted that in Phoenicia, the Canaan of the Bible, known to the Greeks as the Land of Red, the foremost divinity was Melk’- arth,—Hercules. There were other gods of resplendent glory. There was Ba’al Phégor whose altar was honored in nameless ways. There was Ba’al Tis, known to the Babylonians as Mylitta, to the Persians as Mithra, she who was Aphrodite to the Greeks. And there were other and less potent shrines, but no halo was so luminous as that of the Assyro—Akkadien Herakles. He was the deified genius of the nation, and not in Phoenicia alone, but in every land that, displays the quarterings of mythology 84 ‘L0 VD AND LORD. Hercules is the personification of the labors and conquests of the race. He is in the Vedas, in the Schanameh, in the Niebelungen; he pervaded antiquity. The Phoenicians learned of him through Sanchoniaton, he who boasted that in Memphian crypts he had deciphered the sacred books of Thot. Sanchoniaton had many admirers, a few readers even, among the latter a certain Porphyrus who made use of him to show that Genesis was not so much inspired by revelation as by Phoenician and Assyrian annals. This by the way. In Egypt, Hercules,—-or Orus, as he was there known—was regarded as the son of Isis and Osiris. When the Hycsos ——of whom further mention will be made—-—were expelled from the valley of the Nile, they carried Orus in their memories to Greece. In this journey Hercules brought with him art and manners, state-craft and learning, all of which the Greeks sorely lacked, and these things in turn they be- stowed on the settlers of Boetica, as Andalusia was then called. As a con- L0 VE AND LOEE. 85 sequence, when the Phoenicians drifted in their purple galleys that way, they found the inhabitants polished and or- nate; they were free to bring their Melk’arth; had he not been given the freedom of the land before? In a short time that land was theirs. They were a peaceful people, born traders as are all of Semitic origin, unweaponed I, save by their tongue, and they conquered Boetica, not by force but by guile. In a remoter era, they had established them- selves in Canaan, where they built Byblos, Sidon, too, and Tyr. From Tyr a colony moved over to Africa and un- folded its tents along the littoral. Their headquarters was Kartha-Hadath,—— Newtown, that Carthage in whose ruins Marius was to weep. The Phoenicians as has been intimated, were mild of manner. Under a burning sun their younger brothers developed into tigers. They had the storm for ally. They ravaged the coast like whirlwinds. Sicily and Sardinia were theirs. Pre— sently there was a quarrel at Gaddir. It was only natural that the Phoenicians 86 LOVE AND LURE. should ask aid of their relatives. The latter responded, and finding the country to their taste, took possession of it on their own account. To the Romans, with whom already they had crossed swords, they said nothing of this new possession. It must have seemed to them wiser to leave it unmen- tioned, than to guard it with protect- ing yet disclosive treaties. More than once they scuttled their triremes, sus- picious sails were following them to its shore. From this vigilance the name of Spain 18 said to be derived. In Punic, spam signifies hidden, and the Cartha- ginians secreted the land as maidens hide their love. This of course was possible when the Romans were in the nursery, but when the latter conquered Greece and all of Italy was theirs, the world was smaller. Up to this time the two nations had been quasi-friends; at once they were open rivals, it was a question between them as to whom the world should belong. The first argument on this subject resulted in a loss of Sicily and Sardinia. LO VE AND LONE. 87 In the second, Spain went. In the third Carthage was razed to the ground. During the second argument, Andalucia was the theatre in which the two races wrangled over the empire of the earth. After the suicide of Sagentum, a suicide so terrible in its magnificence that it startled even the victors, the conquest began. Slow-1y, at one time advancing, at another retreating, now defeated, now defeating, the Romans promenaded their eagles down the shore. Scipio came and watched the self-destruction of Numantia as Hannibal had watched Sagentum’s death. Pompey, boasting that he had made the Republic mis- tress of a thousand towns, came too; and after him, Caesar, who long before as simple quaestor had wept at Cadix because of that hero who at his age had conquered the world—Caesar, his face from tireless debauches more blanched and vicious than before, came back, and gave the land its coup degrace. In this fashion, with an unhealed wound in every province, Spain crawled down to Augustus’ feet. »A toga was thrown 88 L0 VD AND LORD, over her; when it was withdrawn, the wounds had healed, she was a Roman province, the most flourishing, perhaps, and surely the most fair. The fusion of the two people was immediate. The native soldiery was sent off to bleed in the four corners of the globe, to that Ultima Thule where the Britons lived and which it took years to reach, or nearer home, in Gaul, or else far to the north among the Teuton States, and in the absence of an element which might have turned ugly, the Romans found it easy work to open school. They had always been partial to Greek learning, and they inculcated it on the slightest pretext. They imported their borrowed Pantheon, their local Hercules, all the metamorphosed and irritable gods, and with becoming liberality added to them those divinities whom their adopted children most revered. It was in this way that the fusion of the two races came about. When Augustus assumed the purple, throughout the entire penin- sula Latin was generally in use. It was not of the purest, to be sure. It had LOVE AND LORE. 89 been beaten in with the sword, the accent was rough and the construction bristled with barbarisms; but still it was Latin, and needed only a generation of sandpaper to become polished and refined. But perhaps the least recog- nized factor in the fusion of the two people was a growing and common taste for polite literature. Such as the Romans possessed was like their archi- tecture, their science, philosophy and religion borrowed outright from the Greeks. They were hungry for new ideas. These the Spaniards undertook to provide. They had descended from a race whose fabulous laws were written in verse, and something of that legen~ dary inspiration must have accompanied them through ages of preceding strife, for suddenly Boetica was peopled with poets. In connection with this it may be noted that apart from the crop of Augustan rhymsters and essayists, al- most everything in the way of literature which Rome subsequently produced is the work of Spaniards. Lucan and the Senecas were Boeticans,——Martial, Flo- go LO VE AND LURE. rus, Quintillian, Pomponius Mila were all of that race. j'en passe et des meilleurs. The Romans, trained by the Greeks, were, it is true, the teachers. Under their heavy hand the young Andalucians lost their way among the clouds of Aristophanes, just as we have done ourselves; they spouted the T z'zfyra m, and the arma t/z'rum, they followed the Odyssey and learned that in ages as remote to them as they are to us, Ulysses had visited their coast. Indeed the Romans did what they could, and if their pupils surpassed them it was owing to the lack-lustre of their own im- aginations. But the education of back- ward Spain was not limited to Greek poets and Augustan bores. Lessons in‘ drawing were given, not as an extra, but as part of the ordinary curricu— lum. The sciences, too, were taught, - the blackboard was brought into use, and Euclid—another Greek—was ex- pounded on the very soil that under newer conquerors was to produce the charms and seductions of Algebra. Added to this, industry was not neg- LO VE AND LONE. 91 lected. The Romans got from them not poets alone, but woollens, calicos, and barbers too. emperors even. Trajan was an Andalou, so was Hadrian, and so also was that sceptered misanthrope Marcus Aurelius. As for arms, it is written in blood, that the Romans would have no others than those which came from Spain. The plebs dressed them- selves there. Strabo says that all the ready-made clothing came from Tarra- gona. From Malaga,which in a fair wind was but six days’ sail from the Tiber’s mouth, came potted herring, fat, black grapes that stained the chin, and wax yellow as amber. From Cadix came the rarest purple, wine headier than Faler- nian, honey sweeter than that of Hymet~~ tus, and jars of pale, transparent oil To Iviga the Romans sent their togas there was a Oap/zz‘a there, a dyeing estab— lishment which to be simply charming needed but the signboard Morz'z‘urz' z‘e salutamus. And from the banks of the Betis there came for the lupanars, girls with the Orient in their eyes, and lips that said “ Drink me.” In this pleasant 92 LO VD AND LORD. fashion Rome, after conquering Spain, sat down to banquet on her products. The Imperial city then was not unlike a professional pugilist who is unable to find a worthy opponent ; possible rivals had been slugged into subjection. Perhaps she was weary, too. However great the future of a combatant may, be, there comes an hour when conten- tion palls and peace has charms. In any event, Rome at that time was more occupied in assimilating her dominions than in extending the wonders of her sway. And it was during this caprice that Spain found her fifty races fused in one. On the distant throne was a procession of despots, terribly tyran- nical, yet doing what good they could. In return for flowers, fruits and pretty girls, they gave roads, aqueducts, arenas games and vice. Claud introduced new fashions; Nero, the saturnalia. Each of the emperors did what he was able, even to Hadrian, who increased the number of Jews. It was during his reign that were felt the first tremors of that cataclysm in which antiquity was LO VE AND LORE. 93 to disappear. Rome was so thoroughly mistress of the world, that to master her Nature had to produce new races. The parturitions, as we know, were successful. Already the blue victorious eyes of Vandal and of Goth were peering down at Rome; already they had whis- pered together, and over the hydromel had drunk to her fall. The Goths were a wonderful people. When they first appear in history their hair was tossed and tangled by the salt winds of the Baltic. Later, when in tattered furs they issued from the fens of the Danube, they startled the hardi- est warriors of the world, the descend- ants of that nursling of the gaunt she- wolf. Little by little from Vagabond herders they consolidated first into tribes, then into a nation, finally into an army that beat at the gates of Rome. There they loitered a moment, a century at most. When they receded again with plunder and with slaves they left an emperor behind. Soon they were more turbulent than ever. They swept over antiquity like a tide, their waves sub- 94. LOVE AND L'OEE. siding only to rise anew‘. And just as the earth was oscillating beneath their weight, from the steppes of Tartary issued cyclones of Huns. Where they passed, the plains remained for ever bare. In the shock of their onslaught the empire of the Goths was sundered. Some of them, the Ostrogoths, went back to their cattle, others, the Visigoths, went down to have another word with Rome. It was then that their cousins the Vandals got their fingers on ‘her throat and frightened the world with her cries. In the strain of incessant shrieks the Imperial City fell. From out the ruins a mitred prelate dragged a throne. Paganism had been strangled ; antiquity was dead, new creeds and new races were refurbishing the world. Among the latter the Goths still. prowled. In the advance through the centuries, in the journey from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, in the friction with the attic refinement which the Romans had acquired the Goths left some of their barbarism on the road, not much, however. Historians have LOVE AND LONE. 95 it that when they took possession of Spain they manifested a love of art, a desire for culture, and that they affected the manners and usages of polite soc- iety. But historians are privileged liars. The majority of those who have treated the subject admired the Goths because they fancied them Christians, and in the admiration they placed them in flattering contrast to their predecessors who were pagans and to their successors who were Muhammadans. As a mat- ter of fact, one that is amply attested in local chronicles, they were coarse, illiterate and stupid as carps, moreover they were not Christians, they were Arians and they were Arians precisely as they wereeGoths, they were born so. To the dogma of the Trinity and the ,consubstantiability or non-consubstan- tiability of jesus the Christ they were as ignorant as of the formation of the earth. Throughout Europe at that time not a thread of light was discernible, The dark ages had begun. In the gen- eral obscurity the Goths were not a bit more brilliant than their neighbors. 96 LO VD AND LORD. Under their hand civilization dis- appeared, in return they gave the Spanish nothing but gutterals and a taste for chicanery. In ninety and nine cases, the specimens of architecture, which cheap-trippers admire as due to them are of Saracen workmanship. The monuments which they did erect are not disproportioned perhaps; yet, what- ever the casuist may aflirm, there is still a margin between the commonplace and the beautiful. In brief, to the Visigoths the world owes less than nothing. They let Audalucia retro- grade for three hundred years, and de- layed the discovery and development of America. Previous to their coming Cadix had been a famous sea-port. The Romans called it The Ship of Stone. Its sons had been immemorial explorers. The presentment of another land across the sea was theirs by intuition. They were constantly extending their expedi- tions. They were in love with the sun- set, they sailed as near it as they could, returned for more provisions, and sailed again; nearer, and ever nearer that way. LOVE AND LORE. 97 To the church the theory of the antipo- des was an abominable heresy. If was taught that the earth was a flat parallelo- gram, its extremities walled by moun- tains that supported the skies. Lactance was particularly vehement on this point, so too was St. jerome. Vergilius in as- serting the contrary threw Christen- dom into indignant convulsions. It may be remembered that the most serious obstacle which Columbus sub- sequently encountered lay in the deci- ~ sions of the Fathers. Now Cadix had been more or less converted before the advent of the Visigoths, but it had not for that reason put aside its habits and customs. It continued to be essentially maritime, but when the Visigoths came, navigation languished, the Ship of Stone no longer turned to the west, it found- ered in a sea of ignorance which was then undyked, and the possible dis- covery of America was indefinitely postponed. By way of compensation the Visigoths framed a code of laws the spirit of which still survives, and which is serviceable in showing that the fram- 98 LOVE AND LOEE. ers possessed two distinct traits, a love of agriculture and a hatred of Jews. Traits which are significant when it is understood, that it was through agricul- ture they were supported and through the jews they were overthrown. It was the jews that beckoned the Berbers and their masters the Arabs,—the Moors as those Arabs were called who had de- serted the deserts for the African Riviera. For some time past from the palace of Tandjah, a Musulman emyr had been eying the strip ‘of blue water, which alone separated him from that Andalucia which, like the other parts of this world and all of the next, had been promised to the followers of Muhammad. He was very ready to be beckoned and the land he coveted was like a pretty girl whose heart had been won again and again and who then was yearning for a new adorer. It took him two years to wholly gain her volatile affections. It took Christianity eight hundred to win it back. The invasion of the Arabs was singu- LOVE AND LONE. 99 larly pacific. It was less atrespass than a taking possession. Fancy the French re—entering Alsace. Of all who had passed that way whether Greek, Phoeni- cian, Carthagenian, Roman, Vandal or Goth, they were the most tolerant. The Worship of God was undisturbed. The temples were not only preserved, new ones were built. As the Christians had no schools of their own, their children attended those which the Moors estab- lished. True it is that many heads were amputated. There were pests too in those days and there'were earthquakes crueller than men, there were famines and great tempests and gore in plenty. Whenever a khalyf died there was a crisis. Carnage and torpor were inter- mittent. To the north in the Asturias and under the Pyrenees were bands of rebels, turbulent and aggressive. To the east, beneath Medinian stars, in Baghdad and in Mekke, were envious eyes, but generally speaking things went very well then, better assuredly than before or since. In every town the Arabs entered, presto! a mosque and IOO LOVE AND LORE. a school, and mosques and schools that were entrancing as song. On the banks of the Betis, renamed the Great River, Al-Ouad-al-Kebyr (Guadelqui- ver) twelve hundred villages bloomed like roses in june. From three hundred thousand filigree’d pulpits the glory of Allah, and of Muhammad his prophet, was daily proclaimed. They were superb fellows, these Moors. In earlier ages the restless Bedouins, their ancestors, were rather fierce, and when the degenerate Sabaism they professed was put aside for the lessons of Muhammad, they were not only fierce, they were fanatic as well. A drop of blood shed for Allah, equalled, they were taught, whole months of fast- ing and of prayer. Thereafter, they preached with the scimitar. But in time, that great emollient, they grew less dogmatic. In the ninth century the court of our dearly beloved Harofin-al- Raschid,was a free academy in which all the arts were cultivated and enjoyed. Under the Moors, Cordova surpassed Baghdad. They wrote more poetry than LOVE AND LORE. 101 all the other nations put together. It was they who invented rhyme; they wrote everything in it, contracts, chal- lenges, treaties, treatises, diplomatic notes and messages of love. From the earliest khalyf down to Boabdil, the courts of Grenada, of Cordova and of Seville were peopled with poets, or, as they were termed, with makers of ghazels. It was they who gave us the dulcimer, the hautbois and the guitar; it was they who invented the serenade. We are indebted to them for algebra and for the canons of chivalry as well. The first clock that struck in Europe was a present from Harofln to Karl the Great. Historians aver that he sent with it a game of checkers. Checkers to Charlemagne! The invention of the compass is attributed to them and that of gunpowder too. It was from them that came the first threads of light which preceded the Renaissance. Throughout mediaeval Europe they were the only people that thought. The better part of the literature of an— tiquity they put into Arabic; had they 102 LOVE AND LURE. not we would beminus many a valuable work; the monks it may be remem- bered found parchment dear and were prone to turn pagan literature into palimpsests. Indeed we have many things to thank them for, but particu- larly for their influence on the Renais— sance. In the days in which they flour- ished, it was to their schools that those desirous of self-improvement turned their steps. It was from them that the Romans and the Florentines learned again the alphabet. Any one who has given an hour to comparative mythology will not need to be reminded that the gods of India, of Egypt and of Greece, are practically the same divinities under different names. The manner in whichthey reached Egypt or that in which they crossed from Cumae and Rhegium, and frightened the early Italot to death, is, for the purposes of this article, relatively unim- portant. The point of which the con- veyance is sought is this,that the Greeks received their initial culture from Arabs who with the gods had loitered in LOVE AND LONE. 103 Memphian glades. Historians are agreed that about two thousand years before the present era, a tribe of Arab shep- herds that camped on the borders of the Red Sea were dislodged by their neigh- bors, and forced into Egypt, where presently they made Memphis and all the valley of the Nile their own. These emigrants, known as the Hycsos became in time so luxurious that their subse- quent expulsion from the land and civilization, which they had usurped, was an easy task. There upon the ma- jority of them set out for Greece. Not all at once however, for the country was only recovered from them bit by bit, but in detached bands one of which it would appear was led by Inachus, he who gave the Argolici laws, another by Cecrops who taught the Atticans man- ners, another by Cadmus, who instruct- ed in the use of letters, and still another by Danaus. who first showed the infant Greek a ship. Is has been said that, these gentlemen were Egyptians, but in that case, why should they have left the luxury of their home to found new 104 LOVE AND LORE. governments among uncouth and savage oafsP The invasion of the Hycsos into Egypt, and their conquest of the valley of the Nile, are matters upon which erudites are agreed. Their subsequent expulsion is undisputed. Originally awkward herders, they became adepts in art and science, and it was from them that the Greeks received that enlight- enment with which in turn they dow- ered antiquity. It would seem then that the civilization of the ancients, as well as that which came from the Renaissance, is largely due to them. Had it not been for Karl Martel, the World might have been theirs. Whether the world would have been the better for it, who shall say? Certainly it could not be worse. CAROLLING AZURE. RICH in those dreams that youth can scarce outlast, I strolled beneath insistent stars and thought Of all the pleasant things that life had brought; And planned a future fairer than the past. But while I mused this wise in scenes forecast, A man with haggard eyes as one dis- traught, Approached me suddenly, and when I sought To distance him, he caught and held me fast. In vain I struggled. To his face had passed, Whole chronicles of grief and sin and hate, And therewithal, his eyes shone out familiarly—- 105 106 LOVE AND LORE. “ What is it that you would of me P” I gasped—— “I am Thyself,” he cried,“ O Insen- sate! The image that the future holds of thee.” TH E HEIRESS. IN the mind of every one, however intelligent, lurks the mandrago'ra-root of some infirm prejudice. And among prejudices few are infirmer yet more enduring than one created a few years after the beginning of the present era by a paradoxist named juvenal. In the bath, in the circus, in the forum, in brief wheresoever a listener could be found,‘ this gentleman was accustomed to declare that a rich woman was a nui~ sance and a pest. If the Roman was right, then extraordinary it is that the pest which he denounced is not more contagious. In proportion to the pop- ulation rich women are few, and they belong, as a rule, to that class which the‘ directory describes as “wid.” Against the relict of a dear departed the prejudice alluded to may, for all of the present writer, continue to endure to the end of time, but as to her daugh- 107 108 L0 VD AND LORD. ter, the heiress, fiola, messz'ours, chap- eaux Oas. The heiress may be divided into two distinct types—the heiress as she is imagined and the heiress as she is. The heiress as she is, is pretty even when she is plain, and when a plain heiress is pretty she is the prettiest girl in the world. The eyes of her check-book are bluer, deeper, more alluring even than those of Rossetti’s “ Blessed Dam- ozel”—-they draw on sight. However dark her hair may be, the glisten of gold is in it. Her voice has notes that are never protested. Her taste is so artis- tic that with a pen-stroke she can charm. And such is her wealth that she can afford to do what no other woman is permitted—she can wear last season’s bonnet As she walks abroad she differs sing- ularly from the heiress of the imagina- tion. That lady is the prey of adven- turers, from whose enterprises, after a succession of thrilling escapades, she is ultimately and happily rescued. The real heiress may marry a title or braid LO VE AND LORE. 109 St. Catharine’s tresses, but in either event her existence is as humdrum as our own. The young person with whom fiction has made us familiar is love-sick as a guitar, the other too sensible not to know when she is stupid. Men die because they cannot help it, women marry for the same reason. When the heiress first hears the march of Lohengrin in her dreams, her people do their best to drown the music. To their thinking the evocator of the march alluded to is an individual who has made up his mind that the easiest way to make money is to marry it. In this they may be wrong or right, but the validity of their opinion does not con— stitute one of those impediments to matrimony which are recognized by church, society, or heiresses either. It is with the man that the difficulty lies. In spite of the old French adage that a gentleman can always accept money from his king and from his lady-love, men, in the absence of a tangible quid pro qua of their own, are nowadays ex- tremely unwilling to receive from a IIO LOVE AND LORE. sweetheart anything save her own fair hand. Love, we know, prefers contrasts to similitudes, but when the contrast is between a big bank account and a small one, it is unpalatable as red wine in a green glass. Few there are that can drain it without a qualm. On the stage the indigent hero prefers death. He goes off to battle and returns in the next act. Death he had indeed en- countered, but it is the death of that opportune uncle which the rest of us never possess. It is all very pretty and affecting, but the heiress in real life knows a trick worth two of that. She tells her lover that she is ruined, that a trusteehas taken her dower, the Mon- treal Express as well, and behold he is on his knees at once. In that position it is easy enough to have the bans pro- claimed; the vanished gold returns of itself, there is a scene, there are up- braidings, tears even, but finally forgive- ness and two hearts that beat as one. This little strategem is, parentheti- cally, one that has done good service in testing a lover’s singleness of pur- LOVE AZVD LURE. III 1’ pose. If during the trial, he holds him- self as one who truly loves should do, then indeed may a suspicious maiden leave every doubt behind. But speak- ing generally, an artifice of this kind is unnecessary. Some of our young men may live on a dollar a day and dream of a million, but they are not fortune- hunters by profession; and as for the young women, every traveler that touches our shore tells us they are the most enchanting that exist. As a mat— ter of fact, we are only too anxious to marry them. If they happen to have money, well and good. It is an appan- age, perhaps, but never a bait. The heiress is aware of all this, and carries herself accordingly. Her oppor- tunities of picking and choosing are of the best and—considered as a class, she is not in a hurry to get married that the unobservant give her credit for being. In this she differs from the average girl, and in another particular as well—as she is her own mistress, she need deny herself nothing, and yet through a con- stitutional peculiarity no one is less ex- travagant than she. Being used to IIZ LOVE AND LORE. money, she knows its value, and she knows too, that the uniquest luxury that money can give is in giving that money away. La Rochefoucauld took pleasure in saying that we are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others. But La Rochefoucauld, for all his cleverness, forgot our heiress when he spoke. She is never strong enough for that, and in the matter of alms-giving she is deliciously, femi- ninely weak. And that virtue which we admire so much in our neighbor and are so dif- fident about practicing ourselves, that- sentiment which is the New Testament told in a phrase, charity and compassion to others, is the sole excuse of her wealth. Without it, as Prudhon bawled at the socialists, Property is theft. In this respect she has a duty to perform. She may neglect it and yet carry her wealth very well. But before the day comes when her mouth is closed by a handful of earth, to her own cost she will have learned that poverty may be serener than riches, as tears are more hallowed than mirth. 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