rc^orjoi^^ 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 GEORGE MOREY RICHARDSON. 
 
 Received, August, 1898. 
 ^Accession No. JJ3 77 Class No. 
 
X 
 
i8p ffiiw Kepplter. 
 
 BOOKS AND MEN. i6mo.gilt top, $1.25. 
 POINTS OF VIEW. i6mo, gilt top, $1.25. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK. 
 
POINTS OF VIEW 
 
 BY 
 
 AGNES REPPLIER 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1892 
 
Copyright, 1891, 
 BY AGNES REPPLIER. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Blectrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Uoughton & Company. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A PLEA FOR HUMOR 1 
 
 ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS 30 
 
 BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME .... 64 
 
 LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS 78 
 
 FICTION IN THE PULPIT 105 
 
 PLEASURE: A HERESY 136 
 
 ESOTERIC ECONOMY 166 
 
 SCANDERBEG 189 
 
 ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION 209 
 
 "Scanderbeg" is reprinted from " The Catholic World ' 
 by permission of the publishers. 
 
fNIVERSITY 
 
 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 
 
 MORE than half a dozen years have passed 
 since Mr. Andrew Lang, startled for once out 
 of his customary light-heartedness, asked him- 
 self, and his readers, and the ghost of Charles 
 Dickens all three powerless to answer 
 whether the dismal seriousness of the present 
 day was going to last forever ; or whether, 
 when the great wave of earnestness had rippled 
 over our heads, we would pluck up heart to be 
 merry and, if needs be, foolish once again. 
 Not that mirth and folly are in any degree 
 synonymous, as of old ; for the merry fool, 
 too scarce, alas, even in the times when Jacke 
 of Dover hunted for him in the highways, has 
 since then grown to be rarer than a phoenix. 
 He has carried his cap and bells, and jests 
 and laughter, elsewhere, and has left us to the 
 
2 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 mercies of the serious fool, who is by no 
 means so seductive a companion. If the Cocque- 
 cigrues are in possession of the land, and if 
 they are tenants exceedingly hard to evict, 
 it is because of the connivance and encourage- 
 ment they receive from those to whom we in- 
 nocently turn for help : from the poets, and 
 novelists, and men of letters, whose plain duty 
 it is to brighten and make glad our days. 
 
 " It is obvious," sighs Mr. Birrell deject- 
 edly, "that many people appear to like a 
 drab-colored world, hung around with dusky 
 shreds of philosophy ; " but it is more obvious 
 still that, whether they like it or not, the 
 drapings grow a trifle dingier every year, and 
 that no one seems to have the courage to tack 
 up something gay. What is much worse, 
 even those bits of wanton color which have 
 rested generations of weary eyes are being 
 rapidly obscured by sombre and intricate 
 scroll-work, warranted to oppress and fatigue^ 
 The great masterpieces of humor, which have 
 kept men young by laughter, are being tried 
 in the courts of an orthodox morality, and 
 found lamentably wanting ; or else, by way of 
 giving them another chance, they are being 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 3 
 
 subjected to the peine forte et dure of mod* 
 ern analysis, and are revealing hideous and 
 melancholy meanings in the process. I have 
 always believed that Hudibras owes its chilly 
 treatment at the hands of critics with the 
 single and most genial exception of Sainte- 
 Beuve to the absolute impossibility of twist- 
 ing it into something serious. Strive as we 
 may, we cannot put a new construction on 
 those vigorous old jokes, and to be simply and 
 barefacedly amusing is no longer considered 
 a sufficient raison d'etre. It is the most sig- 
 nificant token of our ever-increasing " sense 
 of moral responsibility in literature " that we 
 should be always trying to graft our own con- 
 scientious purposes upon those authors who, 
 happily for themselves, lived and died before 
 virtue, colliding desperately with cakes and 
 ale, had imposed such depressing obligations. 
 
 " Don Quixote," says Mr. Shorthouse with 
 unctuous gravity, " will come in time to be 
 recognized as one of the saddest books ever 
 written ; " and, if the critics keep on expound- 
 ing it much longer, I truly fear it will. It 
 may be urged that Cervantes himself was low 
 enough to think it exceedingly funny; but 
 
4 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 then one advantage of our new and keener 
 insight into literature is to prove to us how 
 indifferently great authors understood their 
 own masterpieces. Shakespeare, we are told, 
 knew comparatively little about Hamlet, and 
 he is to be congratulated on his limitations. 
 Defoe would hardly recognize Eobinson Crusoe 
 as "a picture of civilization," having inno- 
 cently supposed it to be quite the reverse ; 
 and he would be as amazed as we are to learn 
 from Mr. Frederic Harrison that his book 
 contains " more psychology, more political 
 economy, and more anthropology than are to 
 be found in many elaborate treatises on these 
 especial subjects," blighting words which 
 I would not even venture to quote if I thought 
 that any boy would chance to read them, and 
 so have one of the pleasures of his young life 
 destroyed. As for Don Quixote, which its 
 author persisted in regarding with such mis- 
 placed levity, it has passed through many be- 
 wildering vicissitudes. It has figured bravely 
 as a satire on the Duke of Lerma, on Charles 
 V., on Philip II. , on Ignatius Loyola, Cer- 
 vantes was the most devout of Catholics, 
 and on the Inquisition, which, fortunately, did 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 5 
 
 not think so. In fact, there is little or no- 
 thing which it has not meant in its time ; and 
 now, having attained that deep spiritual in- 
 wardness which we have been recently told is 
 lacking in poor Goldsmith, we are requested 
 by Mr. Shorthouse to refrain from all brutal 
 laughter, but, with a shadowy smile and a 
 profound seriousness, to attune ourselves to 
 the proper state of receptivity. Old-fashioned, 
 coarse-minded people may perhaps ask, " But 
 if we are not to laugh at Don Quixote, at 
 whom are we, please, to laugh?" a ques- 
 tion which I, for one, would hardly dare to 
 answer. Only, after reading the following 
 curious sentence, extracted from a lately pub- 
 lished volume of criticism, I confess to finding 
 myself in a state of mental perplexity, utterly 
 alien to mirth. " How much happier," its 
 author sternly reminds us, " was poor Don 
 Quixote in his energetic career, in his earnest 
 redress of wrong, and in his ultimate triumph 
 over self, than he could have been in the gnaw- 
 ing reproach and spiritual stigma which a 
 yielding to weakness never failingly entails ! " 
 Beyond this point it would be hard to go. 
 Were these things really spoken of the " in- 
 
6 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 genious gentleman " of La Mancha, or of 
 John Howard, or George Peabody, or per- 
 haps Elizabeth Fry, or is there no longer 
 such a thing as a recognized absurdity in the 
 world ? 
 
 Another gloomy indication of the departure 
 of humor from our midst is the tendency of 
 philosophical writers to prove by analysis that, 
 if they are not familiar with the thing itself, 
 they at least know of what it should consist. 
 Mr, Shorthouse's depressing views about Don 
 Quixote are merely introduced as illustrating 
 a very scholarly and comfortless paper on the 
 subtle qualities of mirth. No one could deal 
 more gracefully and less humorously with his 
 topic than does Mr. Shorthouse, and we are 
 compelled to pause every now and then and 
 reassure ourselves as to the subject matter of 
 his eloquence. Professor Everett has more 
 recently and more cheerfully defined for us 
 the Philosophy of the Comic, in a way which, 
 if it does not add to our gayety, cannot be ac- 
 cused of plunging us deliberately into gloom. 
 He thinks, indeed, and small wonder, that 
 there is " a genuine difficulty in distinguish- 
 ing between the comic and the tragic," and 
 
v. V 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 ^ \^*<v 
 
 OP THB 
 
 4 PLEA FOR HUMOR. 
 
 that what we need is some formula which shall 
 accurately interpret the precise qualities of 
 each ; and he is disposed to illustrate his theory 
 by dwelling on the tragic side of Falstaff, which 
 is, of all injuries, the grimmest and hardest to 
 forgive. Falstaff is now the forlorn hope of 
 those who love to laugh, and when he is taken 
 away from us, as soon, alas ! he will be, and 
 sleeps with Don Quixote in the " dull cold 
 marble " of an orthodox sobriety, how shall we 
 make merry our souls ? Mr. George Eadford, 
 who enriched the first volume of " Obiter 
 Dicta " with such a loving study of the fat-wit- 
 ted old knight, tells us reassuringly that by 
 laughter man is distinguished from the beasts, 
 though the cares and sorrows of life have all 
 but deprived him of this elevating grace, and 
 degraded him into a brutal solemnity. Then 
 comes along a rare genius like Falstaff, who 
 restores the power of laughter, and transforms 
 the stolid brute once more into a man, and 
 who accordingly has the highest claim to our 
 grateful and affectionate regard. That there 
 are those who persist in looking upon him 
 as a selfish and worthless fellow is, from Mr. 
 Radford's point of view, a sorrowful instance 
 
8 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of human thanklessness and perversity. .But 
 this I take to be the enamored and exagger- 
 ated language of a too faithful partisan. Mor- 
 ally speaking, Falstaff has not a leg to stand 
 upon, and there is a tragic element lurking 
 always amid the fun. But, seen in the broad 
 sunlight of his transcendent humor, this 
 shadow is as the half-pennyworth of bread to 
 his own noble ocean of sack, and why should 
 we be forever trying to force it into promi- 
 nence ? When Charlotte Bronte advised her 
 friend, Ellen Nussey, to read none of Shake- 
 speare's comedies, she was not beguiled for a 
 moment into regarding them as serious and 
 melancholy lessons of life ; but with uncom- 
 promising directness put them down as mere 
 improper plays, the amusing qualities of which 
 were insufficient to excuse their coarseness, 
 and which were manifestly unfit for the " gen- 
 tle Ellen's " eyes. 
 
 In fact, humor would at all times have been 
 the poorest excuse to offer to Miss Bronte 
 for any form of moral dereliction, for it was 
 the one quality she lacked herself, and failed 
 to tolerate in others. Sam Weller was ap- 
 parently as obnoxious to her as was Fal- 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 9 
 
 staff, for she would not even consent to meet 
 Dickens, when she was being lionized in Lon- 
 don society, a degree of abstemiousness 
 011 her part which it is disheartening to con- 
 template. It does not seem too much to say 
 that every shortcoming in Charlotte Bronte's 
 admirable work, every limitation of her splen- 
 did genius, arose primarily from her want 
 of humor. Her severities of judgment 
 and who more severe than she ? were due 
 to the same melancholy cause ; for humor 
 is the kindliest thing alive. Compare the 
 harshness with which she handles her hap- 
 less curates, and the comparative crudity of 
 her treatment, with the surpassing lightness 
 of Miss Austen's touch as she rounds and 
 completes her immortal clerical portraits. 
 Miss Bronte tells us, in one of her letters, that 
 she regarded all curates as " highly uninter- 
 esting, narrow, and unattractive specimens of 
 the coarser sex," just as she found all the 
 Belgian school-girls " cold, selfish, animal, and 
 inferior." But to Miss Austen's keen and 
 friendly eye the narrowest of clergymen was 
 not wholly uninteresting, the most inferior of 
 school-girls not without some claim to our con- 
 
10 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 sideration ; even the coarseness of the male 
 sex was far from vexing her maidenly seren- 
 ity, probably because she was unacquainted 
 with the Rochester type. Mr. Elton is cer- 
 tainly narrow, Mary Bennet extremely infe- 
 rior ; but their authoress only laughs at them 
 softly, with a quiet tolerance, and a good- 
 natured sense of amusement at their follies. 
 It was little wonder that Charlotte Bronte, 
 who had at all times the courage of her con- 
 victions, could not, and would not, read Jane 
 Austen's novels. " They have not got story 
 enough for me," she boldly affirmed. " I 
 don't want my blood curdled, but I like to 
 have it stirred. Miss Austen strikes me as 
 milk-and- watery, and, to say truth, as dull." 
 Of course she did ! How was a woman, whose 
 ideas of after-dinner conversation are embod- 
 ied in the amazing language of Baroness In- 
 gram and her titled friends, to appreciate the 
 delicious, sleepy small talk, in "Sense and Sen- 
 sibility," about the respective heights of the re- 
 spective grandchildren ? It is to Miss Bronte's 
 abiding lack of humor that we owe such 
 stately caricatures as Blanche Ingram, and all 
 the high-born, ill-bred company who gather 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 11 
 
 in Tliornfield Hall, like a group fresh from 
 Madame Tussaud's ingenious workshop, and 
 against whose waxen unreality Jane Eyre and 
 Rochester, alive to their very finger-tips, con- 
 trast like twin sparks of fire. It was her lack 
 of humor, too, which beguiled her into as- 
 serting that the forty " wicked, sophistical, 
 and immoral French novels," which found 
 their way down to lonely Haworth, gave her 
 " a thorough idea of France and Paris," alas, 
 poor misjudged France ! and which made 
 her think Thackeray very nearly as wicked, 
 sophistical, and immoral as the French novels. 
 Even her dislike for children was probably 
 due to the same irremediable misfortune ; for 
 the humors of children are the only redeem- 
 ing points amid their general naughtiness, and 
 vexing misbehavior. Mr. Swinburne, guilt- 
 less himself of any jocose tendencies, has made 
 the unique discovery that Charlotte Bronte 
 strongly resembles Cervantes, and that Paul 
 Emanuel is a modern counterpart of Don 
 Quixote ; and well it is for our poet that the 
 irascible little professor never heard him hint 
 ^it such a similarity. Surely, to use one of 
 Mr. Swinburne's own incomparable expres- 
 
12 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 sions, the parallel is no better than a " sub- 
 simious absurdity." 
 
 On the other hand, we are told that Miss 
 Austen owed her lively sense of humor to her 
 habit of dissociating the follies of mankind 
 from any rigid standard of right and wrong ; 
 which means, I suppose, that she never 
 dreamed she had a mission. Nowadays, in- 
 deed, no writer is without one. We cannot 
 even read a paper upon gypsies, and not be- 
 come aware that its author is deeply imbued 
 with a sense of his personal responsibility 
 for these agreeable rascals, whom he insists 
 upon our taking seriously, as if we wanted 
 to have anything to do with them on such 
 terms ! " Since the time of Carlyle," says Mr. 
 Bagehot, " earnestness has been a favorite 
 virtue in literature ; " but Carlyle, though 
 sharing largely in that profound melancholy 
 which he declared to be the basis of every 
 English soul, and though he was unfortunate 
 enough to think Pickwick sad trash, had nev- 
 ertheless a grim and eloquent humor of his 
 own. With him, at least, earnestness never 
 degenerated into dullness ; and while dullness^ 
 may be, as he unhesitatingly affirmed, the s 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 13 
 
 first requisite for a great and free people, yet 
 a too heavy percentage of this valuable quality 
 is fatal to the sprightly grace of literature. 
 " In our times," said an old Scotchwoman, 
 " there 's fully mony modern principles," and 
 the first of these seems to be the substitution 
 of a serious and critical discernment for the 
 light-hearted sympathy of former days. Our 
 grandfathers cried a little and laughed a good 
 deal over their books, without the smallest 
 sense of anxiety or responsibility in the mat- 
 ter ; but we are called on repeatedly to face 
 problems which we would rather let alone, to 
 dive dismally into motives, to trace subtle con- 
 nections, to analyze uncomfortable sensations, 
 and to exercise in all cases a discreet and con- 
 scientious severity, when what we really want 
 and need is half an hour's amusement. There 
 is no stronger proof of the great change that 
 has swept over mankind than the sight of a 
 nation which used to chuckle over " Tom 
 Jones " absorbing a few years ago countless 
 editions of " Robert Elsmere." What is droller 
 still is that the people who read " Robert Els- 
 inere " would think it wrong to enjoy " Tom 
 Jones," and that the people who enjoyed "Tom 
 
14 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Jones " would have thought it wrong to read 
 " Robert Elsmere ; " and that the people who, 
 wishing to be on the safe side of virtue, think 
 it wrong to read either, are scorned greatly as 
 lacking true moral discrimination. 
 
 Now he would be a brave man who would 
 undertake to defend the utterly indefensible 
 literature of the past. Where it was most 
 humorous it was also most coarse, wanton, and 
 cruel ; but, in banishing these objectionable 
 qualities, we have effectually contrived to rid 
 ourselves of the humor as well, and with it we 
 have lost one of the safest instincts of our 
 souls. Any book which serves to lower the 
 sum of human gayety is a moral delinquent ; 
 and instead of coddling it into universal no- 
 tice, and growing owlish in its gloom, we 
 should put it briskly aside in favor of brighter 
 and pleasanter things. When Father Faber 
 said that there was no greater help to a reli- 
 gious life than a keen sense of the ridiculous, 
 he startled a number of pious people, yet what 
 a luminous and cordial message it was to help 
 us on our way ! Mr. Birrell has recorded the 
 extraordinary delight with which he came 
 across some after-dinner sally of the Eev. 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 15 
 
 Henry Martyn's ; for the very thought of that 
 ardent and fiery spirit relaxing into pleasant- 
 ries over the nuts and wine made him appear 
 like an actual fellow-being of our own. It is 
 with the same feeling intensified, as I have 
 already noted, that we read some of the letters 
 of the early fathers, those grave and hal- 
 lowed figures seen through a mist of centuries, 
 and find them jesting at one another in the 
 gayest and least sacerdotal manner imaginable. 
 " Who could tell a story with more wit, who 
 could joke so pleasantly ? " sighs St. Gregory of 
 Nazienzen of his friend St. Basil, remember- 
 ing doubtless with a heavy heart the shafts 
 of good-humored raillery that had brightened 
 their lifelong intercourse. With what kindly 
 and loving zest does Gregory, himself the most 
 austere of men, mock at Basil's asceticism, 
 at those " sad and hungry banquets " of which 
 he was invited to partake, those " ungarden- 
 like gardens, void of pot-herbs," in which he 
 was expected to dig ! With what delightful 
 alacrity does Basil vindicate his reputation for 
 humor by making a most excellent joke in 
 court, for the benefit of a brutal magistrate 
 who fiercely threatened to tear out his liver 1 
 
16 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 " Your intention is a benevolent one," said the 
 saint, who had been for years a confirmed in- 
 valid. " Where it is now located, it has given 
 me nothing but trouble." Surely, as we read 
 such an anecdote as this, we share in the 
 curious sensation experienced by little Tom 
 Tulliver, when, by dint of Maggie's repeated 
 questions, he began slowly to understand that 
 the Romans had once been real men, who were 
 happy enough to speak their own language 
 without any previous introduction to the Eton 
 grammar. In like manner, when we come to 
 realize that the fathers of the primitive Church 
 enjoyed their quips and cranks and jests as 
 much as do Mr. Trollope's jolly deans or 
 vicars, we feel we have at last grasped the se- 
 cret of their identity, and we appreciate the 
 force of Father Faber's appeal to the frank 
 spirit of a wholesome mirth. 
 
 Perhaps one reason for the scanty tolerance 
 that humor receives at the hands of the disaf- 
 fected is because of the rather selfish way in 
 which the initiated enjoy their fun ; for there 
 is always a secret irritation about a laugh in 
 which we cannot join. Mr. George Saints- 
 bury is plainly of this way of thinking, and, 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 17 
 
 being blessed beyond his fellows with a love 
 for all that is jovial, he speaks from out of the 
 richness of his experience. " Those who have 
 a sense of humor," he says, " instead of being 
 quietly and humbly thankful, are perhaps a 
 little too apt to celebrate their joy in the face 
 of the afflicted ones who have it not ; and the 
 afflicted ones only follow a general law in pro- 
 testing that it is a very worthless thing, if not 
 a complete humbug." This spirit of exclu- 
 siveness on the one side and of irascibility on 
 the other may be greatly deplored, but who is 
 there among us, I wonder, wholly innocent of 
 blame ? Mr. Saintsbury himself confesses to 
 a silent chuckle of delight when he thinks of 
 the dimly veiled censoriousness with which 
 Peacock's inimitable humor has been received 
 by one half of the reading world. In other 
 words, his enjoyment of the Rev. Drs. Folli- 
 ott and Opimian is sensibly increased by the 
 reflection that a great many worthy people, 
 even among his own acquaintances, are, by 
 some mysterious law of their being, debarred 
 from any share in his pleasure. Yet surely 
 we need not be so niggardly in this matter. 
 There is wit enough in those two reverend 
 
18 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 gentlemen to go all around the living earth, 
 and leave plenty for generations now unborn. 
 Each might say with Juliet, 
 
 " The more I give to thee, 
 The more I have ; " 
 
 for wit is as infinite as love, and a deal more 
 lasting in its qualities. When Peacock de- 
 scribes a country gentleman's range of ideas 
 as "nearly commensurate with that of the 
 great king Nebuchadnezzar when he was 
 turned out to grass," he affords us a happy 
 illustration of the eternal fitness of humor, 
 for there can hardly come a time when such 
 an apt comparison will fail to point its mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Mr. Birrell is quite as selfish in his felicity 
 as Mr. Saintsbury, and perfectly frank in ac- 
 knowledging it. He dwells rapturously over 
 certain well -loved pages of " Pride and Preju- 
 dice," and " Mansfield Park," and then de- 
 liberately adds, " When an admirer of Miss 
 Austen reads these familiar passages, the smile 
 of satisfaction, betraying the deep inward peace 
 they never fail to beget, widens, like ' a circle 
 in the water,' as he remembers (and he is al- 
 ways careful to remember) how his dearest 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 19 
 
 friend, who has been so successful in life, can 
 no more read Miss Austen than he can read 
 the Moabitish Stone." The same peculiarity 
 is noticeable in the more ardent lovers of 
 Charles Lamb. They seem to want him all 
 to themselves, look askance upon any fellow- 
 being who ventures to assert a modest prefer- 
 ence for their ido] 9 and brighten visibly when 
 some ponderous critic declares the Letters to 
 be sad stuff, and not worth half the exasperat- 
 ing nonsense talked about them. Yet Lamb 
 flung his good things to the winds with charac- 
 teristic prodigality, little recking by whom or 
 in what spirit they were received. How many 
 witticisms, I wonder, were roared into the deaf 
 ears of old Thomas Westwood, who heard 
 them not, alas, but who laughed all the same, 
 out of pure sociability, and with a pleasant 
 sense that something funny had been said! 
 And what of that ill-fated pun which Lamb, 
 in a moment of deplorable abstraction, let fall 
 at a funeral, to the surprise and consternation 
 of the mourners ? Surely a man who could 
 joke at a funeral never meant his pleasantries 
 to be hoarded up for the benefit of an initiated 
 few, but would gladly see them the property 
 
20 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of all living men; ay, and of all dead men, 
 too, were such a distribution possible. " Damn 
 the age ! I will write for antiquity ! " he ex- 
 claimed, with not unnatural heat, when the 
 " Gypsy's Malison " was rejected by the in- 
 genious editors of the " Gem," on the ground 
 that it would " shock all mothers ; " and even 
 this expression, uttered with pardonable irrita- 
 tion, manifests no solicitude for a narrow and 
 esoteric audience. 
 
 " Wit is useful for everything, but sufficient 
 for nothing," says Amiel, who probably felt 
 he needed some excuse for burying so much 
 of his Gallic sprightliness in Teutonic gloom ; 
 and dullness, it must be admitted, has the 
 distinct advantage of being useful for every- 
 body, and sufficient for nearly everybody as 
 well. Nothing, we are told, is more rational 
 than ennui ; and Mr. Bagehot, contemplating 
 the "grave files of speechless men " who have 
 always represented the English land, exults 
 more openly and energetically even than Car- 
 lyle in the saving dullness, the superb impene- 
 trability, which stamps the Englishman, as it 
 stamped the Roman, with the sign-manual of 
 patient strength. Stupidity, he reminds us, 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 21 
 
 is not folly, and moreover it often insures a 
 valuable consistency. " ' What I says is this 
 here, as I was a-saying yesterday,' is the av- 
 erage Englishman's notion of historical elo- 
 quence and habitual discretion." But Mr. 
 Bagehot could well afford to trifle thus coyly 
 with dullness, because he knew it only theo- 
 retically and as a dispassionate observer. His 
 own roof-tree is free from the blighting pres- 
 ence ; his own pages are guiltless of the leaden 
 touch. It has been well said that an ordinary 
 mortal might live for a twelvemonth like a 
 gentleman on Hazlitt's ideas ; but he might, if 
 he were clever, shine all his life long with the 
 reflected splendor of Mr. Bagehot's wit, and 
 be thought to give forth a very respectable 
 illumination. There is a telling quality in 
 every stroke ; a pitiless dexterity that drives 
 the weapon, like a fairy's arrow, straight to 
 some vital point. When we read that " of all 
 pursuits ever invented by man for separating 
 the faculty of argument from the capacity of 
 belief, the art of debating is probably the 
 most effective," we feel that an unwelcome 
 statement has been expressed with Mephisto- 
 phelian coolness ; and remembering that these 
 
22 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 words were uttered before Mr. Gladstone had 
 attained his parliamentary preeminence, we 
 have but another proof of the imperishable 
 accuracy of wit. Only say a clever thing-, and 
 mankind will go on forever furnishing living 
 illustrations of its truth. .It was Thurlow who 
 originally remarked that " companies have nei- 
 ther bodies to kick nor souls to lose," and the 
 jest fits in so aptly with our every-day humors 
 and experiences that I have heard men attrib- 
 ute it casually to their friends, thinking, per- 
 haps, that it must have been born in these 
 times of giant corporations, of city railroads, 
 and of trusts. What a gap between Queen 
 Victoria and Queen Bess, what a thorough and 
 far-reaching change in everything that goes to 
 make up the life and habits of men ; and yet 
 Shakespeare's fine strokes of humor have be- 
 come so fitted to our common speech that the 
 very unconsciousness with which we apply 
 them proves how they tally with our modern 
 emotions and opportunities. Lesser, lights 
 burn quite as steadily. Pope and Goldsmith 
 reappear on the lips of people whose know- 
 ledge of the " Essay on Man " is of the very 
 haziest character, and whose acquaintance with 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 23 
 
 "She Stoops to Conquer" is confined exclu- 
 sively to Mr. Abbey's graceful illustrations. 
 Not very long ago I heard a bright school-girl, 
 when reproached for wet feet or some such 
 youthful indiscretion, excuse herself gayly 
 on the plea that she was " bullying Nature ; " 
 and, knowing that the child was but modestly 
 addicted to her books, I wondered how many 
 of Dr. Holmes's trenchant sayings have be- 
 come a heritage in our households, detached 
 often from their original kinship, and seem- 
 ing like the rightful property of every one 
 who utters them. I It is an amusing, barefaced, 
 witless sort of robbery, yet surely not without 
 its compensations ; for it must be a pleasant 
 thing to reflect in old age that the general 
 murkiness of life has been lit up here and 
 there by sparks struck from one's youthful 
 fire, and that these sparks, though they wan- 
 der occasionally masterless as will-o'vthe-wisps, 
 are destined never to go out.l 
 
 Are destined never to go out ! In its vital- 
 ity lies the supreme excellence of humor. 
 Whatever has " wit enough to keep it sweet " 
 defies corruption and outlasts all time ; but 
 the wit must be of that outward and visible 
 
 OF THB 
 TT "KT TTT IT 1 TD 3 T T I "V 
 
24 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 order which needs no introduction or demon- 
 stration at our hands. It is an old trick with 
 dull novelists to describe their characters as 
 being exceptionally brilliant people, and to 
 trust that we will take their word for it, and 
 ask no further proof. Every one remembers 
 how Lord Beaconsfield would tell us that a 
 cardinal could " sparkle with anecdote and 
 blaze with repartee ; " and how utterly desti- 
 tute of sparkle or blaze were the specimens 
 of his eminence's conversation with which we 
 were subsequently favored. Those " lively 
 dinners " in " Endymion " and " Lothair," at 
 which we were assured the brightest minds in 
 England loved to gather, became mere Barme- 
 cide feasts when reported to us without a sin- 
 gle amusing remark ; such waifs and strays of 
 conversation as reached oar ears being of the 
 dreariest and most fatuous description. It is 
 not so with the real masters of their craft. 
 Mr. Peacock does not stop to explain to us 
 that Dr. Folliott is witty. The reverend gen- 
 tleman opens his mouth and acquaints us with 
 the fact himself. There is no need for George 
 Eliot to expatiate on Mrs. Poyser's humor. 
 Five minutes of that lady's society is amply 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 25 
 
 sufficient for the revelation. We do not even 
 hear Mr. Poyser and the rest of the family en- 
 larging delightedly on the subject, as do all 
 of Lawyer Putney's friends, in Mr. Howells's 
 story, " Annie Kilburn ; " and yet even the 
 united testimony of Hatboro' fails to clear up 
 our lingering doubts concerning Mr. Putney's 
 wit. The dull people of that soporific town are 
 really and truly and realistically dull. There 
 is no mistaking them. The stamp of veracity 
 is upon every brow. They pay morning calls, 
 and we listen to their conversation with a 
 dreamy impression that we have heard it all 
 many times before, and that the ghosts of our 
 own morning calls are revisiting us, not in the 
 glimpses of the moon, but in Mr. Howells's deco- 
 rous and quiet pages. That curious conviction 
 that we have formerly passed through a pre- 
 cisely similar experience is strong upon us as 
 we read, and it is the most emphatic testimony 
 to the novelist's peculiar skill. But there is 
 none of this instantaneous acquiescence in Mr. 
 Putney's wit ; for although he does make one 
 very nice little joke, it is hardly enough to fla- 
 vor all his conversation, which is for the most 
 part rather unwholesome than humorous. The 
 
26 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 only way to elucidate him is to suppose that 
 Mr. Howells, in sardonic mood, wishes to show 
 us that if a man be discreet enough to take to 
 hard drinking in his youth, before his general 
 emptiness is ascertained, his friends invariably 
 credit him with a host of shining qualities 
 which, we are given to understand, lie balked 
 and frustrated by his one unfortunate weak- 
 ness. How many of us know these exception- 
 ally brilliant lawyers, doctors, politicians, and 
 journalists, who bear a charmed reputation, 
 based exclusively upon their inebriety, and 
 who take good care not to imperil it by too 
 long a relapse into the mortifying self-revela- 
 tions of soberness ! And what wrong has been 
 done to the honored name of humor by these 
 pretentious rascals ! We do not love Falstaff 
 because he is drunk ; we do not admire Becky 
 Sharp because she is wicked. Drunkenness 
 and wickedness are things easy of imitation ; 
 yet all the sack in Christendom could not be- 
 get us another Falstaff, though Seithenyn 
 ap Seithyn comes very near to the incompar- 
 able model, and all the wickedness in the 
 world could not fashion us a second Becky 
 Sharp. There are too many dull topers and 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 27 
 
 stupid sinners among mankind to admit of 
 any uncertainty on those points. 
 
 Bishop Burnet, in describing Lord Halifax, 
 tells us, with thinly veiled disapprobation, that 
 he was " a man of fine and ready wit, full of 
 life, and very pleasant, but much turned to 
 satire. His imagination was too hard for his 
 judgment, and a severe jest took more with 
 him than all arguments whatever." Yet this 
 was the first statesman of his age, and one 
 whose clear and tranquil vision penetrated 
 so far beyond the turbulent, troubled times 
 he lived in, that men looked askance upon a 
 power they but dimly understood. The sturdy 
 " Trimmer,' 7 who would be bullied neither 
 by king nor commons, who would " speak his 
 mind and not be hanged as long as there was 
 law in England," must have turned with in- 
 finite relief from the horrible medley of plots 
 and counterplots, from the ugly images of 
 Gates and Dangerfield, from the scaffolds of 
 Stafford and Russell and Sidney, from the 
 Bloody Circuit and the massacre of Glencoe, 
 from the false smiles of princes and the howl- 
 ing arrogance of the mob, to any jest, how- 
 ever "severe," which would restore to him 
 
28 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 his cold and fastidious serenity, and keep his 
 judgment and his good temper unimpaired. 
 " Ridicule is the test of truth," said Hazlitt, 
 and it is a test which Halifax remorselessly 
 applied, and which would not be without its 
 uses to the Trimmer of to-day, in whom this 
 adjusting sense is lamentably lacking. For 
 humor distorts nothing, and only false gods 
 are laughed off their earthly pedestals. What 
 monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have re- 
 sisted whole batteries of serious arguments, 
 and then crumbled swiftly into dust before 
 the ringing death-knell of a laugh ! What 
 healthy exultation, what genial warmth, what 
 loyal brotherhood of mirth, attends the friendly 
 sound ! Yet in labeling our life and litera- 
 ture, as the Danes labeled their Royal Theatre 
 in Copenhagen, " Not for amusement merely," 
 we have pushed one step further, and the 
 legend too often stands, " Not for amusement 
 at all." Life is no laughing matter, we are 
 told, which is true ; and, what is still more 
 dismal to contemplate, books are no laughing 
 matters, either. Only now and then some gay, 
 defiant rebel, like Mr. Saintsbury, flaunts the 
 old flag, hums a bar of " Blue Bonnets over 
 
A PLEA FOR HUMOR. 29 
 
 the Border," and ruffles the quiet waters of our 
 souls by hinting that this age of Apollinaris 
 and of lectures is at fault, and that it has 
 produced nothing which can vie as literature 
 with the products of the ages of wine and 
 song. 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 
 
 IN a fair and far-off country, hidden to 
 none, though visited by few, dwell a little 
 band of lovely ladies, to whose youth and ra- 
 diance the poets have added the crowning gift 
 of immortality. There they live, with faint 
 alluring smiles that never fade ; and at their 
 head is Helen of Troy, white-bosomed, azure- 
 eyed, to whom men forgave all things for her 
 beauty's sake. There, too, is Lesbia, fair and 
 false, laughing at a broken heart, but hold- 
 ing close and tenderly the dead sparrow 
 
 " That, living, never strayed from her sweet breast." 
 
 She kisses its ruffled wings and weeps, she 
 who had no tears to spare when Catullus sung 
 and sued. And there is Myrto, beloved by 
 Theocritus, her naked feet gleaming like 
 pearls, a bunch of Coaii rushes pressed in 
 her rosy fingers ; and the nameless girl who 
 held in check Anacreon's wandering heart 
 with the magic of dimples, and parted lips, 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 31 
 
 and thin purple floating garments. With these 
 are later beauties : Fiammetta the ruddy- 
 haired, whom death snatched from Boccaccio's 
 arms, and the gentle Catarina, raising those 
 heavy-lidded eyes that Camoens loved and 
 lost ; Petrarch's Laura, robed in pale green 
 spotted with violets, one golden curl escaping 
 wantonly beneath her veil ; the fair blue-stock- 
 ing, Leonora d'Este, pale as a rain-washed 
 rose, her dress in sweet disorder ; and Bea- 
 trice, with the stillness of eternity in her 
 brooding eyes. If we listen, we hear the shrill 
 laughter of Mignonne, a child of fifteen sum- 
 mers, mocking at Ronsard's wooing; or we 
 catch the gentler murmur of Highland Mary's 
 song. She blushes a little, the low-born 
 lass, and sinks her graceful head, as though 
 abashed by the fame her peasant lover brought 
 her. Barefooted, yellow - haired, she passes 
 swiftly by ; and with her, hand in hand, walks 
 Scotland's queen, sad Jane Beaufort, " the 
 fairest younge floure " that ever won the heart 
 of royal captive and suffered the martyrdom 
 of love. England sends to that far land Stella, 
 with eyes like stars, and a veil of gossamer 
 hiding her delicate beauty, and Celia, and 
 
32 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 false Lucasta, and Castara, tantalizingly dis- 
 creet, in whose dimples Cupid is fain to linger 
 sighing, exiled, poor frozen god, from the 
 
 " Chaste nunnery of her breasts." 
 
 Sacharissa, too, stands near, with a shade of 
 listlessness in her sweet eyes, as though she 
 wearied a little of Master Waller's courtly 
 strains. A withered rose droops from her 
 white fingers, preaching its mute sermon, and 
 preaching it all in vain ; for rose and lady 
 live forever, linked to each other's fame. And 
 by her side, casting her fragile loveliness in 
 the shade, is one of different mould, a sump- 
 tuous, smiling woman, on whom Sacharissa's 
 blue eyes fall with a soft disdain. We know 
 this indolent beauty by the brave vibration 
 of her tempestuous silken robe, by the ruby 
 carcanet that clasps her throat, the rainbow 
 ribbon around her slender waist, the jewels 
 wedged knuckle-deep on every tapering finger, 
 and even oh, vanity of vanities ! on one 
 small rosy thumb. We know her by the 
 scented beads upon her arm, and by the sweet 
 and subtle odors of storax and spikenard and 
 galbanum that breathe softly forth from her 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 33 
 
 brocaded bodice, and from her hair's dark 
 meshes caught in a golden net. It is she to 
 whom the glow-worms lent their eyes, and the 
 elves their wings, and the stars their shooting 
 fires, as she wandered through the dewy woods 
 to meet her lover's steps. It is Herrick's 
 Julia whom we see so clearly through the mist 
 of centuries, that cannot veil nor . dim the 
 brightness of her presence. 
 
 To ask how many of these fair dames have 
 gone through the formality of living, and how 
 many exist only by the might of a poet's 
 breath, is but a thankless question. All share 
 alike in that true being which may not be 
 blown out like the flame of a taper ; in that 
 true entity which Caesar and Hamlet hold in 
 common, and which reveals them side by side. 
 Mr. Gosse, for example, assures us that Julia 
 really walked the earth, and even gives us 
 some details of her mundane pilgrimage ; 
 other critics smile, and shake their heads, and 
 doubt. It matters not ; she lives, and she 
 will continue to live when we who dispute the 
 matter lie voiceless in our graves. The es- 
 sence of her personality lingers on every page 
 where Herrick sings of her. His verse is 
 
34 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 heavy with her spicy perfumes, glittering with 
 her many-colored jewels, lustrous with the 
 shimmer of her silken petticoats. Her very 
 shadow, he sighs, distills sweet odors on the 
 air, and draws him after her, faint with their 
 amorous languor. How lavish she is with her 
 charms, this woman who neither thinks nor 
 suffers; who prays, indeed, sometimes, with 
 great serenity, and dips her snowy finger in 
 the font of blessed water, but whose spiritual 
 humors pale before the calm vigor of her 
 earthly nature ! How kindly, how tranquil, 
 how unmoved, she is ; listening with the same 
 slow smile to her lover's fantastic word-play, 
 to the fervid conceits with which he beguiles 
 the summer idleness, and to the frank and 
 sudden passion with which he conjures her, 
 " dearest of thousands," to close his eyes when 
 death shall summon him, to shed some true 
 tears above the sod, to clasp forever the book 
 in which he writes her name ! How gently 
 she would have fulfilled these last sad duties 
 had the discriminating fates called her to his 
 bier ; how fragrant the sighs she would have 
 wafted in that darkened chamber ; how sin- 
 cere the temperate sorrow for a remediable 
 
I 
 
 K, 
 
 ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 
 
 loss! And then, out into the glowing sun- 
 light, where life is sweet, and the world ex- 
 ults, and the warm blood tingles in our veins, 
 and, underneath the scattered primrose blos- 
 soms, the frozen dead lie forgotten in their 
 graves. 
 
 What gives to the old love-songs their pe- 
 culiar felicity, their undecaying brightness, is 
 this constant sounding of a personal note ; 
 this artless candor with which we are taken 
 by the hand and led straight into the lady's 
 presence, are bidden to admire her beauty and 
 her wit, are freely reminded of her faults and 
 her caprices, and are taught, with many a 
 sigh and tear, and laughter bubbling through- 
 out all, what a delicious and unprofitable pas- 
 time is the love-making of a poet. 
 
 " I lose but what was never mine," 
 
 sings Carew with gay philosophy, contemplat- 
 ing the perfidious withdrawal of Celia's kind- 
 ness ; and after worshiping hotly at her shrine, 
 and calling on all the winds of heaven to wit- 
 ness his desires, he accepts his defeat with 
 undimmed brow, and with melodious frankness 
 returns the false one her disdain : 
 
36 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 " No tears, Celia, now shall win 
 
 My resolved heart to return ; 
 I have searched thy soul within, 
 
 And find naught but pride and scorn. 
 I have learned thy arts, and now 
 Can disdain as much as thou." 
 
 From which heroic altitude we see him pres- 
 ently descending to protest with smiling lips 
 that love shall part with his arrows and the 
 doves of Venus with their pretty wings, that 
 the sun shall fade and the stars fall blinking 
 from the skies, that heaven shall lose its de- 
 lights and hell its torments, that the very fish 
 shall burn in the cool waters of the ocean, if 
 he forsakes or neglects his Celia's embraces. 
 
 It was Carew, indeed, who first sounded 
 these " courtly amorous strains " throughout 
 the English land ; who first taught his fellow- 
 poets that to sing of love was not the occa- 
 sional pastime, but the serious occupation of 
 their lives. Yet what an easy, indolent suitor 
 he is ! What lazy raptures over Celia's eyes 
 and lips ! What finely poised compliments, 
 delicate as rose leaves, and well fitted for the 
 inconstant beauty who listened, with faint 
 blushes and transient interest, to the song ! 
 "He loved wine and roses," says Mr. Gosse, 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 37 
 
 " and fair florid women, to whom he could 
 indite joyous or pensive poems about their 
 comeliness, adoring it while it lasted, regret- 
 ting it when it faded. He has not the same 
 intimate love of detail as Herrick ; we miss in 
 his poetry those realistic touches that give 
 such wonderful freshness to the verses of the 
 younger poet ; but the habit of the two men's 
 minds was very similar. Both were pagans, 
 and given up to an innocent hedonism ; nei- 
 ther was concerned with much beyond the 
 eternal commonplaces of bodily existence, the 
 attraction of beauty, the mutability of life, 
 the brevity and sweetness of enjoyment." 
 
 These things are quite enough, however, to 
 make exceedingly good poets, Mrs. Browning 
 to the contrary, notwithstanding. " I never 
 mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, 
 nor leisure for the hour of the poet," wrote 
 the authoress of "Aurora Leigh," and we quail 
 before the deadly earnestness of the avowal. 
 But pleasure and leisure between them have 
 begotten work far more complete and artistic 
 than anything Mrs. Browning ever gave to an 
 admiring world. Pleasure and leisure are re- 
 sponsible for "L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso," 
 
38 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 for " Kubla Khan " and " The Eve of St. Ag- 
 nes," for " Tani O'Shanter," and " A Dream 
 of Fair Women," and " The Bells." There is 
 so much talk about Herrick's paganism that it 
 has become one of the things we credit without 
 inquiry ; shrugging our shoulders over Corinna 
 and her May blossoms, and passing by that 
 devout prayer of thanksgiving for the simple 
 blessings of life, for the loaf and the cup, the 
 winter hearthstone and the summer sun. There 
 is such a widely diffused belief in the necessity 
 for a serious and urgent motive in art that 
 we have grown to think less of the outward 
 construction of a poem than of the dominant 
 impulse which evoked it. Mrs. Browning, 
 with all her noble idealism and her profound 
 sense of responsibility, was most depressingly 
 indifferent about form, and was quite a law 
 to herself in the matter of rhymes. Carew, 
 whose avowed object was to flatter Celia and 
 Celia's fair rivals, proved himself " enamored 
 of perfection," and wrought with infinite care 
 and delicacy upon his fragile little verses. If 
 he only played at love-making, he was seri- 
 ous enough as a poet ; and, amid the careless 
 exuberance of his time, he came to be re- 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 39 
 
 garded, like Flaubert some generations later, 
 as a veritable martyr to style. He brought 
 forth his lyrical children, complained Sir John 
 Suckling, with trouble and pain, instead of 
 with that light - hearted spontaneity which 
 distinguished his contemporaries, and which 
 made their poetry so deliciously easy to write, 
 and so generally unprofitable to read. Suck- 
 ling himself, and Lovelace, and the host of 
 courtly writers who toyed so gracefully and so 
 joyously with their art, ignored for the most 
 part all severity of workmanship, and made it 
 their especial pride to compose with gentle- 
 manl} 7 ease. The result may be seen in a 
 mass of half-forgotten rubbish, and in a few 
 incomparable songs, which are as fresh and 
 lovely to-day as when they first rang the 
 praises of Lucasta, or the fair Althea, or 
 Chloris, tne favorite daughter of wanton 
 Aphrodite. They are the models for all love- 
 songs and for all time, and, in their delicate 
 beauty, they endure like fragile pieces of por- 
 celain, to prove how light a thing can bear the 
 weight of immortality. We cannot surpass 
 them, we cannot steal their vivacious grace, 
 we cannot feel ourselves first in a field where 
 
40 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 such delicious and unapproachable things have 
 been already whispered. 
 
 " Ah ! f rustics par les anciens homines, 
 Nous sentons le regret jaloux, 
 Qu'ils aient e'te' ce que nous sommes, 
 Qu'ils aient eu nos coeurs avant nous." 
 
 The best love-poems of the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth centuries amply fulfill the require- 
 ments suggested by Southey : their sentiment 
 is always " necessary, and voluptuous, and 
 right." They are no "made-dishes at the 
 Muses' banquet," but each one appears as the 
 embodiment of a passing emotion. In those 
 three faultless little verses " Going to the 
 Wars," a single thought is presented us, 
 regretful love made heroic by the loyal fare- 
 well of the soldier suitor : 
 
 " Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind, 
 
 That from the nunnery 
 Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind 
 To war and arms I flee. 
 
 " True, a new mistress now I chase, 
 
 The first foe in the field, 
 And, with a stronger faith, embrace 
 A sword, a horse, a shield. 
 
 " Yet this inconstancy is such 
 As you too shall adore, 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 41 
 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not honour more." 
 
 In the still more beautiful lines, " To Althea 
 from Prison," passion, made dignified by suf- 
 fering, rewards with lavish hand the captive, 
 happy with his chains : 
 
 " If I have freedom in my love, 
 
 And in my soul am free, 
 Angels alone, that soar above, 
 Enjoy such liberty." 
 
 In both poems there is a tempered delicacy, 
 revealing the finer grain of that impetuous 
 soul which wrecked itself so harshly in the 
 stormy waters of life. Whether we think of 
 Lovelace as the spoiled darling of a voluptu- 
 ous court, or as dying of want in a cellar ; 
 whether we picture him as sighing at the feet 
 of beauty, or as fighting stoutly for his country 
 and his king ; whether he is winning all hearts 
 by the resistless charms of voice and pres- 
 ence, or returning broken from battle to suffer 
 the bitterness of poverty and desertion, we 
 know that in his two famous lyrics we possess 
 the real and perfect fruit, the golden harvest, 
 of that troubled and many-sided existence. 
 A still smaller gleaning comes to us from Sir 
 
42 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Charles Sedley, who, for two hundred years, 
 has been preserved from oblivion by a little 
 wanton verse about Phillis, full of such good- 
 natured contentment and disbelief that we 
 grow young and cheerful again in contem- 
 plating it. Should any long-suffering reader 
 desire to taste the sweets of sudden contrast 
 and of sharp reaction, let him turn from the 
 strenuous, analytic, half-caustic, and wholly 
 discomforting love-poem of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury Mr. Browning's word-picture of " A 
 Pretty "Woman," for example back to those 
 swinging and jocund lines where Phillis, 
 
 " Faithless as the winds or seas," 
 
 smiles furtively upon her suitor, whose clear- 
 sightedness avails him nothing, and who plays 
 the game merrily to the end : 
 
 "She deceiving, 
 
 I believing, 
 What need lovers wish for more ? " 
 
 We who read are very far from wishing for 
 anything more. With the Ettrick Shepherd, 
 we are fain to remember that old tunes, and 
 old songs, and well-worn fancies are best fitted 
 for so simple and so ancient a theme : 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 43 
 
 " A' the world has been in love at ae time 
 or ither o' its life, and kens best hoo to ex- 
 press its ain passion. What see you ever in 
 love-sangs that 's at a' new ? Never ae single 
 word. It 's just the same thing over again, 
 like a vernal shower patterin' amang the bud- 
 din' words. But let the lines come sweetly, 
 and saftly, and a wee wildly too, frae the lips 
 of Genius, and they shall delight a' mankind, 
 and womankind too, without ever wearyin' 
 them, whether they be said or sung. But try 
 to be original, to keep aff a' that ever has been 
 said afore, for fear o' plagiarism, or in ambi- 
 tion o' originality, and your poem 'ill be like a 
 bit o' ice that you hae taken into your mouth 
 unawares for a lump o' white sugar." 
 
 Burns's unrivaled songs come the nearest, 
 perhaps, to realizing this charming bit of de- 
 scription ; and the Shepherd, anticipating 
 Schopenhauer's philosophy of love, is quite as 
 prompt as Burns to declare its promise sweeter 
 than its fulfillment : 
 
 " Love is a soft, bright, balmy, tender, tri- 
 umphant, and glorious lie, in place of which 
 nature offers us in mockery, during a' the 
 rest o' our lives, the puir, paltry, pitiful, 
 
44 POINTS Of 1 VIEW. 
 
 fusionless, faded, cauldrified, and chittering 
 substitute, Truth ! " 
 
 This is not precisely the way in which we 
 suffer ourselves nowadays to talk about truth, 
 but a few generations back, people still cher- 
 ished a healthy predilection for the comforta- 
 ble delusions of life. Mingling with the mu- 
 sic of the sweet old love-songs, lurking amid 
 their passionate protestations, there is always 
 a subtle sense of insecurity, a good-humored 
 desire to enjoy the present, and not peer too 
 closely into the perilous uncertainties of the 
 future. Their very exaggerations, the quaint 
 and extravagant conceits which offend our 
 more exacting taste, are part of this general 
 determination to be wisely blind to the ill-bred 
 obtrusiveness of facts. Accordingly there is 
 no staying the hand of an Elizabethan poet, 
 or of his successor under the Restoration, when 
 either undertakes to sing his lady's praises. 
 Sun, moon, and skies bend down to do her 
 homage, and to acknowledge their own com- 
 parative dimness. 
 
 " Stars, indeed, fair creatures be," 
 
 admits Wither indulgently, and pearls and 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 
 
 rubies are not without their merits ; but when 
 the beauty of Arete dawns upon him, all 
 things else seem dull and vapid by her side. 
 Nay, his poetry, even, is born of her complai- 
 sance, his talents are fostered by her smiles, he 
 gains distinction only as her favor may per- 
 mit. 
 
 " I no skill in numbers had, 
 More than every shepherd's lad, 
 Till she taught me strains that were 
 Pleasing to her gentle ear. 
 Her fair splendour and her worth 
 From obscureness drew me forth. 
 And, because I had no muse, 
 She herself deigned to infuse 
 All the skill by which I climb 
 To these praises in my rhyme." 
 
 Donne, the most ardent of lovers and the 
 most crabbed of poets, who united a great de- 
 votion to his fond and faithful wife with a re- 
 markably poor opinion of her sex in general, 
 pushed his adulations to the extreme verge of 
 absurdity. We find him writing to a lady 
 sick of a fever that she cannot die because all 
 creation would perish with her, 
 
 " The whole world vapours in thy breath." 
 
 After which ebullition, it is hardly a matter 
 
46 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of surprise to know that he considered females 
 in the light of creatures whom it had pleased 
 Providence to make fools. 
 
 tt Hope not for mind in women ! " 
 
 is his warning cry ; at their best, a little sweet- 
 ness and a little wit form all their earthly por- 
 tion. Yet the note of true passion struck by 
 Donne in those glowing addresses, those de- 
 jected farewells to his wife, echoes like a cry 
 of rapture and of pain out of the stillness of 
 the past. Her sorrow at the parting rends 
 his heart ; if she but sighs, she sighs his soul 
 away. 
 
 " When thou weep'st, unkindly kind, 
 My life's blood doth decay. 
 
 It cannot be 
 
 That thou lov'st me, as thou say'st, 
 If in thine my life thou waste ; 
 Thou art the life of me." 
 
 Again, in that strange poem " A Valediction 
 of Weeping," he finds her tears more than he 
 can endure ; and, with the fond exaggeration 
 of a lover, he entreats forbearance in her 
 grief : 
 
 " O more than moon, 
 
 Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere ; 
 Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 47 
 
 To teach the sea what it may do too soon. 
 Let not the wind example find 
 To do me more harm than it purposeth ; 
 Since thou and I sigh one another's breath, 
 Whoe'er sighs most is cruellest, and hastes the other's 
 death." 
 
 There is a lingering sweetness in these lines, 
 for all their manifest unwisdom, that is sur- 
 passed only by a pathetic sonnet of Drayton's, 
 where the pain of parting, bravely borne at 
 first, grows suddenly too sharp for sufferance, 
 and the lover's pride breaks and melts into 
 the passion of a last appeal : 
 
 " Since there 's no helpe, come, let us kisse and parte. 
 Nay, I have done, you get no more of me ; 
 And I am glad, yea, glad with all my hearte, 
 That thus so cleanly I myself can free. 
 Shake hands forever ! cancel all our vows ; 
 And when we meet at any time againe, 
 Be it not scene in either of our brows, 
 That we one jot of former love retaine. 
 
 " Now at the last gaspe of Love's latest breath 
 When, his pulse failing, passion speec.hless lies ; 
 When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death, 
 And Innocence is closing up his eyes, 
 Now ! if thou would'st - when all have given him 
 
 over 
 From death to life thou might' st him yet recover." 
 
 Here, at least, we have grace of sentiment 
 
48 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 and beauty of form combined to make a per- 
 fect whole. It seems strange indeed that Mr. 
 Saintsbury, who gives such generous praise to 
 Drayton's patriotic poems, his legends, his 
 epistles, even his prose prefaces, should have 
 no single word to spare for this most tender 
 and musical of leave-takings. 
 
 As for the capricious humors and over- 
 wrought imagery which disfigure so many of 
 the early love-songs, they have received their 
 full allotment of censure, and have provoked 
 the scornful mirth of critics too staid or too 
 sensitive to be tolerant. We hear more of 
 them, sometimes, than of the merits which 
 should win them forgiveness. Lodge, daz- 
 zled by Eosalynde's beauty, is ill disposed to 
 pass lightly over the catalogue of her charms. 
 Her lips are compared to budded roses, her 
 teeth to ranks of lilies ; her eyes are 
 
 " sapphires set in snow, 
 Refining heaven by every wink," 
 
 her cheeks are blushing clouds, and her neck 
 is a stately tower where the god of love lies 
 captive. All things in nature contribute to 
 her excellence : 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 49 
 
 " With Orient pearl, with ruby red, 
 
 With marble white, with sapphire blue, 
 Her body every way is fed, 
 
 Yet soft to touch, and sweet in view." 
 
 But when this fair representative of all flow- 
 ers and gems, " smiling to herself to think 
 of her new entertained passion," lifts up the 
 music of her voice in that enchanting madri- 
 gal, 
 
 " Love in my bosom, like a bee, 
 
 Doth suck his sweet ; 
 Now with his wings he plays with me, 
 Now with his feet," 
 
 we know her at once for the kinswoman and 
 precursor of another and dearer Rosalind, 
 who, with boyish swagger and tell-tale grace, 
 
 " like a ripe sister," 
 
 gathers from the trees of Arden the first fruits 
 of Orlando's love. It was Lodge who pointed 
 the way to that enchanted forest, where exiles 
 and rustics waste the jocund hours, where toil 
 and care are alike forgotten, where amorous 
 verse-making represents the serious occupa- 
 tion of life, and where the thrice fortunate 
 Jaques can afford to dally with melancholy for 
 lack of any cankering sorrow at his heart. 
 
50 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 William Habbington, who sings to us with 
 such monotonous sweetness of Castara's inno- 
 cent joys, surpasses Lodge alike in the charm 
 of his descriptions and in the extravagance of 
 his follies. In reading him we are sharply 
 reminded of Klopstock's warning, that " a 
 man should speak of his wife as seldom and 
 with as much modesty as of himself ; " for 
 Habbington, who glories in the fairness and 
 the chastity of his spouse, becomes unduly 
 boastful now and then in vaunting these per- 
 fections to the world. He, at least, being 
 safely married to Castara, feels none of that 
 haunting insecurity which disturbs his fellow- 
 poets. 
 
 " All her vows religious be, 
 And her love she vows to me," 
 
 he says complacently, and then stops to assure 
 us in plain prose that she is " so unvitiated by 
 conversation with the world that the subtle- 
 minded of her sex would deem it ignorance." 
 Even to her husband-lover she is " thrifty of 
 a kiss," and in the marble coldness and purity 
 of her breast his glowing roses find a chilly 
 sepulchre. Cupid, perishing, it would seem, 
 from a mere description of her merits, or, as 
 Habbington singularly expresses it, 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 51 
 
 " But if you, when this you hear, 
 Fall down murdered through your ear," 
 
 is, by way of compensation, decently interred 
 in the dimpled cheek which has so often been 
 his lurking-place. Lilies and roses and vio- 
 lets exhale their odors around him, a beau- 
 teous sheet of lawn is drawn up over his cold 
 little body, and all who see the "perfumed 
 hearse " presumably the dimple envy the 
 dead god, blest in his repose. This is as bad 
 in its way as Lovelace's famous lines on " El- 
 linda's Glove," where that modest article of 
 dress is compelled to represent in turn a snow- 
 white farm with five tenements, whose fair 
 mistress has deserted them, an ermine cabinet 
 too small and delicate for any occupant but 
 its own, and a fiddle-case without its fine- 
 tuned instrument. Dr. Thomas Campion, 
 who, after rhyming delightfully all his life, 
 was pleased to write a treatise against that 
 "vulgar and artificial custom," compares his 
 lady's face, in one musical little song, to a fer- 
 tile garden, and her lips to ripe cherries, 
 which none may buy or steal because her eyes, 
 like twin angels, have them in keeping, and 
 her brows, like bended bows, defend such 
 treasures from the crowd. 
 
52 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 " Those cherries fairly do enclose 
 
 Of Orient pearl a double row, 
 Which, when her lovely laughter shows, 
 
 They look like rose-"buds filled with snow ; 
 Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy, 
 Till ' Cherry ripe ' themselves do cry." 
 
 This dazzling array of mixed metaphors 
 with which the early poets love to bewilder us, 
 and the whimsical conceits which must have 
 cost them many laborious hours, have at least 
 one redeeming merit: they are for the most 
 part illustrative of the lady's graces, and not 
 of the writer's lacerated heart. They tell us, 
 seldom indeed with Herrick's intimate realism, 
 but with many quaint and suspicious exag- 
 gerations, whether the fair one was false or 
 fond, light or dark, serious or flippant, gentle 
 or high-spirited ; what fashion of clothes she 
 wore, what jewels and flowers were her adorn- 
 ment : and these are the things we take plea- 
 sure in knowing. It is Mr. Gosse's especial 
 grievance against Waller that he does not en- 
 lighten us on such points. " We can form," 
 he complains, " but a very vague idea of Lady 
 Dorothy Sidney from the Sacharissa poems ; 
 she is everywhere overshadowed by the poet 
 himself. We are told that she can sleep 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 53 
 
 when she pleases, and this inspires a copy of 
 verses ; but later on we are told that she can 
 do anything but sleep when she pleases, and 
 this leads to another copy of verses, which 
 leave us exactly where we were when we 
 started." Indeed, those who express surprise 
 at Sacharissa's coldness have perhaps failed to 
 notice the graceful chill of her lover's poems. 
 " Cupid might have clapped him on the shoul- 
 der, but we could warrant him heart-whole." 
 For seven years he carried on his languid and 
 courtly suit without once warming to the pas- 
 sion point; and when Lady Dorothy at last 
 made up her mind to marry somebody else, he 
 expressed his cordial acquiescence in her views 
 in a most charming and playful letter to her 
 young sister, Lady Lucy Sidney, a letter 
 containing just enough well-bred regret to 
 temper its wit and gayety. He had fulfilled 
 his part in singing the praises of his mistress, 
 in preaching to her sweetly through the soft 
 petals of a rose, and in sighing with gentle 
 complacency over the happy girdle which 
 bound her slender waist. 
 
 " A narrow compass, and yet there 
 Dwelt all that 's good, and all that 's fair; 
 
54 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Give me but this ribbon bound 
 
 Take all the rest the sun goes round." 
 
 Here we have the prototype of that other 
 and more familiar cincture which clasped the 
 Miller's Daughter; and it must be admit- 
 ted that Lord Tennyson's maiden, with her 
 curls, and her jeweled ear-rings, and the neck- 
 lace rising and falling all day long upon her 
 " balmy bosom," is more suggestive of a court 
 beauty, like the fair Sacharissa, than of a 
 buxom village girl. 
 
 The most impersonal, however, of all the 
 poet-lovers is Sir Philip Sidney, who, in the 
 hundred and eight sonnets dedicated to Stella, 
 has managed to tell us absolutely nothing 
 about her. The atmosphere of haunting indi- 
 viduality which gives these sonnets their half- 
 bitter flavor, and which made them a living 
 power in the stormy days of Elizabethan 
 poetry, reveals to us, not Stella, but Astro- 
 phel ; not Penelope Devereux, but Sidney 
 himself, bruised by regrets and resentful of 
 his fate. They are not by any means passion- 
 ate love-songs ; they are not even sanguine 
 enough to be persuasive ; they are steeped 
 throughout in a pungent melancholy, too rest- 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 55 
 
 less for resignation, too gentle for anger, too 
 manly for vain self-indulgence. In their deli- 
 cacy and their languor we read the story of 
 that lingering suit which lacked the elation of 
 success and the heart-break of failure. In- 
 deed, Sidney seems never to have been a very 
 ardent lover until the lady was taken away 
 from him and married to Lord Rich, when he 
 bewailed her musically for a couple of years, 
 and then consoled himself with Frances Wal- 
 singham, who must have found the sonnets to 
 her rival pleasant reading for her leisure 
 hours. This is the bald history of that poetic 
 passion which made the names of Stella and 
 Astrophel famous in English song, and which 
 stirred the disgust of Horace Walpole, whose 
 appreciation of such tender themes was of a 
 painfully restricted nature. In their thought- 
 ful, introspective, and self -revealing character, 
 Sidney's love-poems bear a closer likeness to 
 the genius of the nineteenth than to that of 
 the sixteenth century. If we want to see the 
 same spirit at work, we have but to take up 
 the fifty sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 called " The House of Life," wherein the 
 writer's soul is clearly reflected, but no glimpse 
 
56 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 is vouchsafed us of the woman who has dis- 
 turbed its depth. Their vague, sweet pathos, 
 their brooding melancholy, their reluctant ac- 
 ceptance of a joyless mood, are all familiar 
 features in the earlier poet. Such verses as 
 those beginning, 
 
 " Look in my face ; my name is Might-have-been ; 
 I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell," 
 
 are of the self-same mintage as Sidney's 
 golden coins, only more modern, and perhaps 
 more perfect in form, and a trifle more shad- 
 owy in substance. If Sidney shows us but 
 little of Stella, and if that little is, judged by 
 the light of her subsequent career, not very 
 accurately represented, Rossetti far surpasses 
 him in unconscious reticence. He is not un- 
 willing to analyze, few recent poets are, 
 but his analysis lays bare only the tumult of 
 his own heart, the lights and shades of his 
 own delicate and sensitive nature. 
 
 It was Sidney, however, who first pointed 
 out to women, with clear insistence, the ad- 
 vantage of having poets for lovers, and the 
 promise of immortality thus conferred on 
 them. He entreats them to listen kindly to 
 those who can sing their praises to the world. 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 57 
 
 "For so doing you shall be most fair, most 
 wise, most rich, most everything ! You shall 
 feed upon superlatives." Carew, adopting the 
 same tone, and less gallant than Wither, who 
 refers even his own fame to Arete's kindling 
 glances, tells the flaunting Celia very plainly 
 that she owes her dazzling prominence to him 
 alone. 
 
 " Know, Celia ! since thou art so proud, 
 'T was I that gave thee thy renown ; 
 Thou hadst in the forgotten crowd 
 Of common beauties lived unknown, 
 Had not my verse exhaled thy name, 
 And with it impt the wings of fame." 
 
 What wonder that, under such conditions 
 and with such reminders, a passion for be- 
 ing be-rhymed seized upon all women, from 
 the highest to the lowest, from the marchion- 
 ess at court to the orange-girl smiling in the 
 theatre ! a passion which ended its flutter- 
 ing existence in our great-grandmothers' al- 
 bums. Yet nothing is clearer, when we study 
 these poetic suits, than their very discourag- 
 ing results. The pleasure that a woman takes 
 in being courted publicly in verse is a very 
 distinct sensation from the pleasure that she 
 expects to take when being courted privately 
 
58 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 in prose. She is quick to revere genius, but 
 in her secret soul she seldom loves it. Ge- 
 nius, as Hazlitt scornfully remarks, " says such 
 things," and the average woman distrusts 
 " such things," and wonders why the poet will 
 not learn to talk and behave like ordinary peo- 
 ple. It hardly needed the crusty shrewdness 
 of Christopher North to point out to us the 
 arrant ill-success with which the Muse has 
 always gone a-wooing. 1 "Making love and 
 making love-verses," he explains, " are two of 
 the most different things in the world, and I 
 doubt if both accomplishments were ever found 
 highly united in the same gifted individual. 
 Inspiration is of little avail either to gods or 
 men in the most interesting affairs of life, 
 those of the earth. The pretty maid who 
 seems to listen kindly 
 
 1 Kisses the cup, and passes it to the rest,' 
 
 and next morning, perhaps, is off before break- 
 fast in a chaise-and-four to Gretna Green, 
 with an aid-de-camp of Wellington, as desti- 
 tute of imagination as his master." It is the 
 cheerful equanimity with which the older poets 
 anticipated and endured some such finale as 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 59 
 
 this which gives them their precise advantage 
 over their more exacting and self-centred 
 successors. 
 
 For what is the distinctive characteristic of 
 the early love-songs, and to what do they owe 
 their profound and penetrating charm ? It is 
 that quality of youth which Heine so subtly 
 recognized in Eossini's music, and which, to 
 his world-worn ears, made it sweeter than 
 more reflective and heavily burdened strains. 
 Love was young when Herrick and Carew and 
 Suckling went a-wooing; he has grown now 
 to man's estate, and the burdens of manhood 
 have kept pace with his growing powers. It 
 is no longer, as at the feast of Apollo, a con- 
 test for the deftest kiss, but a life-and-death 
 struggle in that grim arena where passion and 
 pain and sorrow contend for mastery. 
 
 44 Ah ! how sweet it is to love ! 
 Ah ! how gay is young desire ! " 
 
 sang Dryden, who, in truth, was neither sweet 
 nor gay in his amorous outpourings, but who 
 merely echoed the familiar sentiments of his 
 youth. That sweetness and gayety of the past 
 still linger, indeed, in some half-forgotten and 
 wholly neglected verses which we have grown 
 
60 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 too careless or too cultivated to recall. We 
 harden our hearts against such delicious tri- 
 fling as 
 
 " The young May moon is beaming, love, 
 The glow-worm's lamp is gleaming, love." 
 
 We will have none of its pleasant moral, 
 
 " 'T is never too late for delight, my dear," 
 
 and we will not even listen when Mr. Saints- 
 bury tells us with sharp impatience that, in 
 turning our backs so coldly upon the poet who 
 enraptured our grandfathers, we are losing a 
 great deal that we can ill afford to spare. 
 The quality of youth is still more distinctly 
 discernible in some of Thomas Beddoes's daz- 
 zling little songs, stolen straight from the 
 heart of the sixteenth century, and lustrous 
 with that golden light which set so long ago. 
 It is not in spirit only, nor in sentiment, that 
 this resemblance exists ; the words, the im- 
 agery, the swaying music, the teeming fancies 
 of the younger poet, mark him as one strayed 
 from another age, and wandering companion- 
 less under alien skies. Some two hundred 
 years before Beddoes's birth, Drummond of 
 Hawthornden, he who sang so tenderly the 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 61 
 
 praises of his sweet mistress, dead on her 
 wedding-day, wrote these quaint and pretty 
 lines entreating for her favor : 
 
 " I die, dear life, unless to me be given 
 As many kisses as the Spring hath flowers, 
 Or there be silver drops in Iris' showers, 
 Or stars there be in all-embracing heaven. 
 And if displeased, you of the match remain, 
 You shall have leave to take them back again." 
 
 In Beddoes's unfinished drama of " Torres- 
 mond," we find Veronica's maidens singing her 
 to sleep with just such bright conceits and 
 soft caressing words, and their song rings 
 like an echo from some dim old room where 
 Lesbia, or Althea, or Celia lies a-dreaming : 
 
 " How many times do I love thee, dear ? 
 Tell me how many thoughts there be 
 
 In the atmosphere 
 
 Of a new-fall'n year, 
 Whose white and sable hours appear 
 The latest flake of Eternity : 
 So many times do I love thee, dear. 
 
 " How many times do I love again ? 
 Tell me how many beads there are 
 In a silver chain 
 Of evening rain, 
 
 Unraveled from the tumbling main, 
 And threading the eye of a yellow star : 
 So many times do I love again." 
 
62 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 It is not in this fairy fashion that the truly 
 modern poet declares his passion ; it is not 
 thus that Wordsworth sings to us of Lucy, 
 the most alluring and shadowy figure in 
 English poetry, Lucy, richly dowered with 
 a few short verses of unapproachable beauty. 
 To the lover of Wordsworth her death is a 
 lasting hurt. We cannot endure to think of 
 her as he thinks of her, 
 
 " Rolled round in earth's diurnal course 
 With rocks, and stones, and trees.' ' 
 
 We cannot endure that anything so fine 
 and rare should slip forever from the sun- 
 shine, and that the secret stars should look 
 down upon her maidenhood no more. Brown- 
 ing, too, who has been termed the poet of love, 
 who has revealed to us every changeful mood, 
 every stifled secret, every light and shade of 
 human emotion, how has he dealt with his 
 engrossing theme ? Beneath his unsparing 
 touch, at once burning and subtle, the soul 
 lies bare, and its passions rend it like hounds. 
 All that is noble, generous, suffering, shame- 
 ful, finds in him its ablest exponent. Those 
 strange, fantastic sentences in which Mr. Pa- 
 ter has analyzed the inscrutable sorcery of 
 
ENGLISH LOVE-SONGS. 63 
 
 Mona Lisa, beneath whose weary eyelids "the 
 thoughts and experiences of the world lie 
 shadowed," might also fitly portray the image 
 of Love, as Browning has unveiled him to our 
 sight. He too is older than the rocks, and 
 the secrets of the grave and of the deep seas 
 are in his keeping. He too expresses all that 
 man has come to desire in the ways of a 
 thousand years, and his is the beauty " into 
 which the soul with its maladies has passed." 
 The slumbering centuries lie coiled beneath 
 his feet, their hidden meaning is his to grasp, 
 their huge and restless impulses have nour- 
 ished him, their best results are his inherit- 
 ance. But he is not glad, for the maladies of 
 the soul have stilled his laughter, and ihe 
 brightness of youth has fled. 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 
 
 So many grateful and impetuous spirits 
 have recently come forward to tell to an ap- 
 proving world how they have been benefited 
 by their early reading, and by their wisely 
 chosen favorites in literature, that the trustful 
 listener begins to think, against his own rueful 
 experience, that all books must be pleasant 
 and profitable companions. Those who have 
 honored us with confidence in this matter 
 seem to have found their letters, as Sir 
 Thomas Browne found his religion, " all pure 
 profit." Edward E. Hale, for instance, has 
 been "helped" by every imaginable writer, 
 from Marcus Aurelius to the amiable au- 
 thoress of " The Wide, Wide World." Mon- 
 cure D. Conway acknowledges his obligations 
 to an infinite variety of sources. William 
 T. Harris has been happy enough to seize in- 
 stinctively upon those works which aroused 
 his " latent energies to industry and self-ac- 
 tivity ; " and Edward Eggleston has gathered 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 65 
 
 intellectual sustenance from the most unex- 
 pected quarters, the Rollo Books, and Lind- 
 ley Murray's Reader. Only Andrew Lang 
 and Augustus Jessop are disposed, with an 
 untimely levity, to confess that they have read 
 for amusement rather than for self-instruction, 
 and that they have not found it so easily at- 
 tainable. 
 
 Now when a man tells us that he has been 
 really " helped " by certain books, we natu- 
 rally conclude that the condition reached by 
 their assistance is, in some measure, gratify- 
 ing to himself; and, by the same token, I 
 am disposed to argue that my own unsatis- 
 factory development may be the result of less 
 discreetly selected reading, reading for 
 which, in many cases, I was wholly irrespon- 
 sible. I notice particularly that several per- 
 sons who have been helped acknowledge a 
 very pleasing debt of gratitude to their early 
 spelling-books, to Webster's Elementary, and 
 to those modest volumes which first imparted 
 to them the mysteries of the alphabet. It was 
 not so with me. I learned my letters, at the 
 cost of infinite tribulation, out of a horrible 
 little book called " Reading Without Tears," 
 
66 POINTS OF VIE W. 
 
 which I trust has long since been banished 
 from all Christian nurseries. It was a brown 
 book, and had on its cover a deceptive picture 
 of two stout and unclothed Cupids holding 
 the volume open between them, and making 
 an ostentatious pretense of enjoyment. Young 
 as I was, I grew cynical over that title and 
 that picture, for the torrents of tears that I 
 shed blotted them both daily from my sight. 
 It might have been possible for Cupids, who 
 needed no wardrobes and sat comfortably on 
 clouds, to like such lessons, but for an or- 
 dinary little girl in frock and pinafore they 
 were simply heart-breaking. Had it only been 
 my good fortune to be born twenty years later, 
 spelling would have been left out of my early 
 discipline, and I should have found congenial 
 occupation in sticking pins or punching mys- 
 terious bits of clay at a kindergarten. But 
 when I was young, the world was still sadly 
 unenlightened in those matters ; the plain 
 duty of every child was to learn how to read ; 
 and the more hopelessly dull I showed my- 
 self to be, the more imperative became the 
 need of forcing some information into me, 
 information which I received as responsively 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 67 
 
 as does a Strasbourg goose its daily share of 
 provender. For two bitter years I had for my 
 constant companion that hated reader, which 
 began with such isolated statements as " Ann 
 has a cat," and ended with a dismal story 
 about a little African boy named Sam ; Mr. 
 Eider Haggard not having then instructed us 
 as to what truly remarkable titles little Afri- 
 can boys enjoy. If, to this day, I am disposed 
 to underrate the advantages of education, and 
 to think but poorly of compulsory school-laws 
 and the march of mind, it is because of the 
 unhappy nature of my own early experiences. 
 Having at last struggled into some acquaint- 
 anceship with print, the next book to which 
 I can trace a moral downfall is " Sandford 
 and Merton," left on the nursery shelves by 
 an elder brother, and read many times, not 
 because I especially liked it, but because I 
 had so little to choose from. Those were not 
 days when a glut of juvenile literature had 
 produced a corresponding indifference, and 
 a spirit of languid hypercriticism. The few 
 volumes we possessed, even those of a se- 
 verely didactic order, were read and re-read, 
 until we knew them well by heart. Now up 
 
68 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 to a certain age I was, as all healthy chil- 
 dren are, essentially democratic, with a de- 
 cided preference for low company, and a se- 
 cret affinity for the least desirable little girls 
 in the neighborhood. But " Sandf ord and Mer- 
 ton " wrought a pitiable change. I do not 
 think I ever went so far as to dislike the Rev. 
 Mr. Barlow after the very cordial and hearty 
 fashion in which Dickens disliked him, and I 
 know I should have been scandalized by Mr. 
 Burnand's cheerful mockery ; but, pondering 
 over the matter with the stolid gravity of a 
 child, I reached some highly unsatisfactory 
 conclusions. It did not seem to me then, and 
 it does not seem to me now, exactly fair in the 
 estimable clergyman to have refused the board 
 which Mr. Merton was anxious to pay, and 
 then have reproached poor Tommy so coldly 
 with eating the bread of dependence ; neither 
 did it seem worth while for a wealthy little 
 boy to spend his time in doing very ineffi- 
 ciently, I am sure the work of an under- 
 gardener. Harry's contempt for riches, and 
 his supreme satisfaction with a piece of bread 
 for dinner, struck me as overdrawn ; Tommy's 
 mishaps were more numerous than need be, 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 69 
 
 even if lie did have the misfortune to be a 
 gentleman's son ; and the complacency with 
 which Mr. Barlow permitted him to give away 
 a whole suit of clothes clothes which, ac- 
 cording to my childish system of ethics, be- 
 longed, not to him, but to his mother con- 
 trasted but poorly with the anxiety manifested 
 by the reverend mentor over his own pitiful 
 loaf of bread. Altogether, " Sandford and 
 Merton " affected me the wrong way ; and for 
 the first time my soul revolted from the pre- 
 tentious virtues of honest poverty. It is to 
 the malign influence of that tale that I owe 
 my sneaking preference for the drones and 
 butterflies of earth. I do not now believe that 
 men are born equal ; I do not love universal 
 suffrage ; I mistrust all popular agitators, all 
 intrusive legislation, all philanthropic fads, 
 all friends of the people and benefactors of 
 their race. I cannot even sympathize with 
 the noble theory that every man and woman 
 should do their share of the world's work ; I 
 would gladly shirk my own if I could. And 
 this lamentable, unworthy view of life and its 
 responsibilities is due to the subtle poison 
 instilled into my youthful mind by the too 
 
70 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 strenuous counter-teaching of " Sandford and 
 Merton." 
 
 A third pitfall was dug for my unwary 
 feet when, as a school-girl of fifteen, I read, 
 sorely against my will, Milton's "Areopagit- 
 ica." I believe this is a work highly esteemed 
 by critics, and I have even heard people in 
 private life, who might say what they pleased 
 without scandal, speak quite enthusiastically 
 of its manly spirit and sonorous rhetoric. 
 Perhaps they had the privilege of reading 
 it skippingly to themselves, and not as I 
 did, aloud, paragraph after paragraph, each 
 weighted with mighty sentences, cumbrous, 
 involved, majestic, and, so far as my narrow 
 comprehension went, almost unintelligible. 
 Never can I forget the aspect of those pages, 
 bristling all over with mysterious allusions 
 to unknown people and places, and with an 
 armed phalanx of Greek and Roman names 
 which were presumably familiar to my in- 
 structed mind, but which were really dug 
 out bodily from my Classical Dictionary, at 
 the cost of much time and temper. I have 
 counted in one paragraph, and that a moder- 
 ately short one, forty-five of these stumbling- 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 71 
 
 blocks, ranging all the way from the ''liber- 
 tine school of Gyrene," about which I knew 
 nothing, to the no less libertine songs of Naso, 
 about which I know nothing now. Neither 
 was it easy to trace the exact connection be- 
 tween the question at issue, " the freedom of 
 unlicenc'd printing," and such far-off matters 
 as the gods of Egypt and the comedies of Plau- 
 tus, Isaiah's prophecies and the Carthaginian 
 councils. Erudition, like a bloodhound, is a 
 charming thing when held firmly in leash, 
 but it is not so attractive when turned loose 
 upon a defenseless and unerudite public. 
 Lady Harriet Ashburton used to say that, 
 when Macaulay talked, she was not only inun- 
 dated with learning, but she positively stood 
 in the slops. In reading Milton, I waded 
 knee-deep, utterly out of my element, and 
 deeply resentful of the experience. The lib- 
 erty of the press was, to my American notions, 
 so much a matter of course, that the only way 
 I could account for the continued withholding 
 of so commonplace a privilege was by suppos- 
 ing that some unwary members of Parliament 
 read the " Areopagitica," and were forthwith 
 hardened into tyranny forever. I own I felt 
 
72 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 a savage glee in reflecting that Lords and 
 Commons had received this oppressive bit of 
 literature in the same aggrieved spirit that I 
 had myself, and that its immediate result was 
 to put incautious patriots in a more ticklish po- 
 sition than before. If truth now seems to me 
 a sadly overrated virtue ; if plain-speaking is 
 sure to affront me ; if the vigorous personali- 
 ties of the journalist and the amiable indecen- 
 cies of the novel-writer vex my illiberal soul, 
 and if the superficial precautions of a paternal 
 government appear estimable in my eyes, to 
 what can I trace this alien and unprogressive 
 attitude, if not to the " Areopagitica," and its 
 adverse influence over my rebellious and suf- 
 fering girlhood? 
 
 As these youthful reminiscences are of too 
 mournful a nature to be profitably prolonged, 
 I will add only two more to the list of books 
 which have hindered my moral and intellec- 
 tual development. When I was seventeen, I 
 read, at the earnest solicitation of some well- 
 meaning friends, "The Heir of Redclyffe," 
 and my carefully guarded theories of life shiv- 
 ered and broke before the baneful lesson it 
 conveyed. Brought up on a comfortable and 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 73 
 
 wholesome diet of Miss Edgeworth's pleasant 
 stories, I had unconsciously absorbed the ge- 
 nial doctrine that virtue is its own reward, 
 and that additional rewards are sure to be 
 forthcoming; that happiness awaits the good 
 and affable little girl, and that well-merited 
 misfortunes dog the footsteps of her who in- 
 clines to evil ways. I trusted implicitly to 
 those shadowy mills where the impartial gods 
 grind out our just deserts ; and the admirable 
 songs in "Patience" about Gentle Jane and 
 Teasing Tom inadequately express the rigid- 
 ity of my views and the boundless nature of 
 my confidence. u The Heir of Redclyffe " de- 
 stroyed, at once and forever, this cheerful 
 delusion, and with it a powerful stimulus to 
 rectitude. Here are Sir Guy Morville and 
 poor little Amy, both of them virtuous to a 
 degree which would have put Miss Edge- 
 worth's most exemplary characters to the 
 blush; yet Guy, after being bullied and 
 badgered through the greater part of his short 
 life, dies of the very fever which should prop- 
 erly have carried off Philip ; and Amy, be- 
 sides being left widowed and heart-broken, 
 gives birth to a daughter instead of a son, 
 
74 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 and so forfeits the inheritance of Redclyffe. 
 On the other hand, Philip, the most intoler- 
 able of prigs and mischief-makers, whose cruel 
 suspicions play havoc with the happiness of 
 everybody in the story, and whose obstinate 
 folly brings about the final disaster, Philip, 
 who is little better than his cousin's murderer, 
 succeeds to the estate, marries that very stilted 
 and unpleasant young person, Laura (who is 
 after all a world too good for him), and is 
 left in a blaze of glory, a wealthy, honored, 
 and distinguished man. It is true that Miss 
 Yonge, whose conscience must have pricked 
 her a little at bringing about this unwarranted 
 and unjustifiable conclusion, would have us 
 believe that he was sorry for his misbehavior, 
 and that his regret was sufficient to equalize 
 the perfidious scales of justice; but even at 
 seventeen I was not guileless enough to credit 
 the lasting quality of Philip's contrition. A 
 very few years would suffice to reconcile him to 
 Guy's death, and to convince him that his own 
 succession was a mere survival of the fittest, an 
 admirable intervention on the part of Destiny 
 to remedy her former blunders, and exalt him 
 to his proper station in the world. But to 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 75 
 
 me this triumph of guilt meant the downfall 
 of my early creed, the destruction of my most 
 cherished convictions. Never again might I 
 look forward with hopeful heart to the in- 
 evitable righting of all wrong things ; never 
 again might I trust with old-time confidence 
 to the final readjustment of a closing chapter. 
 Even Emerson's essay on " Compensation" 
 has failed to restore to me the full measure 
 of all that I lost through the " The Heir of 
 Kedclyffe." 
 
 The last work to injure me seriously as a 
 girl, and to root up the good seed sown in 
 long years of righteous education, was " Uncle 
 Tom's Cabin," which I read from cover to 
 cover with the innocent credulity of youth ; 
 and, when I had finished, the awful convic- 
 tion forced itself upon me that the thirteenth 
 amendment was a ghastly error, and that the 
 war had been fought in vain. Slavery, which 
 had seemed to me before undeviatingly 
 wicked, now shone in a new and alluring 
 light. All things must be judged by their re- 
 sults, and if the result of slavery was to pro- 
 duce a race so infinitely superior to common 
 humanity ; if it bred strong, capable, self- 
 
76 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 restrained men like George, beautiful, coura- 
 geous, tender-hearted women like Eliza, vi- 
 sions of innocent loveliness like Emmeline ; 
 marvels of acute intelligence like Gassy, chil- 
 dren of surpassing precocity and charm like 
 little Harry, mothers and wives of patient, 
 simple goodness like Aunt Chloe, and, finally, 
 models of all known chivalry and virtue like 
 Uncle Tom himself, then slavery was the 
 most ennobling institution in the world, and 
 we had committed a grievous crime in de- 
 grading a whole heroic race to our narrower, 
 viler level. It was but too apparent, even to 
 my immature mind, that the negroes whom I 
 knew, or knew about, were very little better 
 than white people ; that they shared in all the 
 manifold failings of humanity, and were not 
 marked by any higher intelligence than their 
 Caucasian neighbors. Even in the matters 
 of physical beauty and mechanical ingenuity 
 there had plainly been some degeneracy, some 
 falling off from the high standard of old slav- 
 ery days. Reluctantly I concluded that what 
 had seemed so right had all been wrong in- 
 deed, and that the only people who stood pre- 
 eminent for virtue, intellect, and nobility had 
 
BOOKS THAT HAVE HINDERED ME. 77 
 
 been destroyed by our rash act, had sunk 
 under the enervating influence of freedom to 
 a range of lower feeling, to baser aspirations 
 and content. It was the greatest shock of 
 all, and the last. 
 
 I will pursue the subject no further. Those 
 who read these simple statements may not, 
 I fear, find them as edifying or as stimulat- 
 ing as the happier recollections of more fa- 
 vored souls ; but it is barely possible that they 
 may see in them the unvarnished reflection of 
 some of their own youthful experiences. 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 
 
 THERE is a delightful little story, very well 
 told by Mr. James Payn, the novelist, about 
 an unfortunate young woman who for years 
 concealed in her bosom the terrible fact that 
 she did not think " John Gilpin " funny ; 
 and who at last, in an unguarded moment, 
 confessed to him her guilty secret, and was 
 promptly comforted by the assurance that, for 
 his part, he had always found it dull. The 
 weight that was lifted from that girl's mind 
 made her feel for the first time that she was 
 living in an age which tolerates freedom of 
 conscience, and in a land where the Holy 
 Office is unknown. It is only to be feared 
 that her newly acquired liberty inclined her to 
 be as much of a Philistine as Mr. Payn him- 
 self, and to believe, with him, that all ortho- 
 doxy is of necessity hypocritical, and that 
 when a man says he admires the "Faerie 
 Queene," or " Paradise Lost," or Rabelais, 
 the chances are that he knows little or nothing 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 79 
 
 about them. Now, as a matter of fact, it is sel- 
 dom safe to judge others too rigidly by our own 
 inadequate standards, or to assume that be- 
 cause we prefer " InMemoriam " to " Lycidas," 
 our friend is merely adopting a tone of griev- 
 ous superiority when he modestly but firmly 
 asserts his preference for the earlier dirge. It 
 is even possible that although we may find 
 " Don Quixote " dull, and " The Excursion " 
 vapid, another reader, no whit cleverer, we are 
 sure, than ourselves, may enjoy them both, with 
 honest laughter and with keen delight. There 
 is doubtless as much affectation in the world 
 of books as in the worlds of art and fashion ; 
 but there must always be a certain proportion 
 of men and women who, whether by natural 
 instinct or acquired grace, derive pleasure 
 from the highest ranks of literature, and who 
 should in common justice be permitted to say 
 so, and to return thanks for the blessings ac- 
 corded them. "It is in our power to think 
 as we will," says Marcus Aurelius, and it 
 should be our further privilege to give unfet- 
 tered expression to our thoughts. 
 
 Nevertheless, human nature is weak and 
 erring, and the pitfalls dug for us by wily 
 
80 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 critics are baited with the most ensnaring de- 
 vices. It is not the great writers of the world 
 who have the largest following of sham ad- 
 mirers, but rather that handful of choice 
 spirits who, we are given to understand, ap- 
 peal only to a small and chosen band. Few 
 of us find it worth our while to pretend a pas- 
 sionate devotion for Shakespeare, or Milton, 
 or Dante. On the contrary, nothing is more 
 common than to hear people complain that the 
 " Inferno " is unpleasant, and " Paradise Lost " 
 dreadfully long, neither of which charges is 
 easily refutable in terms. But when we read 
 in a high-class review that u just as Spenser is 
 the poet's poet, so Peacock is the delight of 
 critics and of wits ; " or that "'George Mere- 
 dith, writing as he does for an essentially cul- 
 tivated and esoteric audience, has won but a 
 limited recognition for his brilliant group of 
 novels ; " or that " the subtle and far-reaching 
 excellence of Ibsen's dramatic work is a quality 
 absolutely undecipherable to the groundlings," 
 who can resist tendering his allegiance on the 
 spot ? It is not in the heart of man to harden 
 itself against the allurements of that magic 
 word " esoteric," nor to be indifferent to the 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 81 
 
 distinction it conveys. Mr. Payn, indeed, in 
 a robust spirit of contradiction, has left it on 
 record that he found " Headlong Hall" and 
 "Crotchet Castle" intolerably dull ; but this I 
 believe to have been an unblushing falsehood, 
 in the case of the latter story, at least. It is 
 hardly within the bounds of possibility that a 
 man blessed with so keen a sense of humor 
 could have found the Rev. Dr. Folliott dull ; 
 but it is quite possible that the average reader, 
 whose humorous perceptions are of a some- 
 what restricted nature, should find Mr. Peacock 
 enigmatic, and the oppressive brilliancy of Mr. 
 Meredith's novels a heavy load to bear. There 
 is such a thing as being intolerably clever, 
 and "Evan Harrington" and "The Egoist" 
 are fruitful examples of the fact. The mind 
 is kept on a perpetual strain, lest some fine 
 play of words, some elusive witticism, should 
 be disregarded ; the sense of continued effort 
 paralyzes enjoyment ; fatigue provokes in us 
 an ignoble spirit of contrariety, and we sigh 
 perversely for that serene atmosphere of dull- 
 ness which in happier moments we affected to 
 despise. 
 
 " A man," says Dr. Johnson bluntly, " ought 
 
82 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 to read just as inclination leads him, for what 
 he reads as a task will do him little good." 
 In other words, if his taste is for Mr. Rider 
 Haggard's ingenious tales, it is hardly worth 
 his while to pretend that he prefers Tolstoi. 
 His more enlightened brother will indeed pass 
 him by with a shiver of pained surprise, but 
 he has the solid evidence of the booksellers 
 to prove that he is not sitting alone in his 
 darkness. Yet nowadays the critic diverts 
 his heaviest scorn from the guilty author, who 
 does not mind it at all, to the sensitive reader, 
 who minds it a great deal too much ; and the 
 result is that cowardice prompts a not unnat- 
 ural deception. Few of us remember what 
 Dr. Johnson chanced to say on the subject, 
 and fewer still are prepared to solace ourselves 
 with his advice ; but when an unsparing dis- 
 ciplinarian like Mr. Frederic Harrison lays 
 down the law with a chastening hand, we are 
 all of us aroused to a speedy and bitter con- 
 sciousness of our deficiencies. " The incor- 
 rigible habit of reading little books " a 
 habit, one might say, analogous to that of eat- 
 ing common food meets with scant tolerance 
 at the hands of this inexorable reformer. Bet- 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 83 
 
 ter, far better, never to read at all, and so 
 keep the mind " open and healthy," than be 
 betrayed into seeking "desultory information" 
 from the rank and file of literature. To 
 be simply entertained by a book is an unpar- 
 donable sin ; to be gently instructed is very 
 little better. In fact, Mr. Harrison carries 
 his severity to such a pitch that, on reach- 
 ing this humiliating but comforting sentence, 
 " Systematic reading, in its true sense, is 
 hardly possible for women," it was with a 
 feeble gasp of relief that I realized our igno- 
 minious exclusion from the race. I do not 
 see why systematic reading should be hardly 
 possible for women, any more than I see what 
 is to become of Mr. Harrison if we are to give 
 up little books, but never before did the limi- 
 tations of sex appear in so friendly a light. 
 1 There is something frightful in being required 
 to enjoy and appreciate all masterpieces ; to 
 read with equal relish Milton, and Dante, and 
 Calderon, and Goethe, and Homer, and Scott, 
 and Voltaire, and Wordsworth, and Cer- 
 vantes, and Moliere, and Swift. One is ir- 
 resistibly reminded of Mrs. Blimber surveying 
 the infant Paul Doinbey. " Like a bee," she 
 
84 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 murmured, " about to plunge into a garden of 
 the choicest flowers, and sip the sweets for the 
 first time. Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Terence, 
 Plautus, Cicero. What a world of honey have 
 we here ! " And what a limited appetite and 
 digestion awaited them ! After all, these great 
 men did not invariably love one another, even 
 when they had the chance. Goethe, for in- 
 stance, hated Dante, and Scott very cordially 
 disliked him ; Voltaire had scant sympathy 
 with " Paradise Lost," and Wordsworth fo- 
 cused his true affection upon the children of 
 his own pen. 
 
 It is very amusing to see the position now 
 assigned by critics to that arch - offender, 
 Charles Lamb, who, himself the idlest of 
 readers, had no hesitation in commending the 
 same unscrupulous methods to his friends. 
 We are told in one breath of his unerring lit- 
 erary judgment, and, in the next, are solemnly 
 warned against accepting that judgment as 
 our own. He is the most quoted, because the 
 most quotable of writers, yet every one who 
 uses his name seems faintly displeased at hear- 
 ing it upon another's lips. I have myself 
 been reminded with some sharpness, by a re- 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 85 
 
 viewer, that illustrations drawn from Lamb 
 counted for nothing in my argument, because 
 his was " a unique personality," a " pure ima- 
 gination, which even the drama of the Restora- 
 tion could not pollute." But this seems to be 
 assuming more than we have any right to as- 
 sume. I cannot take it upon myself to say, 
 for example, that Mr. Bagehot's mind was 
 more susceptible to pollution than Charles 
 Lamb's. I am not sufficiently in the secrets 
 of Providence to decide upon so intimate and 
 delicate a question. But granted that others 
 have a clearer light on these matters than I 
 have, it would still appear as though the un- 
 polluted source were the best from which to 
 draw one's help and inspiration. What really 
 makes Lamb a doubtful guide through the 
 mazes of literature is the fact that there is not 
 a single rule given us in these sober days for 
 the proper administration of our faculties 
 which he did not take a positive pleasure in 
 transgressing. His often-quoted heresy in re- 
 gard to those volumes which " no gentleman's 
 library should be without " might perhaps be 
 spared the serious handling it receives ; but 
 his letters abound in passages equally shame- 
 
86 POINTS OF VIEW, 
 
 less and perverting. " I feel as if I had read 
 all the books I want to read," he writes un- 
 concernedly ; and again, " I take less pleasure 
 in reading than heretofore, but I like books 
 about books." And so, alas ! do we ; though 
 this is the most serious charge laid at our 
 doors, and one which has subjected us to the 
 most humiliating reproofs. It is very pleasant 
 to have Mr. Ainger tell us what an admirable 
 critic Lamb was, and with what unerring cer- 
 tainty he pointed out the best lines of Words- 
 worth and Southey and Coleridge. The fact 
 remains though to this Mr. Ainger does 
 not draw our attention that he found no- 
 thing to praise in Byron, heartily disliked 
 Shelley, never, so far as we can see, read 
 Keats, condemned Faust unhesitatingly as " a 
 disagreeable, canting tale of seduction," and 
 discovered strong points of resemblance be- 
 tween Southey and Milton. Under these cir- 
 cumstances, it is hardly safe to elect him as a 
 critical fetich, if we feel the need of such an ar- 
 ticle, merely because he admired the " Ancient 
 Mariner " and Blake's " Chimney Sweeper," 
 and did not particularly admire " We are 
 Seven." Even his fine and subtle sympathy 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 87 
 
 with Shakespeare is a thing to be revered and 
 envied, rather than analyzed and drawn into 
 service, where it will answer little purpose. But 
 what is none the less sure is that Lamb recog- 
 nized by a swift and delicate intuition the lit- 
 erary food that was best fitted to nourish his 
 own intellectual growth. This was Sir Wal- 
 ter Scott's secret, and this was Lamb's. Both 
 knew instinctively what was good for them, 
 and a clear perception of our individual needs 
 is something vastly different from idle pref- 
 erence based on an ignorant conceit. It is 
 what we have each of us to learn, if we would 
 hope to thrive ; and while we may be aided in 
 the effort, yet a general command to read and 
 enjoy all great authors seldom affords us the 
 precise assistance we require. 
 
 Still less do we derive any real help from 
 those more contentious critics who, being 
 wedded hard and fast to one particular author 
 or to one particular school of thought, refuse, 
 with ostentatious continency, to cast lingering 
 looks upon any other type of loveliness. Lit- 
 erary monogamy, as practiced by some of our 
 contemporaries, makes us sigh for the old ge- 
 nial days of Priest Martin, when the tyranny 
 
88 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of opinions had not yet grown into a binding 
 yoke, and when it was still possible to follow 
 the example of Montaigne's old woman, and 
 light one candle to Saint Michael and another 
 to the Dragon. At present, the saint or 
 perhaps the dragon stands in a blaze of 
 glory, all the more lustrous for the dark 
 shadow thrown on his antagonist. "Praise 
 handed in by disparagement," the Greek drama 
 whipped upon the back of Genesis, if I 
 may venture to quote Charles Lamb again 
 this is the modern method of procedure, a 
 method successfully inaugurated by Macaulay, 
 who could find no better way of eulogizing 
 Addison than by heaping antithetical re- 
 proaches upon Steele. In a little volume of 
 lectures upon Russian literature, lectures 
 which were sufficiently popular to bear both 
 printing and delivery, I find the art of per- 
 suasiveness illustrated by this firebrand of a 
 sentence, hurled like an anathema at the heads 
 of a peaceful and unoffending community : 
 " Read Tolstoi ! Read humbly, read admir- 
 ingly ! Reading him in this spirit shall in 
 itself be unto you an education of your highest 
 artistic nature. And when your souls have 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 89 
 
 become able to be thrilled to their very depths 
 by the unspeakable beauty of Tolstoi's art, 
 you will then learn to be ashamed of the 
 thought that for years you sensible folks of 
 Boston have been capable of allowing the Ste- 
 vensons'with their Hydes, and the Haggards 
 with their Shes, and even the clumsy Wards 
 with their ponderous Elsmeres, to steal away, 
 under the flag of literature, your thoughtful 
 moments," 
 
 Now, apart from the delightful vagueness of 
 perspective, for " Robert Elsmere " and 
 " She " grouping themselves amicably together 
 is a spectacle too pleasant to be lost, I can- 
 not but think that there is something oppres- 
 sive about the form in which these comments 
 are offered to the world. It reminds one of 
 that highly dramatic scene in Bulwer's " Riche- 
 lieu," where the aged cardinal hurls " the curse 
 of Rome " at a whole stageful of people, who 
 shrink and cower without knowing very dis- 
 tinctly at what. Why should critics, I won- 
 der, always adopt this stringent and defiant 
 tone when they would beguile us to the enjoy- 
 ment of Russian fiction ? Why should the 
 reading of Tolstoi necessarily imply a con- 
 
90 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 tempt for Robert Louis Stevenson ? Why, 
 when we have been " thrilled to our very 
 depths " by " Peace and War " or " Anna 
 Karenina," should we not devote a few spare 
 moments to the consideration of " Markheim," 
 a story whose solemn intensity of purpose in 
 no way mars its absolute and artistic beauty ? 
 And why, above all, should we be petulantly 
 reprimanded, like so many stupid and obsti- 
 nate children ? I cannot even think that Mr. 
 Howells is justified in calling the English 
 nation " those poor islanders," as if they 
 were dancing naked somewhere in the South 
 Seas, merely because they love George Eliot 
 and Thackeray as well as Jane Austen. 
 They love Jane Austen too. We all love 
 her right heartily, but we have no need to em- 
 ulate good Queen Anne, who, as Swift ob- 
 served, had not a sufficient stock of amity for 
 more than one person at a time. We may 
 not, indeed, be prepared to say with Mr. 
 Howells that Miss Austen is " the first and 
 the last of the English novelists to treat mate- 
 rial with entire truthfulness," having some 
 reasonable doubts as to the precise definition 
 of truth. We may not care to emphasize or~ 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 91 
 
 affection for her by repudiating with one 
 breath all her great successors. We may not 
 even consider " The Newcomes " and " Henry 
 Esmond" as illustrating the degeneracy of 
 modern fiction ; yet nevertheless we may en- 
 joy some fair half -hours in the company of 
 Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Elton, of Cath- 
 erine Morland and Elizabeth Bennet. Only, 
 when we are searching for a shibboleth by 
 which to test our neighbor's intellectual worth, 
 let not Jane Austen's be the name, lest we be 
 rewarded for our trouble by hearing the faint, 
 clear ripple of her amused laughter that 
 gentle, feminine, merciless laughter echoing 
 softly from the dwelling-place of the immortals. 
 It is inevitable, moreover, that too much 
 rigidity on the part of teachers should be fol- 
 lowed by a brisk spirit of insubordination 
 on the part of the taught. Accordingly, now 
 and then, some belligerent freeman rushes 
 into print, and shakes our souls by declaring 
 "breathlessly that he hates " Wagner, and Mr. 
 Irving, and the Elgin Marbles, and Goethe, 
 and Leonardo da Vinci ; " and this rank 
 socialism in literature and art receives a very 
 solid and shameless support from the more 
 
92 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 light-minded writers of the day. Mr. Birrell, 
 for instance, fails to see why the man who 
 liked Montgomery's poetry should have been 
 driven away from it by Macaulay's stormy 
 rhetoric, nor why Macatilay himself could not 
 have let poor Montgomery alone, nor why 
 " some cowardly fellow " should join in the 
 common laugh at Tupper, when he knows 
 very well that in his secret soul he much pre- 
 fers the " Proverbial Philosophy " to " Ata- 
 lanta in Calydon " or " Empedocles on Etna." 
 A recent contributor to Macmillan assures us, 
 with discouraging candor, that it is all vanity 
 to educate ourselves into admiring Turner, 
 and that it is not worth while to try and 
 like the " Mahabharata " or the " Origin of 
 Species," if we really enjoy " King Solomon's 
 Mines " or the " Licensed Victualler's Ga- 
 zette." On the other hand, we have Ruskin's 
 word for it that unless we love Turner with 
 our whole hearts we shall not be artistically 
 speaking saved ; and hosts of strenuous crit- 
 ics in the field of letters are each and every 
 one assuring us that there is no intellectual 
 future for the world unless we speedily ten- 
 der our allegiance wherever he says it is due. 
 
, UNIVERSITY 
 
 LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 93 
 
 Poet-censors, like Mr. Swinburne, whose words 
 are bitterness and whose charity is small, lay 
 crooked yokes upon our galled necks. Even 
 the story-tellers have now turned reviewers on 
 their own account, and gravely tell us how 
 many novels, besides their own, we should feel 
 ourselves at liberty to read. 
 
 Under these circumstances, it is hardly a 
 matter of surprise that people whose minds 
 are, as Mr. Bagehot termed it, " to let " stand 
 hesitating between license and servitude. On 
 the one side, we hear men intelligent men, 
 too boasting that they never read anything 
 but the newspapers, and seeming to take a 
 perverted pride in their own melancholy 
 deprivation. On the other, we see both men 
 and women, and sometimes even children, 
 practicing a curious sort of literary asceticism, 
 and devoting themselves conscientiously and 
 very conspicuously to the authors they least 
 enjoy. These martyrs to an advanced culti- 
 vation find their self-imposed tasks, I am 
 happy to think, grow harder year by year. 
 Helen Pendennis, occasionally reading Shake- 
 speare, " whom she pretended to like, but 
 didn't," had comparatively an easy time of 
 
94 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 it ; but her successor to-day who goes to a 
 lecture on Hegel or Euripides when she would 
 prefer cards and conversation ; who sits, per- 
 plexed and doubtful, through a performance 
 of "A Doll's House" when " Little Lord 
 Fauntleroy" represents her dramatic prefer- 
 ence ; who tries to read Matthew Arnold and 
 Tourgueneff, and now and then Mr. Pater, 
 when she really enjoys Owen Meredith, 
 and " Booties' Baby," and the Duchess, 
 pays a heavy price for her enviable reputation. 
 " The true value of souls is in proportion to 
 what they can admire," says Marius the 
 Epicurean ; but the true value of our friends' 
 distinction is in proportion to the books we 
 behold in their hands. We have hardly yet 
 outgrown the critical methods of the little 
 heroine of " Mademoiselle Panache," who 
 knows that Lady Augusta is accomplished 
 because she has seen her music and heard of 
 her drawings ; and, as few of us resemble 
 the late Mr. Mark Pattison in his unwilling- 
 ness to create a good impression, we naturally 
 make an effort to be taken at our best. Mr. 
 Payn once said that Macaulay had frightened 
 thousands into pretending they knew authors 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 95 
 
 with whom they had not even a bowing ac- 
 quaintance ; and though the days of his au- 
 tocracy are over, it has been succeeded by 
 a more fastidious and stringent legislation. 
 We no longer feel it incumbent upon us to 
 profess an intimacy with Thucydides, nor to 
 revere the "Pilgrim's Progress." Indeed, a 
 recent critic has been found brave enough to 
 speak harsh words concerning the Delectable 
 Mountains and the Valley of Humiliation, 
 words that would have frozen the current of 
 Macaulay's blood, and startled even the tol- 
 erant Sainte-Beuve, weary as he confessed 
 himself of the Pilgrim's vaunted perfections. 
 But there is always a little assortment of 
 literary shibboleths, whose names we con over 
 with careful glibness, that we may assert our 
 intimacy in hours of peril ; nor should we, 
 in justice, be censured very severely for doing 
 what is too often with us, as with the Ephra- 
 imites, a deed of simple self-defense. 
 
 These passwords of culture, although their 
 functions remain always the same, vary 
 greatly with each succeeding generation ; 
 and, as they make room in turn for one an- 
 other, they give to the true and modest lovers 
 
96 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of an author a chance to enjoy him in peace. 
 Wordsworth is now, for example, the cher- 
 ished friend of a tranquil and happy band, 
 who read him placidly in green meadows or 
 by their own firesides, and forbear to trouble 
 themselves about the obstinate blindness of 
 the disaffected. But there was a time when 
 battles royal were fought over his fame, owing 
 principally, if not altogether, to the insulting 
 pretensions of his followers. It was then con- 
 sidered a correct and seemly thing to vaunt 
 his peculiar merits, as if they reflected a shad- 
 owy grandeur upon all who praised them, 
 very much in the spirit of the little Austra- 
 lian boy who said to Mr. Froude, " Don't 
 you think the harbor of Sydney does us great 
 credit ? " To which the historian's characteris- 
 tic reply was, " It does, my dear, if you made 
 it." Apart from the prolonged and point- 
 less discussion of Wordsworth's admirable 
 moral qualities, " as though he had been the 
 candidate for a bishopric," there was always 
 a delicately implied claim on the part of his 
 worshipers that they possessed finer percep- 
 tions than their neighbors, that they were in 
 some incomprehensible way open to influences 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 97 
 
 which revealed nothing to less subtle and dis- 
 criminating souls. The same tone of heart- 
 felt superiority is noticeable among the very 
 ardent admirers of Robert Browning, who 
 seem to be perpetually offering thanks to 
 Heaven that they are not as other men, and 
 who evince a gentle but humiliating contempt 
 for their uninitiated fellow-creatures ; while 
 Ibsen's fervent devotees dwell on the moun- 
 tain tops apart. How many people, I wonder, 
 who believe that they have loved Shelley all 
 their lives, find themselves exceedingly dazed 
 and harassed by what Mr. Freeman calls " the 
 snares of Shelley ana," a mist of confusing 
 chatter and distorted praise ! How many un- 
 ambitious readers, who would fain enjoy their 
 Shakespeare quietly, are pursued even to their 
 peaceful chimney-corners by the perfidious 
 devices of commentators and of cranks ! In 
 the mean while, an experienced few ally them- 
 selves, with supreme but transient enthusiasm, 
 to Frederic Mistral or to Pushkin, to Omar 
 Khayyam or to Amiel ; and an inexperienced 
 many strive falteringly to believe that they 
 were acquainted with the Rubaiyat before the 
 date of Mr. Vedder's illustrations, and that 
 
98 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 the diary of a half -Germanized Frenchman, 
 submerged in a speculative and singularly 
 cheerless philosophy, represents the intellec- 
 tual food for which their souls are craving. 
 
 The object of criticism, it has been said, is 
 to supply the world with a basis, a definition 
 which cannot be accused of lacking sufficient 
 liberality and breadth. Yet, after applying 
 the principle for a good many years, it is dis- 
 couraging to note that what has really been 
 afforded us is less a basis than a battlefield, 
 the din and tumult from which strike a dis- 
 cordant note in our lives. That somewhat 
 contemptuous severity with which critics ad- 
 dress the general public, and which the gen- 
 eral public very stoutly resents, is urbanity 
 itself when compared with the language which 
 they feel themselves privileged to use to one 
 another. Senor Armando Palacio Vald^s, for 
 example, who has been recently presented to 
 us as a clear beacon-light to guide our wan- 
 dering steps, has no hesitation in saying that 
 " among the vulgar, of course" he includes 
 " the greater part of those who write literary 
 criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, 
 since they teach what they do not know." 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 99 
 
 But this is the kind of thing that is very easy 
 to say, and carries 110 especial weight when 
 said. The u of course" adds, indeed, a faint 
 flavor of unconscious huinor to the enviable 
 complacency of the whole, and there is always 
 a certain satisfaction to a generous soul in the 
 sight of a fellow-mortal so thoroughly enjoy- 
 ing the altitude to which he believes he has 
 risen. 
 
 " Let us sit on the thrones 
 In a purple sublimity, 
 And grind down men's bones 
 To a pale unanimity," 
 
 sings Mrs. Browning in one of her less lumi- 
 nous moments ; and Seiior Valde*s and his 
 friends respond with alacrity, " We will ! " 
 Unhappily, however, " the greater part of 
 those who write literary criticism," while per- 
 haps no more vulgar than their neighbors 9 are 
 not generous enough nor humorous enough to 
 appreciate the delicate irony of the situation. 
 They rush forward to protest with energetic 
 ill temper, and the air is dark with warfare. 
 Alas for those who succeed, as Montaigne ob- 
 served, in giving to their harmless opinions a 
 fatal air of importance ! Alas for those who 
 
100 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 tilt with irrational chivalry at all that man 
 holds dear ! How many years have passed 
 since Saint-Evremond uttered his cynical pro- 
 test against the unprofitable wisdom of re- 
 formers ; and to-day, when one half the world 
 devotes itself strenuously to tlie correction and 
 improvement of the other half, what is the 
 result, save pretense, and contention, and a 
 dismal consciousness of insecurity ! More 
 and more do we sigh for greater harmony and 
 repose in the intellectual life ; more and more 
 do we respect the tranquil sobriety of that 
 wise old worldling, Lord Chesterfield, who 
 counsels every man to think as he pleases, or 
 rather as he can, but to forbear to disclose his 
 valuable ideas when they are of a kind to dis- 
 turb the peace of society. 
 
 In reading the recently published letters of 
 Edward Fitzgerald, we cannot fail to be struck 
 with the amount of unmixed pleasure he de- 
 rived from his books, merely because he ap- 
 proached them with such instinctive honesty 
 and singleness of purpose. He was perfectly 
 frank in his satisfaction, and he was wholly 
 innocent of any didactic tendency. Those 
 subjects which he confessed he enjoyed be- 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 101 
 
 cause he only partly understood them, " just 
 as the old women love sermons," he refrained 
 from interpreting to his friends ; those " large, 
 still books," like " Clarissa Harlowe," for 
 which he shared all Tennyson's enthusiasm, he 
 forbore to urge upon less leisurely readers. 
 And what a world of meaning in that single 
 line, " For human delight, Shakespeare, Cer- 
 vantes, and Scott " ! For human delight ! 
 The words sound like a caress ; a whole sunny 
 vista opens before us ; idleness and pleasure 
 lure us gently on ; a warm and mellow at- 
 mosphere surrounds us ; we are invited, not 
 driven, to be happy. I cannot but compare 
 Fitzgerald reading Scott, " for human de- 
 light," in the quiet winter evenings, with a 
 very charming old gentleman whom I recently 
 saw working conscientiously so I thought 
 through Tolstoi's " Peace and War." He 
 sighed a little when he spoke to me, and held 
 up the book for inspection. "My daughter- 
 in-law sent it to me," he explained resignedly, 
 " and said I must be sure and read it. But," 
 this with a sudden sense of gratitude and 
 deliverance, " thank Heaven ! one volume 
 was lost on the way." Now we have Mr. An- 
 
102 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 drew Lang's word for it that the Englishmen 
 of to-day, " those poor islanders," indeed, are 
 better acquainted with " Anna Karenina " than 
 with "The Fortunes of Nigel," and we cannot 
 well doubt the assertion, in view of the too man- 
 ifest regret with which it is uttered. But then 
 nobody reads " The Fortunes of Nigel " because 
 he has been told to read it, nor because his 
 neighbors are reading it, nor because he wants 
 to say that he has read it. The hundred and 
 one excellent reasons for becoming acquainted 
 with Tolstoi or Ibsen resolve themselves into 
 a single motive when we turn to Scott. It is 
 " for human delight " or nothing. And if, 
 even to children, this joy has grown somewhat 
 tasteless of late years, I fear the reason lies in 
 their lack of healthy unconsciousness. They 
 are taught so much they did not use to know 
 about the correct standing of authors, they 
 are so elaborately directed in their recreations 
 as well as in their studies, that the old simple 
 charm of self-forgetful absorption in a book 
 seems well-nigh lost to them. It is not very 
 encouraging to see a bright little girl of ten 
 making believe she enjoys Miss Austen's 
 novels, and to hear her mother's complacent 
 
LITERARY SHIBBOLETHS. 103 
 
 comments thereon, when we realize how ex- 
 clusively the fine, thin perfection of Miss Aus- 
 ten's work appeals to the mature observation 
 of men and women, and how utterly out of har- 
 mony it must be with the crude judgment and 
 expansive ideality of a child. I am willing 
 to believe that these abnormally clever little 
 people, who read grown-up books so conspicu- 
 ously in public, love their Shakespeares, and 
 their Grecian histories, and their " Idylls of 
 the King." I have seen literature of the del- 
 icately elusive order, like " The Marble Faun," 
 and " Elsie Venner," and " Lamia," devoured 
 with a wistful eagerness that plainly revealed 
 the awakened imagination responding with 
 quick delight to the sweet and subtle charm of 
 mystery. But I am impelled to doubt the 
 attractiveness of Thackeray to the youthful 
 mind, even when I have just been assured that 
 " Henry Esmond " is " a lovely story ; " and I 
 am still more skeptical as to Miss Austen's 
 marvelous hair-strokes conveying any meaning 
 at all to the untrained faculties of a child. 
 Can it be that our boys and girls have learned 
 from Emerson and Carlyle not to wish to be 
 amused ? Or is genuine amusement so rare 
 
104 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 that, like Mr. Payn's young friend, they have 
 grown reconciled to a pretended sensation, and 
 strive dutifully to make the most of it? Alas ! 
 such pretenses are not always the facile things 
 they seem, and if a book is ever to become 
 a friend to either young or old, it must be 
 treated with that simple integrity on which all 
 lasting amity is built. "Read, not to con- 
 tradict and confute," says Lord Bacon, " nor 
 to believe and take for granted, nor to find 
 talk and discourse ; " and, in the delicate 
 irony of this advice, we discern the satisfac- 
 tion of the philosopher in having deprived the 
 mass of mankind of the only motives which 
 prompt them to read at all. 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 
 
 ONE of the most curious and depressing 
 things about our modern literary criticism is 
 the tendency it has to slide into an ethical 
 criticism before we know what to expect. 
 We go to a Browning Society, for example, 
 at least some of us who are stout-hearted 
 go, presumably to hear about Mr. Brown- 
 ing's poetry. What we do hear about are his 
 ethics. Insinuate a doubt as to the artistic set- 
 ting of a poem, and you are met at once by the 
 spirited counter-statement that the poet has 
 taught us a particularly noble lesson in that 
 particularly noble verse. Push your heresy a 
 step further by hinting that the question at 
 issue is not so much the nobility of the lesson 
 taught as the degree of beauty which has been 
 made manifest in the teaching, and you find 
 yourself in much the same position as that 
 unfortunate Epicurean who strayed wantonly 
 into the lecture-hall of Epictetus, and got phi- 
 losophically crushed for his presumption. The 
 
106 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 fiction of the day, a commonplace product for 
 the most part, which surely merits lighter treat- 
 ment at our hands, is subjected to a similar 
 discipline ; and the novelist, finding his own 
 importance immensely increased thereby, rises 
 promptly to the emergency, and, with charac- 
 teristic diffidence, consents to be our guide, 
 philosopher, and friend. It is amusing to hear 
 Bishop Copleston, writing for that young and 
 vivacious generation who knew not the seri- 
 ousness of life, remind them pointedly that 
 "the task of pleasing is at all times easier 
 than that of instructing." It is delightful 
 to think that there ever was a period when 
 people preferred to be pleased rather than 
 instructed. It is refreshing to go back in 
 spirit to those halcyon days when poets 
 sang of their ladies' eyebrows rather than of 
 the inscrutable problems of fate, and when 
 Mrs. Battle relaxed herself, after a game of 
 whist, over that genial and unostentatious 
 trifle called a novel. Fancy Mrs. Battle re- 
 laxing herself to-day over " Daniel Deronda," 
 or " The Ordeal of Richard Feveril," or " The 
 Story of an African Farm " ! 
 
 Vernon Lee, speaking by the mouth of 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 107 
 
 Marcel, that shadowy young Frenchman who 
 is none the less unpleasant for being so indis- 
 tinct, would have us believe that this incor- 
 rigible habit of applying ethical standpoints 
 to artistic questions is merely an English idio- 
 syncrasy, one of those " weird and exquisite 
 moral impressions" which can be gathered 
 only from contact with British soil. But in 
 view of the deductions recently drawn from 
 French and Russian fiction by an ingenious 
 American critic, we are forced to conclude 
 that true didacticism is an exotic of such rare 
 and subtle excellence as frequently to be mis- 
 taken for vice. In fact, it is not its least 
 advantageous peculiarity that a novelist may, 
 on high moral grounds, treat of a great many 
 subjects which he would be compelled rigor- 
 ously to let alone, if he had no nobler object 
 before him than the mere pleasure and en- 
 tertainment of his readers. There are no 
 improper novels any longer, because even 
 those that strike the uninitiated as admirably 
 adapted to the spiritual requirements of Coin- 
 modus or Elagabalus are, in truth, far more 
 moral than morality itself, being set up, like 
 the festering heads of old-time criminals, as a 
 
108 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 stern warning in the market-place. Zola, we 
 all know, aspires as much to be a teacher as 
 George Eliot. His methods are different, 
 to be sure, but the directing principle is the 
 same. He can neither amuse nor please, but 
 he can and will instruct. " When I have once 
 shown you," he seems to say, " every known 
 detail of every known sin, and the list, it 
 must be confessed, is a long one, you will 
 then be glad to walk purely on your appointed 
 path. You will remember what I have de- 
 scribed to you, and be cautious." But it may 
 fairly be doubted whether the Spartan boys, 
 whose anxious fathers exhibited to them the 
 drunken Helots sprawling swine-like in the 
 sun, were quite as deeply shocked at the 
 sight as classical history would give us to 
 understand. There are some old-fashioned 
 lines by an old-fashioned poet to the effect 
 that the ugliness of Vice is no especial det- 
 riment to her seductions, if we will only look 
 at her often enough to forget it. Probably 
 those Spartan lads, after a few educational 
 experiments, began to think that the Helots, 
 in their reeking filth and bestiality, were 
 rather interesting studies ; were experiencing 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 109 
 
 new and perhaps pleasurable emotions ; were 
 more comfortable, at all events, than they 
 themselves, sitting stiff and upright at the 
 public table, with a scanty plateful of unpalat- 
 able broth ; were, in short, having a jolly good 
 time of it, and why not try for once what 
 such thorough-going drunkenness was like ? 
 
 This point of view, however, is far too shal- 
 low and frivolous to find favor with the seri- 
 ous apostles who are regenerating the world 
 by the simple process of calling old and evil 
 things by new and beautiful names. In the 
 days of our great-grandfathers, a novel was 
 simply a novel. Ten chances to one it was 
 not as virtuous as it should have been, in 
 which case the great-grandfathers laughed 
 over it jovially, if they chanced to be light- 
 minded, or shook their heads impressively, 
 if they were disposed to be grave ; perhaps 
 even going so far as to lock it up, having 
 previously satisfied their own curiosity, from 
 their equally curious families. But it never 
 occurred to them to make a merit of reading 
 " Tom Jones " or " Humphry Clinker," any 
 more than it occurred to the authors of those 
 ingenious books to pose as illustrative moral- 
 
110 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 ists before the world. The men of that ro- 
 bust generation were better able to bear the 
 theory of their amusements, and vices were 
 quite content to flourish shamelessly under 
 their proper names. Cruelty then took the 
 form of pastime, bear-baiting, badger-draw- 
 ing, cock-fighting; questionable pleasures, 
 doubtless, yet gentle as the sports of cherubs 
 when compared with the ever-increasing ago- 
 nies of vivisection, with the ceaseless and 
 nameless experiments of German and Italian 
 scientists, the " JFisiologia del Dolore " of Pro- 
 fessor Mantegazza, all of which horrors are 
 justified and turned into painful duties by our 
 new evolutionary morality. Sensuality, too, 
 which used to show itself coarse, smiling, un- 
 masked, and unmistakable, is now serious, 
 analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its 
 responsibilities that it passes muster half the 
 time as a new type of asceticism. The moral 
 animus with which Frenchmen write immoral 
 books is one of the paradoxes of our present 
 system of ethics ; and it occasionally happens 
 that the simple-minded reader, failing to ap- 
 preciate the shadowy elevation of their plat- 
 form, fancies they are working con amore 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. Ill 
 
 amid their unpromising and unsavory ma- 
 terials. So it was that Mr. Howells startled 
 a great many respectable people by the as- 
 surance that "Madame Bovary" was "one 
 impassioned cry of the austerest morality," 
 when they had innocently supposed it to be 
 something vastly different. Even respectable 
 critics, unemancipated English critics in par- 
 ticular, seem to have been somewhat taken 
 back by the breadth of this definition. Per- 
 haps they recalled Epictetus, " Austerity 
 should be both cleanly and pleasing," and 
 considered that " Madame Bovary " was nei- 
 ther. Perhaps they thought, and with some 
 reason, that never, since Swift's angry eyes 
 were closed in death, has any writer expressed 
 more harsh and cruel scorn for his fellow-men 
 than Gustave Flaubert, and that concentrated 
 contempt is seldom the most effective weapon 
 for an apostle. Perhaps they were merely 
 conventional enough to fancy that a novel, 
 against which even wicked Paris protested, 
 was hardly decorous enough for sober Lon- 
 don. At all events, it would appear as though 
 a goodly number of stragglers along the path 
 of virtue felt themselves insufficiently advanced 
 
112 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 for such a difficult and abstruse text-book of 
 ethics. 
 
 In the midst of this universal disclaimer, 
 it never seems to occur to anybody to ask the 
 simple question, Why should " Madame Bo- 
 vary " be an impassioned cry of the austerest 
 morality, why should any novel undertake 
 to be an impassioned cry of morality at all ? 
 It is not the office of a novelist to show us how 
 to behave ourselves ; it is not the business of 
 fiction to teach us anything. Scientific truths, 
 new forms of religion, the humorous eccentri- 
 cities of socialism, the countless fads of radical 
 reformers, the proper way to live our own 
 lives, these matters, which are now objects 
 of such tender regard to the story-teller, form 
 no part of his rightful stock-in-trade. \ His 
 task is simply to give us pleasure, and his 
 duty is to give it within the not very Puritan- 
 ical limits prescribed by our modern notions 
 of decency. If he chooses to overstep these 
 limits, an offense against propriety, it is exas- 
 perating to have him defended on the score of 
 an ethical purpose, an offense against art ; for 
 there is nothing so hopelessly inartistic as to 
 represent the world as worse than it is, or to 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 113 
 
 express a too vehement dissatisfaction with the 
 men who dwell in it. Art is never didactic, 
 does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to 
 grapple with theories, and is killed outright by 
 a sermon. Its knowledge is not that of a 
 schoolmaster, and is not imparted through the 
 severe medium of lessons. It assumes no re- 
 sponsibilities, undertakes no reformation, and, 
 as George Sand neatly points out, proves no- 
 thing. What are we to learn, she asks, from 
 " Paul and Virginia " ? Merely that youth, 
 friendship, love, and the tropics are beautiful 
 things when St. Pierre describes them. What 
 from " Faust ? " Only that science, human 
 life, fantastic images, profound, graceful, or 
 terrible ideas, are wonderful things when Goe- 
 the makes out of them a sublime and moving 
 picture. This sounds like high authority for 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde's latest and most amusing 
 heresy, that Nature gains her true distinction 
 from being reproduced, with necessary modifi- 
 cations, by Art ; that too close a copy of the 
 original is fatal to the perfection of the younger 
 and fairer sister ; that the insignificant and 
 sordid types in which Nature takes such repre- 
 hensible delight are to be, if possible, forgot- 
 
114 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 ten, rather than dandled into insulting promi- 
 nence; and that not all the dreary vices of 
 the most drearily vicious man or woman whom 
 Zola ever drew can give that man or woman 
 a right to breathy in the tranquil air of fiction. 
 As for accepting inartistic and repellent sin- 
 ners for the sake of the moral lesson which 
 may, or may not, be drawn from their sin, Mr. 
 Wilde is as prompt as De Quincey himself to 
 repudiate any such utilitarian theory. " If 
 you insist on my telling you what is the moral 
 of the Iliad," says De Quincey, " I must insist 
 on your telling me what is the moral of a rat- 
 tlesnake, or the moral of Niagara. I suppose 
 the moral is, that you must get out of their 
 way if you mean to moralize much longer." 
 
 But this light-hearted flippancy on the part 
 of the critic was only possible, or at least was 
 only acceptable, in those days when the nov- 
 elist had not yet awakened to his serious 
 duties in life. Content, for the most part, to 
 tell a story, he barely remembered now and 
 then, in the beginning, may be, or at the end, 
 that there was such a thing as an ethical 
 purpose in existence. Even Richardson, the 
 father of English didactic fiction, was but an 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 115 
 
 indifferent parent, starting out with a great 
 many gallant promises on behalf of his off- 
 spring, and easily forgetting all about them. 
 Miss Burney was as cheerfully unconscious of 
 her own grave obligations to society as was 
 Miss Austen ; while in those few lines with 
 which Sir Walter Scott closes " The Heart 
 of Mid - Lothian " lines addressed to the 
 " reader," and containing some irrefutable but 
 not very original remarks about the happiness 
 of virtue and the infelicity of vice we see an 
 almost pathetic avowal on the part of the great 
 novelist that, in the mere delight of telling his 
 beautiful and best loved tale, he had well- 
 nigh lost sight of any moral lesson it might 
 be fitted to convey, and was trying at the last 
 moment to make amends for this deficiency. 
 Imagine George Eliot forgetting, or permit- 
 ting her readers to forget, the moral lesson of 
 "Adam Bede," when every fresh development 
 of character or of narrative has for its con- 
 scions purpose the driving home of hard and 
 bitter truths. No need for the authoress of 
 " Romola " to wind up her story with that 
 paragraph of excellent advice to poor little 
 Lillo, who is after all rather young to profit 
 
116 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 by it ; while we who have followed Tito from 
 his first joyous entrance into Florence to that 
 last dreadful moment when, floating, bruised, 
 beautiful, and helpless, down the Arno, he 
 opens his dying eyes to meet the horror of 
 Baldassarre's vengeance, we surely do not 
 require to be warned afresh against the unpar- 
 donable sin of making things easy for our- 
 selves. In the pathetic history of the marred 
 and broken lives of " Middlemarch," in the 
 darker and harsher tragedy of " Daniel De- 
 ronda," we see forever present upon each suc- 
 ceeding page the underlying motive of the 
 tale ; we hear George Eliot listening, as Mor- 
 ley says, to the sound of her own voice, and 
 announcing as distinctly as she announced in 
 life that her function is that of the aesthetic 
 teacher, to rouse the nobler emotions which 
 make mankind desire the social right. 
 
 If the test of the true artist be to conceal 
 his art, then this transparently didactic pur- 
 pose is fatal to the perfection of any work 
 claiming to spring from the imagination. It 
 is impossible to preach a sermon out of the 
 mouth of fiction without making the fiction 
 subordinate to the sermon, and thus at once 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 117 
 
 destroying the just proportions of a story, and 
 forfeiting that subtle sympathy with life, as it 
 is, which gives to every artistic masterpiece its 
 admirable air of self-sufficing and harmonious 
 repose. " I always tremble when I see a 
 philosophical idea attached to a novel," said 
 Sainte-Beuve, who was spared by the kindly 
 hand of death from the sight of countless 
 novels attached to philosophical ideas. Charles 
 Lamb, with that unerring intuition which was 
 the most wonderful thing about his indolent 
 luminous genius, recognized, even in the com- 
 parative sunlight of his day, the growing 
 shadow of a speculative, disciplinal, analytic 
 literature which should sadly overrate its own 
 responsibilities and importance. " We turn 
 away," he said, " from the real essences of 
 things to hunt after their relative shadows, 
 moral duties ; whereas, if the truth of things 
 were fairly represented, the relative duties 
 might be safely trusted to themselves, and 
 moral philosophy lose the name of a science." 
 No one understood more thoroughly than 
 Lamb that the purely natural point of view, 
 as apart from the purely ethical point of view, 
 supplies the proper basis for all imaginative 
 
118 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 writing. " I have lived to grow into an in- 
 decent character," he sighed, struggling with 
 whimsical dejection to comprehend the new 
 forces at work ; sometimes protesting angrily 
 against the " Puritanical obtuseness, the stupid, 
 infantile goodness which is creeping among 
 us, instead of the vigorous passions and vir- 
 tues clad in flesh and blood ; " sometimes con- 
 templating, with humorously lowered eyelids, 
 " the least little men who spend their time and 
 lose their wits in chasing nimble and retiring 
 Truth, to the extreme perturbation and drying 
 up of the moistures." 
 
 " On court, Mas ! apr&s la v^rit^ ; 
 Ah ! croyez-moi, 1'erreur a son m^rite." 
 
 But if modern novelists are disposed to sacri- 
 fice their art to a conscious ethical purpose, 
 to write fiction, as Mr. Oscar Wilde wittily 
 says, " as though it were a painful duty," it 
 can hardly be denied that they are giving the 
 public what the public craves ; that they are 
 on the safe side of criticism, and have chosen 
 their position wisely, if not well. Should any 
 one feel inclined to doubt this, it might be 
 a convincing and salutary exercise to re-read 
 as swiftly as possible a few of the numerous 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 119 
 
 essays and reviews which followed closely on 
 George Eliot's death, and which have not 
 altogether vanished from the literary market 
 now. With one or two distinct and admi- 
 rable exceptions, they deal almost exclusively 
 with the didactic aspect of her novels ; they 
 weigh and balance every social theory, every 
 spiritual problem, every moral lesson, to be 
 extracted from her pages ; they take her as 
 seriously as she took herself, and give their 
 keenest praise to those precise qualities which 
 marred the artistic perfection of her work. I 
 have myself counted the obnoxious word " eth- 
 ics " six times repeated in the opening para- 
 graph of one review, and have felt too deeply 
 disheartened by such an outset to penetrate 
 any further. On the other hand, her dra- 
 matic power, her subtle insight, her masterly 
 style, her warm and vivid pictures of a life 
 that has touched us so closely, the exquisite 
 
 art with which her earlier tales are con- 
 
 & 
 
 structed, and, above and beyond all, her 
 delicious and inimitable humor, these things 
 appear to be regarded as mere minor details, 
 useful perhaps and pleasing, but strictly sub- 
 ordinate to the nobler endowments of her 
 
120 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 spirit. That some of us endure George Eliot 
 the teacher for the sake of George Eliot the 
 story-teller is a truth too painful to be put 
 often into words. That little Maggie Tulliver 
 spelling out the examples in the Latin gram- 
 mar, and secretly delighted at her own amaz- 
 ing cleverness, enables some of us to support 
 the processional virtues of Romola, and the 
 deadly priggishness of Daniel Deronda, is a 
 melancholy fact which perhaps it would be 
 wiser to ignore. Maggie, as we are aware, 
 has deeply shocked the sensitive nature of Mr. 
 Swinburne by her grossness in failing in love 
 with Stephen, for no better reason, appar- 
 ently, than because he was the first big, and 
 strong, and handsome man she had ever 
 known. That wonderful scene on the boat, 
 with its commonplace setting and strained in- 
 tensity of emotion ; the short, sad, rapturous 
 flight; the few misty hours of passionate 
 dreaming which made poor Maggie's little 
 share of earthly happiness, have branded her 
 so deeply in the sight of this hardened moral- 
 ist that even her bitter agony of renunciation 
 and her final triumph have failed to win 
 her pardon. With what chastened severity 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 121 
 
 and with what an animated vocabulary he 
 condemns the " revolting avowal " of her love, 
 the "hideous transformation," the '''vulgar 
 and brutal outrage/' the " radical and moral 
 plague spot," which debases her into something 
 too vile for pity or redemption ! Verily, this 
 is the squeamishness of the true ascetic who 
 has somehow mistaken his vocation, and there 
 will be a scant allowance of cakes and ale for 
 any of us when it is Mr. Swinburne's turn to 
 be virtuous. 
 
 As for the humor of George Eliot's novels, 
 that mysterious humor which she herself was 
 not humorous enough to appreciate, it de- 
 serves better treatment at our hands, were 
 it only for the sake of its valuable adapta- 
 bility, were it only because it is pliant enough 
 to lit in all the time with our own duller 
 imaginings, and to afford a basis and an il- 
 lustration for our own inadequate thoughts. 
 From what depths of her sombre nature came 
 those arrow - points tipped with fire, or, 
 choicer still, those tempered shafts of re- 
 flective ridicule, which are kindly enough to 
 win our unhesitating acquiescence ? With 
 what pleasure we are reminded that " people 
 
122 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 who live at a distance are naturally less faulty 
 than those immediately under our own eyes, 
 and it seems superfluous, when we consider 
 the geographical position of the Ethiopians, 
 and how very little the Greeks had to do with 
 them, to inquire further why Homer calls 
 them ' blameless' " ! Surely, to express a truth 
 humorously is to rob that truth of all offen- 
 sive qualities, and Lucian himself would be 
 prepared to admit that, in a case like this, it 
 is almost as pleasant as falsehood. But to 
 beguile us into the grateful shades of fiction, 
 as Jael beguiled Sisera into the shelter of her 
 tent, and then, with deadly purpose, to trans- 
 fix us with a truth as sharp and cruel as the 
 nail with which Jael slew her guest, is a das- 
 tardly betrayal of confidence. When a nov- 
 elist undertakes to sit in judgment upon his 
 characters, for the sake of illustrating some 
 moral lesson with which he has no need to 
 concern himself^ he rudely breaks the mystic 
 web of illusion, and destroys the charm which 
 binds us to his side. What is it that gives to 
 " Henry Esmond " its supreme artistic value, 
 if not the fact that Thackeray sank himself 
 out of sight ; was content for once to look at 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 123 
 
 things with Esmond's gentle eyes, to judge of 
 things with Esmond's tolerant soul ; and for- 
 bore to whip his actors through the play like 
 criminals at the cart - tail ? On the other 
 hand, what whimsical sense of responsibility 
 induced Bulwer to elaborate a character like 
 Randal Leslie, only to make of him an educa- 
 tional sign-post, after the approved fashion of 
 Miss Edgeworth's " Early Lessons " ? Judged 
 by a purely ethical standard, Randal no doubt 
 merited his failure ; judged by the standard 
 of his ability and energy, Reynard the Fox was 
 as little likely to fail ; and though Mr. Froude 
 tells us that " women, with their clear moral 
 insight, have no sympathy with Reynard's 
 successful villainy," yet I doubt whether we 
 should really like to see him outwitted by a 
 fool like Bruin, or beaten by a bully like Ise- 
 grim. He is a terrible scamp, to be sure, but 
 the charm of the situation is that we are not 
 compelled to watch it from a jury-box. 
 
 Now the disadvantage of being at once a 
 novelist and a teacher is that you have no 
 neutral ground from which to observe your 
 characters, no friendly appreciation of things 
 or people as you find them. What the ar- 
 
124 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 tist accepts with delicate sympathy, though 
 with no pretense at justification, the moralist 
 must either justify or condemn. The first 
 course is common enough, and produces a 
 class of literature essentially vicious because 
 of its very limitations, six deadly sins held 
 up to public execration, and the seventh pre- 
 sented to us tenderly as an ill-understood and 
 sadly calumniated virtue. The second course 
 that of implied condemnation is equally 
 open to a Sunday-school story or to the least 
 decorous of French novels ; both have for 
 their avowed object the pillorying of vice, and 
 both put forward this claim as a reasonable 
 excuse for existence. But art has no pillory, 
 no stocks, no whipping-post, no exclusive 
 methods for fixing our attention upon sin. 
 Art gives us Lady Macbeth and lago, and 
 gives them to us without reproaches, without 
 extenuation, and without any attempt to re- 
 form. It is less painful to watch the irresisti- 
 ble development of their respective crimes 
 than to hear Thackeray lashing with keen 
 scorn some poor sinner stumbling through the 
 mazes of worldly wickedness, or to see George 
 Eliot pursuing one of her own creations 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 125 
 
 with inextinguishable severity and contempt. 
 There is something paralyzing in the cold 
 anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded 
 and shamed ; there is something appalling in 
 the conscientious vindictiveness with which 
 Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final 
 retribution. That delightful essayist, Mr. 
 Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature is 
 about as much at home among modern the- 
 ories as a strayed Faun in a button factory, 
 has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing 
 picture of some old acquaintances under the 
 new dispensation : of Manon Lescaut threat- 
 ened with Charlotte Bronte's birch-rod ; of 
 Squire Western opening his startled eyes as 
 Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the 
 latest and most highly realistic study of de- 
 lirium tremens ; of Falstaff, whom that losel 
 Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening 
 abashed to George Eliot's scathing denuncia- 
 tions. " For really, Sir John," he hears her 
 say, " you have no excuse whatever. If you 
 were a poor devil who had never had any 
 but bad examples before your eyes ! but 
 you have had all the advantages which des- 
 tiny can give to man on his way through life. 
 
126 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Are you not born of a good family? Have 
 you not had at Oxford the best education 
 England is able to give to her children? 
 Have you not had the highest connections ? 
 And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen ! 
 Do you know why ? I have warned my Tito 
 over and over again against it : because you 
 have always done that only which was agree- 
 able to you, and have shunned everything that 
 was unpleasant." 
 
 This sounds like sad trifling to our sober 
 and orthodox ears, but it is not more auda- 
 cious, on the whole, than the pathetic lamenta- 
 tions of Mr. Oscar Wilde over the career of 
 Charles Reade : the most disheartening^ he 
 protests, in all literature ; " wasted in a fool- 
 ish attempt to be modern, and to draw atten- 
 tion to the state of our convict prisons, and 
 the management of private lunatic asylums. 
 Charles Dickens was depressing enough, in all 
 conscience, when he tried to arouse our sympa- 
 thy for the victims of the poor-law administra- 
 tion ; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, 
 a man with a true sense of beauty, raging 
 and roaring over the abuses of modern life 
 like a common pamphleteer or a sensational 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 127 
 
 journalist, is really a sight for the angels to 
 weep over." It is just possible that whatever 
 personal interest the angelic hosts take in our 
 earthly lot may be directed to philanthropy 
 rather than to literature ; but, for the idle and 
 inglorious mortal, the protest holds a world of 
 truth and meaning. Reade, as a reformer, is 
 melancholy company ; and Dickens is inex- 
 pressibly dismal when he drags the Chancery 
 business into " Bleak House," and the pauper 
 dinner-table into " Oliver Twist," and that 
 dreary caricature, the Circumlocution Office, 
 into " Little Dorrit." If these things really ac- 
 complished the good that is claimed for them, 
 it was dearly bought by the weariness of so 
 many millions of readers. " A fiction contrived 
 to support an opinion is a vicious composition," 
 said Jeffrey, who was as apt in his general crit- 
 icisms as he was awkward in their particular 
 applications, and who lived before the era of 
 serious and educational novels. To-day we 
 have the unhesitating assertion of Mr. How- 
 ells that one of Tolstoi 's highest claims to our 
 consideration is his steadfast teaching "that 
 all war, private and public, is a sin." Mr. 
 Ruskin, it may be remembered, holds some- 
 
128 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 what different views : " There is no great art 
 possible to a nation but that which is based 
 on war." Yet as every man is entitled to his 
 own opinion in such matters, there is no reason 
 why we should quarrel with either the Russian 
 or the Englishman for their chosen principles. 
 But Euskin is no greater as an essayist be- 
 cause he approves of war, and Tolstoi gains 
 nothing as a novelist because he adheres to 
 peace. The glory of the battlefield, its pathos 
 and its horror, are all fitting subjects for the 
 artist's pen or pencil. He may stir our blood 
 and rouse our fighting instincts, like Homer or 
 Scott ; or he may move us to pity, and sorrow, 
 and shame, by the revelation of all the shat- 
 tered hopes and bitter agonies that lie beyond. 
 But his own greatness depends exclusively on 
 his treatment of the subject, and not on his 
 point of view. Who knows and who cares 
 what De Neuville thinks of war ? He paints 
 for us a handful of men roused at dawn, and 
 rushing gallantly to their deaths, and we feel 
 our hearts beat high as we look at them. The 
 terror, the awf ulness, the self-forgetting cour- 
 age, the gay defiance of battle, all are there, 
 imprisoned mysteriously in the artistic group- 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 129 
 
 ing of a few blue-coated soldiers. But Vere- 
 stchagin, who aspires to teach us the wicked- 
 ness of war, is powerless to thrill us in this 
 manner. He is probably sincere in his opinions, 
 and he has striven hard to give them form and 
 expression, but, lacking the artistic impulse, 
 he has for the most part striven in vain. His 
 huge canvases, packed with dead and dying, 
 are less impressive, less solemn, less painful 
 even, from their monotonous overcrowding, 
 than a single Zouave, whose wounds De Neu- 
 ville has no need to emphasize with vast ex- 
 penditure of vermilion, when the faintness of 
 a mortal agony draws his weary body to the 
 earth. " All real power," says Euskin, " lies 
 in delicacy." To trouble the senses is an easy 
 task, but it is through the imagination only 
 that we receive any strong and lasting impres- 
 sions, and no sincerity of purpose can suffice 
 to turn a crude didacticism into art. 
 
 It is hard to analyze the peculiar nature of 
 the claims asserted and upheld by the disciples 
 of modern realism. They are not content 
 with the splendid position which is theirs by 
 right, not content with the admirable work 
 they have done, and the hold they have se- 
 
130 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 cured on the sympathies of our earnest, ration- 
 alistic, and unimaginative age ; but they as- 
 sume in some subtle and incomprehensible 
 way that their school is based upon man's 
 love and appreciation for his fellow-creatures. 
 If we would but look upon all men as our 
 brothers, it is plainly hinted, all men would be 
 of equal interest to us, and it is our duty, as 
 nineteenth-century citizens, to accept and cher- 
 ish this universal relationship. To the perpet- 
 ual sounding of the humanitarian note, there 
 are some, it is true, who answer, with Vernon 
 Lee's very amusing and very wicked skeptic, 
 that "the new-fangled bore called mankind is 
 as great a plague as the old-fashioned nuisance 
 called a soul ; " but there are others who, find- 
 ing themselves in full possession of a con- 
 science, stoutly maintain that they love their 
 undistinguished brother none the less because 
 they weary of his society in literature and art. 
 It was Ruskin, for example, who sneered at 
 George Eliot's characters as the " sweepings of 
 a Pentonville omnibus," a terrible misap- 
 plication of an inspired phrase ; but Ruskin 
 is the last man in Christendom who can be 
 accused of an indifference to his fellow-men. 
 

 FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 
 
 His whole life is a sufficient refutation of the 
 charge. Voltaire is responsible for the state- 
 ment that the world is full of people who are 
 not worth knowing. Yet Voltaire was for- 
 ever restlessly espousing some popular cause, 
 forever interesting himself in the supposed 
 welfare of these eminently undesirable associ- 
 ates. What he thought, and what he was quite 
 right in thinking, is that we gain nothing, intel- 
 lectually or spiritually, from the mass of men 
 and women with whom we come in contact ; 
 and that it is wiser to fix our attention upon 
 graceful and exalted types than to go on for- 
 ever, as Charles Lamb expressed it, " encour- 
 aging each other in mediocrity." 
 
 The present stand of realism, however, is but 
 one more phase of the intrusion of ethics upon 
 art, the assumption that I cannot have a sin- 
 cere regard for the welfare of my washerwo- 
 man if I do not care for her company either 
 in a book or out of it. Tubs have grown in 
 favor since the day when Wordsworth was 
 compelled, " in deference to the opinion of 
 friends," to substitute an impossible turtle- 
 shell for the homely vessel in which the blind 
 Highland boy set sail on Loch Leven. All 
 
132 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 classes and all people, I am now given to un- 
 derstand, are of supreme interest to the loving 
 student of human nature, and it is a " narrow 
 conservatism " chilling phrase that seeks 
 to limit the artist's field of action. But as 
 limiting the artist's field of action is practically 
 impossible, and not often essayed, it is hard to 
 understand what the respective schools of fic- 
 tion find to fight over, and why this new battle 
 of the books should be raging as fiercely as if 
 there were any visible cause of war. It is not 
 an orderly and well-appointed battle, either, 
 confined to the ranks of critics and reviewers, 
 but a free skirmish, where everybody who has 
 written a novel rushes in and plays an active 
 part. Conflicting opinions rattle around our 
 heads like hail, and the voice of the peace- 
 maker, Mr. Andrew Lang, protesting that 
 all schools are equally good, if the scholars 
 are equal to their tasks, is lost in the univer- 
 sal clamor. The only point on which any two 
 sharpshooters appear to agree is in laying the 
 blame for the " unmanly timidity of English 
 fiction " a timidity not always so apparent 
 as it might be on the shoulders of women, 
 who, it seems, will have all novels modeled to 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 133 
 
 suit themselves, and who, with the arrogance 
 of supreme power, have reversed the political 
 situation, and deprived mankind of their vote. 
 This is the opinion of Eider Haggard, and also 
 of Vernon Lee, who asserts that "the ethics 
 of fiction are framed entirely for the benefit 
 or the detriment of women," and that its en- 
 forced morality a defect which, to do her 
 justice, she is striving her best to eradicate 
 is fatal to its mission in life. 
 
 But that fiction has a mission, nobody dares 
 to doubt ; that its ethics are of paramount im- 
 portance, nobody dares to deny. It devotes 
 itself in all seriousness to our moral and intel- 
 lectual welfare ; and if, now and then, we are 
 reminded of Sydney Smith, who would rather 
 Mr. Perceval had whipped his boys and saved 
 his country, we stifle the sinful impulse, and 
 turn to biography and history for recreation, 
 for that purely imaginative element which 
 places no tax upon our conscience or credu- 
 lity. Yet we may at least remember that 
 all natures do not develop on the same lines ; 
 that all goodness is not comprised within 
 certain recognized virtues, or limited to cer- 
 tain fields of thought. Tolstoi, a figure on a 
 
134 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 grand scale, " filled with pity for the oppressed, 
 the poor, and the lowly," has manifested the 
 sincerity of his creed by a life of hard work 
 and hearty renunciation. But Sir Walter 
 Scott, the Tory, the "feudalist," content to 
 take the world as he found it, and to believe 
 that whatever is, is right, proved himself no 
 less the friend and benefactor of his kind. 
 The halo round his head is not that of genius 
 only, but of love, love freely given and abun- 
 dantly returned. The anxious whisper of the 
 London workmen to Allan Cunningham, " Do 
 you know, sir, if this is the street where he is 
 lying ? " the rapturous cry of the little de- 
 formed tailor who, with his last breath, sobbed 
 out, " The Lord bless and reward you ! " and, 
 falling back, expired, these are the sounds 
 that ring through generations to bear witness 
 to man's fidelity to man. 
 
 " For the might 
 Of the whole world's good wishes with him goes," 
 
 sang Wordsworth, with whom affectionate hy- 
 perbole was hardly a common fault. It can- 
 not be that Mr. Howells believes in his heart 
 that American children need to be warned 
 against Sir Walter's errors, and that it is the 
 
FICTION IN THE PULPIT. 135 
 
 duty of American parents to give this solemn 
 warning. Consider that it is only in youth 
 that our imagination triumphs vividly over re- 
 alities, a triumph short-lived enough, but 
 rich in fruits for the future. The time comes 
 all too soon when we doubt, and question, 
 and make room in our puzzled minds for 
 the opinions of many men. Ah, leave to the 
 child, at least, his clear, intuitive, unbiased en- 
 joyment, his sympathy with things that have 
 been ! He is not so easily hurt as we sup- 
 pose ; he is strong in his elastic ignorance, and 
 has no need of a pepsin pill with every mouth- 
 ful of literary food he swallows. Mental hy- 
 giene, it is said, is apt to lead to mental vale- 
 tudinarianism ; but if we are to turn our very 
 nurseries into hot-beds of prigs, we may say 
 once more what was said when Chapelain pub- 
 lished his portentous epic, that " a new horror 
 has been added to the accomplishment of 
 reading." 
 
PLEASURE : A HERESY. 
 
 IT is an interesting circumstance in the 
 lives of those persons who are called either 
 heretics or reformers, according to the mental 
 attitudes or antecedent prejudices of their 
 critics, that they always begin by hinting their 
 views with equal modesty and moderation. 
 It is only when rubbed sore by friction, when 
 hard driven and half spent, that they ven- 
 ture into the open, and define their positions 
 before the world in all their bald malignity. 
 Now I have a certain sneaking sympathy, not 
 with heretics or reformers, either, but with 
 that frame of mind which compels a hunted 
 and harried creature suddenly to assume the 
 offensive, cast prudence to the winds, nail his 
 thesis conspicuously to the doorpost, and 
 snortingly await developments. He is not, 
 while so occupied, a winning or beautiful 
 figure, when judged by the strict standards 
 of sweetness and light; but he is eminently 
 human, and is entitled to the forbearance of 
 humanity. 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 137 
 
 It is now over a year since, in an article 
 called " Fiction in the Pulpit," and published 
 in the " Atlantic Monthly," I ventured to say, 
 or rather I said without any consciousness of 
 being venturesome, that the sole business of 
 a novel-writer was to give us pleasure ; his 
 sole duty was to give it to us within decent 
 and prescribed limits. It seemed to me then 
 that the assertion was so self-evident as to be 
 hardly worth the making ; it was a little like 
 saying an undisputed thing " in such a solemn 
 way." I have learned since how profoundly 
 I was mistaken in the temper, not of writers 
 only, but of readers as well, how far re- 
 mote I stood from the current of ethical 
 activity. It is needless to state that this later 
 knowledge has been brought to me by the 
 mouths of critics : sometimes by professional 
 critics, who said their say in print ; sometimes 
 by amateur and neighborly critics, who ex- 
 pressed theirs frankly in speech. It is need- 
 less, also, to state that, of the two, the pro- 
 fessional critics brothers and sisters of my 
 own household I count them have been 
 infinitely more tolerant of my shortcomings, 
 more lenient in their remonstrances, more per- 
 
138 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 suasive and even flattering in their lines of 
 argument. The ordinary reviewer, anony- 
 mous or otherwise, is not the ruthless de- 
 stroyer, " ferocious, dishonest, butcherly," 
 whom Mr. Ho wells so graphically portrays, 
 but rather a kindly, indifferent sort of crea- 
 ture, who cares so little what you think that 
 even his reproaches wear an air of gentle and 
 friendly unconcern. 
 
 In all cases, however, the verdict reached 
 was practically the same. The business of 
 fiction is to elevate our moral tone ; to teach 
 us the stern lessons of life ; to quicken our 
 conceptions of duty ; to show us the dark 
 abysses of fallen nature ; to broaden our 
 spiritual vistas ; to destroy our old comfort- 
 able creeds ; to open our half-closed eyes ; to 
 expand our souls with the generous senti- 
 ments of humanity; to vex us with social 
 problems and psychological conundrums ; to 
 gird us with chain armor for our daily bat- 
 tles ; to do anything or everything, in short, 
 except simply give us pleasure. It is not 
 forbidden us, to be sure, to take delight, if 
 we can, in the system of instruction ; a good 
 child, we are told, should always love its les- 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 139 
 
 sons; but the really important thing is to 
 study and know them by heart. Verily 
 
 " This rugged virtue makes me gasp " ! 
 
 Why should the word " pleasure," when used 
 in connection with literature, send a cold 
 chill down our strenuous nineteenth-century 
 spines? It is a good and charming word, 
 caressing in sound and softly exhilarating in 
 sense. As in a dream, it shows us swiftly 
 rich minutes by a winter firelight, with " The 
 Eve of St. Agnes " held in our happy hands ; 
 long, lazy summer afternoons spent right joy- 
 ously in company with Emma Woodhouse and 
 Mr. Knightley ; or, perhaps, hours of content, 
 lost in the letters of Charles Lamb, dear to 
 us alike in all seasons and in all moods, a 
 heritage of delight as long as life shall last. 
 I do not, indeed, as I have been accused of 
 doing, employ the word " pleasure " as synony- 
 mous with amusement. Amusement is merely 
 one side of pleasure, but a very excellent 
 side, against which, in truth, I have no evil 
 word to urge. The gods forbid such base and 
 savorless ingratitude ! This is not at best a 
 merry world. " There is a certain grief in 
 
140 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 things as they are, in man as he has come to 
 be ; " and the background of our lives is a 
 steady, un deviating sadness. Who, then, has 
 not felt that sudden lifting of the spirits, that 
 quick purging of black, melancholy vapors 
 from the brain, as wise old Burton would ex- 
 press it, when some fine jest appeals irresis- 
 tibly to one's sense of humor ! There comes to 
 the alert mind at such a moment a distinct 
 revelation of contentment ; a conscious thought 
 that it is well to be alive, and to hear that 
 nimble witticism which has so warmed and 
 tickled one's fancy. " Live merrily as thou 
 canst," says Burton, " for by honest mirth we 
 cure many passions of the mind. A gay com- 
 panion is as a wagon to him that is wearied 
 by the way." 
 
 If amusement can help us so materially 
 in our daily life, which is a daily struggle as 
 well, how much more pleasure ! pleasure 
 which is the rightful goal of art, just as know- 
 ledge is the rightful goal of science. " Art," 
 says Winckelmann, " is the daughter of Plea- 
 sure ; " and as Demeter sought for Perse- 
 phone with resistless fervor and desire, so 
 Pleasure seeks for Art, languishing in sunless 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 141 
 
 gloom, and, having found her, expresses 
 through her the joy and beauty of existence, 
 and lives again herself in the possession of 
 her fair child, while the whole earth bubbles 
 into laughter. We cannot separate these two 
 without exchanging sunlight for frost and the 
 cold, dark winter nights. Mr. E. S. Dallas, 
 who, in those charming volumes pleadingly 
 entitled " The Gay Science," has made a gal- 
 lant fight for pleasure as the end of art, and 
 for criticism as the path by which that end 
 is reached, shows us very clearly and very 
 persuasively that, in all ages and in all na- 
 tions, there has been a natural, wholesome, 
 outspoken conviction that art exists for plea- 
 sure, and, pleasing, instructs as well. There 
 is a core of truth, he grants, in the Horatian 
 maxim that art may be profitable as well as 
 delightful, " since it always holds that wis- 
 dom's ways are ways of pleasantness, that en- 
 during pleasure comes only out of healthful 
 action, and that amusement, as mere amuse- 
 ment, is in its own place good if it be but 
 innocent. There is profit in art, as there is 
 gain in godliness, and policy in an honest life. 
 But we are not to pursue art for profit, nor 
 
142 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 godliness for gain, nor honesty because it is 
 politic." 
 
 This, then, is the earliest lesson that the 
 student of art has to learn : that it exists for 
 pleasure, but for a pleasure that may be 
 profitable, and that stands in no sort of oppo- 
 sition to truth. " Science," says Mr. Dallas, 
 " gives us truth without reference to pleasure, 
 but immediately and chiefly for the sake of 
 knowledge. Art gives us truth without ref- 
 erence to knowledge, but immediately and 
 mainly for the sake of pleasure." The test 
 of science, then, must always be an increase of 
 knowledge, of proven and demonstrable facts ; 
 the test of art must always be an increase 
 of pleasure, of conscious and sentient joy. 
 " What is good only because it pleases," says 
 Dr. Johnson, " cannot be pronounced good 
 until it has been found to please." 
 
 The joy that is born of art is not always a 
 simple or easily analyzed emotion. The plea- 
 sure we take in looking at the soft, white, 
 dimpled Venus of the Capitol is something 
 very different from that strange tugging at 
 our heart-strings when we first see the sad 
 and scornful beauty of the Venus of Milo, or 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 143 
 
 the curious pity with which we watch the 
 dejected Cupid of the Vatican hanging his 
 lovely head. But with both the Venus of 
 Milo and the Vatican Cupid, the sensation of 
 pleasure they afford is greater than the sen- 
 sation of pain, or pity, or regret. It triumphs 
 wholly over our other emotions, and gains 
 fullness from the conflict of our thoughts. 
 We feel many things, but we feel pleasure 
 most of all, and this is the final test and the 
 final victory of art. In the same manner, the 
 mixed emotions with which we listen to music 
 resolve themselves ultimately to pleasure in 
 that music ; and the mixed emotions with 
 which we read poetry resolve themselves ulti- 
 mately to pleasure in that poetry. If it were 
 otherwise, we should know that the music and 
 the poetry had failed in their crucial trial. If 
 we did not feel more pleasure than pain in the 
 tragedy of " Othello," it would not be a great 
 play. That we do feel more pleasure than 
 pain, that our pleasure is subtly fed by our 
 pain, proves it to be a masterpiece of art. 
 
 There is still another point to urge. While 
 art may instruct as well as please, it can nev- 
 ertheless be true art without instructing, but 
 
144 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 not without pleasing. The former quality 
 is accidental, the latter essential, to its being. 
 " Enjoyment," says Schiller, " may be only a 
 subordinate object in life ; it is the highest 
 in art." We cannot say that " The Eve of 
 St. Agnes " teaches us, directly or indirectly, 
 anything whatever. The trembling lovers, 
 the withered Angela, the revelers, 
 
 " The carved angels, ever eager-eyed," 
 
 the storm without, the fragrant warmth and 
 light within, are all equally innocent of moral 
 emphasis. Even the Beadsman is not worked 
 up, as he might have been, into a didactic 
 agent. But every beauty-laden line is rich in 
 pleasure, the whole poem is an inheritance 
 of delight. I never read it without being re- 
 minded afresh of that remonstrance offered 
 so gently by Keats to Shelley, by Keats, 
 who was content to be a poet, to Shelley, 
 who would also be a reformer : " You will, I 
 am sure, forgive me for sincerely remarking 
 that you might curb your magnanimity, and 
 be more of an artist, and load every rift 
 of your subject with ore." Load every rift of 
 your subject with ore, there spoke the man 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 145 
 
 who claimed no more for himself than that 
 he had loved " the principle of beauty in all 
 things," and to whose hushed and listening 
 soul the cry of Shelley's " divine discontent " 
 rang jarringly in the stillness of the night. 
 If the poetry of Keats, a handful of scattered 
 jewels left us by a dying boy, is, as Matthew 
 Arnold admits, more solid and complete than 
 Shelley's superb and piercing song, to what 
 is this due, save that Keats possessed, in ad- 
 dition to his poetic gift, the tranquil artist 
 soul ; content, as Goethe was content, to 
 love the principle of beauty, and to be in 
 sympathy with the great living past which 
 has nourished, and still nourishes, the living 
 present. The passion for reconstructing so- 
 ciety, and for distributing pamphlets as a 
 first step in the reconstruction, had no part 
 in his artistic development. The errors of his 
 fellow-mortals touched him lightly ; their su- 
 perstitions did not trouble him at all ; their 
 civil rights and inherited diseases were not 
 matters of daily thought and analysis. But 
 what he had to give them he gave unstinted- 
 ly, and we to-day are rich in the fullness of 
 his gift. " The proper and immediate object 
 
146 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of poetry," says Coleridge, " is the commu- 
 nication of immediate pleasure ; " and are our 
 lives so joyous that this boon may go un- 
 recognized and unregarded ? Which is best 
 for us in this chilly world, that which 
 pleases, but does not instruct, like " The Eve 
 of St. Agnes," or that which instructs, but does 
 not please, like Dr. Ibsen's " Ghosts " ? I do 
 not say, which is true art? because the rela- 
 tive positions of the two authors forbid com- 
 parison ; but, judged by the needs of human- 
 ity, which is the finer gift to earth ? If, with 
 Pliny, we seek an escape from mortality in 
 literature, which shall be our choice ? If, with 
 Dr. Johnson, we require that a book should 
 help us either to enjoy life or to endure it, 
 which shall we take for a friend ? 
 
 "Everything that is any way beautiful is 
 beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself," 
 says Marcus Aurelius ; and the pleasure we 
 derive from a possession of beauty has char- 
 acteristic completeness and vitality. This 
 pleasure is not only, as we are so often told, 
 a temporary escape from pain ; it is' not a 
 negation, a mere cessation of suffering ; it is 
 not necessarily preceded by craving or fol- 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 147 
 
 lowed by satiety ; it is emphatically not a mat- 
 ter of prospect as Shelley would have us 
 believe ; l it is a matter of conscious posses- 
 sion. " Vivre, c'est penser et sentir son 
 ame ; " and when a happy moment, complete 
 and rounded as a pearl, falls into the tossing 
 ocean of life, it is never wholly lost. For our 
 days are made up of moments and our years 
 of days, and every swift realization of a law- 
 ful joy is a distinct and lasting gain in our 
 onward flight to eternity. 
 
 It seems to me strangely cruel that this 
 philosophy of pleasure should be so ruthlessly 
 at variance with the ethical criticism of our 
 day. If it has come down to us as a gracious 
 gift from the most cheerful and not the least 
 wholesome of heathens, it has been broadened 
 and brightened into fresh comeliness by the 
 spirit of Christianity, which is, above all things, 
 a spirit of lawful and recognized joy. No- 
 thing is more plain to us in the teaching of the 
 early Church than that asceticism is for the 
 chosen few, and enjoyment, diffused, genial, 
 temperate, and pure enjoyment, is for the 
 
 1 " Pain or pleasure, if subtly analyzed, will be found to 
 consist entirely in prospect." 
 
148 POJNTS OF VIEW. 
 
 many. " Put on, therefore, gladness that hath 
 always favor with God, and is acceptable unto 
 him, and delight thyself in it ; for every man 
 that is glad doeth the things that are good, 
 and thinketh good thoughts, despising grief." l 
 Through all the centuries, rational Christianity 
 has still taught us bravely to endure what we 
 must, and gratefully to enjoy what we can. 
 There is a very charming and sensible letter on 
 this point, written by the Abbe Duval to Ma- 
 dame de Remusat, who was disposed to re- 
 proach herself a little for her own happiness, 
 and to think that she had no right to be so 
 comfortable and so well content. 
 
 " You say that you are happy," writes this 
 gentlest and wisest of confessors ; " why then 
 distress yourself ? Your happiness is a proof 
 of God's love toward you ; and if in your heart 
 you truly love Him, can you refuse to respond 
 to the divine benevolence ? . . . Engrave 
 upon your conscience this fundamental truth : 
 that religion demands order above all things ; 
 and that, since the institutions of society have 
 been allowed and consecrated, there is encour- 
 agement for those duties by which they are 
 
 1 Shepherd of Hernias. 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 149 
 
 maintained. . . . But especially banish from 
 your mind the error that our pains alone are ac- 
 ceptable to God. A general willingness to bear 
 trial is enough. Never fear but life and time 
 will bring it. Dispose yourself beforehand to 
 resignation, and meanwhile thank God inces- 
 santly for the peace which pervades your lot." 
 This is something very different from Bus- 
 kin's ethics, from the plain statement that 
 we have no right to be happy while our brother 
 suffers, no right to put feathers in our own 
 child's hat, while somebody else's child goes 
 featherless and ragged. But there is a certain 
 staying power in the older and simpler doctrine, 
 and an admirable truth in the gentle suggestion 
 that we need not vex ourselves too deeply with 
 the notion of our ultimate freedom from trial. 
 It was not given to Madame de Remusat, any 
 more than it is given to us, to ride in untrou- 
 bled gladness over a stony world. All that she 
 attained, all that we can hope for, are distinct 
 and happy moments, brief intervals from 
 pain, or from that rational ennui which is in- 
 separable from the conditions of human life. 
 But I cannot agree with the long list of philo- 
 sophers and critics, from Kant and Schopen- 
 
150 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 \ 
 
 hauer down to Mr. Dallas, who have taught 
 that these passing moments are negative in 
 their character ; that they are hidden from our 
 consciousness and elude our scrutiny, exist- 
 ing while we are content simply to enjoy them, 
 vanishing, if, like Psyche, we seek to under- 
 stand our joy. The trained intelligence grasps 
 its pleasures, and recognizes them as such ; not 
 after they have fled, and linger only, a golden 
 haze, in memory, but alertly, in the present, 
 while they still lie warm in the hollow of the 
 heart. There is indeed a certain breathless 
 and unconscious delight in life itself, which is 
 born of our ceaseless struggle to live, a sweet- 
 ness of honey snatched from the lion's mouth. 
 This delight is common to all men, and is 
 probably keenest in those who struggle hardest. 
 When society is reorganized on a Utopian 
 basis, and nobody has any further need to 
 elbow his own way through hardships and dif- 
 ficulties, there will be one joy less in the 
 world ; and, missing it, many people will real- 
 ize that all which made life worth having has 
 been softened and improved out of existence. 
 They will cease to value, and refuse to possess, 
 that which costs them nothing to preserve. 
 
OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 PLEASURE-. A HERESY. 151 
 
 This fundamental happiness in life, and in 
 the enforced activity by which it is maintained, 
 is hidden from our consciousness. We feel 
 the hardships, and do not especially feel any 
 relish in ceaselessly combating them, though 
 the relish is there ; not keen enough for palpa- 
 ble felicity, but vital enough to keep the human 
 race alive. All other pleasures, however, we 
 should train ourselves to enjoy. They flow 
 from many sources, and are fitted to many 
 moods. They are fed alike by our most secret 
 emotions and by our severest toil, by the sim- 
 plest thing in* nature and by the utmost sub- 
 tlety of art. A primrose by a river's brim 
 often makes its appeal as vainly as does Ham- 
 let, or the Elgin Marbles. What we need is, 
 not more cultivation, but a recognized habit 
 of enjoyment. There is, I am told, though 
 I cannot speak from experience, a very high 
 degree of pleasure in successfully working out 
 a mathematical problem. Burton confesses 
 frankly that his impelling motive, in long 
 hours of research, was primarily his own grati- 
 fication. " The delight is it I aim at, so great 
 pleasure, such sweet content, there is in study." 
 I think the most beautiful figure in recent lit- 
 
152 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 erature is Mr. Pater's Marius the Epicurean, 
 whose life, regarded from the outside, is but 
 a succession of imperfect results, yet who, de- 
 serted and dying, counts over with a patient 
 and glad heart the joys he has been permitted 
 to know. 
 
 " Like a child thinking over the toys it loves, 
 one after another, that it may fall asleep so, 
 and the sooner forget all about them, he would 
 try to fix his mind, as it were impassively, on 
 all the persons he had loved in life, on his 
 love for them, dead or living, grateful for his 
 love or not, rather than on theirs for him, 
 letting their images pass away again, or rest 
 with him, as they would. One after another, 
 he suffered those faces and voices to come and 
 go, as in some mechanical exercise ; as he 
 might have repeated all the verses he knew by 
 heart, or like the telling of beads, one by one, 
 with many a sleepy nod between whiles." 
 
 Here is a profound truth, delicately and rev- 
 erently conveyed. That which is given us for 
 our joy is ours as long as life shall last ; not 
 passing away with the moment of enjoyment, 
 but dwelling with us, and enriching us to the 
 end. The memory of a past pleasure, derived 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 153 
 
 from any lawful source, is a part of the plea- 
 sure itself, a vital part, which remains in our 
 keeping as long as we recognize and cherish it. 
 Thus, the pleasure obtained from seeing the 
 Venus of Milo or reading " The Eve of St. Ag- 
 nes " is not ended when we have left the Louvre 
 or closed the book. It becomes a portion of 
 our inheritance, a portion of the joy of living ; 
 and the statue and the poem have fulfilled their 
 allotted purpose in yielding us this delight. 
 There is a curious fashion nowadays of criticis- 
 ing art and poetry, and even fiction, with scant 
 reference to the pleasure for which they exist ; 
 yet a rational estimate of these things is hardly 
 possible from any other standpoint. Mr. Kus- 
 kin, we know, has invented that pleasing nov- 
 elty, ethical art-criticism, and, by its means, as 
 Mr. Dallas frankly admits, he has made, not 
 the criticism only, but the art itself, intelligi- 
 ble and palatable to his English readers. It 
 would seem as if they hardly held themselves 
 justified in enjoying a thing unless there was 
 a moral meaning back of it, a moral principle 
 involved in their own happiness. This mean- 
 ing and this principle Mr. Ruskin has supplied, 
 bringing to bear upon his task all the earnest- 
 
154 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 ness and sincerity of his spirit, all the wonder- 
 ful charm and beauty of a winning and per- 
 suasive eloquence. It is well-nigh impossible 
 to withstand his appeals, they are so irresisti- 
 bly worded ; and it is only when we have with- 
 drawn from his seductive influence, to think a 
 little for ourselves, that we realize how much 
 of his criticism, as criticism, is valueless, be- 
 cause it consists in analyzing motives rather 
 than in estimating results. He assumes that 
 the first interest in a picture is, what did the 
 painter intend ? the second interest is, how did 
 he carry out his intention ? whereas the one 
 really important and paramount consideration 
 in art is workmanship. We have, many of us, 
 the artist's soul, but few the artist's fingers. 
 It is a pleasant pastime to decipher the men- 
 tal attitude of the painter ; it is essential to un- 
 derstand the quality and limit of his powers. 
 
 Reading Mr. Raskin's criticisms on Tinto- 
 ret's pictures in the Scuola di S. Rocco on 
 the Annunciation particularly is very much 
 like listening to a paper in a Browning Society. 
 Perhaps the poet, perhaps the painter, did mean 
 all that. It is manifestly impossible to prove 
 they did n't, inasmuch as death has removed 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 155 
 
 them from any chance of interrogation. But 
 by what mysterious and exclusive insight have 
 Mr. Euskin and the Browning student found 
 it out? The interpretation is not suggested 
 as feasible, it is asserted as a fact; though 
 precisely how it has been reached we are not 
 suffered to know. Many unkind and severe 
 things have been said about judicial criticism, 
 but Mr. Ruskin's criticism is not judicial, 
 which infers an application of governing prin- 
 ciples ; it is dogmatic, the unhesitating expres- 
 sion of a personal sentiment. He shows you 
 Giotto's frescoes in the cloister of Santa Maria 
 Novella ; he pleads with you very prettily and 
 charmingly to admire the Birth of the Virgin ; 
 he points out to you with rather puzzling pre- 
 cision exactly what the painter intended to im- 
 ply by every detail of the work. This is pleas- 
 ant enough ; but suppose you don't really care 
 about the Birth of the Virgin when you see it ; 
 suppose you fail to follow the guiding finger 
 that reveals to you its significance and beauty. 
 What happens then ? Mr. Ruskin retorts in 
 the severest manner, and with a degree of scorn 
 that seems hardly warranted by the contin- 
 gency : " If you can be pleased with this, you 
 
156 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 can see Florence. But if not, by all means 
 amuse yourself there, if you find it amusing, 
 as long as you like ; you can never see it." 
 
 So Florence with all its loveliness is lost to 
 you, unless you can sufficiently sympathize with 
 one small fresco. It would be as reasonable 
 to say that all English literature is lost to you, 
 unless you truly enjoy "Conius; " that all music 
 is lost to you, unless you delight in "Parsifal." 
 It is the special privilege of ethical criticism 
 to take this exclusive and didactic form ; to 
 bid you admire a thing, not because it is beau- 
 tiful in itself, but because it has a subtle lesson 
 to convey, a lesson of which, it is urbanely 
 hinted, you stand particularly in need. On 
 precisely the same principle, you are com- 
 manded to cleave to Tolstoi, not because he 
 has written able novels, but because those 
 novels teach a great many things which it is 
 desirable you should know and believe; you 
 are bidden to revere George Meredith, not 
 because he has given the world some brilliant 
 and captivating books, but because these books 
 contain a tonic element fitted for your moral 
 reconstruction. If you do not sufficiently value 
 these admirable lessons, then you are told, in 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 157 
 
 language every whit as contemptuous as Mr. 
 Euskin's, to amuse yourself, by all means, with 
 Lever, and Gaboriau, and Jules Verne ; for 
 all higher fiction is, like the art of Florence, 
 a sealed book to your understanding. 
 
 " Most men," says Mr. Froude, " feel the 
 necessity of being on some terms with their con- 
 science, at their own expense or at another's ; " 
 and one very popular method of balancing their 
 score is by exacting from art and literature 
 that serious ethical purpose which they hesitate 
 to intrude too prominently into their daily lives, 
 rightly opining that it gives much less trouble 
 in books. So prevalent is this tone in mod- 
 ern thought that even a consummate critic like 
 Mr. Bagehot is capable of saying, in one of his 
 supremely moral moments, that Byron's poems 
 " taught nothing, and therefore are forgotten." 
 Et tu, Brute ! Such a sentence from such a 
 pen makes me realize something of the bitter- 
 ness with which the dying Caesar covered up his 
 face from his most trusted friend. That Lord 
 Byron's poems are forgotten is rather a matter 
 of doubt ; that they are given over entirely into 
 the hands of " a stray schoolboy " is a hazard- 
 ous assertion to make ; but to say that they are 
 
158 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 forgotten because they teach nothing is to strike 
 at the very life and soul of poetry. It does 
 not exist to teach, but to please ; it can cease 
 to exist only when it ceases to give pleasure. 
 
 Perhaps what Mr. Bagehot meant to imply 
 is that it would be a difficult task to review 
 Byron's poetry after the approved modern 
 fashion ; to assign him, as we assign more con- 
 templative and analytic poets, a moral raison 
 d'etre. Pick up a criticism of Mr. Browning, 
 for example, and this is the first thing we see : 
 " What was the kernel of Browning's ethical 
 teaching, and how does he apply its principles 
 to life, religion, art, and love?" 1 It would 
 be as manifestly absurd to ask this question 
 about Byron as it would be to review Fielding 
 from the standpoint adapted for Tolstoi, or to 
 discuss Sheridan from the same field of view 
 as Ibsen. With the earlier writers it was a 
 question of workmanship ; with our present 
 favorites it has become a question of ethics. 
 Yet when we seek for simple edification, as 
 our plain-spoken grandfathers understood the 
 word, as many innocent people understand it 
 now, the new school seems as remote from fur- 
 
 1 Quarterly Eeview. 
 
PLEAS URE : A HERES Y. 1 59 
 
 nishing it as the old. Browning, Tolstoi', and 
 Ibsen have their own methods of dealing with 
 sin, and richly suggestive and illustrative 
 methods they are. The lessons taught may be 
 of a highly desirable kind, but I doubt their 
 practical efficacy in our common working lives ; 
 and I cannot think this possible efficacy war- 
 rants their intrusion into art. Great truths, 
 unconsciously revealed and as unconsciously 
 absorbed, have been, in all ages, the soul of 
 poetry, the subtle life of fiction. These truths, 
 always in harmony with the natural world and 
 with the vital sympathies of man, were not 
 put forward crudely as lessons to be learned, 
 but primarily as pleasures to be enjoyed ; 
 and through our " sweet content," as Burton 
 phrased it, we came into our heritage of know- 
 ledge. To-day both poetry and fiction have 
 assumed a different and less winning attitude. 
 They have grown sensibly didactic, are at 
 times almost reproachful in their tone, and, so 
 far from striving to yield us pleasure, to in- 
 crease our " sweet content " with life, they en- 
 deavor, with very tolerable success, to prevent 
 our being happy after our own limited fashion. 
 Their principal mission is to worry us vaguely 
 
160 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 about our souls or our neighbors' souls, or the 
 social order which we did not establish, and the 
 painful problems that we cannot solve. Our 
 spirits, at all times restless and troubled, re- 
 spond with quick alarm to these dismal agita- 
 tions ; our serenity is not proof against the 
 strain ; our sense of humor is not keen enough 
 to cure us with wholesome laughter ; and nine- 
 teenth-century cultivation consists in being 
 miserable for misery's sake, and in saying 
 solemnly to one another at proper intervals, 
 " This is the eternal progress of the ages. " 
 
 It was a curious and rather melancholy ex- 
 perience, a year ago, to hear the comments of 
 those patient women who devoted their after- 
 noons to Ibsen readings, and to turning over 
 in their minds the new and unprofitable situa- 
 tions thus suggested. The discussions that 
 followed were invariably ethical, never critical ; 
 they had reference always to some moral co- 
 nundrum offered by the play, never to the ar- 
 tistic or dramatic excellence of the play itself. 
 "Was Nora Helmer justified, or was she not, in 
 abandoning her children with explicit confi- 
 dence to the care of Mary Ann? Had Dr. 
 Wangel a right, or had he not, to annul his 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 161 
 
 own marriage tie with the primitive simplicity 
 of the king of Dahomey? To answer such 
 questions as these has become our notion of 
 literary recreation, and there is something pa- 
 thetically droll in the earnestness with which 
 we bend our wits to the task. Indeed, poor 
 little Nora's matrimonial infelicities threat- 
 ened to become as important in their way as 
 those of Catherine of Aragon or Josephine 
 Beauharnais, and we talked about them quite 
 seriously and with a certain awe. The un- 
 flinching manner in which Ibsen has followed 
 Sir Thomas Browne's advice, " Strive not to 
 beautify thy corruption ! " commends him, nat- 
 urally, to that large class of persons who can 
 tolerate sin only when it is dismal ; and Bau- 
 delaire, praying for a new vice, was jocund 
 in comparison with our Norwegian dramatist, 
 unwearyingly analyzing the old one. Yet 
 what have we gained from the rankness of 
 these disclosures, from these horrible studies 
 of heredity, these hospital and madhouse 
 sketches, these incursions of pathology into the 
 realms of art? What shall we ever gain by 
 beating down the barriers of reserve which 
 civilized communities have thought fit to rear, 
 
162 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 by abandoning that wholesome reticence which 
 is the test of self-restraint ? We try so hard 
 to be happy, we have such need, each of his 
 little share of happiness ; yet Ibsen, troubling 
 the soul more even than he troubles the senses, 
 has chosen to employ his God-given genius in 
 deliberately lessening our small sum of human 
 joy. When shall we cease to worship at such 
 dark altars ? When shall we recognize, with 
 Goethe, that " all talent is wasted if the sub- 
 ject be unsuitable " ? " When shall we under- 
 stand and believe that "the gladness of a spirit 
 is an index of its power " ? 
 
 " To live," says Amiel, " we must conquer 
 incessantly, we must have the courage to be 
 happy." Enjoyment, then, is not our common 
 daily portion, to be stupidly ignored or care- 
 lessly cast away. It is something we must 
 seek courageously and intelligently, distin- 
 guishing the pure sources from which it flows, 
 and rightly persuaded that art is true and good 
 only when it adds to our delight. For this 
 were our poets and dramatists, our painters 
 and novelists, sent to us, to make us lawfully 
 happier in a hard world, to help us smilingly 
 through the gloom. And can it be they think 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 163 
 
 this mission beneath their august consideration, 
 unworthy of their mighty powers? Why, to 
 have given pleasure to one human being is a 
 recollection that sweetens life ; and what should 
 be the fervor and transport of him to whom it 
 has been granted to give pleasure to genera- 
 tions, to add materially to the stored-up glad- 
 ness of the earth! "Science pales," says Mr. 
 Dallas, " age after age is forgotten, and age 
 after age has to be freshened ; but the secret 
 thinking of humanity, embalmed in art, sur- 
 vives, as nothing else in life survives." This 
 is our inheritance from the past, this secret 
 thinking of humanity, embalmed in imper- 
 ishable beauty, and enduring for our delight. 
 The thinking of that idle vicar, Robert Her- 
 rick, when he sang, on a fair May morning : 
 
 " Come, let us go, while we are in our prime, 
 And take the harmless folly of the time I 
 We shall grow old apace, and die 
 Before we know our liberty." 
 
 The thinking of Theocritus, who, lying drow- 
 sily on the hillside, saw the sacred waters well- 
 ing from the cool caverns, and heard the little 
 owl cry in the thorn brake, and the yellow bees 
 murmur and hum in the soft spicy air : 
 
164 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 " All breathed the scent of the opulent sum- 
 mer, of the season of fruit. Pears and apples 
 were rolling at our feet ; the tender branches, 
 laden with wild plums, were bowed to earth ; 
 and the four-year-old pitch seal was loosened 
 from the mouth of the wine-jars." 
 
 Here is art attuned to the simplest forms 
 of pleasure, yet as lasting as the pyramids, 
 a whispered charm borne down the current 
 of years to soothe our fretted souls. But the 
 tranquil enjoyment of what is given us to 
 enjoy has become a subtle reproach in these 
 days of restless disquiet, of morbid and con- 
 scious self - scrutiny, when we have forfeited 
 our sympathy with the beliefs, the aspirations, 
 and the " sweet content " that linked the cen- 
 turies together. We are suffering at present 
 from a glut of precepts, a surfeit of preceptors, 
 and have grown sadly wise, and very much 
 cast down in consequence. We lack, as Amiel 
 says, the courage to be happy, and glorify our 
 discontent into an intellectual barrier, pluming 
 ourselves on a seriousness that may not be di- 
 verted. But if we will only consent to calm 
 our fears, to quiet our scruples, to humble our 
 pride, and to take one glad look into the world 
 
PLEASURE: A HERESY. 165 
 
 of art, we shall see it bathed in the golden sun- 
 light of pleasure ; and we shall know very well 
 that didacticism, whether masquerading as a 
 psychological drama or a socialistic forecast, 
 as a Sunday-school story or a deistical novel, 
 is no guide to that enchanted land. 
 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 
 
 IT is one of the most delightful things about 
 Miss Edge worth's immortal tales for children 
 that the incidents they relate have a knack of 
 remaining indelibly fixed in our memories, long 
 after we have succeeded in forgetting the more 
 severely acquired information of our school- 
 days. Why, for instance, do I vex my temper 
 and break my finger-nails in a vain effort to 
 untie the knotted cord of every bundle that 
 comes to the house, save that I have still be- 
 fore me the salutary example of that prudent 
 little Ben, who so conscientiously and cheer- 
 fully devoted himself to unfastening his uncle's 
 package ? " You may keep the string for your 
 pains," says Mr. Gresham, with pleasing liber- 
 ality. "Thank you, sir," replies Ben, with 
 more effusion than I think he feels. u What 
 an excellent whipcord it is ! " And so, pocket- 
 ing his fee, it wins for him, as we all know, the 
 prize at Lady Diana Sweepstake's great arch- 
 ery contest, while poor Hal forfeits his shot, 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 167 
 
 and loses his hat, and gets covered with mud 
 and disgrace, and sprains his little cousin Pat- 
 ty's ankle, and all because he has been rash 
 enough to cut his piece of cord. Never was 
 moral more sternly pointed, not even in the 
 case of Miss Jane Taylor's heedless little 
 Emily, who will not stoop to pick up a pin, and 
 is punished by the loss of a whole day's plea- 
 sure, because, owing to some unexplained in- 
 tricacy of her toilet, 
 
 " She could not stir, 
 For just a pin to finish her. " 
 
 But was whipcord such a costly article in 
 Miss Edgeworth's time, that a small piece of it 
 was worth so much trouble and pains? We 
 have Hal's testimony that twice as much could 
 have been bought for twopence ; and though 
 Hal is but a graceless young scamp, who can- 
 not be induced to look upon twopence with be- 
 coming reverence, and who plainly has a career 
 of want and misery before him, yet his word 
 on this matter may be accepted as final. At 
 the present day, the value of a bit of string 
 saved by patient dexterity from the scissors is 
 so infinitesimal that the hoarding up of match 
 stumps, after the fashion of a certain great 
 
168 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 banker, would really seem the quicker road to 
 wealth. But the true gain in these minute 
 economies is of a strictly moral nature, and 
 serves, when we know we have been extravagant, 
 to balance our account with conscience. The 
 least practical of us have some petty thrift 
 dear to our hearts, some one direction in which 
 we love to scrimp. I have known wealthy men 
 who grudged themselves and their families 
 nothing that money could buy, yet were made 
 perfectly miserable by the amount of gas 
 burned nightly in their homes. They roamed 
 around with manifest and pitiful uneasiness, 
 stealthily turning down a burner here and there, 
 whenever they could do so unperceived, dim- 
 ming the glories of their glass and gilding, and 
 reducing upper halls and familiar stairways 
 into very pitfalls for the stumbling of the un- 
 wary. The advent of lamps has brought but 
 scant solace to these sufferers, for their econ- 
 omy is, in fact, much older than the gas itself, 
 and flourished exceedingly in the days of wax 
 tapers and tallow-dips. We read in the vera- 
 cious chronicles of "Cranford" how Miss Matty 
 Jenkyns, so thoughtlessly generous in all other 
 matters, had for her one pet frugality the hoard- 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 169 
 
 ing of her candles, and by how many intricate 
 devices the dear old lady sought to cherish and 
 protect these objects of her tender solicitude. 
 
 " They (the candles) were usually brought 
 in with tea, but we only burned one at a time. 
 As we lived in constant preparation for a 
 friend who might come in any moment (but 
 who never did), it required some contriv- 
 ance to keep them of the same length, ready 
 to be lighted, and to look as if we burned two 
 always. They took it in turns, and, whatever 
 we might be talking about or doing, Miss 
 Matty's eyes were habitually fixed upon the 
 candle, ready to jump up and extinguish it, 
 and to light the other, before they had become 
 too uneven in length to be restored to equality 
 in the course of the evening." 
 
 This little scene of innocent deception is 
 finer, in its way, than the famous newspaper 
 paths on which Miss Deborah's guests step 
 lightly over her new carpet to their respective 
 chairs. We sympathize with Miss Matty's 
 anxiety about her tapers because it represents 
 one phase of a weakness common to all man- 
 kind, and far remote, we trust, from mere 
 vulgar parsimony, which, seeking to stint in all 
 
170 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 things, is, by its very nature, incapable of a 
 nice spirit of selection. Even the narrator of 
 " Cranford," that shadowy, indistinguishable 
 Mary Smith, who contrives so cleverly to keep 
 her own identity in the background, even she 
 consents to emerge one moment from her chosen 
 dimness, and to claim a share in this highly 
 discriminating economy. String, she acknow- 
 ledges, is her foible. Like the excellent Mr. 
 Gresham, she would preserve it from destruc- 
 tion at the most liberal expenditure of other 
 people's time and trouble. " My pockets," she 
 confesses, " get full of little hanks of it, picked 
 up and twisted together, ready for uses that 
 never come. I am seriously annoyed if any 
 one cuts the string of a parcel instead of pa- 
 tiently and faithfully undoing it fold by fold. 
 How people can bring themselves to use India- 
 rubber rings, which are a sort of deification 
 of string, as lightly as they do, I cannot ima- 
 gine. To me an India-rubber ring is a pre- 
 cious treasure. I have one which is not new ; 
 one that I picked up off the floor six years 
 ago. I have really tried to use it, but my 
 heart failed me, and I could not commit the 
 extravagance." 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 
 
 It would be a pity to spoil this vivacious 
 description by a touch of odious modern real- 
 ism, and to hint that an India-rubber ring 
 which had knocked about the world for six - 
 years must have parted with much of its youth- 
 ful elasticity, and would be of comparatively 
 little use to any one. 
 
 Illustrious examples are not lacking to give 
 dignity and weight to these seemingly trivial 
 frugalities. The great, and wise, and mean 
 Duke of Marlborough, he who held the fate of 
 Europe in his hands, and who was, without 
 doubt, the first of English-speaking generals, 
 did not disdain to bend his mighty mind to the 
 contemplation of his candle-ends, or to the 
 tender protection of his luggage. Who under- 
 stood so well as he how to spend a thousand 
 pounds, and save a shilling ? When Prince 
 Eugene came to a conference in his tent, the 
 duke's servant, anxious no doubt for an osten- 
 tatious display, had the temerity to light four 
 wax tapers in honor of the royal guest, which, 
 when Marlborough perceived, he promptly ex- 
 tinguished, rating the unlucky attendant with 
 such caustic severity that the offense ran little 
 likelihood of being soon repeated. While the 
 
172 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 great pile of Blenheim was absorbing countless 
 thousands in its slow process of erection, the 
 duke walked every morning from the public 
 rooms at Bath to his own lodging, thereby 
 saving sixpence daily, and affording a shining 
 model to those whose favorite economy is cab- 
 hire. He walked to the very end, this con- 
 sistent old warrior ; walked while the pangs of 
 illness were creeping over his disabled frame ; 
 and at last, when he could save no more six- 
 pences, he died, and left nearly two million 
 pounds to be squandered briskly by his heirs. 
 
 His wife, too, the beautiful, brilliant, high- 
 tempered Duchess Sarah, was every bit as 
 thrifty as her lord. She built the triumphal 
 arch of Blenheim at her own expense, and 
 wrangled mightily all the while over the price 
 of lime, " sevenpence half-penny per bushel, 
 when it could be made in the park." She was 
 the richest peeress in England, but her keen 
 blue eyes, as fiery as Marlborough's own, were 
 ever awake to any attempted depredation. 
 Her dressmaker, one Mrs. Buda, essayed, not 
 knowing with whom she had to deal, to hold 
 back from her some yards of cloth ; whereupon 
 the duchess borrowed Mrs. Buda's diamond 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 173 
 
 ring " for a pattern," and refused to give it 
 up until the stuff was returned. She under- 
 stood also the admirable art of utilizing her 
 friends, and there is a delighf ul letter written 
 by her to Lord Stair, then minister at France, 
 commissioning him to buy her a night-gown, 
 or more properly a dressing-gown, " easy and 
 warm, with a light silk wadd in it, such as are 
 used to come out of bed and gird round, with- 
 out any train at all, but very full. 'T is no 
 matter what color, except pink or yellow no 
 gold or silver in it; but some pretty striped 
 satin or damask, lined with a tafetty of the 
 same color." She also desires for her daugh- 
 ter, Lady Harriet, then a child of thirteen, " a 
 monto and petticoat to go abroad in, no silver 
 or gold in it, nor a stuff that is dear, but a 
 middling one that may be worn either in win- 
 ter or in summer." The canny duchess pru- 
 dently adds that she will wait for the things 
 until " no one need be troubled with the cus- 
 tom-house people," a euphuism worthy of an 
 American conscience, and she thanks Lord 
 Stair at the same time for sending her " a pair 
 of bodyes," which were so well-fitting, and evi- 
 dently so cheap, that she will have two more 
 
174 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 pairs of " white tabby from the same taylor." 
 Fancy asking a foreign minister to purchase 
 one's stays, and wrappers, and little daughter's 
 petticoats, and to please wait his opportunity 
 to smuggle them in without duty ! 
 
 Yet " Queen Sarah " was capable of sudden 
 deeds of generosity that quite take away our 
 breath by their magnificence, and so, for the 
 matter of that, was another noble termagant, 
 Queen Elizabeth, who gave away right royally 
 with one hand, even while she held out the 
 other for beggarly gratuities. We see her 
 heaping riches into Sir Walter Raleigh's lap, 
 and managing to get a great deal of it back 
 again, when his treasure-laden ships came 
 slowly to port. Nay, did she not seize on "a 
 waistcoat of carnation colour, curiously em- 
 broidered," which the brave navigator, always 
 passionately addicted to fine clothes, had 
 snatched from some Spanish galleon for the 
 adornment of his own handsome figure, and 
 which the queen straightway proceeded to 
 flaunt as a stomacher before his injured eyes ? 
 If we read a list of Elizabeth's New Year gifts, 
 we are both astonished and edified by their 
 number and variety. Here is Fulke Greville 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 175 
 
 presenting his sovereign with a night-dress ; not 
 a wrapper this time, but a genuine night-dress, 
 " made of cambric, wrought about the collar 
 and sleeves with Spanish work of roses and 
 letters, and a night-coif with a forehead-cloth 
 of the same work." And here is Mrs. Carre 
 offering her majesty an embroidered cambric 
 sheet ; and Dr. Bayly, one of the court physi- 
 cians, arriving brisk and early with a pot of 
 green ginger under his arm ; and Mrs. Amy 
 Shelton with six handkerchiefs all edged with 
 gold and silver braid ; and Sir Philip Sidney 
 with a most beautiful cambric smock, " and a 
 suite of ruffs of cut-work, flourished with gold 
 and silver, and set with spangles containing 
 four ounces of gold." And here, best of all, 
 are several gentlemen of rank, who, being un- 
 acquainted with the intricacies of the female 
 toilet, feel afraid to venture upon smocks, and 
 ruffs, and night-dresses, so solve their dilemma 
 by pluinply handing down ten pounds apiece, 
 a practical donation which the virgin monarch 
 accepts with all possible alacrity and good-will. 
 Elizabeth, moreover, was known to be a 
 costly and often a sadly unremunerative guest 
 when it pleased her to visit her loyal people. 
 
176 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 There is a letter written by the Earl of Bed- 
 ford to Lord Burleigh that is positively pathetic 
 in its apprehension of the impending honor. 
 " I trust truly," says the expectant host, " that 
 your lordship will have in remembrance to 
 provide and help that her majesty's tarrying 
 be not above two nights and a day, for so long 
 time do I prepare." As it was one of the 
 queen's whims to give scant warning of her 
 coming, the unfortunate gentlemen suddenly 
 called upon to harbor their sovereign and her 
 suite often found themselves at their wits' end 
 for food and entertainment ; and not unfre- 
 quently it happened that, after days of ruinous 
 expenditure, they had the satisfaction of seeing 
 their prospects as blighted as their larders. 
 Lord Henry Berkely lamenting the loss of his 
 good red deer, twenty-seven of which were slain 
 in one day in their owner's absence, be it 
 noted for Elizabeth's diversion, was at least 
 a happier man than the luckless young Rook- 
 wood of Eustoii Hall, whom her majesty re- 
 quited for his hospitality by cruel insult and im- 
 prisonment. Even King John, who has come 
 down to us in history as the least profitable of 
 royal guests, could not well do worse than this, 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 177 
 
 though his visits, being occasionally of longer 
 duration, were just so much harder to be borne. 
 In the chronicles of Joceliii of Brakelond, we 
 read how once the king came with a large reti- 
 nue to the convent of St. Edmundsbury, and 
 stayed there for two whole weeks, eating up 
 the monk's provisions at a fearful rate, empty- 
 ing the cellars of their choicest wines, and 
 making, no doubt, what with drunken, swear- 
 ing soldiers and insolent court parasites, sad 
 riot and confusion within those peaceful walls. 
 At last, however, the weary fortnight was over, 
 and the guests stood marshaled to depart ; but 
 not before his gracious majesty had made 
 offering, as guerdon for two weeks' entertain- 
 ment, of a silk cloak to cover St. Edmund's 
 shrine, which same cloak was promptly bor- 
 rowed back again by one of the royal train, 
 and the monks beheld it no more. In addition 
 to this elusive legacy, which left the shrine as 
 bare as it found it, Jocelin records that the 
 monarch, ere he rode forth, presented the con- 
 vent with the handsome sum of thirteen pence, 
 in consideration of a mass being said for his 
 soul, which sorely needed all the spiritual ali- 
 ment the good monks could furnish it. We 
 
178 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 can fancy Abbot Samson standing at bis mon- 
 astery door, and regarding tbose thirteen pence 
 very mucb as the Genoese consul must have re- 
 garded the Duke of Kingston's old spectacles, 
 which the dowager duchess tendered him in 
 return for his hospitality ; or as Commodore 
 Barnet regarded the paste emerald ring with 
 which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu grace- 
 fully acknowledged the valuable services of 
 his man-of-war. 
 
 " Lady Mary's avarice seems to have been 
 generally credited at the time, though we have 
 no proofs of it," says one of her recent biogra- 
 phers, who is disposed, and rightly, to put 
 scant faith in Walpole's malicious jibes. But 
 if the story of the ring be a true one, she can 
 hardly be acquitted of amazing thrift, and of 
 a still more amazing assurance. It is said that 
 the gallant commodore, never doubting the 
 worth of her token, was wont to show it with 
 some ostentation to his friends, until one of 
 them, who knew the lady well, stoutly main- 
 tained that if the stone were genuine she would 
 never have parted with it, and a closer inspec- 
 tion proved the melancholy accuracy of his 
 suspicions. As for much of her so-called 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 179 
 
 greed, it was not without solid justification. 
 If she drove a hard bargain with Mr. Wortley, 
 stipulating most unromantically for her mar- 
 riage settlement before she ran away with him, 
 be it remembered that upon this auspicious 
 occasion she was compelled to act as her own 
 guardian ; and if she had an inexplicable fancy 
 for wearing her old clothes, the dimity petti- 
 coat, and the gray stockings, and the faded 
 green brocade riding-jacket which so deeply 
 offended Walpole's fastidious eyes, let us deal 
 charitably with a fault in which she has but 
 few feminine successors. Those were times 
 when fashions had not yet learned to change 
 with such chameleon-like speed, and people did 
 occasionally wear their old clothes with an un- 
 blushing effrontery that would be well-nigh 
 disgraceful to-day. Silks and satins, laces and 
 furbelows, were all of the costliest description, 
 and their owners were chary of discarding 
 them, or even of lightly exposing them to ruin/) 
 Emile Souvestre's languid lady, who proves" ; 
 the purity of her blood, somewhat after the 
 manner of the princess and the rose leaf, by 
 supercilious indifference to the fate of her vel- 
 vet mantle in a snowstorm, could hardly have 
 
180 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 existed a few hundred years ago. We have in 
 Pepys's diary a most amusing record of his dis- 
 gust at being over-persuaded by his wife to 
 wear his best suit on a certain threatening May 
 Day, and how of course it rained, and all their 
 pleasure was spoiled. The guilty Eve was 
 quite as unfortunate as her husband, for she 
 too had gone forth " extraordinary fine in her 
 flowered tabby gown," which we are greatly 
 relieved to learn a little later was two years 
 old, but smartly renovated with brand-new 
 lacings. Only fancy being so careful of a 
 two-year gown as to begrudge it to the sight 
 of court and commoners on May Day ! 
 
 The same frugal spirit extended down to the 
 last century, and was of infinite value to the 
 self-respecting poor. Artisans had not yet 
 found it imperative to dress their wives and 
 children in imitation finery, and farmers were 
 even less awake to the exigencies of fashion- 
 able attire. We read of rural couples placidly 
 wearing their wedding clothes into their ad- 
 vanced old age, and we are lost in hopeless 
 speculation as to how they accommodated their 
 spreading proportions to the coats and gowns 
 which presumably had fitted the comparative 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 181 
 
 slimness of their youth. With what patient 
 ingenuity did the good dames of Miss Mitford's 
 village, aided occasionally by an itinerant tai- 
 loress, turn and return their husbands' cast-off 
 clothing, until, from seeming ruin, they had 
 evolved sound garments for their growing boys ; 
 and with what pardonable pride did the strut- 
 ting youngsters exhibit on the village streets 
 these baggy specimens of their mothers' skill ! 
 Among the innumerable anecdotes told of 
 George III., it is said that, strolling once with 
 Queen Charlotte in the woods of Windsor, he 
 met a little red-cheeked, white-haired lad, who 
 proved, on examination, to be the son of one of 
 his majesty's beef-eaters. The gracious king, 
 always well pleased with children, patted the 
 boy's flaxen head, and bade him kneel and kiss 
 the queen's hand, but this the sturdy young 
 Briton declined flatly to do ; not, be it said, from 
 any desire to emulate the examples of Penn and 
 Franklin, by illustrating on a minor scale the 
 heroic principles of democracy, but solely and 
 entirely that he might not spoil his new 
 breeches by contact with the grass. So thrifty 
 a monarch, says Thackeray, should have hugged 
 on the spot a child after his own heart ; and 
 
182 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 even if the royal favor failed to manifest itself 
 in precisely this fashion, I make no doubt that 
 the beef-eater's wife, who had stitched those 
 little breeches with motherly solicitude, found 
 ample comfort in such a judicious son. 
 
 Perhaps, indeed, he was a worthy scion of 
 the race of Dodsons, with whom it was an 
 honorable tradition to preserve their best 
 clothes, very much as the inhabitants of Ceylon 
 preserved their sacred Bo-trees, by guarding 
 them jealously from the desecrating touch of 
 man. Who that has ever had the happiness 
 of reading " The Mill on the Floss " can for- 
 get the dim seclusion of the shrouded room, 
 where, far from the madding crowd, reposes in 
 dignified seclusion Mrs. Pullet's* new bonnet ? 
 To go to see it is in itself a pilgrimage ; to try 
 it on, a solemn ceremonial ; what, then, must 
 have been the profound emotions with which 
 it was actually worn ! Little Maggie Tulli- 
 ver, watching with breathless interest while it 
 is lifted reverently from the shrine, feels op- 
 pressed with a sense of mystery, and is childish- 
 ly indignant because no one will tell her what it 
 means. The Dodsons are all fond of fine rai- 
 ment, but not for the mere vulgar pleasure of 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 183 
 
 self-adornment. Less favored families may take 
 a coarse delight in exhibiting their clothes, but 
 it remains for them to derive a higher grati- 
 fication from keeping them unseen. Even a 
 third-best front is felt to be much too good for 
 a sister's dinner party, while in the matter of 
 frocks and trimmings they are as adamant. 
 " Other women, if they liked, might have their 
 best thread lace in every wash ; but when Mrs. 
 Glegg died, it would be found that she had 
 better lace laid by in the right-hand drawer of 
 her wardrobe in the spotted chamber, than ever 
 Mrs. Wooll of St. Ogg's had bought in her life, 
 although Mrs. Wooll wore her lace before it was 
 paid for." Here, in a humble way, we have 
 the same sentiment that thrilled the heart of 
 Elizabeth Petrovna, when she gazed at the 
 thousand and one gowns hanging up in the 
 royal closets, and felt a true womanly satisfac- 
 tion in knowing they were there. 
 
 It is in fact a curious and edifying circum- 
 stance that the great ones of this earth, if they 
 must be held responsible for much of its un- 
 warranted luxury, have at the same time af- 
 forded us many shining examples, not only of 
 that general and indiscriminate parsimony 
 
184 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 which induced old Frederic William, for in- 
 stance, to feed his family on pork and cabbage, 
 but also of that more refined and esoteric 
 species of economy which it is our task to rec- 
 ognize and encourage. George III. was frugal 
 in all things, but his particular saving appears 
 to have been in carpets, for, summer or winter, 
 he never permitted these effeminate devices 
 upon his bedroom floor. His great-grand- 
 father, George I., does not figure as an austere 
 or self-denying character ; but he, too, stinted 
 bravely in one direction, the family wash. 
 In that beloved court of Hanover, which he 
 exchanged so reluctantly for the glories of St. 
 James, there was evidently no lack of well-fed, 
 well-paid attendants. Looking down the list, 
 we see seventy odd postilions and stable-men, 
 twenty cooks with six assistants, seven " officers 
 of the cellar," twenty-four lackeys in livery, 
 sixteen trumpeters and fiddlers, and only 
 two washerwomen. Think of it, twenty-six 
 people to cook, and only two to wash ! " But 
 one half -penny worth of bread to this intoler- 
 able deal of sack ! " Yet the chances are that, 
 of all the officials in that snug, jolly, dirty little 
 Hanoverian court, those two washerwomen 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 185 
 
 alone led comparatively idle lives. When 
 balanced with the arduous labors of the seven 
 officers of the cellar, I am convinced their 
 position was a sinecure. 
 
 Of much the same temper as royal George 
 was that great Earl of Northumberland, 
 whose expense-book, which may be consulted 
 to-day, gives us a delightful insight into some 
 of the curious methods of past housekeeping. 
 Germany, be it confessed, has always been 
 a trifle backward in the matter of cleanli- 
 ness, but England, until within the last two 
 centuries, was very nearly as conservative. 
 Appalling stories are told of the fine ladies 
 and gentlemen who glittered in the courts of 
 the Tudors and Stuarts, and who, in their 
 light-hearted indifference to dirt, very nearly 
 rivaled the prowess of the Spanish Isabella, 
 when she vowed away her clean linen until 
 Ostend should fall, and gave the honor of her 
 name to that delicate yellow tint which her 
 garments assumed in the interval. The Earl 
 of Northumberland, however, aspired to no 
 such uneasy asceticism. He was simply the 
 model housekeeper of his age. Every item of 
 expenditure in his immense establishment was 
 
186 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 rigorously defined, and no less rigorously over- 
 looked. With his own noble hands he wrote 
 down the exact proportion of food, fuel, and 
 candles which each body of retainers was ex- 
 pected to consume ; and while the upper ser- 
 vants appear to have fared tolerably well, the 
 commoner sort enjoyed an unbroken monotony 
 of salt meat, black bread, and beer. But it 
 is in the matter of tablecloths that his grace 
 chiefly excelled, and that he merits an honor- 
 able mention in the ranks of esoteric parsimony. 
 For his own needs, and for the service and 
 pleasure of his many guests, and let us re- 
 member that he kept open house after the hos- 
 pitable fashion of his day, eight of these 
 valuable articles were deemed amply sufficient ; 
 while in the servants' hall one cloth a month was 
 the allowance. Granted, if you please, that in 
 this rather effeminate age we have grown un- 
 duly fastidious about such trivialities ; yet who, 
 looking back through the long vista of years, 
 can contemplate without a shudder the condi- 
 tion of that tablecloth when its month's servi- 
 tude was over ? 
 
 It is easier, however, to jeer at the honorable 
 efforts of mankind than to arrange our own 
 
ESOTERIC ECONOMY. 187 
 
 economies on a strictly satisfactory basis. Be- 
 yond a rational and healthy impulse to save 
 on others rather than on ourselves, few of us 
 can boast of much enlightenment in the mat- 
 ter, and even our one unerring guide is, in a 
 measure, neutralized by the consistent deter- 
 mination of others to exert their own saving 
 powers on us. The out-and-out miser is at best 
 a creature of little penetration. He cheats 
 himself sorely throughout life, and gains a sort 
 of shabby posthumous distinction only when 
 he is long past enjoying it. The true econo- 
 mist is, if we may believe Mrs. Oliphant, a rara 
 avis, as exceptional in his way as the true 
 genius. She endeavors, indeed, with much 
 humility, to describe for us such a character 
 in " The Curate in Charge ; " but, while laying 
 all possible stress on Mrs. St. John's extraor- 
 dinary proficiency, she does not for a moment 
 venture to hint at the secret of her power. " I 
 don't pretend to know how she did it," con- 
 fesses this discriminating authoress, " any more 
 than I can tell you how Shakespeare wrote 
 ' Hamlet.' It was quite easy to him and to 
 her, but if one knew how, one would be as great 
 a poet as he was, as great an economist as she." 
 
188 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 This is a degree of perfection to which we may 
 not well aspire. Shakespeare and Mrs. St. 
 John lie equally beyond our humble imitation. 
 We do not even feel ambitious of such excel- 
 lence, but cherish the more contentedly those 
 few finely selected frugalities, those car-fares 
 and match-stumps, those postage stamps and 
 half sheets of paper, those dimly-lighted rooms 
 and evaded custom-house duties, which, while 
 they may not leave us much richer at the year's 
 end, have yet a distinct ethical value of their 
 own, and, breathing an indescribable air of 
 conscious rectitude, serve to keep us in har- 
 mony with ourselves. 
 
SCANDERBEG. 
 
 CLIO is the most shamelessly unreliable of 
 the Muses. She selects her favorites with the 
 autocratic partiality of the Russian Catherine, 
 decorates them with questionable honors, en- 
 riches them with other people's spoils, admires 
 them to her heart's content, and thrusts them 
 serenely to the front to receive the approbation 
 of the world. Occasionally she wearies of one 
 or the other, and flings him lightly down from 
 the pedestal he has adorned so bravely. Oc- 
 casionally, having a fine feminine sense of 
 humor, she is pleased to play with our credu- 
 lity, and, dressing up a man of straw, she 
 assures us smilingly that he is real flesh and 
 blood, and worthy of our sincerest admiration. 
 And all this while, her best and noblest meet 
 with stiffly measured praise, and her strong 
 sons are passed indifferently by. It is at least 
 amusing to think of the relative positions occu- 
 pied by the true mountaineer Scanderbeg, and 
 the mythical mountaineer William Tell. The 
 
 or THB 
 TJNTVTVRfiTT 
 
190 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 one sleeps unremembered with scanty, hard- 
 won fame ; the other carries such a weight of 
 laurels that poets, wearied with singing his 
 praises, have been driven in despair to sing the 
 praises of those who praise him, as Coleridge 
 piped to the Duchess of Devonshire, 
 
 "Splendor's fondly fostered child," 
 
 because, in a moment of mild enthusiasm, she 
 addressed some well-meant but highly inefficient 
 verses to the platform from which Tell did not 
 shoot the tyrant Gessler. 
 
 If 'the heroic struggle for a national life is 
 at all times the most engrossing picture the 
 world's history has to show us, where shall we 
 look for a more vivid illustration of the theme 
 than in the long and bitter contest between 
 cross and crescent, between the steady, relent- 
 less encroachment of the Turkoman power, and 
 the vain and dauntless courage which opposed 
 it ? The story of the early Ottomans is one of 
 wasteful and inexorable conquest, unrelieved 
 by any touches of humanity, or any impulses 
 towards a higher civilization. To the ferocious 
 and impetuous pride of the barbarian they 
 added an almost inconceivable wariness and 
 
SCANDERBKG. 191 
 
 patience ; they knew when to wait and when 
 to strike ; they were never unduly elated by 
 victory, and never demoralized by defeat. 
 That strange dream of their founder Othman 
 which won for him his Cilician wife, the mys- 
 terious vision of the full moon resting in his 
 bosom, and of the stately tree that sprang 
 therefrom, must have dirnly hinted to the sav- 
 age chief of the glory that was to be. When 
 in his sleep he placed Constantinople as a 
 jewel upon his swarthy finger, he felt the 
 coming of shrouded things, and, believing the 
 prophecy would be fulfilled in his descendant, 
 he saluted his bride as the mother of a mighty 
 race of kings. It was this firm conviction of 
 future greatness which made him seek for his 
 son Orchan a fairer and nobler wife than 
 could be found in the black tents of his fol- 
 lowers ; and, true to the instincts of his race, 
 he despoiled an enemy to enrich his own hearth. 
 A Greek captain, in command of the castle of 
 Belecoma, was betrothed to the beautiful 
 daughter of a neighboring Christian chief. 
 On their marriage night Othman surprised 
 the wedding party as they rode through the 
 dark mountain passes. The short and desper- 
 
192 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 ate conflict which ensued could have but one 
 bitter ending. " The bridegroom was slain, 
 and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, 
 was swept off by the Turkoman robbers to 
 their lair, to become the spouse of their leader's 
 son. " i 
 
 Orchan was a mere boy when he received this 
 ravished prize, the fair booty of a barbarous 
 strife. Fifty years later, when hair and beard 
 were white with age, he married again ; and 
 this time his bride was the daughter of a Chris- 
 tian emperor, not stolen away from friends and 
 kindred, but given to him publicly with superb 
 ceremonies, and a ghastly mockery of rejoicing. 
 In fifty years the Ottoman power had grown 
 into such fierce and sinister lustihood that 
 Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Cantacu- 
 zene, was assigned as a precious hostage and 
 seal of friendship between her father and his 
 dreaded Turkish ally. The church refused 
 her blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and, amid 
 the pomp and majesty of imperial nuptials, 
 there was lacking even the outward form of 
 Christian marriage. From that date the tide 
 of Turkish conquest spread with devastating 
 1 The Early Ottomans, by Dean Church. 
 
SCANDERBEG. 193 
 
 rapidity. The impetuous encroachments of 
 Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances 
 of Anmrath, became under Bajazet a struggle 
 for life and death, not with the enfeebled 
 powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror 
 who had swept from the broad Tartar steppes 
 to subdue and lay waste the Eastern world. 
 Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, 
 eight crowned heads had been laid low, when 
 Tim our, grimly ready for a ninth victim, en- 
 countered the hitherto invincible sultan. They 
 met, and Bajazet, who had seen the flower of 
 French and German chivalry perish at his com- 
 mand, who had sat at his tent-door to witness 
 the day-long massacre of Christian prisoners, 
 and who had shadowed the very walls of Con- 
 stantinople, Bajazet was crushed like a worm 
 by the lame, white-haired old Tartar, and, eat- 
 ing out his heart with dull fury, died in shame- 
 ful captivity. But his race survived, vigorous, 
 elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with 
 amazing swiftness under Mahommed the Re- 
 storer and Amurath the Second, whose reign 
 was one long conflict with the Greek Emperor 
 Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and, 
 hardest of all to subdue, with those warlike 
 
194 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Sclavonic tribes who, often defeated but never 
 conquered, maintained with superb courage the 
 freedom of their mountain fastnesses. It was 
 an unknown Servian soldier who slew Amurath 
 the First in the very moment of his triumph ; 
 it was the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who re- 
 pulsed Amurath the Second, and hurled him 
 back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at 
 Adrianople. 
 
 Pride of race, love for his native land, shame 
 at prolonged captivity, and fury at heaped-up 
 wrongs, all these conflicting passions united 
 themselves in the breast of this implacable 
 warrior, and urged him relentlessly along his 
 appointed path. He was the outcome of that 
 ruthless policy by which the Turks turned the 
 children of the cross into defenders of the cres- 
 cent, a policy pursued with almost undeviating 
 success since Black Halil, a century and a half 
 before, had urged the training of Christian 
 boys into a school of Moslem soldiers. What 
 gives to the history of Scanderbeg its peculiar 
 significance, and its peculiar ethical and artistic 
 value is the fact that he avenged, not only his 
 own injuries, but the injuries of countless chil- 
 dren who, for over a hundred and fifty years, 
 
SCANDERBEG. 195 
 
 had been snatched from their homes, families, 
 and faith to swell the ranks of an infidel foe. 
 Wherever the tide of Ottoman battle raged 
 most fiercely, there, savage, dark, invincible, 
 stood the Janissaries, men suckled on Christian 
 breasts and signed with Christian baptism, 
 now flinging away their lives for an alien cause 
 and an alien creed, fighting with the irresistible 
 courage of fanaticism against their birthright 
 and their kindred. Never before or since, in 
 the history of all the nations, has a system of 
 proselytizing been attended with such tremen- 
 dous results. The life-blood of Christendom 
 was drained to supply fresh triumphs for its 
 enemies, and the rigorous discipline of a mo- 
 nastic training moulded these innocent young 
 captives into a soldiery whose every thought 
 and every action was subordinate to one over- 
 powering influence, an austere, unquestioning 
 obedience to the cause of Islam. 
 
 With the example of this extraordinary suc- 
 cess always before their eyes, it is little wonder 
 that the Turks regarded the children of the 
 vanquished as so many docile instruments to 
 be fashioned by rigid tutelage into faithful 
 followers of the Prophet, and the first step 
 
196 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 towards this desired goal lay in their early adop- 
 tion of the Mohammedan faith. No pang of 
 pity, no sentiment of honor, interfered with this 
 relentless purpose. When John Castriota, the 
 hereditary lord of Croia, yielded up his four 
 sons as hostages to Amurath the Second, he 
 relied on the abundant promises made him by 
 that sovereign, who had, on the whole, a fair 
 reputation for keeping his royal word. The 
 lads were carried to Adrianople and reared in 
 the sultan's palace, where one at least of the 
 little prisoners attracted dangerous notice by 
 his vivacity and grace, inheritances, it is 
 said, from his beautiful mother, Voisava. The 
 fair-haired boy, then only eight years old, be- 
 came first the plaything of the seraglio, and 
 afterwards the jealously guarded favorite of 
 Amurath himself. He was carefully taught, 
 and was forced to conform to the ceremonial 
 rites of the Ottomans, and to make an open 
 profession of his new creed, receiving on this 
 occasion the name of Scanderbeg, a name des- 
 tined to carry with it a just retribution in the 
 universal terror it excited. How much of 
 Christian belief still lingered in the child's 
 soul, or how much he gained afterwards from 
 
SCANDERBEG. 197 
 
 the Albanian soldiers who had access to him, 
 it is impossible to say. Young as he was, he 
 had learned, amid the unutterable treachery 
 and corruption of an Eastern court, to hide 
 his emotions under an impenetrable mask, so 
 that even Amurath, cruel, wily, and suspicious, 
 found himself baffled by this Greek boy, whose 
 handsome face betrayed to none the impetuous 
 anger that consumed him. At nineteen he 
 had command of five thousand horsemen, and 
 enjoyed the title of pasha, a barren honor for 
 one soon to be robbed of his birthright. After 
 the close of the Hungarian war John Castriota 
 died, and Amurath, ignoring his plighted 
 faith, seized Croia in the name of the captive 
 princes, ruthlessly extinguished its civil and 
 religious liberties, turned the churches into 
 mosques, and treated the whole country as a 
 defeated and dependent province. Scander- 
 beg's three brothers were conveniently re- 
 moved by poison ; he himself, the object of a 
 curious affection on the sultan's part, was 
 watched with jealous and exacting eyes, and 
 for a while it seemed as though the free-born 
 mountain chief would add one more to the 
 long list of Turkish proselytes and favorites, 
 
198 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 silenced with doubtful titles, bought with dis- 
 honorable wealth. 
 
 But it was a time of waiting, a time ominous 
 with delay. The heir of Croia, mute, patient, 
 and resolved, bided with steady self-control the 
 hour when he could strike a single blow for 
 faith and freedom. It came with the breaking 
 out of fresh Hungarian troubles : with the de- 
 fiance sent by John Hunyadi and his forces 
 drawn up on the banks of the Moravia. 
 While the .Ottoman armies were engaged in 
 this most disastrous conflict, Scanderbeg threw 
 off his long-endured disguise, possessed himself 
 by an unscrupulous device of his native city, 
 and put all who opposed him to the sword. 
 From that day until his death, forty years 
 later, the record of his life is one perpetual 
 heroic struggle to preserve the hard- won liberty 
 of Epeiros, a struggle without intermission or 
 relief, without rest for the victor or pity for 
 the vanquished. His scornful indifference to 
 pressing dangers was in itself the best of tonics 
 to a people naturally brave, but taught by 
 bitter experience to fear the inexorable Turkish 
 yoke. Scanderbeg feared nothing ; with him, 
 indeed, fear was swallowed up in hatred. He 
 
SCANDERBEG. 199 
 
 understood perfectly the nature of the warfare 
 in which he was engaged ; he knew that, with 
 adroitness and vigilance, every dark pass and 
 every rocky crag became his friend and ally. 
 He knew, too, the slender resources of the 
 country, and never committed the mistake of 
 taking more men into the field than he could 
 manage and support. When Amurath sent 
 an army of forty thousand soldiers to punish 
 Croia, and bring back the rebel chief " alive 
 or dead " to Adrianople, Scande^beg limited 
 his own forces to seven thousand foot and eight 
 thousand horse, when he might, had he chosen, 
 have trebled that number. With this compact 
 body of picked and hardy warriors he lay in 
 wait for the enemy, entrapped them by a feigned 
 retreat into a narrow defile, and, hemming 
 them in on either side, filled up the valley with 
 their slain. Over twenty thousand Turks 
 perished in that dreadful snare, many of them 
 being trampled down by their helpless and 
 panic-stricken countrymen. It was Scander- 
 beg's first decisive victory, and a grim warning 
 to Amurath of the possibilities that awaited 
 him in the future. It gave to Croia a breath- 
 ing spell, and to its victorious army the rich 
 
200 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 spoils of an Ottoman camp, so that those who 
 had gone forth meagrely on foot returned well 
 armed and bravely mounted to their rock-built 
 citadel. 
 
 Had this sudden and bewildering success 
 been followed up by a vigorous aggressive 
 warfare on the part of Servia, Hungary, and 
 Poland, then all in arms against their common 
 foe ; had the allied powers listened to the moun- 
 tain chiefs, or to the burning remonstrances 
 of Cardinal* Julian, the pope's legate, the 
 Turks might have been driven forcibly back 
 from Europe, and long centuries of suffering 
 and dishonor spared to Christendom. But the 
 lord of Servia, George Brankovich, yearned for 
 his children whom Amurath held as hostages ; 
 Ladislaw, king of Hungary and Poland, was 
 weary of the perpetual strife ; even Hunyadi's 
 fiery voice was silenced ; and a treaty of peace 
 was signed with an enemy who might then, and 
 then only, have been crushed. This treaty, 
 shameful in itself, was still more shamefully 
 broken in the following year, when the Chris- 
 tian hosts again took the field, only to be 
 utterly routed in the terrible battle of St. 
 Martin's Eve. Never was disaster more com- 
 
SCANDERBEG. 201 
 
 plete : Ladislaw's severed head, borne on a pike 
 over the Ottoman ranks, struck terror and de- 
 spair into the hearts of his followers ; Hunya- 
 di, after a vain, furious effort to redeem this 
 ghastly symbol of defeat, fled from a field red 
 with his countrymen's blood ; the papal legate 
 and two Hungarian bishops perished in the 
 thickest of the fray. It was the beginning 
 of the end, and four years later the cause of 
 Christendom received its deathblow at Kos- 
 sova, when Hunyadi, beaten finally back from 
 Servia, was taught by the bitterness of defeat 
 that his name no longer sounded ominously, 
 as of old, in the ears of his Moslem foe. Only 
 Scanderbeg remained unsubdued amid his 
 mountain peaks, and Amurath, flushed with 
 conquest, now turned his whole attention to 
 the final punishment of this audacious rebel. 
 
 The scale on which the invasion of Croia 
 was planned shows in itself how deep-seated 
 was the sultan's anger, and how relentless his 
 purpose. One hundred and sixty thousand 
 men were assembled in Adrianople, the ablest 
 generals were united in command, and Mo- 
 hammed, his savage son and successor, accom- 
 panied the expedition, filled with fierce hopes 
 
202 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of vengeance. Resistance seemed almost vain, 
 but Scanderbeg, in no way disturbed by the 
 coming storm, prepared with characteristic 
 coolness to meet it at every point. He ordered 
 all who dwelt in 7 the open country or in unpro- 
 tected villages to destroy their harvests and to 
 quit their homes, so that the enemy might find 
 no resources in the scorched and deserted fields. 
 The women and children, the aged and infirm, 
 were sent either to the sea-coast or out of the 
 kingdom, many of them as far away as Venice. 
 The fortifications of Croia were repaired ; 
 the garrison was strengthened and put under 
 command of a brave and able governor, and 
 Scanderbeg himself, with only ten thousand 
 men, took the field, ready to waylay and harass 
 Amurath at every step of his difficult and dan- 
 gerous march. The first severe fighting was 
 done before the walls of Setigrade, a strongly 
 guarded town which made a gallant resistance, 
 repulsing the Turks again and again, and only 
 yielding when a traitor, bought by the sultan's 
 gold, poisoned the fountains which supplied 
 the city with water. From this point the in- 
 vading army marched on to Croia, covered the 
 surrounding plains, planted their cannon 
 
SCANDERBEG. 203 
 
 then an imposing novelty in warfare before 
 its massive gates, and summoned the garrison 
 to surrender. A defiant refusal was returned ; 
 the Ottomans stormed the walls, and were re- 
 pulsed with such fury that over eight thousand 
 Janissaries perished in the combat, while 
 Scanderbeg, poised like an eagle on the cliffs, 
 wa'ted until the battle was at its height, and 
 then sweeping down on the unconscious foe, 
 forced their trenches, fired the camp, and drove 
 all before him with terrible havoc and slaugh- 
 ter. By the time Mohammed could rally his 
 scattered forces, the Epeirots were off and 
 away, with little scathe or damage to them- 
 selves ; and this exasperating method of attack 
 was the weapon with which the mountain chief 
 finally wore out the courage and endurance 
 of the invaders. Every inch of ground was 
 familiar to him, and a snare to his enemies. 
 Did Mohammed, burning with rage, scale the 
 hills in pursuit, a handful of men held him at 
 bay ; while Scanderbeg, appearing as if by 
 magic on the other side of the camp, chose this 
 propitious moment for an attack. By day or 
 night he gave the enemy no truce, no respite, 
 no quarter. Two hours out of the twenty-four 
 
204 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 he slept, and all the rest he spent in unceas 
 ing, unwearying, unpitying warfare ; until the 
 Turks, harassed by a danger ever present but 
 never visible, lost heart and trembled before 
 the breathless energy of their foe. They were 
 beginning also to suffer from a scarcity of pro- 
 visions, and Scanderbeg took excellent care 
 that this trouble should not be too speedily re- 
 lieved. The supplies, brought at an immense 
 cost from Desia, were intercepted and carried 
 off triumphantly to the hills, and the unhappy 
 Ottomans, starved in camp and slaughtered 
 out of it, realized with ever-increasing dismay 
 the unenviable nature of their position. 
 
 It must be admitted, in justice to the 
 Epeirots, that the success of Scanderbeg's ma- 
 noeuvres rested exclusively on their absolute 
 and unquestioned fidelity. Swift and sure in- 
 formation was brought him of every movement 
 on the enemy's part, and vigilant eyes kept 
 watch over every rocky pass that gave access 
 to his haunts. For once Amurath's gold was 
 powerless to buy a single traitor, and the syste- 
 matic perfidy by which the Turks were accus- 
 tomed to steal what they could not grasp failed 
 for once of its prey. After a fruitless effort 
 
SCANDERBEG. 205 
 
 to undermine the rock on which Croia was 
 founded, the sultan sought to corrupt first the 
 governor and then the garrison with dazzling 
 offers of advancement, but all the wealth in 
 Adrianople could not purchase one poor Chris- 
 tian soldier. Baffled and heart-sick with re- 
 peated failure, Amurath at last offered to raise 
 the siege and depart, on payment of a small 
 yearly sum, a mere nominal tribute to salve 
 his wounded pride. Even this trifling conces- 
 sion was sternly refused by Scanderbeg, who 
 would yield nothing to his hated foe. Then 
 for the first time the sultan understood the 
 relentless nature of this man whom he had 
 petted as a child and wronged as a boy, whom 
 he had held a helpless hostage in his hands, 
 and who now defied him with unutterable aver- 
 sion and scorn. Abandoning himself to grief, 
 fury, and despair, he tore his white beard, and 
 recalled his countless triumphs in the past, 
 only to compare them with this shameful over- 
 throw. He who had seen the allied powers of 
 Christendom suing at his feet, to be humbled 
 in his old age by an insignificant Illyrian 
 chieftain ! The blow broke his proud heart, 
 and on his death-bed he conjured his son to 
 
206 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 avenge his name and 'honor. Gladly Moham- 
 med undertook the task, but the present was 
 no time for its fulfillment. The siege of Croia 
 was raised, the dejected Moslem army strag- 
 gled homewards, cruelly harassed at every 
 step by their unwearied foe, and Scanderbeg 
 once more entered his native city amid the 
 acclamations of a brave people, born again 
 to freedom, and wild to welcome their de- 
 liverer. 
 
 It is pleasant to think that, before being 
 called a third time into the field, even this in- 
 domitable fighter found a little leisure in which 
 to marry a wife, and to cultivate the arts of 
 peace. Domestic tranquillity ran but a slender 
 chance of palling on its possessor in those stir- 
 ring days ; but Scanderbeg made the most of 
 his limited opportunities. He carried his 
 bride in triumph to every corner of his little 
 kingdom, he labored hard to restore those 
 habits of thrift and industry which perpetual 
 warfare roots out of every nation, and he 
 wisely refrained from overtaxing the narrow 
 resources of his people. When his purse was 
 empty, he looked to his enemies and not to his 
 friends for its replenishment; and that stout 
 
SCANDERBEG. 207 
 
 old adage, " The Turk's dominions are Scan- 
 derbeg's revenues," is a sufficient witness to 
 his admirable financiering. He realized fully 
 that the legacy of hate bequeathed by Amurath 
 to Mohammed would bear bitter fruits in the 
 hands of that fierce and able monarch, and so 
 employed every interval of peace in strength- 
 ening himself for the struggle that was to fol- 
 low. Twice again during his lifetime was 
 Epeiros invaded by the Ottomans ; and Scan- 
 derbeg, driven from his lair, was hunted like a 
 deer from hill to hill, now lying in covert, now 
 fiercely resisting, but unconquered always. 
 Wily offers of friendship from the sultan were 
 received with a not unnatural suspicion, and 
 courteously declined ; hired assassins were de- 
 tected, and delivered up to a prompt and piti- 
 less justice. For forty years this Albanian 
 soldier defended his mountain eyrie from a 
 power vast enough to destroy two empires, 
 and cruel enough to make the whole Eastern 
 world tremble. Constantinople fell, while 
 Croia stood unharmed. The last news brought 
 to Scanderbeg, as he lay dying at Lyssa, was 
 that the Turks had invaded the Venetian do- 
 minions. The feeble warrior raised himself in 
 
208 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 bed, and called for his sword and armor. " Tell 
 them," he gasped, " that I will be with them 
 to-morrow," and fell back fainting on his pil- 
 lows. On the morrow he was dead. 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 
 
 SANDWICHES, oranges, and penny novelettes 
 are the three great requisites for English trav- 
 eling, for third-class traveling, at least ; and, 
 of the three, the novelette is by far the most 
 imperative, a pleasant proof of how our intel- 
 lectual needs outstrip our bodily requirements. 
 The clerks and artisans, shopgirls, dressmak- 
 ers, and milliners, who pour into London every 
 morning by the early trains, have, each and 
 every one, a choice specimen of penny fiction 
 with which to beguile the short journey, and 
 perhaps the few spare minutes of a busy day. 
 The workingman who slouches up and down 
 the platform, waiting for the moment of de- 
 parture, is absorbed in some crumpled bit of 
 pink-covered romance. The girl who lounges 
 opposite to us in the carriage, and who would 
 be a very pretty girl in any other conceivable 
 hat, sucks mysterious sticky lozenges, and 
 reads a story called " Mariage a la Mode, or 
 Getting into Society," which she subsequently 
 
210 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 lends to me, seeing, I think, the covetous 
 looks I cast in its direction, and whiqh I 
 find gives as vivid and startling a picture of 
 high life as one could reasonably expect for a 
 penny. Should I fail to provide myself with 
 one of these popular journals at the book-stall, 
 another chance is generally afforded me before 
 the train moves off ; and I am startled out of 
 a sleepy reverie by a small boy's thrusting " A 
 Black Business " alarmingly into my face, 
 while a second diminutive lad on the platform 
 holds out to me enticingly " Fettered for Life," 
 "Neranya's Eevenge," and "Ruby." The 
 last has on the cover an alluring picture of a 
 circus girl jumping through a hoop, which 
 tempts me to the rashness of a purchase, circus 
 riders being my literary weakness. 1 remem- 
 ber, myself, trying to write a story about one, 
 when I was fourteen, and experiencing great 
 difficulty from a comprehensive and all-embra- 
 cing ignorance of my subject. It is but fair 
 to the author of " Ruby " to say that he was 
 too practiced a workman to be disconcerted 
 or turned from his course by any such trivial 
 disadvantage. 
 
 I should hardly like to confess how many 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 211 
 
 coins of the realm I dissipated before learn- 
 ing the melancholy truth, that the seductive 
 titles and cuts which form the tours deforce 
 of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to 
 the tales themselves, which are like vials of 
 skimmed milk, labeled absinthe, but warranted 
 to be wholly without flavor. Mr. James Payn, 
 who has written very amusingly about the 
 mysterious weekly journals which lie "thick 
 as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Val- 
 lombrosa " upon the counters of small, dark 
 shops, " in the company of cheap tobacco, 
 hardbake, and, at the proper season, valen- 
 tines," laments with frank asperity that he can 
 find in them neither dramatic interest, nor even 
 impropriety. He has searched them patiently 
 for something wrong, and his quest has been 
 wholly unrewarded. Mr. Thomas Wright, in 
 a paper published some years ago in the " Nine- 
 teenth Century," makes a similar complaint. 
 The lovely heroines of these stories are u virtu- 
 ous even to insipidity," and their heroes are so 
 blamably blameless as to be absolutely revolt- 
 ing. Yet it has been my fate to encounter 
 some very pretty villains in the course of my 
 penny readings, and at least one specimen of 
 
212 POINTS OF VIEW, 
 
 the sinful gilded youth, who has " handsome 
 blonde hair parted in the middle, a discon- 
 tented mustache, a pale face and apathetic ex- 
 pression." This scion of the aristocracy, I am 
 grieved to say, keeps beautiful Jewesses on 
 board his sumptuous yacht, and otherwise mis- 
 behaves himself after a fashion calculated to 
 make his relatives and well-wishers more dis- 
 contented even than his mustache. He has a 
 lovely sister, Alma, with whom, we are assured, 
 the Prince of Wales danced three times in one 
 night, " and was also heard to express his ad- 
 miration of her looks and her esprit in some 
 very emphatic superlatives, exciting a variety 
 of comment and criticism." Naturally, and all 
 the more naturally because the fair Alma dis- 
 creetly reserves her esprit for royal ears and 
 royal commendation, and is exceedingly chary 
 of revealing any of it to interested readers, who 
 are fain to know what kind of conversation the 
 Prince found so diverting. From the speci- 
 mens presented to our consideration, we are 
 forced to conclude either that his Highness is 
 easily satisfied in the matter of esprit, or that 
 he has an almost superhuman power of detect- 
 ing it when hidden from ordinary observation. 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 213 
 
 The wonderful dullness of penny fiction is 
 not really due to the absence of incidents, of 
 vice, or even of dramatic situations, but to the 
 placidity with which these incidents or situa- 
 tions are presented and received. How can 
 we reasonably be expected to excite ourselves 
 over a catastrophe which makes little or no im- 
 pression on the people most deeply concerned 
 in it ? When Bonny Adair engages herself, 
 with guileless alacrity, to a man who has a wife 
 already, the circumstance is narrated with a 
 coolness which hardly allows of a tremor. The 
 wife herself is not the hidden, mysterious, 
 veiled creature with whom we are all familiar ; 
 not an actress, or a ballet girl, or an adven- 
 turess ; but a highly respectable young lady, 
 going into society, and drinking tea with poor 
 Bonny at afternoon receptions. This would 
 seem like a startling innovation, but as nobody 
 else expresses any surprise at the matter, why 
 should we ? Bonny herself, it is explained, 
 put no embarrassing questions to her suitor. 
 " She was only a simple country maid. She 
 knew that he loved her, and that was all she 
 cared for." Still, to drink tea amicably with 
 the wife of her pretendu is too much even for 
 
214 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 a simple country maid ; and when Bonny is 
 formally introduced to " Mrs. Alec Doyle," she 
 feels it time to withdraw from the scene and 
 become a hospital nurse, until a convenient 
 accident in the hunting-field removes the in- 
 trusive spouse, and reestablishes her claim to 
 the husband. 
 
 The same well-bred indifference is revealed 
 in a more sensational story called " Elfrida's 
 Wooing," where we have a villainous uncle 
 foiled in his base plots ; a father supposed to 
 ba drowned, but turning up just at the critical 
 moment ; a wicked lover baffled, a virtuous 
 lover rewarded. This sounds promising, but 
 in reality everything is taken with such won- 
 derful calm that not a ripple of excitement 
 breaks over the smooth surface of the tale. 
 There is even an abduction, which surely can- 
 not be an every-day occurrence in English 
 clerical life, I do not remember anything 
 like it in one of Trollope's novels, and by 
 mistake the wrong girl, the vicar's daughter, is 
 carried off by the rogues. But no matron of 
 feudal times could have betrayed less annoy- 
 ance at the incident than does the vicar's wife. 
 ' Rupert," she remarks placidly to her son, " it 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 215 
 
 is your place to go and look for your sister." 
 " Where shall I go ? " is the brother's languid 
 query. To which his mother retorts, with some 
 f retfulness : " How can I tell you ? If I knew, 
 I should be able to send for her myself," a 
 very simple and a very sensible way of stating 
 the case ; but it sounds as if the pet dog, rather 
 than the only daughter of the family, had been 
 
 spirited suddenly away. -'" 
 
 The most striking instance, however, of that 
 repose of mien which stamps the caste of 
 penny-fiction characters I found in a delightful 
 little romance entitled " Golden Chains," where 
 the heroine marries the villain to oblige a 
 friend, and is rewarded for her amiability by 
 being imprisoned in a ruined castle, situated 
 vaguely "on a lonely hillside looking down 
 upon the blue Mediterranean." Apparently, 
 nothing can be easier than to dispose of super- 
 fluous wives in this particular locality of Italy, 
 for no impertinent questions are asked ; and 
 Ernestine, proving intractable, is left by her 
 husband, Captain Beamish, an English officer 
 of a type not yet elucidated by Eudyard Kip- 
 ling, to starve quietly in her dungeon. She is 
 prevented from fulfilling this agreeable des- 
 
216 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 tiny by the accidental drowning of the captain, 
 and the accidental arrival of her lover, the 
 virtuous hero, who is traveling providentially 
 in the south of Europe, and who has a taste for 
 exploring ruins. This gentlemanly instinct 
 leads to the discovery of his beloved in a coma- 
 tose condition, " but beautiful still," though 
 " her youthful roundness was gone forever." 
 Surely now, the reader thinks, there will be a 
 scene of transport, of fierce wrath, of mingled 
 agony and rapture. Nothing of the sort. 
 Linden merely " lifts the fair head upon his 
 arm," and administers a dose of brandy. Then, 
 as Ernestine's eyes open, he murmurs, " ' Dear- 
 est, do you know me ? ' ' Yes,' she faintly 
 answered. 'All is well, Nessa. You have 
 been cruelly used, but all is well. You are 
 safe with me. Tell me, dear one, you are glad 
 to see me.' '' 
 
 If she were not glad to see him, under the 
 circumstances, it would indicate an extraordi- 
 nary indifference, not so much to love as to life ; 
 and the modesty which, in such a case, could 
 doubt a hearty welcome seems like an exagger- 
 ated emotion. But the hero of penny fiction 
 is the least arrogant of mortals. He worships 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 217 
 
 from afar, and expresses his affection in lan- 
 guage which at times is almost obsequious in its 
 timidity. He is never passionate, never exult- 
 ant, never the least bit foolish, and never for 
 a single moment relapses into humanity. Yet 
 millions of people believe in him, love him, 
 cherish him, and hail his weekly reappearance 
 with sincere and unwearied applause. 
 
 The Unknown Public, that huge body of 
 readers who meddle not with Ruskin, nor with 
 Browning, nor with Herbert Spencer, who 
 have 110 acquaintance with George Eliot, and 
 to whom even Thackeray and Scott are as re- 
 condite as George Meredith and Walter Pater, 
 has been an object of interest and curiosity to 
 its neighbor, the Known Public, ever since 
 Wilkie Collins formally introduced it into good 
 society, more than thirty years ago. This in- 
 terest is mingled with philanthropy, and is 
 apt to be a little didactic in the expression of 
 its regard. Wilkie Collins, indeed, after the 
 easy-going fashion of his generation, was con- 
 tent to take the Unknown Public as he found 
 it, and to wonder vaguely whether the same 
 man wrote all the stories that were so fear- 
 fully and wonderfully alike : " a combination 
 
218 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 of fierce melodrama and meek domestic senti- 
 ment ; short dialogues and paragraphs on the 
 French pattern, with English moral reflections 
 of the sort that occur on the top lines of chil- 
 dren's copybooks ; descriptions and conversa- 
 tions for the beginning of the number, and a 
 ' strong situation ' dragged in by the neck and 
 shoulders for the end." It was in the An- 
 swers to Correspondents, however, that the dis- 
 tinguished novelist confesses he took the keen- 
 est delight, in the punctilious reader, who 
 is anxious to know the correct hour at which 
 to visit a newly married couple ; in the prac- 
 tical reader, who asks how to make crumpets 
 and liquid blacking ; in the sentimental reader, 
 who has received presents from a gentleman to 
 whom she is not engaged, and desires the ed- 
 itor's sanction for the deed ; in the timorous 
 reader, who is afraid of a French invasion and 
 of dragonflies. The scraps of editorial wisdom 
 doled out to these benighted beings were, in 
 Wilkie Collins's opinion, well worth the jour- 
 nal's modest price. He was rejoiced to know 
 that " a sensible and honorable man never 
 flirts himself, and ever despises flirts of the 
 other sex." He was still more pleased to be 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 219 
 
 told, " When you have a sad trick of blushing, 
 on being introduced to a young lady, and when 
 you want to correct the habit, summon to your 
 aid a serene and manly confidence." 
 
 Members of the Known Public who explore 
 the wilds and deeps of penny fiction to-day are 
 less satisfied with what they see, less flippant 
 in their methods of criticism, and less disposed 
 to permit mankind to be amused after its own 
 dull fashion. " Let us raise the tone of these 
 popular journals," is their cry, " and we shall 
 soon have millions of readers taking rational 
 delight in wholesome literature. Let us pub- 
 lish good stories at a penny apiece, in fact, 
 it is our plain duty to do so, and these mil- 
 lions of readers will, with grateful hearts, rise 
 up and call us blessed." To which Mr. Payn 
 responds mirthfully that the Unknown Public 
 is every whit as sure of what it wants as the 
 Known Public that aspires to teach it, and 
 perhaps even a little surer. " The Count of 
 Monte Cristo," " The Wandering Jew," " Ivan- 
 hoe," and " White Lies " were all offered in 
 turn at a penny apiece, and were in turn re- 
 jected. That it does occasionally accept bet- 
 ter fiction, if it can get it cheap, we have the 
 
220 POINTS OF VIEW, 
 
 word of Mr. Wright, who claims to have been 
 for years a member of this mysterious body, 
 and to have an inner knowledge of what it 
 likes and dislikes. " The Woman in White," 
 " Lady Audley's Secret," and " It is Never 
 Too Late to Mend " are, he asserts, familiar 
 names with a certain stratum of the Unknown 
 Public ; " Midshipman Easy " is an old friend, 
 and " The Pathfinder " and " The Last of the 
 Mohicans " enjoy a fitful popularity. But its 
 real favorite, its admitted pride and delight, 
 is Ouida. The " genteel young ladies of the 
 counter," and their hard-working sisterhood 
 of dressmakers and milliners and lodging- 
 house keepers, all accept Ouida as a literary 
 oracle. " They quite agree with herself that 
 she is a woman of genius. They recognize 
 in her the embodiment of their own inex- 
 pressible imaginings of aristocratic people and 
 things. They believe in her Byronic charac- 
 ters, arid their Arabian-Nights-like wealth and 
 power ; in her titanic and delightfully wicked 
 guardsmen ; in her erratic or ferocious, but al- 
 ways gorgeous princes, her surpassingly lovely, 
 but more or less immoral grand dames, and 
 her wonderful Bohemians of both sexes. They 
 
H A 
 
 ENGLISH KAIL WAY FICTION. 
 
 believe, too, in her sheer ' fine writing.' Its 
 jingle is pleasant to their senses, even though 
 they fail to catch its meaning. Ouida's work 
 is essentially the acme of penny-serial style. 
 The novelists of the penny prints toil after her 
 in vain, but they do toil after her. They aim 
 at the same gorgeousness of effect, though they 
 lack her powers to produce it, to impress it 
 vividly upon readers. ''^x*'* 
 
 It has not been my experience to find in 
 these weeklies and I have read many of 
 them even a dim reflection of Ouida's mere- 
 tricious glitter. A gentle and unobtrusive 
 dullness ; a smooth fluency of style, suggestive 
 of the author's having written several hundreds 
 of such stories before, and turning them out 
 with no more intellectual effort than an organ- 
 grinder uses in turning the crank of his organ ; 
 an air of absolute unreality about the charac- 
 ters, not so much from overdrawing as from 
 their deadly sameness ; conversations of vapid 
 sprightliness and an atmosphere of oppressive 
 respectability, these are the characteristics 
 of penny fiction, if I may judge from the va- 
 ried specimens that have fallen into my hands. 
 The foreign scoundrels and secret poisoners, 
 
222 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 the sumptuous wealth and lavish bloodshed, 
 that thrilled the boyhood of Mr. Wright have, 
 I greatly fear, been refined out of existence. 
 There is an occasional promise of this sort of 
 thing, but never any adequate fulfillment. I 
 once hoped much from the opening paragraph 
 of a tale describing the virtuous heroine's 
 wicked husband in language which seemed to 
 me full of bright auspices for his future : 
 
 " The speaker was a fair, well-dressed man, 
 in appearance about three-and-thirty. A yel- 
 low mustache increased the languid, insouciant 
 expression of his long, well-cut features, which 
 were handsome, but, despite their delicacy, 
 had a singular animal resemblance in them, 
 God's image in the possession of a cool, un- 
 principled fiend, which now and then peered 
 out of the pale blue eyes, half veiled by the 
 yellow lashes." 
 
 Yet, with all his advantages of physiognomj,^ 
 the utmost this pale-eyed person achieves is 
 to hang around in his wife's way until she 
 shoots him, accidentally, of course, and 
 secures herself from any further annoyance. 
 
 In a taste for aristocracy, however, and a 
 splendid contempt for trade, and " the city," 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 223 
 
 and the objectionable middle classes, our penny 
 novelist surpasses even Ouida, and approaches 
 more nearly to that enamored exponent of high 
 life, Lord Beaconsfield. He will dance his 
 puppets, as Tony Lumpkin's boon companion 
 danced his bear, " only to the very genteelest 
 of tunes." Mr. Edward Salmon, who has 
 written with amazing seriousness on " What 
 the Working Classes Read," and who thinks 
 it a pity " more energy is not exerted in bring- 
 ing home to the people the inherent attractions 
 of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lyt- 
 ton, and George Eliot," makes the distinct 
 assertion that socialism and a hatred of the 
 fashionable world are fostered by the penny 
 serials, and by the pictures they draw of a lux- 
 urious and depraved nobility. " The stories," 
 he says gravely, u are utterly contemptible in 
 literary execution. They thrive on the wicked 
 baronet, the faithless but handsome peeress, 
 and find their chief supporters among shop- 
 girls, seamstresses, and domestic servants. It 
 is hardly surprising that there should exist in 
 the impressionable minds of the masses an 
 aversion more or less deep to the upper classes. 
 If one of their own order, man or woman, ap- 
 
224 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 pears in the pages of these unwholesome prints, 
 it is only as a paragon of virtue, who is proba- 
 bly ruined, or at least wronged, by that incar- 
 nation of evil, the sensuous aristocrat, standing 
 six feet, with his dark eyes, heavy mustache, 
 pearl-like teeth, and black hair. Throughout 
 the story the keynote struck is high - born 
 scoundrelism. Every social misdemeanor is 
 called in to assist the progress of the slipshod 
 narrative. Crime and love are the essential 
 ingredients, and the influence exercised over 
 the feminine reader, often unenlightened by 
 any close contact with the classes whom the 
 novelist pretends to portray, crystallizes into 
 an irremovable dislike of the upper strata of 
 society." 1 
 
 It is hard, after reading this extract, to be- 
 lieve that Mr. Salmon ever examined any of 
 these " slipshod narratives " for himself, or he 
 would know that the aristocrat of penny fiction 
 is always fair. The stalwart young farmer, 
 the aspiring artist, the sailor lover, may rival 
 each oxher in dark clustering curls, but the 
 peer, as befits his rank, is monotonously 
 blonde 
 
 1 The Nineteenth Century. 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 225 
 
 u The dark was dowered with beauty, 
 
 The fair was nobly born. 
 In the face of the one was hatred ; 
 In the face of the other, scorn." 
 
 Mr. Hamilton Ai'de probably does not design 
 liis graceful verses as illustrations of weekly 
 novelettes, but he understands better than Mr. 
 Salmon the subtle sympathy between birth and 
 coloring. 
 
 Neither have I discovered any socialistic 
 tendency in these stories, nor any disposition 
 to exalt the lower orders at the expense of the 
 upper. The Clara Vere de Veres who smiled 
 on me in the course of my researches were all 
 as virtuous as they were beautiful, and their 
 noble lovers were models of chivalry and truth. 
 It was the scheming lawyer, the base-born, 
 self-made man of business, who crept as a ser- 
 pent into their patrician Eden, and was treated 
 with the contempt and contumely he deserved. 
 In one instance, such an upstart, Mr. John 
 Farlow by name, ventures to urge upon an im- 
 poverished landholder his offers of friendship 
 and assistance, and this is the spirit in which 
 his advances are received : 
 
 " The colonel shudders, as he gazes, half 
 wearily, half scornfully, at the shapeless, squat 
 
226 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 figure of the Caliban-like creature before him. 
 That he, Courtenay St. Leger Walterton, late 
 in command of her Majesty's Lancers, should 
 have to listen respectfully to the hectoring of 
 this low city rascal, while a horsepond awaits 
 without, and a collection of horsewhips hang 
 ready for instant application on the hunting- 
 rack in the hall within ! Yet it is so ; he is 
 wholly at this man's mercy, and the colonel, 
 like the humblest of mankind, is obliged to 
 succumb to the inevitable." 
 
 Now, since I turned the last page of " Ten 
 Thousand a Year," a long, long time ago, I 
 have hardly met with a finer instance of aris- 
 tocratic feeling than this, or a more crushing 
 disdain for the ignoble creature known as a 
 solicitor. Mr. John Farlow is of course a vil- 
 lain, but Courtenay St. Leger Walterton is not 
 aware of this fact, and neither, in the begin- 
 ning of the tale, is the reader. What we do 
 know, however, is that, being a " low city ras- 
 cal," he naturally merits horsewhipping at the 
 hands of a blue-blooded country squire. He 
 would have deserved hanging, had the colonel 
 been a duke, and perhaps that punishment 
 might have been meted triumphantly out to 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 227 
 
 him, for the penny novelist, with all his faults, 
 still " loves his House of Peers." 
 
 The task of providing literature for the Un- 
 known Public is not the easy thing it seems to 
 critics like Mr. Wright and Mr. Salmon. The 
 Unknown Public has its literature already, 
 a literature which enjoys an enormous circu- 
 lation, and gives absolute satisfaction. One 
 publishing company alone, "for the people," 
 claims that its penny novelettes, issued weekly, 
 reach seven millions of readers, and these 
 seven millions are evidently content with what 
 they receive. Mr. Andrew Lang is responsi- 
 ble for the statement that a story about a mill 
 girl, which was printed in a Glasgow penny 
 journal, so delighted the subscribers that they 
 demanded it should be several times repeated 
 in its columns. " There could not," says Mr. 
 Lang somewhat wistfully, " be a more perfect 
 and gratifying success ; " and publishers of 
 ambitious and high-toned periodicals may well 
 be forgiven for envying such a master-stroke. 
 When were they ever asked to reprint a story, 
 however vaunted its perfections, however pop- 
 ular it seemed to be ? The heroine of this 
 magic tale is defrauded of her inheritance by 
 
228 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 villains who possess sumptuous subterranean 
 palaces and torture-chambers in " her own ro- 
 mantic town " of Glasgow, the last place in 
 the world where we should reasonably expect 
 to find them. "The one essential feature," 
 Mr. Lang observes, " in a truly successful 
 tale is that there should be an ingenue, as pure 
 as poor, who is debarred by conspiracies from 
 the enjoyment of a prodigious fortune." This 
 is a favorite device with weekly papers at 
 home, and the serial story, on either side of 
 the Atlantic, is perforce a little more stirring 
 in its character than that presented to us in 
 finished form through the medium of the 
 penny novelette. With the first, the " strong 
 situation " is serviceable as a decoy to lure the 
 reader into purchasing the following number. 
 With the second, no such artifice is needed or 
 employed. The buyer has his pennyworth al- 
 ready in hand ; and a very good pennyworth 
 it is, judged by quantity alone. Wilkie Col- 
 lins tells us how he tried vainly to extract from 
 a shopman an opinion as to which was the best 
 journal to select, and how the shopman per- 
 sisted, very naturally, in saying that there was 
 no choice, one was every bit as long as 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 229 
 
 another. " Well, you see some likes one, and 
 some the next. Take 'em all the year around, 
 and there ain't a pin, as I knows of, to choose 
 between them. There 's just about as much in 
 one as there is in its neighbor. All good 
 penn'orths. Bless my soul ! Just take 'em up 
 and look for yourself ! All good penn'orths, 
 choose where you like." 
 
 Exactly as if they were shrimps or peri- 
 winkles ! Very good measure, if you chance 
 to like the stuff ! "Dorothy, a Home Journal 
 for Ladies," in a rather attractive pale green 
 cover, gives you every week a complete story, 
 nearly half the length of an average English 
 novel, and fairly well illustrated with full-page 
 cuts. Each number contains, in addition, 
 Dorothy's Letter-Box, where all reasonable 
 questions are answered, and Dorothy's Draw- 
 ing-Room, with items of fashionable news, 
 the whereabouts of the Queen, and the inter- 
 esting fact that "the Duke and Duchess of 
 Portland have been living quietly and giving 
 no parties at Langwell, the Duke being desir- 
 ous of affording the Duchess every chance of 
 better regaining her health." Also Hints for 
 Practical Dressmaking, by " Busy Bee ; " 
 
230 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 Our Homes, by " Lady Bird ; " an occasional 
 poem ; and Notes on Handwriting, where you 
 may learn that you have " ambition, an ardent, 
 tender, affectionate, and sensitive nature, easily 
 impressed, and inclined to jealousy. There 
 is also some sense of beauty, vivid fancy, and 
 sequence of ideas." Now and then a doubting 
 maid sends a scrap of her lover's penmanship 
 to be deciphered, and receives the following 
 gentle encouragement : 
 
 " LOVE LIES BLEEDING. I hardly like to 
 say whether the writer of the morsel you in- 
 close would make a good husband ; but I 
 should imagine him as thoughtful for others, 
 romantic and loving, very orderly in his habits, 
 and fairly well educated ; rather hot-tempered, 
 but forgives and forgets quickly." 
 
 All this for a penny, two cents of Ameri- 
 can money ! No wonder " Dorothy " reaches 
 her millions of readers. No wonder the little 
 green books lie in great heaps on the counters 
 of every railway station in England. She is, 
 perhaps, the most high-toned of such weekly 
 issues ; but " The Princess," in a bright blue 
 cover, follows closely in her wake, with a com- 
 plete story, illustrated, and Boudoir Gossip 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 231 
 
 about Prince George of Wales, and Mrs. 
 Mackay, and the Earl and Countess of Jersey. 
 " Bow Bells " and " The Wide World Novel- 
 ettes " are on a distinctly lower scale : the fic- 
 tion more sensational, the cuts coarser, and the 
 pink cover of " Bow Bells " flaunting and vul- 
 gar. " A Magazine of Short Stories " aims at 
 being lively and vivacious in the style of Rhoda 
 Broughton, and gives a good pennyworth of 
 tales, verses, Answers to Correspondents, and 
 a column of Familiar Quotations Verified that 
 alone is worth the money. But the final 
 triumph of quantity over quality, of matter 
 over mind, is in the " Book for All," published 
 weekly at the price of one penny, and contain- 
 ing five separate departments, for women, girls, 
 men, boys, and children. Each of these depart- 
 ments has a short illustrated story, poetry, 
 anecdotes, puzzles, confidential talks with the 
 editor, advice on every subject, and informa- 
 tion of every description. Here you can learn 
 "how to preserve your beauty" and how to 
 make " royal Battenberg " lace, how to run a 
 Texas ranch and how to go into mourning for 
 your mother, how to cure stammering and how 
 to rid a dog of fleas. Here you may acquire 
 
232 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 knowledge upon the most varied topics, from 
 lung diseases in animals to Catherine of Rus- 
 sia's watch, from the aborigines of Australia 
 to scientific notes on the Lithuanian language. 
 The Unknown Public must indeed be athirst 
 for knowledge, if it can absorb such quantities 
 week after week with unabated zeal ; and, 
 from the Answers to Correspondents, we are 
 led to suppose it is ever eager for more. One 
 inquiring mind is comforted by the assurance 
 that " narrative monophone will appear in its 
 turn," and an ambitious but elderly reader is 
 gently warned that " a person aged fifty might 
 learn to play on the guitar, and perhaps be 
 able to sing ; but the chances are that, in both 
 instances, the performance will not be likely 
 to captivate those who are compelled to listen 
 to it." On the whole, after an exhaustive 
 study of penny weeklies, I should say that, 
 were I expected to provide a large family with 
 reading matter and encyclopaedic information 
 at the modest rate of one dollar and four 
 cents a year, the " Book for All " would be 
 the journal of my choice. 
 
 It is not in penny fiction alone, however, 
 that the railway book-stalls do a thriving trade. 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 233 
 
 The shilling novels stand in goodly rows, in- 
 viting you to a purchase you are sure after- 
 wards to regret. The average shilling novel 
 in England differs from the average penny 
 novel in size only ; and, judged by measure- 
 ment, the sole standard it is possible to apply, 
 it should, to warrant its price, be about six 
 times the length. " Lord Elwyn's Daughter " 
 and "The Nun's Curse," at a shilling each, 
 bear such a strong family resemblance to their 
 penny cousins, " Golden Chains " and " Her 
 Bitter Burden," that it needs their outward 
 dress to distinguish them; and "Haunted" 
 and " The Man who Vanished " carry their fin- 
 est thrills in their title. Quite early in my 
 search, I noticed at the Waterloo station three 
 shilling novels, " Weaker than Woman," 
 "Lady Button's Ward," and "Diana's Dis- 
 cipline," all advertised conspicuously as being 
 by the author of " Dora Thorne." Feeling 
 that my ignorance of Dora Thorne herself 
 was a matter for regret and enlightenment, I 
 asked for her at once, to be told she was not 
 in stock, but I might, if I liked, have " Lady 
 Gwendolen's Dream," by the same writer. I 
 declined " Lady Gwendolen," and at the next 
 
234 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 station once more demanded " Dora Thome." 
 In vain ! The young man in attendance glanced 
 over his volumes, shook his head, and offered 
 me "Diana's Discipline," and a fresh book 
 "The Fatal Lilies," also by the author of 
 " Dora Thorne." Another stall at another 
 station had all five of these novels, and a sixth 
 one in addition, " A Golden Heart," by the 
 author of "Dora Thorne," but still no "Dora." 
 Elsewhere I encountered " Her Martyrdom " 
 and " Which Loved Him Best," both stamped 
 with the cabalistic words " By the Author of 
 ' Dora Thorne ' ; " and so it continued to the 
 end. New stories without number, all from 
 the same pen, and all countersigned "By the 
 Author of fc Dora Thorne,' " but never "Dora." 
 From first to last, she remained elusive, invisi- 
 ble, unattainable, a Mrs. Harris among 
 books, a name and nothing more. 
 
 Comedy is very popular at railway book- 
 stalls : " My Churchwardens," by a Vicar, and 
 "My Eectors," by a Quondam Curate; a 
 weekly pennyworth of mild jokes called " Pick- 
 Me-Up," and a still cheaper and still milder 
 collection for a half-penny called " Funny 
 Cuts ; " an occasional shabby copy of " Inno- 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 235 
 
 cents Abroad," which stands as the representa- 
 tive of American humor, and that most mysteri- 
 ous of journals, "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday," 
 which always conveys the impression of being 
 exceedingly amusing if one could only under- 
 stand the fun. Everybody I mean, of 
 course, everybody who rides in third-class car- 
 riages buys this paper, and studies it so- 
 berly, industriously, almost sadly ; but I have 
 never yet seen anybody laugh over it. Mrs. 
 Pennell, indeed, with a most heroic devotion 
 to the cause of humor, and a catholic apprecia- 
 tion of its highways and byways, has analyzed 
 Ally Sloper for the benefit of the Known 
 Public which reads the "Contemporary Re- 
 view," and claims that he is a modern brother 
 of old-time jesters, of Pierrot, and Pulci- 
 nello, and Pantaleone ; reflecting national 
 vices and follies with caustic but good-natured 
 fidelity. " While the cultured of the present 
 generation have been busy proving their pow- 
 ers of imitation," says Mrs. Pennell, "this 
 unconscious evolution of a popular type has 
 established the pretensions of the people to 
 originality." But, alas ! it is not given to the 
 moderately cultivated to understand such types 
 
236 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 without a good deal of interpretation; and 
 merely buying and reading the paper are of 
 very little service. Here are the pictures, 
 which I am told are clever ; here is the text, 
 which is probably clever, too ; but their com- 
 bined brilliancy conveys no light to my mind. 
 Ally Sloper leading "a local German band " at 
 Tenby, Ally Sloper interviewing distinguished 
 people, may, like Mr. F.'s aunt, be " ingenious 
 and even subtle," but the key to his subtlety 
 is lacking. As for Tootsie, and The Dook 
 Snook, and Lord Bob, and The Hon. Billy, and 
 all the other members of this interesting fam- 
 ily who play their weekly part in the recurring 
 comedy, they would be quite as amusing to the 
 uninitiated reader if they followed the example 
 of the erudite Oxonian, and conversed in " the 
 Ostiak dialect of Tungusian." 
 
 By way of contrast, I suppose, the other 
 comic weeklies preserve a simplicity of charac- 
 ter which is equaled only by their placid and 
 soothing dullness. It is easy to understand 
 the amount of humor conveyed in such jests 
 as these, both of which are deemed worthy of 
 half-page illustrations. 
 
 " Aunt Kate (in the park). Tell me, Ethel, 
 when any of the men look at me. 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 237 
 
 " Little Ethel. It 's me they look at, aunty. 
 You 're too old." 
 
 " Dear friends again. Madge (rather eld- 
 erly). What do you think of my new hat, 
 Lily? 
 
 " Lily. It 's rather old-fashioned, dear, but 
 it suits you." 
 
 This is the very meekest of funning, and 
 feminine tartness and juvenile precocity must 
 be at a low ebb with the Unknown Public when 
 it can relish such shadowy thrusts, even at in- 
 creasing years, which, from the days of the 
 prophet to the days of Mr. Gladstone, have 
 ever been esteemed a fitting subject for mirth. 
 The distance between the penny dreadful and 
 " Lorna Doone " is not vaster than the dis- 
 tance between these hopeless jests and the fine 
 cynicism, the arrowy humor, of Du Maurier. 
 Mrs. Pennell says very truely that Cimabue 
 Brown and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns would 
 have no meaning whatever for the British 
 workman, would probably be as great a mys- 
 tery to him as The Dook Snook and The Hon. 
 Billy are to me. But Punch's dear little lad 
 who, on a holiday afternoon, has caught only 
 one fish, " and that was so young it (lid n't 
 
238 POINTS OF VIEW. 
 
 know how to hold on," and the charitable but 
 near-sighted old lady who drops a penny into 
 the hat of a meditative peer, come within the 
 scope of everybody's comprehension. If more 
 energy is to be exerted " in bringing home to 
 the people the inherent attractions of Shake- 
 speare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lytton, and 
 George Eliot," according to the comprehensive 
 programme laid out by Mr. Salmon, why not, 
 as a first step, bring home to them the attrac- 
 tions of a bright, clean, merry jest ? It might 
 enable them, perhaps, to recognize the gap 
 between the humor of George Eliot and the 
 humor of Captain Marryat, and would serve 
 to prick their dormant critical faculties into 
 life. 
 
 The one sad sight at an English railway 
 book-stall is the little array of solid writers 
 who stand neglected, shabby, and apart, plead- 
 ing dumbly out of their dusty shame for rec- 
 ognition and release. I have seen Baxter's 
 " Saint's Kest " jostled contemptuously into a 
 corner. I have seen " The Apostolic Fathers " 
 hanging their hoary heads with dignified hu- 
 mility, and " The Popes of Rome " lingering 
 in inglorious bondage. I have seen our own 
 
ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION. 239 
 
 Emerson broken -backed and spiritless; and, 
 harder still, " The Autocrat of the Breakfast- 
 Table " shorn of his gay supremacy, frayed, 
 and worn, and exiled from his friends. I have 
 seen " Sartor Resartus" skulking on a dark 
 shelf with a yellow -covered neighbor more 
 gaudy than respectable, and I have seen 
 Buckle's boasted " Civilization " in a condition 
 that would have disgraced a savage. These 
 Titans, discrowned and discredited, these cap- 
 tives, honorable in their rags, stirred my heart 
 with sympathy and compassion. I wanted to 
 gather them up and carry them away to re- 
 spectability, and the long-forgotten shelter of 
 library walls. But light-weight luggage pre- 
 cluded philanthropy, and, steeling my reluc- 
 tant soul, I left them to their fate. Still they 
 stand, I know, unsought, neglected, scorned, 
 while thousands of " Dorothys " and " Ally 
 Slopers " are daily sold around them. " How 
 had the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, 
 while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had 
 waned!" How shall genius be revered and 
 honored, when buried without decent rites in 
 the bleak graveyard of a railway book-stall? 
 

u.c.