. ; -.- ) , r , T . , M -J,..,^..^.,...... ., . ..,,. 
 
IN MEMORY OF 
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Kepplier. 
 
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 A BOOK OF FAMOUS VERSE. Selected 
 by Agnes Repplier. In Riverside Library 
 for Young People. i6mo, 75 cents; Holiday 
 Edition, i6mo, fancy binding, $1.25. 
 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK. 
 
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS 
 
 BY 
 
 AGNES REPPLIER 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 
 1895 
 

 Copyright, 1893, 
 BY AGNES REPPLIER, 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 FIFTH EDITION. 
 
 GIFT 
 
 The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
 Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co- 
 
To AGNES IRWIN. 
 
 M617438 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 AGRIPPINA 1 
 
 THE CHILDREN S POETS ... .33 
 
 THE PRAISES OF WAR 65 
 
 LEISURE 94 
 
 WORDS 113 
 
 ENNUI 137 
 
 WIT AND HUMOR 168 
 
 LETTERS . . .192 
 
 "Leisure" is reprinted from "Scribner s Magazine" by 
 permission of the publishers. 
 
ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 AGRIPPINA. 
 
 SHE is sitting now on my desk, and I glance 
 at her with deference, mutely begging per 
 mission to begin. But her back is turned to 
 me, and expresses in every curve such fine 
 and delicate disdain that I falter and lose cour 
 age at the very threshold of my task. I have 
 long known that cats are the most contemptu 
 ous of creatures, and that Agrippina is the 
 most contemptuous of cats. The spirit of Bou- 
 haki, the proud Theban beast that sat erect, 
 with gold earrings in his ears, at the feet of 
 his master^ King Hana ; the spirit of Muezza, 
 whose slumbers Mahomet himself was not bold 
 enough to disturb ; the spirit of Micetto, Cha 
 teaubriand s ecclesiastical pet, dignified as a 
 cardinal, and conscious ever that he was the 
 gift of a sovereign pontiff, the spirits of all 
 
2 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 arrogant cats that have played scornful parts in 
 the world s great comedy look out from Agrip- 
 pina s yellow eyes, and hold me in subjection. 
 I should like to explain to her, if I dared, 
 that my desk is small, littered with many 
 papers, and sadly overcrowded with the useful 
 inutilities which affectionate friends delight in 
 giving me at Christmas time. Sainte-Beuve s 
 cat, I am aware, sat on his desk, and roamed 
 at will among those precious manuscripts 
 which no intrusive hand was ever permitted to 
 touch; but Sainte-Beuve probably had suffi 
 cient space reserved for his own comfort and 
 convenience. I have not; and Agrippina s 
 beautifully ringed tail flapping across my copy 
 distracts my attention, and imperils the neat 
 ness of my penmanship. Even when she is 
 disposed to be affable, turns the light of her 
 countenance upon me, watches with attentive 
 curiosity every stroke I make, and softly, with 
 curved paw, pats my pen as it travels over the 
 paper, even in these halcyon moments, 
 though my self-love is flattered by her conde 
 scension, I am aware that I should work bet 
 ter and more rapidly if I denied myself this 
 charming companionship. 
 
A GR1PPINA. 6 
 
 But in truth it is impossible for a lover of 
 cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discrimi 
 nating little friends, who give us just enough 
 of their regard and complaisance to make us 
 hunger for more. M. Fee, the naturalist, who 
 has written so admirably about animals, and 
 who understands, as only a Frenchman can 
 understand, the delicate and subtle organiza 
 tion of a cat, frankly admits that the keynote 
 of its character is independence. It dwells 
 under our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures our 
 blandishments, and apparently enjoys our so 
 ciety, without for one moment forfeiting its 
 sense of absolute freedom, without acknow 
 ledging any servile relation to the human crea 
 ture who shelters it. " The cat," says M. Fee, 
 " will never part with its liberty ; it will 
 neither be our servant, like the horse, nor our 
 friend, like the dog. It consents to live as our 
 guest; it accepts the home we offer and the 
 food we give ; it even goes so far as to solicit 
 our caresses, but capriciously, and when it suits 
 its humor to receive them." 
 
 Rude and masterful souls resent this fine 
 self-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and re 
 quire that it should have no will but theirs, 
 
4 SSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 no pleasure that does not emanate from them. 
 They are forever prating of the love and fidel 
 ity of the dog, of the beast that obeys their 
 slightest word, crouches contentedly for hours 
 at their feet, is exuberantly grateful for the 
 smallest attention, and so affectionate that its 
 demonstrations require to be curbed rather 
 than encouraged. All this homage is pleasing 
 to their vanity ; yet there are people, less ma 
 gisterial perhaps, or less exacting, who believe 
 that true friendship, even with an animal, may 
 be built upon mutual esteem and independence ; 
 that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy of 
 it ; and that obedience is not essential to agree 
 able and healthy intercourse. A man who 
 owns a dog is, in every sense of the word, its 
 master ; the term expresses accurately their 
 mutual relations. But it is ridiculous when 
 applied to the limited possession of a cat. I 
 am certainly not Agrippina s mistress, and the 
 assumption of authority on my part would be 
 a mere empty dignity, like those swelling titles 
 which afford such innocent delight to the 
 
 O 
 
 Freemasons of our severe republic. If I call 
 Agrippina, she does not come ; if I tell her to 
 go away, she remains where she is ; if I try to 
 
AGRIPPINA. 5 
 
 persuade her to show off her one or two little 
 accomplishments, she refuses, with courteous 
 but unswerving decision. She has frolicsome 
 moods, in which a thimble, a shoe-buttoner, a 
 scrap of paper, or a piece of string will drive 
 her wild with delight ; she has moods of inflexi 
 ble gravity, in which she stares solemnly at her 
 favorite ball rolling over the carpet, without 
 stirring one lazy limb to reach it. " Have I 
 seen this foolish toy before ? " she seems to be 
 asking herself with musing austerity ; " and 
 can it be possible that there are cats who run 
 after such frivolous trifles? Vanity of vani 
 ties, and all is vanity, save only to lie upon 
 the hearth-rug, and be warm, and think grave 
 thoughts to feed a serious soul. In such 
 moments of rejection and humiliation, I com 
 fort myself by recalling the words of one 
 too wise for arrogance. " When I play with 
 my cat," says Montaigne, " how do I know 
 whether she does not make a jest of me ? We 
 entertain each other with mutual antics ; and 
 if I have my own time for beginning or refus 
 ing, she too has hers." 
 
 This is the spirit in which we should ap 
 proach a creature so reserved and so utterly 
 
6 ESSAYS -IN IDLENESS. 
 
 self-sufficing ; this is the only key we have to 
 that natural distinction of character which re 
 pels careless and unobservant natures. When 
 I am told that Agrippina is disobedient, un 
 grateful, cold-hearted, perverse, stupid, treach 
 erous, and cruel, I no longer strive to check 
 the torrent of abuse. I know that Buffon said 
 all this, and much more, about cats, and that 
 people have gone on repeating it ever since, 
 principally because these spirited little beasts 
 have remained just what it pleased Providence 
 to make them, have preserved their primitive 
 freedom through centuries of effete and demor 
 alizing civilization. Why, I wonder, should a 
 great many good men and women cherish an 
 unreasonable grudge against one animal be 
 cause it does not chance to possess the precise 
 qualities of another ? " My dog fetches my 
 slippers for me every night," said a friend 
 triumphantly, not long ago. " He puts them 
 first to warm by the fire, and then brings them 
 over to my chair, wagging his tail, and as 
 proud as Punch. Would your cat do as much 
 for you, I d like to know ? " Assuredly not ! 
 If I waited for Agrippina to fetch me shoes or 
 slippers, I should have no other resource save 
 
AGRIPPINA. 7 
 
 to join as speedily as possible one of the bare 
 footed religious orders of Italy. But, after all, 
 fetching slippers is not the whole duty of do 
 mestic pets. As La Fontaine gently reminds 
 us : 
 
 " Tout animal n a pas toutes propri^t^s." 
 
 We pick no quarrel with a canary because it 
 does not talk like a parrot, nor with a parrot 
 because it does not sing like a canary. We 
 find no fault with a King Charles spaniel for 
 not flying at the throat of a burglar, nor with 
 a St. Bernard because we cannot put it in our 
 pocket. Agrippina will never make herself 
 serviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestima 
 ble service. How many times have I rested 
 tired eyes on her graceful little body, curled 
 up in a ball and wrapped round with her tail 
 like a parcel ; or stretched out luxuriously on 
 my bed, one paw coyly covering her face, the 
 other curved gently inwards, as though clasp 
 ing an invisible treasure ! Asleep or awake, 
 in rest or in motion, grave or gay, Agrippina 
 is always beautiful; and it is better to be 
 beautiful than to fetch and carry from the 
 rising to the setting of the sun. She is droll, 
 too, with an unconscious humor, even in her 
 
8 ASSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 most serious and sentimental moods. She has 
 quite the longest ears that ever were seen on so 
 small a cat, eyes more solemn than Athene s 
 owl blinking in the sunlight, and an air of 
 supercilious disdain that would have made 
 Diogenes seem young and ardent by her side. 
 Sitting on the library table, under the evening 
 lamp, with her head held high in air, her tall 
 ears as erect as chimneys, and her inscrutable 
 gaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room, 
 Agrippina inspires in the family sentiments of 
 mingled mirthfulness and awe. To laugh at 
 her in such moments, however, is to incur her 
 supreme displeasure. I have known her to 
 jump down from the table, and walk haugh 
 tily out of the room, because of a single half- 
 suppressed but wholly indecorous giggle. 
 
 Schopenhauer has said that the reason do 
 mestic pets are so lovable and so helpful to 
 us is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly, 
 the present moment. Life holds no future for 
 them, and consequently no care ; if they are 
 content, their contentment is absolute ; and 
 our jaded and wearied spirits find a natural 
 relief in the sight of creatures whose little cups 
 of happiness can so easily be filled to the brim. 
 
AGRIPPINA. 9 
 
 Walt Whitman expresses the same thought 
 more coarsely when he acknowledges that he 
 loves the society of animals because they do 
 not sweat and whine over their condition, nor 
 lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 
 nor sicken him with discussions of their duty. 
 In truth, that admirable counsel of Sydney 
 Smith s, " Take short views of life," can be 
 obeyed only by the brutes ; for the thought 
 that travels even to the morrow is long enough 
 to destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as we 
 know not what the morrow may bring forth. 
 But when Agrippina has breakfasted, and 
 washed, and sits in the sunlight blinking at 
 me with affectionate contempt, I feel soothed 
 by her absolute and unqualified enjoyment. I 
 know how full my day will be of things that I 
 don t want particularly to do, and that are not 
 particularly worth doing ; but for her, time 
 and the world hold only this brief moment of 
 contentment. Slowly the eyes close, gently 
 the little body is relaxed. Oh, you who strive 
 to relieve your overwrought nerves, and cul 
 tivate power through repose, watch the ex 
 quisite languor of a drowsy cat, and despair 
 of imitating such perfect and restful grace! 
 
10 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 There is a gradual yielding of every muscle to 
 the soft persuasiveness of slumber ; the flexi 
 ble frame is curved into tender lines, the head 
 nestles lower, the paws are tucked out of sight ; 
 no convulsive throb or start betrays a rebel 
 lious alertness; only a faint quiver of uncon 
 scious satisfaction, a faint heaving of the tawny 
 sides, a faint gleam of the half -shut yellow 
 eyes, and Agrippina is asleep. I look at her 
 for one wistful moment, and then turn reso 
 lutely to my work. It were ignoble to wish 
 myself in her place, and yet how charming to 
 be able to settle down to a nap, sans peur et 
 sans reproche, at ten o clock in the morning ! 
 
 These, then, are a few of the pleasures to be 
 derived from the society of an amiable cat ; 
 and by an amiable cat I mean one that, while 
 maintaining its own dignity and delicate re 
 serve, is nevertheless affable and condescend 
 ing in the company of human beings. There 
 is nothing I dislike more than newspaper and 
 magazine stories about priggish pussies like 
 the children in Sunday-school books that 
 share their food with hungry beasts from the 
 back alleys, and show touching fidelity to old 
 blind masters, and hunt partridges, in a spirit 
 
AGRIPPINA. 11 
 
 of noble self-sacrifice, for consumptive mis 
 tresses, and scorn to help themselves to delica 
 cies from the kitchen tables, and arouse their 
 households so often in cases of fire that I 
 should suspect them of starting the conflagra 
 tions in order to win applause by giving the 
 alarm. Whatever a real cat may or may not 
 be, it is never a prig, and all true lovers of the 
 race have been quick to recognize and appre 
 ciate this fact. 
 
 u I value in the cat," says Chateaubriand, 
 " that independent and almost ungrateful tem 
 per which prevents it from attaching itself to 
 any one ; the indifference with which it passes 
 from the salon to the housetop. When you 
 caress it, it stretches itself out and arches its 
 back responsively ; but that is caused by phy 
 sical pleasure, and not, as in the case of the 
 dog, by a silly satisfaction in loving and being 
 faithful to a master who returns thanks in 
 kicks. The cat lives alone, has no need of 
 society, does not obey except when it likes, pre 
 tends to sleep that it may see the more clearly, 
 and scratches everything that it can scratch." 
 
 Here is a sketch spirited enough, and of good 
 outline, but hardly correct in detail. A cat 
 
12 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 seldom manifests affection, yet is often dis 
 tinctly social, and likes to see itself the petted 
 minion of a family group. Agrippina, in fact, 
 so far from living alone, will not, if she can 
 help it, remain for a moment in a room by her 
 self. She is content to have me as a compan 
 ion, perhaps in default of better; but if I 
 go upstairs or downstairs in search of a book, 
 or my eyeglasses, or any one of the countless 
 things that are never where they ought to be, 
 Agrippina follows closely at my heels. Some 
 times, when she is fast asleep, I steal softly 
 out of the door, thinking to escape her vigi 
 lance ; but before I have taken a dozen steps 
 she is under my feet, mewing a gentle re 
 proach, and putting on all the injured airs of 
 a deserted Ariadne. I should like to think 
 such behavior prompted by affection rather 
 than by curiosity ; but in my candid moments 
 I find this " pathetic fallacy " a difficult sen 
 timent to cherish. There are people, I am 
 aware, who trustfully assert that their pets 
 love them; and one such sanguine creature 
 has recently assured the world that " no man 
 who boasts the real intimacy and confidence 
 of a cat would dream of calling his four-footed 
 
AGRIPPINA, 13 
 
 friend 4 puss. But is not such a boast 
 rather ill-timed at best ? How dare any man 
 venture to assert that he possesses the intimacy 
 and confidence of an animal so exclusive and 
 so reserved ? I doubt if Cardinal Wolsey, in 
 the zenith of his pride and power, claimed the 
 intimacy and confidence of the superb cat who 
 sat in a cushioned armchair by his side, and 
 reflected with mimic dignity the full-blown 
 honors of the Lord High Chancellor of Eng 
 land. Agrippina, I am humbly aware, grants 
 me neither her intimacy nor her confidence, 
 but only her companionship, which I endeavor 
 to receive modestly, and without flaunting my 
 favors to the world. She is displeased and 
 even downcast when I go out, and she greets 
 my return with delight, thrusting her little 
 gray head between the banisters the instant 
 I open the house door, and waving a welcome 
 in mid-air with one ridiculously small paw. 
 Being but mortal, I am naturally pleased with 
 these tokens of esteem, but I do not, on that 
 account, go about with arrogant brow, and 
 boast of my intimacy with Agrippina. I 
 should be laughed at, if I did, by everybody 
 who is privileged to possess and appreciate a 
 cat. 
 
14 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 As for curiosity, that vice which the Abbe 
 Galiani held to be unknown to animals, but 
 which the more astute Voltaire detected in 
 every little dog that he saw peering out of the 
 window of its master s coach, it is the ruling 
 passion of the feline breast. A closet door left 
 ajar, a box with half -closed lid, an open bureau 
 drawer, these are the objects that fill a cat 
 with the liveliest interest and delight. Agrip- 
 pina watches breathlessly the unfastening of 
 a parcel, and tries to hasten matters by clutch 
 ing actively at the string. When its contents 
 are shown her, she examines them gravely, 
 and then, with a sigh of relief, settles down to 
 repose. The slightest noise disturbs and irri 
 tates her until she discovers its cause. If she 
 hears a footstep in the hall, she runs out to 
 see whose it is, and, like certain troublesome 
 little people I have known, she dearly loves 
 to go to the front door every time the bell 
 is rung. From my window she surveys the 
 street with tranquil scrutiny, and, if boys are 
 playing below, she follows their games with a 
 steady, scornful stare, very different from the 
 wistful eagerness of a friendly dog, quiver- 
 ing to join in the sport. Sometimes the boys 
 
AGRIPPINA. 15 
 
 catch sight of her, and shout up rudely at her 
 window ; and I can never sufficiently admire 
 Agrippina s conduct upon these trying occa 
 sions, the well-bred composure with which she 
 affects neither to see nor to hear them, nor 
 to be aware that there are such objectionable 
 creatures as children in the world. Some 
 times, too, the terrier that lives next door 
 comes out to sun himself in the street, and, 
 beholding my cat sitting well out of reach, he 
 dances madly up and down the pavement, 
 barking with all his might, and rearing him 
 self on his short hind legs, in a futile, attempt 
 to dislodge her. Then the spirit of evil 
 enters Agrippina s little heart. The win 
 dow is open, and she creeps to the extreme 
 edge of the stone sill, stretches herself at full 
 length, peers down smilingly at the frenzied 
 dog, dangles one paw enticingly in the air, 
 and exerts herself with quiet malice to drive 
 him to desperation. Her sense of humor is 
 awakened by his frantic efforts, and by her 
 own absolute security ; and not until he is 
 spent with exertion, and lies panting and 
 exhausted on the bricks, does she arch her 
 graceful back, stretch her limbs lazily in the 
 
16 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 sun, and with one light bound spring from the 
 window to my desk. Wisely has Moncrif 
 observed that a cat is not merely diverted by 
 everything that moves, but is convinced that 
 all nature is occupied exclusively with cater 
 ing to her diversion. 
 
 There is a charming story told by M. 
 Champfleury, who has written so much and so 
 admirably about cats, of a poor hermit whose 
 piety and asceticism were so great that in a 
 vision he was permitted to behold his place 
 in heaven, next to that of St. Gregory, the 
 sovereign pontiff of Christendom. The her 
 mit, who possessed nothing upon earth but a 
 female cat, was abashed by the thought that in 
 the next world he was destined to rank with 
 so powerful a prince of the Church ; and per 
 haps for who knows the secret springs of 
 spiritual pride ? he fancied that his self- 
 inflicted poverty would win for him an even 
 higher reward. Whereupon a second revela 
 tion made known to him that his detachment 
 from the world was by no means so complete 
 as he imagined, for that he loved and valued 
 his cat, the sole companion of his solitude, 
 more than St. Gregory loved and valued all 
 
AGRIPPINA. 17 
 
 his earthly possessions. The Pope on his 
 throne was the truer ascetic of the two. 
 
 This little tale conveys to us, in addition 
 to its excellent moral, never more needed 
 than at present, a pleasing truth concern 
 ing the lovability of cats. While they have 
 never attained, and never deserve to attain, 
 the widespread and somewhat commonplace 
 popularity of dogs, their fascination is a 
 more potent and irresistible charm. He 
 who yields himself to the sweet seductiveness 
 of a cat is beguiled forever from the simple, 
 honorable friendship of the more generous 
 and open-hearted beast. The small domestic 
 sphinx whose inscrutable eyes never soften 
 with affection ; the fetich animal that comes 
 down to us from the far past, adored, hated, 
 and feared, a god in wise and silent Egypt, 
 a plaything in old Rome, a hunted and un 
 holy creature, suffering one long martyrdom 
 throughout the half-seen, dimly-fathomed Mid 
 dle Ages, even now this lovely, uncanny 
 pet is capable of inspiring mingled sentiments 
 of horror and devotion. Those who are under 
 its spell rejoice in their thralldom, and, like 
 M. Champfleury s hermit, grow strangely wed- 
 
18 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 ded to this mute, unsympathetic comradeship. 
 Those who have inherited the old, half-fear 
 ful aversion render a still finer tribute to the 
 cat s native witchery and power. I have seen 
 middle-aged women, of dignified and tranquil 
 aspect, draw back with unfeigned dismay at 
 the sight of Agrippina, a little ball of gray 
 and yellow fur, curled up in peaceful slum 
 ber on the hearth rug. And this instinctive 
 shrinking has nothing in common with the 
 perfectly reasonable fear we entertain for a 
 terrier snapping and snarling at our heels, 
 or for a mastiff the size of a calf, which our 
 friend assures us is as gentle as a baby, but 
 which looks able and ready to tear us limb 
 from limb. It may be ignominious to be 
 afraid of dogs, but the emotion is one which 
 will bear analysis and explanation ; we know 
 exactly what it is we fear ; while the uneasi 
 ness with which many people behold a harm 
 less and perfectly indifferent cat is a faint 
 reflection of that superstitious terror which 
 the nineteenth century still borrows occasion 
 ally from the ninth. We call it by a differ 
 ent name, and account for it on purely natural 
 principles, in deference to progress; but the 
 
AGRIPPINA. 19 
 
 Mediaeval peasant who beheld his cat steal 
 out, like a gray shadow, on St. John s Eve, to 
 join in unholy rites, felt the same shuddering 
 abhorrence which we witness and wonder at 
 to-day. He simplified matters somewhat, and 
 eased his troubled mind by killing the beast ; 
 for cats that ventured forth on the feast of 
 St. John, or on. Halloween, or on the second 
 Wednesday in Lent, did so at their peril. 
 Fires blazed for them in every village, and 
 even quiet stay-at-homes were too often hunted 
 from their chimney-corners to a cruel death. 
 There is a receipt signed in 1575 by one 
 Lucas Pommoreux, abhorred forever be his 
 name J to whom has been paid the sum of a 
 hundred sols parisis " for having supplied for 
 three years all the cats required for the fire on 
 St. John s Day ; " and be it remembered that 
 the gracious child, afterwards Louis XIII. , 
 interceded with Henry IV. for the lives of 
 these poor animals, sacrificed to wicked sport 
 and an unreasoning terror. 
 
 Girt around with fear, and mystery, and sub 
 tle associations of evil, the cat comes down to 
 us through the centuries ; and from every land 
 fresh traditions of sorcery claim it for their 
 
20 ESS A YS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 own. In Brittany is still whispered the dread 
 ful tale of the cats that danced with sacrile 
 gious glee around the crucifix until their king 
 was slain ; and in Sicily men know that if 
 a black cat serves seven masters in turn he 
 carries the soul of the seventh into hell. In 
 Kussia black cats become devils at the end of 
 seven years, and in southern Europe they are 
 merely serving their apprenticeship as witches. 
 Norwegian folk-lore is rich in ghastly stories 
 like that of the wealthy miller whose mill has 
 been twice burned down on Whitsun night, 
 and for whom a traveling tailor offers to keep 
 watch. The tailor chalks a circle on the floor, 
 writes the Lord s prayer around it, and waits 
 until midnight, when a troop of cats rush in, 
 and hang a great pot of pitch over the fire 
 place. Again and again they try to overturn 
 this pitch, but every time the tailor frightens 
 them away ; and when their leader endeavors 
 stealthily to draw him outside of his magic 
 circle, he cuts off her paw with his knife. 
 Then they all fly howling into the night, and 
 the next morning the miller sees with joy his 
 mill standing whole and unharmed. But the 
 miller s wife cowers under the bedclothes, of- 
 
AGRIPPINA. 21 
 
 fering her left hand to the tailor, and hid 
 ing as best she can her right arm s bleeding 
 stump. 
 
 Finer even than this tale is the well-known 
 story which " Monk " Lewis told to Shelley of 
 a gentleman who, late one night, went to visit 
 a friend living on the outskirts of a forest in 
 east Germany. He lost his path, and, after 
 wandering aimlessly for some time, beheld at 
 last a light streaming from the windows of an 
 old and ruined abbey. Looking in, he saw a 
 procession of cats lowering into the grave a 
 small coffin with a crown upon it. The sight 
 filled him with horror, and, spurring his horse, 
 he rode away as fast as he could, never stop 
 ping until he reached his destination, long 
 after midnight. His friend was still await 
 ing him, and at once he recounted what had 
 happened ; whereupon a cat that lay sleeping 
 by the fire sprang to its feet, cried out, " Then 
 I am the King of the Cats ! " and disappeared 
 like a flash up the chimney. 
 
 For my part, I consider this the best cat 
 story in all literature, full of suggestiveness 
 and terror, yet picturesque withal, and leaving 
 ample room in the mind for speculation. Why 
 
22 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 was not the heir apparent bidden to the royal 
 funeral? Was there a disputed succession, 
 and how are such points settled in the myste 
 rious domain of cat-land? The notion that 
 these animals gather in ghost-haunted churches 
 and castles for their nocturnal revels is one 
 common to all parts of Europe. We remem 
 ber how the little maiden of the " Mountain 
 Idyl " confides to Heine that the innocent-look 
 ing cat in the chimney-corner is really a witch, 
 and that at midnight, when the storm is high, 
 she steals away to the ruined keep, where the 
 spirits of the dead wait spellbound for the 
 word that shall waken them. In all scenes 
 of impish revelry cats play a prominent part, 
 although occasionally, by virtue of their dual 
 natures, they serve as barriers against the 
 powers of evil. There is the old story of the 
 witch s cat that was grateful to the good girl 
 who gave it some ham to eat, I may observe 
 here, parenthetically, that I have never known 
 a cat that would touch ham, and there is the 
 fine bit of Italian folk-lore about the servant 
 maid who, with no other protector than a black 
 cat, ventures to disturb a procession of ghosts 
 on the dreadful Night of the Dead. " It is 
 
AGRIPPINA. 23 
 
 well for you that the cat lies in your arms," 
 the angry spirit says to her ; " otherwise what 
 I am, you also would be." The last pale reflex 
 of a universal tradition I found three years 
 ago in London, where the bad behavior of the 
 Westminster cats proverbially the most dis 
 solute and profligate specimens of their race 
 has given rise to the pleasant legend of a coun 
 try house whither these rakish animals retire 
 for nights of gay festivity, and whence they 
 return in the early morning, jaded, repentant, 
 and forlorn. 
 
 Of late years there has been a rapid and 
 promising growth of what disaffected and al 
 literative critics call the " cat cult," and poets 
 and painters vie with one another in celebrat 
 ing the charms of this long-neglected pet. 
 Mr. M. H. Spielmann s beautiful volume in 
 praise of Madame Henriette Roimer and her 
 pictures is a treasure upon which many an ar 
 dent lover of cats will cast wandering and wist 
 ful glances. It is impossible for even the most 
 disciplined spirit not to yearn over these little 
 furry darlings, these gentle, mischievous, lazy, 
 irresistible things. As for Banjo, that dear 
 and sentimental kitten, with his head on one 
 
24 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 side like Lydia Languish, and a decorous 
 melancholy suffusing" his splendid eyes, let any 
 obdurate scorner of the race look at his loveli 
 ness and be converted. Mrs. Graham R. Tom- 
 son s pretty anthology, " Concerning Cats," 
 is another step in the right direction ; a dainty 
 volume of selections from French and English 
 verse, where we may find old favorites like 
 Cowper s " Retired Cat " and Calverly s " Sad 
 Memories," graceful epitaphs on departed pus 
 sies, some delightful poems from Baudelaire, 
 and three, no less delightful, from the pen of 
 Mrs. Tomson herself, whose preface, or " fore 
 word," is enough to win for her at once the 
 friendship and sympathy of the elect. The 
 book, while it contains a good deal that might 
 well have been omitted, is necessarily a small 
 one ; for poets, English poets especially, have 
 just begun to sing the praises of the cat, as 
 they have for generations sung the praises of 
 the horse and dog. Nevertheless, all English 
 literature, and all the literatures of every land, 
 are full of charming allusions to this friendly 
 animal, allusions the brevity of which only 
 enhances their value. Those two delicious 
 lines of Herrick s, for example, 
 
AGRIPPINA. 25 
 
 " And the brisk mouse may feast herself with crumbs, 
 Till that the green-eyed kitling comes," 
 
 are worth the whole of Wordsworth s solemn 
 poem, " The Kitten and the Falling Leaves." 
 What did Wordsworth know of the innate 
 vanity, the affectation and coquetry, of kitten- 
 hood ? He saw the little beast gamboling on 
 the wall, and he fancied her as innocent as she 
 looked, as though any living creature could 
 be as innocent as a kitten looks ! With touch 
 ing simplicity, he believed her all unconscious 
 of the admiration she was exciting : 
 
 " What would little Tabby care 
 For the plaudits of the crowd ? 
 Over happy to be proud, 
 Over wealthy in the treasure 
 Of her own exceeding pleasure ! 
 
 Ah, the arrant knavery of that kitten ! The 
 tiny impostor, showing off her best tricks, and 
 feigning to be occupied exclusively with her 
 own infantile diversion ! We can see her now, 
 prancing and paddling after the leaves, and 
 all the while peeping out of " the tail o her 
 ee" at the serene poet and philosopher, and 
 waving her naughty tail in glee over his con 
 fidence and condescension. 
 
26 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Heine s pretty lines, 
 
 " And close beside me the cat sits purring 1 , 
 
 Warming her paws at the cheery gleam ; 
 The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring ; 
 My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream," 
 
 find their English echo in the letter Shelley 
 writes to Peacock, describing, half wistfully, 
 the shrines of the Penates, "whose hymns 
 are the purring of kittens, the hissing of ket 
 tles, the long talks over the past and dead, the 
 laugh of children, the warm wind of summer 
 filling the quiet house, and the pelting storm 
 of winter struggling in vain for entrance." 
 How incomplete would these pictures be, how 
 incomplete is any fireside sketch, without the 
 purring kitten or drowsy cat ! 
 
 " The queen I am o that cozy place; 
 As wi ilka paw I dicht my face, 
 I sing an purr wi mickle grace." 
 
 This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little 
 god of domesticity, whose presence turns a 
 house into a home. Even the chilly desolation 
 of a hotel may be rendered endurable by these 
 affable and discriminating creatures ; for one 
 of them, as we know, once welcomed Sir Wal 
 ter Scott, and softened for him the unfamiliar 
 
AGRIPPINA. 27 
 
 and unloved surroundings. " There are no 
 dogs in the hotel where I lodge," he writes to 
 Abbotsford from London, " but a tolerably 
 conversable cat who eats a mess of cream with 
 me in the morning." Of course it did, the 
 wise and lynx-eyed beast ! I make no doubt 
 that, day after day and week after week, that 
 cat had wandered superbly amid the common 
 throng of lodgers, showing favor to none, and 
 growing cynical and disillusioned by constant 
 contact with a crowd. Then, one morning, it 
 spied the noble, rugged face which neither man 
 nor beast could look upon without loving, and 
 forthwith tendered its allegiance on the spot. 
 Only " tolerably conversable " it was, this 
 reserved and town-bred animal; less urbane 
 because less happy than the much-respected 
 retainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinse- 
 f eld, whom Sir Walter called his friend. " Ah, 
 mon grand ami, vous avez tue mon autre grand 
 ami ! " he sighed, when the huge hound Nim- 
 rod ended poor Hinse s placid career. And if 
 Scott sometimes seems to disparage cats, as 
 when he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain to 
 one, in " Quentin Durward," he atones for 
 such indignity by the use of the little pronoun 
 
28 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 " who " when writing of the London puss. 
 My own habit is to say " who " on similar 
 occasions, and I am glad to have so excellent 
 an authority. 
 
 It were an endless though a pleasant task to 
 recount all that has been said, and well said, 
 in praise of the cat by those who have rightly 
 valued her companionship. M. Loti s Mou- 
 moutte Blanche and Moumoutte Chinoise 
 are well known and widely beloved, and M. 
 Theophile Gautier s charming pages are too 
 familiar for comment. Who has not read with 
 delight of the Black and White Dynasties 
 that for so long ruled with gentle sway over 
 his hearth and heart ; of Madame Theophile, 
 who thought the parrot was a green chicken ; 
 of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply resented 
 his master s staying out late at night ; of the 
 graceful and fastidious Seraphita ; the glut 
 tonous Enjolras ; the acute Bohemian, Ga- 
 vroche ; the courteous and well-mannered Epo- 
 nine, who received M. Gautier s guests in the 
 drawing-room and dined at his table, taking 
 each course as it was served, and restraining 
 any rude distaste for food not to her fancy. 
 " Her place was laid without a knife and fork, 
 
AGRIPPINA. 29 
 
 indeed, but with a glass, and she went regu 
 larly through dinner, from soup to dessert, 
 awaiting her turn to be helped, and behaving 
 with a quiet propriety which most children 
 might imitate with advantage. At the first 
 stroke of the bell she would appear, and when 
 I came into the dining-room she would be at 
 her post, upright on her chair, her forepaws on 
 the edge of the tablecloth ; and she would pre 
 sent her smooth forehead to be kissed, like a 
 well-bred little girl who was affectionately po 
 lite to relatives and old people." 
 
 I have read this pretty description several 
 times to Agrippina, who is extremely wayward 
 and capricious about her food, rejecting plain 
 tively one day the viands which she has eaten 
 with apparent enjoyment the day before. In 
 fact, the difficulty of catering to her is so well 
 understood by tradesmen that recently, when 
 the housemaid carried her on an errand to the 
 grocery, Agrippina is very fond of these 
 jaunts and of the admiration she excites, 
 the grocer, a fatherly man, with cats of his 
 own, said briskly, " Is this the little lady who 
 eats the biscuits ? " and presented her on the 
 spot with several choice varieties from which 
 
30 ESS A rS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 to choose. She is fastidious, too, about the 
 way in which her meals are served ; disliking 
 any other dishes than her own, which are of 
 blue-and-white china ; requiring that her meat 
 should be cut up fine and all the fat removed, 
 and that her morning oatmeal should be well 
 sugared and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn. 
 My friends tell me sometimes that it is not 
 the common custom of cats to receive so much 
 attention at table, and that it is my fault 
 Agrippina is so exacting ; but such grumblers 
 fail to take into consideration the marked in 
 dividuality that is the charm of every kindly 
 treated puss. She differs from her sisters as 
 widely as one woman differs from another, 
 and reveals varying characteristics of good and 
 evil, varying powers of intelligence and adap 
 tation. She scales splendid heights of virtue, 
 and, unlike Sir Thomas Browne, is " singular 
 in offenses." Even those primitive instincts 
 which we believe all animals hold in common 
 are lost in acquired ethics and depravity. No 
 heroism could surpass that of the London cat 
 who crawled back five times under the stage 
 of the burning theatre to rescue her litter of 
 kittens, and, having carried four of them to 
 
AGRIPPINA. 31 
 
 safety, perished devotedly with the fifth. On 
 the other hand, I know of a cat who drowned 
 her three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason, 
 apparently, save to be rid of them, and that 
 she might lie in peace on the hearth rug, a 
 murder well planned, deliberate, and cruel. 
 
 " So Tiberius might have sat, 
 Had Tiberius been a cat." 
 
 Only in her grace and beauty, her love of 
 comfort, her dignity of bearing, her courteous 
 reserve, and her independence of character 
 does puss remain immutable and unchanged. 
 These are the traits which win for her the 
 warmest corner by the fire, and the unshaken 
 regard of those who value her friendship and 
 aspire to her affection. These are the traits so 
 subtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnet 
 which every true lover of cats feels in his heart 
 must have been addressed to his own particu 
 lar pet : 
 
 " Half gentle kindliness, and half disdain, 
 Thou comest to my call, serenely suave, 
 With humming 1 speech and gracious gestures grave, 
 In salutation courtly and urbane ; 
 Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain, 
 For wiles may win thee, but no arts enslave ; 
 
32 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 And nowhere gladly thou abidest, save 
 
 Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign. 
 
 " Sphinx of my quiet hearth ! who deign st to dwell 
 Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease, 
 Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses ; 
 That men forget dost thou remember well, 
 Beholden still in blinking reveries, 
 With sombre sea-green gaze inscrutable." 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 
 
 Now and then I hear it affirmed by sad- 
 voiced pessimists, whispering in the gloom, 
 that people do not read as much poetry in 
 our day as they did in our grandfathers , that 
 this is distinctly the era of prose, and that 
 the poet is no longer, as Shelley claimed, 
 the unacknowledged legislator of the world. 
 Perhaps these cheerless statements are true, 
 though it would be more agreeable not to 
 believe them. Perhaps, with the exception 
 of Browning, whom we study because he is 
 difficult to understand, and of Shakespeare, 
 whom we read because it is hard to content 
 our souls without him, the poets have slipped 
 away from our crowded lives, and are best 
 known to us through the medium of their 
 reviewers. We are always wandering from 
 the paths of pleasure, and this may be one of 
 our deviations. Yet what matters it, after 
 all, while around us, on every side, in school- 
 
34 JESS AYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 rooms and nurseries, in quiet corners and by 
 cheerful fires, the children are reading poetry ? 
 reading it with a joyous enthusiasm and an 
 absolute surrendering of spirit which we can 
 all remember, but can never feel again. Well 
 might Sainte-Beuve speak bravely of the clear, 
 fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Well 
 might he recall, with wistful sighs, " that 
 instinctive knowledge which afterwards ripens 
 into judgment, but of which the fresh lu 
 cidity remains forever unapproached." He 
 knew, as all critics have known, that it is only 
 the child who responds swiftly, pliantly, and 
 unreservedly to the allurements of the ima 
 gination. He knew that, when poetry is in 
 question, it is better to feel than to think ; 
 and that with the growth of a guarded and 
 disciplined intelligence, straining after the en 
 joyment which perfection in literary art can 
 give, the first careless rapture of youth fades 
 into a half-remembered dream. 
 
 If we are disposed to doubt the love that 
 children bear to poetry, a love concerning 
 which they exhibit a good deal of reticence, 
 let us consider only the alacrity with which 
 they study, for their own delight, the poems 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 35 
 
 that please them best. How should we fare, 
 I wonder, if tried by a similar test? How 
 should we like to sit down and commit to 
 memory Tennyson s " CEnone, " or " Locksley 
 Hall," or Byron s apostrophe to the Ocean, or 
 the battle scene in " Marmion " ? Yet I have 
 known children to whom every word of these 
 and many other poems was as familiar as the 
 alphabet ; and a great deal more familiar 
 thank Heaven ! than the multiplication 
 table, or the capitals of the United States. A 
 rightly constituted child may find the paths of 
 knowledge hopelessly barred by a single page 
 of geography, or by a single sum in fractions ; 
 but he will range at pleasure through the 
 paths of poetry, having the open sesame to 
 every door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essen 
 tially a rightly constituted child, did not even 
 wait for a formal introduction to his letters, 
 but managed to learn the ballad of Hardy- 
 knute before he knew how to read, and went 
 shouting it around the house, warming his 
 baby blood to fighting-point, and training 
 himself in very infancy to voice the splendors 
 of his manhood. He remembered this ballad, 
 too, and loved it all his life, reciting it once 
 
36 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 with vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whose 
 own unhappy childhood had been softened 
 and vivified by the same innocent delights. 
 
 In truth, the most charming thing about 
 youth is the tenacity of its impressions. If 
 we had the time and courage to study a dozen 
 verses to-day, we should probably forget 
 eleven of them in a fortnight ; but the poetry 
 we learned as children remains, for the most 
 part, indelibly fixed in our memories, and 
 constitutes a little Golden Treasury of our 
 own, more dear and valuable to us than any 
 other collection, because it contains only our 
 chosen favorites, and is always within the reach 
 of reference. Once, when I was very young, I 
 asked a girl companion well known now in 
 the world of literature if she did not grow 
 weary waiting for trains, which were always 
 late, at the suburban station where she went 
 to school. " Oh, no," was the cheerful reply. 
 " If I have no book, and there is no one 
 here to talk with, I walk up and down the 
 platform and think over the poetry that I 
 know." Admirable occupation for an idle 
 minute ! Even the tedium of railway travel 
 ing loses half its horrors if one can withdraw 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 37 
 
 at pleasure into the society of the poets and, 
 soothed by their gentle and harmonious voices, 
 forget the irksome recurrence of familiar 
 things. 
 
 It has been often demonstrated, and as 
 often forgotten, that children do not need to 
 have poetry written down to their intellectual 
 level, and do not love to see the stately Muse 
 ostentatiously bending to their ear. In the 
 matter of prose, it seems necessary for them 
 to have a literature of their own, over which 
 they linger willingly for a little while, as 
 though in the sunny antechamber of a king. 
 But in the golden palace of the poets there is 
 no period of probation, there is no enforced 
 attendance upon petty things. The clear- 
 eyed children go straight to the heart of the 
 mystery, and recognize in the music of words, 
 in the enduring charm of metrical quality, an 
 element of never-ending delight. When to 
 this simple sensuous pleasure is added the 
 enchantment of poetic images, lovely and 
 veiled and dimly understood, then the delight 
 grows sweeter and keener, the child s soul 
 flowers into a conscious love of poetry, and 
 one lifelong source of happiness is gained. 
 
38 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 But it is never through infantine or juvenile 
 verses that the end is reached. There is no 
 poet dearer to the young than Tennyson, and 
 it was not the least of his joys to know that 
 all over the English-speaking world children 
 were tuning their hearts to the music of his 
 lines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturously 
 over the beauty he revealed. Therefore the 
 insult seemed greater and more wanton when 
 this beloved idol of our nurseries deliberately 
 offered to his eager audience such anxiously 
 babyish verses as those about Minnie and 
 Winnie, and the little city maiden who goes 
 straying among the flowers. Is there in 
 Christendom a child who wants to be told by 
 one of the greatest of poets that 
 
 " Minnie and Winnie 
 Slept in a shell ;" 
 
 that the shell was pink within and silver with 
 out ; and that 
 
 " Sounds of the great sea 
 Wandered about. 
 
 Two bright stars 
 
 Peep d into the shell. 
 What are they dreaming of ? 
 
 Who can tell ? 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 39 
 
 " Started a green linnet 
 
 Out of the croft ; 
 Wake, little ladies, 
 The sun is aloft. " 
 
 It is not in these tones that poetry speaks 
 to the childish soul, though it is too often in 
 this fashion that the poet strives to adjust 
 himself to what he thinks is the childish 
 standard. He lowers his sublime head from 
 the stars, and pipes with painstaking flatness 
 on a little reed, while the children wander far 
 away, and listen breathlessly to older and 
 dreamier strains. 
 
 " She left the web, she left the loom, 
 She made three paces thro the room, 
 She saw the water-lily bloom, 
 She saw the helmet and the plume, 
 She look d down to Camelot, 
 Out flew the web and floated wide ; 
 The mirror crack d from side to side ; 
 1 The curse is come upon me, cried 
 The Lady of Shalott." 
 
 Here is the mystic note that childhood loves, 
 and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linked 
 rhymes that makes music for its ears. How 
 many of us can remember well our early joy 
 in this poem, which was but as another and 
 
40 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 more exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly with 
 Andersen s "Little Mermaid," and " Un- 
 dine," and all sad stories of unhappy lives ! 
 And who shall forget the sombre passion of 
 " Oriana," of those wailing verses that rang 
 through our little hearts like the shrill sob 
 bing of winter storms, of that strange tragedy 
 that oppressed us more with fear than pity ! 
 
 " When the long dun wolds are ribb d with snow, 
 And loud the Norland whirlwinds blow, 
 
 Oriana, 
 Alone I wander to and fro, 
 
 Oriana." 
 
 If any one be inclined to think that children 
 must understand poetry in order to appreciate 
 and enjoy it, that one enchanted line, 
 
 " When the long dun wolds are ribb d with snow," 
 
 should be sufficient to undeceive him forever. 
 The spell of those finely chosen words lies in 
 the shadowy and half-seen picture they con 
 vey, a picture with indistinct outlines, as of 
 an unknown land, where the desolate spirit 
 wanders moaning in the gloom. The whole 
 poem is inexpressibly alluring to an imagina 
 tive child, and its atmosphere of bleak de 
 spondency darkens suddenly into horror at 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 41 
 
 the breaking off of the last line from visions 
 of the grave and of peaceful death, 
 
 " I hear the roaring of the sea, 
 Oriana." 
 
 The same grace of indistinctness, though 
 linked with a gentler mood and with a softer 
 music, makes the lullaby in " The Princess " 
 a lasting delight to children, while the pretty 
 cradle-song in " Sea Dreams," beginning, 
 
 " What does little birdie say 
 In her nest at peep of day ? " 
 
 has never won their hearts. Its motive is too 
 apparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced. 
 It has none of the condescension of " Minnie 
 and Winnie," and grown people can read it 
 with pleasure ; but a simple statement of ob 
 vious truths, or a simple line of obvious rea 
 soning, however dexterously narrated in prose 
 or verse, has not the art to hold a youthful 
 soul in thrall. 
 
 If it be a matter of interest to know what 
 poets are most dear to the children around 
 us, to the ordinary " apple-eating " little boys 
 and girls for whom we are hardly brave 
 enough to predict a shining future, it is de 
 lightful to be told by favorite authors and 
 
42 JESS AYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 by well-loved men of letters what poets first 
 bewitched their ardent infant minds. It is 
 especially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Lang 
 admit us a little way into his confidence, and 
 confess to us that he disliked " Tarn O Shan- 
 ter " when his father read it aloud to him; pre 
 ferring, very sensibly, " to take my warlocks 
 and bogies with great seriousness." Of course 
 he did, and the sympathies of all children are 
 with him in his choice. The ghastly details 
 of that witches Sabbath are far beyond a 
 child s limited knowledge of demonology and 
 the Scotch dialect. Tarn s escape and Mag 
 gie s final catastrophe seem like insults offered 
 to the powers of darkness ; only the humor of 
 the situation is apparent, and humor is seldom, 
 to the childish mind, a desirable element of 
 poetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott s illus 
 trations can make " John Gilpin " a real fa 
 vorite in our nurseries, while " The Jackdaw of 
 Kheims " is popular simply because children, 
 being proof against cynicism, accept the story 
 as it is told, with much misplaced sympathy 
 for the thievish bird, and many secret rejoi 
 cings over his restoration to grace and feath 
 ers. As for " The Pied Piper of Hamelin," 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 43 
 
 its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and the 
 terror of what is to come helps little readers 
 over such sad stumbling-blocks as 
 
 " So munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon, 
 Breakfast, dinner, supper, luncheon ! 
 
 lines which are every whit as painful to their 
 ears as to ours. I have often wondered how 
 the infant Southeys and Coleridges, that 
 bright-eyed group of alert and charming chil 
 dren, all afire with romantic impulses, received 
 " The Cataract of Lodore," when papa Southey 
 condescended to read it in the schoolroom. 
 What well-bred efforts to appear pleased and 
 grateful ! What secret repulsion to a senseless 
 clatter of words, as remote from the silvery 
 sweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters, 
 as from the unalterable requirements of poetic 
 art! 
 
 " And moreover he tasked me 
 To tell him in rhyme." 
 
 Ah ! unwise little son, to whose rash request 
 generations of children have owed the presence, 
 in readers and elocution-books and volumes of 
 " Select Lyrics for the Nursery," of those 
 hated and hateful verses. 
 
 " Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott," 
 
44 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 says Mr. Lang ; with " Marmion," and the 
 "Last Minstrel," and "The Lady of the 
 Lake," read " for the twentieth time," and 
 ever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scott 
 with Shakespeare, studied rapturously by fire 
 light in his mother s dressing-room, when all 
 the household thought him fast asleep, and with 
 Pope s translation of the Iliad, that royal road 
 over which the Muse has stepped, smiling, 
 into many a boyish heart. Poetry came to 
 Pope poor little lame lad with Spenser s 
 " Faerie Queene ; " with the brave adventures 
 of strong, valiant knights, who go forth, un 
 blemished and unfrighted, to do battle with 
 dragons and "Paynims cruel." And so the 
 links of the magic chain are woven, and child 
 hands down to child the spell that holds the 
 centuries together. I cannot bear to hear the 
 unkind things which even the most tolerant of 
 critics are wont to say about Pope s " Iliad," 
 remembering as I do how many boys have re 
 ceived from its pages their first poetic stimulus, 
 their first awakening to noble things. What 
 a charming picture we have of Coleridge, a 
 feeble, petulant child tossing with fever on his 
 little bed, and of his brother Francis stealing 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 45 
 
 up, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his side 
 and read him Pope s translation of Homer. 
 The bond that drew these boys together was 
 forged in such breathless moments and in such 
 mutual pleasures ; for Francis, the handsome, 
 spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, and 
 robbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports, 
 had little in common with his small, silent, pre 
 cocious brother. " Frank had a violent love 
 of beating me," muses Coleridge, in a tone of 
 mild complaint (and no wonder, we think, for 
 a more beatable child than Samuel Taylor it 
 would have been hard to find). " But when 
 ever that was superseded by any humor or 
 circumstance, he was very fond of me, and used 
 to regard me with a strange mixture of admira 
 tion and contempt." More contempt than ad 
 miration, probably ; yet was all resentment 
 forgotten, and all unkindness at an end, while 
 one boy read to the other the story of Hector 
 and Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrow 
 in his heart, pacing round his dead comrade, 
 as a tawny lioness paces round her young 
 when she sees the hunters coming through 
 the woods. As a companion picture to this 
 we have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playing 
 
46 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Othello in the nursery, and so carried away by 
 the passionate impulse of these lines, 
 
 " In Aleppo once, 
 
 Where a malignant and a turban d Turk 
 Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, 
 I took by the throat the circumcised dog 1 , 
 And smote him, thus," 
 
 that he struck himself fiercely on the breast 
 with an iron chisel, and fainted under the 
 blow. We can hardly believe that Shake 
 speare is beyond the mental grasp of childhood, 
 when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed on 
 winter nights to read " King Henry IV.," and 
 Rossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by the 
 agony of Othello s remorse. 
 
 On the other hand, there are writers, and 
 very brilliant writers, too, whose early lives 
 appear to have been undisturbed by such 
 keenly imaginative pastimes, and for whom 
 there are no well-loved and familiar figures 
 illumined forever in " that bright, clear, undy 
 ing light that borders the edge of the oblivion 
 of infancy." Count Tolstoi confesses himself 
 to have been half hurt, half puzzled, by his 
 fellow-students at the University of Mos 
 cow, who seemed to him so coarse and inele- 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 47 
 
 gant, and yet who had read and enjoyed so 
 much. " Pushkin and Zhukovsky were litera 
 ture to them," he says wistfully, " and not, as 
 to me, little books in yellow bindings which I 
 had studied as a child." But how, one won 
 ders, could Pushkin have remained merely a 
 " little book in yellow binding " to any boy 
 who had had the happiness of studying him as 
 a child ? Pushkin is the Eussian Byron, and 
 embodies in his poems the same spirit of rest 
 less discontent, of dejected languor, of pas 
 sionate revolt ; not revolt against the Tsar, 
 which is a limited and individual judgment, 
 but revolt against the bitter penalties of life, 
 which is a sentiment common to the youth of 
 all nations and of every age. Yet there are 
 Englishmen who have no word save that of 
 scorn for Byron, and I feel uncertain whether 
 such critics ever enjoyed the privilege of being 
 boys at all. If to George Meredith s composed 
 and complacent mind there strays any wanton 
 recollection of young, impetuous days, how 
 can he write with pen of gall these worse than 
 churlish lines on Manfred ? 
 
 " Projected from the bilious Childe, 
 This clatterjaw his foot could set 
 
48 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 On Alps, without a breast beguiled 
 
 To glow in shedding rascal sweat. 
 
 Somewhere about his grinder teeth 
 
 He mouthed of thoughts that grilled beneath, 
 
 And summoned Nature to her feud 
 
 With bile and buskin attitude." 
 
 There is more of this pretty poem, but I have 
 quoted as much as my own irascibility can 
 bear. I, at least, have been a child, and have 
 spent some of my childhood s happiest hours 
 with Manfred on the Alps ; and have with 
 him beheld 
 
 " the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs 
 In dizziness of distance," 
 
 and have believed with all a child s sincerity 
 in his remorseful gloom : 
 
 "for I have ceased 
 To justify my deeds unto myself 
 The last infirmity of evil." 
 
 Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now, 
 recalling, as it does, the time " when I was in 
 my father s house, and my path ran down with 
 butter and honey." Once more I see the big, 
 bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust which was 
 my daily task, my dear mother having striven 
 long and vainly to teach my idle little hands 
 some useful housewifely accomplishment. In 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 49 
 
 one corner stood a console-table, with chilly 
 Parian ornaments on top, and underneath a 
 pile of heavy books ; Wordsworth, Moore, the 
 poems of Frances Sargent Osgood, no lack 
 of variety here, " The Lady of the Lake," 
 and Byron in an embossed brown binding, with 
 closely printed double columns, well calculated 
 to dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Not 
 that mysterious and malignant mountain which 
 rose frowning from the sea, and drew all ships 
 shattered to its feet, was more irresistible in 
 its attraction than this brown, bulky Byron. 
 I could not pass it by ! My dusting never got 
 beyond the table Where it lay ; but sitting 
 crumpled on the floor, with the enchanted 
 volume on my lap, I speedily- forgot every 
 thing in the world save only the wandering 
 Childe, 
 
 " Who ne in virtue s ways did take delight," 
 
 or " The Corsair," or " Mazeppa," or " Man 
 fred," best loved of that dark group. Perhaps 
 Byron is not considered wholesome reading for 
 little girls in these careful days when expur 
 gated editions of " The Vicar of Wakefield " 
 and " Paul and Virginia " find favor in our 
 nurseries. On this score I have no defense to 
 
50 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 offer, and I am not proposing the poet as a 
 safe text-book for early youth ; but having 
 never been told that there was such a thing 
 as forbidden fruit in literature, I was spared 
 at least that alert curiosity concerning it 
 which is one of the most unpleasant results of 
 our present guarded system. Moreover, we 
 have Goethe s word for it that Byron is not 
 as immoral as the newspapers, and certainly 
 he is more agreeable reading. I do sincerely 
 believe that if part of his attraction for the 
 young lies in what Mr. Pater calls " the 
 grieved dejection, the endless regret," which 
 to the undisciplined soul sounds like the true 
 murmur of life, a better part lies in his large 
 grasp of nature, not nature in her minute 
 and lovely detail, but in her vast outlines, 
 her salient features, her solemn majesty and 
 strength. Crags and misty mountain tops, 
 storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of the 
 restless deep, these are the aspects of nature 
 that childhood prizes, and loves to hear de 
 scribed in vigorous verse. The pink-tipped 
 daisy, the yellow primrose, and the freckled 
 nest-eggs 
 
 " Hatching in the hawthorn-tree " 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 51 
 
 belong to a late stage of development. Eu 
 genie de Guerin, who recognized as clearly as 
 Sainte-Beuve the " fine penetration " peculiar 
 to children, and who regarded them ever with 
 half -wistful, half -wondering delight, has written 
 some very charming suggestions about the kind 
 of poetry, " pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate," 
 which she considered proper food for these 
 highly idealized little people, " angels upon 
 earth." The only discouraging part of her 
 pretty pleading is her frank admission that 
 in French literature, at least there is no such 
 poetry as she describes, which shows how hard 
 it is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excel 
 lence. She endeavored sincerely, in her " In- 
 fantines," to remedy this defect, to " speak to 
 childhood in its own language ; " and her verses 
 on " Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings," are 
 quaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies. 
 No child is strongly moved, or taught the en 
 during delight of song, by such lines as these, 
 but most children will take a genuine pleasure 
 in the baby angel who played with little Abel 
 under the myrtle-trees, who made the first doll 
 and blew the first bubble, and who finds a 
 friend in every tiny boy and girl born into this 
 
52 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 big gray world. Strange to say, he lias his 
 English counterpart in Mr. Robert Louis 
 Stevenson s " Unseen Playmate," that shadowy 
 companion whose home is the cave dug by 
 childish hands, and who is ready to share all 
 games in the most engaging spirit of accom 
 modation. 
 
 " "Tis he, when you play with your soldiers of tin, 
 That sides with the Frenchmen, and never can win; " 
 
 a touch of combative veracity which brings us 
 down at once from Mademoiselle de Guerin s 
 fancy flights to the real playground, where 
 real children, very faintly resembling " angels 
 upon earth," are busy with mimic warfare. 
 Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whose 
 verses, written especially for the nursery, have 
 found their way straight into little hearts. 
 His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy, 
 and the ease with which he enters into that 
 brilliant world of imagination wherein chil 
 dren habitually dwell, make him their natural 
 friend and minstrel. If some of the rhymes 
 in "A Child s Garden of Verses" seem a trifle 
 bald and babyish, even these are guiltless 
 of condescension ; while others, like " Travel," 
 " Shadow March," and " The Land of Story- 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 53 
 
 Books," are instinct with poetic life. I can 
 only regret that a picture so faultless in detail 
 as " Shadow March," where we see the crawl 
 ing darkness peer through the window pane, 
 and hear the beating of the little boy s heart 
 as he creeps fearfully up the stair, should be 
 marred at its close by a single line of false 
 imagery : 
 
 " All the wicked shadows coming-, tramp, tramp, tramp, 
 With the black night overhead." 
 
 So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must know 
 that shadows do not tramp, and that the recur 
 rence of a short, vigorous word which tells so 
 admirably in Scott s " William and Helen," and 
 wherever the effect of sound combined with 
 motion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of place 
 in describing the ghostly things that glide with 
 horrible noiselessness at the feet of the fright 
 ened lad. Children, moreover, are keenly 
 alive to the value and the suggestiveness of 
 terms. A little eight-year-old girl of my ac 
 quaintance, who was reciting " Lord Ullin s 
 Daughter," stopped short at these lines, 
 
 Adown the glen rode armed men, 
 
 Their trampling sounded nearer." 
 
 and called out excitedly, " Don t you hear the 
 
54 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 horses ? " She, at least, heard them as if with 
 the swift apprehension of fear, heard them loud 
 above the sounds of winds and waters, and 
 rendered her unconscious tribute of praise to 
 the sympathetic selection of words. 
 
 There is, as we know, a great deal of poetry 
 written every year for childish readers. Some 
 of it makes its appearance in Christmas books, 
 which are so beautifully bound and illustrated 
 that the little foolish, feeble verses are forgiven, 
 and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether amid 
 more important accessories. Better poems than 
 these are published in children s periodicals, 
 where they form a notable feature, and are, 
 I dare say, read by the young people whose 
 tastes are catered to in this fashion. Those of 
 us who are familiar with these periodicals 
 either weeklies or monthlies are well aware 
 that the verses they offer may be easily divided 
 into three classes. First, mere rhymes and 
 jingles, intended for very little readers, and 
 with which it would be simple churlishness 
 to quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry, 
 they are sometimes very amusing, and they 
 have an easy swing that is pleasant alike to 
 young ears and old. It must be a hard heart 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 55 
 
 that does not sympathize with the unlucky and 
 ill-mated gnome who was 
 
 " full of fun and frolic, 
 But his wife was melancholic ; " 
 
 or with the small damsel in pigtail and pina 
 fore who comforts herself at the piano with 
 this engaging but dubious maxim : 
 
 " Practicing is good for a good little girl ; 
 It makes her nose straight, and it makes her hair curl." 
 
 The second kind of verse appears to be written 
 solely for the sake of the accompanying illus 
 tration, and is often the work of the illustrator, 
 who is more at home with his pencil than his 
 pen. Occasionally it is comic, occasionally 
 sentimental or descriptive ; for the most part 
 it is something in this style : 
 
 THE ELF AND THE BUMBLE BEE. 
 
 " Oh, bumble bee ! 
 
 Bumble bee ! 
 Don t fly so near ! 
 Or you will tumble me 
 Over, I fear." 
 
 " Oh, funny elf ! 
 
 Funny elf ! 
 Don t be alarmed ! 
 I am looking for honey, elf ; 
 You sha n t be harmed." 
 
56 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, 
 
 " Then tarry, 
 
 Oh, tarry, bee ! 
 Fill up your sack ; 
 And carry, oh, carry me 
 Home on your back." * 
 
 Now what child will read more than once these 
 empty little verses (very prettily illustrated) 
 when it is in his power to turn back to other 
 sprites that sing in different strains, to the 
 fairy who wanders 
 
 " Over hill, over dale, 
 Thorough bush, thorough briar, " 
 
 seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips ears ; 
 or to that softer shape, the music of whose 
 song, once heard, haunts us forever : 
 
 " Full fathom five thy father lies ; 
 
 Of his bones are coral made ; 
 Those are pearls that were his eyes : 
 
 Nothing of him that doth fade 
 But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 
 
 These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of true 
 fairyland, where Shakespeare and little chil 
 dren wander at their will. 
 
 Poems of the third class are intended for 
 growing girls and boys, and aspire to be 
 
 1 Oliver Herf ord in St. Nicholas. 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 57 
 
 considered literature. They are well written, 
 as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems to 
 be the distinguishing gift of our minor verse- 
 makers, who, even when they have least to say, 
 say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. This 
 pretty, easy insignificance is much better 
 adapted to adult readers, who demand little 
 of poets beyond brevity, than to children, 
 who love large issues, real passions, fine emo 
 tions, and an heroic attitude in life. Pleas 
 ant thoughts couched in pleasant language, 
 trivial details, and photographic bits of de 
 scription make no lasting appeal to the ex 
 pansive imagination of a child. Analysis is 
 wasted upon him altogether, because he sees 
 things swiftly, and sees them as a whole. He 
 may disregard fine shading and minute merits, 
 but there are no boundaries to his wandering 
 vision. " Small sciences are the labors of our 
 manhood, but the round universe is the play 
 thing of the boy." 
 
 The painful lack of distinction in most of 
 the poetry prepared especially for him chills 
 his fine ardor and dulls his imagination. 
 Subtle verses about moods and tempers, cal 
 culated to make healthy little readers emu- 
 
58 ESS A YS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 late Miss Martineau s peevish self-sympathy ; 
 melancholy verses about young children who 
 suffer poverty and disaster ; weird and unin 
 telligible verses, with all Poe s indistinctness 
 and none of his music; commonplace verses 
 about bootblacks and newsboys ; descriptive 
 verses about snowstorms and April showers ; 
 pious verses about infant prigs ; verses of 
 every kind, all on the same level of agreeable 
 mediocrity, and all warranted to be so harm 
 less that a baby could hear them without 
 blushing. Why, the child who reads " Young 
 Lochinvar " is richer in that one good and gal 
 lant poem than the child who has all these 
 modern substitutes heaped yearly at his fool 
 ish feet. 
 
 For the question at issue is not what kind 
 of poetry is wholesome for children, but what 
 kind of poetry do children love. In nineteen 
 cases out of twenty, that which they love is 
 good for them, and they can guide themselves 
 a great deal better than we can hope to guide 
 them. I once asked a friend who had spent 
 many years in teaching little girls and boys 
 whether her small pupils, when left to their 
 own discretion, ever chose any of the pretty, 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 59 
 
 trivial verses out of new books and magazines 
 for study and recitation. She answered, 
 Never. They turned instinctively to the same 
 old favorites she had been listening to so long ; 
 to the same familiar poems that their fathers 
 and mothers had probably studied and recited 
 before them. " Hohenlinden," " Glenara," 
 "Lord UUin s Daughter," "Young Lochin- 
 var," " Rosabelle," " To Lucasta, on going to 
 the Wars," the lullaby from " The Princess," 
 " Lady Clara Yere de Yere," " Annabel Lee," 
 Longfellow s translation of " The Castle by the 
 Sea," and " The Skeleton in Armor," these 
 are the themes of which children never weary ; 
 these are the songs that are sung forever in 
 their secret Paradise of Delights. The little 
 volumes containing such tried and proven 
 friends grow shabby with much handling ; and 
 I have seen them marked all over with myste 
 rious crosses and dots and stars, each of which 
 denoted the exact degree of affection which the 
 child bore to the poem thus honored and ap 
 proved. I can fancy Mr. Lang s " Blue Poetry 
 Book" fairly covered with such badges of 
 distinction ; for never before has any selection 
 of poems appealed so clearly and insistently to 
 
60 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 childish tastes and hearts. When I turn over 
 its pages, I feel as if the children of England 
 must have brought their favorite songs to Mr. 
 Lang, and prayed, each one, that his own 
 darling might be admitted, as if they must 
 have forced his choice into their chosen chan 
 nels. Its only rival in the field, Palgrave s 
 "Children s Treasury of English Song," is 
 edited with such nice discrimination, such 
 critical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless, 
 a triumph of delicacy and good taste. But 
 much that childhood loves is necessarily ex 
 cluded from a volume so small and so care 
 fully considered. The older poets, it is true, 
 are generously treated, Herrick, especially, 
 makes a braver show than he does in Mr. 
 Lang s collection ; and there are plenty of 
 beautiful ballads, some of which, like "The 
 Lass of Lochroyan," we miss sorely from the 
 pages of the " Blue Poetry Book." On the 
 other hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave s " Treas 
 ury," are those lovely snatches of song familiar 
 to our earliest years, and which we welcome 
 individually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr. 
 Lang shows them to us once more ? " Rose 
 Aylmer," "County Guy," "Proud Maisie," 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 61 
 
 " How Sleep the Brave," " Nora s Vow," 
 the delight of my own childhood, the pa 
 thetic " Farewell," 
 
 " It was a for our rightf u King, 
 
 We left fair Scotland s strand ; 
 It was a for our rightfu King 1 , 
 We e er saw Irish land," 
 
 and Hood s silvery little verses beginning, 
 
 "A lake and a fairy boat 
 
 To sail in the moonlight clear, 
 And merrily we would float 
 
 From the dragons that watch us here ! " 
 
 All these and many more are gathered safely 
 into this charming volume. Nothing we long 
 to see appears to be left out, except, indeed, 
 Waller s " Go, Lovely Rose," and Herrick s 
 " Night Piece," both of them very serious omis 
 sions. It seems strange to find seven of Edgar 
 Poe s poems in a collection which excludes the 
 " Night Piece," so true a favorite with all girl 
 children, and a favorite that, once rightfully 
 established, can never be thrust from our affec 
 tions. As for Praed s " Red Fisherman," Mr. 
 Lang has somewhere recorded his liking for 
 this " sombre " tale, which, I think, embodies 
 everything that a child ought not to love. It 
 
62 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 is the only poem in the book that I wish else 
 where ; but perhaps this is a perverse prejudice 
 on my part. There may be little readers to 
 whom its savage cynicism and gloom carry a 
 pleasing terror, like that which oppressed my 
 infant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brown 
 in the awful witch-haunted forest where Haw 
 thorne has shown us the triumph of evil things. 
 "It is his excursions into the unknown world 
 which the child enjoys," says Mr. Lang ; and 
 how shall we set a limit to his wanderings ! He 
 journeys far with careless, secure footsteps ; 
 and for him the stars sing in their spheres, 
 and fairies dance in the moonlight, and the 
 hoarse clashing of arms rings bravely from 
 hard-won fields, and lovers fly together under 
 the stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar, 
 and sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the north 
 ern seas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a- 
 Dale, and stands by Marmion s side in the 
 thick of the ghastly fray. He has given hig 
 heart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid of 
 Saragossa, and to the pale child who met her 
 death on the cruel Gordon spears, and to the 
 lady with yellow hair who knelt moaning by 
 Barthram s bier. His friends are bold Eobin 
 
THE CHILDREN S POETS. 63 
 
 Hood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white- 
 plumed Henry of Navarre, and the princely 
 scapegrace who robbed the robbers to make 
 " laughter for a month, and a good jest for 
 ever." A lordly company these, and seldom 
 to be found in the gray walks of middle age. 
 Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange, 
 and Prince Hal dare not show his laughing 
 face before societies for leveling thrones and 
 reorganizing the universe. We adults pass 
 our days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity, 
 abhorred of Bunyan s soul, and our com 
 panions are Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr. 
 Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrub 
 bing his Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, and 
 the " deplorable young woman named Dull." 
 But it is better to be young, and to see the 
 golden light of romance in the skies, and to 
 kiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands like 
 a star on the battlements. It is better to fol 
 low Hector to the fight, and Guinevere to the 
 sad cloisters of Almesbury, and the Ancient 
 Mariner to that silent sea where the death- 
 fires gleam by night. Even to us who have 
 made these magic voyages in our childhood 
 there comes straying, at times, a pale reflection 
 
64 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 of that early radiance, a faint, sweet echo 
 of that early song. Then the streets of the 
 Town of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Fal- 
 staff s great laugh frightens Mr. Despondency 
 into a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on us 
 under the wintry moonlight, and Porphyro 
 steals by with strange sweets heaped in bas 
 kets of wreathed silver. Then we know that 
 with the poets there is perpetual youth, and 
 that for us, as for the child dreaming in the 
 firelight, the shining casements open upon 
 fairyland. 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 
 
 WHEN the world was younger and perhaps 
 merrier, when people lived more and thought 
 less, and when the curious subtleties of an ad 
 vanced civilization had not yet turned men s 
 heads with conceit of their own enlightening 
 progress from simple to serious things, poets 
 had two recognized sources of inspiration, 
 which were sufficient for themselves and for 
 their unexacting audiences. They sang of 
 love and they sang of war, of fair women and 
 of brave men, of keen youthful passions and 
 of the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosa- 
 monde lingers " in Woodstocke bower," and 
 Sir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte ; 
 Annie of Lochroyan sails over the roughening 
 seas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Chev 
 iot hills with fifteen hundred bowmen at his 
 back. It did not occur to the thick-headed 
 generation who first listened to the ballad of 
 "Chevy Chace" to hint that the game was 
 
66 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 hardly worth the candle, or that poaching on 
 a large scale was as reprehensible ethically as 
 poaching on a little one. This sort of insight 
 was left for the nineteenth-century philosopher, 
 and the nineteenth - century moralist. In 
 earlier, easier days, the last thing that a poet 
 troubled himself about was a defensible motive 
 for the battle in which his soul exulted. His 
 business was to describe the fighting, not to 
 justify the fight, which would have been a task 
 of pure supererogation in that truculent age. 
 Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie or 
 Johnie of Braedislee, instead of counting the 
 hard knocks they give and the stout men they 
 lay low ! 
 
 " Johnie s set his back against an aik, 
 
 His foot against a stane ; 
 And he has slain the Seven Foresters, 
 He has slain them a but ane." 
 
 The last echo of this purely irresponsible 
 spirit may be found in the " War Song of 
 Dinas Yawr," where Peacock, always three 
 hundred years behind his time, sings of 
 slaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness which 
 only his admirable versification can excuse : 
 
 " The mountain sheep are sweeter, 
 But the valley sheep are fatter ; 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 67 
 
 We therefore deemed it meeter 
 
 To carry off the latter. 
 
 We made an expedition ; 
 
 We met an host and quelled it ; 
 
 We forced a strong- position, 
 
 And killed the men who held it." 
 
 There is not even a lack of food at home 
 the old traditional dinner of spurs to war 
 rant this foray. There is no hint of necessity 
 for the harriers, or consideration for the har 
 ried. 
 
 " We brought away from battle, 
 And much their land bemoaned them, 
 Two thousand head of cattle, 
 And the head of him who owned them : 
 Ednyfed, King of Dyfed, 
 His head was borne before us ; 
 His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, 
 And his overthrow our chorus." 
 
 It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistibly 
 narrated ; but if the lines were a hair-breadth 
 less mellifluous, I think we should call this a 
 very barbarous method of campaigning. 
 
 When the old warlike spirit was dying out 
 of English verse, when poets had begun to 
 meditate and moralize, to interpret nature and 
 to counsel man, the good gods gave to Eng 
 land, as a link with the days that were dead, 
 
68 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton be 
 fore or since has ever sung, of battlefields and 
 the hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds and 
 midnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brig- 
 nail banks, and the trooper shaking his silken 
 bridle reins upon the river shore : 
 
 " Adieu for evermore, 
 
 My love ! 
 And adieu for evermore." 
 
 These are not precisely the themes which 
 enjoy unshaken popularity to-day, " the poet 
 of battles fares ill in modern England," says 
 Sir Francis Doyle, and as a consequence 
 there are many people who speak slightingly of 
 Scott s poetry, and who appear to claim for 
 themselves some inscrutable superiority by so 
 doing. They give you to understand, without 
 putting it too coarsely into words, that they 
 are beyond that sort of thing, but that they 
 liked it very well as children, and are pleased 
 if you enjoy it still. There is even a class of 
 unfortunates who, through no apparent fault 
 of their own, have ceased to take delight 
 in Scott s novels, and who manifest a curious 
 indignation because the characters in them go 
 ahead and do things, instead of thinking and 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 69 
 
 talking about them, which is the present 
 approved fashion of evolving fiction. Why, 
 what time have the good people in " Quentin 
 Durward " for speculation and chatter ? The 
 rush of events carries them irresistibly into 
 action. They plot, and fight, and run away, 
 and scour the country, and meet with so many 
 adventures, and perform so many brave and 
 cruel deeds, that they have no chance for in 
 trospection and the joys of analysis. Natu 
 rally, those writers who pride themselves upon 
 making a story out of nothing, and who are 
 more concerned with excluding material than 
 with telling their tales, have scant liking for 
 Sir Walter, who thought little and prated not 
 at all about the " art of fiction," but used the 
 subjects which came to hand with the instinc 
 tive and unhesitating skill of a great artist. 
 The battles in "Quentin Durward" and "Old 
 Mortality " are, I think, as fine in their way as 
 the battle of Flodden ; and Flodden, says Mr. 
 Lang, is the finest fight on record, " better 
 even than the stand of Aias by the ships in 
 the Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooers 
 in the Odyssey." 
 
 The ability to carry us whither he would, to 
 
70 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 show us whatever he pleased, and to stir our 
 hearts blood with the story of 
 
 " old, unhappy, far-off things, 
 And battles long ago," 
 
 was the especial gift of Scott, of the man 
 whose sympathies were as deep as life itself, 
 whose outlook was as wide as the broad 
 bosom of the earth he trod on. He believed 
 in action, and he delighted in describing it. 
 " The thinker s voluntary death in life " was 
 not, for him, the power that moves the world, 
 but rather deeds, deeds that make history 
 and that sing themselves forever. He honestly 
 felt himself to be a much smaller man than 
 Wellington. He stood abashed in the pres 
 ence of the soldier who had led large issues 
 and controlled the fate of nations. He would 
 have been sincerely amused to learn from 
 " Robert Elsmere " what a delicious thing 
 it is to contemplate Sir Walter reading 
 " Eobert Elsmere " ! that " the decisive 
 events of the world take place in the intellect." 
 The decisive events of the world, Scott held 
 to take place in the field of action ; on the 
 plains of Marathon and Waterloo rather than 
 in the brain tissues of William Godwin. He 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 71 
 
 knew what befell Athens when she could put 
 forward no surer defense against Philip of 
 Macedon than the most brilliant orations ever 
 written in praise of freedom. It was better, 
 he probably thought, to argue as the English 
 did, " in platoons." The schoolboy who fought 
 with the heroic " Green-Breeks " in the streets 
 of Edinburgh ; the student who led the Tory 
 youths in their gallant struggle with the riot 
 ous Irishmen, and drove them with stout cud 
 geling out of the theatre they had disgraced ; 
 the man who, broken in health and spirit, was 
 yet blithe and ready to back his quarrel with 
 Gourgaud by giving that gentleman any satis 
 faction he desired, was consistent throughout 
 with the simple principles of a bygone genera 
 tion. " It is clear to me," he writes in his jour 
 nal, " that what is least forgiven in a man of 
 any mark or likelihood is want of that article 
 blackguardly called pluck. All the fine quali 
 ties of genius cannot make amends for it. 
 We are told the genius of poets especially 
 is irreconcilable with this species of gren 
 adier accomplishment. If so, qiiel chien de 
 genie ! " 
 
 Quel chien de genie indeed, and far beyond 
 
72 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 the compass of Scott, who, amid the growing 
 sordidness and seriousness of an industrial 
 and discontented age, struck a single resonant 
 note that rings in our hearts to-day like the 
 echo of good and joyous things : 
 
 " Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife ! 
 
 To all the sensual world proclaim, 
 One crowded hour of glorious life 
 Is worth an age without a name." 
 
 The same sentiments are put, it may be remem 
 bered, into admirable prose when Graham of 
 Claverhouse expounds to Henry Morton his 
 views on living and dying. At present, Phi 
 losophy and Philanthropy between them are 
 hustling poor Glory into a small corner of the 
 field. Even to the soldier, we are told, it 
 should be a secondary consideration, or per 
 haps no consideration at all, his sense of 
 duty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, like 
 Homer, held somewhat different views, and 
 absolutely declined to let " that jade Duty " 
 have everything her own way. It is the plain 
 duty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare s 
 side and guard her as they were bidden, instead 
 of which they rush off, with Sir Walter s tacit 
 approbation, to the fray. 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 73 
 
 " No longer Blount the view could bear : 
 * By heaven and all its saints ! I swear 
 
 I will not see it lost ! 
 Fitz-Eustace, you with Lady Clare 
 May bid your beads and patter prayer, 
 I gallop to the host. " 
 
 It was this cheerful acknowledgment of hu 
 man nature as a large factor in life which 
 gave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave, 
 imperfect men ; which enabled him to draw 
 with true and kindly art such soldiers as Le 
 Balafre, and Dugald Dalgetty, and William 
 of Deloraine. Le Balafre, indeed, with his 
 thick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his own 
 wisdom, his unswerving, almost unconscious 
 courage, his readiness to risk his neck for a 
 bride, and his reluctance to marry her, is 
 every whit as veracious as if he were the over- 
 analyzed child of realism, instead of one of 
 the many minor characters thrust with wanton 
 prodigality into the pages of a romantic novel. 
 Alone among modern poets, Scott sings 
 Homerically of strife. Others have caught 
 the note, but none have upheld it with such sus 
 tained force, such clear and joyous resonance. 
 Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is always 
 too rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion. 
 
74 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finest 
 tribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs. 
 Browning, who said she could not read the 
 " Lays " lying down ; they drew her irresistibly 
 to her feet. But when Macaulay sings of Lake 
 Regillus, I do not see the battle swim before 
 my eyes. I see whether I want to or not 
 a platform, and the poet s own beloved school 
 boy declaiming with appropriate gestures those 
 glowing and vigorous lines. When Scott sings 
 of Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickest 
 of the fray. I know how the Scottish ranks 
 waver and reel before the charge of Stanley s 
 men, how Tunstall s stainless banner sweeps 
 the field, and how, in the gathering gloom, 
 
 " The stubborn spearmen still made good 
 Their dark impenetrable wood, 
 Each stepping where his comrade stood, 
 The instant that he fell." 
 
 There is none of this noble simplicity in the 
 somewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in the 
 Pharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but not 
 the less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, which 
 read a little like old Kaiser William s war 
 dispatches turned into verse. Better a thousand 
 times are the splendid swing, the captivating 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR, 75 
 
 enthusiasm of Drayton s "Agincourt," which 
 hardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred. 
 Reading it, we are as keen for battle as were 
 King Harry s soldiers straining at the leash. 
 The ardor for strife, the staying power of 
 quiet courage, all are here ; and here, too, a 
 felicity of language that makes each noble 
 name a trumpet blast of defiance, a fresh 
 incentive to heroic deeds. 
 
 " With Spanish yew so strong, 
 Arrows a cloth-yard long, 
 That like to serpents stung, 
 
 Piercing the weather ; 
 None from his fellow starts, 
 But playing manly parts, 
 And like true English hearts, 
 Stuck close together. 
 
 " Warwick in blood did wade, 
 Oxford the foe invade, 
 And cruel slaughter made, 
 
 Still as they ran up ; 
 Suffolk his axe did ply, 
 Beaumont and Willoughby 
 Bare them right doughtily, 
 
 Ferrers and Fanhope. 
 
 " Upon Saint Crispin s day 
 Fought was this noble fray, 
 Which fame did not delay 
 To England to carry ; 
 
76 ESSAYS /AT IDLENESS. 
 
 Oh, when shall Englishmen 
 With such acts fill a pen, 
 Or England breed again 
 Such a King Harry ? " 
 
 Political economists and chilly historians and 
 all long-headed calculating creatures gener 
 ally may perhaps hint that invading France 
 was no part of England s business, and rep 
 resented fruitless labor and bloodshed. But 
 this, happily, is not the poet s point of view. 
 He dreams with Hotspur 
 
 " Of basilisks, of cannon, culverm, 
 Of prisoners ransom and of soldiers slain, 
 And all the currents of a heady fight." 
 
 He hears King Harry s voice ring clearly above 
 the cries and clamors of battle : 
 
 " Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more ; 
 Or close the wall up with our English dead ; " 
 
 and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur and 
 the field of Agincourt seem not only glorious 
 but righteous things. "That pure and generous 
 desire to thrash the person opposed to you 
 because he is opposed to you, because he is not 
 4 your side, " which Mr. Saintsbury declares 
 to be the real incentive of all good war songs, 
 hardly permits a too cautious analysis of mo- 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 77 
 
 tives. Fighting is not a strictly philanthropic 
 pastime, and its merits are not precisely the 
 merits of church guilds and college settlements. 
 Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, not 
 withstanding the splendid example of Michael, 
 " of celestial armies, prince," and there is at 
 present a shameless conspiracy on foot to 
 defraud even St. George of his hard-won glory, 
 and to melt him over in some modern crucible 
 into a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arian 
 bishop, too, by way of deepening the scandal ! 
 We shall hear next that Saint Denis was a 
 Calvinistic minister, and Saint lago, whom 
 devout Spanish eyes have seen mounted in 
 the hottest of the fray, was a friendly well- 
 wisher of the Moors. 
 
 But why sigh over fighting saints, in a day 
 when even fighting sinners have scant measure 
 of praise ? " Moral courage is everything. 
 Physical heroism is a small matter, often triv 
 ial enough," wrote that clever, emotional, sen 
 sitive German woman, Kahel Varnhagen, at 
 the very time when a little " physical heroism " 
 might have freed her conquered fatherland. 
 And this profession of faith has gone on in 
 creasing in popularity, until we have even a 
 
78 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 lad like the young Laurence Oliphant, with 
 hot blood surging in his veins, gravely record 
 ing his displeasure because a parson " with 
 a Crimean medal on his surplice " preached a 
 rousing battle sermon to the English soldiers 
 who had no alternative but to fight. "My 
 natural man," confesses Oliphant naively, " is 
 intensely warlike, which is just as low a passion 
 as avarice or any other," a curious moral 
 perspective, which needs no word of comment, 
 and sufficiently explains much that was to 
 follow. We are irresistibly reminded by such 
 a verdict of Shelley s swelling lines 
 
 " War is the statesman s game, the priest s delight, 
 The lawyer s jest, the hired assassin s trade ; " 
 
 lines which, to borrow a witticism of Mr. Oscar 
 Wilde s, have " all the vitality of error," and 
 will probably be quoted triumphantly by Peace 
 Societies for many years to come. 
 
 In the mean time, there is a remarkable and 
 very significant tendency to praise all war 
 songs, war stories, and war literature gener 
 ally, in proportion to the discomfort and hor 
 ror they excite, in proportion to their inartistic 
 and unjustifiable realism. I well remember, 
 when I was a little girl, having a dismal 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 79 
 
 French tale by Erckmann-Chatrian, called 
 " Le Conscrit," given me by a kindly disposed 
 but mistaken friend, and the disgust with 
 which I waded through those scenes of sordid 
 bloodshed and misery, untouched by any fire 
 of enthusiasm, any halo of romance. The 
 very first description of Napoleon, Napoleon, 
 the idol of my youthful dreams, as a fat, 
 pale man, with a tuft of hair upon his fore 
 head, filled me with loathing for all that was 
 to follow. But I believe I finished the book, 
 it never occurred to me, in those innocent 
 days, not to finish every book that I began, 
 and then I re-read in joyous haste all of Sir 
 Walter Scott s fighting novels, " Waverley," 
 " Old Mortality," " Ivanhoe," " Quentin 
 Durward," and even " The Abbot," which has 
 one good battle, to get the taste of that abom 
 inable story out of my mouth. Of late years, 
 however, I have heard a great deal of French, 
 Russian, and occasionally even English litera 
 ture commended for the very qualities which 
 aroused my childish indignation. No one has 
 sung the praises of war more gallantly than 
 Mr. Rudyard Kipling ; yet those grim verses 
 called " The Grave of the Hundred Dead " 
 
80 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 verses closely resembling the appalling speci 
 mens of truculency with which Mr. Ruskin 
 began and ended his brief poetical career 
 have been singled out from their braver 
 brethren for especial praise, and offered as 
 " grim, naked, ugly truth " to those " who 
 would know more of the poet s picturesque 
 qualities." 
 
 But " grim, naked, ugly truth " can never be 
 made a picturesque quality, and it is not the 
 particular business of a battle poem to empha 
 size the desirability of peace. We all know 
 the melancholy anticlimax of Campbell s 
 splendid song "Ye Mariners of England," 
 when, to three admirable verses, the poet must 
 needs add a fourth, descriptive of the joys 
 of harmony, and of the eating and drinking 
 which shall replace the perils of the sea. I 
 count it a lasting injury, after having my 
 blood fired with these surging lines, 
 
 " Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell, 
 Your manly hearts shall glow, 
 As ye sweep through the deep, 
 While the stormy winds do blow ; 
 While the battle rages loud and long, 
 And the stormy winds do blow," 
 
 to be suddenly introduced to a scene of inglo- 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 81 
 
 rious junketing ; and I ain not surprised that 
 Campbell s peculiar inspiration, which was 
 born of war and of war only, failed him the 
 instant he deserted his theme. Such shocking 
 lines as 
 
 " The meteor-flag- of England 
 Shall yet terrific burn," 
 
 while quite in harmony with the poet s ordi 
 nary achievements, would have been simply 
 impossible in those first three verses of "Ye 
 Mariners," where he remains true to his one 
 artistic impulse. He strikes a different and a 
 finer note when, in " The Battle of the Baltic," 
 he turns gravely away from feasting and jollity 
 to remember the brave men who have died for 
 England s glory : 
 
 " Let us think of them that sleep, 
 Full many a fathom deep, 
 By thy wild and stormy steep, 
 Elsinore ! " 
 
 To go back to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, how 
 ever, from whom I have wandered far, he is 
 more in love with the " dear delights " of bat 
 tle than with its dismal carnage, and he wins 
 an easy forgiveness for a few horrors by show 
 ing us much brave and hearty fighting. Who 
 can forget the little Gurkhas drawing a deep 
 
82 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 breath of contentment when at last they see 
 the foe, and gaping expectantly at their offi 
 cers, " as terriers grin ere the stone is cast 
 for them to fetch ? " Who can forget the 
 joyous abandon with which Mulvaney the dis 
 reputable and his "four an twenty young 
 wans " fling themselves upon Lungtungpen ? 
 It is a good and wholesome thing for a man 
 to be in sympathy with that primitive virtue, 
 courage, to recognize it promptly, and to do 
 honor to it under any flag. " Homer s heart 
 is with the brave of either side," observes 
 Mr. Lang ; " with Glaucus and Sarpedon of 
 Lycia no less than with Achilles and Patro- 
 clus." Scott s heart is with Surrey and Dacre 
 no less than with Lennox and Argyle ; with 
 the English hosts charging like whirlwinds to 
 the fray no less than with the Scottish soldiers 
 standing ringed and dauntless around their 
 king. Theodore de Banville, hot with shame 
 over fallen France, checks his bitterness to 
 write some tender verses to the memory of a 
 Prussian boy found dead on the field, with a 
 bullet-pierced volume of Pindar on his breast. 
 Dumas, that lover of all brave deeds, cries out 
 with noble enthusiasm that it was not enough 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 83 
 
 to kill the Highlanders at Waterloo, " we 
 had to push them down ! " and the reverse of 
 the medal has been shown us by Mr. Lang in 
 the letter of an English officer, who writes 
 home that he would have given the rest of his 
 life to have served with the French cavalry on 
 that awful day. Sir Francis Doyle delights, 
 like an honest and stout-hearted Briton, to pay 
 an equal tribute of praise, in rather question 
 able verse, to the private of the Buffs, 
 
 " Poor, reckless, rude, low-born, untaught, 
 Bewildered and alone, " 
 
 who died for England s honor in a far-off 
 land ; and to the Indian prince, Mehrab 
 Khan, who, brought to bay, swore proudly 
 that he would perish, 
 
 " to the last the lord 
 Of all that man can call his own, " 
 
 and fell beneath the English bayonets at the 
 door of his zenana. This is the spirit by 
 which brave men know one another the world 
 over, and which, lying back of all healthy 
 national prejudices, unites in a human brother 
 hood those whom the nearness of death has 
 taught to start at no shadows. 
 
84 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 " Oh, east is east, and west is west, and never the two shall 
 
 meet 
 Till earth and sky stand presently at God s great Judgment 
 
 Seat. 
 But there is neither east nor west, border nor breed nor 
 
 birth, 
 When two strong men stand face to face, though they come 
 
 from the ends of the earth." 
 
 Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here, 
 too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier to 
 hand than that much-desired bond of cultiva 
 tion which Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us will 
 one day knit the world together. The time 
 when Germany will no longer hate France, 
 "because the prose of France is perfect," 
 seems still as far-off as it is fair ; the day when 
 " intellectual criticism will bind Europe to 
 gether " dawns only in the dreamland of 
 desire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry at 
 the expense of " Peace Societies, so dear to 
 the sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmed 
 International Arbitration, so popular among 
 those who have never read history ; " but crit 
 icism, the mediator of the future, " will anni 
 hilate race prejudices by insisting upon the 
 unity of the human mind in the variety of its 
 forms. If we are tempted to make war upon 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 85 
 
 another nation, we shall remember that we are 
 seeking to destroy an element of our own cul 
 ture, and possibly its most important element." 
 This restraining impulse will allow us to fight 
 only red Indians, and Feejeeans, and Bush 
 men, from whom no grace of culture is to be 
 gleaned; and it may prove a strong induce 
 ment to some disturbed countries, like Ireland 
 and Eussia, to advance a little further along 
 the paths of sweetness and light. Meanwhile, 
 the world, which rolls so easily in old and 
 well-worn ways, will probably remember that 
 " power* is measured by resistance," and will 
 go on arguing stolidly in platoons. 
 
 " All healthy men like fighting and like the 
 sense of danger ; all brave women like to hear 
 of their fighting and of their facing danger," 
 says Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himself 
 the defense of war in his own irresistibly un 
 convincing manner. Others indeed have de 
 lighted in it from a purely artistic standpoint, 
 or as a powerful stimulus to fancy. Mr. 
 Saintsbury exults more than most critics in 
 battle poems, and in those " half-inarticulate 
 songs that set the blood coursing." Sir Fran 
 cis Doyle, whose simple manly soul never 
 
86 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 wearied of such themes, had no ambition to 
 outgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boy 
 hood. " I knew the battle in Marmion by 
 heart almost before I could read," he writes in 
 his " Reminiscences ; " " and I cannot raze out 
 I do not wish to raze out of my soul all 
 that filled and colored it in years gone by." 
 Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by the 
 picture squeness of a sea fight as was Canon 
 Kingsley, appears to believe in all seriousness 
 that the British privateers who went plunder 
 ing in the Spanish main were inspired by a 
 pure love for England, and a zeal for the 
 Protestant faith. He can say truly with the 
 little boy of adventurous humor, 
 
 " There is something that suits my mind to a T 
 In the thought of a reg lar Pirate King." 
 
 Mr. Lang s love of all warlike literature is 
 too well known to need comment. As a child, 
 he confesses he pored over "the fightingest 
 parts of the Bible," when Sunday deprived 
 him of less hallowed reading. As a boy, he 
 devoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hours 
 which were presumably sacred to the shrine of 
 Latin grammar. As a man, he lures us with 
 glowing words from the consideration of politi 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 87 
 
 cal problems, or of our own complicated spirit 
 ual machinery, to follow the fortunes of the 
 brave, fierce men who fought in the lonely 
 north, or of the heroes who went forth in 
 gilded armor "to win glory or to give it " be 
 fore the walls of Troy. In these days, when 
 many people find it easier to read " The Ring 
 and the Book " than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makes 
 a strong plea in behalf of that literature which 
 has come down to us out of the past to stand 
 forevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring the 
 hearts of all generations until human nature 
 shall be warped from simple and natural lines. 
 " With the Bible and Shakespeare," he says, 
 " the Homeric poems are the best training for 
 life. There is no good quality that they lack ; 
 manliness, courage, reverence for old age and 
 for the hospitable hearth, justice, piety, pity, 
 a brave attitude towards life and death, are all 
 conspicuous in Homer." It might be well, 
 perhaps, to add to this long list one more in 
 comparable virtue, an instinctive and illogical 
 delight in living. Amid shipwrecks and bat 
 tles, amid long wanderings and hurtling spears, 
 amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear, 
 Homer teaches us, and teaches us in right joy- 
 
88 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 ful fashion, the beauty and value of an ex 
 istence which we profess nowadays to find a 
 little burdensome on our hands. 
 
 All these things have the lovers of war said 
 to us, and in all these ways have they striven 
 to fire our hearts. But Mr. Kuskin is not 
 content to regard any matter from a purely 
 artistic standpoint, or to judge it on natural 
 and congenital lines ; he must indorse it ethi 
 cally or condemn. Accordingly, it is not 
 enough for him, as it would be for any other 
 man, to claim that " no great art ever yet rose 
 on earth but among a nation of soldiers." He 
 feels it necessary to ask himself some searching 
 and embarrassing questions about fighting 
 " for its own sake," and as " a grand pastime," 
 questions which he naturally finds it ex 
 tremely difficult to answer. It is not enough 
 for him to say, with equal truth and justice, 
 that if " brave death in a red coat " be no bet 
 ter than "brave life in a black one," it is at 
 least every bit as good. He must needs wax 
 serious, and commit himself to this strong and 
 doubtful statement : 
 
 " Assume the knight merely to have ridden 
 out occasionally to fight his neighbor for exer- 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 89 
 
 cise; assume him even a soldier of fortune, 
 and to have gained his bread and filled his 
 purse at the sword s point. Still I feel as if 
 it were, somehow, grander and worthier in him 
 to have made his bread by sword play than 
 any other play. I had rather he had made 
 it by thrusting than by batting, much more 
 than by betting ; much rather that he should 
 ride war horses than back race horses ; and 
 I say it sternly and deliberately much 
 rather would I have him slay his neighbor 
 than cheat him." 
 
 Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate as 
 this, it would not be altogether amiss to con 
 sult the subject acted upon ; in other words, 
 the neighbor, who, whatever may be his preju 
 dice against dishonest handling, might proba 
 bly prefer it to the last irredeemable disaster. 
 In this commercial age we get tolerably ac 
 customed to being cheated like the skinned 
 eel, we are used to it, but there is an old 
 rhyme which tells us plainly that a broken 
 neck is beyond all help of healing. 
 
 No, it is best, when we treat a theme as 
 many-sided as war, to abandon modern in 
 quisitorial methods, and confine ourselves to 
 
90 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 that good old-fashioned simplicity which was 
 content to take short obvious views of life. It 
 is best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightly 
 as we may. The finest poems of battle and of 
 camp have been written in this unincumbered 
 spirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatch 
 of song from " Rokeby : " 
 
 " A weary lot is thine, fair maid, 
 
 A weary lot is thine ! 
 To pull the thorn thy brow to "braid, 
 
 And press the rue for wine. 
 A lightsome eye, a soldier s mien, 
 
 A feather of the blue, 
 A doublet of the Lincoln green, 
 
 No more of me you knew, 
 My love ! 
 
 No more of me you knew." 
 
 And this other, far less familiar, which I quote 
 from Lockhart s Spanish Ballads, and which 
 is fitly called "The Wandering Knight s 
 Song:" 
 
 " My ornaments are arms, 
 My pastime is in war, 
 My bed is cold upon the wold, 
 My lamp yon star. 
 
 " My journeyings are long, 
 
 My slumbers short and broken ; 
 From hill to hill I wander still, 
 Kissing thy token. 
 
TEE PRAISES OF WAR. 91 
 
 " I ride from land to land, 
 I sail from sea to sea ; 
 Some day more kind I fate may find, 
 Some night, kiss thee." 
 
 Now, apart from the charming felicity of these 
 lines, we cannot but be struck with their 
 singleness of conception and purpose. " The 
 Wandering Knight " is well-nigh as disincum- 
 bered of mental as of material luggage. He 
 rides as free from our tangled perplexity of 
 introspection as from our irksome contrivances 
 for comfort. It is not that he is precisely 
 guileless or ignorant. One does not journey 
 far over the world without learning the world s 
 ways, and the ways of the men who dwell upon 
 her. But the knowledge of things looked at 
 from the outside is never the knowledge that 
 wears one s soul away, and the traveling com 
 panion that Lord Byron found so ennuyant, 
 
 "The blight of life the demon Thought," 
 
 forms no part of the " Wandering Knight s " 
 equipment. As I read this little fugitive song 
 which has drifted down into an alien age, I 
 feel an envious liking for those days when the 
 tumult of existence made its triumph, when 
 action fanned the embers of joy, and when 
 
92 88 AYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 people were too busy with each hour of life, as 
 it came, to question the usefulness or desira 
 bility of the whole. 
 
 There is one more point to consider. Mr. 
 Saintsbury appears to think it strange that 
 battles, when they occur, and especially when 
 they chance to be victories, should not imme 
 diately inspire good war songs. But this is 
 seldom or never the case, " The Charge of the 
 Light Brigade " being an honorable exception 
 to the rule. Drayton s heroic ballad was writ 
 ten nearly two hundred years after the battle 
 of Agincourt ; Flodden is a tale of defeat ; 
 and Campbell, whose songs are so intoxicat- 
 ingly warlike, belonged, I am sorry to say, to 
 the " Peace at all price" party. The fact is 
 that a battle fought five hundred years ago is 
 just as inspiring to the poet as a battle fought 
 yesterday ; and a brave deed, the memory of 
 which comes down to us through centuries, 
 stirs our hearts as profoundly as though we 
 witnessed it in our own time. Sarpedon, leap 
 ing lightly from his chariot to dare an un 
 equal combat ; the wounded knight, Schon- 
 burg, dragging himself painfully from amid 
 the dead and dying to offer his silver shield to 
 
THE PRAISES OF WAR. 93 
 
 his defenseless emperor ; the twenty kinsmen 
 of the noble family of Trauttmansdorf who 
 fell, under Frederick of Austria, in the single 
 battle of Miihldorf ; the English lad, young 
 Anstruther, who carried the queen s colors of 
 the Royal Welsh at the storming of Sebasto- 
 pol, and who, swift-footed as a schoolboy, was 
 the first to gain the great redoubt, and stood 
 there one happy moment, holding his flagstaff 
 and breathing hard, before he was shot dead, 
 these are the pictures whose value distance 
 can never lessen, and whose colors time can 
 never dim. These are the deeds that belong 
 to all ages and to all nations, a heritage for 
 every man who walks this troubled earth. 
 " All this the gods have fashioned, and have 
 woven the skein of death for men, that there 
 might be a song in the ears even of the folk 
 of after time." 
 
LEISURE. 
 
 " Zounds ! how has he the leisure to be sick ? " 
 
 A VISITOR strolling through the noble 
 woods of Ferney complimented Voltaire on 
 the splendid growth of his trees. "Ay, v replied 
 the great wit, half in scorn and half, perhaps, 
 in envy, " they have nothing else to do ; " and 
 walked on, deigning no further word of appro 
 bation. 
 
 Has it been more than a hundred years 
 since this distinctly modern sentiment was 
 uttered, more than a hundred years since 
 the spreading chestnut boughs bent kindly 
 over the lean, strenuous, caustic, disappointed 
 man of genius who always had so much to 
 do, and who found in the doing of it a 
 mingled bliss and bitterness that scorched 
 him like fever pain ? How is it that, while 
 Dr. Johnson s sledge-hammer repartees sound 
 like the sonorous echoes of a past age, Vol 
 taire s remarks always appear to have been 
 
LEISURE. 95 
 
 spoken the day before yesterday? They are 
 the kind of witticisms which we do not say 
 for ourselves, simply because we are not witty ; 
 but they illustrate with biting accuracy the 
 spirit of restlessness, of disquiet, of intellec 
 tual vanity and keen contention which is the 
 brand of our vehement and over-zealous gen 
 eration. 
 
 " The Gospel of Work " that is the phrase 
 woven insistently into every homily, every 
 appeal made to the conscience or the intelli 
 gence of a people who are now straining their 
 youthful energy to its utmost speed. " Blessed 
 be Drudgery ! " that is the text deliberately 
 chosen for a discourse which has enjoyed such 
 amazing popularity that sixty thousand printed 
 copies have been found all inadequate to sup 
 ply the ravenous demand. Readers of Dick 
 ens if any one has the time to read Dickens 
 nowadays may remember Miss Monflather s 
 inspired amendment of that familiar poem 
 concerning the Busy Bee : 
 
 " In work, work, work. In work alway, 
 Let my first years be past." 
 
 And when our first years are past, the same 
 programme is considered adequate and satis- 
 
96 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 factory to the end. "A whole lifetime of 
 horrid industry," to quote Mr. Bagehot s 
 uninspired words, this is the prize dangled 
 alluringly before our tired eyes ; and if we 
 are disposed to look askance upon the booty, 
 then vanity is subtly pricked to give zest to 
 faltering resolution. " Our virtues would be 
 proud if our faults whipped them not ; " they 
 would be laggards in the field if our faults did 
 not sometimes spur them to action. It is the 
 paean of self-glorification that wells up perpet 
 ually from press and pulpit, from public ora 
 tors, and from what is courteously called liter 
 ature, that keeps our courage screwed to the 
 sticking place, and veils the occasional bare 
 ness of the result with a charitable vesture of 
 self-delusion. 
 
 Work is good. No one seriously doubts 
 this truth. Adam may have doubted it when 
 he first took spade in hand, and Eve when 
 she scoured her first pots and kettles ; but in 
 the course of a few thousand years we have 
 learned to know and value this honest, 
 troublesome, faithful, and extremely exacting 
 friend. But work is not the only good thing 
 in the world ; it is not a fetich to be adored ; 
 
LEISURE. 97 
 
 neither is it to be judged, like a sum in addi 
 tion, by its outward and immediate results. 
 The god of labor does not abide exclusively 
 in the rolling-mill, the law courts, or the corn 
 field. He has a twin sister whose name is 
 leisure, and in her society he lingers now and 
 then to the lasting gain of both. 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mme. de Sevigne 
 and her time, says that we, " with our habits 
 of positive occupation, can scarcely form a 
 just conception of that life of leisure and 
 chit-chat." " Conversations were infinite," 
 admits Mme. de Sevigne herself, recalling the 
 long summer afternoons when she and her 
 guests walked in the charming woods of Les 
 Eochers until the shadows of twilight fell. 
 The whole duty of life seemed to be con 
 centrated in the pleasant task of entertain 
 ing your friends when they were with you, 
 or writing them admirable letters when they 
 were absent. Occasionally there came, even 
 to this tranquil and finely poised French 
 woman, a haunting consciousness that there 
 might be other and harder work for human 
 hands to do. "Nothing is accomplished day 
 by day," she writes, doubtfully; "and life is 
 
98 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 made up of days, and we grow old and die." 
 This troubled her a little, when she was all 
 the while doing work that was to last for 
 generations, work that was to give pleasure 
 to men and women whose great-grandfathers 
 were then unborn. Not that we have the 
 time now to read Mme. de Sevigne ! Why, 
 there are big volumes of these delightful 
 letters, and who can afford to read big vol 
 umes of anything, merely for the sake of the 
 enjoyment to be extracted therefrom ? It was 
 all very well for Sainte-Beuve to say " Lisons 
 tout Mme. de Sevigne," when the question 
 arose how should some long idle days in a 
 country-house be profitably employed. It was 
 all very well for Sainte-Beuve to plead, with 
 touching confidence in the intellectual pas 
 times of his contemporaries, " Let us treat 
 Mme. de Sevigne as we treat Clarissa Har- 
 lowe, when we have a fortnight of leisure 
 and rainy weather in the country." A fort 
 night of leisure and rainy weather in the 
 country ! The words would be antiquated 
 even for Dr. Johnson. Rain may fall or rain 
 may cease, but leisure comes not so lightly 
 to our calling. Nay, Sainte-Beuve s wistful 
 
LEISURE. 99 
 
 amazement at the polished and cultivated 
 inactivity which alone could produce such a 
 correspondence as Mme. de Sevigne s is not 
 greater than our wistful amazement at the 
 critic s conception of possible idleness in bad 
 weather. In one respect at least we follow 
 his good counsel. We do treat Mme. de Se- 
 vigii(3 precisely as we treat Clarissa Harlowe ; 
 that is, we leave them both severely alone, 
 as being utterly beyond the reach of what we 
 are pleased to call our time. 
 
 And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who, 
 taking his life in his two hands, disposed of it 
 as he thought fit, with no restless self-accusa 
 tions on the score of indolence. In the world 
 and of the world, yet always able to meet and 
 greet the happy solitude of Gascony ; toiling 
 with no thought of toil, but rather " to enter- 
 taine my spirit as it best pleased," this man 
 wrought out of time a coin which passes 
 current over the reading world. And what 
 of Horace, who enjoyed an industrious idle 
 ness, the bare description of which sets our 
 hearts aching with desire ! " The picture 
 which Horace draws of himself in his coun 
 try home," says an envious English critic, 
 
100 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 u affords us a delightful glimpse of such liter 
 ary leisure as is only possible in the golden 
 days of good Haroun-Al-Kaschid. Horace 
 goes to bed and gets up when he likes ; there 
 is no one to drag him down to the law courts 
 the first thing in the morning, to remind him 
 of an important engagement with his brother 
 scribes, to solicit his interest with Maecenas, 
 or to tease him about public affairs and the 
 latest news from abroad. He can bury him 
 self in his Greek authors, or ramble through 
 the woody glens which lie at the foot of 
 Mount Ustica, without a thought of business 
 or a feeling that he ought to be otherwise en 
 gaged." " Swim smoothly in the stream of 
 thy nature, and live but one man," counsels 
 Sir Thomas Browne ; and it may be this 
 gentle current will bear us as bravely through 
 life as if we buffeted our strength away in the 
 restless ocean of endeavor. 
 
 Leisure has a value of its own. It is not a 
 mere handmaid of labor ; it is something we 
 should know how to cultivate, to use, and to 
 enjoy. It has a distinct and honorable place 
 wherever nations are released from the pres 
 sure of their first rude needs, their first homely 
 
LEISURE. 101 
 
 toil, and rise to happier levels of grace and 
 intellectual repose. " Civilization, in its final 
 outcome," says the keen young author of 
 " The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani," " is heavily 
 in the debt of leisure ; and the success of any 
 society worth considering is to be estimated 
 largely by the use to which its fortunati put 
 their spare moments." Here is a sentiment 
 so relentlessly true that nobody wants to be 
 lieve it. We prefer uttering agreeable plati 
 tudes concerning the blessedness of drudgery 
 and the iniquity of eating bread earned by 
 another s hands. Yet the creation of an ar 
 tistic and intellectual atmosphere in which 
 workers can work, the expansion of a noble 
 sympathy with all that is finest and most 
 beautiful, the jealous guardianship of what 
 ever makes the glory and distinction of a 
 nation ; this is achievement enough for the 
 fortunati of any land, and this is the debt 
 they owe. It can hardly be denied that the 
 lack of scholarship of classical scholarship 
 especially at our universities is due pri 
 marily to the labor-worship which is the prev 
 alent superstition of our day, and which, like 
 all superstitions, has gradually degraded its 
 
102 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 god into an idol, and lost sight of the higher 
 powers and attributes beyond. The student 
 who is pleased to think a knowledge of Ger 
 man " more useful " than a knowledge of 
 Greek ; the parent who deliberately declares 
 that his boys have " no time to waste " over 
 Homer ; the man who closes the doors of his 
 mind to everything that does not bear directly 
 on mathematics, or chemistry, or engineering, 
 or whatever he calls " work ; " all these plead 
 in excuse the exigencies of life, the absolute 
 and imperative necessity of labor. 
 
 It would appear, then, that we have no 
 fortunati, that we are not yet rich enough to 
 afford the greatest of all luxuries leisure to 
 cultivate and enjoy " the best that has been 
 known and thought in the world. " This is a 
 pity, because there seems to be money in plenty 
 for so many less valuable things. The yearly 
 taxes of the United States sound to innocent 
 ears like the fabled wealth of the Orient ; the 
 yearly expenditures of the people are on no 
 rigid scale ; yet we are too poor to harbor the 
 priceless literature of the past because it is not 
 a paying investment, because it will not put 
 bread in our mouths nor clothes on our shiver- 
 
LEISURE. 103 
 
 ing nakedness. " Poverty is a most odious 
 calling," sighed Burton many years ago, and 
 we have good cause to echo his lament. Until 
 we are able to believe, with that enthusiastic 
 Greek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that " intellectual 
 training is an end in itself, and not a mere 
 preparation for a trade or a profession ; " until 
 we begin to understand that there is a leisure 
 which does not mean an easy sauntering 
 through life, but a special form of activity, 
 employing all our faculties, and training us to 
 the adequate reception of whatever is most 
 valuable in literature and art ; until we learn 
 to estimate the fruits of self-culture at their 
 proper worth, we are still far from reaping the 
 harvest of three centuries of toil and struggle ; 
 we are still as remote as ever from the serenity 
 of intellectual accomplishment. 
 
 There is a strange pleasure in work wedded 
 to leisure, in work which has grown beautiful 
 because its rude necessities are softened and 
 humanized by sentiment and the subtle grace 
 of association. A little paragraph from the 
 journal of Eugenie de Guerin illustrates with 
 charming simplicity the gilding of common 
 toil by the delicate touch of a cultivated and 
 sympathetic intelligence : 
 
104 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 " A day spent in spreading out a large wash 
 leaves little to say, and yet it is rather pretty, 
 too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or to 
 see it float on lines. One may fancy one s self 
 Homer s Nausicaa, or one of those Biblical 
 princesses who washed their brothers tunics. 
 We have a basin at Moulinasse that you have 
 never seen, sufficiently large, and full to the 
 brim of water. It embellishes the hollow, and 
 attracts the birds who like a cool place to 
 sing in." 
 
 In the same spirit, Maurice de Guerin con 
 fesses frankly the pleasure he takes in gather 
 ing fagots for the winter fire, " that little task 
 of the woodcutter which brings us close to 
 nature," and which was also a favorite occupa 
 tion of M. de Lamennais. The fagot gather 
 ing, indeed, can hardly be said to have 
 assumed the proportions of real toil ; it was 
 rather a pastime where play was thinly dis 
 guised by a pretty semblance of drudgery. 
 " Idleness," admits de Guerin, " but idleness 
 full of thought, and alive to every impres 
 sion" Eugenie s labors, however, had other 
 aspects and bore different fruit. There is 
 nothing intrinsically charming in stitching 
 
LEISURE. 105 
 
 seams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one s 
 fingers over a kitchen fire ; yet every page 
 in the journal of this nobly born French girl 
 reveals to us the nearness of work, work made 
 sacred by the prompt fulfillment of visible 
 duties, and what is more rare made beau 
 tiful by that distinction of mind which was 
 the result of alternating hours of finely culti 
 vated leisure. A very ordinary and estimable 
 young woman might have spread her wash 
 upon the grass with honest pride at the white 
 ness of her linen ; but it needed the solitude 
 of Le Cayla, the few books, well read and 
 well worth reading, the life of patriarchal 
 simplicity, and the habit of sustained and 
 delicate thought, to awaken in the worker s 
 mind the graceful association of ideas, the 
 pretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidens 
 cleansing their finely woven webs in the cool, 
 rippling tide. 
 
 For it is self -culture that warms the chilly 
 earth wherein no good seed can mature; it 
 is self-culture that distinguishes between the 
 work which has inherent and lasting value 
 and the work which represents conscientious 
 activity and no more. And for the training 
 
106 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 of one s self, leisure is requisite ; leisure and 
 that rare modesty which turns a man s 
 thoughts back to his own shortcomings and 
 requirements, and extinguishes in him the 
 burning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings. 
 "We might make ourselves spiritual by de 
 taching ourselves from action, and become 
 perfect by the rejection of energy," says Mr. 
 Oscar Wilde, who delights in scandalizing his 
 patient readers, and who lapses unconsciously 
 into something resembling animation over the 
 wrongs inflicted by the solemn preceptors of 
 mankind. The notion that it is worth while 
 to learn a thing only if you intend to impart 
 it to others is widespread and exceedingly 
 popular. I have myself heard an excellent 
 and anxious aunt say to her young niece, 
 then working hard at college, " But, my dear, 
 why do you give so much of your time to 
 Greek? You don t expect to teach it, do 
 you ? " as if there were no other use to 
 be gained, no other pleasure to be won from 
 that noble language, in which lies hidden 
 the hoarded treasure of centuries. To study 
 Greek in order to read and enjoy it, and 
 thereby make life better worth the living, 
 
LEISURE. 107 
 
 is a possibility that seldom enters the practi 
 cal modern mind. 
 
 Yet this restless desire to give out infor 
 mation, like alms, is at best a questionable 
 bounty ; this determination to share one s wis 
 dom with one s unwilling fellow-creatures is a 
 noble impulse provocative of general discon 
 tent. When Southey, writing to James Murray 
 about a dialogue which he proposes to publish 
 in the " Quarterly," says, with characteristic 
 complacency : " I have very little doubt that it 
 will excite considerable attention, and lead 
 many persons into a wholesome train of 
 thought, " we feel at once how absolutely fa 
 miliar is the sentiment, and how absolutely 
 hopeless is literature approached in this spirit. 
 The same principle, working under different 
 conditions to-day, entangles us in a network of 
 lectures, which have become the chosen field 
 for every educational novelty, and the diversion 
 of the mentally unemployed. 
 
 Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly his 
 veneration for the old-fashioned schoolmaster 
 who taught his Greek and Latin in leisurely 
 fashion day after day, with no thought wasted 
 upon more superficial or practical acquirements, 
 
108 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 and who " came to his task as to a sport." He 
 has made equally plain his aversion for the new 
 fangled pedagogue new in his time, at least 
 who could not "relish a beggar or a gypsy" 
 without seeking to collect or to impart some 
 statistical information on the subject. A gen 
 tleman of this calibre, his fellow - traveler in 
 a coach, once asked him if he had ever made 
 " any calculation as to the value of the rental 
 of all the retail shops in London ? " and the 
 magnitude of the question so overwhelmed 
 Lamb that he could not even stammer out a 
 confession of his ignorance. "To go preach 
 to the first passer-by, to become tutor to the 
 ignorance of the first thing I meet, is a task 
 I abhor," observes Montaigne, who must cer 
 tainly have been the most acceptable compan 
 ion of his day. 
 
 Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy with 
 insistent and arrogant industry. He could 
 work hard enough when circumstances de 
 manded it ; but he " always felt an inclination 
 to do nothing," and not infrequently gratified 
 his desires. " No man, sir, is obliged to do as 
 much as he can. A man should have part of 
 his life to himself," was the good doctor s 
 
LEIS URE. 109 
 
 soundly heterodox view, advanced upon many 
 occasions. He hated to hear people boast of 
 their assiduity, and nipped such vain preten 
 sions in the bud with frosty scorn. When he 
 and Boswell journeyed together in the Har 
 wich stage-coach, a "fat, elderly gentle-wo 
 man," who had been talking freely of her own 
 affairs, wound up by saying that she never 
 permitted any of her children to be for a 
 moment idle. "I wish, madam," said Dr. 
 Johnson testily, " that you would educate me 
 too, for I have been an idle fellow all my life." 
 "I am sure, sir," protested the woman with 
 dismayed politeness, " you have not been idle." 
 " Madam," was the retort, " it is true ! And 
 that gentleman there " pointing to poor 
 young Boswell " has been idle also. He 
 was idle in Edinburgh. His father sent him 
 to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. 
 He came to London, where he has been very 
 idle. And now he is going to Utrecht, where 
 he will be as idle as ever." 
 
 That there was a background of truth in 
 these spirited assertions we have every reason 
 to be grateful. Dr. Johnson s value to-day 
 does not depend on the number of essays, or 
 
110 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 reviews, or dedications he wrote in a year, 
 some years he wrote nothing, but on his own 
 sturdy and splendid personality ; " the real 
 primate, the soul s teacher of all England," 
 says Carlyle ; a great embodiment of uncom 
 promising goodness and sense. Every genera 
 tion needs such a man, not to compile diction 
 aries, but to preserve the balance of sanity, 
 and few generations are blest enough to possess 
 him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in 
 the law courts until he was gray without ben 
 efiting or amusing anybody. It was in the 
 nights he spent drinking port wine at the 
 Mitre, and in the days he spent trotting, like 
 a terrier, at his master s heels, that the seed 
 was sown which was to give the world a mas- 
 terpiece of literature, the most delightful bi 
 ography that has ever enriched mankind. It 
 is to leisure that we owe the " Life of Johnson," 
 and a heavy debt we must, in all integrity, 
 acknowledge it to be. 
 
 Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter 
 Scott that he was "making himself in the 
 busy, idle pleasures of his youth ; " in those 
 long rambles by hill and dale, those whimsical 
 adventures in farmhouses, those merry, pur- 
 
LEISURE. Ill 
 
 poseless journeys in which the eager lad tasted 
 the flavor of life. At home such unauthor 
 ized amusements were regarded with emphatic 
 disapprobation. " I greatly doubt, sir," said 
 his father to him one day, "that you were 
 born for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut! " 
 and one half pities the grave clerk to the Sig 
 net, whose own life had been so decorously 
 dull, and who regarded with affectionate so 
 licitude his lovable and incomprehensible son. 
 In later years Sir Walter recognized keenly 
 that his w r asted school hours entailed on him a 
 lasting loss, a loss he was determined his sons 
 should never know. It is to be forever re 
 gretted that " the most Homeric of modern 
 men could not read Homer." But every day 
 he stole from the town to give to the country, 
 every hour he stole from law to give to liter 
 ature, every minute he stole from work to 
 give to pleasure, counted in the end as gain. 
 It is in his pleasures that a man really lives, 
 it is from his leisure that he constructs the true 
 fabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb s fellow- 
 clerks thought that because his days were 
 spent at a desk in the East India House, his 
 life was spent there too. His life was far 
 
112 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 remote from that routine of labor ; built up of 
 golden moments of respite, enriched with joys, 
 chastened by sorrows, vivified by impulses 
 that had no filiation with his daily toil. " For 
 the time that a man may call his own," he 
 writes to Wordsworth, "that is his life." 
 The Lamb who worked in the India House, 
 and who had " no skill in figures," has passed 
 away, and is to-day but a shadow and a name. 
 The Lamb of the " Essays " and the " Letters " 
 lives for us now, and adds each year his 
 generous share to the innocent gayety of the 
 world. This is the Lamb who said, " Riches 
 are chiefly good because they give us time," 
 and who sighed for a little son that he might 
 christen him Nothing-to-do, and permit him 
 to do nothing. 
 
WORDS. 
 
 " Do you read the dictionary ? " asked M. 
 Theophile Gautier of a young and ardent dis 
 ciple who had come to him for counsel. " It 
 is the most fruitful and interesting of books. 
 Words have an individual and a relative value. 
 They should be chosen before being placed in 
 position. This word is a mere pebble ; that a 
 fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handi 
 craft is everything, and the absolute distinc 
 tion of the artist lies, not so much in his 
 capacity to feel nature, as in his power to 
 render it." 
 
 We are always pleased to have a wholesome 
 truth presented to us with such genial viva 
 city, so that we may feel ourselves less edified 
 than diverted, and learn our lesson without 
 the mortifying consciousness of ignorance. He 
 is a wise preceptor who conceals from us his 
 awful rod of office, and grafts his knowledge 
 dexterously upon our self-esteem. 
 
114 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 " Men must be taught as if you taught them not, 
 And things unknown proposed as things forgot." 
 
 An appreciation of words is so rare that every 
 body naturally thinks he possesses it, and this 
 universal sentiment results in the misuse of 
 a material whose beauty enriches the loving 
 student beyond the dreams of avarice. Mu 
 sicians know the value of chords ; painters 
 know the value of colors ; writers are often so 
 blind to the value of words that they are con 
 tent with a bare expression of their thoughts, 
 disdaining the " labor of the file," and confi 
 dent that the phrase first seized is for them 
 the phrase of inspiration. They exaggerate 
 the importance of what they have to say, 
 lacking which we should be none the poorer, 
 and underrate the importance of saying it in 
 such fashion that we may welcome its very 
 moderate significance. It is in the habitual 
 and summary recognition of the laws of lan 
 guage that scholarship delights, says Mr. 
 Pater ; and while the impatient thinker, eager 
 only to impart his views, regards these laws 
 as a restriction, the true artist finds in them 
 an opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe re 
 joiced, to work within conditions and limits. 
 
WORDS. 115 
 
 For every sentence that may be penned or 
 spoken the right words exist. They lie con 
 cealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocab 
 ulary enriched by centuries of noble thought 
 and delicate manipulation. He who does not 
 find them and fit them into place, who ac 
 cepts the first term which presents itself rather 
 than search for the expression which accu 
 rately and beautifully embodies his meaning, 
 aspires to mediocrity, and is content with fail 
 ure. The exquisite adjustment of a word to 
 its significance, which was the instrument of 
 Flaubert s daily martyrdom and daily triumph ; 
 the generous sympathy of a word with its 
 surroundings, which was the secret wrung by 
 Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of 
 language, these are the twin perfections 
 which constitute style, and substantiate genius. 
 Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraor 
 dinary degree Flaubert s art of fitting his 
 words to the exact thoughts they are designed 
 to convey. Such a brief sentence as " Ten 
 thousand difficulties do not make one doubt " 
 reveals with pregnant simplicity the mental 
 attitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne, 
 working under fewer restraints, and without 
 
116 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 the severity of intellectual discipline, harmo 
 nizes each musical syllable into a prose of 
 leisurely sweetness and sonorous strength. 
 " Court not felicity too far, and weary not the 
 favorable hand of fortune." " Man is a noble 
 animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the 
 grave." " The race of delight is short, and 
 pleasures have mutable faces." Such sentences, 
 woven with curious skill from the rich fabric 
 of seventeenth - century English, defy the 
 wreckage of time. In them a gentle dignity 
 of thought finds its appropriate expression, 
 and the restfulness of an unvexed mind 
 breathes its quiet beauty into each cadenced 
 line. Here are no " boisterous metaphors," 
 such as Dryden scorned, to give undue em 
 phasis at every turn, and amaze the careless 
 reader with the cheap delights of turbulence. 
 Here is no trace of that " full habit of 
 speech," hateful to Mr. Arnold s soul, and 
 which, in the years to come, was to be the gift 
 of journalism to literature. 
 
 The felicitous choice of words, which with 
 most writers is the result of severe study and 
 unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored 
 few who should be envied and not imitated 
 
WORDS. 117 
 
 to be the genuine fruit of inspiration, as 
 though caprice itself could not lead them far 
 astray. Shelley s letters and prose papers 
 teem with sentences in which the beautiful 
 words are sufficient satisfaction in themselves, 
 and of more value than the conclusions they 
 reveal. They have a haunting sweetness, a 
 pure perfection, which makes the act of read 
 ing them a sustained and dulcet pleasure. 
 Sometimes this effect is produced by a few 
 simple terms reiterated into lingering music. 
 " We are born, and our birth is unremembered, 
 and our infancy remembered but in fragments ; 
 we live on, and in living we lose the apprehen 
 sion of life." Sometimes a clearer note is 
 struck with the sure and delicate touch which 
 is the excellence of art. "For the mind in 
 creation is as a fading coal, which some invis 
 ible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens 
 to transitory brightness." The substitution of 
 the word " glow " for " brightness " would, I 
 think, make this sentence extremely beautiful. 
 If it lacks the fullness and melody of those 
 incomparable passages in which Burke, the 
 great master of words, rivets our admiration 
 forever, it has the same peculiar and lasting 
 
118 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 hold upon our imaginations and our memo 
 ries. Once read, we can no more forget its 
 charm than we can forget " that chastity of 
 honor which felt a stain like a wound," or 
 the mournful cadence of regret over virtues 
 deemed superfluous in an age of strictly icon 
 oclastic progress. " Never more shall we be 
 hold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, 
 that proud submission, that dignified obedi 
 ence, that subordination of the heart which 
 kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit 
 of an exalted freedom." It is the fashion 
 at present to subtly depreciate Burke s power 
 by some patronizing allusion to the " grand 
 style," - a phrase which, except when applied 
 to Milton, appears to hold in solution an un 
 defined and undefmable reproach. But until 
 we can produce something better, or some 
 thing as good, those " long savorsome Latin 
 words," checked and vivified by " racy Saxon 
 monosyllables," must still represent an excel 
 lence which it is easier to belittle than to 
 emulate. 
 
 It is strange that our chilling disapproba 
 tion of what we are prone to call " fine writ 
 ing " melts into genial applause over the 
 
WORDS. 119 
 
 freakish perversity so dear to modern unrest. 
 We look askance upon such an old-time mas 
 ter of his craft as the Opium-Eater, and re 
 quire to be told by a clear-headed, unenthusi- 
 astic critic like Mr. George Saintsbury that 
 the balanced harmony of De Quincey s style 
 is obtained often by the use of extremely 
 simple words, couched in the clearest imagi 
 nable form. Place by the side of Mr. Pater s 
 picture of Monna Lisa too well known to 
 need quotation De Quincey s equally famous 
 description of Our Lady of Darkness. Both 
 passages are as beautiful as words can make 
 them, but the gift of simplicity is in the 
 hands of the older writer. Or take the single 
 sentence which describes for us the mystery of 
 Our Lady of Sighs : " And her eyes, if they 
 were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor 
 subtle ; no man could read their story ; they 
 would be found filled with perishing dreams, 
 and with wrecks of forgotten delirium." 
 Here, as Mr. Saintsbury justly points out, are 
 no needless adjectives, no unusual or extrava 
 gant words. The sense is adequate to the 
 sound, and the sound is only what is required 
 as accompaniment to the sense. We are not 
 
120 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 perplexed and startled, as when Browning in 
 troduces us to 
 
 "the Tyrrhene whelk s pearl-sheeted lip," 
 
 or to a woman s 
 
 "morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades." 
 
 We are not irritated and confused, as when 
 Carlyle whose misdeeds, like those of 
 Browning, are matters of pure volition is 
 pleased, for our sharper discipline, to write 
 " like a comet inscribing with its tail." No 
 man uses words more admirably, or abuses 
 them more shamefully, than Carlyle. That 
 he should delight in seeing his pages studded 
 all over with such spikes as " mammoiiism," 
 " flunkeyhood," " nonentity," and " simula 
 crum," that he should repeat them again and 
 again with unwearying self-content, is an 
 enigma that defies solution, save on the simple 
 presumption that they are designed, like other 
 instruments of torture, to test the fortitude of 
 the sufferer. It is best to scramble over them 
 as bravely as we can, and forget our scars in 
 the enjoyment of those vivid and matchless 
 pictures in which each word plays its part, 
 and supplies its share of outline and emphasis 
 
WORDS. 121 
 
 to the scene. The art that can dictate such 
 a brief bit of description as " little red-colored 
 pulpy infants " is the art of a Dutch master 
 who, on five inches of canvas, depicts for us 
 with subdued vehemence the absolute realities 
 of life. 
 
 " All freaks," remarks Mr. Arnold, " tend 
 to impair the beauty and power of language ; " 
 yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarre 
 with the picturesque that at present a great 
 deal of English literature resembles a linguis 
 tic museum, where every type of monstrosity 
 is cheerfully exhibited and admired. Writers 
 of splendid capacity, of undeniable originality 
 and force, are not ashamed to add their curios 
 to the group, either from sheer impatience of 
 restraint, or, as I sometimes think, from a 
 grim and perverted sense of humor, which is 
 enlivened by noting how far they can venture 
 beyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredith 
 is pleased to tell us that one of his characters 
 "neighed a laugh," that another "tolled her 
 naughty head," that a third " stamped ; her 
 aspect spat," and that a fourth was discovered 
 " pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth," 
 we cannot smother a dawning suspicion that 
 
122 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 he is diverting himself at our expense, and 
 pluming a smile of his own, more sapless than 
 succulent, over the naive simplicity of the 
 public. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtlety 
 rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor which 
 prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo s 
 " dark Kenaissance face perplexed with an in 
 cipient laugh; " but really a very interesting 
 and improving little paper might be written 
 on the extraordinary laughs and smiles which 
 cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern 
 analytic fiction. " Correctness, that humble 
 merit of prose," has been snubbed into a re 
 cognition of her insignificance. She is as 
 tame as a woman with only one head and 
 two arms amid her more striking and richly 
 endowed sisters in the museum. 
 
 " A language long employed by a delicate 
 and critical society," says Mr. Walter Bage- 
 hot, " is a treasure of dexterous felicities ; " 
 and to awaken the literary conscience to its 
 forgotten duty of guarding this treasure is the 
 avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another 
 stylist, less understood and less appreciated, 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantily 
 rewarded in an age which has but little in- 
 
WORDS. 123 
 
 stinct for fqrm, and which habitually allows 
 itself the utmost license of phraseology. That 
 " unblessed freedom from restraint," which to 
 the clear-eyed Greeks appeared diametrically 
 opposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty, 
 and which finds its amplest expression in the 
 poems of Walt Whitman, has dazzled us only 
 to betray. The emancipation of the savage is 
 sufficiently comprehensive, but his privileges 
 are not always as valuable as they may at first 
 sight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his admira 
 ble volume " French Traits," unhesitatingly 
 defines Whitman s slang as " the riotous 
 medium of the under-languaged ; " and the re 
 proach is not too harsh nor too severe. Even 
 Mr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acute 
 and enthusiastic of his English critics, admits 
 sadly that it is " gutter slang," equally pur 
 poseless and indefensible. That a man who 
 held within himself the elements of greatness 
 should have deliberately lessened the force of 
 his life s work by a willful misuse of his 
 material is one of those bitter and irremedi 
 able errors which sanity forever deplores. 
 We are inevitably repelled by the employ 
 ment of trivial or vulgar words in serious 
 
124 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 poetry, and they become doubly offensive 
 when brought into relation with the beauty 
 and majesty of nature. It is neither pleasant 
 nor profitable to hear the sun s rays described 
 as 
 
 " scooting obliquely high and low." 
 
 It is still less satisfactory to have the universe 
 addressed in this convivial and burlesque fash 
 ion : 
 
 " Earth, you seem to look for something at my hands ; 
 Say, old Topknot, what do you want ? 
 
 There is a kind of humorousness which a true 
 sense of humor would render impossible ; 
 there is a species of originality from which the 
 artist shrinks aghast; and worse than mere 
 vulgarity is the constant employment of words 
 indecorous in themselves, and irreverent in 
 their application, the smirching of clean 
 and noble things with adjectives grossly un 
 fitted for such use, and repellent to all the 
 canons of good taste. This is not the " gentle 
 pressure " which Sophocles put upon common 
 words to wring from them a fresh significance ; 
 it is a deliberate abuse of terms, and betrays 
 a lack of that fine quality of self-repression 
 which embraces the power of selection, and is 
 
WORDS. 125 
 
 the best characteristic of literary morality. 
 " Oh, for the style of honest men ! " sighs 
 Sainte-Beuve, sick of such unreserved dis 
 closures ; " of men who have revered every 
 thing worthy of respect, whose innate feelings 
 have ever been governed by the principles of 
 good taste. Oh, for the polished, pure, and 
 moderate writers ! " 
 
 There is a pitiless French maxim, less pop 
 ular with English and Americans than with 
 our Gallic neighbors, " Le secret d ennuyer 
 est de tout dire." Mr. Pater indeed expresses 
 the same thought in ampler English fashion 
 (which but emphasizes the superiority of the 
 French) when he says, " For in truth all art does 
 but consist in the removal of surplusage, from 
 the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing 
 away the last particle of invisible dust, back 
 to the earliest divination of the finished work 
 to be, lying somewhere, according to Michel 
 angelo s fancy, in the rough-hewn block of 
 stone." That the literary artist tests his skill 
 by a masterly omission of all that is better 
 left unsaid is a truth widely admitted and 
 scantily utilized. Authors who have not 
 taken the trouble de faire leur toilette admit 
 
126 JESS AYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 us with painful frankness into their dressing- 
 rooms, and suffer us to gaze more intimately 
 than is agreeable to us upon the dubious 
 mysteries of their deshabille. Authors who 
 have the gift of continuity disregard with 
 insistent generosity the limits of time and 
 patience. What a noble poem was lost to 
 myriads of readers when " The Ring and the 
 Book " reached its twenty thousandth line ! 
 How inexorable is the tyranny of a great and 
 powerful poet who will spare his readers no 
 thing! Authors who are indifferent to the 
 beauties of reserve charge down upon us with 
 a dreadful impetuosity from which there is no 
 escape. The strength that lies in delicacy, 
 the chasteness of style which does not aban 
 don itself to every impulse, are qualities ill- 
 understood by men who subordinate taste to 
 fervor, and whose words, coarse, rank, or unc 
 tuous, betray the undisciplined intellect that 
 mistakes passion for power. " The language 
 of poets," says Shelley, " has always effected a 
 certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of 
 sound, without which it were not poetry ; " and 
 it is the sustained effort to secure this bal 
 anced harmony, this magnificent work within 
 
WORDS. 127 
 
 limits, which constitutes the achievement of 
 the poet, and gives beauty and dignity to his 
 art. " Where is the man who can flatter him 
 self that he knows the language of prose, if he 
 has not assiduously practiced the language of 
 poetry?" asks M. Francisque Sarcey, whose 
 requirements are needlessly exacting, but 
 whose views would have been cordially in 
 dorsed by at least one great master of English. 
 Dryden always maintained that the admirable 
 quality of his prose was due to his long train 
 ing in a somewhat mechanical verse. A more 
 modern and diverting approximation of M. 
 Sarcey s views may be found in the robust 
 statement of Benjamin Franklin : " I ap 
 proved, for my part, the amusing one s self 
 now and then with poetry, so far as to im 
 prove one s language, but no farther." It is 
 a pity that people cannot always be born in 
 the right generation ! What a delicious pic 
 ture is presented to our fancy of a nineteenth- 
 century Franklin amusing himself and im 
 proving his language by an occasional study 
 of " Bordello " ! 
 
 The absolute mastery of words, which is the 
 prerogative of genius, can never be acquired 
 
128 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 by painstaking, or revealed to criticism. Mr. 
 Lowell, pondering deeply on the subject, has 
 devoted whole pages to a scholarly analysis of 
 the causes which assisted Shakespeare to his 
 unapproached and unapproachable vocabulary. 
 The English language was then, Mr. Lowell 
 reminds us, a living thing, " hot from the 
 hearts and brains of a people ; not hardened 
 yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of 
 sharp and clear relief in the moulds of new 
 thought. Shakespeare found words ready to 
 his use, original and untarnished, types of 
 thought whose edges were unworn by repeated 
 impressions. . . . No arbitrary line had been 
 drawn between high words and low ; vulgar 
 then meant simply what was common ; poetry 
 had not been aliened from the people by the 
 establishment of an Upper House of vocables. 
 The conception of the poet had no time to cool 
 while he was debating the comparative respec 
 tability of this phrase or that ; but he snatched 
 what word his instinct prompted, and saw no 
 indiscretion in making a king speak as his 
 country nurse might have taught him." 
 
 It is a curious thing, however, that the more 
 we try to account for the miracles of genius, 
 
WORDS. 129 
 
 the more miraculous they grow. We can 
 never hope to understand the secret of Ho 
 mer s style. It is best to agree simply with 
 Mr. Pater : " Homer was always saying things 
 in this manner." We can never know how 
 Keats came to write, 
 
 "With beaded bubbles winking at the brim," 
 
 or those other lines, perhaps the most beautiful 
 in our language, 
 
 " Magic casements, opening on the foam 
 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 
 
 It is all a mystery, hidden from the un 
 inspired, and Mr. Lowell s clean-built scaf 
 folding, while it helps us to a comprehensive 
 enjoyment of Shakespeare, leaves us dumb 
 and amazed as ever before the concentrated 
 splendor of a single line, 
 
 " In cradle of the rude, imperious surge." 
 
 There is only one way to fathom its concep 
 tion. The great waves reared their foamy 
 heads, and whispered him the words. 
 
 The richness of Elizabethan English, the 
 freedom and delight with which men sounded 
 and explored the charming intricacies of a 
 tongue that was expanding daily into fresh 
 
130 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 majesty and beauty, must have given to litera 
 ture some of the allurements of navigation. 
 Mariners sailed away upon stormy seas, on 
 strange, half -hinted errands ; haunted by the 
 shadow of glory, dazzled by the lustre of 
 wealth. Scholars ventured far upon the un 
 known ocean of letters ; haunted by the seduc 
 tions of prose, dazzled by the fairness of 
 verse. They brought back curious spoils, 
 gaudy, subtle, sumptuous, according to the 
 taste or potency of the discoverer. Their 
 words have often a mingled weight and sweet 
 ness, whether conveying briefly a single 
 thought, like Burton s " touched with the 
 loadstone of love," or adding strength and 
 lustre to the ample delineations of Ben Jon- 
 son. " Give me that wit whom praise ex 
 cites, glory puts on, or disgrace grieves ; he 
 is to be nourished with ambition, pricked for 
 ward with honors, checked with reprehension, 
 and never to be suspected of sloth." Bacon s 
 admirable conciseness, in which nothing is 
 disregarded, but where every word carries its 
 proper value and expresses its exact signifi 
 cance, is equaled only by Cardinal Newman. 
 "Reading maketh a full man, conference a 
 
WORDS. 131 
 
 ready man, and study an exact man," says 
 Bacon ; and this simple accuracy of definition 
 reminds us inevitably of the lucid terseness 
 with which every sentence of the " Apologia " 
 reveals the thought it holds. " The truest 
 expedience is to answer right out when you 
 are asked ; the wisest economy is to have no 
 management ; the best prudence is not to be a 
 coward." As for the naivete and the pictur- 
 esqueness which lend such inexpressible charm 
 to the earlier writers and atone for so many of 
 their misdeeds, what can be more agreeable 
 than to hear Sir Walter Raleigh remark with 
 cheerful ingenuousness, " Some of our cap- 
 taines garoused of wine till they were reason 
 able pleasant " ! a most engaging way of 
 narrating a not altogether uncommon occur 
 rence. And what can be more winning to the 
 ear than the simple grace with which Roger 
 Ascham writes of familiar things : "In the 
 whole year, Springtime, Summer, Fall of the 
 Leaf, and Winter ; and in one day, Morning, 
 Noontime, Afternoon, and Eventide, altereth 
 the course of the weather, the pith of the bow, 
 the strength of the man " ! It seems an easy 
 thing to say " fall of the leaf " for fall, and 
 
132 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 " eventide " for evening, but in such easy 
 things lies the subtle beauty of language ; in 
 the rejection of such nice distinctions lies the 
 barrenness of common speech. We can hardly 
 spare the time, in these hurried days, to 
 speak of the fall of the leaf, to use four words 
 where one would suffice, merely because the 
 four words have a graceful significance, and 
 the one word has none ; and so, even in com 
 position, this finely colored phrase, with its 
 hint of russet, wind-swept woods, is lost to us 
 forever. Yet compare with it the line which 
 Lord Tennyson, that great master of beauti 
 ful words, puts into Marian s song : 
 
 " Have you still any honey, my dear ? 
 She said, It s the fall of the year ; 
 But come, come ! 
 
 How tame and gray is the idiom which con 
 veys a fact, which defines a season, but sug 
 gests nothing to our imaginations, by the side 
 of the idiom which brings swiftly before our 
 eyes the brilliant desolation of autumn ! 
 
 The narrow vocabulary, which is the conver 
 sational freehold of people whose education 
 should have provided them a broader field, 
 admits of little that is picturesque or forcible, 
 
WORDS. 133 
 
 and of less that is finely graded or delicately 
 conceived. Ordinary conversation appears to 
 consist mainly of " ands," " buts," and " thes," 
 with an occasional " well " to give a flavor of 
 nationality, a " yes " or " no " to stand for 
 individual sentiment, and a few widely exag 
 gerated terms to destroy value and perspective. 
 Is this, one wonders, the " treasure of dex 
 terous felicities " which Mr. Bagehot contem 
 plated with such delight, and which a critical 
 society is destined to preserve flawless and 
 uncontaminated ? Is this the "heroic utter 
 ance," the great " mother tongue," possessing 
 which we all become or so Mr. Sydney 
 Dobell assures us 
 
 " Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare s soul, 
 Sublime as Milton s immemorial theme, 
 And rich as Chaucer s speech and fair as Spenser s dream " ? 
 
 Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr. 
 Oscar Wilde to such rapturous and finely 
 worded praise, praise which awakens in us 
 a noble emulation to prove what we can 
 accomplish with a medium at once so sump 
 tuous and so flexible ? " For the material that 
 painter or sculptor uses is meagre in compari 
 son with language," says Mr. Wilde. " Words 
 
134 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 have not merely music as sweet as that of viol 
 and lute, color as rich and vivid as any that 
 makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian 
 or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure 
 and certain than that which reveals itself in 
 marble or in bronze ; but thought and passion 
 and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs 
 indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised 
 nothing 1 but language, they would still have 
 been the great art critics of the world. To 
 know the principles of the highest art is to 
 know the principles of all the arts." 
 
 This is not claiming too much, for in truth 
 Mr. Wilde is sufficiently well equipped to 
 illustrate his claim. If his sentences are 
 sometimes overloaded with ornament, the 
 decorations are gold, not tinsel ; if his vocab 
 ulary is gorgeous, it is never glaring ; if his 
 allusions are fanciful, they are controlled and 
 subdued into moderation. Even the inev 
 itable and swiftly uttered reproach of " fine 
 writing " cannot altogether blind us to the 
 fact that his are beautiful words, pearls 
 and amethysts M. Gautier would call them, 
 aptly chosen, and fitted into place with 
 the careful skill of a goldsmith. They are 
 
WORDS. 135 
 
 free, moreover, from that vice of unexpected 
 ness which is part of fine writing, and which 
 Mr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among the 
 literary workers of to-day ; the desire to sur 
 prise us by some new and profoundly ir 
 relevant application of a familiar word. The 
 " veracity " of a bar of music, the finely exe 
 cuted " passage " of a marble chimney-piece, 
 the " andante " of a sonnet, and the curious 
 statement, commonly applied to Mr. Glad 
 stone, that he is " part of the conscience of 
 a nation," these are the vagaries which to 
 Mr. Saintsbury, and to every other student 
 of words, appear so manifestly discouraging. 
 Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of an 
 aesthetic sideboard which was described to 
 him as having a Chippendale feeling about 
 it, before which touching conceit the ever 
 famous " fringes of the north star " pale into 
 insignificance. A recent editor of Shelley s 
 letters and essays says with seeming serious 
 ness in his preface that the " Witch of Atlas " 
 is a " characteristic outcome," an " exquisite 
 mouse of fancy brought forth by what moun 
 tain of Shelley an imagination." Now, when 
 a careful student and an appreciative reader 
 
136 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 can bring himself to speak of a poem as a 
 "mouse of fancy," merely for the sake of 
 forcing a conceit, and confronting us with the 
 perils of the unexpected, it is time we turned 
 soberly back to first principles and to our dic 
 tionaries ; it is time we listened anew to M. 
 Gautier s advice, and studied the value of 
 words. 
 
ENNUI. 
 
 " Tous les genres sont permis, hors le genre ennuyeux." 
 
 " WANT and ennui," says Schopenhauer, 
 " are the two poles of human life." The fur 
 ther we escape from one evil, the nearer we 
 inevitably draw to the other. As soon as the 
 first rude pressure of necessity is relieved, and 
 man has leisure to think of something beyond 
 his unsatisfied craving for food and shelter, 
 then ennui steps in and claims him for her 
 own. It is the price he pays, not merely for 
 luxury, but for comfort. Time, the inexorable 
 taskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hard 
 with whip and spur when we are struggling 
 under the heavy burden of work ; but stays his 
 hand, and prolongs the creeping hours, when 
 we are delivered over to that weariness of 
 spirit which weights each moment with lead. 
 Time is, in fact, either our open oppressor or 
 our false friend. He is that agent by which, 
 at every instant, " all things in our hands 
 
138 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 become as nothing, and lose any real value 
 they possess." 
 
 Here is a doctrine distinctly discouraging, 
 and stated with that relentless candor which 
 compels our reluctant consideration. There 
 can be no doubt that to Schopenhauer s mind 
 ennui was an evil every whit as palpable as 
 want. He hated and feared them both with 
 the painful susceptibility of a self-centred 
 man ; and he strove resolutely from his youth 
 to protect himself against these twin disasters 
 of life. The determined fashion in which he 
 guarded his patrimony from loss resembled the 
 determined fashion in which he strove with 
 less success to guard himself from boredom. 
 The vapid talk, the little wearisome iterations, 
 which most of us bear resignedly enough be 
 cause custom has taught us patience, were to 
 him intolerable afflictions. He retaliated by 
 an ungracious dismissal of society as some 
 thing pitiably and uniformly contemptible. 
 His advice has not the grave and simple wis 
 dom of Sir Thomas Browne, " Be able to be 
 alone," but is founded rather on Voltaire s dis 
 dainful maxim, " The world is full of people 
 who are not worth speaking to," and implies 
 
ENNUL 139 
 
 an almost savage rejection of one s fellow-be 
 ings. " Every fool is pathetically social," says 
 Schopenhauer, and the advantage of solitude 
 consists less in the possession of ourselves than 
 in the escape from others. With whimsical 
 eagerness he built barrier after barrier be 
 tween himself and the dreaded enemy, ennui, 
 only to see his citadel repeatedly stormed, and 
 to find himself at the mercy of his foe. There 
 is but one method, after all, by which the in 
 vader can be even partially disarmed, and this 
 method was foreign to Schopenhauer s nature. 
 It was practiced habitually by Sir Walter 
 Scott, who, in addition to his sustained and 
 splendid work, threw himself with such unself 
 ish, unswerving ardor into the interests of 
 his brother men that he never gave them a 
 thorough chance to bore him. They did their 
 part stoutly enough, and were doubtless as 
 tiresome as they knew how to be ; but his in 
 vincible sweet temper triumphed over their 
 malignity, and enabled him to say, in the even 
 ing of his life, that he had suffered little at 
 their hands, and had seldom found any one 
 from whom he could not extract either amuse* 
 ment or edification. 
 
140 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Perhaps his journal tells a different tale, a 
 tale of heavy moments stretching into hours, 
 and borne with cheerful patience out of simple 
 consideration for others. Men and women, 
 friends and strangers, took forcible possession 
 of his golden leisure, and he yielded it to them 
 without a murmur. That which was well-nigh 
 maddening to Carlyle s irritable nerves and 
 selfish petulance, and which strained even 
 Charles Lamb s forbearance to the snapping- 
 point, Sir Walter endured smilingly, as if it 
 were the most reasonable thing in the world. 
 Mr. Lang is right when he says Scott did not 
 preach socialism, he practiced it; that is, he 
 never permitted himself to assign to his own 
 comfort or convenience a very important place 
 in existence ; he never supposed his own satis 
 faction to be the predestined purpose of the 
 universe. But his love for genial life, his 
 keen enjoyment of social pleasures, made him 
 singularly sensitive to ennui. He was able, 
 indeed, like Sir Thomas Browne, to be alone, 
 when the charity of his fellow-creatures 
 suffered it, and he delighted in diverting 
 companionship, whether of peers or hinds ; but 
 the weariness of daily intercourse with stupid 
 
ENNUI. 141 
 
 people told as heavily upon him as upon less 
 patient victims. Little notes scattered through 
 out his journal reveal his misery, and awaken 
 sympathetic echoes in every long-tried soul. 
 " Of all bores," he writes, " the greatest is to 
 hear a dull and bashful man sing a facetious 
 song." And again, with humorous intensity: 
 " Miss Ayton s father is a bore, after the fash 
 ion of all fathers, mothers, aunts, and other 
 chaperons of pretty actresses." And again, 
 this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne : 
 
 " Oh, James ! oh, James ! two Irish dames 
 
 Oppress me very sore : 
 I groaning send one sheet I Ve penned, 
 For, hang- them ! there s no more." 
 
 That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings as 
 soon as they were over is proof, not of callous 
 ness, but of magnanimity. He forgave his tor 
 mentors the instant they ceased to torment 
 him, and then found time to deplore his pre 
 vious irritation. " I might at least have asked 
 him to dinner," he was heard murmuring self- 
 reproachfully, when an unscrupulous intruder 
 had at last departed from Abbotsford ; and 
 on another occasion, when some impatient lads 
 refused to emulate his forbearance, he recalled 
 
142 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 them with prompt insistence to their forgot 
 ten sense of propriety. " Come, come, young 
 gentlemen," he expostulated. " It requires 
 no small ability, I assure you, to be a decided 
 bore. You must endeavor to show a little 
 more respect." 
 
 The self-inflicted pangs of ennui are less 
 salutary and infinitely more onerous than those 
 we suffer at the hands of others. It is natural 
 that our just resentment when people weary us 
 should result in a temporary taste for solitude, 
 a temporary exaltation of our own society. 
 Like most sentiments erected on an airy tres 
 tle-work of vanity, this is an agreeable delusion 
 while it lasts ; but it seldom does last after we 
 are bold enough to put it to the test. The in 
 evitable and rational discontent which lies at 
 the bottom of our hearts is not a thing to be 
 banished by noise, or lulled to sleep by silence. 
 We are not sufficient for ourselves, and com 
 panionship is not sufficient for us. " Venez, 
 monsieur," said Louis XIII. to a listless court 
 ier ; " allons nous ennuyer ensemble." We 
 fancy it is the detail of life, its small griev 
 ances, its apparent monotony, its fretful cares, 
 its hours alternately lagging and feverish, that 
 
ENNUI. 143 
 
 wear out the joy of existence. This is not so. 
 Were each day differently filled, the result 
 would be much the same. Young Maurice de 
 Guerin, struggling with a depression he too 
 clearly understands, strikes at the very root of 
 the matter in one dejected sentence : " Mon 
 Dieu, que je souffre de la vie ! Non dans ses 
 accidents, un peu de philosophic y suffit ; mais 
 dans elle-meme, dans sa substance, a part tout 
 phenomene." To which the steadfast optimist 
 opposes an admirable retort: "It is a pity 
 that M. de Guerin should have permitted him 
 self this relentless analysis of a misery which 
 is never bettered by contemplation." Happi 
 ness may not be, as we are sometimes told, the 
 legacy of the barbarian, but neither is it a final 
 outcome of civilization. Men can weary, and 
 do weary, of every stage that represents a step 
 in the world s progress, and the ennui of men 
 tal starvation is equaled only by the ennui of 
 mental satiety. 
 
 It is curious how much of this temper is 
 reflected in the somewhat dispiriting literature 
 which attains popularity to-day. Mr. Hamlin 
 Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called 
 I think unfairly " Main-Travelled Roads" 
 
144 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 have deprived most of us of some cheerful 
 hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life 
 in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the 
 poverty of his Western farmers that oppresses 
 us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser 
 evils with its deadly breath, is not known to 
 these people at all. They have roofs, fire, 
 food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless 
 labor, the rough fare, the gray skies, the 
 muddy barnyards, which stand for the trouble 
 in their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of 
 living. It is the burden of a dull existence, 
 clogged at every pore, and the hopeless mel 
 ancholy of which they have sufficient intelli 
 gence to understand. Theirs is the ennui of 
 emptiness, and the implied reproach 011 every 
 page is that a portion, and only a portion, 
 of mankind is doomed to walk along these 
 shaded paths ; while happier mortals who 
 abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spend 
 their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual 
 and artistic excitation. The clearest denial of 
 this fallacy may be found in that matchless 
 and desolate sketch of Mr. Pater s called " Se 
 bastian van Storck," where we have painted for 
 us with penetrating distinctness man s delib- 
 
ENNUI. 145 
 
 erate rejection of those crowded accessories 
 which, to the empty-handed, represent the joys 
 of life. Never has the undying essence of 
 ennui been revealed to our unwilling gaze as 
 in this merciless picture. Never has it been 
 so portrayed in its awful nakedness, amid a 
 plenty which it cannot be persuaded to share. 
 We see the rich, warm, highly colored sur 
 roundings, the vehement intensity of work and 
 pastime, the artistic completeness of every 
 detail, the solicitations of love, the delicate and 
 alluring touches which give to every day its 
 separate delight, its individual value ; and, 
 amid all these things, the impatient soul striv 
 ing vainly to adjust itself to a life which seems 
 so worth the living. Here, indeed, is one of 
 u Fortune s favorites," whom she decks with 
 garlands like a sacrificial heifer, and at whom, 
 unseen, she points her mocking finger. En 
 compassed from childhood by the " thriving 
 genius " of the Dutch, by the restless activity 
 which made dry land and populous towns 
 where nature had willed the sea, and by the 
 admirable art which added each year to the 
 heaped-up treasures of Holland, Sebastian 
 van Storck has but one vital impulse which 
 
146 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 shapes itself to an end, escape ; escape from 
 an existence made unendurable by its stifling 
 fullness, its vivid and marvelous accomplish 
 ment. 
 
 It is an interesting question to determine, 
 or to endeavor to determine, how far animals 
 share man s melancholy capacity for ennui. 
 Schopenhauer, who, like Hartmann and all 
 other professional pessimists, steadfastly main 
 tains that beasts are happier than men, is dis 
 posed to believe that in their natural state 
 they never suffer from this malady, and that, 
 even when domesticated, only the most intelli 
 gent give any indication of its presence. But 
 how does Schopenhauer know that which he so 
 confidently affirms ? The bird, impelled by an 
 instinct she is powerless to resist, sits patiently 
 on her eggs until they are hatched ; but who 
 can say she is not weary of the pastime ? What 
 loneliness and discontent may find expression 
 in the lion s dreadful roar, which is said to be 
 as mournful as it is terrible ! We are nat 
 urally tempted, in moments of fretfulness and 
 dejection, to seek relief not unmixed with 
 env y i n contemplating with Sir Thomas 
 Browne " the happiness of inferior creatures 
 
ENNUI. 147 
 
 who iii tranquillity possess their constitutions." 
 But freedom from care, and from the apprehen 
 sion that is worse than care, does not neces 
 sarily imply freedom from all disagreeable 
 sensations ; and the surest claim of the brute 
 to satisfaction, its absolute adequacy to the 
 place it is designed to fill, is destroyed by our 
 interference in its behalf. As a result, domes 
 tic pets reveal plainly to every close observer 
 how frequently they suffer from ennui. They 
 pay, in smaller coin, the same price that man 
 pays for comfortable living. Mr. Ruskin has 
 written with ready sympathy of the house dog, 
 who bears resignedly long hours of dull inac 
 tion, and only shows by his frantic delight 
 what a relief it is to be taken out for the mild 
 dissipation of a stroll. I have myself watched 
 and pitied the too evident ennui of my cat, 
 poor little beast of prey, deprived in a mouse- 
 less home of the supreme pleasures of the 
 hunt ; fed until dinner ceases to be a coveted 
 enjoyment ; housed, cushioned, combed, ca 
 ressed, and forced to bear upon her pretty 
 shoulders the burden of a wearisome opulence, 
 or what represents opulence to a pussy. I 
 have seen Agrippina listlessly moving from 
 
148 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 chair to chair, and from sofa to sofa, in a vain 
 attempt to nap ; looking for a few languid 
 minutes out of the window with the air of a 
 great lady sadly bored at the play ; and then 
 turning dejectedly back into the room whose 
 attractions she had long since exhausted. Her 
 expressive eyes lifted to mine betrayed her dis 
 content ; the lassitude of an irksome luxury 
 unnerved her graceful limbs ; if she could have 
 spoken, it would have been to complain with 
 Charles Lamb of that " dumb, sopor ifical good- 
 for-nothingness " which clogs the wheels of 
 life. 
 
 It is a pleasant fancy, baseless and proof- 
 less, which makes us imagine the existence of 
 fishes to be peculiarly tranquil and unmolested. 
 The element in which they live appears to 
 shelter them from so many evils ; noises es 
 pecially, and the sharpness of sudden change, 
 scorching heats, and the inclement skies of 
 winter. A delightful mystery wraps them 
 round, and the smooth apathy with which they 
 glide through the water suggests content ap 
 proaching to complacency. That old-fashioned 
 poem beginning 
 
 " Deep in the wave is a coral grove, 
 Where the purple mullet and goldfish rove," 
 
ENNUI. 149 
 
 filled my childish heart with a profound envy 
 of these happy creatures, which was greatly 
 increased by reading a curious story of Father 
 Faber s, called " The Melancholy Heart." In 
 this tale, a little shipwrecked girl is carried to 
 the depths of the ocean, and sees the green sea 
 swinging to and fro because it is so full of joy, 
 and the fishes waving their glistening fins in 
 silent satisfaction, and the oysters opening and 
 shutting their shells in lazy raptures of delight. 
 Afterwards she visits the birds and beasts and 
 insects, and finds amongst them intelligence, 
 industry, patience, ingenuity, a whole host 
 of admirable qualities, but nowhere else the 
 sweet contentment of that dumb watery life. 
 So universal is this fallible sentiment that 
 even Leopardi, while assigning to all created 
 things their full share of pain, reluctantly ad 
 mits that the passive serenity of the less viva 
 cious creatures of the sea starfish and their 
 numerous brothers and sisters is the nearest 
 possible approach to an utterly impossible 
 happiness. And indeed it is difficult to look 
 at a sea-urchin slowly moving its countless 
 spines in the clear shallow water without 
 thinking that here, at least, is an existence 
 
150 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 equally free from excitability and from ennui ; 
 here is a state of being sufficient for itself, 
 and embracing all the enjoyment it can hold. 
 The other side of the story is presented when 
 we discover the little prickly cup lying empty 
 and dry on the peak of a neighboring rock, 
 and know that a crow s sharp beak has relent 
 lessly dug the poor urchin from its comfortable 
 cradle, and ended its slumbrous felicity. Yet 
 the sudden cessation of life has nothing what 
 ever to do with its reasonable contentment. 
 The question is, not how soon is it over, or how 
 does it come to an end, but is it worth living- 
 while it lasts ? Moreover, the chances of death 
 make the sweetness of self-preservation ; and 
 this is precisely the sentiment which Leigh 
 Hunt has so admirably embodied in those lines 
 the finest, I think, he ever wrote where 
 the fish pleads for its own pleasant and satis 
 factory existence : 
 
 * A cold, sweet, silver life, wrapped in round waves, 
 Quickened with touches of transporting- fear." 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, fear is the best antidote 
 for ennui. The early settlers of America, sur 
 rounded by hostile Indians, and doubtful each 
 morning whether the coming nightfall would 
 
ENNUI. 151 
 
 not see their rude homes given to the flames, 
 probably suffered but little from the dullness 
 which seems so oppressive to the peaceful agri 
 culturist of to-day. The mediaeval women, who 
 were content to pass their time in weaving 
 endless tapestries, had less chance to complain 
 of the monotony of life than their artistic, 
 scientific, literary, and philanthropic sisters of 
 our age; for at any hour, breaking in upon 
 their tranquil labors, might be heard the 
 trumpet s blast ; at any hour might come the 
 tidings, good or bad, which meant a few more 
 years of security, or the horrors of siege and 
 pillage. 
 
 It is pleasant to turn our consideration from 
 the ennui which is inevitable, and consequently 
 tragic, to the ennui which is accidental, and 
 consequently diverting. The first is part of 
 ourselves, from which there is no escape ; the 
 second is, as a rule, the contribution of our 
 neighbors, and may be eluded if fortune and 
 our own wits favor us. Lord Byron, for ex 
 ample, finding himself hard beset by Madame 
 de Stael, whom he abhorred, had the dexterity 
 to entrap poor little " Monk " Lewis into the 
 conversation, and then slipped away from both, 
 
152 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 leaving them the dismally congenial task of 
 wearying each other without mercy. "A bore," 
 says Bishop Selwyn, "is a man who will persist 
 in talking about himself when you want to talk 
 about yourself ; " and this simple explanation 
 offers a satisfactory solution of much of the 
 ennui suffered in society. People with theories 
 of life are, perhaps, the most relentless of their 
 kind, for no time or place is sacred from their 
 devastating elucidations. A theoretic social 
 ist not the practical working kind, like Sir 
 Walter is adamant to the fatigue of his lis 
 teners. " Eloquence," says Mr. Lowell feel 
 ingly, " has no bowels for its victims ; " and 
 one of the most pathetic figures in the history 
 of literature is poor Heine, awakened from his 
 sweet morning nap by Ludwig Borne, who sat 
 relentlessly on the edge of the bed and talked 
 patriotism. I hardly think that even this wan 
 ton injury justified Heine in his cruel attack 
 upon Borne, when the latter was dead and 
 could offer no defense ; yet who knows how 
 many drops of concentrated bitterness were 
 stored up in those dreary moments of bore 
 dom ! The only other instance of ennui which 
 seems as grievous and as cruel is the picture 
 
ENNUI. 153 
 
 of the Baron Fouque s brilliant wife con 
 demned to play loto every evening with the 
 officers of the victorious French army; an 
 illustration equally novel and malign of the 
 devastating inhumanity of war. 
 
 In fact, amusements which do not amuse are 
 among the most depressing of earthly evils. 
 When Sir George Cornwall Lewis candidly 
 confessed that life would be tolerable were it 
 not for its pleasures, he had little notion that 
 he was uttering a witticism fated to enjoy 
 a melancholy immortality. His protest was 
 purely personal, and society, prompt to recog 
 nize a grievance when it is presented, has gone 
 on ever since peevishly and monotonously echo 
 ing his lament. We crave diversion so eagerly, 
 we need it so sorely, that our disappointment 
 in its elusiveness is fed by the flickerings of 
 perpetual hope. Ennui has been denned as a 
 desire for activity without the capacity for ac 
 tion, as a state of inertia quickened by discon 
 tent. But it is rather a desire for amusement 
 than for activity ; it is a rational instinct 
 warped by the irony of circumstances, and by 
 our own selfish limitations. It was not activ 
 ity that Schopenhauer lacked. He worked 
 
154 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS, 
 
 hard all his life, and with the concentrated 
 industry of a man who knew exactly what 
 he wanted to do. It was the common need of 
 enjoyment, which he shared with the rest of 
 mankind, and his own singular incapacity for 
 enjoying himself, which chafed him into bitter 
 ness, and made him so unreasonably angry with 
 the world. " In human existence," says Leo- 
 pardi, "the intervals between pleasure and 
 pain are occupied by ennui. And since all 
 pleasures are like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile, 
 thin, and transparent, ennui penetrates their 
 tissue and saturates them, just as air pene 
 trates the webs. It is, indeed, nothing but a 
 yearning for happiness, without the illusion of 
 pleasure or the reality of pain. This yearning 
 is never satisfied, since true happiness does not 
 exist. So that life is interwoven with weariness 
 and suffering, and one of these evils disap 
 pears only to give place to the other. Such is 
 the destiny of man." 
 
 Now, to endure pain resolutely, courage is 
 required ; to endure ennui, one must be bred 
 to the task. The restraints of a purely arti 
 ficial society are sufferable to those only whom 
 ciistom has rendered docile, and who have been 
 
ENNUI. 155 
 
 trained to subordinate their own impulses and 
 desires. The more elaborate the social con 
 ditions, the more relentless this need of adjust 
 ment, which makes a harmonious whole at 
 the cost of individual development. We all 
 know how, when poor Frances Burney was 
 lifted suddenly from the cheerful freedom of 
 middle-class life to the wearisome etiquette of 
 a court, she drooped and fretted under the bur 
 den of an honor which brought her nothing 
 but vexation. Macaulay, who champions her 
 cause with burning zeal, is pleased to repre 
 sent the monotony of court as simple slavery 
 with no extenuating circumstances. He likens 
 Dr. Burney conducting his daughter to the 
 palace to a Circassian father selling his own 
 child into bondage. The sight of the authoress 
 of " Evelina " assisting at the queen s toilet, or 
 chatting sleepily with the ladies in waiting, 
 thrills him with indignation ; the thought of 
 her playing cards night after night with 
 Madame Schwellenberg reduces him to de 
 spair. And indeed, card-playing, if you have 
 not the grace to like it, is the most unprofit 
 able form of social martyrdom ; you suffer 
 horribly yourself, and you add very little to 
 
156 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 the pleasure of your neighbor. The Baroness 
 Fouque may have conquered the infantine im 
 becilities of loto with no great mental exhaus 
 tion. If she were painfully bored, her patience 
 alone was taxed. The Frenchmen probably 
 thought her a pleased and animated com 
 panion. But Miss Burney, delicate, sleepy, 
 fatigued, loathing cards, and inwardly re 
 bellious at her fate, must have made the game 
 drag sadly before bedtime. It was a dreary 
 waste of moments for her ; but a less intoler 
 ant partisan than Macaulay would have some 
 sympathy to spare for poor Madame Schwel- 
 leiiberg, who, like most women of rank, adored 
 the popular pastime, and who doubtless found 
 the distinguished young novelist a very unsat 
 isfactory associate. 
 
 It is salutary to turn from Miss Burney and 
 her wrathful historian to the letters of Char 
 lotte Elizabeth, mother of the Regent d Or- 
 leans, and see how the oppressive monotony of 
 the French court was cheerfully endured for 
 fifty years by a woman exiled from home and 
 kindred, whose pleasures were few, whose an 
 noyances were manifold. Madame would have 
 enjoyed nothing better than a bowl of beer, 
 
ENNUI. 157 
 
 soup, or a dish of sausages eaten in congenial 
 company. She lunched daily alone, on hated 
 French messes, stared at by twenty footmen, 
 from whose supercilious eyes she was glad to 
 escape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madame 
 detested sermons. She listened to them end 
 lessly without complaint, and was grateful for 
 the occasional privilege of a nap. Madame 
 liked cards. She was not permitted to play, 
 nor even to show herself at the lansquenet 
 table. She never gambled, in fact, she had 
 no money, and it was a fancy of her hus 
 band s that she brought him ill luck by hover 
 ing near. Neither was she allowed to retire. 
 " All the old women who do not play have to 
 be entertained by me," she writes with sur 
 passing good humor. " This goes on from 
 seven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully." 
 Supper was eaten at the royal table, where the 
 guests often waited three quarters of an hour 
 for the king to appear, and where nobody 
 spoke a word during the meal. "I live as 
 though I were quite alone in the world," con 
 fesses this friendless exile to her favorite 
 correspondent, the Raugravine Louise. " But 
 I am resigned to such a state of things, and 
 
158 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 I meddle in nothing." Here was a woman 
 trained to the endurance of ennui. The theatre 
 and the chase were her sole amusements ; let 
 ter-writing was her only occupation. Her 
 healthy German nature had in it no trace of 
 languor, no bitterness born of useless rebellion 
 against fate. She knew how to accept the in 
 evitable, and how to enjoy the accidental ; and 
 this double philosophy afforded her something 
 closely resembling content. Napoleon, it is 
 said, once desired some comedians to play 
 at court, and M. de Talleyrand gravely an 
 nounced to the audience waiting to hear them, 
 " Gentlemen, the emperor earnestly requests 
 you to be amused." Had Charlotte Elizabeth 
 long before laid to sleep in St. Denis 
 been one of that patient group, she would have 
 literally obeyed the royal commands. She 
 would have responded with prompt docility to 
 any offered entertainment. This is not an easy 
 task. " Amuse me, if you can find out how to 
 do it," was the melancholy direction of Riche 
 lieu to Boisrobert, when the pains of ennui 
 grew unbearable, and even kittens ceased to 
 be diverting. Amuse ! amuse ! amuse ! is the 
 plea of a weariness as wide as the world, and 
 
ENNUI. 159 
 
 as old as humanity. Amuse me for a little 
 while, that I may think I have escaped from 
 myself. 
 
 Tt is curious that England should have to 
 borrow from France the word " ennui," while 
 the French are unanimous in their opinion that 
 the thing itself is emphatically of English 
 growth. The old rhyme, 
 
 " Jean Rosbif ^cuyer, 
 Qui pendit soi-mgme pour se d&sennuyer," 
 
 has never lost its application, though the pres 
 ent generation of English-speaking men are 
 able to digest a great deal of dullness without 
 seeking such violent forms of relief. In fact, 
 Mr. Oscar Wilde, prompt to offer an unwel 
 come criticism, explains the amazing popu 
 larity of the psychological and religiously 
 irreligious novel on the ground that the genre 
 ennuyeux, which no Frenchman can bring 
 himself to pardon, is the one form of litera 
 ture which his countrymen thoroughly enjoy. 
 They have a kindly tolerance for stupid people 
 as well, and the ill-natured term " bore " has 
 only forced itself of late years upon an urbane 
 and long-suffering public. Johnson s diction 
 ary is innocent of the word, though Johnson 
 
160 JESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 himself was well acquainted with the article. 
 As late as 1822, a reviewer in " Colburn s 
 Magazine " entreats his readers to use the word 
 " bore ; " to write it, if they please ; to print 
 it, even, if necessary. Why shrink from 
 the expression, when the creature itself is so 
 common, and " daily gaining ground in the 
 country " ? 
 
 Before this date, however, one English 
 writer had given to literature some priceless 
 illustrations of the species. " Could we but 
 study our bores as Miss Austen must have 
 studied hers in her country village," says 
 Mrs. Eitchie, " what a delightful world this 
 might be ! " But I seriously doubt whether 
 any real enjoyment could be extracted from 
 Miss Bates, or Mr. Rushworth, or Sir William 
 Lucas, in the flesh. If we knew them, we 
 should probably feel precisely as did Emma 
 Woodhouse, and Maria Bertram, and Elizabeth 
 Bennet, vastly weary of their company. 
 In fact, only their brief appearances make 
 the two gentlemen bores so diverting, even in 
 fiction ; and Miss Bates, I must confess, taxes 
 my patience sorely. She is so tiresome that 
 she tires, and I am invariably tempted to do 
 
ENNUI. 161 
 
 what her less fortunate townspeople would have 
 gladly done, run away from her to more 
 congenial society. Surely comedy ceases, and 
 tragedy begins, when poor Jane Fairfax es 
 capes from the strawberry party at Donwell, 
 and seeks, under the burning noonday sun, 
 the blessed relief of solitude. " We all know 
 at times what it is to be wearied in spirits. 
 Mine, I admit, are exhausted," is the confes 
 sion wrung from the silent lips of a girl who 
 has borne all that human nature can bear 
 from Miss Bates s affectionate solicitude. Per 
 haps the best word ever spoken upon the cre 
 ation of such characters in novels comes from 
 Cardinal Newman. " It is very difficult," he 
 says, " to delineate a bore in a narrative, for 
 the simple reason that he is a bore. A tale 
 must aim at condensation, but a bore acts in 
 solution. It is only in the long run that he 
 is ascertained." And when he is ascertained, 
 and his identity established beyond reach of 
 doubt, what profit have we in his desolating 
 perfections? Miss Austen was far from en 
 joying the dull people whom she knew in life. 
 We have the testimony of her letters to this 
 effect. Has not Mrs. Stent, otherwise lost to 
 
162 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 fame, been crowned with direful immortality 
 as the woman who bored Jane Austen ? " We 
 may come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves," she 
 writes, with facile self-reproach at her impa 
 tience, " unequal to anything, and unwelcome 
 to anybody ; " an apprehension manifestly 
 manufactured out of nothingness to strengthen 
 some wavering purpose of amendment. Stu 
 pidity is acknowledged to be the one natural 
 gift which cannot be cultivated, and Miss 
 Austen well knew it lay beyond her grasp. 
 With as much sincerity could Emma Wood- 
 house have said, " I may come in time to be a 
 second Miss Bates." 
 
 There is a small, compact, and enviable mi 
 nority among us, who, through no merit of 
 their own, are incapable of being bored, and 
 consequently escape the endless pangs of en 
 nui. They are so clearly recognized as a body 
 that a great deal of the world s work is pre 
 pared especially for their entertainment and 
 instruction. Books are written for them, ser 
 mons are preached to them, lectures are given 
 to them, papers are read to them, societies 
 and clubs are organized for them, discussions 
 after the order of Melchizedek are carried on 
 
ENNUI. 163 
 
 monotonously in their behalf. A brand new 
 school of fiction has been invented for their 
 exclusive diversion ; and several complicated 
 systems of religion have been put together for 
 their recent edification. It is hardly a matter 
 of surprise that, fed on such meats, they 
 should wax scornful, and deride their hungry 
 fellow-creatures. It is even less amazing that 
 these fellow-creatures should weary from time 
 to time of the crumbs that fall from their 
 table. It is told of Pliny the younger that, 
 being invited to a dinner, he consented to come 
 on the express condition that the conversation 
 should abound in Socratic discourses. Here 
 was a man equally insensible to ennui and to 
 the sufferings of others. The guests at that 
 ill-starred banquet appear to have been sacri 
 ficed as ruthlessly as the fish and game they 
 ate. They had not even the loophole of escape 
 which Mr. Bagehot contemplates so admir 
 ingly in Paradise Lost. Whenever Adam s 
 remarks expand too obviously into a sermon, 
 Eve, in the most discreet and wife-like manner, 
 steps softly away, and refreshes herself with 
 slumber. Indeed, when we come to think of 
 it, conversation between these two must have 
 
164 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 been difficult at times, because they had no 
 body to talk about. If we exiled our neigh 
 bors permanently from our discussions, we 
 should soon be reduced to silence ; and if we 
 confined ourselves even to laudatory remarks, 
 we should probably say but little. Miss Fran 
 ces Power Cobbe, who is uncompromisingly 
 hostile to the feeble vices of society, insists 
 that it is the duty of every woman to look 
 bored when she hears a piece of scandal ; but 
 this mandate is hardly in accord with Miss 
 Cobbe s other requisite for true womanhood, 
 absolute and undeviating sincerity. How can 
 she look bored when she does not feel bored, 
 unless she plays the hypocrite? And while 
 many women are shocked and repelled by 
 scandal, few, alas ! are wont to find it tire 
 some. I have not even observed any exceed 
 ing weariness in men when subjected to a 
 similar ordeal. In that pitiless dialogue of 
 Landor s between Catherine of Russia and 
 Princess Dashkov, we find some opinions on 
 this subject stated with appalling candor. 
 "Believe me," says the empress, "there is 
 nothing so delightful in life as to find a liar in 
 a person of repute. Have you never heard 
 
ENNUI. 165 
 
 good folks rejoicing at it ? Or rather, can you 
 mention to me any one who has not been in 
 raptures when he could communicate such 
 glad tidings ? The goutiest man would go on 
 foot to tell his friend of it at midnight ; and 
 would cross the Neva for the purpose, when 
 he doubted whether the ice would bear him." 
 Here, indeed, is the very soul and essence of 
 ennui ; not the virtuous sentiment which re 
 volts at the disclosure of another s faults, but 
 that deep and deadly ennui of life which wel 
 comes evil as a distraction. The same selfish 
 lassitude which made the gladiatorial combats 
 a pleasant sight for the jaded eyes which wit 
 nessed them finds relief for its tediousness to 
 day in the swift destruction of confidence and 
 reputation. 
 
 There is a curious and melancholy fable of 
 Leopardi s in which he seeks to explain what 
 always puzzled him sorely, the continued en 
 durance of life. In the beginning, he says, 
 the gods gave to men an existence without 
 care, and an earth without evil. The world 
 was small, and easily traversed. No seas di 
 vided it, no mountains rose frowning from its 
 bosom, no extremes of heat or cold afflicted 
 
166 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 its inhabitants. Their wants were supplied, 
 their pleasures provided ; their happiness, Jove 
 thought, assured. For a time all things went 
 well ; but as the human race outgrew its 
 infancy, it tired of this smooth perfection, 
 and little by little there dawned upon men the 
 inherent worthlessness of life. Every day 
 they sounded its depths more clearly, and 
 every day they wearied afresh of all they 
 knew and were. Illusions vanished, and the 
 insupportable pains of ennui forced them to 
 cast aside a gift in which they found no value. 
 They desired death, and sought it at their own 
 hands. 
 
 Then Jove, half in wrath and half in pity, 
 devised a means by which his rebellious crea 
 tures might be preserved. He enlarged the 
 earth, moulded the mountains, and poured into 
 mighty hollows the restless and pitiless seas. 
 Burning heat and icy cold he sent, diseases 
 and dangers of every kind, craving desires 
 that could never be satisfied, vain ambitions, a 
 babble of many tongues, and the deep-rooted 
 animosities of nations. Gone was the old 
 tranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A new 
 race, struggling amid terrible hardships, fought 
 
ENNUI. 167 
 
 bravely and bitterly for the preservation of an 
 existence they had formerly despised. Man 
 found his life filled with toil, sweetened by 
 peril, checked by manifold disasters, and was 
 deluded into cherishing at any cost that which 
 was so painful to sustain. The greater the 
 difficulties and dangers, the more he opposed 
 to them his own indomitable purpose, the more 
 determined he was to live. The zest of per 
 petual effort, the keenness of contention, the 
 brief, sweet triumph over adversity, these 
 left him neither the time nor the disposition 
 to question the value of all that he wrung 
 from fate. 
 
 It is a cheerless philosophy, but not without 
 value to the sanguine socialist of to-day, who 
 dreams of preparing for all of us a lifetime of 
 unbroken ennui. 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 
 
 IT is dubious wisdom to walk in the foot 
 prints of a giant, and to stumble with little 
 steps along the road where his great strides 
 were taken. Yet many years have passed 
 since Hazlitt trod this way ; fresh flowers have 
 grown by the route, and fresh weeds have 
 fought with them for mastery. The face of 
 the country has changed for better or for 
 worse, and a brief survey reveals much that 
 never met his eyes. The journey, too, was 
 safer in his day than in ours; and while he 
 gathers and analyzes every species of wit and 
 humor, it plainly does not occur to him for a 
 moment that either calls for any protection at 
 his hands. Hazlitt is so sure that laughter is 
 our inalienable right, that he takes no pains 
 to soften its cadences or to justify its mirth. 
 " We laugh at that in others which is a serious 
 matter to ourselves," he says, and sees no 
 reason why this should not be. " Some one is 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 169 
 
 generally sure to be the sufferer by a joke ; " 
 and, fortified with this assurance, he confesses 
 to a frank delight in the comic parts of the 
 Arabian Nights, although recognizing keenly 
 the spirit of cruelty that underlies them, and 
 aware that they " carry the principle of callous 
 indifference in a jest as far as it can go." 
 Don Quixote, too, he stoutly affirms to be as 
 fitting a subject for merriment as Sancho 
 Panza. Both are laughable, and both are 
 meant to be laughed at ; the extravagances of 
 each being pitted dexterously against those of 
 the other by a great artist in the ridiculous. 
 But he is by no means insensible to the charm 
 and goodness of the " ingenious gentleman ; " 
 for sympathy is the legitimate attribute of 
 humor, and even where the humorist seems 
 most pitiless, and even brutal, in his apprehen 
 sion of the absurd, he has a living tenderness 
 for our poor humanity which is so rich in its 
 absurdities. 
 
 Hazlitt s definition of wit and humor is per 
 haps as good as any definition is ever likely to 
 be ; that is, it expresses a half-truth with a 
 great deal of reasonableness and accuracy. 
 "Humor," he says, "is the describing the 
 
170 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 ludicrous as it is in itself ; wit is the exposing 
 it by comparing or contrasting it with some 
 thing else. Humor is the growth of nature 
 and accident; wit is the product of art and 
 fancy. Humor, as it is shown in books, is an 
 imitation of the natural or acquired absurdities 
 of mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident, 
 situation, and character; wit is the illustrating 
 and heightening the sense of that absurdity by 
 some sudden and unexpected likeness or oppo 
 sition of one thing to another, which sets off 
 the quality we laugh at or despise in a still 
 more contemptible or striking point of view." 
 This is perhaps enough to show us at least 
 one cause of the endless triumph of humor over 
 wit, a triumph due to its closer affinity with 
 the simple and elementary conditions of human 
 nature and life. Wit is artificial ; humor is 
 natural. Wit is accidental ; humor is inevi 
 table. Wit is born of conscious effort; humor, 
 of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can be 
 expressed only in language ; humor can be 
 developed sufficiently in situation. Wit is the 
 plaything of the intellectual, or the weapon of 
 nimble minds ; humor is the possession of all 
 sorts and conditions of men. Wit is truly 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 171 
 
 what Shelley falsely imagined virtue to be, 
 " a refinement of civilized life ;" humor is the 
 property of all races in every stage of develop 
 ment. Wit possesses a species of immortality, 
 and for many generations holds its own ; 
 humor is truly immortal, and as long as the 
 eye sees, and the ear hears, and the heart 
 beats, it will be our privilege to laugh at the 
 pleasant absurdities which require no other 
 seed or nurture than man s endless intercourse 
 with man. 
 
 Nevertheless, an understanding of the differ 
 ences in nations and in epochs helps us to the 
 enjoyment of many humorous situations. We 
 should know something of England and of 
 India to appreciate the peculiar horror with 
 which Lord Minto, on reaching Calcutta, be 
 held the fourteen male attendants who stood 
 in his chamber, respectfully prepared to help 
 him into bed ; or his still greater dismay at 
 being presented by the rajah of Bali with 
 seven slaves, five little boys and two little 
 girls, all of whom cost the conscientious 
 governor-general a deal of trouble and expense 
 before they were properly disposed of, and in a 
 fair way to learn their alphabet and catechism. 
 
172 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Yet perhaps a deeper knowledge of time and 
 character is needed to sound the depths of Sir 
 Robert Walpole s cynical observation, " Grati 
 tude is a lively sense of future favors ; " al 
 though this is indeed a type of witticism which 
 possesses inherent vitality, not depending upon 
 any play of words or double meanings, but 
 striking deep root into the fundamental fail 
 ings of the human heart. 
 
 It is in its simplest forms, however, that 
 humor enjoys a world-wide actuality, and is 
 the connecting link of all times and places and 
 people. " Let us start from laughter," says M. 
 Edmond Scherer, " since laughter is a thing 
 familiar to every one. It is excited by a sense 
 of the ridiculous, and the ridiculous arises 
 from the contradiction between the use of a 
 thing and its intention." Even that common 
 est of all themes, a fellow-creature slipping or 
 falling, M. Scherer holds to be provocative of 
 mirth ; and in selecting this elementary ex 
 ample he bravely drives the matter back to its 
 earliest and rudest principles. Eor it is a 
 weapon in the hands of the serious that such 
 casualties, which should excite instant sym 
 pathy and alarm, awaken laughter only in 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 173 
 
 those who are too foolish or too brutal to ex 
 perience any other sensation. It would seem, 
 indeed, that the sight of a man falling on the 
 ice or in the mud cannot be, and ought not to 
 be, very amusing. But before we frown se 
 verely and forever upon such vulgar jests, let 
 us turn for a moment to a well-known essay, 
 and see what Charles Lamb has to plead in 
 their extenuation : 
 
 "I am by nature extremely susceptible of 
 street affronts; the jeers and taunts of the 
 populace ; the low-bred triumph they display 
 over the casual trip or splashed stocking of a 
 gentleman. Yet I can endure the jocularity 
 of a young sweep with something more than 
 forgiveness. In the last winter but one, pacing 
 along Cheapside with my accustomed precipi 
 tation when I walk westward, a treacherous 
 slide brought me upon my back in an instant. 
 I scrambled up with pain and shame enough, 
 yet outwardly trying to face it down, as if 
 nothing had happened, when the roguish 
 grin of one of these young wits encountered 
 me. There he stood, pointing me out with his 
 dusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman 
 (I suppose his mother) in particular, till the 
 
174 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 tears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so he 
 thought it) worked themselves out at the cor 
 ners of his poor red eyes, red from many a pre 
 vious weeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinkling 
 through all with such a joy, snatched out of 
 desolation, that Hogarth but Hogarth has 
 got him already (how could he miss him?) in 
 the March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman ; 
 
 there he stood, as he stands in the picture, 
 irremovable, as if the jest was to last forever, 
 with such a maximum of glee and minimum 
 of mischief in his mirth for the grin of a 
 genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it 
 
 that I could have been content, if the honor 
 of a gentleman might endure it, to have re 
 mained his butt and his mockery till mid 
 night." 
 
 Ah, prince of kindly humorists, to whom 
 shall we go but to you for tears and laughter, 
 and pastime and sympathy, and jests and 
 gentle tolerance, and all things needed to make 
 light our trouble-burdened hearts ! 
 
 It is not worth while to deny or even to 
 soften the cruel side of humor, though it is a 
 far more grievous error to overlook its gener 
 ous forbearance. The humorist s view of life 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 175 
 
 is essentially genial ; but he has given stout 
 blows in his day, and the sound of his vigorous 
 warfare rings harshly in our unaccustomed 
 ears. " The old giants of English fun " were 
 neither soft-spoken nor soft-handed gentry, 
 and it seems to us now and then as if they 
 laid about them with joyous and indiscriminate 
 activity. Even Dickens, the last and greatest 
 of his race, and haunted often to his fall by 
 the beckoning of mirthless modern phantoms, 
 shows in his earlier work a good deal of this 
 gleeful and unhesitating belligerency. The 
 scenes between old Weller and Mr. Stiggins 
 might be successfully acted in a spirited 
 puppet-show, where conversation is of less 
 importance than well-timed and well-bestowed 
 pommeling. But we have now reached that 
 point of humane seriousness when even puppet- 
 shows cannot escape their educational respon 
 sibilities, and when Punch and Judy are 
 gravely censured for teaching a lesson in bru 
 tality. The laughter of generations, which 
 should protect and hallow the little manikins 
 at play, counts for nothing by the side of their 
 irresponsible naughtiness, and their cheerful 
 disregard of all our moral standards. Yet 
 
176 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 here, too, Hazlitt has a seasonable word of 
 defense, holding indeed that he who invented 
 such diverting pastimes was a benefactor to 
 his species, and gave us something which it 
 was rational and healthy to enjoy. " We place 
 the mirth and glee and triumph to our own 
 account," he says, "and we know that the 
 bangs and blows the actors have received go 
 for nothing as soon as the showman puts them 
 up in his box, and marches off quietly with 
 them, as jugglers of a less amusing description 
 sometimes march off with the wrongs and 
 rights of mankind in their pockets." It has 
 been well said that wit requires a good head ; 
 humor, a good heart ; and fun, high spirits. 
 Punch s spirits, let us hasten to admit, are 
 considerably in advance of his head and heart ; 
 yet nevertheless he is wanting neither in 
 acuteness nor in the spirit of good-fellowship. 
 He has hearkened to the advice given by 
 Seneca many years ago, "Jest without bit 
 terness " ! and has practiced this delightful 
 accomplishment for centuries, as befits the 
 most conservative joker in the world. 
 
 Another reproach urged against humor 
 rather than wit is its somewhat complicated 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 177 
 
 system of lying ; and much well-merited sever 
 ity, has been expended upon such questionable 
 diversions as hoaxing, quizzing, " selling," and 
 other variations of the game, the titles of 
 which have long since passed away, leaving 
 their substance behind them. It would be 
 easy, but untrue, to say that real humor has 
 nothing whatever to do with these unworthy 
 offshoots, and never encourages their growth. 
 The fact remains that they spring from a great 
 humorous principle, and one which critics have 
 been prompt to recognize, and to embody in 
 language as clear and unmistakable as possible. 
 "Lying," says Hazlitt, "is a species of wit 
 and humor. To lay anything to a person s 
 charge from which he is perfectly free shows 
 spirit and invention ; and the more incredible 
 the effrontery the greater is the joke." " The 
 terrors of Sancho," observes M. Scherer, " the 
 rascalities of Scapin, the brags of Falstaff, 
 amuse us because of their disproportion with 
 circumstances, or their disagreement with 
 facts." Just as Charles Lamb humanizes a 
 brutal jest by turning it against himself, so 
 Sir Walter Scott gives amusing emphasis to a 
 lie by directing it against his own personality. 
 
178 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 His description of himself in his journal as a 
 " pebble-hearted cur," the occasion being his 
 parting with the emotional Madame Mirbel, is 
 truly humorous, because of its remoteness from 
 the truth. There are plenty of men who could 
 have risked using the phrase without exciting 
 in us that sudden sense of incongruity which 
 is a legitimate source of laughter. A delight 
 ful instance of effrontery, which shows both 
 spirit and invention, is the story told by Sir 
 Francis Doyle of the highwayman who, having 
 attacked and robbed Lord Derby and his 
 friend Mr. Grenville, said to them with re 
 proachful candor, " What scoundrels you must 
 be to fire at gentlemen who risk their lives 
 upon the road ! " As for the wit that lies in 
 playful misstatements and exaggerations, we 
 must search for it in the riotous humor of 
 Lamb s letters, where the true and the false 
 are often so inextricably commingled that it is 
 a hopeless task to separate facts from fancies. 
 " I shall certainly go to the naughty man for 
 fibbing," writes Lamb, with soft laughter ; and 
 the devout apprehension may have been justly 
 shared by Edward Fitzgerald, when he de 
 scribes the parish church at Woodbridge as 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 179 
 
 being so clamp that the fungi grew in great 
 numbers about the communion table. 
 
 A keen sense of the absurd is so little rel 
 ished by those who have it not that it is too 
 often considered solely as a weapon of offense, 
 and not as a shield against the countless ills 
 that come to man through lack of sanity and 
 judgment. There is a well-defined impression 
 in the world that the satirist, like the devil, 
 roams abroad, seeking whom he may devour, 
 and generally devouring the best ; whereas his 
 position is often that of the besieged, who 
 defends himself with the sharpest weapons at 
 his command against a host of invading evils. 
 There are many things in life so radically un 
 wholesome that it is not safe to approach them 
 save with laughter as a disinfectant ; and when 
 people cannot laugh, the moral atmosphere 
 grows stagnant, and nothing is too morbid, too 
 preposterous, or too mischievous to meet with 
 sympathy and solemn assurances of good will. 
 This is why a sense of the ridiculous has been 
 justly called the guardian of our minor morals, 
 rendering men in some measure dependent 
 upon the judgments of their associates, and 
 laying the basis of that decorum and propriety 
 
180 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 of conduct which is a necessary condition of 
 human life, and upon which is founded the 
 great charm of intercourse between equals. 
 From what pitfalls of vanity and self-assurance 
 have we been saved by this ever-watchful pres 
 ence ! Into what abysmal follies have we 
 fallen when she withholds her restraining 
 hand ! Shelley s letters are perhaps the 
 strongest argument in behalf of healthy hu 
 mor that literature has yet offered to the 
 world. Only a man burdened with an "in 
 vincible repugnance to the comic " could have 
 gravely penned a sentence like this : " Cer 
 tainly a saint may be amiable, she may be 
 so ; but then she does not understand, has 
 neglected to investigate the religion which re 
 tiring, modest prejudice leads her to profess." 
 Only a man afflicted with what Mr. Arnold 
 mildly calls an "inhuman" lack of humor 
 could have written thus to a female friend: 
 "The French language you already know; 
 and, if the great name of Rousseau did not 
 redeem it, it would have been perhaps as well 
 that you had remained ignorant of it." Our 
 natural pleasure at this verdict may be agree 
 ably heightened by placing alongside of it 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 181 
 
 Madame de StaeTs moderate statement, " Con 
 versation, like talent, exists only in France." 
 And such robust expressions of opinion give 
 us our clearest insight into at least one of the 
 dangers from which a sense of the ridiculous 
 rescues its fortunate possessor. 
 
 When all has been said, however, we must 
 admit that edged tools are dangerous things to 
 handle, and not infrequently do much hurt. 
 " The art of being humorous in an agreeable 
 way " is as difficult in our day as in the days 
 of Marcus Aurelius, and a disagreeable exer 
 cise of this noble gift is as unwelcome now as 
 then. " Levity has as many tricks as the kit 
 ten," says Leigh Hunt, who was quite capable 
 of illustrating and proving the truth of his as 
 sertion, and whose scratching at times closely 
 resembled the less playful manifestations of a 
 full-grown cat. Wit is the salt of conversation, 
 not the food, and few things in the world are 
 more wearying than a sarcastic attitude towards 
 life. " Je goute ceux qui sont raisonnables, et 
 me divertis des extra vagants," says Uranie, in 
 " La Critique de 1 Ecole des Femmes ; " and 
 even these words seem to tolerant ears to savor 
 unduly of arrogance. The best use we can make 
 
182 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 of humor is, not to divert ourselves with, but 
 to defend ourselves against, the folly of fools ; 
 for much of the world s misery is entailed upon 
 her by her eminently well-meaning and foolish 
 children. There is no finer proof of Miss 
 Austen s matured genius than the gradual 
 mellowing of her humor, from the deliberate 
 pleasure affected by Elizabeth Bennet and her 
 father in the foibles of their fellow-creatures to 
 the amused sympathy betrayed in every page 
 of " Emma " and " Persuasion." Not even the 
 charm and brilliance of " Pride and Prejudice " 
 can altogether reconcile us to a heroine who, 
 like Uranie, diverts herself with the failings of 
 mankind. What a gap between Mr. Bennet s 
 cynical praise of his son-in-law, Wickham, 
 which, under the circumstances, is a little re 
 volting, and Mr. Knightley s manly reproof 
 to Emma, whose youthful gayety beguiles her 
 into an unkind jest. While we talk much of 
 Miss Austen s merciless laughter, let us remem 
 ber always that the finest and bravest defense 
 of harmless folly against insolent wit is embod 
 ied in this earnest remonstrance from the lips 
 of a lover who is courageous enough to speak 
 plain truths, with no suspicion of priggishness 
 to mar their wholesome flavor. 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 183 
 
 It is difficult, at any time, to deprive wit 
 of its social or political surroundings ; it is 
 impossible to drive it back to those deeper, 
 simpler sources whence humor springs un 
 veiled. "Hudibras," for example, is witty; 
 " Don Quixote " is humorous. Sheridan is 
 witty ; Goldsmith is humorous. To turn from 
 the sparkling scenes where the Rivals play their 
 mimic parts to the quiet fireside where the 
 Vicar and Farmer Flamborough sit sipping 
 their gooseberry wine is to reenter life, and to 
 feel human hearts beating against our own. 
 How delicate the touch which puts everything 
 before us with a certain gentle, loving malice, 
 winning us to laughter, without for a moment 
 alienating our sympathies from the right. 
 Hazlitt claims for the wicked and witty come 
 dies of the Restoration that it is their privilege 
 to allay our scruples and banish our just re 
 grets ; but when Goldsmith brings the profli 
 gate squire and his female associates into the 
 Vicar s innocent household, the scene is one 
 of pure and incomparable humor, which never 
 theless leaves us more than ever in love with 
 the simple goodness which is so readily de 
 ceived. Mr. Thornhill utters a questionable 
 
184 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 sentiment. The two fine ladies, who have been 
 striving hard to play their parts, and only let 
 ting slip occasional oaths, affect great displea 
 sure at his laxness, and at once begin a very dis 
 creet and serious dialogue upon virtue. " In this 
 my wife, the chaplain, and I soon joined ; and 
 the squire himself was at last brought to con 
 fess a sense of sorrow for his former excesses. 
 We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and 
 of the sunshine of the mind unpolluted with 
 guilt. I was so well pleased that my little 
 ones were kept up beyond the usual time, to 
 be edified by so much good conversation. Mr. 
 Thornhill even went beyond me, and demanded 
 if I had any objection to giving prayers. I 
 joyfully embraced the proposal ; and in this 
 manner the night was passed in a most com 
 fortable way, till at length the company began 
 to think of returning." What a picture it is ! 
 What an admirably humorous situation ! 
 What easy tolerance in the treatment ! We 
 laugh, but even in our laughter we know that 
 not for the space of a passing breath does 
 Goldsmith yield his own sympathy, or divert 
 ours, away from the just cause of innocence 
 and truth. 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 185 
 
 If men of real wit have been more numer 
 ous in the world than men of real humor, it is 
 because discernment and lenity, mirth and 
 conciliation, are qualities which do not blend 
 easily with the natural asperity of our race. 
 Humor has been somewhat daringly denned as 
 " a sympathy for the seamy side of things." 
 It does not hover on the borders of the light 
 and trifling ; it does not linger in that keen 
 and courtly atmosphere which is the chosen 
 playground of wit ; but diffusing itself subtly 
 throughout all nature, reveals to us life, life 
 which we love to consider and to judge from 
 some pet standpoint of our own, but which is so 
 big and wonderful, and good and bad, and fine 
 and terrible, that our little peaks of observa 
 tion command only a glimpse of the mysteries 
 we are so ready and willing to solve. Thus, the 
 degree of wit embodied in an old story is a mat 
 ter of much dispute and of scant importance ; 
 but when we read that Queen Elizabeth, in her 
 last illness, turned wearily away from matters 
 of state, "yet delighted to hear some of the 
 Hundred Merry Tales, and to such was very 
 attentive," we feel we have been lifted into 
 the regions of humor, and by its sudden light 
 
186 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 we recognize, not the dubious merriment of the 
 tales, but the sick and world-worn spirit seek 
 ing a transient relief from fretful care and 
 poisonous recollections. So, too, when Sheri 
 dan said of Mr. Dundas that he resorted to 
 his memory for his jests, and to his imagina 
 tion for his facts, the great wit, after the 
 fashion of wits, expressed a limited truth. It 
 was a delightful statement so far as it went, 
 but it went no further than Mr. Dundas, with 
 just the possibility of a second application. 
 When Voltaire sighed, " Nothing is so disa 
 greeable as to be obscurely hanged," he gave 
 utterance to a national sentiment, which is not 
 in the least witty, but profoundly humorous, 
 revealing with charming distinctness a French 
 man s innate aversion to all dull and common 
 place surroundings. Dying is not with him, 
 as with an Englishman, a strictly " private af 
 fair ; " it is the last act of life s brilliant play, 
 which is expected to throw no discredit upon 
 the sparkling scenes it closes. 
 
 The breadth of atmosphere which humor 
 requires for its development, the saneness and 
 sympathy of its revelations, are admirably 
 described by one of the most penetrating and 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 187 
 
 least humorous of French critics, M. Edmond 
 Scherer, whose words are all the more grateful 
 and valuable to us when they refer, not to his 
 own countrymen, but to those robust English 
 humorists whom it is our present pleasure to 
 ignore. M. Scherer, it is true, finds much 
 fault, and reasonable fault ever, with these 
 stout-hearted, strong-handed veterans. They 
 are not always decorous. They are not always 
 sincere. They are wont to play with their 
 subjects. They are too eager to amuse them 
 selves and other people. It is easy to make 
 out a list of their derelictions. " Yet this does 
 not prevent the temperament of the humorist 
 from being, on the whole, the happiest that a 
 man can bring with him into this world, nor 
 his point of view from being the fairest from 
 which the world can be judged. The satirist 
 grows wroth ; the cynic banters ; the humorist 
 laughs and sympathizes by turns. . . . He has 
 neither the fault of the pessimist, who refers 
 everything to a purely personal conception, 
 and is angry with reality for not being such 
 as he conceives it ; nor that of the optimist, 
 who shuts his eyes to everything missing on 
 the real earth, that he may comply with the 
 
188 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 demands of his heart and of his reason. The 
 humorist feels the imperfections of reality, 
 and resigns himself to them with good temper, 
 knowing that his own satisfaction is not the 
 rule of things, and that the formula of the 
 universe is necessarily larger than the prefer 
 ences of a single one of the accidental beings 
 of whom the universe is composed. He is be 
 yond doubt the true philosopher." 
 
 This is a broad statement ; yet to endure 
 life smilingly is no ignoble task ; and if the 
 humors of mankind are inseparably blended 
 with all their impulses and actions, it is worth 
 while to consider bravely the value of quali 
 ties so subtle and far-reaching in their influ 
 ences. Steele, as we know, dressed the invad 
 ing bailiffs in liveries, and amazed his guests 
 by the number and elegance of his retainers. 
 Sydney Smith fastened antlers on his sheep, 
 for the gratification of a lady who thought he 
 ought to have deer in his park. Such elabo 
 rate jests, born of invincible gayety and high 
 spirits, seem childish to our present adult 
 seriousness ; and we are too impatient to un 
 derstand that they represent an attitude, and 
 a very healthy attitude, towards life. The 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 189 
 
 iniquity of Steele s career lay in his repeatedly 
 running into debt, not in the admirable temper 
 with which he met the consequences of that 
 debt when they were forced upon him ; and 
 if the censorious are disposed to believe that 
 a less happy disposition would have avoided 
 these consequences, let them consider the ca 
 reers of poor Richard Savage and other mis 
 anthropic prodigals. As for Sydney Smith, 
 he followed Burton s excellent counsel, " Go 
 on then merrily to heaven ; " and his path was 
 none the less straight because it was smoothed 
 by laughter. That which must be borne had 
 best be borne cheerfully, and sometimes a 
 single telling stroke of wit, a single word rich 
 in manly humor, reveals to us that true cour 
 age, that fine philosophy, which endures and 
 even tolerates the vicissitudes of fortune, 
 without for a moment relinquishing its honest 
 hold upon the right. Mr. Lang has told us 
 such a little story of the verger in a Saxon 
 town who was wont to show visitors a silver 
 mouse, which had been offered by the women 
 to the Blessed Virgin that she might rid the 
 town of mice. A Prussian officer, with that 
 prompt brutality which loves to offend religious 
 
190 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 sentiment it does not share, asked jeeringly, 
 " Are you such fools as to believe that the 
 creatures went away because a silver mouse 
 was dedicated ? " " Ah, no," replied the ver 
 ger, " or long ago we should have offered a 
 silver Prussian." 
 
 It is the often-expressed opinion of Leigh 
 Hunt that although wit and humor may be 
 found in perfection apart from each other, yet 
 their best work is shared in common. Wit 
 separated from humor is but an element of 
 sport ; " a laughing jade," with petulant 
 whims and fancies, which runs away with our 
 discretion, confuses our wisdom, and mocks at 
 holy charity ; yet adds greatly, withal, to the 
 buoyancy and popularity of life. It makes 
 gentlefolk laugh, a difficult task, says Mo- 
 liere ; it scatters our faculties, and " bears 
 them off deridingly into pastime." It is a 
 fire-gleam in our dull world, a gift of the gods, 
 who love to provide weapons for the amuse 
 ment and discomfiture of mankind. But hu 
 mor stands on common soil, and breathes our 
 common air. The kindly contagion of its 
 mirth lifts our hearts from their personal ap 
 prehension of life s grievances, and links us 
 
WIT AND HUMOR. 191 
 
 together in a bond of mutual tears and laugh 
 ter. If it be powerless to mould existence, or 
 even explain it to our satisfaction, it can give 
 us at least some basis for philosophy, some 
 scope for sympathy, and sanity, and endurance. 
 " The perceptions of the contrasts of human 
 destiny," says M. Scherer, "by a man who 
 does not sever himself from humanity, but 
 who takes his own shortcomings and those of 
 his dear fellow-creatures cheerfully, this is 
 the essence of humor." 
 
LETTERS. 
 
 IT is one of the current complaints of to-day 
 that the art of letter-writing, as our great 
 grandfathers and our great-great-grandfathers 
 knew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost. 
 Railways, which bring together easily and often 
 people who used to spend the greater portion 
 of their lives apart ; cheap postage, which re 
 lieves a man from any serious responsibility for 
 what he writes, the most insignificant scrawl 
 seems worth the stamp he puts on it ; the hur 
 ried, restless pace at which we live, each day 
 filled to the brim with things which are hardly 
 so important as we think them, and which 
 have cost us the old rich hours of leisurely 
 thought and inaction, these are the forces 
 which have conspired to destroy the letter, and 
 to crowd into its place that usurping and un 
 profitable little upstart called the note. " The 
 art of note-writing," says Mr. Bagehot, " may 
 become classical ; it is for the present age to 
 
LETTERS. 193 
 
 provide models for that sort of composition ; 
 but letters have perished. In the last century, 
 cultivated people who sat down to write took 
 pains to have something to say, and took pains 
 to say it. The correspondence of to-day is 
 like a series of telegrams with amplified head 
 ings. There is not more than one idea, and 
 that idea soon comes and is soon over. The 
 best correspondence of the past is rather like 
 a good light article, in which the points are 
 studiously made ; in which the effort to make 
 them is studiously concealed ; in which a series 
 of selected circumstances is set forth ; in which 
 you feel, but are not told, that the principle of 
 the writer s selection was to make his composi 
 tion pleasant." 
 
 It is difficult not to agree with Mr. Bagehot 
 and other critics who have uttered similar 
 lamentations. The letter which resembled a 
 good light article has indeed disappeared from 
 our midst, and I am not sure that many dry 
 eyes have not witnessed its departure. * Light 
 articles are now provided for us in such gen 
 erous measure by our magazines that we have 
 scant need to exact them from our friends. In 
 fact, we should have no time to read them, if 
 
194 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 they were written. A more serious loss is the 
 total absence of any minute information or 
 gossip upon current topics in the mass of 
 modern correspondence. The letter which is 
 so useful to historians, which shows us, and 
 shows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordi 
 nary, e very-day life of prominent men and 
 women, this letter has also disappeared, and 
 there is nothing to take its place. We can 
 reconstruct the England, or at least the Lon 
 don of George II. and George III. from the 
 pages of Horace Walpole. Who is there 
 likely to hand down in this fashion to a com 
 ing generation the England of Queen Victoria? 
 Neither does the fact of Walpole s being by 
 no means a bigot in the matter of truth-telling 
 interfere with his real value. He lies con 
 sciously and with a set purpose here and there ; 
 he is unconsciously and even inevitably vera 
 cious in the main. There are some points, 
 observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost every 
 body s letters are true. " The delineation of 
 a recurring and familiar life is beyond the 
 reach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpole 
 was not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it was 
 too much trouble, even for him, to tell lies 
 
LETTERS. 195 
 
 on many things. His stories and conspic 
 uous scandals are no doubt often unfounded ; 
 but there is a gentle undercurrent of daily 
 unremarkable life and manners which he 
 evidently assumed as a datum for his histor 
 ical imagination." 
 
 We may be quite sure, for example, on his 
 testimony, that people of fashion went to 
 Ranelagh two hours after the music was over, 
 because it was thought vulgar to go earlier ; 
 that Lord Derby s cook gave him warning, 
 rather than dress suppers at three o clock in 
 the morning; that when a masked ball was 
 given by eighteen young noblemen at Soho, 
 the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches, 
 held up torches to the windows, and demanded 
 to have the masks pulled off and put on at 
 their pleasure, u but all with extreme good- 
 humor and civility ; " that he, Horace Wai- 
 pole, one night at Yauxhall, helped Lady 
 Caroline Petersham to mince seven chickens 
 in a china dish, which chickens " Lady Caro 
 line stewed over a lamp, with three pats of 
 butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rat 
 tling and laughing, and we every minute ex 
 pecting to have the dish fly about our ears ; " 
 
196 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 that at the funeral of George II., the Duke of 
 Newcastle that curious burlesque of an Eng 
 lish nobleman stood on the train of the 
 butcher Duke of Cumberland to avoid the chill 
 of the marble. If we think these things are 
 not worth knowing, we had better not read 
 Walpole s letters, for these are the things 
 which he delights in telling us. Macaulay 
 thought these things were not worth knowing, 
 and he has accordingly branded Walpole as a 
 superficial observer, a vain and shallow world 
 ling. How, he wonders, can we listen seriously 
 to a man who haunted auctions ; who collected 
 bricabrac ; who sat up all night playing cards 
 with fine, frivolous ladies ; who liked being 
 a fashionable gentleman, and had no proper 
 pride in belonging to the august assemblage 
 of authors ; and who, most deadly crime of all, 
 lived face to face with the great Whig leaders 
 of the day, and was not in the least impressed 
 by the magnitude of the distinction thus con 
 ferred on him. But, after all, we cannot, every 
 one of us, be built upon the same solemn and 
 righteous lines. It is not even granted to 
 every one to be a fervent and consistent Whig. 
 Horace Walpole, you see, was Horace Wai- 
 
LETTERS. 197 
 
 pole, and not Thomas Babington Macaulay: 
 therefore Macaulay despised him, and called 
 on all his readers to despise him too. We can 
 only have recourse to Mr. Lang s philosophy : 
 " T is a wide world, my masters ; there is room 
 for both." Walpole is the prince of letter- 
 writers, because writing letters was the inspi 
 ration, the ruling passion of his life, and he 
 was preeminently qualified for the task. It 
 has been well said that had some evil chance 
 wrecked him, like Kobinson Crusoe, upon a 
 desert island, he would have gone on writing 
 letters just the same, and waited for a ship to 
 carry them away. This is a pleasant conceit, 
 because the spectacle of Horace Walpole on a 
 desert island is one which captivates the idle 
 fancy. Think of his little airs and graces, his 
 courtly affectations, his fine clothes and frip 
 pery, his dainty epicureanism, his sense of 
 good comradeship, all thrown away upon a 
 desert island, and upon the society of a parrot 
 and a goat. What malicious tales he would 
 have been forced to invent about the parrot ! 
 It is best not to believe evil of any one upon 
 Walpole s word, especially not of any one who 
 had ever attacked Sir Robert s ministry ; for 
 
198 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Horace s filial piety took the very exclusive 
 form of undying enmity to all his father s po 
 litical opponents. But when we have passed 
 over and tried to forget all that is spiteful and 
 caustic and coarse in these celebrated letters, 
 there is a great deal left, a great deal that is 
 not even the current gossip of the day. He 
 goes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughing 
 is out of fashion in that once gay capital. 
 " Good folks ! " he cries, " they have no time 
 to laugh. There are God and the king to be 
 pulled down first, and men and women, one 
 and all, are devoutly employed in the demoli 
 tion. They think me quite profane for having 
 my belief left." A few years later, Walpole 
 sees clearly that French politics must end in 
 " despotism, a civil war, or assassination." 
 The age is not, he says, as he once thought, 
 an age of abortion; but rather "an age of 
 seeds which are to produce strange crops here 
 after." Surely, even Macaulay might allow 
 that these are the words of a thinker, of a 
 prophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in the 
 market-place. 
 
 Granted, then, that the light-article letter, 
 and the letter which gives us material with 
 
LETTERS. 199 
 
 which to fill up the gaps and crannies of his 
 tory, which holds the life of the past embalmed 
 in its faded pages, have disappeared, perhaps 
 forever. There is another letter which has not 
 disappeared, which never can disappear as long 
 as man stays man and woman, woman, the 
 letter which reveals to us the personality of 
 the writer ; which is dear and valuable to us 
 because in it his hand stretches out frankly 
 from the past, and draws us to his side. It 
 may be long or short, carefully or carelessly 
 written, full of useful information or full of 
 idle nonsense. We do not stop to ask. It is 
 enough for us to know from whom it came. 
 And the finest type of such a letter may surely 
 be found in the well-loved correspondence of 
 Charles Lamb. If we eliminated from his 
 pages all critical matter, all those shrewd and 
 admirable verdicts upon prose and verse ; if 
 we cut out ruthlessly such scraps of news 
 as they occasionally convey ; if we banished 
 all references to celebrated people, from the 
 " obnoxious squeak " of Shelley s voice to the 
 generous sympathy expressed for Napoleon, we 
 should still have left the writer himself, 
 which is all that we desire. We should still 
 
200 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 have the record of that harmless and patient, 
 that brave and sorely tried life. We should 
 still see infinite mirth and infinite pathos inter 
 woven upon every page. We should catch the 
 echo of that clear, kind laughter which never 
 hardens into scorn. Lamb laughs at so many 
 people, and never once wrongs any one. We 
 should see the flashes of a wit which carries no 
 venom in its sting. We should feel that atmos 
 phere of wonderful, whimsical humor illumi 
 nating all the trivial details of existence. We 
 should recognize in the turning of every sen 
 tence, the conscious choice of every word, the 
 fine and distinctive qualities of a genius that 
 has no parallel. 
 
 It matters little at what page we read. Here 
 is the sad story of Henry Robinson s waistcoat, 
 which Mary Lamb tried to bring over from 
 France, but which was seized at the Custom 
 House, " for the use of the king," says 
 Charles dryly. " He will probably appear in it 
 at the next levee." Here is the never-to-be- 
 forgotten tea-party at Miss Benjay s, where 
 that tenth-rate little upstart of a woman 
 type of a genus that survives to-day alter- 
 nately patronized and snubbed her guest; 
 
LETTERS. 201 
 
 flinging at him her pitiful scraps of infor 
 mation, marveling that he did not under 
 stand French, insulting him when he ventured 
 an opinion upon poetry, " seeing that it was 
 my own trade in a manner," imparting to 
 him Hannah More s valuable dogmas on edu 
 cation, feeding him scantily with macaroons, 
 and sending him home, not angry as he had 
 a right to be, as any other man would have 
 been in his place, only infinitely amused. And 
 then some people say that a keen sense of the 
 ridiculous is not a kindly sentiment ! It is, we 
 know it is, when we read the letter to Cole 
 ridge in which Lamb tells how he went to con 
 dole with poor Joseph Cottle on the death of 
 his brother Amos, and how, as the readiest 
 comfort he could offer, he swiftly introduced 
 into his conversation Joseph s epic poem, 
 " Alfred," luring the mourner gently from his 
 grief by arousing his poetic vanity. The dear, 
 good, stupid Cottle, brightening visibly under 
 such soothing treatment, fixed upon his visitor 
 a benevolent gaze, and prepared himself for 
 melancholy enjoyment. After a while the 
 name of Alswitha, Alfred s queen, was slipped 
 adroitly into the discourse. "At that mo- 
 
202 SSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 ment," says Lamb, " I could perceive that 
 Cottle had forgot his brother was so lately be 
 come a blessed spirit. In the language of 
 mathematicians, the author was as nine, the 
 brother as one. I felt my cue, and strong pity 
 stirring at the root, I went to work." So the 
 little comedy proceeds, until it reaches its cli 
 max when George Dyer, to whom all poems 
 were good poems, remarks that the dead Amos 
 was estimable both for his head and heart, and 
 would have made a fine poet if he had lived. 
 " To this," says Lamb, " Joseph fully assented, 
 but could not help adding that he always 
 thought the qualities of his brother s heart ex 
 ceeded those of his head. I believe his brother, 
 when living, had formed precisely the same 
 idea of him ; and I apprehend the world will 
 assent to both judgments." Now if we will but 
 try to picture to ourselves how Carlyle would 
 have behaved to poor Miss Ben jay, how Wai- 
 pole would have sneered at Joseph Cottle, we 
 will understand better the harmless, the al 
 most loving nature of Charles Lamb s raillery, 
 which we can enjoy so frankly because it gave 
 no pain. 
 
 As for the well-known fact that Lamb s let- 
 
LETTERS. 203 
 
 ters reflect nothing of the political tumult, the 
 stirring warfare, amid which he lived, it is 
 interesting to place by their side the contem 
 porary letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, the first 
 Earl of Miiito, a correspondence the princi 
 pal charm of which is the revelation it makes 
 of a nature so fine and brave, so upright and 
 honorable, so wise and strong and good, that 
 we can best understand the secret of England s 
 greatness when we know she has given birth 
 to such sons. To study the life of a man who 
 played so prominent a part in home and foreign 
 politics is to study the history of Europe dur 
 ing those troubled years. In Lord Minto s 
 letters we follow breathlessly the desperate 
 struggle with Napoleon, the ceaseless wran 
 gling of the Allies, the dangerous rebellions in 
 Ireland, the grave perplexities of the Indian 
 empire ; and besides these all-important topics, 
 we have side-lights thrown upon social life. 
 We learn, for instance, that Mrs. Crewe, the 
 celebrated beauty and toast of the Whigs, 
 liked good conversation, and took an interest 
 and even a part, writes Sir Gilbert naively to 
 his wife, " in all subjects which men would 
 naturally talk of when not in woman s com- 
 
204 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 pany, as politics and literature." We learn 
 also what we half suspected before that 
 Madame de Stael was so greedy of admira 
 tion that she was capable of purchasing " any 
 quantity of anybody at any price, and among 
 other prices by a traffic of mutual flattery ; " 
 and that she was never satisfied unless she 
 could have the whole conversation to herself, 
 and be the centre of every company. 
 
 Now, it is hardly to be expected that the 
 letters of a great statesman and the letters of 
 an obscure clerk in the India House should 
 reveal precisely the same interests and infor 
 mation, any more than it is to be expected that 
 the letters of the statesman who was, after 
 all, a statesman and no more should equal 
 in literary charm and merit the letters of the 
 clerk who was in addition an immortal genius. 
 But when we think how profoundly England 
 was shaken and disturbed by the discords and 
 apprehensions of those troubled times, how 
 wars and the rumors of wars darkened the 
 air, and stirred the blood of country bump 
 kins and placid rural squires, it seems a little 
 strange that Lamb, who lived long years in 
 the heart of London, and must have heard 
 
LETTERS. 205 
 
 so much of these things, should have written 
 about them so little. He does learn when 
 there is a change of ministry, because he hears 
 a butcher say something about it in the mar 
 ket-place. He cultivates a frank admiration 
 for Napoleon, whom all his countrymen hated 
 and feared so madly. He would be glad, he 
 says, to stand bareheaded at his table, doing- 
 honor to him in his fall. And, after the bat- 
 tie of Trafalgar, he writes to Hazlitt : " Lord 
 Nelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keeps 
 a slight fluttering in odes and elegies in news 
 papers, and impromptus which could not be 
 got ready before the funeral." 
 
 These characteristic passages and others 
 like them are all we hear of public matters 
 from Charles Lamb, and few of us would ask 
 for more. It is the continual sounding of the 
 personal note that makes his pages so dear to 
 us ; it is the peculiarly restful character of his 
 beloved chit-chat that keeps them so fresh and 
 delightful. And while there is but one Lamb, 
 there are many letters which have in them 
 something of this same personal quality, some 
 thing of this restful charm. The supply can 
 never be exhausted, because letter-writing 
 
206 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 not light articles now, nor brilliant semi-his 
 toric narratives, but real letter-writing is 
 founded on a need as old and as young as hu 
 manity itself, the need that one human being 
 has of another. The craving for sympathy ; 
 the natural and healthy egotism which prompts 
 us to open our minds to absent friends ; the 
 desire we all feel to make known to others 
 that which is happening to ourselves ; the 
 certainty we all feel that others will be pro 
 foundly interested in this revelation ; the 
 inextinguishable impulse to " pass on " ex 
 periences either of soul or body, to share with 
 some one else that which we are hearing, or 
 seeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying, 
 these are the motives which make letter-writ 
 ing essential and inevitable, crowd it into 
 the busiest lives, assimilate it with the dullest 
 understandings, and fit it into some crevice 
 of every one s daily experience. Thus it hap 
 pens that there is a strong family resemblance 
 between letters of every age and every country ; 
 they really change less than we are pleased 
 to think. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in one 
 of his delightful essays, quotes from a long 
 and chatty letter written, about the time that 
 
LETTERS. 207 
 
 Moses was a little lad, by an Egyptian gentle 
 man named Pambesa to a friend named Ame- 
 nemapt, and giving a very lively and minute 
 account of the city of Rameses, which Pam 
 besa was then happily visiting for the first 
 time. We have all of us had just such let 
 ters from our absent friends, and have read 
 them with mingled pleasure, and envy, and ir 
 ritation. Pambesa the traveler is not disposed 
 to spare Amenemapt the stay-at-home any de 
 tail of what he is missing. Never was there 
 such a city of the gods as this particular town 
 of Rameses which Amenemapt was not des 
 tined to see. There might be found the best 
 of good living ; vines, and fig-trees, and onion 
 beds, and nursery gardens. Stout drinkers 
 too were its jovial inhabitants, with a variety 
 of strong liquors, sweet syrups richer than 
 honey, red wine, and very excellent imported 
 beer. Its women were all well dressed, and 
 curled their hair enticingly, smoothing it with 
 sweet oil. They stood at their doors, hold 
 ing nosegays in their hands, and presenting 
 a very alluring appearance to this gay and 
 shameless Pambesa, who could hardly make up 
 his mind to pass them coldly by. Altogether, 
 
208 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Rameses was an exceedingly pleasant town to 
 visit, and the Egyptian gentleman was having 
 a very jolly time of it, and we, reading his 
 correspondence, fall to thinking that human 
 nature before the Exodus was uncommonly 
 like human nature to-day. This is one of the 
 delights of letter-reading, that it reveals to us, 
 not only the life of the past, but, better still, 
 the people of the past, our brothers and sis 
 ters who, being dead, still live in their written 
 pages. For the scholar the interest lies in 
 what Pambesa has to tell ; for the rest of us 
 the interest lies in Pambesa himself, who, so 
 many thousand years ago, drank the bitter 
 beer, and stared at the pretty girls standing 
 curled and flower-bedecked, with those de 
 mure, faint smiles which centuries cannot alter 
 or impair. 
 
 So it continues, as we run swiftly down the 
 years, the bulk of correspondence increasing 
 enormously at every stage, until we reach such 
 monuments of industry as the famous Cecil 
 letters, preserved at Hatfield, and comprising 
 over thirty thousand documents. It is pleasant 
 to feel we need read none of these, and that, 
 if we search for character, we may find it in 
 
LETTERS. 209 
 
 thirty words as well as in thirty thousand rolls 
 of musty parchment. We may find it surely 
 in that historic note dispatched by Ann, 
 Countess of Dorset, to Sir Joseph Williamson, 
 Secretary of State under Charles II., who 
 wanted her to appoint a courtier as member 
 from Appleby. Nothing could well be shorter ; 
 nothing could possibly be more significant. 
 This is all : - 
 
 SIR, I have been bullied by an usurper, I have 
 been ill-treated by a court, but I won t be dictated 
 to by a subject. Your man shall not stand. 
 
 DORSET, PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY. 
 
 Now if you don t feel you know Ann Dorset 
 pretty well after reading those four lines, you 
 would n t know her if she left a diary as long 
 as Samuel Pepys s ; and if you don t feel, after 
 reading them, that she is worth the knowing, it 
 is hopeless for her to try and win your regard. 
 Another and still more amusing instance of 
 self -revelation may be found in a manuscript 
 familiar to many who have visited the Bod 
 leian Library at Oxford. There, among other 
 precious treasures, is a collection of notes 
 scribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, and 
 
210 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 by Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile the 
 tedium of Council. They look, for all the 
 world, like the notes which school-girls are 
 wont to scribble to one another, to beguile the 
 tedium of study. On one page, Charles in a 
 little careless hand, not unlike a school-girl s, 
 writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to see 
 his sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer charac 
 ters writes back that there is no reason why he 
 should not, if he can return in a few days, and 
 adds tentatively, " I suppose you will go with 
 a light train." Charles, as though glowing 
 with conscious rectitude, responds, " I intend 
 to take nothing but my night-bag." Claren 
 don, who knows his master s luxurious habits, 
 is startled out of all propriety. " Gods ! " he 
 writes : " you will not go without forty or 
 fifty horse." Then Charles, who seems to 
 have been waiting for this point in the dia 
 logue, tranquilly replies in one straggling line 
 at the bottom of the page. " I count that part 
 of my night-bag." How plainly we can hear 
 the royal chuckle which accompanied this gra 
 cious explanation ! How really valuable is 
 this scrap of correspondence which shows us 
 for a moment Charles Stuart ; not the Charles 
 
LETTERS. 211 
 
 of Sir Walter s loyal stories, nor the Charles 
 of Macaulay s eloquent invectives ; but Charles 
 himself, our fellow mortal, and a very human 
 character indeed. 
 
 If, as Mr. Bagehot affirms, it is for the pres 
 ent day to provide models which shall make 
 the art of note-writing classical, we can begin 
 no better than by studying the specimens al 
 ready in our keeping. If we want humor,- 
 pathos, a whole tale told in half a dozen words, 
 we have these things already in every sentence 
 of Steele s hasty scrawls to his wife : " Prue, 
 Prue, look a little dressed, and be beautiful." 
 And again : " T is the glory of a Woman, 
 Prue, to be her husband s Friend and Com 
 panion, and not his Sovereign Director." Or 
 " Good-nature, added to that beautiful form 
 God has given you, would make an happinesse 
 too great for Humane life." And finally, 
 " I am, dear Prue, a little in Drink, but at 
 all times, Your Faithful Husband, Richard 
 Steele." 
 
 These bare scraps of letters, briefer, many 
 of them, than the "scandalous half -sheets" 
 which Prue was wont to send in return, give 
 us a tolerably clear insight into the precise 
 
212 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 nature of Steele s domestic happiness. We 
 understand, not only the writer, but the recipi 
 ent of such missives, poor petulant Prue, who 
 has had scant mercy shown her in Thackeray s 
 brilliant pages, but whose own life was not 
 passed upon a bed of roses. We are eager 
 to catch these swift glimpses of real people 
 through a few careless lines which have 
 miraculously escaped destruction; or perhaps 
 through a brief aside in an important, but, to 
 us, very uninteresting communication ; as, for 
 example, when Marlborough reopens a dis 
 patch to say that he has just received word of 
 the surprise and defeat of the Dutch general, 
 Opdam. " Since I sealed my letter," he writes 
 with characteristic dryness, " we have a report 
 from Breda that Opdam is beaten. I pray 
 God it be not so, for he is very capable of 
 having it happen to him." It is difficult not to 
 enjoy this, because, if we sat within the shadow 
 of Marlborough s tent, we could not hear him 
 more distinctly ; and the desire we feel to get 
 nearer to the people who interest us, to know 
 them as they really were, is, in the main, nat 
 ural and wholesome. Yet there must be some 
 limit set to the gratification of this desire, if 
 
LETTERS. 213 
 
 we are to check the unwarranted publishing 
 of private letters which has become the recog 
 nized disgrace of literature. It is hard for us 
 
 O 
 
 to understand just when our curiosity ceases to 
 be permissible ; it is harder still for editors to 
 understand just when their privileges cease to 
 be beneficial. Not many years ago it was pos 
 sible for Mr. Bagehot to say that he took com 
 fort in thinking of Shelley as a poet about 
 whom our information was mercifully incom 
 plete. Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is in 
 complete no longer ; but we have scant cause 
 to congratulate ourselves on what we have 
 gained by his disclosures. Mr. Froude, acting 
 up to an heroic theory of friendship, has pil 
 loried Carlyle for the pleasure and the pain of 
 gaping generations ; but there are some who 
 turn away with averted eyes from the sordid, 
 shameful spectacle. Within the last decade 
 the reading world welcomed with acclamations 
 a volume of letters from the pen of one who 
 had made it his especial request that no 
 such correspondence should ever be published. 
 How many of those who laughed over the 
 witty, whimsical, intimate, affectionate out 
 pourings of Thackeray paused to consider 
 
214 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 that they would one and all have remained un 
 written, could their author have foreseen their 
 fate. They were not meant for us, they never 
 would have reached us, had his known desires 
 and prejudices been respected. Many of them 
 are delightful, as when he tells with sedate 
 humor of his absurd proposal to Macaulay 
 that they should change identities at Sir 
 George Napier s dinner, so as to confuse and 
 baffle a young American woman, the desire of 
 whose heart was to meet these two great lions, 
 and of Macaulay s disgust at the bare notion 
 of jesting with anything so serious as his lit 
 erary reputation. Yet when the recipient of 
 these letters yielded to the temptation of pub 
 lishing them, she would have done well to sup 
 press those trivial, colorless, and private com 
 munications which can have no possible value 
 or interest to others. An invitation to dinner 
 is of some importance the day that it arrives, 
 but it loses its vitality when reprinted forty 
 years after the dinner is eaten. There is hor 
 ror in the thought that a man of genius can 
 never promise himself that grateful privacy 
 which is the lot of his happier and less distin 
 guished brothers ; but that after he has died in 
 
LETTERS. 215 
 
 the least ostentatious manner lie knows how, 
 the whole wide world is made acquainted with 
 his diversions and his digestion, with his fee 
 blest jokes and his most tender confidences. 
 The problem of what to give and what to with 
 hold must be solved by editors who, having 
 laboriously collected their material, feel a nat 
 ural disposition to use it. When, as occasion 
 ally happens, the editor regards the author 
 simply as his prey, he never conceives the de 
 sirability of withholding anything. He is as 
 unreserved as a savage, and probably defends 
 himself, as did Montaigne when reproached 
 for the impropriety of his essays, by saying 
 that if people do not like details of that de 
 scription they certainly take great pains to 
 read them. 
 
 Among the letters too charming to be lost, 
 yet too personal and frankly confiding to be 
 read without some twinges of conscience, are 
 those of Edward Fitzgerald, the last man in 
 all England to have coveted such posthumous 
 publicity. They reveal truthfully that kind, 
 shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intensely 
 conservative nature ; a scholar without the 
 prick of ambition, a critic with no desire to 
 
216 ASSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 be judicial, an unwearied mind turned aside 
 from healthy and normal currents of activity. 
 Yet the indiscreet publishing of a private 
 opinion, a harmless bit of criticism such as 
 any man has a right to express to a friend, 
 drew down upon this least aggressive of authors 
 abuse too coarse to be quoted. It is easy to 
 say that Browning dishonored himself rather 
 than Fitzgerald by the brutality of his lan 
 guage. This is true ; but, nevertheless, it is 
 not pleasant to go down to posterity branded 
 with Billingsgate by a great poet; and it is 
 doubly hard to bear such a weight of vitupera 
 tion because a word said in a letter has been 
 ruthlessly given to the world. 
 
 The unhesitating fashion in which women 
 reveal themselves to their correspondents 
 makes it seem treachery to read their printed 
 pages. Those girlish confidences of Jane 
 Austen to Cassandra, so frank and gay, so full 
 of jokes and laughter, and country gossip, and 
 sisterly affection, what a contrast they afford 
 to the attitude of unbroken reserve which Miss 
 Austen always presented to the world ! Yet 
 now the world is free to follow each foolish 
 little jest, and to pass judgment on the wit it 
 
LETTERS. 217 
 
 holds. Those affectionate and not over-wise 
 outpourings of Miss Mitford, with their effusive 
 terms of endearment ; those dignified and sol 
 emn reflections of Sara Coleridge, humanized 
 occasionally by a chance remark about the 
 baby, or an inadvertent admission that she has 
 gone down twice to supper at an evening party ; 
 those keen, combative, brilliant letters of Mrs. 
 Carlyle that are so bitter-sweet ; those unre 
 served and purely personal communications of 
 Geraldine Jewsbury which have no message 
 whatever for the public ; how much has been 
 given us to which we show scant claim ! It is 
 true that in the days when the Polite Letter- 
 Writer ruled the land, and his baleful influence 
 was felt on every side, a great many women 
 wrote elaborate missives which nobody now 
 wants to read, but which were then more highly 
 prized than the gossiping pages we have learned 
 to love so well. These sedate blue-stockings 
 told neither their own affairs nor their neigh 
 bors ; but confined themselves to dignified gen 
 eralities, expressed with Johnsonian elegance. 
 There was Miss Seward, for example, who at 
 times was too ridiculous for even Scott s genial 
 forbearance ; yet whose letters won her such a 
 
218 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 reputation that we find them diligently sought 
 for, years after they were penned. Fancy 
 admiring groups of men and women listen 
 ing to Miss Seward s celebrated epistles to 
 Miss Rogers and Miss Weston, one of which 
 begins : 
 
 " Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia, 
 is the regret you express for our separation ! 
 Pleasant were the weeks we have recently 
 passed together in this ancient and embowered 
 mansion. I had strongly felt the silence and 
 vacancy of the depriving day on which you 
 vanished. How prone are our hearts per 
 versely to quarrel with the friendly coercion 
 of employment, at the very instant in which it 
 is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of 
 unavailing melancholy." 
 
 The letter which opens in this promising 
 manner closes, as might be expected, with a 
 fervent and glowing apostrophe to the absent 
 one: 
 
 " Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacred 
 are thy delights ! Sophia, thy mind is capable 
 of tasting them in all their poignancy. Against 
 how many of life s incidents may that capacity 
 be considered as a counterpoise." 
 
LETTERS. 219 
 
 Now, in the last century, when people re 
 ceived letters of this kind, they did not, as we 
 might suppose, laugh and tear them up. They 
 treasured them sacredly in their desks, and 
 read them to their young nieces and nephews, 
 and made fair copies of them for less favored 
 friends. Yet the same mail-bags which groaned 
 under these ponderous compositions were laden 
 now and then with Sir Walter s delightful 
 pages, all aglow with that diffused spirit of 
 healthy enjoyment, that sane and happy know 
 ledge of life, that dauntless and incomparable 
 courage. Perhaps they carried some of Cow- 
 per s letters, rich mines of pleasure and profit 
 for us all, full to the brim of homely pleasant 
 details which only leisure can find time to note. 
 A man who was even ordinarily busy would 
 never have stopped to observe the things which 
 Cowper tells us about so charmingly, the 
 bustling candidate kissing all the maids ; the 
 hungry beggar who declines to eat vermicelli 
 soup ; the young thief who is whipped for steal 
 ing the butcher s iron-work ; the kitchen table 
 which is scrubbed into paralysis ; the retinue 
 of kittens in the barn ; the foolish old cat who 
 must needs pursue a viper crawling in the sun ; 
 
220 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 and the favorite tabby who ungratefully ran 
 away into a ditch, and cost the family four 
 shillings before she was recovered. Cowper 
 had time to see all these things, had time to 
 hear the soft click of Mrs. Unwin s knitting- 
 needles, and the hum of the boiling tea-kettle ; 
 and he had moreover the faculty of bringing 
 all that he saw and heard very vividly before 
 our eyes, of interesting us, almost against our 
 will, in the petty annals of an uneventful life. 
 It is no more possible for important city men, 
 heads of banking-houses and hard-working 
 members of Parliament, to write letters of this 
 kind, than it is possible for them to hold the 
 attention of generations, as Gray so easily 
 holds it, with a few playful lines of condolence 
 on the death of a friend s cat, a few polished 
 verses set like jewels in the delicate filigree of 
 a sportive and caressing letter. "It would be 
 a sensible satisfaction to me," he writes to 
 Walpole, " before I testify my sorrow, and the 
 sincere part I take in your misfortune, to know 
 for certain who it is I lament. I knew Zara 
 and Selima (Selima, was it ? or Fatima ?), or 
 rather I knew them both together ; for I can 
 not justly say which was which. Then as to 
 
LETTERS. 221 
 
 your handsome Cat, the name you distinguish 
 her by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowing 
 one s handsome cat is always the cat one loves 
 best ; or if one be alive and one dead, it is 
 usually the latter which is the handsomer. 
 Besides, if the point were never so clear, I 
 hope you do not think me so ill-bred or so 
 imprudent as to forfeit all my interest in the 
 survivor. Oh, no ! I would rather seem to 
 mistake, and imagine to be sure it must be 
 the tabby one that has met with this sad 
 accident." 
 
 Labor accomplishes many things in this 
 busy, tired world, and receives her full share 
 of applause for every nail she drives. But 
 leisure writes the letters ; leisure aided by 
 observation, and sometimes as in the case 
 of Mme. de Sevigne by that rare faculty of 
 receiving and imparting impressions without 
 judicial reasoning, by that winning, unconten- 
 tious amenity which accepts life as it is, and 
 men as they chance to be. There is no rancor 
 in the light laugh with which this charming 
 Frenchwoman greets the follies and frivolities 
 of her day. There is no moral protest in 
 her amused survey of that attractive invalid, 
 
222 ESSAYS IN IDLENESS. 
 
 Mine, de Brissac, who lies in bed so " curled 
 and beautiful " tliat she turns everybody s 
 head. " I wish you could have seen," writes 
 Mine, de Sevigne to her daughter, "the use 
 she made of her sufferings ; of her eyes, of 
 her sighs, of her arms, of her hands languish 
 ing on the counterpane, of the situation, and 
 the compassion she excited. I was overcome 
 with tenderness and admiration as I gazed on 
 the performance, which seemed to me so fine. 
 My riveted attention must surely have given 
 satisfaction ; and bear in mind that it was for 
 the Abbe Bayard, for Saint Herens, for Mont- 
 jeu and Plancy, that the scene was rehearsed. 
 When I remember with what simplicity you 
 are ill, you seem to me a mere bungler in 
 comparison." 
 
 This is good-natured ridicule, keen but not 
 condemnatory, without mercy, yet without 
 upbraiding. Sainte-Beuve, who dearly loves 
 Mme. de Sevigne, complains with reason that 
 she is not even angry at things which ought to 
 anger her, and that this gentle tolerance lacks 
 humanity when cruelty and wrong-doing call 
 for denunciation. Yet who can remember so 
 long and tenderly a friend fallen and dis- 
 
LETTERS, 223 
 
 graced ? Who can extend a helping hand so 
 frankly to a fellow mortal ? Who can love so 
 devotedly, or sacrifice herself with such cheer 
 ful serenity at the shrine of her deep affec 
 tions ? Her memory conies down to us through 
 two centuries, enriched with graceful fancies. 
 We know her as one good and gay, gentle and 
 witty and wise, who, by virtue of her supreme 
 and narrowed genius, wrote letters unsur 
 passed in literature. " Keep my correspon 
 dence," said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 
 in the heyday of her youth and pride. " It 
 will be as good as Mme. de Sevigne s, forty 
 years hence." But four times forty years 
 have only served to widen the gulf between 
 these two writers, and to place them in parted 
 spheres. Their work springs from different 
 sources, and is as unlike in inspiration as in 
 form. " It is impossible," says Sainte-Beuve, 
 " to speak of women without first putting one s 
 self in a good humor by the thought of Mme. 
 de Sevigne. With us moderns, this process 
 takes the place of one of those invocations or 
 libations which the ancients were used to offer 
 up to the pure source of grace." In the same 
 devout spirit I am glad to close my volume 
 
224 ESSAYS JN IDLENESS. 
 
 with a few words about this incomparable 
 letter-writer, with a little libation poured at her 
 shadowy feet, that my last page may leave me 
 and Heaven permitting my readers in a 
 good humor, cheered by the pleasant memories 
 which gild a passing hour. 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
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