Essays in Idleness, by Agnes Repplier--A Project Gutenberg eBook (2024)

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Essays in Idleness, by Agnes RepplierThis eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and mostother parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictionswhatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms ofthe Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll haveto check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.Title: Essays in IdlenessAuthor: Agnes RepplierRelease Date: May 4, 2019 [EBook #59430]Language: EnglishCharacter set encoding: UTF-8*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN IDLENESS ***Produced by Chris Curnow, Barry Abrahamsen, and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (Thisfile was produced from images generously made availableby The Internet Archive)

CONTENTS.

“Leisure” is reprinted from “Scribner’s Magazine” bypermission of the publishers.

AGRIPPINA.

She is sitting now on my desk, and I glanceat her with deference, mutely begging permissionto begin. But her back is turned tome, and expresses in every curve such fineand delicate disdain that I falter and lose courageat the very threshold of my task. I havelong known that cats are the most contemptuousof creatures, and that Agrippina is themost contemptuous of cats. The spirit of Bouhaki,the proud Theban beast that sat erect,with gold earrings in his ears, at the feet ofhis master, King Hana; the spirit of Muezza,whose slumbers Mahomet himself was not boldenough to disturb; the spirit of Micetto, Chateaubriand’secclesiastical pet, dignified as acardinal, and conscious ever that he was thegift of a sovereign pontiff,—the spirits of allarrogant cats that have played scornful parts inthe world’s great comedy look out from Agrippina’syellow eyes, and hold me in subjection.I should like to explain to her, if I dared,that my desk is small, littered with manypapers, and sadly overcrowded with the usefulinutilities which affectionate friends delight ingiving me at Christmas time. Sainte-Beuve’scat, I am aware, sat on his desk, and roamedat will among those precious manuscriptswhich no intrusive hand was ever permitted totouch; but Sainte-Beuve probably had sufficientspace reserved for his own comfort andconvenience. I have not; and Agrippina’sbeautifully ringed tail flapping across my copydistracts my attention, and imperils the neatnessof my penmanship. Even when she isdisposed to be affable, turns the light of hercountenance upon me, watches with attentivecuriosity every stroke I make, and softly, withcurved paw, pats my pen as it travels over thepaper,—even in these halcyon moments,though my self-love is flattered by her condescension,I am aware that I should work betterand more rapidly if I denied myself thischarming companionship.

But in truth it is impossible for a lover ofcats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminatinglittle friends, who give us just enoughof their regard and complaisance to make ushunger for more. M. Fée, the naturalist, whohas written so admirably about animals, andwho understands, as only a Frenchman canunderstand, the delicate and subtle organizationof a cat, frankly admits that the keynoteof its character is independence. It dwellsunder our roof, sleeps by our fire, endures ourblandishments, and apparently enjoys our society,without for one moment forfeiting itssense of absolute freedom, without acknowledgingany servile relation to the human creaturewho shelters it. “The cat,” says M. Fée,“will never part with its liberty; it willneither be our servant, like the horse, nor ourfriend, like the dog. It consents to live as ourguest; it accepts the home we offer and thefood we give; it even goes so far as to solicitour caresses, but capriciously, and when it suitsits humor to receive them.”

Rude and masterful souls resent this fineself-sufficiency in a domestic animal, and requirethat it should have no will but theirs,no pleasure that does not emanate from them.They are forever prating of the love and fidelityof the dog, of the beast that obeys theirslightest word, crouches contentedly for hoursat their feet, is exuberantly grateful for thesmallest attention, and so affectionate that itsdemonstrations require to be curbed ratherthan encouraged. All this homage is pleasingto their vanity; yet there are people, less magisterialperhaps, or less exacting, who believethat true friendship, even with an animal, maybe built upon mutual esteem and independence;that to demand gratitude is to be unworthy ofit; and that obedience is not essential to agreeableand healthy intercourse. A man whoowns a dog is, in every sense of the word, itsmaster; the term expresses accurately theirmutual relations. But it is ridiculous whenapplied to the limited possession of a cat. Iam certainly not Agrippina’s mistress, and theassumption of authority on my part would bea mere empty dignity, like those swelling titleswhich afford such innocent delight to theFreemasons of our severe republic. If I callAgrippina, she does not come; if I tell her togo away, she remains where she is; if I try topersuade her to show off her one or two littleaccomplishments, she refuses, with courteousbut unswerving decision. She has frolicsomemoods, in which a thimble, a shoe-buttoner, ascrap of paper, or a piece of string will driveher wild with delight; she has moods of inflexiblegravity, in which she stares solemnly at herfavorite ball rolling over the carpet, withoutstirring one lazy limb to reach it. “Have Iseen this foolish toy before?” she seems to beasking herself with musing austerity; “andcan it be possible that there are cats who runafter such frivolous trifles? Vanity of vanities,and all is vanity, save only to lie uponthe hearth rug, and be warm, and ‘think gravethoughts to feed a serious soul.’” In suchmoments of rejection and humiliation, I comfortmyself by recalling the words of onetoo wise for arrogance. “When I play withmy cat,” says Montaigne, “how do I knowwhether she does not make a jest of me? Weentertain each other with mutual antics; andif I have my own time for beginning or refusing,she too has hers.”

This is the spirit in which we should approacha creature so reserved and so utterlyself-sufficing; this is the only key we have tothat natural distinction of character which repelscareless and unobservant natures. WhenI am told that Agrippina is disobedient, ungrateful,cold-hearted, perverse, stupid, treacherous,and cruel, I no longer strive to checkthe torrent of abuse. I know that Buffon saidall this, and much more, about cats, and thatpeople have gone on repeating it ever since,principally because these spirited little beastshave remained just what it pleased Providenceto make them, have preserved their primitivefreedom through centuries of effete and demoralizingcivilization. Why, I wonder, should agreat many good men and women cherish anunreasonable grudge against one animal becauseit does not chance to possess the precisequalities of another? “My dog fetches myslippers for me every night,” said a friendtriumphantly, not long ago. “He puts themfirst to warm by the fire, and then brings themover to my chair, wagging his tail, and asproud as Punch. Would your cat do as muchfor you, I’d like to know?” Assuredly not!If I waited for Agrippina to fetch me shoes orslippers, I should have no other resource saveto join as speedily as possible one of the barefootedreligious orders of Italy. But, after all,fetching slippers is not the whole duty of domesticpets. As La Fontaine gently remindsus:—

We pick no quarrel with a canary because itdoes not talk like a parrot, nor with a parrotbecause it does not sing like a canary. Wefind no fault with a King Charles spaniel fornot flying at the throat of a burglar, nor witha St. Bernard because we cannot put it in ourpocket. Agrippina will never make herselfserviceable, yet nevertheless is she of inestimableservice. How many times have I restedtired eyes on her graceful little body, curledup in a ball and wrapped round with her taillike a parcel; or stretched out luxuriously onmy bed, one paw coyly covering her face, theother curved gently inwards, as though claspingan invisible treasure! Asleep or awake,in rest or in motion, grave or gay, Agrippinais always beautiful; and it is better to bebeautiful than to fetch and carry from therising to the setting of the sun. She is droll,too, with an unconscious humor, even in hermost serious and sentimental moods. She hasquite the longest ears that ever were seen on sosmall a cat, eyes more solemn than Athene’sowl blinking in the sunlight, and an air ofsupercilious disdain that would have madeDiogenes seem young and ardent by her side.Sitting on the library table, under the eveninglamp, with her head held high in air, her tallears as erect as chimneys, and her inscrutablegaze fixed on the darkest corner of the room,Agrippina inspires in the family sentiments ofmingled mirthfulness and awe. To laugh ather in such moments, however, is to incur hersupreme displeasure. I have known her tojump down from the table, and walk haughtilyout of the room, because of a single half-suppressedbut wholly indecorous giggle.

Schopenhauer has said that the reason domesticpets are so lovable and so helpful tous is because they enjoy, quietly and placidly,the present moment. Life holds no future forthem, and consequently no care; if they arecontent, their contentment is absolute; andour jaded and wearied spirits find a naturalrelief in the sight of creatures whose little cupsof happiness can so easily be filled to the brim.Walt Whitman expresses the same thoughtmore coarsely when he acknowledges that heloves the society of animals because they donot sweat and whine over their condition, norlie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,nor sicken him with discussions of their duty.In truth, that admirable counsel of SydneySmith’s, “Take short views of life,” can beobeyed only by the brutes; for the thoughtthat travels even to the morrow is long enoughto destroy our peace of mind, inasmuch as weknow not what the morrow may bring forth.But when Agrippina has breakfasted, andwashed, and sits in the sunlight blinking atme with affectionate contempt, I feel soothedby her absolute and unqualified enjoyment. Iknow how full my day will be of things that Idon’t want particularly to do, and that are notparticularly worth doing; but for her, timeand the world hold only this brief moment ofcontentment. Slowly the eyes close, gentlythe little body is relaxed. Oh, you who striveto relieve your overwrought nerves, and cultivatepower through repose, watch the exquisitelanguor of a drowsy cat, and despairof imitating such perfect and restful grace!There is a gradual yielding of every muscle tothe soft persuasiveness of slumber; the flexibleframe is curved into tender lines, the headnestles lower, the paws are tucked out of sight;no convulsive throb or start betrays a rebelliousalertness; only a faint quiver of unconscioussatisfaction, a faint heaving of the tawnysides, a faint gleam of the half-shut yelloweyes, and Agrippina is asleep. I look at herfor one wistful moment, and then turn resolutelyto my work. It were ignoble to wishmyself in her place, and yet how charming tobe able to settle down to a nap, sans peur etsans reproche, at ten o’clock in the morning!

These, then, are a few of the pleasures to bederived from the society of an amiable cat;and by an amiable cat I mean one that, whilemaintaining its own dignity and delicate reserve,is nevertheless affable and condescendingin the company of human beings. Thereis nothing I dislike more than newspaper andmagazine stories about priggish pussies—likethe children in Sunday-school books—thatshare their food with hungry beasts from theback alleys, and show touching fidelity to oldblind masters, and hunt partridges, in a spiritof noble self-sacrifice, for consumptive mistresses,and scorn to help themselves to delicaciesfrom the kitchen tables, and arouse theirhouseholds so often in cases of fire that Ishould suspect them of starting the conflagrationsin order to win applause by giving thealarm. Whatever a real cat may or may notbe, it is never a prig, and all true lovers of therace have been quick to recognize and appreciatethis fact.

“I value in the cat,” says Chateaubriand,“that independent and almost ungrateful temperwhich prevents it from attaching itself toany one; the indifference with which it passesfrom the salon to the housetop. When youcaress it, it stretches itself out and arches itsback responsively; but that is caused by physicalpleasure, and not, as in the case of thedog, by a silly satisfaction in loving and beingfaithful to a master who returns thanks inkicks. The cat lives alone, has no need ofsociety, does not obey except when it likes, pretendsto sleep that it may see the more clearly,and scratches everything that it can scratch.”

Here is a sketch spirited enough, and of goodoutline, but hardly correct in detail. A catseldom manifests affection, yet is often distinctlysocial, and likes to see itself the pettedminion of a family group. Agrippina, in fact,so far from living alone, will not, if she canhelp it, remain for a moment in a room by herself.She is content to have me as a companion,perhaps in default of better; but if Igo upstairs or downstairs in search of a book,or my eyeglasses, or any one of the countlessthings that are never where they ought to be,Agrippina follows closely at my heels. Sometimes,when she is fast asleep, I steal softlyout of the door, thinking to escape her vigilance;but before I have taken a dozen stepsshe is under my feet, mewing a gentle reproach,and putting on all the injured airs ofa deserted Ariadne. I should like to thinksuch behavior prompted by affection ratherthan by curiosity; but in my candid momentsI find this “pathetic fallacy” a difficult sentimentto cherish. There are people, I amaware, who trustfully assert that their petslove them; and one such sanguine creaturehas recently assured the world that “no manwho boasts the real intimacy and confidenceof a cat would dream of calling his four-footedfriend ‘puss.’” But is not such a boastrather ill-timed at best? How dare any manventure to assert that he possesses the intimacyand confidence of an animal so exclusive andso reserved? I doubt if Cardinal Wolsey, inthe zenith of his pride and power, claimed theintimacy and confidence of the superb cat whosat in a cushioned armchair by his side, andreflected with mimic dignity the full-blownhonors of the Lord High Chancellor of England.Agrippina, I am humbly aware, grantsme neither her intimacy nor her confidence,but only her companionship, which I endeavorto receive modestly, and without flaunting myfavors to the world. She is displeased andeven downcast when I go out, and she greetsmy return with delight, thrusting her littlegray head between the banisters the instantI open the house door, and waving a welcomein mid-air with one ridiculously small paw.Being but mortal, I am naturally pleased withthese tokens of esteem, but I do not, on thataccount, go about with arrogant brow, andboast of my intimacy with Agrippina. Ishould be laughed at, if I did, by everybodywho is privileged to possess and appreciate acat.

As for curiosity, that vice which the AbbéGaliani held to be unknown to animals, butwhich the more astute Voltaire detected inevery little dog that he saw peering out of thewindow of its master’s coach, it is the ridingpassion of the feline breast. A closet door leftajar, a box with half-closed lid, an open bureaudrawer,—these are the objects that fill a catwith the liveliest interest and delight. Agrippinawatches breathlessly the unfastening ofa parcel, and tries to hasten matters by clutchingactively at the string. When its contentsare shown her, she examines them gravely,and then, with a sigh of relief, settles down torepose. The slightest noise disturbs and irritatesher until she discovers its cause. If shehears a footstep in the hall, she runs out tosee whose it is, and, like certain troublesomelittle people I have known, she dearly lovesto go to the front door every time the bellis rung. From my window she surveys thestreet with tranquil scrutiny, and, if boys areplaying below, she follows their games with asteady, scornful stare, very different from thewistful eagerness of a friendly dog, quiveringto join in the sport. Sometimes the boyscatch sight of her, and shout up rudely at herwindow; and I can never sufficiently admireAgrippina’s conduct upon these trying occasions,the well-bred composure with which sheaffects neither to see nor to hear them, norto be aware that there are such objectionablecreatures as children in the world. Sometimes,too, the terrier that lives next doorcomes out to sun himself in the street, and,beholding my cat sitting well out of reach, hedances madly up and down the pavement,barking with all his might, and rearing himselfon his short hind legs, in a futile attemptto dislodge her. Then the spirit of evilenters Agrippina’s little heart. The windowis open, and she creeps to the extremeedge of the stone sill, stretches herself at fulllength, peers down smilingly at the frenzieddog, dangles one paw enticingly in the air,and exerts herself with quiet malice to drivehim to desperation. Her sense of humor isawakened by his frantic efforts, and by herown absolute security; and not until he isspent with exertion, and lies panting andexhausted on the bricks, does she arch hergraceful back, stretch her limbs lazily in thesun, and with one light bound spring from thewindow to my desk. Wisely has Moncrifobserved that a cat is not merely diverted byeverything that moves, but is convinced thatall nature is occupied exclusively with cateringto her diversion.

There is a charming story told by M.Champfleury, who has written so much and soadmirably about cats, of a poor hermit whosepiety and asceticism were so great that in avision he was permitted to behold his placein heaven, next to that of St. Gregory, thesovereign pontiff of Christendom. The hermit,who possessed nothing upon earth but afemale cat, was abashed by the thought that inthe next world he was destined to rank withso powerful a prince of the Church; and perhaps—forwho knows the secret springs ofspiritual pride?—he fancied that his self-inflictedpoverty would win for him an evenhigher reward. Whereupon a second revelationmade known to him that his detachmentfrom the world was by no means so completeas he imagined, for that he loved and valuedhis cat, the sole companion of his solitude,more than St. Gregory loved and valued allhis earthly possessions. The Pope on histhrone was the truer ascetic of the two.

This little tale conveys to us, in additionto its excellent moral,—never more neededthan at present,—a pleasing truth concerningthe lovability of cats. While they havenever attained, and never deserve to attain,the widespread and somewhat commonplacepopularity of dogs, their fascination is amore potent and irresistible charm. Hewho yields himself to the sweet seductivenessof a cat is beguiled forever from the simple,honorable friendship of the more generousand open-hearted beast. The small domesticsphinx whose inscrutable eyes never softenwith affection; the fetich animal that comesdown 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 unholycreature, suffering one long martyrdomthroughout the half-seen, dimly-fathomed MiddleAges,—even now this lovely, uncannypet is capable of inspiring mingled sentimentsof horror and devotion. Those who are underits spell rejoice in their thralldom, and, likeM. Champfleury’s hermit, grow strangely weddedto this mute, unsympathetic comradeship.Those who have inherited the old, half-fearfulaversion render a still finer tribute to thecat’s native witchery and power. I have seenmiddle-aged women, of dignified and tranquilaspect, draw back with unfeigned dismay atthe sight of Agrippina, a little ball of grayand yellow fur, curled up in peaceful slumberon the hearth rug. And this instinctiveshrinking has nothing in common with theperfectly reasonable fear we entertain for aterrier snapping and snarling at our heels,or for a mastiff the size of a calf, which ourfriend assures us is as gentle as a baby, butwhich looks able and ready to tear us limbfrom limb. It may be ignominious to beafraid of dogs, but the emotion is one whichwill bear analysis and explanation; we knowexactly what it is we fear; while the uneasinesswith which many people behold a harmlessand perfectly indifferent cat is a faintreflection of that superstitious terror whichthe nineteenth century still borrows occasionallyfrom the ninth. We call it by a differentname, and account for it on purely naturalprinciples, in deference to progress; but theMediæval peasant who beheld his cat stealout, like a gray shadow, on St. John’s Eve, tojoin in unholy rites, felt the same shudderingabhorrence which we witness and wonder atto-day. He simplified matters somewhat, andeased his troubled mind by killing the beast;for cats that ventured forth on the feast ofSt. John, or on Halloween, or on the secondWednesday in Lent, did so at their peril.Fires blazed for them in every village, andeven quiet stay-at-homes were too often huntedfrom their chimney-corners to a cruel death.There is a receipt signed in 1575 by oneLucas Pommoreux,—abhorred forever be hisname!—to whom has been paid the sum of ahundred sols parisis “for having supplied forthree years all the cats required for the fire onSt. John’s Day;” and be it remembered thatthe gracious child, afterwards Louis XIII.,interceded with Henry IV. for the lives ofthese poor animals, sacrificed to wicked sportand an unreasoning terror.

Girt around with fear, and mystery, and subtleassociations of evil, the cat comes down tous through the centuries; and from every landfresh traditions of sorcery claim it for theirown. In Brittany is still whispered the dreadfultale of the cats that danced with sacrilegiousglee around the crucifix until their kingwas slain; and in Sicily men know that ifa black cat serves seven masters in turn hecarries the soul of the seventh into hell. InRussia black cats become devils at the end ofseven years, and in southern Europe they aremerely serving their apprenticeship as witches.Norwegian folk-lore is rich in ghastly storieslike that of the wealthy miller whose mill hasbeen twice burned down on Whitsun night,and for whom a traveling tailor offers to keepwatch. The tailor chalks a circle on the floor,writes the Lord’s prayer around it, and waitsuntil midnight, when a troop of cats rush in,and hang a great pot of pitch over the fireplace.Again and again they try to overturnthis pitch, but every time the tailor frightensthem away; and when their leader endeavorsstealthily to draw him outside of his magiccircle, he cuts off her paw with his knife.Then they all fly howling into the night, andthe next morning the miller sees with joy hismill standing whole and unharmed. But themiller’s wife cowers under the bedclothes, offeringher left hand to the tailor, and hidingas best she can her right arm’s bleedingstump.

Finer even than this tale is the well-knownstory which “Monk” Lewis told to Shelley ofa gentleman who, late one night, went to visita friend living on the outskirts of a forest ineast Germany. He lost his path, and, afterwandering aimlessly for some time, beheld atlast a light streaming from the windows of anold and ruined abbey. Looking in, he saw aprocession of cats lowering into the grave asmall coffin with a crown upon it. The sightfilled him with horror, and, spurring his horse,he rode away as fast as he could, never stoppinguntil he reached his destination, longafter midnight. His friend was still awaitinghim, and at once he recounted what hadhappened; whereupon a cat that lay sleepingby the fire sprang to its feet, cried out, “ThenI am the King of the Cats!” and disappearedlike a flash up the chimney.

For my part, I consider this the best catstory in all literature, full of suggestivenessand terror, yet picturesque withal, and leavingample room in the mind for speculation. Whywas not the heir apparent bidden to the royalfuneral? Was there a disputed succession,and how are such points settled in the mysteriousdomain of cat-land? The notion thatthese animals gather in ghost-haunted churchesand castles for their nocturnal revels is onecommon to all parts of Europe. We rememberhow the little maiden of the “MountainIdyl” confides to Heine that the innocent-lookingcat 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 thespirits of the dead wait spellbound for theword that shall waken them. In all scenesof impish revelry cats play a prominent part,although occasionally, by virtue of their dualnatures, they serve as barriers against thepowers of evil. There is the old story of thewitch’s cat that was grateful to the good girlwho gave it some ham to eat,—I may observehere, parenthetically, that I have never knowna cat that would touch ham,—and there is thefine bit of Italian folk-lore about the servantmaid who, with no other protector than a blackcat, ventures to disturb a procession of ghostson the dreadful Night of the Dead. “It iswell for you that the cat lies in your arms,”the angry spirit says to her; “otherwise whatI am, you also would be.” The last pale reflexof a universal tradition I found three yearsago in London, where the bad behavior of theWestminster cats—proverbially the most dissoluteand profligate specimens of their race—hasgiven rise to the pleasant legend of a countryhouse whither these rakish animals retirefor nights of gay festivity, and whence theyreturn in the early morning, jaded, repentant,and forlorn.

Of late years there has been a rapid andpromising growth of what disaffected and alliterativecritics call the “cat cult,” and poetsand painters vie with one another in celebratingthe charms of this long-neglected pet.Mr. M. H. Spielmann’s beautiful volume inpraise of Madame Henriette Ronner and herpictures is a treasure upon which many an ardentlover of cats will cast wandering and wistfulglances. It is impossible for even the mostdisciplined spirit not to yearn over these littlefurry darlings, these gentle, mischievous, lazy,irresistible things. As for Banjo, that dearand sentimental kitten, with his head on oneside like Lydia Languish, and a decorousmelancholy suffusing his splendid eyes, let anyobdurate scorner of the race look at his lovelinessand be converted. Mrs. Graham R. Tomson’spretty anthology, “Concerning Cats,”is another step in the right direction; a daintyvolume of selections from French and Englishverse, where we may find old favorites likeCowper’s “Retired Cat” and Calverly’s “SadMemories,” graceful epitaphs on departed pussies,some delightful poems from Baudelaire,and three, no less delightful, from the pen ofMrs. Tomson herself, whose preface, or “foreword,”is enough to win for her at once thefriendship and sympathy of the elect. Thebook, while it contains a good deal that mightwell have been omitted, is necessarily a smallone; for poets, English poets especially, havejust begun to sing the praises of the cat, asthey have for generations sung the praises ofthe horse and dog. Nevertheless, all Englishliterature, and all the literatures of every land,are full of charming allusions to this friendlyanimal,—allusions the brevity of which onlyenhances their value. Those two deliciouslines of Herrick’s, for example,—

are worth the whole of Wordsworth’s solemnpoem, “The Kitten and the Falling Leaves.”What did Wordsworth know of the innatevanity, the affectation and coquetry, of kittenhood?He saw the little beast gamboling onthe wall, and he fancied her as innocent as shelooked,—as though any living creature couldbe as innocent as a kitten looks! With touchingsimplicity, he believed her all unconsciousof the admiration she was exciting:—

Ah, the arrant knavery of that kitten! Thetiny impostor, showing off her best tricks, andfeigning to be occupied exclusively with herown infantile diversion! We can see her now,prancing and paddling after the leaves, andall the while peeping out of “the tail o’ heree” at the serene poet and philosopher, andwaving her naughty tail in glee over his confidenceand condescension.

Heine’s pretty lines,—

find their English echo in the letter Shelleywrites to Peacock, describing, half wistfully,the shrines of the Penates, “whose hymnsare the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles,the long talks over the past and dead, thelaugh of children, the warm wind of summerfilling the quiet house, and the pelting stormof winter struggling in vain for entrance.”How incomplete would these pictures be, howincomplete is any fireside sketch, without thepurring kitten or drowsy cat!

This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the littlegod of domesticity, whose presence turns ahouse into a home. Even the chilly desolationof a hotel may be rendered endurable by theseaffable and discriminating creatures; for oneof them, as we know, once welcomed Sir WalterScott, and softened for him the unfamiliarand unloved surroundings. “There are nodogs in the hotel where I lodge,” he writes toAbbotsford from London, “but a tolerablyconversable cat who eats a mess of cream withme in the morning.” Of course it did, thewise and lynx-eyed beast! I make no doubtthat, day after day and week after week, thatcat had wandered superbly amid the commonthrong of lodgers, showing favor to none, andgrowing cynical and disillusioned by constantcontact with a crowd. Then, one morning, itspied the noble, rugged face which neither mannor beast could look upon without loving, andforthwith tendered its allegiance on the spot.Only “tolerably conversable” it was, thisreserved and town-bred animal; less urbanebecause less happy than the much-respectedretainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinsefeld,whom Sir Walter called his friend. “Ah,mon grand ami, vous avez tué mon autre grandami!” he sighed, when the huge hound Nimrodended poor Hinse’s placid career. And ifScott sometimes seems to disparage cats, aswhen he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain toone, in “Quentin Durward,” he atones forsuch indignity by the use of the little pronoun“who” when writing of the London puss.My own habit is to say “who” on similaroccasions, and I am glad to have so excellentan authority.

It were an endless though a pleasant task torecount all that has been said, and well said,in praise of the cat by those who have rightlyvalued her companionship. M. Loti’s MoumoutteBlanche and Moumoutte Chinoiseare well known and widely beloved, and M.Théophile Gautier’s charming pages are toofamiliar for comment. Who has not read withdelight of the Black and White Dynastiesthat for so long ruled with gentle sway overhis hearth and heart; of Madame Théophile,who thought the parrot was a green chicken;of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply resentedhis master’s staying out late at night; of thegraceful and fastidious Séraphita; the gluttonousEnjolras; the acute Bohemian, Gavroche;the courteous and well-mannered Eponine,who received M. Gautier’s guests in thedrawing-room and dined at his table, takingeach course as it was served, and restrainingany rude distaste for food not to her fancy.“Her place was laid without a knife and fork,indeed, but with a glass, and she went regularlythrough dinner, from soup to dessert,awaiting her turn to be helped, and behavingwith a quiet propriety which most childrenmight imitate with advantage. At the firststroke of the bell she would appear, and whenI came into the dining-room she would be ather post, upright on her chair, her forepaws onthe edge of the tablecloth; and she would presenther smooth forehead to be kissed, like awell-bred little girl who was affectionately politeto relatives and old people.”

I have read this pretty description severaltimes to Agrippina, who is extremely waywardand capricious about her food, rejecting plaintivelyone day the viands which she has eatenwith apparent enjoyment the day before. Infact, the difficulty of catering to her is so wellunderstood by tradesmen that recently, whenthe housemaid carried her on an errand to thegrocery,—Agrippina is very fond of thesejaunts and of the admiration she excites,—thegrocer, a fatherly man, with cats of hisown, said briskly, “Is this the little lady whoeats the biscuits?” and presented her on thespot with several choice varieties from whichto choose. She is fastidious, too, about theway in which her meals are served; dislikingany other dishes than her own, which are ofblue-and-white china; requiring that her meatshould be cut up fine and all the fat removed,and that her morning oatmeal should be wellsugared and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn.My friends tell me sometimes that it is notthe common custom of cats to receive so muchattention at table, and that it is my faultAgrippina is so exacting; but such grumblersfail to take into consideration the marked individualitythat is the charm of every kindlytreated puss. She differs from her sisters aswidely as one woman differs from another,and reveals varying characteristics of good andevil, varying powers of intelligence and adaptation.She scales splendid heights of virtue,and, unlike Sir Thomas Browne, is “singularin offenses.” Even those primitive instinctswhich we believe all animals hold in commonare lost in acquired ethics and depravity. Noheroism could surpass that of the London catwho crawled back five times under the stageof the burning theatre to rescue her litter ofkittens, and, having carried four of them tosafety, perished devotedly with the fifth. Onthe other hand, I know of a cat who drownedher three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason,apparently, save to be rid of them, and thatshe might lie in peace on the hearth rug,—amurder well planned, deliberate, and cruel.

Only in her grace and beauty, her love ofcomfort, her dignity of bearing, her courteousreserve, and her independence of characterdoes puss remain immutable and unchanged.These are the traits which win for her thewarmest corner by the fire, and the unshakenregard of those who value her friendship andaspire to her affection. These are the traits sosubtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnetwhich every true lover of cats feels in his heartmust have been addressed to his own particularpet:—

THE CHILDREN’S POETS.

Now and then I hear it affirmed by sad-voicedpessimists, whispering in the gloom,that people do not read as much poetry inour day as they did in our grandfathers’, thatthis is distinctly the era of prose, and thatthe 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 tobelieve them. Perhaps, with the exceptionof Browning, whom we study because he isdifficult to understand, and of Shakespeare,whom we read because it is hard to contentour souls without him, the poets have slippedaway from our crowded lives, and are bestknown to us through the medium of theirreviewers. We are always wandering fromthe paths of pleasure, and this may be one ofour deviations. Yet what matters it, afterall, while around us, on every side, in schoolroomsand nurseries, in quiet corners and bycheerful fires, the children are reading poetry?—readingit with a joyous enthusiasm and anabsolute surrendering of spirit which we canall remember, but can never feel again. Wellmight Sainte-Beuve speak bravely of the clear,fine penetration peculiar to childhood. Wellmight he recall, with wistful sighs, “thatinstinctive knowledge which afterwards ripensinto judgment, but of which the fresh lucidityremains forever unapproached.” Heknew, as all critics have known, that it is onlythe child who responds swiftly, pliantly, andunreservedly to the allurements of the imagination.He knew that, when poetry is inquestion, it is better to feel than to think;and that with the growth of a guarded anddisciplined intelligence, straining after the enjoymentwhich perfection in literary art cangive, the first careless rapture of youth fadesinto a half-remembered dream.

If we are disposed to doubt the love thatchildren bear to poetry, a love concerningwhich they exhibit a good deal of reticence,let us consider only the alacrity with whichthey study, for their own delight, the poemsthat please them best. How should we fare,I wonder, if tried by a similar test? Howshould we like to sit down and commit tomemory Tennyson’s “œnone,” or “LocksleyHall,” or Byron’s apostrophe to the Ocean, orthe battle scene in “Marmion”? Yet I haveknown children to whom every word of theseand many other poems was as familiar as thealphabet; and a great deal more familiar—thankHeaven!—than the multiplicationtable, or the capitals of the United States. Arightly constituted child may find the paths ofknowledge hopelessly barred by a single pageof geography, or by a single sum in fractions;but he will range at pleasure through thepaths of poetry, having the open sesame toevery door. Sir Walter Scott, who was essentiallya rightly constituted child, did not evenwait for a formal introduction to his letters,but managed to learn the ballad of Hardy-knutebefore he knew how to read, and wentshouting it around the house, warming hisbaby blood to fighting-point, and traininghimself in very infancy to voice the splendorsof his manhood. He remembered this ballad,too, and loved it all his life, reciting it oncewith vast enthusiasm to Lord Byron, whoseown unhappy childhood had been softenedand vivified by the same innocent delights.

In truth, the most charming thing aboutyouth is the tenacity of its impressions. Ifwe had the time and courage to study a dozenverses to-day, we should probably forgeteleven of them in a fortnight; but the poetrywe learned as children remains, for the mostpart, indelibly fixed in our memories, andconstitutes a little Golden Treasury of ourown, more dear and valuable to us than anyother collection, because it contains only ourchosen favorites, and is always within the reachof reference. Once, when I was very young, Iasked a girl companion—well known now inthe world of literature—if she did not growweary waiting for trains, which were alwayslate, at the suburban station where she wentto school. “Oh, no,” was the cheerful reply.“If I have no book, and there is no onehere to talk with, I walk up and down theplatform and think over the poetry that Iknow.” Admirable occupation for an idleminute! Even the tedium of railway travelingloses half its horrors if one can withdrawat pleasure into the society of the poets and,soothed by their gentle and harmonious voices,forget the irksome recurrence of familiarthings.

It has been often demonstrated, and asoften forgotten, that children do not need tohave poetry written down to their intellectuallevel, and do not love to see the stately Museostentatiously bending to their ear. In thematter of prose, it seems necessary for themto have a literature of their own, over whichthey linger willingly for a little while, asthough in the sunny antechamber of a king.But in the golden palace of the poets there isno period of probation, there is no enforcedattendance upon petty things. The clear-eyedchildren go straight to the heart of themystery, and recognize in the music of words,in the enduring charm of metrical quality, anelement of never-ending delight. When tothis simple sensuous pleasure is added theenchantment of poetic images, lovely andveiled and dimly understood, then the delightgrows sweeter and keener, the child’s soulflowers into a conscious love of poetry, andone lifelong source of happiness is gained.But it is never through infantine or juvenileverses that the end is reached. There is nopoet dearer to the young than Tennyson, andit was not the least of his joys to know thatall over the English-speaking world childrenwere tuning their hearts to the music of hislines, were dreaming vaguely and rapturouslyover the beauty he revealed. Therefore theinsult seemed greater and more wanton whenthis beloved idol of our nurseries deliberatelyoffered to his eager audience such anxiouslybabyish verses as those about Minnie andWinnie, and the little city maiden who goesstraying among the flowers. Is there inChristendom a child who wants to be told byone of the greatest of poets that

that the shell was pink within and silver without;and that

It is not in these tones that poetry speaksto the childish soul, though it is too often inthis fashion that the poet strives to adjusthimself to what he thinks is the childishstandard. He lowers his sublime head fromthe stars, and pipes with painstaking flatnesson a little reed, while the children wander faraway, and listen breathlessly to older anddreamier strains.

Here is the mystic note that childhood loves,and here, too, is the sweet constraint of linkedrhymes that makes music for its ears. Howmany of us can remember well our early joyin this poem, which was but as another andmore exquisite fairy tale, ranking fitly withAndersen’s “Little Mermaid,” and “Undine,”and all sad stories of unhappy lives!And who shall forget the sombre passion of“Oriana,” of those wailing verses that rangthrough our little hearts like the shrill sobbingof winter storms, of that strange tragedythat oppressed us more with fear than pity!

If any one be inclined to think that childrenmust understand poetry in order to appreciateand enjoy it, that one enchanted line,—

should be sufficient to undeceive him forever.The spell of those finely chosen words lies inthe shadowy and half-seen picture they convey,—apicture with indistinct outlines, as ofan unknown land, where the desolate spiritwanders moaning in the gloom. The wholepoem is inexpressibly alluring to an imaginativechild, and its atmosphere of bleak despondencydarkens suddenly into horror atthe breaking off of the last line from visionsof the grave and of peaceful death,—

The same grace of indistinctness, thoughlinked with a gentler mood and with a softermusic, makes the lullaby in “The Princess”a lasting delight to children, while the prettycradle-song in “Sea Dreams,” beginning,—

has never won their hearts. Its motive is tooapparent, its nursery flavor too pronounced.It has none of the condescension of “Minnieand Winnie,” and grown people can read itwith pleasure; but a simple statement of obvioustruths, or a simple line of obvious reasoning,however dexterously narrated in proseor verse, has not the art to hold a youthfulsoul in thrall.

If it be a matter of interest to know whatpoets are most dear to the children aroundus, to the ordinary “apple-eating” little boysand girls for whom we are hardly braveenough to predict a shining future, it is delightfulto be told by favorite authors andby well-loved men of letters what poets firstbewitched their ardent infant minds. It isespecially pleasant to have Mr. Andrew Langadmit us a little way into his confidence, andconfess to us that he disliked “Tam O’Shanter”when his father read it aloud to him; preferring,very sensibly, “to take my warlocksand bogies with great seriousness.” Of coursehe did, and the sympathies of all children arewith him in his choice. The ghastly detailsof that witches’ Sabbath are far beyond achild’s limited knowledge of demonology andthe Scotch dialect. Tam’s escape and Maggie’sfinal catastrophe seem like insults offeredto the powers of darkness; only the humor ofthe situation is apparent, and humor is seldom,to the childish mind, a desirable element ofpoetry. Not all the spirit of Caldecott’s illustrationscan make “John Gilpin” a real favoritein our nurseries, while “The Jackdaw ofRheims” is popular simply because children,being proof against cynicism, accept the storyas it is told, with much misplaced sympathyfor the thievish bird, and many secret rejoicingsover his restoration to grace and feathers.As for “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,”its humor is swallowed up in tragedy, and theterror of what is to come helps little readersover such sad stumbling-blocks as

lines which are every whit as painful to theirears as to ours. I have often wondered howthe infant Southeys and Coleridges, thatbright-eyed group of alert and charming children,all afire with romantic impulses, received“The Cataract of Lodore,” when papa Southeycondescended to read it in the schoolroom.What well-bred efforts to appear pleased andgrateful! What secret repulsion to a senselessclatter of words, as remote from the silverysweetness, the cadenced music of falling waters,as from the unalterable requirements of poeticart!

Ah! unwise little son, to whose rash requestgenerations of children have owed the presence,in readers and elocution-books and volumes of“Select Lyrics for the Nursery,” of thosehated and hateful verses.

“Poetry came to me with Sir Walter Scott,”says Mr. Lang; with “Marmion,” and the“Last Minstrel,” and “The Lady of theLake,” read “for the twentieth time,” andever with fresh delight. Poetry came to Scottwith Shakespeare, studied rapturously by firelightin his mother’s dressing-room, when allthe household thought him fast asleep, and withPope’s translation of the Iliad, that royal roadover which the Muse has stepped, smiling,into many a boyish heart. Poetry came toPope—poor little lame lad—with Spenser’s“Faerie Queene;” with the brave adventuresof strong, valiant knights, who go forth, unblemishedand unfrighted, to do battle withdragons and “Paynims cruel.” And so thelinks of the magic chain are woven, and childhands down to child the spell that holds thecenturies together. I cannot bear to hear theunkind things which even the most tolerant ofcritics are wont to say about Pope’s “Iliad,”remembering as I do how many boys have receivedfrom its pages their first poetic stimulus,their first awakening to noble things. Whata charming picture we have of Coleridge, afeeble, petulant child tossing with fever on hislittle bed, and of his brother Francis stealingup, in defiance of all orders, to sit by his sideand read him Pope’s translation of Homer.The bond that drew these boys together wasforged in such breathless moments and in suchmutual pleasures; for Francis, the handsome,spirited sailor lad, who climbed trees, androbbed orchards, and led all dangerous sports,had little in common with his small, silent, precociousbrother. “Frank had a violent loveof beating me,” muses Coleridge, in a tone ofmild complaint (and no wonder, we think, fora more beatable child than Samuel Taylor itwould have been hard to find). “But wheneverthat was superseded by any humor orcircumstance, he was very fond of me, and usedto regard me with a strange mixture of admirationand contempt.” More contempt than admiration,probably; yet was all resentmentforgotten, and all unkindness at an end, whileone boy read to the other the story of Hectorand Patroclus, and of great Ajax, with sorrowin his heart, pacing round his dead comrade,as a tawny lioness paces round her youngwhen she sees the hunters coming throughthe woods. As a companion picture to thiswe have little Dante Gabriel Rossetti playingOthello in the nursery, and so carried away bythe passionate impulse of these lines,—

that he struck himself fiercely on the breastwith an iron chisel, and fainted under theblow. We can hardly believe that Shakespeareis beyond the mental grasp of childhood,when Scott, at seven, crept out of bed onwinter nights to read “King Henry IV.,” andRossetti, at nine, was overwhelmed by theagony of Othello’s remorse.

On the other hand, there are writers, andvery brilliant writers, too, whose early livesappear to have been undisturbed by suchkeenly imaginative pastimes, and for whomthere are no well-loved and familiar figuresillumined forever in “that bright, clear, undyinglight that borders the edge of the oblivionof infancy.” Count Tolstoi confesses himselfto have been half hurt, half puzzled, by hisfellow-students at the University of Moscow,who seemed to him so coarse and inelegant,and yet who had read and enjoyed somuch. “Pushkin and Zhukovsky were literatureto them,” he says wistfully, “and not, asto me, little books in yellow bindings which Ihad studied as a child.” But how, one wonders,could Pushkin have remained merely a“little book in yellow binding” to any boywho had had the happiness of studying him asa child? Pushkin is the Russian Byron, andembodies in his poems the same spirit of restlessdiscontent, of dejected languor, of passionaterevolt; 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 ofall nations and of every age. Yet there areEnglishmen who have no word save that ofscorn for Byron, and I feel uncertain whethersuch critics ever enjoyed the privilege of beingboys at all. If to George Meredith’s composedand complacent mind there strays any wantonrecollection of young, impetuous days, howcan he write with pen of gall these worse thanchurlish lines on Manfred?—

There is more of this pretty poem, but I havequoted as much as my own irascibility canbear. I, at least, have been a child, and havespent some of my childhood’s happiest hourswith Manfred on the Alps; and have withhim beheld

and have believed with all a child’s sincerityin his remorseful gloom:—

Every line is inexpressibly dear to me now,recalling, as it does, the time “when I was inmy father’s house, and my path ran down withbutter and honey.” Once more I see the big,bare, old-fashioned parlor, to dust which wasmy daily task, my dear mother having strivenlong and vainly to teach my idle little handssome useful housewifely accomplishment. Inone corner stood a console-table, with chillyParian ornaments on top, and underneath apile of heavy books; Wordsworth, Moore, thepoems of Frances Sargent Osgood,—no lackof variety here,—“The Lady of the Lake,”and Byron in an embossed brown binding, withclosely printed double columns, well calculatedto dim the keenest sight in Christendom. Notthat mysterious and malignant mountain whichrose frowning from the sea, and drew all shipsshattered to its feet, was more irresistible inits attraction than this brown, bulky Byron.I could not pass it by! My dusting never gotbeyond the table where it lay; but sittingcrumpled on the floor, with the enchantedvolume on my lap, I speedily forgot everythingin the world save only the wanderingChilde,

or “The Corsair,” or “Mazeppa,” or “Manfred,”best loved of that dark group. PerhapsByron is not considered wholesome reading forlittle girls in these careful days when expurgatededitions of “The Vicar of Wakefield”and “Paul and Virginia” find favor in ournurseries. On this score I have no defense tooffer, and I am not proposing the poet as asafe text-book for early youth; but havingnever been told that there was such a thingas forbidden fruit in literature, I was sparedat least that alert curiosity concerning itwhich is one of the most unpleasant results ofour present guarded system. Moreover, wehave Goethe’s word for it that Byron is notas immoral as the newspapers, and certainlyhe is more agreeable reading. I do sincerelybelieve that if part of his attraction for theyoung lies in what Mr. Pater calls “thegrieved dejection, the endless regret,” whichto the undisciplined soul sounds like the truemurmur of life, a better part lies in his largegrasp of nature,—not nature in her minuteand lovely detail, but in her vast outlines,her salient features, her solemn majesty andstrength. Crags and misty mountain tops,storm-swept skies and the blue bosom of therestless deep,—these are the aspects of naturethat childhood prizes, and loves to hear describedin vigorous verse. The pink-tippeddaisy, the yellow primrose, and the frecklednest-eggs

belong to a late stage of development. Eugéniede Guérin, who recognized as clearly asSainte-Beuve the “fine penetration” peculiarto children, and who regarded them ever withhalf-wistful, half-wondering delight, has writtensome very charming suggestions about the kindof poetry, “pure, fresh, joyous, and delicate,”which she considered proper food for thesehighly idealized little people,—“angels uponearth.” The only discouraging part of herpretty pleading is her frank admission that—inFrench literature, at least—there is no suchpoetry as she describes, which shows how hardit is to conciliate an exclusive theory of excellence.She endeavored sincerely, in her “Infantines,”to remedy this defect, to “speak tochildhood in its own language;” and her verseson “Joujou, the Angel of the Playthings,” arequaintly conceived and full of gentle fancies.No child is strongly moved, or taught the enduringdelight of song, by such lines as these,but most children will take a genuine pleasurein the baby angel who played with little Abelunder the myrtle-trees, who made the first dolland blew the first bubble, and who finds afriend in every tiny boy and girl born into thisbig gray world. Strange to say, he has hisEnglish counterpart in Mr. Robert LouisStevenson’s “Unseen Playmate,” that shadowycompanion whose home is the cave dug bychildish hands, and who is ready to share allgames in the most engaging spirit of accommodation.

a touch of combative veracity which brings usdown at once from Mademoiselle de Guérin’sfancy flights to the real playground, wherereal children, very faintly resembling “angelsupon earth,” are busy with mimic warfare.Mr. Stevenson is one of the few poets whoseverses, written especially for the nursery, havefound their way straight into little hearts.His charming style, his quick, keen sympathy,and the ease with which he enters into thatbrilliant world of imagination wherein childrenhabitually dwell, make him their naturalfriend and minstrel. If some of the rhymesin “A Child’s Garden of Verses” seem a triflebald and babyish, even these are guiltlessof condescension; while others, like “Travel,”“Shadow March,” and “The Land of Story-Books,”are instinct with poetic life. I canonly regret that a picture so faultless in detailas “Shadow March,” where we see the crawlingdarkness peer through the window pane,and hear the beating of the little boy’s heartas he creeps fearfully up the stair, should bemarred at its close by a single line of falseimagery:—

So fine an artist as Mr. Stevenson must knowthat shadows do not tramp, and that the recurrenceof a short, vigorous word which tells soadmirably in Scott’s “William and Helen,” andwherever the effect of sound combined withmotion is to be conveyed, is sadly out of placein describing the ghostly things that glide withhorrible noiselessness at the feet of the frightenedlad. Children, moreover, are keenlyalive to the value and the suggestiveness ofterms. A little eight-year-old girl of my acquaintance,who was reciting “Lord Ullin’sDaughter,” stopped short at these lines,—

and called out excitedly, “Don’t you hear thehorses?” She, at least, heard them as if withthe swift apprehension of fear, heard them loudabove the sounds of winds and waters, andrendered her unconscious tribute of praise tothe sympathetic selection of words.

There is, as we know, a great deal of poetrywritten every year for childish readers. Someof it makes its appearance in Christmas books,which are so beautifully bound and illustratedthat the little foolish, feeble verses are forgiven,and in fact forgotten, ignored altogether amidmore important accessories. Better poems thanthese are published in children’s periodicals,where they form a notable feature, and are,I dare say, read by the young people whosetastes are catered to in this fashion. Those ofus who are familiar with these periodicals—eitherweeklies or monthlies—are well awarethat the verses they offer may be easily dividedinto three classes. First, mere rhymes andjingles, intended for very little readers, andwith which it would be simple churlishnessto quarrel. They do not aspire to be poetry,they are sometimes very amusing, and theyhave an easy swing that is pleasant alike toyoung ears and old. It must be a hard heartthat does not sympathize with the unlucky andill-mated gnome who was

or with the small damsel in pigtail and pinaforewho comforts herself at the piano withthis engaging but dubious maxim:—

The second kind of verse appears to be writtensolely for the sake of the accompanying illustration,and is often the work of the illustrator,who is more at home with his pencil than hispen. Occasionally it is comic, occasionallysentimental or descriptive; for the most partit is something in this style:—

1.Oliver Herford in St. Nicholas.

Now what child will read more than once theseempty little verses (very prettily illustrated)when it is in his power to turn back to othersprites that sing in different strains,—to thefairy who wanders

seeking pearl eardrops for the cowslips’ ears;or to that softer shape, the music of whosesong, once heard, haunts us forever:—

These are the sweet, mysterious echoes of truefairyland, where Shakespeare and little childrenwander at their will.

Poems of the third class are intended forgrowing girls and boys, and aspire to beconsidered literature. They are well written,as a rule, with a smooth fluency that seems tobe the distinguishing gift of our minor verse-makers,who, even when they have least to say,say it with unbroken sweetness and grace. Thispretty, easy insignificance is much betteradapted to adult readers, who demand littleof poets beyond brevity, than to children,who love large issues, real passions, fine emotions,and an heroic attitude in life. Pleasantthoughts couched in pleasant language,trivial details, and photographic bits of descriptionmake no lasting appeal to the expansiveimagination of a child. Analysis iswasted upon him altogether, because he seesthings swiftly, and sees them as a whole. Hemay disregard fine shading and minute merits,but there are no boundaries to his wanderingvision. “Small sciences are the labors of ourmanhood, but the round universe is the playthingof the boy.”

The painful lack of distinction in most ofthe poetry prepared especially for him chillshis fine ardor and dulls his imagination.Subtle verses about moods and tempers, calculatedto make healthy little readers emulateMiss Martineau’s peevish self-sympathy;melancholy verses about young children whosuffer poverty and disaster; weird and unintelligibleverses, with all Poe’s indistinctnessand none of his music; commonplace versesabout bootblacks and newsboys; descriptiveverses about snowstorms and April showers;pious verses about infant prigs;—verses ofevery kind, all on the same level of agreeablemediocrity, and all warranted to be so harmlessthat a baby could hear them withoutblushing. Why, the child who reads “YoungLochinvar” is richer in that one good and gallantpoem than the child who has all thesemodern substitutes heaped yearly at his foolishfeet.

For the question at issue is not what kindof poetry is wholesome for children, but whatkind of poetry do children love. In nineteencases out of twenty, that which they love isgood for them, and they can guide themselvesa great deal better than we can hope to guidethem. I once asked a friend who had spentmany years in teaching little girls and boyswhether her small pupils, when left to theirown discretion, ever chose any of the pretty,trivial verses out of new books and magazinesfor study and recitation. She answered,Never. They turned instinctively to the sameold favorites she had been listening to so long;to the same familiar poems that their fathersand mothers had probably studied and recitedbefore them. “Hohenlinden,” “Glenara,”“Lord Ullin’s Daughter,” “Young Lochinvar,”“Rosabelle,” “To Lucasta, on going tothe Wars,” the lullaby from “The Princess,”“Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” “Annabel Lee,”Longfellow’s translation of “The Castle by theSea,” and “The Skeleton in Armor,”—theseare the themes of which children never weary;these are the songs that are sung forever intheir secret Paradise of Delights. The littlevolumes containing such tried and provenfriends grow shabby with much handling; andI have seen them marked all over with mysteriouscrosses and dots and stars, each of whichdenoted the exact degree of affection which thechild bore to the poem thus honored and approved.I can fancy Mr. Lang’s “Blue PoetryBook” fairly covered with such badges ofdistinction; for never before has any selectionof poems appealed so clearly and insistently tochildish tastes and hearts. When I turn overits pages, I feel as if the children of Englandmust have brought their favorite songs to Mr.Lang, and prayed, each one, that his owndarling might be admitted,—as if they musthave forced his choice into their chosen channels.Its only rival in the field, Palgrave’s“Children’s Treasury of English Song,” isedited with such nice discrimination, suchcritical reserve, that it is well-nigh flawless,—atriumph of delicacy and good taste. Butmuch that childhood loves is necessarily excludedfrom a volume so small and so carefullyconsidered. 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 ofbeautiful ballads, some of which, like “TheLass of Lochroyan,” we miss sorely from thepages of the “Blue Poetry Book.” On theother hand, where, in Mr. Palgrave’s “Treasury,”are those lovely snatches of song familiarto our earliest years, and which we welcomeindividually with a thrill of pleasure, as Mr.Lang shows them to us once more?—“RoseAylmer,” “County Guy,” “Proud Maisie,”“How Sleep the Brave,” “Nora’s Vow,”—thedelight of my own childhood,—the pathetic“Farewell,”—

and Hood’s silvery little verses beginning,—

All these and many more are gathered safelyinto this charming volume. Nothing we longto see appears to be left out, except, indeed,Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose,” and Herrick’s“Night Piece,” both of them very serious omissions.It seems strange to find seven of EdgarPoe’s poems in a collection which excludes the“Night Piece,” so true a favorite with all girlchildren, and a favorite that, once rightfullyestablished, can never be thrust from our affections.As for Praed’s “Red Fisherman,” Mr.Lang has somewhere recorded his liking forthis “sombre” tale, which, I think, embodieseverything that a child ought not to love. Itis the only poem in the book that I wish elsewhere;but perhaps this is a perverse prejudiceon my part. There may be little readers towhom its savage cynicism and gloom carry apleasing terror, like that which oppressed myinfant soul as I lingered with Goodman Brownin the awful witch-haunted forest where Hawthornehas shown us the triumph of evil things.“It is his excursions into the unknown worldwhich the child enjoys,” says Mr. Lang; andhow shall we set a limit to his wanderings! Hejourneys far with careless, secure footsteps;and for him the stars sing in their spheres,and fairies dance in the moonlight, and thehoarse clashing of arms rings bravely fromhard-won fields, and lovers fly together underthe stormy skies. He rides with Lochinvar,and sails with Sir Patrick Spens into the northernseas, and chases the red deer with Allen-a-Dale,and stands by Marmion’s side in thethick of the ghastly fray. He has given hisheart to Helen of Troy, and to the Maid ofSaragossa, and to the pale child who met herdeath on the cruel Gordon spears, and to thelady with yellow hair who knelt moaning byBarthram’s bier. His friends are bold RobinHood, and Lancelot du Lac, and the white-plumedHenry of Navarre, and the princelyscapegrace who robbed the robbers to make“laughter for a month, and a good jest forever.”A lordly company these, and seldomto be found in the gray walks of middle age.Robin Hood dwells not on the Stock Exchange,and Prince Hal dare not show his laughingface before societies for leveling thrones andreorganizing the universe. We adults passour days, alas, in the Town of Stupidity,—abhorredof Bunyan’s soul,—and our companionsare Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and Mr.Despondency, and Mr. Want-wit, still scrubbinghis Ethiopian, and Mr. Feeble-mind, andthe “deplorable young woman named Dull.”But it is better to be young, and to see thegolden light of romance in the skies, and tokiss the white feet of Helen, as she stands likea star on the battlements. It is better to followHector to the fight, and Guinevere to thesad cloisters of Almesbury, and the AncientMariner to that silent sea where the deathfiresgleam by night. Even to us who havemade these magic voyages in our childhoodthere comes straying, at times, a pale reflectionof that early radiance, a faint, sweet echoof that early song. Then the streets of theTown of Stupidity grow soft to tread, and Falstaff’sgreat laugh frightens Mr. Despondencyinto a shadow. Then Madeline smiles on usunder the wintry moonlight, and Porphyrosteals by with strange sweets heaped in basketsof wreathed silver. Then we know thatwith the poets there is perpetual youth, andthat for us, as for the child dreaming in thefirelight, the shining casements open uponfairyland.

THE PRAISES OF WAR.

When the world was younger and perhapsmerrier, when people lived more and thoughtless, and when the curious subtleties of an advancedcivilization had not yet turned men’sheads with conceit of their own enlighteningprogress from simple to serious things, poetshad two recognized sources of inspiration,which were sufficient for themselves and fortheir unexacting audiences. They sang oflove and they sang of war, of fair women andof brave men, of keen youthful passions andof the dear delights of battle. Sweet Rosamondelingers “in Woodstocke bower,” andSir Cauline wrestles with the Eldridge knighte;Annie of Lochroyan sails over the rougheningseas, and Lord Percy rides gayly to the Cheviothills with fifteen hundred bowmen at hisback. It did not occur to the thick-headedgeneration who first listened to the ballad of“Chevy Chace” to hint that the game washardly worth the candle, or that poaching ona large scale was as reprehensible ethically aspoaching on a little one. This sort of insightwas left for the nineteenth-century philosopher,and the nineteenth-century moralist. Inearlier, easier days, the last thing that a poettroubled himself about was a defensible motivefor the battle in which his soul exulted. Hisbusiness was to describe the fighting, not tojustify the fight, which would have been a taskof pure supererogation in that truculent age.Fancy trying to justify Kinmont Willie orJohnie of Braedislee, instead of counting thehard knocks they give and the stout men theylay low!

The last echo of this purely irresponsiblespirit may be found in the “War Song ofDinas Vawr,” where Peacock, always threehundred years behind his time, sings ofslaughter with a bellicose cheerfulness whichonly his admirable versification can excuse:—

There is not even a lack of food at home—theold traditional dinner of spurs—to warrantthis foray. There is no hint of necessityfor the harriers, or consideration for the harried.

It is impossible to censure a deed so irresistiblynarrated; but if the lines were a hair-breadthless mellifluous, I think we should call this avery barbarous method of campaigning.

When the old warlike spirit was dying outof English verse, when poets had begun tomeditate and moralize, to interpret nature andto counsel man, the good gods gave to England,as a link with the days that were dead,Sir Walter Scott, who sang, as no Briton beforeor since has ever sung, of battlefields andthe hoarse clashing of arms, of brave deeds andmidnight perils, of the outlaw riding by Brignallbanks, and the trooper shaking his silkenbridle reins upon the river shore:—

These are not precisely the themes whichenjoy unshaken popularity to-day,—“the poetof battles fares ill in modern England,” saysSir Francis Doyle,—and as a consequencethere are many people who speak slightingly ofScott’s poetry, and who appear to claim forthemselves some inscrutable superiority by sodoing. They give you to understand, withoutputting it too coarsely into words, that theyare beyond that sort of thing, but that theyliked it very well as children, and are pleasedif you enjoy it still. There is even a class ofunfortunates who, through no apparent faultof their own, have ceased to take delightin Scott’s novels, and who manifest a curiousindignation because the characters in them goahead and do things, instead of thinking andtalking about them, which is the presentapproved fashion of evolving fiction. Why,what time have the good people in “QuentinDurward” for speculation and chatter? Therush of events carries them irresistibly intoaction. They plot, and fight, and run away,and scour the country, and meet with so manyadventures, and perform so many brave andcruel deeds, that they have no chance for introspectionand the joys of analysis. Naturally,those writers who pride themselves uponmaking a story out of nothing, and who aremore concerned with excluding material thanwith telling their tales, have scant liking forSir Walter, who thought little and prated notat all about the “art of fiction,” but used thesubjects which came to hand with the instinctiveand unhesitating skill of a great artist.The battles in “Quentin Durward” and “OldMortality” are, I think, as fine in their way asthe battle of Flodden; and Flodden, says Mr.Lang, is the finest fight on record,—“bettereven than the stand of Aias by the ships inthe Iliad, better than the slaying of the Wooersin the Odyssey.”

The ability to carry us whither he would, toshow us whatever he pleased, and to stir ourhearts’ blood with the story of

was the especial gift of Scott,—of the manwhose sympathies were as deep as life itself,whose outlook was as wide as the broadbosom of the earth he trod on. He believedin action, and he delighted in describing it.“The thinker’s voluntary death in life” wasnot, for him, the power that moves the world,but rather deeds,—deeds that make historyand that sing themselves forever. He honestlyfelt himself to be a much smaller man thanWellington. He stood abashed in the presenceof the soldier who had led large issuesand controlled the fate of nations. He wouldhave been sincerely amused to learn from“Robert Elsmere”—what a delicious thingit is to contemplate Sir Walter reading“Robert Elsmere”!—that “the decisiveevents of the world take place in the intellect.”The decisive events of the world, Scott heldto take place in the field of action; on theplains of Marathon and Waterloo rather thanin the brain tissues of William Godwin. Heknew what befell Athens when she could putforward no surer defense against Philip ofMacedon than the most brilliant orations everwritten in praise of freedom. It was better,he probably thought, to argue as the Englishdid, “in platoons.” The schoolboy who foughtwith the heroic “Green-Breeks” in the streetsof Edinburgh; the student who led the Toryyouths in their gallant struggle with the riotousIrishmen, and drove them with stout cudgelingout of the theatre they had disgraced;the man who, broken in health and spirit, wasyet blithe and ready to back his quarrel withGourgaud by giving that gentleman any satisfactionhe desired, was consistent throughoutwith the simple principles of a bygone generation.“It is clear to me,” he writes in his journal,“that what is least forgiven in a man ofany mark or likelihood is want of that articleblackguardly called pluck. All the fine qualitiesof genius cannot make amends for it.We are told the genius of poets especiallyis irreconcilable with this species of grenadieraccomplishment. If so, quel chien degénie!”

Quel chien de génie indeed, and far beyondthe compass of Scott, who, amid the growingsordidness and seriousness of an industrialand discontented age, struck a single resonantnote that rings in our hearts to-day like theecho of good and joyous things:—

The same sentiments are put, it may be remembered,into admirable prose when Graham ofClaverhouse expounds to Henry Morton hisviews on living and dying. At present, Philosophyand Philanthropy between them arehustling poor Glory into a small corner of thefield. Even to the soldier, we are told, itshould be a secondary consideration, or perhapsno consideration at all, his sense ofduty being a sufficient stay. But Scott, likeHomer, held somewhat different views, andabsolutely declined to let “that jade Duty”have everything her own way. It is the plainduty of Blount and Eustace to stay by Clare’sside and guard her as they were bidden, insteadof which they rush off, with Sir Walter’s tacitapprobation, to the fray.

It was this cheerful acknowledgment of humannature as a large factor in life whichgave to Scott his genial sympathy with brave,imperfect men; which enabled him to drawwith true and kindly art such soldiers as LeBalafré, and Dugald Dalgetty, and Williamof Deloraine. Le Balafré, indeed, with histhick-headed loyalty, his conceit of his ownwisdom, his unswerving, almost unconsciouscourage, his readiness to risk his neck for abride, and his reluctance to marry her, isevery whit as veracious as if he were the over-analyzedchild of realism, instead of one ofthe many minor characters thrust with wantonprodigality into the pages of a romantic novel.

Alone among modern poets, Scott singsHomerically of strife. Others have caughtthe note, but none have upheld it with such sustainedforce, such clear and joyous resonance.Macaulay has fire and spirit, but he is alwaystoo rhetorical, too declamatory, for real emotion.He stirs brave hearts, it is true, and the finesttribute to his eloquence was paid by Mrs.Browning, who said she could not read the“Lays” lying down; they drew her irresistiblyto her feet. But when Macaulay sings of LakeRegillus, I do not see the battle swim beforemy eyes. I see—whether I want to or not—aplatform, and the poet’s own beloved schoolboydeclaiming with appropriate gestures thoseglowing and vigorous lines. When Scott singsof Flodden, I stand wraith-like in the thickestof the fray. I know how the Scottish rankswaver and reel before the charge of Stanley’smen, how Tunstall’s stainless banner sweepsthe field, and how, in the gathering gloom,

There is none of this noble simplicity in thesomewhat dramatic ardor of Horatius, or in thepharisaical flavor, inevitable perhaps, but notthe less depressing, of Naseby and Ivry, whichread a little like old Kaiser William’s wardispatches turned into verse. Better a thousandtimes are the splendid swing, the captivatingenthusiasm of Drayton’s “Agincourt,” whichhardly a muck-worm could hear unstirred.Reading it, we are as keen for battle as wereKing Harry’s soldiers straining at the leash.The ardor for strife, the staying power ofquiet courage, all are here; and here, too, afelicity of language that makes each noblename a trumpet blast of defiance, a freshincentive to heroic deeds.

Political economists and chilly historians andall long-headed calculating creatures generallymay perhaps hint that invading Francewas no part of England’s business, and representedfruitless labor and bloodshed. Butthis, happily, is not the poet’s point of view.He dreams with Hotspur

He hears King Harry’s voice ring clearly abovethe cries and clamors of battle:—

and to him the fierce scaling of Harfleur andthe field of Agincourt seem not only gloriousbut righteous things. “That pure and generousdesire to thrash the person opposed to youbecause he is opposed to you, because he is not‘your side,’” which Mr. Saintsbury declaresto be the real incentive of all good war songs,hardly permits a too cautious analysis of motives.Fighting is not a strictly philanthropicpastime, and its merits are not precisely themerits of church guilds and college settlements.Warlike saints are rare in the calendar, notwithstandingthe splendid example of Michael,“of celestial armies, prince,” and there is atpresent a shameless conspiracy on foot todefraud even St. George of his hard-won glory,and to melt him over in some modern crucibleinto a peaceful Alexandrian bishop. An Arianbishop, too, by way of deepening the scandal!We shall hear next that Saint Denis was aCalvinistic minister, and Saint Iago, whomdevout Spanish eyes have seen mounted inthe hottest of the fray, was a friendly well-wisherof the Moors.

But why sigh over fighting saints, in a daywhen even fighting sinners have scant measureof praise? “Moral courage is everything.Physical heroism is a small matter, often trivialenough,” wrote that clever, emotional, sensitiveGerman woman, Rahel Varnhagen, atthe very time when a little “physical heroism”might have freed her conquered fatherland.And this profession of faith has gone on increasingin popularity, until we have even alad like the young Laurence Oliphant, withhot blood surging in his veins, gravely recordinghis displeasure because a parson “witha Crimean medal on his surplice” preached arousing battle sermon to the English soldierswho had no alternative but to fight. “Mynatural man,” confesses Oliphant naïvely, “isintensely warlike, which is just as low a passionas avarice or any other,”—a curious moralperspective, which needs no word of comment,and sufficiently explains much that was tofollow. We are irresistibly reminded by sucha verdict of Shelley’s swelling lines—

lines which, to borrow a witticism of Mr. OscarWilde’s, have “all the vitality of error,” andwill probably be quoted triumphantly by PeaceSocieties for many years to come.

In the mean time, there is a remarkable andvery significant tendency to praise all warsongs, war stories, and war literature generally,in proportion to the discomfort and horrorthey excite, in proportion to their inartisticand unjustifiable realism. I well remember,when I was a little girl, having a dismalFrench tale by Erckmann-Chatrian, called“Le Conscrit,” given me by a kindly disposedbut mistaken friend, and the disgust withwhich I waded through those scenes of sordidbloodshed and misery, untouched by any fireof enthusiasm, any halo of romance. Thevery first description of Napoleon,—Napoleon,the idol of my youthful dreams,—as a fat,pale man, with a tuft of hair upon his forehead,filled me with loathing for all that wasto follow. But I believe I finished the book,—itnever occurred to me, in those innocentdays, not to finish every book that I began,—andthen I re-read in joyous haste all of SirWalter Scott’s fighting novels, “Waverley,”“Old Mortality,” “Ivanhoe,” “QuentinDurward,” and even “The Abbot,” which hasone good battle, to get the taste of that abominablestory out of my mouth. Of late years,however, I have heard a great deal of French,Russian, and occasionally even English literaturecommended for the very qualities whicharoused my childish indignation. No one hassung the praises of war more gallantly thanMr. Rudyard Kipling; yet those grim versescalled “The Grave of the Hundred Dead”—versesclosely resembling the appalling specimensof truculency with which Mr. Ruskinbegan and ended his brief poetical career—havebeen singled out from their braverbrethren for especial praise, and offered as“grim, naked, ugly truth” to those “whowould know more of the poet’s picturesquequalities.”

But “grim, naked, ugly truth” can never bemade a picturesque quality, and it is not theparticular business of a battle poem to emphasizethe desirability of peace. We all knowthe melancholy anticlimax of Campbell’ssplendid song “Ye Mariners of England,”when, to three admirable verses, the poet mustneeds add a fourth, descriptive of the joysof harmony, and of the eating and drinkingwhich shall replace the perils of the sea. Icount it a lasting injury, after having myblood fired with these surging lines,—

to be suddenly introduced to a scene of ingloriousjunketing; and I am not surprised thatCampbell’s peculiar inspiration, which wasborn of war and of war only, failed him theinstant he deserted his theme. Such shockinglines as

while quite in harmony with the poet’s ordinaryachievements, would have been simplyimpossible in those first three verses of “YeMariners,” where he remains true to his oneartistic impulse. He strikes a different and afiner note when, in “The Battle of the Baltic,”he turns gravely away from feasting and jollityto remember the brave men who have died forEngland’s glory:—

To go back to Mr. Rudyard Kipling, however,from whom I have wandered far, he ismore in love with the “dear delights” of battlethan with its dismal carnage, and he winsan easy forgiveness for a few horrors by showingus much brave and hearty fighting. Whocan forget the little Gurkhas drawing a deepbreath of contentment when at last they seethe foe, and gaping expectantly at their officers,“as terriers grin ere the stone is castfor them to fetch?” Who can forget thejoyous abandon with which Mulvaney the disreputableand his “four an’ twenty youngwans” fling themselves upon Lungtungpen?It is a good and wholesome thing for a manto be in sympathy with that primitive virtue,courage, to recognize it promptly, and to dohonor to it under any flag. “Homer’s heartis with the brave of either side,” observesMr. Lang; “with Glaucus and Sarpedon ofLycia no less than with Achilles and Patroclus.”Scott’s heart is with Surrey and Dacreno less than with Lennox and Argyle; withthe English hosts charging like whirlwinds tothe fray no less than with the Scottish soldiersstanding ringed and dauntless around theirking. Théodore de Banville, hot with shameover fallen France, cheeks his bitterness towrite some tender verses to the memory of aPrussian boy found dead on the field, with abullet-pierced volume of Pindar on his breast.Dumas, that lover of all brave deeds, cries outwith noble enthusiasm that it was not enoughto kill the Highlanders at Waterloo,—“wehad to push them down!” and the reverse ofthe medal has been shown us by Mr. Lang inthe letter of an English officer, who writeshome that he would have given the rest of hislife to have served with the French cavalry onthat awful day. Sir Francis Doyle delights,like an honest and stout-hearted Briton, to payan equal tribute of praise, in rather questionableverse, to the private of the Buffs,

who died for England’s honor in a far-offland; and to the Indian prince, MehrabKhan, who, brought to bay, swore proudlythat he would perish,

and fell beneath the English bayonets at thedoor of his zenana. This is the spirit bywhich brave men know one another the worldover, and which, lying back of all healthynational prejudices, unites in a human brotherhoodthose whom the nearness of death hastaught to start at no shadows.

Here is Mr. Kipling at his best, and here,too, is a link somewhat simpler and readier tohand than that much-desired bond of cultivationwhich Mr. Oscar Wilde assures us willone day knit the world together. The timewhen 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 together”dawns only in the dreamland ofdesire. Mr. Wilde makes himself merry atthe expense of “Peace Societies, so dear tothe sentimentalists, and proposals for unarmedInternational Arbitration, so popular amongthose who have never read history;” but criticism,the mediator of the future, “will annihilaterace prejudices by insisting upon theunity of the human mind in the variety of itsforms. If we are tempted to make war uponanother nation, we shall remember that we areseeking to destroy an element of our own culture,and possibly its most important element.”This restraining impulse will allow us to fightonly red Indians, and Feejeeans, and Bushmen,from whom no grace of culture is to begleaned; and it may prove a strong inducementto some disturbed countries, like Irelandand Russia, to advance a little further alongthe paths of sweetness and light. Meanwhile,the world, which rolls so easily in old andwell-worn ways, will probably remember that“power is measured by resistance,” and willgo on arguing stolidly in platoons.

“All healthy men like fighting and like thesense of danger; all brave women like to hearof their fighting and of their facing danger,”says Mr. Ruskin, who has taken upon himselfthe defense of war in his own irresistibly unconvincingmanner. Others indeed have delightedin it from a purely artistic standpoint,or as a powerful stimulus to fancy. Mr.Saintsbury exults more than most critics inbattle poems, and in those “half-inarticulatesongs that set the blood coursing.” Sir FrancisDoyle, whose simple manly soul neverwearied of such themes, had no ambition tooutgrow the first hearty sympathies of his boyhood.“I knew the battle in ‘Marmion’ byheart almost before I could read,” he writes inhis “Reminiscences;” “and I cannot raze out—Ido not wish to raze out—of my soul allthat filled and colored it in years gone by.”Mr. Froude, who is as easily seduced by thepicturesqueness of a sea fight as was CanonKingsley, appears to believe in all seriousnessthat the British privateers who went plunderingin the Spanish main were inspired by apure love for England, and a zeal for theProtestant faith. He can say truly with thelittle boy of adventurous humor,—

Mr. Lang’s love of all warlike literature istoo well known to need comment. As a child,he confesses he pored over “the fightingestparts of the Bible,” when Sunday deprivedhim of less hallowed reading. As a boy, hedevoted to Sir Walter Scott the precious hourswhich were presumably sacred to the shrine ofLatin grammar. As a man, he lures us withglowing words from the consideration of politicalproblems, or of our own complicated spiritualmachinery, to follow the fortunes of thebrave, fierce men who fought in the lonelynorth, or of the heroes who went forth ingilded armor “to win glory or to give it” beforethe walls of Troy. In these days, whenmany people find it easier to read “The Ringand the Book” than the Iliad, Mr. Lang makesa strong plea in behalf of that literature whichhas come down to us out of the past to standforevermore unrivaled and alone, stirring thehearts of all generations until human natureshall be warped from simple and natural lines.“With the Bible and Shakespeare,” he says,“the Homeric poems are the best training forlife. There is no good quality that they lack;manliness, courage, reverence for old age andfor the hospitable hearth, justice, piety, pity,a brave attitude towards life and death, are allconspicuous in Homer.” It might be well,perhaps, to add to this long list one more incomparablevirtue, an instinctive and illogicaldelight in living. Amid shipwrecks and battles,amid long wanderings and hurtling spears,amid sharp dangers and sorrows bitter to bear,Homer teaches us, and teaches us in right joyfulfashion, the beauty and value of an existencewhich we profess nowadays to find alittle burdensome on our hands.

All these things have the lovers of war saidto us, and in all these ways have they strivento fire our hearts. But Mr. Ruskin is notcontent to regard any matter from a purelyartistic standpoint, or to judge it on naturaland congenital lines; he must indorse it ethicallyor condemn. Accordingly, it is notenough for him, as it would be for any otherman, to claim that “no great art ever yet roseon earth but among a nation of soldiers.” Hefeels it necessary to ask himself some searchingand embarrassing questions about fighting“for its own sake,” and as “a grand pastime,”—questionswhich he naturally finds it extremelydifficult to answer. It is not enoughfor him to say, with equal truth and justice,that if “brave death in a red coat” be no betterthan “brave life in a black one,” it is atleast every bit as good. He must needs waxserious, and commit himself to this strong anddoubtful statement:—

“Assume the knight merely to have riddenout occasionally to fight his neighbor for exercise;assume him even a soldier of fortune,and to have gained his bread and filled hispurse at the sword’s point. Still I feel as ifit were, somehow, grander and worthier in himto have made his bread by sword play thanany other play. I had rather he had madeit by thrusting than by batting,—much morethan by betting; much rather that he shouldride war horses than back race horses; and—Isay it sternly and deliberately—muchrather would I have him slay his neighborthan cheat him.”

Perhaps, in deciding a point as delicate asthis, it would not be altogether amiss to consultthe subject acted upon; in other words,the neighbor, who, whatever may be his prejudiceagainst dishonest handling, might probablyprefer it to the last irredeemable disaster.In this commercial age we get tolerably accustomedto being cheated—like the skinnedeel, we are used to it,—but there is an oldrhyme which tells us plainly that a brokenneck is beyond all help of healing.

No, it is best, when we treat a theme asmany-sided as war, to abandon modern inquisitorialmethods, and confine ourselves tothat good old-fashioned simplicity which wascontent to take short obvious views of life. Itis best to leave ethics alone, and ride as lightlyas we may. The finest poems of battle and ofcamp have been written in this unincumberedspirit, as, for example, that lovely little snatchof song from “Rokeby:”—

And this other, far less familiar, which I quotefrom Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads, and whichis fitly called “The Wandering Knight’sSong:”—

Now, apart from the charming felicity of theselines, we cannot but be struck with theirsingleness of conception and purpose. “TheWandering Knight” is well-nigh as disincumberedof mental as of material luggage. Herides as free from our tangled perplexity ofintrospection as from our irksome contrivancesfor comfort. It is not that he is preciselyguileless or ignorant. One does not journeyfar over the world without learning the world’sways, and the ways of the men who dwell uponher. But the knowledge of things looked atfrom the outside is never the knowledge thatwears one’s soul away, and the traveling companionthat Lord Byron found so ennuyant,

forms no part of the “Wandering Knight’s”equipment. As I read this little fugitive songwhich has drifted down into an alien age, Ifeel an envious liking for those days when thetumult of existence made its triumph, whenaction fanned the embers of joy, and whenpeople were too busy with each hour of life, asit came, to question the usefulness or desirabilityof the whole.

There is one more point to consider. Mr.Saintsbury appears to think it strange thatbattles, when they occur, and especially whenthey chance to be victories, should not immediatelyinspire good war songs. But this isseldom or never the case, “The Charge of theLight Brigade” being an honorable exceptionto the rule. Drayton’s heroic ballad was writtennearly two hundred years after the battleof Agincourt; Flodden is a tale of defeat;and Campbell, whose songs are so intoxicatinglywarlike, belonged, I am sorry to say, tothe “Peace at all price” party. The fact isthat a battle fought five hundred years ago isjust as inspiring to the poet as a battle foughtyesterday; and a brave deed, the memory ofwhich comes down to us through centuries,stirs our hearts as profoundly as though wewitnessed it in our own time. Sarpedon, leapinglightly from his chariot to dare an unequalcombat; the wounded knight, Schönburg,dragging himself painfully from amidthe dead and dying to offer his silver shield tohis defenseless emperor; the twenty kinsmenof the noble family of Trauttmansdorf whofell, under Frederick of Austria, in the singlebattle of Mühldorf; the English lad, youngAnstruther, who carried the queen’s colors ofthe Royal Welsh at the storming of Sebastopol,and who, swift-footed as a schoolboy, wasthe first to gain the great redoubt, and stoodthere one happy moment, holding his flagstaffand breathing hard, before he was shot dead,—theseare the pictures whose value distancecan never lessen, and whose colors time cannever dim. These are the deeds that belongto all ages and to all nations, a heritage forevery man who walks this troubled earth.“All this the gods have fashioned, and havewoven the skein of death for men, that theremight be a song in the ears even of the folkof after time.”

LEISURE.

A visitor strolling through the noblewoods of Ferney complimented Voltaire onthe splendid growth of his trees. “Ay,” repliedthe great wit, half in scorn and half, perhaps,in envy, “they have nothing else to do;” andwalked on, deigning no further word of approbation.

Has it been more than a hundred yearssince this distinctly modern sentiment wasuttered,—more than a hundred years sincethe spreading chestnut boughs bent kindlyover the lean, strenuous, caustic, disappointedman of genius who always had so much todo, and who found in the doing of it amingled bliss and bitterness that scorchedhim like fever pain? How is it that, whileDr. Johnson’s sledge-hammer repartees soundlike the sonorous echoes of a past age, Voltaire’sremarks always appear to have beenspoken the day before yesterday? They arethe kind of witticisms which we do not sayfor ourselves, simply because we are not witty;but they illustrate with biting accuracy thespirit of restlessness, of disquiet, of intellectualvanity and keen contention which is thebrand of our vehement and over-zealous generation.

“The Gospel of Work”—that is the phrasewoven insistently into every homily, everyappeal made to the conscience or the intelligenceof a people who are now straining theiryouthful energy to its utmost speed. “Blessedbe Drudgery!”—that is the text deliberatelychosen for a discourse which has enjoyed suchamazing popularity that sixty thousand printedcopies have been found all inadequate to supplythe ravenous demand. Readers of Dickens—ifany one has the time to read Dickensnowadays—may remember Miss Monflather’sinspired amendment of that familiar poemconcerning the Busy Bee:—

And when our first years are past, the sameprogramme is considered adequate and satisfactoryto the end. “A whole lifetime ofhorrid industry,”—to quote Mr. Bagehot’suninspired words,—this is the prize dangledalluringly before our tired eyes; and if weare disposed to look askance upon the booty,then vanity is subtly pricked to give zest tofaltering resolution. “Our virtues would beproud if our faults whipped them not;” theywould be laggards in the field if our faults didnot sometimes spur them to action. It is thepæan of self-glorification that wells up perpetuallyfrom press and pulpit, from public orators,and from what is courteously called literature,that keeps our courage screwed to thesticking place, and veils the occasional barenessof the result with a charitable vesture ofself-delusion.

Work is good. No one seriously doubtsthis truth. Adam may have doubted it whenhe first took spade in hand, and Eve whenshe scoured her first pots and kettles; but inthe course of a few thousand years we havelearned to know and value this honest,troublesome, faithful, and extremely exactingfriend. But work is not the only good thingin the world; it is not a fetich to be adored;neither is it to be judged, like a sum in addition,by its outward and immediate results.The god of labor does not abide exclusivelyin the rolling-mill, the law courts, or the cornfield.He has a twin sister whose name isleisure, and in her society he lingers now andthen to the lasting gain of both.

Sainte-Beuve, writing of Mme. de Sévignéand her time, says that we, “with our habitsof positive occupation, can scarcely form ajust conception of that life of leisure andchit-chat.” “Conversations were infinite,”admits Mme. de Sévigné herself, recalling thelong summer afternoons when she and herguests walked in the charming woods of LesRochers until the shadows of twilight fell.The whole duty of life seemed to be concentratedin the pleasant task of entertainingyour friends when they were with you,or writing them admirable letters when theywere absent. Occasionally there came, evento this tranquil and finely poised Frenchwoman, a haunting consciousness that theremight be other and harder work for humanhands to do. “Nothing is accomplished dayby day,” she writes, doubtfully; “and life ismade up of days, and we grow old and die.”This troubled her a little, when she was allthe while doing work that was to last forgenerations, work that was to give pleasureto men and women whose great-grandfatherswere then unborn. Not that we have thetime now to read Mme. de Sévigné! Why,there are big volumes of these delightfulletters, and who can afford to read big volumesof anything, merely for the sake of theenjoyment to be extracted therefrom? It wasall very well for Sainte-Beuve to say “Lisonstout Mme. de Sévigné,” when the questionarose how should some long idle days in acountry-house be profitably employed. It wasall very well for Sainte-Beuve to plead, withtouching confidence in the intellectual pastimesof his contemporaries, “Let us treatMme. de Sévigné as we treat Clarissa Harlowe,when we have a fortnight of leisureand rainy weather in the country.” A fortnightof leisure and rainy weather in thecountry! The words would be antiquatedeven for Dr. Johnson. Rain may fall or rainmay cease, but leisure comes not so lightlyto our calling. Nay, Sainte-Beuve’s wistfulamazement at the polished and cultivatedinactivity which alone could produce such acorrespondence as Mme. de Sévigné’s is notgreater than our wistful amazement at thecritic’s conception of possible idleness in badweather. In one respect at least we followhis good counsel. We do treat Mme. de Sévignéprecisely as we treat Clarissa Harlowe;that is, we leave them both severely alone,as being utterly beyond the reach of what weare pleased to call our time.

And what of the leisure of Montaigne, who,taking his life in his two hands, disposed of itas he thought fit, with no restless self-accusationson the score of indolence. In the worldand of the world, yet always able to meet andgreet the happy solitude of Gascony; toilingwith no thought of toil, but rather “to entertainemy spirit as it best pleased,” this manwrought out of time a coin which passescurrent over the reading world. And whatof Horace, who enjoyed an industrious idleness,the bare description of which sets ourhearts aching with desire! “The picturewhich Horace draws of himself in his countryhome,” says an envious English critic,“affords us a delightful glimpse of such literaryleisure as is only possible in the goldendays of good Haroun-Al-Raschid. Horacegoes to bed and gets up when he likes; thereis no one to drag him down to the law courtsthe first thing in the morning, to remind himof an important engagement with his brotherscribes, to solicit his interest with Mæcenas,or to tease him about public affairs and thelatest news from abroad. He can bury himselfin his Greek authors, or ramble throughthe woody glens which lie at the foot ofMount Ustica, without a thought of businessor a feeling that he ought to be otherwise engaged.”“Swim smoothly in the stream ofthy nature, and live but one man,” counselsSir Thomas Browne; and it may be thisgentle current will bear us as bravely throughlife as if we buffeted our strength away in therestless ocean of endeavor.

Leisure has a value of its own. It is not amere handmaid of labor; it is something weshould know how to cultivate, to use, and toenjoy. It has a distinct and honorable placewherever nations are released from the pressureof their first rude needs, their first homelytoil, and rise to happier levels of grace andintellectual repose. “Civilization, in its finaloutcome,” says the keen young author of“The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani,” “is heavilyin the debt of leisure; and the success of anysociety worth considering is to be estimatedlargely by the use to which its fortunati puttheir spare moments.” Here is a sentimentso relentlessly true that nobody wants to believeit. We prefer uttering agreeable platitudesconcerning the blessedness of drudgeryand the iniquity of eating bread earned byanother’s hands. Yet the creation of an artisticand intellectual atmosphere in whichworkers can work, the expansion of a noblesympathy with all that is finest and mostbeautiful, the jealous guardianship of whatevermakes the glory and distinction of anation; this is achievement enough for thefortunati of any land, and this is the debtthey owe. It can hardly be denied that thelack of scholarship—of classical scholarshipespecially—at our universities is due primarilyto the labor-worship which is the prevalentsuperstition of our day, and which, likeall superstitions, has gradually degraded itsgod into an idol, and lost sight of the higherpowers and attributes beyond. The studentwho is pleased to think a knowledge of German“more useful” than a knowledge ofGreek; the parent who deliberately declaresthat his boys have “no time to waste” overHomer; the man who closes the doors of hismind to everything that does not bear directlyon mathematics, or chemistry, or engineering,or whatever he calls “work;” all these pleadin excuse the exigencies of life, the absoluteand imperative necessity of labor.

It would appear, then, that we have nofortunati, that we are not yet rich enough toafford the greatest of all luxuries—leisure tocultivate and enjoy “the best that has beenknown and thought in the world.” This is apity, because there seems to be money in plentyfor so many less valuable things. The yearlytaxes of the United States sound to innocentears like the fabled wealth of the Orient; theyearly expenditures of the people are on norigid scale; yet we are too poor to harbor thepriceless literature of the past because it is nota paying investment, because it will not putbread in our mouths nor clothes on our shiveringnakedness. “Poverty is a most odiouscalling,” sighed Burton many years ago, andwe have good cause to echo his lament. Untilwe are able to believe, with that enthusiasticGreek scholar, Mr. Butcher, that “intellectualtraining is an end in itself, and not a merepreparation for a trade or a profession;” untilwe begin to understand that there is a leisurewhich does not mean an easy saunteringthrough life, but a special form of activity,employing all our faculties, and training us tothe adequate reception of whatever is mostvaluable in literature and art; until we learnto estimate the fruits of self-culture at theirproper worth, we are still far from reaping theharvest of three centuries of toil and struggle;we are still as remote as ever from the serenityof intellectual accomplishment.

There is a strange pleasure in work weddedto leisure, in work which has grown beautifulbecause its rude necessities are softened andhumanized by sentiment and the subtle graceof association. A little paragraph from thejournal of Eugénie de Guérin illustrates withcharming simplicity the gilding of commontoil by the delicate touch of a cultivated andsympathetic intelligence:—

“A day spent in spreading out a large washleaves little to say, and yet it is rather pretty,too, to lay the white linen on the grass, or tosee it float on lines. One may fancy one’s selfHomer’s Nausicaa, or one of those Biblicalprincesses who washed their brothers’ tunics.We have a basin at Moulinasse that you havenever seen, sufficiently large, and full to thebrim of water. It embellishes the hollow, andattracts the birds who like a cool place tosing in.”

In the same spirit, Maurice de Guérin confessesfrankly the pleasure he takes in gatheringfagots for the winter fire, “that little taskof the woodcutter which brings us close tonature,” and which was also a favorite occupationof M. de Lamennais. The fagot gathering,indeed, can hardly be said to haveassumed the proportions of real toil; it wasrather a pastime where play was thinly disguisedby a pretty semblance of drudgery.“Idleness,” admits de Guérin, “but idlenessfull of thought, and alive to every impression.”Eugénie’s labors, however, had otheraspects and bore different fruit. There isnothing intrinsically charming in stitchingseams, hanging out clothes, or scorching one’sfingers over a kitchen fire; yet every pagein the journal of this nobly born French girlreveals to us the nearness of work, work madesacred by the prompt fulfillment of visibleduties, and—what is more rare—made beautifulby that distinction of mind which wasthe result of alternating hours of finely cultivatedleisure. A very ordinary and estimableyoung woman might have spread her washupon the grass with honest pride at the whitenessof her linen; but it needed the solitudeof Le Cayla, the few books, well read andwell worth reading, the life of patriarchalsimplicity, and the habit of sustained anddelicate thought, to awaken in the worker’smind the graceful association of ideas,—thepretty picture of Nausicaa and her maidenscleansing their finely woven webs in the cool,rippling tide.

For it is self-culture that warms the chillyearth wherein no good seed can mature; itis self-culture that distinguishes between thework which has inherent and lasting valueand the work which represents conscientiousactivity and no more. And for the trainingof one’s self, leisure is requisite; leisure andthat rare modesty which turns a man’sthoughts back to his own shortcomings andrequirements, and extinguishes in him theburning desire to enlighten his fellow-beings.“We might make ourselves spiritual by detachingourselves from action, and becomeperfect by the rejection of energy,” says Mr.Oscar Wilde, who delights in scandalizing hispatient readers, and who lapses unconsciouslyinto something resembling animation over thewrongs inflicted by the solemn preceptors ofmankind. The notion that it is worth whileto learn a thing only if you intend to impartit to others is widespread and exceedinglypopular. I have myself heard an excellentand anxious aunt say to her young niece,then working hard at college, “But, my dear,why do you give so much of your time toGreek? You don’t expect to teach it, doyou?”—as if there were no other use tobe gained, no other pleasure to be won fromthat noble language, in which lies hiddenthe hoarded treasure of centuries. To studyGreek in order to read and enjoy it, andthereby make life better worth the living,is a possibility that seldom enters the practicalmodern mind.

Yet this restless desire to give out information,like alms, is at best a questionablebounty; this determination to share one’s wisdomwith one’s unwilling fellow-creatures is anoble impulse provocative of general discontent.When Southey, writing to James Murrayabout a dialogue which he proposes to publishin the “Quarterly,” says, with characteristiccomplacency: “I have very little doubt that itwill excite considerable attention, and leadmany persons into a wholesome train ofthought,” we feel at once how absolutely familiaris the sentiment, and how absolutelyhopeless is literature approached in this spirit.The same principle, working under differentconditions to-day, entangles us in a network oflectures, which have become the chosen fieldfor every educational novelty, and the diversionof the mentally unemployed.

Charles Lamb has recorded distinctly hisveneration for the old-fashioned schoolmasterwho taught his Greek and Latin in leisurelyfashion day after day, with no thought wastedupon more superficial or practical acquirements,and who “came to his task as to a sport.” Hehas made equally plain his aversion for the new-fangledpedagogue—new in his time, at least—whocould not “relish a beggar or a gypsy”without seeking to collect or to impart somestatistical information on the subject. A gentlemanof this calibre, his fellow-traveler ina coach, once asked him if he had ever made“any calculation as to the value of the rentalof all the retail shops in London?” and themagnitude of the question so overwhelmedLamb that he could not even stammer out aconfession of his ignorance. “To go preachto the first passer-by, to become tutor to theignorance of the first thing I meet, is a taskI abhor,” observes Montaigne, who must certainlyhave been the most acceptable companionof his day.

Dr. Johnson, too, had scant sympathy withinsistent and arrogant industry. He couldwork hard enough when circumstances demandedit; but he “always felt an inclinationto do nothing,” and not infrequently gratifiedhis desires. “No man, sir, is obliged to do asmuch as he can. A man should have part ofhis life to himself,” was the good doctor’ssoundly heterodox view, advanced upon manyoccasions. He hated to hear people boast oftheir assiduity, and nipped such vain pretensionsin the bud with frosty scorn. When heand Boswell journeyed together in the Harwichstage-coach, a “fat; elderly gentle-woman,”who had been talking freely of her ownaffairs, wound up by saying that she neverpermitted any of her children to be for amoment idle. “I wish, madam,” said Dr.Johnson testily, “that you would educate metoo, for I have been an idle fellow all my life.”“I am sure, sir,” protested the woman withdismayed politeness, “you have not been idle.”“Madam,” was the retort, “it is true! Andthat gentleman there”—pointing to pooryoung Boswell—“has been idle also. Hewas idle in Edinburgh. His father sent himto Glasgow, where he continued to be idle.He came to London, where he has been veryidle. And now he is going to Utrecht, wherehe will be as idle as ever.”

That there was a background of truth inthese spirited assertions we have every reasonto be grateful. Dr. Johnson’s value to-daydoes not depend on the number of essays, orreviews, or dedications he wrote in a year,—someyears he wrote nothing,—but on his ownsturdy and splendid personality; “the realprimate, the soul’s teacher of all England,”says Carlyle; a great embodiment of uncompromisinggoodness and sense. Every generationneeds such a man, not to compile dictionaries,but to preserve the balance of sanity,and few generations are blest enough to possesshim. As for Boswell, he might have toiled inthe law courts until he was gray without benefitingor amusing anybody. It was in thenights he spent drinking port wine at theMitre, and in the days he spent trotting, likea terrier, at his master’s heels, that the seedwas sown which was to give the world a masterpieceof literature, the most delightful biographythat has ever enriched mankind. Itis 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 WalterScott that he was “making himself in thebusy, idle pleasures of his youth;” in thoselong rambles by hill and dale, those whimsicaladventures in farmhouses, those merry, purposelessjourneys in which the eager lad tastedthe flavor of life. At home such unauthorizedamusements were regarded with emphaticdisapprobation. “I greatly doubt, sir,” saidhis father to him one day, “that you wereborn for nae better than a gangrel scrape-gut!”and one half pities the grave clerk to the Signet,whose own life had been so decorouslydull, and who regarded with affectionate solicitudehis lovable and incomprehensible son.In later years Sir Walter recognized keenlythat his wasted school hours entailed on him alasting loss, a loss he was determined his sonsshould never know. It is to be forever regrettedthat “the most Homeric of modernmen could not read Homer.” But every dayhe stole from the town to give to the country,every hour he stole from law to give to literature,every minute he stole from work togive 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 truefabric of self. Perhaps Charles Lamb’s fellow-clerksthought that because his days werespent at a desk in the East India House, hislife was spent there too. His life was farremote from that routine of labor; built up ofgolden moments of respite, enriched with joys,chastened by sorrows, vivified by impulsesthat had no filiation with his daily toil. “Forthe time that a man may call his own,” hewrites to Wordsworth, “that is his life.”The Lamb who worked in the India House,and who had “no skill in figures,” has passedaway, 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 hisgenerous share to the innocent gayety of theworld. This is the Lamb who said, “Richesare chiefly good because they give us time,”and who sighed for a little son that he mightchristen him Nothing-to-do, and permit himto do nothing.

WORDS.

“Do you read the dictionary?” asked M.Théophile Gautier of a young and ardent disciplewho had come to him for counsel. “Itis the most fruitful and interesting of books.Words have an individual and a relative value.They should be chosen before being placed inposition. This word is a mere pebble; that afine pearl or an amethyst. In art the handicraftis everything, and the absolute distinctionof the artist lies, not so much in hiscapacity to feel nature, as in his power torender it.”

We are always pleased to have a wholesometruth presented to us with such genial vivacity,so that we may feel ourselves less edifiedthan diverted, and learn our lesson withoutthe mortifying consciousness of ignorance. Heis a wise preceptor who conceals from us hisawful rod of office, and grafts his knowledgedexterously upon our self-esteem.

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybodynaturally thinks he possesses it, and thisuniversal sentiment results in the misuse ofa material whose beauty enriches the lovingstudent beyond the dreams of avarice. Musiciansknow the value of chords; paintersknow the value of colors; writers are often soblind to the value of words that they are contentwith a bare expression of their thoughts,disdaining the “labor of the file,” and confidentthat the phrase first seized is for themthe phrase of inspiration. They exaggeratethe importance of what they have to say,—lackingwhich we should be none the poorer,—andunderrate the importance of saying it insuch fashion that we may welcome its verymoderate significance. It is in the habitualand summary recognition of the laws of languagethat scholarship delights, says Mr.Pater; and while the impatient thinker, eageronly to impart his views, regards these lawsas a restriction, the true artist finds in theman opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe rejoiced,to work within conditions and limits.

For every sentence that may be penned orspoken the right words exist. They lie concealedin the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabularyenriched by centuries of noble thoughtand delicate manipulation. He who does notfind them and fit them into place, who acceptsthe first term which presents itself ratherthan search for the expression which accuratelyand beautifully embodies his meaning,aspires to mediocrity, and is content with failure.The exquisite adjustment of a word toits significance, which was the instrument ofFlaubert’s daily martyrdom and daily triumph;the generous sympathy of a word with itssurroundings, which was the secret wrung bySir Thomas Browne from the mysteries oflanguage,—these are the twin perfectionswhich constitute style, and substantiate genius.Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraordinarydegree Flaubert’s art of fitting hiswords to the exact thoughts they are designedto convey. Such a brief sentence as “Tenthousand difficulties do not make one doubt”reveals with pregnant simplicity the mentalattitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne,working under fewer restraints, and withoutthe severity of intellectual discipline, harmonizeseach musical syllable into a prose ofleisurely sweetness and sonorous strength.“Court not felicity too far, and weary not thefavorable hand of fortune.” “Man is a nobleanimal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in thegrave.” “The race of delight is short, andpleasures have mutable faces.” Such sentences,woven with curious skill from the rich fabricof seventeenth-century English, defy thewreckage of time. In them a gentle dignityof thought finds its appropriate expression,and the restfulness of an unvexed mindbreathes its quiet beauty into each cadencedline. Here are no “boisterous metaphors,”such as Dryden scorned, to give undue emphasisat every turn, and amaze the carelessreader with the cheap delights of turbulence.Here is no trace of that “full habit ofspeech,” hateful to Mr. Arnold’s soul, andwhich, in the years to come, was to be the giftof journalism to literature.

The felicitous choice of words, which withmost writers is the result of severe study andunswerving vigilance, seems with a favoredfew—who should be envied and not imitated—tobe the genuine fruit of inspiration, asthough caprice itself could not lead them farastray. Shelley’s letters and prose papersteem with sentences in which the beautifulwords are sufficient satisfaction in themselves,and of more value than the conclusions theyreveal. They have a haunting sweetness, apure perfection, which makes the act of readingthem a sustained and dulcet pleasure.Sometimes this effect is produced by a fewsimple 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 apprehensionof life.” Sometimes a clearer note isstruck with the sure and delicate touch whichis the excellence of art. “For the mind increation is as a fading coal, which some invisibleinfluence, like an inconstant wind, awakensto transitory brightness.” The substitution ofthe word “glow” for “brightness” would, Ithink, make this sentence extremely beautiful.If it lacks the fullness and melody of thoseincomparable passages in which Burke, thegreat master of words, rivets our admirationforever, it has the same peculiar and lastinghold upon our imaginations and our memories.Once read, we can no more forget itscharm than we can forget “that chastity ofhonor which felt a stain like a wound,” orthe mournful cadence of regret over virtuesdeemed superfluous in an age of strictly iconoclasticprogress. “Never more shall we beholdthat generous loyalty to rank and sex,that proud submission, that dignified obedience,that subordination of the heart whichkept alive, even in servitude itself, the spiritof an exalted freedom.” It is the fashionat present to subtly depreciate Burke’s powerby some patronizing allusion to the “grandstyle,”—a phrase which, except when appliedto Milton, appears to hold in solution an undefinedand undefinable reproach. But untilwe can produce something better, or somethingas good, those “long savorsome Latinwords,” checked and vivified by “racy Saxonmonosyllables,” must still represent an excellencewhich it is easier to belittle than toemulate.

It is strange that our chilling disapprobationof what we are prone to call “fine writing”melts into genial applause over thefreakish perversity so dear to modern unrest.We look askance upon such an old-time masterof his craft as the Opium-Eater, and requireto be told by a clear-headed, unenthusiasticcritic like Mr. George Saintsbury thatthe balanced harmony of De Quincey’s styleis obtained often by the use of extremelysimple words, couched in the clearest imaginableform. Place by the side of Mr. Pater’spicture of Monna Lisa—too well known toneed quotation—De Quincey’s equally famousdescription of Our Lady of Darkness. Bothpassages are as beautiful as words can makethem, but the gift of simplicity is in thehands of the older writer. Or take the singlesentence which describes for us the mystery ofOur Lady of Sighs: “And her eyes, if theywere ever seen, would be neither sweet norsubtle; no man could read their story; theywould be found filled with perishing dreams,and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.”Here, as Mr. Saintsbury justly points out, areno needless adjectives, no unusual or extravagantwords. The sense is adequate to thesound, and the sound is only what is requiredas accompaniment to the sense. We are notperplexed and startled, as when Browning introducesus to

or to a woman’s

We are not irritated and confused, as whenCarlyle—whose misdeeds, like those ofBrowning, are matters of pure volition—ispleased, for our sharper discipline, to write“like a comet inscribing with its tail.” Noman uses words more admirably, or abusesthem more shamefully, than Carlyle. Thathe should delight in seeing his pages studdedall over with such spikes as “mammonism,”“flunkeyhood,” “nonentity,” and “simulacrum,”that he should repeat them again andagain with unwearying self-content, is anenigma that defies solution, save on the simplepresumption that they are designed, like otherinstruments of torture, to test the fortitude ofthe sufferer. It is best to scramble over themas bravely as we can, and forget our scars inthe enjoyment of those vivid and matchlesspictures in which each word plays its part,and supplies its share of outline and emphasisto the scene. The art that can dictate sucha brief bit of description as “little red-coloredpulpy infants” is the art of a Dutch masterwho, on five inches of canvas, depicts for uswith subdued vehemence the absolute realitiesof life.

“All freaks,” remarks Mr. Arnold, “tendto impair the beauty and power of language;”yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarrewith the picturesque that at present a greatdeal of English literature resembles a linguisticmuseum, where every type of monstrosityis cheerfully exhibited and admired. Writersof splendid capacity, of undeniable originalityand force, are not ashamed to add their curiosto the group, either from sheer impatience ofrestraint, or, as I sometimes think, from agrim and perverted sense of humor, which isenlivened by noting how far they can venturebeyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredithis pleased to tell us that one of his characters“neighed a laugh,” that another “tolled hernaughty head,” that a third “stamped; heraspect spat,” and that a fourth was discovered“pluming a smile upon his succulent mouth,”we cannot smother a dawning suspicion thathe is diverting himself at our expense, andpluming a smile of his own, more sapless thansucculent, over the naïve simplicity of thepublic. Perhaps it is a yearning after subtletyrather than a spirit of uncurbed humor whichprompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo’s“dark Renaissance face perplexed with an incipientlaugh;” but really a very interestingand improving little paper might be writtenon the extraordinary laughs and smiles whichcheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modernanalytic fiction. “Correctness, that humblemerit of prose,” has been snubbed into a recognitionof her insignificance. She is astame as a woman with only one head andtwo arms amid her more striking and richlyendowed sisters in the museum.

“A language long employed by a delicateand critical society,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot,“is a treasure of dexterous felicities;”and to awaken the literary conscience to itsforgotten duty of guarding this treasure is theavowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of anotherstylist, less understood and less appreciated,Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are scantilyrewarded in an age which has but little instinctfor form, and which habitually allowsitself the utmost license of phraseology. That“unblessed freedom from restraint,” which tothe clear-eyed Greeks appeared diametricallyopposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty,and which finds its amplest expression in thepoems of Walt Whitman, has dazzled us onlyto betray. The emancipation of the savage issufficiently comprehensive, but his privilegesare not always as valuable as they may at firstsight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his admirablevolume “French Traits,” unhesitatinglydefines Whitman’s slang as “the riotousmedium of the under-languaged;” and the reproachis not too harsh nor too severe. EvenMr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acuteand enthusiastic of his English critics, admitssadly that it is “gutter slang,” equally purposelessand indefensible. That a man whoheld within himself the elements of greatnessshould have deliberately lessened the force ofhis life’s work by a willful misuse of hismaterial is one of those bitter and irremediableerrors which sanity forever deplores.We are inevitably repelled by the employmentof trivial or vulgar words in seriouspoetry, and they become doubly offensivewhen brought into relation with the beautyand majesty of nature. It is neither pleasantnor profitable to hear the sun’s rays describedas

It is still less satisfactory to have the universeaddressed in this convivial and burlesque fashion:—

There is a kind of humorousness which a truesense of humor would render impossible;there is a species of originality from which theartist shrinks aghast; and worse than merevulgarity is the constant employment of wordsindecorous in themselves, and irreverent intheir application,—the smirching of cleanand noble things with adjectives grossly unfittedfor such use, and repellent to all thecanons of good taste. This is not the “gentlepressure” which Sophocles put upon commonwords to wring from them a fresh significance;it is a deliberate abuse of terms, and betraysa lack of that fine quality of self-repressionwhich embraces the power of selection, and isthe best characteristic of literary morality.“Oh, for the style of honest men!” sighsSainte-Beuve, sick of such unreserved disclosures;“of men who have revered everythingworthy of respect, whose innate feelingshave ever been governed by the principles ofgood taste. Oh, for the polished, pure, andmoderate writers!”

There is a pitiless French maxim, less popularwith English and Americans than withour Gallic neighbors,—“Le secret d’ennuyerest de tout dire.” Mr. Pater indeed expressesthe same thought in ampler English fashion(which but emphasizes the superiority of theFrench) when he says, “For in truth all art doesbut consist in the removal of surplusage, fromthe last finish of the gem-engraver blowingaway the last particle of invisible dust, backto the earliest divination of the finished workto be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’sfancy, in the rough-hewn block ofstone.” That the literary artist tests his skillby a masterly omission of all that is betterleft unsaid is a truth widely admitted andscantily utilized. Authors who have nottaken the trouble de faire leur toilette admitus with painful frankness into their dressing-rooms,and suffer us to gaze more intimatelythan is agreeable to us upon the dubiousmysteries of their deshabille. Authors whohave the gift of continuity disregard withinsistent generosity the limits of time andpatience. What a noble poem was lost tomyriads of readers when “The Ring and theBook” reached its twenty thousandth line!How inexorable is the tyranny of a great andpowerful poet who will spare his readers nothing!Authors who are indifferent to thebeauties of reserve charge down upon us witha dreadful impetuosity from which there is noescape. The strength that lies in delicacy,the chasteness of style which does not abandonitself to every impulse, are qualities ill-understoodby men who subordinate taste tofervor, and whose words, coarse, rank, or unctuous,betray the undisciplined intellect thatmistakes passion for power. “The languageof poets,” says Shelley, “has always effected acertain uniform and harmonious recurrence ofsound, without which it were not poetry;” andit is the sustained effort to secure this balancedharmony, this magnificent work withinlimits, which constitutes the achievement ofthe poet, and gives beauty and dignity to hisart. “Where is the man who can flatter himselfthat he knows the language of prose, if hehas not assiduously practiced the language ofpoetry?” asks M. Francisque Sarcey, whoserequirements are needlessly exacting, butwhose views would have been cordially indorsedby at least one great master of English.Dryden always maintained that the admirablequality of his prose was due to his long trainingin a somewhat mechanical verse. A moremodern and diverting approximation of M.Sarcey’s views may be found in the robuststatement of Benjamin Franklin: “I approved,for my part, the amusing one’s selfnow and then with poetry, so far as to improveone’s language, but no farther.” It isa pity that people cannot always be born inthe right generation! What a delicious pictureis presented to our fancy of a nineteenth-centuryFranklin amusing himself and improvinghis language by an occasional studyof “Sordello”!

The absolute mastery of words, which is theprerogative of genius, can never be acquiredby painstaking, or revealed to criticism. Mr.Lowell, pondering deeply on the subject, hasdevoted whole pages to a scholarly analysis ofthe causes which assisted Shakespeare to hisunapproached and unapproachable vocabulary.The English language was then, Mr. Lowellreminds us, a living thing, “hot from thehearts and brains of a people; not hardenedyet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes ofsharp and clear relief in the moulds of newthought. Shakespeare found words ready tohis use, original and untarnished, types ofthought whose edges were unworn by repeatedimpressions.... No arbitrary line had beendrawn between high words and low; vulgarthen meant simply what was common; poetryhad not been aliened from the people by theestablishment of an Upper House of vocables.The conception of the poet had no time to coolwhile he was debating the comparative respectabilityof this phrase or that; but he snatchedwhat word his instinct prompted, and saw noindiscretion in making a king speak as hiscountry nurse might have taught him.”

It is a curious thing, however, that the morewe try to account for the miracles of genius,the more miraculous they grow. We cannever hope to understand the secret of Homer’sstyle. It is best to agree simply withMr. Pater: “Homer was always saying thingsin this manner.” We can never know howKeats came to write,

or those other lines, perhaps the most beautifulin our language,

It is all a mystery, hidden from the uninspired,and Mr. Lowell’s clean-built scaffolding,while it helps us to a comprehensiveenjoyment of Shakespeare, leaves us dumband amazed as ever before the concentratedsplendor of a single line,—

There is only one way to fathom its conception.The great waves reared their foamyheads, and whispered him the words.

The richness of Elizabethan English, thefreedom and delight with which men soundedand explored the charming intricacies of atongue that was expanding daily into freshmajesty and beauty, must have given to literaturesome of the allurements of navigation.Mariners sailed away upon stormy seas, onstrange, half-hinted errands; haunted by theshadow of glory, dazzled by the lustre ofwealth. Scholars ventured far upon the unknownocean of letters; haunted by the seductionsof prose, dazzled by the fairness ofverse. They brought back curious spoils,gaudy, subtle, sumptuous, according to thetaste or potency of the discoverer. Theirwords have often a mingled weight and sweetness,whether conveying briefly a singlethought, like Burton’s “touched with theloadstone of love,” or adding strength andlustre to the ample delineations of Ben Jonson.“Give me that wit whom praise excites,glory puts on, or disgrace grieves; heis to be nourished with ambition, pricked forwardwith honors, checked with reprehension,and never to be suspected of sloth.” Bacon’sadmirable conciseness, in which nothing isdisregarded, but where every word carries itsproper value and expresses its exact significance,is equaled only by Cardinal Newman.“Reading maketh a full man, conference aready man, and study an exact man,” saysBacon; and this simple accuracy of definitionreminds us inevitably of the lucid tersenesswith which every sentence of the “Apologia”reveals the thought it holds. “The truestexpedience is to answer right out when youare asked; the wisest economy is to have nomanagement; the best prudence is not to be acoward.” As for the naïveté and the picturesquenesswhich lend such inexpressible charmto the earlier writers and atone for so many oftheir misdeeds, what can be more agreeablethan to hear Sir Walter Raleigh remark withcheerful ingenuousness, “Some of our captainesgaroused of wine till they were reasonablepleasant”!—a most engaging way ofnarrating a not altogether uncommon occurrence.And what can be more winning to theear than the simple grace with which RogerAscham writes of familiar things: “In thewhole year, Springtime, Summer, Fall of theLeaf, and Winter; and in one day, Morning,Noontime, Afternoon, and Eventide, altereththe course of the weather, the pith of the bow,the strength of the man”! It seems an easything to say “fall of the leaf” for fall, and“eventide” for evening, but in such easythings lies the subtle beauty of language; inthe rejection of such nice distinctions lies thebarrenness of common speech. We can hardlyspare the time, in these hurried days, tospeak of the fall of the leaf, to use four wordswhere one would suffice, merely because thefour words have a graceful significance, andthe one word has none; and so, even in composition,this finely colored phrase, with itshint of russet, wind-swept woods, is lost to usforever. Yet compare with it the line whichLord Tennyson, that great master of beautifulwords, puts into Marian’s song:—

How tame and gray is the idiom which conveysa fact, which defines a season, but suggestsnothing to our imaginations, by the sideof the idiom which brings swiftly before oureyes the brilliant desolation of autumn!

The narrow vocabulary, which is the conversationalfreehold of people whose educationshould have provided them a broader field,admits of little that is picturesque or forcible,and of less that is finely graded or delicatelyconceived. Ordinary conversation appears toconsist mainly of “ands,” “buts,” and “thes,”with an occasional “well” to give a flavor ofnationality, a “yes” or “no” to stand forindividual sentiment, and a few widely exaggeratedterms to destroy value and perspective.

Is this, one wonders, the “treasure of dexterousfelicities” which Mr. Bagehot contemplatedwith such delight, and which a criticalsociety is destined to preserve flawless anduncontaminated? Is this the “heroic utterance,”the great “mother tongue,” possessingwhich we all become—or so Mr. SydneyDobell assures us—

Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr.Oscar Wilde to such rapturous and finelyworded praise,—praise which awakens in usa noble emulation to prove what we canaccomplish with a medium at once so sumptuousand so flexible? “For the material thatpainter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparisonwith language,” says Mr. Wilde. “Wordshave not merely music as sweet as that of violand lute, color as rich and vivid as any thatmakes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetianor the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sureand certain than that which reveals itself inmarble or in bronze; but thought and passionand spirituality are theirs also, are theirsindeed alone. If the Greeks had criticisednothing but language, they would still havebeen the great art critics of the world. Toknow the principles of the highest art is toknow the principles of all the arts.”

This is not claiming too much, for in truthMr. Wilde is sufficiently well equipped toillustrate his claim. If his sentences aresometimes overloaded with ornament, thedecorations are gold, not tinsel; if his vocabularyis gorgeous, it is never glaring; if hisallusions are fanciful, they are controlled andsubdued into moderation. Even the inevitableand swiftly uttered reproach of “finewriting” cannot altogether blind us to thefact that his are beautiful words,—pearlsand amethysts M. Gautier would call them,—aptlychosen, and fitted into place withthe careful skill of a goldsmith. They arefree, moreover, from that vice of unexpectednesswhich is part of fine writing, and whichMr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among theliterary workers of to-day; the desire to surpriseus by some new and profoundly irrelevantapplication of a familiar word. The“veracity” of a bar of music, the finely executed“passage” of a marble chimney-piece,the “andante” of a sonnet, and the curiousstatement, commonly applied to Mr. Gladstone,that he is “part of the conscience ofa nation,”—these are the vagaries which toMr. Saintsbury, and to every other studentof words, appear so manifestly discouraging.Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of anæsthetic sideboard which was described tohim as having a Chippendale feeling aboutit, before which touching conceit the everfamous “fringes of the north star” pale intoinsignificance. A recent editor of Shelley’sletters and essays says with seeming seriousnessin his preface that the “Witch of Atlas”is a “characteristic outcome,” an “exquisitemouse of fancy brought forth by what mountainof Shelleyan imagination.” Now, whena careful student and an appreciative readercan bring himself to speak of a poem as a“mouse of fancy,” merely for the sake offorcing a conceit, and confronting us with theperils of the unexpected, it is time we turnedsoberly back to first principles and to our dictionaries;it is time we listened anew to M.Gautier’s advice, and studied the value ofwords.

ENNUI.

“Want and ennui,” says Schopenhauer,“are the two poles of human life.” The furtherwe escape from one evil, the nearer weinevitably draw to the other. As soon as thefirst rude pressure of necessity is relieved, andman has leisure to think of something beyondhis unsatisfied craving for food and shelter,then ennui steps in and claims him for herown. It is the price he pays, not merely forluxury, but for comfort. Time, the inexorabletaskmaster of poor humanity, drives us hardwith whip and spur when we are strugglingunder the heavy burden of work; but stays hishand, and prolongs the creeping hours, whenwe are delivered over to that weariness ofspirit which weights each moment with lead.Time is, in fact, either our open oppressor orour false friend. He is that agent by which,at every instant, “all things in our handsbecome as nothing, and lose any real valuethey possess.”

Here is a doctrine distinctly discouraging,and stated with that relentless candor whichcompels our reluctant consideration. Therecan be no doubt that to Schopenhauer’s mindennui was an evil every whit as palpable aswant. He hated and feared them both withthe painful susceptibility of a self-centredman; and he strove resolutely from his youthto protect himself against these twin disastersof life. The determined fashion in which heguarded his patrimony from loss resembled thedetermined fashion in which he strove—withless success—to guard himself from boredom.The vapid talk, the little wearisome iterations,which most of us bear resignedly enough becausecustom has taught us patience, were tohim intolerable afflictions. He retaliated byan ungracious dismissal of society as somethingpitiably and uniformly contemptible.His advice has not the grave and simple wisdomof Sir Thomas Browne, “Be able to bealone,” but is founded rather on Voltaire’s disdainfulmaxim, “The world is full of peoplewho are not worth speaking to,” and impliesan almost savage rejection of one’s fellow-beings.“Every fool is pathetically social,” saysSchopenhauer, and the advantage of solitudeconsists less in the possession of ourselves thanin the escape from others. With whimsicaleagerness he built barrier after barrier betweenhimself and the dreaded enemy, ennui,only to see his citadel repeatedly stormed, andto find himself at the mercy of his foe. Thereis but one method, after all, by which the invadercan be even partially disarmed, and thismethod was foreign to Schopenhauer’s nature.It was practiced habitually by Sir WalterScott, who, in addition to his sustained andsplendid work, threw himself with such unselfish,unswerving ardor into the interests ofhis brother men that he never gave them athorough chance to bore him. They did theirpart stoutly enough, and were doubtless astiresome as they knew how to be; but his invinciblesweet temper triumphed over theirmalignity, and enabled him to say, in the eveningof his life, that he had suffered little attheir hands, and had seldom found any onefrom whom he could not extract either amusementor edification.

Perhaps his journal tells a different tale, atale of heavy moments stretching into hours,and borne with cheerful patience out of simpleconsideration for others. Men and women,friends and strangers, took forcible possessionof his golden leisure, and he yielded it to themwithout a murmur. That which was well-nighmaddening to Carlyle’s irritable nerves andselfish petulance, and which strained evenCharles Lamb’s forbearance to the snapping-point,Sir Walter endured smilingly, as if itwere the most reasonable thing in the world.Mr. Lang is right when he says Scott did notpreach socialism, he practiced it; that is, henever permitted himself to assign to his owncomfort or convenience a very important placein existence; he never supposed his own satisfactionto be the predestined purpose of theuniverse. But his love for genial life, hiskeen enjoyment of social pleasures, made himsingularly sensitive to ennui. He was able,indeed, like Sir Thomas Browne, to be alone,—whenthe charity of his fellow-creaturessuffered it,—and he delighted in divertingcompanionship, whether of peers or hinds; butthe weariness of daily intercourse with stupidpeople told as heavily upon him as upon lesspatient victims. Little notes scattered throughouthis journal reveal his misery, and awakensympathetic echoes in every long-tried soul.“Of all bores,” he writes, “the greatest is tohear a dull and bashful man sing a facetioussong.” And again, with humorous intensity:“Miss Ayton’s father is a bore, after the fashionof all fathers, mothers, aunts, and otherchaperons of pretty actresses.” And again,this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne:—

That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings assoon as they were over is proof, not of callousness,but of magnanimity. He forgave his tormentorsthe instant they ceased to tormenthim, and then found time to deplore his previousirritation. “I might at least have askedhim to dinner,” he was heard murmuring self-reproachfully,when an unscrupulous intruderhad at last departed from Abbotsford; andon another occasion, when some impatient ladsrefused to emulate his forbearance, he recalledthem with prompt insistence to their forgottensense of propriety. “Come, come, younggentlemen,” he expostulated. “It requiresno small ability, I assure you, to be a decidedbore. You must endeavor to show a littlemore respect.”

The self-inflicted pangs of ennui are lesssalutary and infinitely more onerous than thosewe suffer at the hands of others. It is naturalthat our just resentment when people weary usshould result in a temporary taste for solitude,a temporary exaltation of our own society.Like most sentiments erected on an airy trestle-workof vanity, this is an agreeable delusionwhile it lasts; but it seldom does last after weare bold enough to put it to the test. The inevitableand rational discontent which lies atthe bottom of our hearts is not a thing to bebanished by noise, or lulled to sleep by silence.We are not sufficient for ourselves, and companionshipis not sufficient for us. “Venez,monsieur,” said Louis XIII. to a listless courtier;“allons nous ennuyer ensemble.” Wefancy it is the detail of life, its small grievances,its apparent monotony, its fretful cares,its hours alternately lagging and feverish, thatwear out the joy of existence. This is not so.Were each day differently filled, the resultwould be much the same. Young Maurice deGuérin, struggling with a depression he tooclearly understands, strikes at the very root ofthe matter in one dejected sentence: “MonDieu, que je souffre de la vie! Non dans sesaccidents, un peu de philosophie y suffit; maisdans elle-même, dans sa substance, à part toutphénomène.” To which the steadfast optimistopposes an admirable retort: “It is a pitythat M. de Guérin should have permitted himselfthis relentless analysis of a misery whichis never bettered by contemplation.” Happinessmay not be, as we are sometimes told, thelegacy of the barbarian, but neither is it a finaloutcome of civilization. Men can weary, anddo weary, of every stage that represents a stepin the world’s progress, and the ennui of mentalstarvation is equaled only by the ennui ofmental satiety.

It is curious how much of this temper isreflected in the somewhat dispiriting literaturewhich attains popularity to-day. Mr. HamlinGarland, whose leaden-hued sketches called—Ithink unfairly—“Main-Travelled Roads”have deprived most of us of some cheerfulhours, paints with an unfaltering hand a lifein which ennui sits enthroned. It is not thepoverty of his Western farmers that oppressesus. Real biting poverty, which withers lesserevils with its deadly breath, is not known tothese people at all. They have roofs, fire,food, and clothing. It is not the ceaselesslabor, the rough fare, the gray skies, themuddy barnyards, which stand for the troublein their lives. It is the dreadful weariness ofliving. It is the burden of a dull existence,clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholyof which they have sufficient intelligenceto understand. Theirs is the ennui ofemptiness, and the implied reproach on everypage is that a portion, and only a portion,of mankind is doomed to walk along theseshaded paths; while happier mortals whoabide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spendtheir days in a pleasant tumult of intellectualand artistic excitation. The clearest denial ofthis fallacy may be found in that matchlessand desolate sketch of Mr. Pater’s called “Sebastianvan Storck,” where we have painted forus with penetrating distinctness man’s deliberaterejection of those crowded accessorieswhich, to the empty-handed, represent the joysof life. Never has the undying essence ofennui been revealed to our unwilling gaze asin this merciless picture. Never has it beenso portrayed in its awful nakedness, amid aplenty which it cannot be persuaded to share.We see the rich, warm, highly colored surroundings,the vehement intensity of work andpastime, the artistic completeness of everydetail, the solicitations of love, the delicate andalluring touches which give to every day itsseparate delight, its individual value; and,amid all these things, the impatient soul strivingvainly to adjust itself to a life which seemsso worth the living. Here, indeed, is one of“Fortune’s favorites,” whom she decks withgarlands like a sacrificial heifer, and at whom,unseen, she points her mocking finger. Encompassedfrom childhood by the “thrivinggenius” of the Dutch, by the restless activitywhich made dry land and populous townswhere nature had willed the sea, and by theadmirable art which added each year to theheaped-up treasures of Holland, Sebastianvan Storck has but one vital impulse whichshapes itself to an end,—escape; escape froman existence made unendurable by its stiflingfullness, its vivid and marvelous accomplishment.

It is an interesting question to determine,or to endeavor to determine, how far animalsshare man’s melancholy capacity for ennui.Schopenhauer, who, like Hartmann and allother professional pessimists, steadfastly maintainsthat beasts are happier than men, is disposedto believe that in their natural statethey never suffer from this malady, and that,even when domesticated, only the most intelligentgive any indication of its presence. Buthow does Schopenhauer know that which he soconfidently affirms? The bird, impelled by aninstinct she is powerless to resist, sits patientlyon her eggs until they are hatched; but whocan say she is not weary of the pastime? Whatloneliness and discontent may find expressionin the lion’s dreadful roar, which is said to beas mournful as it is terrible! We are naturallytempted, in moments of fretfulness anddejection, to seek relief—not unmixed withenvy—in contemplating with Sir ThomasBrowne “the happiness of inferior creatureswho in tranquillity possess their constitutions.”But freedom from care, and from the apprehensionthat is worse than care, does not necessarilyimply freedom from all disagreeablesensations; and the surest claim of the bruteto satisfaction, its absolute adequacy to theplace it is designed to fill, is destroyed by ourinterference in its behalf. As a result, domesticpets reveal plainly to every close observerhow frequently they suffer from ennui. Theypay, in smaller coin, the same price that manpays for comfortable living. Mr. Ruskin haswritten with ready sympathy of the house dog,who bears resignedly long hours of dull inaction,and only shows by his frantic delightwhat a relief it is to be taken out for the milddissipation of a stroll. I have myself watchedand pitied the too evident ennui of my cat,poor little beast of prey, deprived in a mouse-lesshome of the supreme pleasures of thehunt; fed until dinner ceases to be a covetedenjoyment; housed, cushioned, combed, caressed,and forced to bear upon her prettyshoulders the burden of a wearisome opulence,—orwhat represents opulence to a pussy. Ihave seen Agrippina listlessly moving fromchair to chair, and from sofa to sofa, in a vainattempt to nap; looking for a few languidminutes out of the window with the air of agreat lady sadly bored at the play; and thenturning dejectedly back into the room whoseattractions she had long since exhausted. Herexpressive eyes lifted to mine betrayed her discontent;the lassitude of an irksome luxuryunnerved her graceful limbs; if she could havespoken, it would have been to complain withCharles Lamb of that “dumb, soporifical good-for-nothingness”which clogs the wheels oflife.

It is a pleasant fancy, baseless and proofless,which makes us imagine the existence offishes to be peculiarly tranquil and unmolested.The element in which they live appears toshelter them from so many evils; noises especially,and the sharpness of sudden change,scorching heats, and the inclement skies ofwinter. A delightful mystery wraps themround, and the smooth apathy with which theyglide through the water suggests content approachingto complacency. That old-fashionedpoem beginning

filled my childish heart with a profound envyof these happy creatures, which was greatlyincreased by reading a curious story of FatherFaber’s, called “The Melancholy Heart.” Inthis tale, a little shipwrecked girl is carried tothe depths of the ocean, and sees the green seaswinging to and fro because it is so full of joy,and the fishes waving their glistening fins insilent satisfaction, and the oysters opening andshutting their shells in lazy raptures of delight.Afterwards she visits the birds and beasts andinsects, and finds amongst them intelligence,industry, patience, ingenuity,—a whole hostof admirable qualities,—but nowhere else thesweet contentment of that dumb watery life.So universal is this fallible sentiment thateven Leopardi, while assigning to all createdthings their full share of pain, reluctantly admitsthat the passive serenity of the less vivaciouscreatures of the sea—starfish and theirnumerous brothers and sisters—is the nearestpossible approach to an utterly impossiblehappiness. And indeed it is difficult to lookat a sea-urchin slowly moving its countlessspines in the clear shallow water withoutthinking that here, at least, is an existenceequally 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 whenwe discover the little prickly cup lying emptyand dry on the peak of a neighboring rock,and know that a crow’s sharp beak has relentlesslydug the poor urchin from its comfortablecradle, and ended its slumbrous felicity. Yetthe sudden cessation of life has nothing whateverto do with its reasonable contentment.The question is, not how soon is it over, or howdoes it come to an end, but is it worth livingwhile it lasts? Moreover, the chances of deathmake the sweetness of self-preservation; andthis is precisely the sentiment which LeighHunt has so admirably embodied in those lines—thefinest, I think, he ever wrote—wherethe fish pleads for its own pleasant and satisfactoryexistence:—

Here, as elsewhere, fear is the best antidotefor ennui. The early settlers of America, surroundedby hostile Indians, and doubtful eachmorning whether the coming nightfall wouldnot see their rude homes given to the flames,probably suffered but little from the dullnesswhich seems so oppressive to the peaceful agriculturistof to-day. The mediæval women, whowere content to pass their time in weavingendless tapestries, had less chance to complainof the monotony of life than their artistic,scientific, literary, and philanthropic sisters ofour age; for at any hour, breaking in upontheir tranquil labors, might be heard thetrumpet’s blast; at any hour might come thetidings, good or bad, which meant a few moreyears of security, or the horrors of siege andpillage.

It is pleasant to turn our consideration fromthe ennui which is inevitable, and consequentlytragic, to the ennui which is accidental, andconsequently diverting. The first is part ofourselves, from which there is no escape; thesecond is, as a rule, the contribution of ourneighbors, and may be eluded if fortune andour own wits favor us. Lord Byron, for example,finding himself hard beset by Madamede Staël, whom he abhorred, had the dexterityto entrap poor little “Monk” Lewis into theconversation, and then slipped away from both,leaving them the dismally congenial task ofwearying each other without mercy. “A bore,”says Bishop Selwyn, “is a man who will persistin talking about himself when you want to talkabout yourself;” and this simple explanationoffers a satisfactory solution of much of theennui suffered in society. People with theoriesof life are, perhaps, the most relentless of theirkind, for no time or place is sacred from theirdevastating elucidations. A theoretic socialist—notthe practical working kind, like SirWalter—is adamant to the fatigue of his listeners.“Eloquence,” says Mr. Lowell feelingly,“has no bowels for its victims;” andone of the most pathetic figures in the historyof literature is poor Heine, awakened from hissweet morning nap by Ludwig Börne, who satrelentlessly on the edge of the bed and talkedpatriotism. I hardly think that even this wantoninjury justified Heine in his cruel attackupon Börne, when the latter was dead andcould offer no defense; yet who knows howmany drops of concentrated bitterness werestored up in those dreary moments of boredom!The only other instance of ennui whichseems as grievous and as cruel is the pictureof the Baron Fouqué’s brilliant wife condemnedto play loto every evening with theofficers of the victorious French army; anillustration equally novel and malign of thedevastating inhumanity of war.

In fact, amusements which do not amuse areamong the most depressing of earthly evils.When Sir George Cornwall Lewis candidlyconfessed that life would be tolerable were itnot for its pleasures, he had little notion thathe was uttering a witticism fated to enjoya melancholy immortality. His protest waspurely personal, and society, prompt to recognizea grievance when it is presented, has goneon ever since peevishly and monotonously echoinghis lament. We crave diversion so eagerly,we need it so sorely, that our disappointmentin its elusiveness is fed by the flickerings ofperpetual hope. Ennui has been defined as adesire for activity without the capacity for action,as a state of inertia quickened by discontent.But it is rather a desire for amusementthan for activity; it is a rational instinctwarped by the irony of circumstances, and byour own selfish limitations. It was not activitythat Schopenhauer lacked. He workedhard all his life, and with the concentratedindustry of a man who knew exactly whathe wanted to do. It was the common need ofenjoyment, which he shared with the rest ofmankind, and his own singular incapacity forenjoying himself, which chafed him into bitterness,and made him so unreasonably angry withthe world. “In human existence,” says Leopardi,“the intervals between pleasure andpain are occupied by ennui. And since allpleasures are like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile,thin, and transparent, ennui penetrates theirtissue and saturates them, just as air penetratesthe webs. It is, indeed, nothing but ayearning for happiness, without the illusion ofpleasure or the reality of pain. This yearningis never satisfied, since true happiness does notexist. So that life is interwoven with wearinessand suffering, and one of these evils disappearsonly to give place to the other. Such isthe destiny of man.”

Now, to endure pain resolutely, courage isrequired; to endure ennui, one must be bredto the task. The restraints of a purely artificialsociety are sufferable to those only whomcustom has rendered docile, and who have beentrained to subordinate their own impulses anddesires. The more elaborate the social conditions,the more relentless this need of adjustment,which makes a harmonious whole atthe cost of individual development. We allknow how, when poor Frances Burney waslifted suddenly from the cheerful freedom ofmiddle-class life to the wearisome etiquette ofa court, she drooped and fretted under the burdenof an honor which brought her nothingbut vexation. Macaulay, who champions hercause with burning zeal, is pleased to representthe monotony of court as simple slaverywith no extenuating circumstances. He likensDr. Burney conducting his daughter to thepalace to a Circassian father selling his ownchild into bondage. The sight of the authoressof “Evelina” assisting at the queen’s toilet, orchatting sleepily with the ladies in waiting,thrills him with indignation; the thought ofher playing cards night after night withMadame Schwellenberg reduces him to despair.And indeed, card-playing, if you havenot the grace to like it, is the most unprofitableform of social martyrdom; you sufferhorribly yourself, and you add very little tothe pleasure of your neighbor. The BaronessFouqué may have conquered the infantine imbecilitiesof loto with no great mental exhaustion.If she were painfully bored, her patiencealone was taxed. The Frenchmen probablythought her a pleased and animated companion.But Miss Burney, delicate, sleepy,fatigued, loathing cards, and inwardly rebelliousat her fate, must have made the gamedrag sadly before bedtime. It was a drearywaste of moments for her; but a less intolerantpartisan than Macaulay would have somesympathy to spare for poor Madame Schwellenberg,who, like most women of rank, adoredthe popular pastime, and who doubtless foundthe distinguished young novelist a very unsatisfactoryassociate.

It is salutary to turn from Miss Burney andher wrathful historian to the letters of CharlotteElizabeth, mother of the Regent d’Orléans,and see how the oppressive monotony ofthe French court was cheerfully endured forfifty years by a woman exiled from home andkindred, whose pleasures were few, whose annoyanceswere manifold. Madame would haveenjoyed nothing better than a bowl of beer,soup, or a dish of sausages eaten in congenialcompany. She lunched daily alone, on hatedFrench messes, stared at by twenty footmen,from whose supercilious eyes she was glad toescape with hunger still unsatisfied. Madamedetested sermons. She listened to them endlesslywithout complaint, and was grateful forthe occasional privilege of a nap. Madameliked cards. She was not permitted to play,nor even to show herself at the lansquenettable. She never gambled,—in fact, she hadno money,—and it was a fancy of her husband’sthat she brought him ill luck by hoveringnear. Neither was she allowed to retire.“All the old women who do not play have tobe entertained by me,” she writes with surpassinggood humor. “This goes on fromseven to ten, and makes me yawn frightfully.”Supper was eaten at the royal table, where theguests often waited three quarters of an hourfor the king to appear, and where nobodyspoke a word during the meal. “I live asthough I were quite alone in the world,” confessesthis friendless exile to her favoritecorrespondent, the Raugravine Louise. “ButI am resigned to such a state of things, andI meddle in nothing.” Here was a womantrained to the endurance of ennui. The theatreand the chase were her sole amusements; letter-writingwas her only occupation. Herhealthy German nature had in it no trace oflanguor, no bitterness born of useless rebellionagainst fate. She knew how to accept the inevitable,and how to enjoy the accidental; andthis double philosophy afforded her somethingclosely resembling content. Napoleon, it issaid, once desired some comedians to playat court, and M. de Talleyrand gravely announcedto the audience waiting to hear them,“Gentlemen, the emperor earnestly requestsyou to be amused.” Had Charlotte Elizabeth—longbefore laid to sleep in St. Denis—beenone of that patient group, she would haveliterally obeyed the royal commands. Shewould have responded with prompt docility toany offered entertainment. This is not an easytask. “Amuse me, if you can find out how todo it,” was the melancholy direction of Richelieuto Boisrobert, when the pains of ennuigrew unbearable, and even kittens ceased tobe diverting. Amuse! amuse! amuse! is theplea of a weariness as wide as the world, andas old as humanity. Amuse me for a littlewhile, that I may think I have escaped frommyself.

It is curious that England should have toborrow from France the word “ennui,” whilethe French are unanimous in their opinion thatthe thing itself is emphatically of Englishgrowth. The old rhyme,

has never lost its application, though the presentgeneration of English-speaking men areable to digest a great deal of dullness withoutseeking such violent forms of relief. In fact,Mr. Oscar Wilde, prompt to offer an unwelcomecriticism, explains the amazing popularityof the psychological and religiouslyirreligious novel on the ground that the genreennuyeux, which no Frenchman can bringhimself to pardon, is the one form of literaturewhich his countrymen thoroughly enjoy.They have a kindly tolerance for stupid peopleas well, and the ill-natured term “bore” hasonly forced itself of late years upon an urbaneand long-suffering public. Johnson’s dictionaryis innocent of the word, though Johnsonhimself was well acquainted with the article.As late as 1822, a reviewer in “Colburn’sMagazine” entreats his readers to use the word“bore;” to write it, if they please; to printit, even, if necessary. Why shrink fromthe expression, when the creature itself is socommon, and “daily gaining ground in thecountry”?

Before this date, however, one Englishwriter had given to literature some pricelessillustrations of the species. “Could we butstudy our bores as Miss Austen must havestudied hers in her country village,” saysMrs. Ritchie, “what a delightful world thismight be!” But I seriously doubt whetherany real enjoyment could be extracted fromMiss Bates, or Mr. Rushworth, or Sir WilliamLucas, in the flesh. If we knew them, weshould probably feel precisely as did EmmaWoodhouse, and Maria Bertram, and ElizabethBennet,—vastly weary of their company.In fact, only their brief appearances makethe two gentlemen bores so diverting, even infiction; and Miss Bates, I must confess, taxesmy patience sorely. She is so tiresome thatshe tires, and I am invariably tempted to dowhat her less fortunate townspeople would havegladly done,—run away from her to morecongenial society. Surely comedy ceases, andtragedy begins, when poor Jane Fairfax escapesfrom the strawberry party at Donwell,and seeks, under the burning noonday sun,the blessed relief of solitude. “We all knowat times what it is to be wearied in spirits.Mine, I admit, are exhausted,” is the confessionwrung from the silent lips of a girl whohas borne all that human nature can bearfrom Miss Bates’s affectionate solicitude. Perhapsthe best word ever spoken upon the creationof such characters in novels comes fromCardinal Newman. “It is very difficult,” hesays, “to delineate a bore in a narrative, forthe simple reason that he is a bore. A talemust aim at condensation, but a bore acts insolution. It is only in the long run that heis ascertained.” And when he is ascertained,and his identity established beyond reach ofdoubt, what profit have we in his desolatingperfections? Miss Austen was far from enjoyingthe dull people whom she knew in life.We have the testimony of her letters to thiseffect. Has not Mrs. Stent, otherwise lost tofame, been crowned with direful immortalityas the woman who bored Jane Austen? “Wemay come to be Mrs. Stents ourselves,” shewrites, with facile self-reproach at her impatience,“unequal to anything, and unwelcometo anybody;” an apprehension manifestlymanufactured out of nothingness to strengthensome wavering purpose of amendment. Stupidityis acknowledged to be the one naturalgift which cannot be cultivated, and MissAusten well knew it lay beyond her grasp.With as much sincerity could Emma Woodhousehave said, “I may come in time to be asecond Miss Bates.”

There is a small, compact, and enviable minorityamong us, who, through no merit oftheir own, are incapable of being bored, andconsequently escape the endless pangs of ennui.They are so clearly recognized as a bodythat a great deal of the world’s work is preparedespecially for their entertainment andinstruction. Books are written for them, sermonsare preached to them, lectures are givento them, papers are read to them, societiesand clubs are organized for them, discussionsafter the order of Melchizedek are carried onmonotonously in their behalf. A brand newschool of fiction has been invented for theirexclusive diversion; and several complicatedsystems of religion have been put together fortheir recent edification. It is hardly a matterof surprise that, fed on such meats, theyshould wax scornful, and deride their hungryfellow-creatures. It is even less amazing thatthese fellow-creatures should weary from timeto time of the crumbs that fall from theirtable. It is told of Pliny the younger that,being invited to a dinner, he consented to comeon the express condition that the conversationshould abound in Socratic discourses. Herewas a man equally insensible to ennui and tothe sufferings of others. The guests at thatill-starred banquet appear to have been sacrificedas ruthlessly as the fish and game theyate. They had not even the loophole of escapewhich Mr. Bagehot contemplates so admiringlyin Paradise Lost. Whenever Adam’sremarks expand too obviously into a sermon,Eve, in the most discreet and wife-like manner,steps softly away, and refreshes herself withslumber. Indeed, when we come to think ofit, conversation between these two must havebeen difficult at times, because they had nobodyto talk about. If we exiled our neighborspermanently from our discussions, weshould soon be reduced to silence; and if weconfined ourselves even to laudatory remarks,we should probably say but little. Miss FrancesPower Cobbe, who is uncompromisinglyhostile to the feeble vices of society, insiststhat it is the duty of every woman to lookbored when she hears a piece of scandal; butthis mandate is hardly in accord with MissCobbe’s other requisite for true womanhood,absolute and undeviating sincerity. How canshe look bored when she does not feel bored,unless she plays the hypocrite? And whilemany women are shocked and repelled byscandal, few, alas! are wont to find it tiresome.I have not even observed any exceedingweariness in men when subjected to asimilar ordeal. In that pitiless dialogue ofLandor’s between Catherine of Russia andPrincess Dashkov, we find some opinions onthis subject stated with appalling candor.“Believe me,” says the empress, “there isnothing so delightful in life as to find a liar ina person of repute. Have you never heardgood folks rejoicing at it? Or rather, can youmention to me any one who has not been inraptures when he could communicate suchglad tidings? The goutiest man would go onfoot to tell his friend of it at midnight; andwould cross the Neva for the purpose, whenhe doubted whether the ice would bear him.”Here, indeed, is the very soul and essence ofennui; not the virtuous sentiment which revoltsat the disclosure of another’s faults, butthat deep and deadly ennui of life which welcomesevil as a distraction. The same selfishlassitude which made the gladiatorial combatsa pleasant sight for the jaded eyes which witnessedthem finds relief for its tediousness to-dayin the swift destruction of confidence andreputation.

There is a curious and melancholy fable ofLeopardi’s in which he seeks to explain whatalways puzzled him sorely, the continued enduranceof life. In the beginning, he says,the gods gave to men an existence withoutcare, and an earth without evil. The worldwas small, and easily traversed. No seas dividedit, no mountains rose frowning from itsbosom, no extremes of heat or cold afflictedits inhabitants. Their wants were supplied,their pleasures provided; their happiness, Jovethought, assured. For a time all things wentwell; but as the human race outgrew itsinfancy, it tired of this smooth perfection,and little by little there dawned upon men theinherent worthlessness of life. Every daythey sounded its depths more clearly, andevery day they wearied afresh of all theyknew and were. Illusions vanished, and theinsupportable pains of ennui forced them tocast aside a gift in which they found no value.They desired death, and sought it at their ownhands.

Then Jove, half in wrath and half in pity,devised a means by which his rebellious creaturesmight be preserved. He enlarged theearth, moulded the mountains, and poured intomighty hollows the restless and pitiless seas.Burning heat and icy cold he sent, diseasesand dangers of every kind, craving desiresthat could never be satisfied, vain ambitions, ababble of many tongues, and the deep-rootedanimosities of nations. Gone was the oldtranquillity, vanished the old ennui. A newrace, struggling amid terrible hardships, foughtbravely and bitterly for the preservation of anexistence they had formerly despised. Manfound his life filled with toil, sweetened byperil, checked by manifold disasters, and wasdeluded into cherishing at any cost that whichwas so painful to sustain. The greater thedifficulties and dangers, the more he opposedto them his own indomitable purpose, the moredetermined he was to live. The zest of perpetualeffort, the keenness of contention, thebrief, sweet triumph over adversity,—theseleft him neither the time nor the dispositionto question the value of all that he wrungfrom fate.

It is a cheerless philosophy, but not withoutvalue to the sanguine socialist of to-day, whodreams of preparing for all of us a lifetime ofunbroken ennui.

WIT AND HUMOR.

It is dubious wisdom to walk in the footprintsof a giant, and to stumble with littlesteps along the road where his great strideswere taken. Yet many years have passedsince Hazlitt trod this way; fresh flowers havegrown by the route, and fresh weeds havefought with them for mastery. The face ofthe country has changed for better or forworse, and a brief survey reveals much thatnever met his eyes. The journey, too, wassafer in his day than in ours; and while hegathers and analyzes every species of wit andhumor, it plainly does not occur to him for amoment that either calls for any protection athis hands. Hazlitt is so sure that laughter isour inalienable right, that he takes no painsto soften its cadences or to justify its mirth.“We laugh at that in others which is a seriousmatter to ourselves,” he says, and sees noreason why this should not be. “Some one isgenerally sure to be the sufferer by a joke;”and, fortified with this assurance, he confessesto a frank delight in the comic parts of theArabian Nights, although recognizing keenlythe spirit of cruelty that underlies them, andaware that they “carry the principle of callousindifference in a jest as far as it can go.”Don Quixote, too, he stoutly affirms to be asfitting a subject for merriment as SanchoPanza. Both are laughable, and both aremeant to be laughed at; the extravagances ofeach being pitted dexterously against those ofthe other by a great artist in the ridiculous.But he is by no means insensible to the charmand goodness of the “ingenious gentleman;”for sympathy is the legitimate attribute ofhumor, and even where the humorist seemsmost pitiless, and even brutal, in his apprehensionof the absurd, he has a living tendernessfor our poor humanity which is so rich in itsabsurdities.

Hazlitt’s definition of wit and humor is perhapsas good as any definition is ever likely tobe; that is, it expresses a half-truth with agreat deal of reasonableness and accuracy.“Humor,” he says, “is the describing theludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposingit by comparing or contrasting it with somethingelse. Humor is the growth of natureand accident; wit is the product of art andfancy. Humor, as it is shown in books, is animitation of the natural or acquired absurditiesof mankind, or of the ludicrous in accident,situation, and character; wit is the illustratingand heightening the sense of that absurdity bysome sudden and unexpected likeness or oppositionof one thing to another, which sets offthe quality we laugh at or despise in a stillmore contemptible or striking point of view.”

This is perhaps enough to show us at leastone cause of the endless triumph of humor overwit,—a triumph due to its closer affinity withthe simple and elementary conditions of humannature and life. Wit is artificial; humor isnatural. Wit is accidental; humor is inevitable.Wit is born of conscious effort; humor,of the allotted ironies of fate. Wit can beexpressed only in language; humor can bedeveloped sufficiently in situation. Wit is theplaything of the intellectual, or the weapon ofnimble minds; humor is the possession of allsorts and conditions of men. Wit is trulywhat Shelley falsely imagined virtue to be,“a refinement of civilized life;” humor is theproperty of all races in every stage of development.Wit possesses a species of immortality,and for many generations holds its own;humor is truly immortal, and as long as theeye sees, and the ear hears, and the heartbeats, it will be our privilege to laugh at thepleasant absurdities which require no otherseed or nurture than man’s endless intercoursewith man.

Nevertheless, an understanding of the differencesin nations and in epochs helps us to theenjoyment of many humorous situations. Weshould know something of England and ofIndia to appreciate the peculiar horror withwhich Lord Minto, on reaching Calcutta, beheldthe fourteen male attendants who stoodin his chamber, respectfully prepared to helphim into bed; or his still greater dismay atbeing presented by the rajah of Bali withseven slaves,—five little boys and two littlegirls,—all of whom cost the conscientiousgovernor-general a deal of trouble and expensebefore they were properly disposed of, and in afair way to learn their alphabet and catechism.Yet perhaps a deeper knowledge of time andcharacter is needed to sound the depths of SirRobert Walpole’s cynical observation, “Gratitudeis a lively sense of future favors;” althoughthis is indeed a type of witticism whichpossesses inherent vitality, not depending uponany play of words or double meanings, butstriking deep root into the fundamental failingsof the human heart.

It is in its simplest forms, however, thathumor enjoys a world-wide actuality, and isthe connecting link of all times and places andpeople. “Let us start from laughter,” says M.Edmond Scherer, “since laughter is a thingfamiliar to every one. It is excited by a senseof the ridiculous, and the ridiculous arisesfrom the contradiction between the use of athing and its intention.” Even that commonestof all themes, a fellow-creature slipping orfalling, M. Scherer holds to be provocative ofmirth; and in selecting this elementary examplehe bravely drives the matter back to itsearliest and rudest principles. For it is aweapon in the hands of the serious that suchcasualties, which should excite instant sympathyand alarm, awaken laughter only inthose who are too foolish or too brutal to experienceany other sensation. It would seem,indeed, that the sight of a man falling on theice or in the mud cannot be, and ought not tobe, very amusing. But before we frown severelyand forever upon such vulgar jests, letus turn for a moment to a well-known essay,and see what Charles Lamb has to plead intheir extenuation:—

“I am by nature extremely susceptible ofstreet affronts; the jeers and taunts of thepopulace; the low-bred triumph they displayover the casual trip or splashed stocking of agentleman. Yet I can endure the jocularityof a young sweep with something more thanforgiveness. In the last winter but one, pacingalong Cheapside with my accustomed precipitationwhen I walk westward, a treacherousslide brought me upon my back in an instant.I scrambled up with pain and shame enough,—yetoutwardly trying to face it down, as ifnothing had happened,—when the roguishgrin of one of these young wits encounteredme. There he stood, pointing me out with hisdusky finger to the mob, and to a poor woman(I suppose his mother) in particular, till thetears for the exquisiteness of the fun (so hethought it) worked themselves out at the cornersof his poor red eyes, red from many a previousweeping, and soot-inflamed, yet twinklingthrough all with such a joy, snatched out ofdesolation, that Hogarth—but Hogarth hasgot him already (how could he miss him?) inthe March to Finchley, grinning at the pieman;—therehe stood, as he stands in the picture,irremovable, as if the jest was to last forever,with such a maximum of glee and minimumof mischief in his mirth—for the grin of agenuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—thatI could have been content, if the honorof a gentleman might endure it, to have remainedhis butt and his mockery till midnight.”

Ah, prince of kindly humorists, to whomshall we go but to you for tears and laughter,and pastime and sympathy, and jests andgentle tolerance, and all things needed to makelight our trouble-burdened hearts!

It is not worth while to deny or even tosoften the cruel side of humor, though it is afar more grievous error to overlook its generousforbearance. The humorist’s view of lifeis essentially genial; but he has given stoutblows in his day, and the sound of his vigorouswarfare rings harshly in our unaccustomedears. “The old giants of English fun” wereneither soft-spoken nor soft-handed gentry,and it seems to us now and then as if theylaid about them with joyous and indiscriminateactivity. Even Dickens, the last and greatestof his race, and haunted often to his fall bythe beckoning of mirthless modern phantoms,shows in his earlier work a good deal of thisgleeful and unhesitating belligerency. Thescenes between old Weller and Mr. Stigginsmight be successfully acted in a spiritedpuppet-show, where conversation is of lessimportance than well-timed and well-bestowedpommeling. But we have now reached thatpoint of humane seriousness when even puppet-showscannot escape their educational responsibilities,and when Punch and Judy aregravely censured for teaching a lesson in brutality.The laughter of generations, whichshould protect and hallow the little manikinsat play, counts for nothing by the side of theirirresponsible naughtiness, and their cheerfuldisregard of all our moral standards. Yethere, too, Hazlitt has a seasonable word ofdefense, holding indeed that he who inventedsuch diverting pastimes was a benefactor tohis species, and gave us something which itwas rational and healthy to enjoy. “We placethe mirth and glee and triumph to our ownaccount,” he says, “and we know that thebangs and blows the actors have received gofor nothing as soon as the showman puts themup in his box, and marches off quietly withthem, as jugglers of a less amusing descriptionsometimes march off with the wrongs andrights of mankind in their pockets.” It hasbeen well said that wit requires a good head;humor, a good heart; and fun, high spirits.Punch’s spirits, let us hasten to admit, areconsiderably in advance of his head and heart;yet nevertheless he is wanting neither inacuteness nor in the spirit of good-fellowship.He has hearkened to the advice given bySeneca many years ago, “Jest without bitterness”!and has practiced this delightfulaccomplishment for centuries, as befits themost conservative joker in the world.

Another reproach urged against humorrather than wit is its somewhat complicatedsystem of lying; and much well-merited severityhas been expended upon such questionablediversions as hoaxing, quizzing, “selling,” andother variations of the game, the titles ofwhich have long since passed away, leavingtheir substance behind them. It would beeasy, but untrue, to say that real humor hasnothing whatever to do with these unworthyoffshoots, and never encourages their growth.The fact remains that they spring from a greathumorous principle, and one which critics havebeen prompt to recognize, and to embody inlanguage as clear and unmistakable as possible.“Lying,” says Hazlitt, “is a species of witand humor. To lay anything to a person’scharge from which he is perfectly free showsspirit and invention; and the more incrediblethe effrontery the greater is the joke.” “Theterrors of Sancho,” observes M. Scherer, “therascalities of Scapin, the brags of Falstaff,amuse us because of their disproportion withcircumstances, or their disagreement withfacts.” Just as Charles Lamb humanizes abrutal jest by turning it against himself, soSir Walter Scott gives amusing emphasis to alie by directing it against his own personality.His description of himself in his journal as a“pebble-hearted cur,” the occasion being hisparting with the emotional Madame Mirbel, istruly humorous, because of its remoteness fromthe truth. There are plenty of men who couldhave risked using the phrase without excitingin us that sudden sense of incongruity whichis a legitimate source of laughter. A delightfulinstance of effrontery, which shows bothspirit and invention, is the story told by SirFrancis Doyle of the highwayman who, havingattacked and robbed Lord Derby and hisfriend Mr. Grenville, said to them with reproachfulcandor, “What scoundrels you mustbe to fire at gentlemen who risk their livesupon the road!” As for the wit that lies inplayful misstatements and exaggerations, wemust search for it in the riotous humor ofLamb’s letters, where the true and the falseare often so inextricably commingled that it isa hopeless task to separate facts from fancies.“I shall certainly go to the naughty man forfibbing,” writes Lamb, with soft laughter; andthe devout apprehension may have been justlyshared by Edward Fitzgerald, when he describesthe parish church at Woodbridge asbeing so damp that the fungi grew in greatnumbers about the communion table.

A keen sense of the absurd is so little relishedby those who have it not that it is toooften considered solely as a weapon of offense,and not as a shield against the countless illsthat come to man through lack of sanity andjudgment. There is a well-defined impressionin the world that the satirist, like the devil,roams abroad, seeking whom he may devour,and generally devouring the best; whereas hisposition is often that of the besieged, whodefends himself with the sharpest weapons athis command against a host of invading evils.There are many things in life so radically unwholesomethat it is not safe to approach themsave with laughter as a disinfectant; and whenpeople cannot laugh, the moral atmospheregrows stagnant, and nothing is too morbid, toopreposterous, or too mischievous to meet withsympathy and solemn assurances of good will.This is why a sense of the ridiculous has beenjustly called the guardian of our minor morals,rendering men in some measure dependentupon the judgments of their associates, andlaying the basis of that decorum and proprietyof conduct which is a necessary condition ofhuman life, and upon which is founded thegreat charm of intercourse between equals.From what pitfalls of vanity and self-assurancehave we been saved by this ever-watchful presence!Into what abysmal follies have wefallen when she withholds her restraininghand! Shelley’s letters are perhaps thestrongest argument in behalf of healthy humorthat literature has yet offered to theworld. Only a man burdened with an “invinciblerepugnance to the comic” could havegravely penned a sentence like this: “Certainlya saint may be amiable,—she may beso; but then she does not understand,—hasneglected to investigate the religion which retiring,modest prejudice leads her to profess.”Only a man afflicted with what Mr. Arnoldmildly calls an “inhuman” lack of humorcould have written thus to a female friend:“The French language you already know;and, if the great name of Rousseau did notredeem it, it would have been perhaps as wellthat you had remained ignorant of it.” Ournatural pleasure at this verdict may be agreeablyheightened by placing alongside of itMadame de Staël’s moderate statement, “Conversation,like talent, exists only in France.”And such robust expressions of opinion giveus our clearest insight into at least one of thedangers from which a sense of the ridiculousrescues its fortunate possessor.

When all has been said, however, we mustadmit that edged tools are dangerous things tohandle, and not infrequently do much hurt.“The art of being humorous in an agreeableway” is as difficult in our day as in the daysof Marcus Aurelius, and a disagreeable exerciseof this noble gift is as unwelcome now asthen. “Levity has as many tricks as the kitten,”says Leigh Hunt, who was quite capableof illustrating and proving the truth of his assertion,and whose scratching at times closelyresembled the less playful manifestations of afull-grown cat. Wit is the salt of conversation,not the food, and few things in the world aremore wearying than a sarcastic attitude towardslife. “Je goûte ceux qui sont raisonnables, etme divertis des extravagants,” says Uranie, in“La Critique de l’Ecole des Femmes;” andeven these words seem to tolerant ears to savorunduly of arrogance. The best use we can makeof humor is, not to divert ourselves with, butto defend ourselves against, the folly of fools;for much of the world’s misery is entailed uponher by her eminently well-meaning and foolishchildren. There is no finer proof of MissAusten’s matured genius than the gradualmellowing of her humor, from the deliberatepleasure affected by Elizabeth Bennet and herfather in the foibles of their fellow-creatures tothe amused sympathy betrayed in every pageof “Emma” and “Persuasion.” Not even thecharm and brilliance of “Pride and Prejudice”can altogether reconcile us to a heroine who,like Uranie, diverts herself with the failings ofmankind. What a gap between Mr. Bennet’scynical praise of his son-in-law, Wickham,—which,under the circumstances, is a little revolting,—andMr. Knightley’s manly reproofto Emma, whose youthful gayety beguiles herinto an unkind jest. While we talk much ofMiss Austen’s merciless laughter, let us rememberalways that the finest and bravest defenseof harmless folly against insolent wit is embodiedin this earnest remonstrance from the lipsof a lover who is courageous enough to speakplain truths, with no suspicion of priggishnessto mar their wholesome flavor.

It is difficult, at any time, to deprive witof its social or political surroundings; it isimpossible to drive it back to those deeper,simpler sources whence humor springs unveiled.“Hudibras,” for example, is witty;“Don Quixote” is humorous. Sheridan iswitty; Goldsmith is humorous. To turn fromthe sparkling scenes where the Rivals play theirmimic parts to the quiet fireside where theVicar and Farmer Flamborough sit sippingtheir gooseberry wine is to reënter life, and tofeel human hearts beating against our own.How delicate the touch which puts everythingbefore us with a certain gentle, loving malice,winning us to laughter, without for a momentalienating our sympathies from the right.Hazlitt claims for the wicked and witty comediesof the Restoration that it is their privilegeto allay our scruples and banish our just regrets;but when Goldsmith brings the profligatesquire and his female associates into theVicar’s innocent household, the scene is oneof pure and incomparable humor, which neverthelessleaves us more than ever in love withthe simple goodness which is so readily deceived.Mr. Thornhill utters a questionablesentiment. The two fine ladies, who have beenstriving hard to play their parts, and only lettingslip occasional oaths, affect great displeasureat his laxness, and at once begin a very discreetand serious dialogue upon virtue. “In thismy wife, the chaplain, and I soon joined; andthe squire himself was at last brought to confessa sense of sorrow for his former excesses.We talked of the pleasures of temperance, andof the sunshine of the mind unpolluted withguilt. I was so well pleased that my littleones were kept up beyond the usual time, tobe edified by so much good conversation. Mr.Thornhill even went beyond me, and demandedif I had any objection to giving prayers. Ijoyfully embraced the proposal; and in thismanner the night was passed in a most comfortableway, till at length the company beganto think of returning.” What a picture it is!What an admirably humorous situation!What easy tolerance in the treatment! Welaugh, but even in our laughter we know thatnot for the space of a passing breath doesGoldsmith yield his own sympathy, or divertours, away from the just cause of innocenceand truth.

If men of real wit have been more numerousin the world than men of real humor, it isbecause discernment and lenity, mirth andconciliation, are qualities which do not blendeasily with the natural asperity of our race.Humor has been somewhat daringly defined as“a sympathy for the seamy side of things.”It does not hover on the borders of the lightand trifling; it does not linger in that keenand courtly atmosphere which is the chosenplayground of wit; but diffusing itself subtlythroughout all nature, reveals to us life,—lifewhich we love to consider and to judge fromsome pet standpoint of our own, but which is sobig and wonderful, and good and bad, and fineand terrible, that our little peaks of observationcommand only a glimpse of the mysterieswe are so ready and willing to solve. Thus, thedegree of wit embodied in an old story is a matterof much dispute and of scant importance;but when we read that Queen Elizabeth, in herlast illness, turned wearily away from mattersof state, “yet delighted to hear some of the‘Hundred Merry Tales,’ and to such was veryattentive,” we feel we have been lifted intothe regions of humor, and by its sudden lightwe recognize, not the dubious merriment of thetales, but the sick and world-worn spirit seekinga transient relief from fretful care andpoisonous recollections. So, too, when Sheridansaid of Mr. Dundas that he resorted tohis memory for his jests, and to his imaginationfor his facts, the great wit, after thefashion of wits, expressed a limited truth. Itwas a delightful statement so far as it went,but it went no further than Mr. Dundas, withjust the possibility of a second application.When Voltaire sighed, “Nothing is so disagreeableas to be obscurely hanged,” he gaveutterance to a national sentiment, which is notin the least witty, but profoundly humorous,revealing with charming distinctness a Frenchman’sinnate aversion to all dull and commonplacesurroundings. Dying is not with him,as with an Englishman, a strictly “private affair;”it is the last act of life’s brilliant play,which is expected to throw no discredit uponthe sparkling scenes it closes.

The breadth of atmosphere which humorrequires for its development, the saneness antisympathy of its revelations, are admirablydescribed by one of the most penetrating andleast humorous of French critics, M. EdmondScherer, whose words are all the more gratefuland valuable to us when they refer, not to hisown countrymen, but to those robust Englishhumorists whom it is our present pleasure toignore. M. Scherer, it is true, finds muchfault, and reasonable fault ever, with thesestout-hearted, strong-handed veterans. Theyare not always decorous. They are not alwayssincere. They are wont to play with theirsubjects. They are too eager to amuse themselvesand other people. It is easy to makeout a list of their derelictions. “Yet this doesnot prevent the temperament of the humoristfrom being, on the whole, the happiest that aman can bring with him into this world, norhis point of view from being the fairest fromwhich the world can be judged. The satiristgrows wroth; the cynic banters; the humoristlaughs and sympathizes by turns.... He hasneither the fault of the pessimist, who referseverything to a purely personal conception,and is angry with reality for not being suchas he conceives it; nor that of the optimist,who shuts his eyes to everything missing onthe real earth, that he may comply with thedemands of his heart and of his reason. Thehumorist feels the imperfections of reality,and resigns himself to them with good temper,knowing that his own satisfaction is not therule of things, and that the formula of theuniverse is necessarily larger than the preferencesof a single one of the accidental beingsof whom the universe is composed. He is beyonddoubt the true philosopher.”

This is a broad statement; yet to endurelife smilingly is no ignoble task; and if thehumors of mankind are inseparably blendedwith all their impulses and actions, it is worthwhile to consider bravely the value of qualitiesso subtle and far-reaching in their influences.Steele, as we know, dressed the invadingbailiffs in liveries, and amazed his guestsby the number and elegance of his retainers.Sydney Smith fastened antlers on his sheep,for the gratification of a lady who thought heought to have deer in his park. Such elaboratejests, born of invincible gayety and highspirits, seem childish to our present adultseriousness; and we are too impatient to understandthat they represent an attitude, anda very healthy attitude, towards life. Theiniquity of Steele’s career lay in his repeatedlyrunning into debt, not in the admirable temperwith which he met the consequences of thatdebt when they were forced upon him; andif the censorious are disposed to believe thata less happy disposition would have avoidedthese consequences, let them consider the careersof poor Richard Savage and other misanthropicprodigals. As for Sydney Smith,he followed Burton’s excellent counsel, “Goon then merrily to heaven;” and his path wasnone the less straight because it was smoothedby laughter. That which must be borne hadbest be borne cheerfully, and sometimes asingle telling stroke of wit, a single word richin manly humor, reveals to us that true courage,that fine philosophy, which endures andeven tolerates the vicissitudes of fortune,without for a moment relinquishing its honesthold upon the right. Mr. Lang has told ussuch a little story of the verger in a Saxontown who was wont to show visitors a silvermouse, which had been offered by the womento the Blessed Virgin that she might rid thetown of mice. A Prussian officer, with thatprompt brutality which loves to offend religioussentiment it does not share, asked jeeringly,“Are you such fools as to believe that thecreatures went away because a silver mousewas dedicated?” “Ah, no,” replied the verger,“or long ago we should have offered asilver Prussian.”

It is the often-expressed opinion of LeighHunt that although wit and humor may befound in perfection apart from each other, yettheir best work is shared in common. Witseparated from humor is but an element ofsport; “a laughing jade,” with petulantwhims and fancies, which runs away with ourdiscretion, confuses our wisdom, and mocks atholy charity; yet adds greatly, withal, to thebuoyancy and popularity of life. It makesgentlefolk laugh,—a difficult task, says Molière;it scatters our faculties, and “bearsthem off deridingly into pastime.” It is afire-gleam in our dull world, a gift of the gods,who love to provide weapons for the amusementand discomfiture of mankind. But humorstands on common soil, and breathes ourcommon air. The kindly contagion of itsmirth lifts our hearts from their personal apprehensionof life’s grievances, and links ustogether in a bond of mutual tears and laughter.If it be powerless to mould existence, oreven explain it to our satisfaction, it can giveus at least some basis for philosophy, somescope for sympathy, and sanity, and endurance.“The perceptions of the contrasts of humandestiny,” says M. Scherer, “by a man whodoes not sever himself from humanity, butwho takes his own shortcomings and those ofhis dear fellow-creatures cheerfully,—this isthe essence of humor.”

LETTERS.

It is one of the current complaints of to-daythat the art of letter-writing, as our great-grandfathersand our great-great-grandfathersknew it, has been utterly and irrevocably lost.Railways, which bring together easily and oftenpeople who used to spend the greater portionof their lives apart; cheap postage, which relievesa man from any serious responsibility forwhat he writes,—the most insignificant scrawlseems worth the stamp he puts on it; the hurried,restless pace at which we live, each dayfilled to the brim with things which are hardlyso important as we think them, and whichhave cost us the old rich hours of leisurelythought and inaction,—these are the forceswhich have conspired to destroy the letter, andto crowd into its place that usurping and unprofitablelittle upstart called the note. “Theart of note-writing,” says Mr. Bagehot, “maybecome classical; it is for the present age toprovide models for that sort of composition;but letters have perished. In the last century,cultivated people who sat down to write tookpains to have something to say, and took painsto say it. The correspondence of to-day islike a series of telegrams with amplified headings.There is not more than one idea, andthat idea soon comes and is soon over. Thebest correspondence of the past is rather likea good light article, in which the points arestudiously made; in which the effort to makethem is studiously concealed; in which a seriesof selected circumstances is set forth; in whichyou feel, but are not told, that the principle ofthe writer’s selection was to make his compositionpleasant.”

It is difficult not to agree with Mr. Bagehotand other critics who have uttered similarlamentations. The letter which resembled agood light article has indeed disappeared fromour midst, and I am not sure that many dryeyes have not witnessed its departure. Lightarticles are now provided for us in such generousmeasure by our magazines that we havescant need to exact them from our friends. Infact, we should have no time to read them, ifthey were written. A more serious loss is thetotal absence of any minute information orgossip upon current topics in the mass ofmodern correspondence. The letter which isso useful to historians, which shows us, andshows us as nothing else can ever do, the ordinary,every-day life of prominent men andwomen, this letter has also disappeared, andthere is nothing to take its place. We canreconstruct the England, or at least the Londonof George II. and George III. from thepages of Horace Walpole. Who is therelikely to hand down in this fashion to a cominggeneration the England of Queen Victoria?Neither does the fact of Walpole’s being byno means a bigot in the matter of truth-tellinginterfere with his real value. He lies consciouslyand with a set purpose here and there;he is unconsciously and even inevitably veraciousin the main. There are some points,observes Mr. Bagehot, on which almost everybody’sletters are true. “The delineation ofa recurring and familiar life is beyond thereach of a fraudulent fancy. Horace Walpolewas not a very scrupulous narrator, yet it wastoo much trouble, even for him, to tell lieson many things. His stories and conspicuousscandals are no doubt often unfounded;but there is a gentle undercurrent of dailyunremarkable life and manners which heevidently assumed as a datum for his historicalimagination.”

We may be quite sure, for example, on histestimony, that people of fashion went toRanelagh 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 inthe morning; that when a masked ball wasgiven by eighteen young noblemen at Soho,the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches,held up torches to the windows, and demandedto have the masks pulled off and put on attheir pleasure, “but all with extreme good humorand civility;” that he, Horace Walpole,one night at Vauxhall, helped LadyCaroline Petersham to mince seven chickensin a china dish, which chickens “Lady Carolinestewed over a lamp, with three pats ofbutter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattlingand laughing, and we every minute expectingto have the dish fly about our ears;”that at the funeral of George II., the Duke ofNewcastle—that curious burlesque of an Englishnobleman—stood on the train of thebutcher Duke of Cumberland to avoid the chillof the marble. If we think these things arenot worth knowing, we had better not readWalpole’s letters, for these are the thingswhich he delights in telling us. Macaulaythought these things were not worth knowing,and he has accordingly branded Walpole as asuperficial observer, a vain and shallow worldling.How, he wonders, can we listen seriouslyto a man who haunted auctions; who collectedbricabrac; who sat up all night playing cardswith fine, frivolous ladies; who liked beinga fashionable gentleman, and had no properpride in belonging to the august assemblageof authors; and who, most deadly crime of all,lived face to face with the great Whig leadersof the day, and was not in the least impressedby the magnitude of the distinction thus conferredon him. But, after all, we cannot, everyone of us, be built upon the same solemn andrighteous lines. It is not even granted toevery one to be a fervent and consistent Whig.Horace Walpole, you see, was Horace Walpole,and not Thomas Babington Macaulay:therefore Macaulay despised him, and calledon all his readers to despise him too. We canonly have recourse to Mr. Lang’s philosophy:“’Tis a wide world, my masters; there is roomfor both.” Walpole is the prince of letter-writers,because writing letters was the inspiration,the ruling passion of his life, and hewas preëminently qualified for the task. Ithas been well said that had some evil chancewrecked him, like Robinson Crusoe, upon adesert island, he would have gone on writingletters just the same, and waited for a ship tocarry them away. This is a pleasant conceit,because the spectacle of Horace Walpole on adesert island is one which captivates the idlefancy. Think of his little airs and graces, hiscourtly affectations, his fine clothes and frippery,his dainty epicureanism, his sense ofgood comradeship, all thrown away upon adesert island, and upon the society of a parrotand a goat. What malicious tales he wouldhave been forced to invent about the parrot!It is best not to believe evil of any one uponWalpole’s word, especially not of any one whohad ever attacked Sir Robert’s ministry; forHorace’s filial piety took the very exclusiveform of undying enmity to all his father’s politicalopponents. But when we have passedover and tried to forget all that is spiteful andcaustic and coarse in these celebrated letters,there is a great deal left, a great deal that isnot even the current gossip of the day. Hegoes to Paris in 1765, and finds that laughingis out of fashion in that once gay capital.“Good folks!” he cries, “they have no timeto laugh. There are God and the king to bepulled down first, and men and women, oneand all, are devoutly employed in the demolition.They think me quite profane for havingmy belief left.” A few years later, Walpolesees 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 ofseeds which are to produce strange crops hereafter.”Surely, even Macaulay might allowthat these are the words of a thinker, of aprophet, perhaps, standing unheeded in themarket-place.

Granted, then, that the light-article letter,and the letter which gives us material withwhich to fill up the gaps and crannies of history,which holds the life of the past embalmedin its faded pages, have disappeared, perhapsforever. There is another letter which has notdisappeared, which never can disappear as longas man stays man and woman, woman,—theletter which reveals to us the personality ofthe writer; which is dear and valuable to usbecause in it his hand stretches out franklyfrom the past, and draws us to his side. Itmay be long or short, carefully or carelesslywritten, full of useful information or full ofidle nonsense, We do not stop to ask. It isenough for us to know from whom it came.And the finest type of such a letter may surelybe found in the well-loved correspondence ofCharles Lamb. If we eliminated from hispages all critical matter, all those shrewd andadmirable verdicts upon prose and verse; ifwe cut out ruthlessly such scraps of newsas they occasionally convey; if we banishedall references to celebrated people, from the“obnoxious squeak” of Shelley’s voice to thegenerous sympathy expressed for Napoleon, weshould still have left—the writer himself,which is all that we desire. We should stillhave the record of that harmless and patient,that brave and sorely tried life. We shouldstill see infinite mirth and infinite pathos interwovenupon every page. We should catch theecho of that clear, kind laughter which neverhardens into scorn. Lamb laughs at so manypeople, and never once wrongs any one. Weshould see the flashes of a wit which carries novenom in its sting. We should feel that atmosphereof wonderful, whimsical humor illuminatingall the trivial details of existence. Weshould recognize in the turning of every sentence,the conscious choice of every word, thefine and distinctive qualities of a genius thathas no parallel.

It matters little at what page we read. Hereis the sad story of Henry Robinson’s waistcoat,which Mary Lamb tried to bring over fromFrance, but which was seized at the CustomHouse, “for the use of the king,” saysCharles dryly. “He will probably appear in itat the next levee.” Here is the never-to-be-forgottentea-party at Miss Benjay’s, wherethat tenth-rate little upstart of a woman—typeof a genus that survives to-day—alternatelypatronized and snubbed her guest;flinging at him her pitiful scraps of information,marveling that he did not understandFrench, insulting him when he venturedan opinion upon poetry,—“seeing that it wasmy own trade in a manner,”—imparting tohim Hannah More’s valuable dogmas on education,feeding him scantily with macaroons,and sending him home,—not angry as he hada right to be, as any other man would havebeen in his place, only infinitely amused. Andthen some people say that a keen sense of theridiculous is not a kindly sentiment! It is, weknow it is, when we read the letter to Coleridgein which Lamb tells how he went to condolewith poor Joseph Cottle on the death ofhis brother Amos, and how, as the readiestcomfort he could offer, he swiftly introducedinto his conversation Joseph’s epic poem,“Alfred,” luring the mourner gently from hisgrief by arousing his poetic vanity. The dear,good, stupid Cottle, brightening visibly undersuch soothing treatment, fixed upon his visitora benevolent gaze, and prepared himself formelancholy enjoyment. After a while thename of Alswitha, Alfred’s queen, was slippedadroitly into the discourse. “At that moment,”says Lamb, “I could perceive thatCottle had forgot his brother was so lately becomea blessed spirit. In the language ofmathematicians, the author was as nine, thebrother as one. I felt my cue, and strong pitystirring at the root, I went to work.” So thelittle comedy proceeds, until it reaches its climaxwhen George Dyer, to whom all poemswere good poems, remarks that the dead Amoswas estimable both for his head and heart, andwould have made a fine poet if he had lived.“To this,” says Lamb, “Joseph fully assented,but could not help adding that he alwaysthought the qualities of his brother’s heart exceededthose of his head. I believe his brother,when living, had formed precisely the sameidea of him; and I apprehend the world willassent to both judgments.” Now if we will buttry to picture to ourselves how Carlyle wouldhave behaved to poor Miss Benjay, how Walpolewould have sneered at Joseph Cottle, wewill understand better the harmless, the almostloving nature of Charles Lamb’s raillery,which we can enjoy so frankly because it gaveno pain.

As for the well-known fact that Lamb’s lettersreflect nothing of the political tumult, thestirring warfare, amid which he lived, it isinteresting to place by their side the contemporaryletters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, the firstEarl of Minto, a correspondence the principalcharm of which is the revelation it makesof a nature so fine and brave, so upright andhonorable, so wise and strong and good, thatwe can best understand the secret of England’sgreatness when we know she has given birthto such sons. To study the life of a man whoplayed so prominent a part in home and foreignpolitics is to study the history of Europe duringthose troubled years. In Lord Minto’sletters we follow breathlessly the desperatestruggle with Napoleon, the ceaseless wranglingof the Allies, the dangerous rebellions inIreland, the grave perplexities of the Indianempire; and besides these all-important topics,we have side-lights thrown upon social life.We learn, for instance, that Mrs. Crewe, thecelebrated beauty and toast of the Whigs,liked good conversation, and took an interestand even a part, writes Sir Gilbert naïvely tohis wife, “in all subjects which men wouldnaturally talk of when not in woman’s company,as politics and literature.” We learnalso—what we half suspected before—thatMadame de Stäel was so greedy of admirationthat she was capable of purchasing “anyquantity of anybody at any price, and amongother prices by a traffic of mutual flattery;”and that she was never satisfied unless shecould have the whole conversation to herself,and be the centre of every company.

Now, it is hardly to be expected that theletters of a great statesman and the letters ofan obscure clerk in the India House shouldreveal precisely the same interests and information,any more than it is to be expected thatthe letters of the statesman—who was, afterall, a statesman and no more—should equalin literary charm and merit the letters of theclerk who was in addition an immortal genius.But when we think how profoundly Englandwas shaken and disturbed by the discords andapprehensions of those troubled times, howwars and the rumors of wars darkened theair, and stirred the blood of country bumpkinsand placid rural squires, it seems a littlestrange that Lamb, who lived long years inthe heart of London, and must have heardso much of these things, should have writtenabout them so little. He does learn whenthere is a change of ministry, because he hearsa butcher say something about it in the market-place.He cultivates a frank admirationfor Napoleon, whom all his countrymen hatedand feared so madly. He would be glad, hesays, to stand bareheaded at his table, doinghonor to him in his fall. And, after the battleof Trafalgar, he writes to Hazlitt: “LordNelson is quiet at last. His ghost only keepsa slight fluttering in odes and elegies in newspapers,and impromptus which could not begot ready before the funeral.”

These characteristic passages and otherslike them are all we hear of public mattersfrom Charles Lamb, and few of us would askfor more. It is the continual sounding of thepersonal note that makes his pages so dear tous; it is the peculiarly restful character of hisbeloved chit-chat that keeps them so fresh anddelightful. And while there is but one Lamb,there are many letters which have in themsomething of this same personal quality, somethingof this restful charm. The supply cannever be exhausted, because letter-writing—notlight articles now, nor brilliant semi-historicnarratives, but real letter-writing—isfounded on a need as old and as young as humanityitself, the need that one human beinghas of another. The craving for sympathy;the natural and healthy egotism which promptsus to open our minds to absent friends; thedesire we all feel to make known to othersthat which is happening to ourselves; thecertainty we all feel that others will be profoundlyinterested in this revelation; theinextinguishable impulse to “pass on” experienceseither of soul or body, to share withsome one else that which we are hearing, orseeing, or feeling, or suffering, or enjoying,—theseare the motives which make letter-writingessential and inevitable, crowd it intothe busiest lives, assimilate it with the dullestunderstandings, and fit it into some creviceof every one’s daily experience. Thus it happensthat there is a strong family resemblancebetween letters of every age and every country;they really change less than we are pleasedto think. The Rev. Augustus Jessopp, in oneof his delightful essays, quotes from a longand chatty letter written, about the time thatMoses was a little lad, by an Egyptian gentlemannamed Pambesa to a friend named Amenemapt,and giving a very lively and minuteaccount of the city of Rameses, which Pambesawas then happily visiting for the firsttime. We have all of us had just such lettersfrom our absent friends, and have readthem with mingled pleasure, and envy, and irritation.Pambesa the traveler is not disposedto spare Amenemapt the stay-at-home any detailof what he is missing. Never was theresuch a city of the gods as this particular townof Rameses which Amenemapt was not destinedto see. There might be found the bestof good living; vines, and fig-trees, and onionbeds, and nursery gardens. Stout drinkerstoo were its jovial inhabitants, with a varietyof strong liquors, sweet syrups richer thanhoney, red wine, and very excellent importedbeer. Its women were all well dressed, andcurled their hair enticingly, smoothing it withsweet oil. They stood at their doors, holdingnosegays in their hands, and presentinga very alluring appearance to this gay andshameless Pambesa, who could hardly make uphis mind to pass them coldly by. Altogether,Rameses was an exceedingly pleasant town tovisit, and the Egyptian gentleman was havinga very jolly time of it, and we, reading hiscorrespondence, fall to thinking that humannature before the Exodus was uncommonlylike human nature to-day. This is one of thedelights 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 sisterswho, being dead, still live in their writtenpages. For the scholar the interest lies inwhat Pambesa has to tell; for the rest of usthe interest lies in Pambesa himself, who, somany thousand years ago, drank the bitterbeer, and stared at the pretty girls standingcurled and flower-bedecked, with those demure,faint smiles which centuries cannot alteror impair.

So it continues, as we run swiftly down theyears, the bulk of correspondence increasingenormously at every stage, until we reach suchmonuments of industry as the famous Cecilletters, preserved at Hatfield, and comprisingover thirty thousand documents. It is pleasantto feel we need read none of these, and that,if we search for character, we may find it inthirty words as well as in thirty thousand rollsof musty parchment. We may find it surelyin that historic note dispatched by Ann,Countess of Dorset, to Sir Joseph Williamson,Secretary of State under Charles II., whowanted her to appoint a courtier as memberfrom Appleby. Nothing could well be shorter;nothing could possibly be more significant.This is all:—

Sir,—I have been bullied by an usurper, I havebeen ill-treated by a court, but I won’t be dictatedto by a subject. Your man shall not stand.

Ann Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery.

Now if you don’t feel you know Ann Dorsetpretty well after reading those four lines, youwouldn’t know her if she left a diary as longas Samuel Pepys’s; and if you don’t feel, afterreading them, that she is worth the knowing, itis hopeless for her to try and win your regard.Another and still more amusing instance ofself-revelation may be found in a manuscriptfamiliar to many who have visited the BodleianLibrary at Oxford. There, among otherprecious treasures, is a collection of notesscribbled by Charles II. to Clarendon, andby Clarendon to Charles II., to beguile thetedium of Council. They look, for all theworld, like the notes which school-girls arewont to scribble to one another, to beguile thetedium of study. On one page, Charles in alittle careless hand, not unlike a school-girl’s,writes that he wants to go to Tunbridge, to seehis sister. Clarendon in larger, firmer characterswrites back that there is no reason why heshould not, if he can return in a few days, andadds tentatively, “I suppose you will go witha light train.” Charles, as though glowingwith conscious rectitude, responds, “I intendto take nothing but my night-bag.” Clarendon,who knows his master’s luxurious habits,is startled out of all propriety. “Gods!” hewrites: “you will not go without forty orfifty horse.” Then Charles, who seems tohave been waiting for this point in the dialogue,tranquilly replies in one straggling lineat the bottom of the page. “I count that partof my night-bag.” How plainly we can hearthe royal chuckle which accompanied this graciousexplanation! How really valuable isthis scrap of correspondence which shows usfor a moment Charles Stuart; not the Charlesof Sir Walter’s loyal stories, nor the Charlesof Macaulay’s eloquent invectives; but Charleshimself, our fellow mortal, and a very humancharacter indeed.

If, as Mr. Bagehot affirms, it is for the presentday to provide models which shall makethe art of note-writing classical, we can beginno better than by studying the specimens alreadyin our keeping. If we want humor,pathos, a whole tale told in half a dozen words,we have these things already in every sentenceof Steele’s hasty scrawls to his wife: “Prue,Prue, look a little dressed, and be beautiful.”—Andagain: “’Tis the glory of a Woman,Prue, to be her husband’s Friend and Companion,and not his Sovereign Director.”—Or“Good-nature, added to that beautiful formGod has given you, would make an happinessetoo great for Humane life.”—And finally,“I am, dear Prue, a little in Drink, but atall times, Your Faithful Husband, RichardSteele.”

These bare scraps of letters, briefer, manyof them, than the “scandalous half-sheets”which Prue was wont to send in return, giveus a tolerably clear insight into the precisenature of Steele’s domestic happiness. Weunderstand, not only the writer, but the recipientof such missives, poor petulant Prue, whohas had scant mercy shown her in Thackeray’sbrilliant pages, but whose own life was notpassed upon a bed of roses. We are eagerto catch these swift glimpses of real peoplethrough a few careless lines which havemiraculously escaped destruction; or perhapsthrough a brief aside in an important, but, tous, very uninteresting communication; as, forexample, when Marlborough reopens a dispatchto say that he has just received word ofthe surprise and defeat of the Dutch general,Opdam. “Since I sealed my letter,” he writeswith characteristic dryness, “we have a reportfrom Breda that Opdam is beaten. I prayGod it be not so, for he is very capable ofhaving it happen to him.” It is difficult not toenjoy this, because, if we sat within the shadowof Marlborough’s tent, we could not hear himmore distinctly; and the desire we feel to getnearer to the people who interest us, to knowthem as they really were, is, in the main, naturaland wholesome. Yet there must be somelimit set to the gratification of this desire, ifwe are to check the unwarranted publishingof private letters which has become the recognizeddisgrace of literature. It is hard for usto understand just when our curiosity ceases tobe permissible; it is harder still for editors tounderstand just when their privileges cease tobe beneficial. Not many years ago it was possiblefor Mr. Bagehot to say that he took comfortin thinking of Shelley as a poet aboutwhom our information was mercifully incomplete.Thanks to Professor Dowden, it is incompleteno longer; but we have scant causeto congratulate ourselves on what we havegained by his disclosures. Mr. Froude, actingup to an heroic theory of friendship, has pilloriedCarlyle for the pleasure and the pain ofgaping generations; but there are some whoturn away with averted eyes from the sordid,shameful spectacle. Within the last decadethe reading world welcomed with acclamationsa volume of letters from the pen of one whohad made it his especial request that nosuch correspondence should ever be published.How many of those who laughed over thewitty, whimsical, intimate, affectionate outpouringsof Thackeray paused to considerthat they would one and all have remained unwritten,could their author have foreseen theirfate. They were not meant for us, they neverwould have reached us, had his known desiresand prejudices been respected. Many of themare delightful, as when he tells with sedatehumor of his absurd proposal to Macaulaythat they should change identities at SirGeorge Napier’s dinner, so as to confuse andbaffle a young American woman, the desire ofwhose heart was to meet these two great lions,and of Macaulay’s disgust at the bare notionof jesting with anything so serious as his literaryreputation. Yet when the recipient ofthese letters yielded to the temptation of publishingthem, she would have done well to suppressthose trivial, colorless, and private communicationswhich can have no possible valueor interest to others. An invitation to dinneris of some importance the day that it arrives,but it loses its vitality when reprinted fortyyears after the dinner is eaten. There is horrorin the thought that a man of genius cannever promise himself that grateful privacywhich is the lot of his happier and less distinguishedbrothers; but that after he has died inthe least ostentatious manner he knows how,the whole wide world is made acquainted withhis diversions and his digestion, with his feeblestjokes and his most tender confidences.The problem of what to give and what to withholdmust be solved by editors who, havinglaboriously collected their material, feel a naturaldisposition to use it. When, as occasionallyhappens, the editor regards the authorsimply as his prey, he never conceives the desirabilityof withholding anything. He is asunreserved as a savage, and probably defendshimself, as did Montaigne when reproachedfor the impropriety of his essays, by sayingthat if people do not like details of that descriptionthey certainly take great pains toread them.

Among the letters too charming to be lost,yet too personal and frankly confiding to beread without some twinges of conscience, arethose of Edward Fitzgerald, the last man inall England to have coveted such posthumouspublicity. They reveal truthfully that kind,shy, proud, indolent, indifferent, and intenselyconservative nature; a scholar without theprick of ambition, a critic with no desire tobe judicial, an unwearied mind turned asidefrom healthy and normal currents of activity.Yet the indiscreet publishing of a privateopinion, a harmless bit of criticism such asany man has a right to express to a friend,drew down upon this least aggressive of authorsabuse too coarse to be quoted. It is easy tosay that Browning dishonored himself ratherthan Fitzgerald by the brutality of his language.This is true; but, nevertheless, it isnot pleasant to go down to posterity brandedwith Billingsgate by a great poet; and it isdoubly hard to bear such a weight of vituperationbecause a word said in a letter has beenruthlessly given to the world.

The unhesitating fashion in which womenreveal themselves to their correspondentsmakes it seem treachery to read their printedpages. Those girlish confidences of JaneAusten to Cassandra, so frank and gay, so fullof jokes and laughter, and country gossip, andsisterly affection, what a contrast they affordto the attitude of unbroken reserve which MissAusten always presented to the world! Yetnow the world is free to follow each foolishlittle jest, and to pass judgment on the wit itholds. Those affectionate and not over-wiseoutpourings of Miss Mitford, with their effusiveterms of endearment; those dignified and solemnreflections of Sara Coleridge, humanizedoccasionally by a chance remark about thebaby, or an inadvertent admission that she hasgone down twice to supper at an evening party;those keen, combative, brilliant letters of Mrs.Carlyle that are so bitter-sweet; those unreservedand purely personal communications ofGeraldine Jewsbury which have no messagewhatever for the public;—how much has beengiven us to which we show scant claim! It istrue that in the days when the Polite Letter-Writerruled the land, and his baleful influencewas felt on every side, a great many womenwrote elaborate missives which nobody nowwants to read, but which were then more highlyprized than the gossiping pages we have learnedto love so well. These sedate blue-stockingstold neither their own affairs nor their neighbors’;but confined themselves to dignified generalities,expressed with Johnsonian elegance.There was Miss Seward, for example, who attimes was too ridiculous for even Scott’s genialforbearance; yet whose letters won her such areputation that we find them diligently soughtfor, years after they were penned. Fancyadmiring groups of men and women listeningto Miss Seward’s celebrated epistles toMiss Rogers and Miss Weston, one of whichbegins:—

“Soothing and welcome to me, dear Sophia,is the regret you express for our separation!Pleasant were the weeks we have recentlypassed together in this ancient and emboweredmansion. I had strongly felt the silence andvacancy of the depriving day on which youvanished. How prone are our hearts perverselyto quarrel with the friendly coercionof employment, at the very instant in which itis clearing the torpid and injurious mists ofunavailing melancholy.”

The letter which opens in this promisingmanner closes, as might be expected, with afervent and glowing apostrophe to the absentone:—

“Virtuous friendship, how pure, how sacredare thy delights! Sophia, thy mind is capableof tasting them in all their poignancy. Againsthow many of life’s incidents may that capacitybe considered as a counterpoise.”

Now, in the last century, when people receivedletters of this kind, they did not, as wemight suppose, laugh and tear them up. Theytreasured them sacredly in their desks, andread them to their young nieces and nephews,and made fair copies of them for less favoredfriends. Yet the same mail-bags which groanedunder these ponderous compositions were ladennow and then with Sir Walter’s delightfulpages, all aglow with that diffused spirit ofhealthy enjoyment, that sane and happy knowledgeof life, that dauntless and incomparablecourage. Perhaps they carried some of Cowper’sletters, rich mines of pleasure and profitfor us all, full to the brim of homely pleasantdetails which only leisure can find time to note.A man who was even ordinarily busy wouldnever have stopped to observe the things whichCowper tells us about so charmingly,—thebustling candidate kissing all the maids; thehungry beggar who declines to eat vermicellisoup; the young thief who is whipped for stealingthe butcher’s iron-work; the kitchen tablewhich is scrubbed into paralysis; the retinueof kittens in the barn; the foolish old cat whomust needs pursue a viper crawling in the sun;and the favorite tabby who ungratefully ranaway into a ditch, and cost the family fourshillings before she was recovered. Cowperhad time to see all these things, had time tohear the soft click of Mrs. Unwin’s knitting-needles,and the hum of the boiling tea-kettle;and he had moreover the faculty of bringingall that he saw and heard very vividly beforeour eyes, of interesting us, almost against ourwill, in the petty annals of an uneventful life.It is no more possible for important city men,heads of banking-houses and hard-workingmembers of Parliament, to write letters of thiskind, than it is possible for them to hold theattention of generations, as Gray so easilyholds it, with a few playful lines of condolenceon the death of a friend’s cat, a few polishedverses set like jewels in the delicate filigree ofa sportive and caressing letter. “It would bea sensible satisfaction to me,” he writes toWalpole, “before I testify my sorrow, and thesincere part I take in your misfortune, to knowfor certain who it is I lament. I knew Zaraand Selima (Selima, was it? or Fatima?), orrather I knew them both together; for I cannotjustly say which was which. Then as toyour ‘handsome Cat,’ the name you distinguishher by, I am no less at a loss, as well knowingone’s handsome cat is always the cat one lovesbest; or if one be alive and one dead, it isusually the latter which is the handsomer.Besides, if the point were never so clear, Ihope you do not think me so ill-bred or soimprudent as to forfeit all my interest in thesurvivor. Oh, no! I would rather seem tomistake, and imagine to be sure it must bethe tabby one that has met with this sadaccident.”

Labor accomplishes many things in thisbusy, tired world, and receives her full shareof applause for every nail she drives. Butleisure writes the letters; leisure aided byobservation, and sometimes—as in the caseof Mme. de Sévigné—by that rare faculty ofreceiving and imparting impressions withoutjudicial reasoning, by that winning, uncontentiousamenity which accepts life as it is, andmen as they chance to be. There is no rancorin the light laugh with which this charmingFrenchwoman greets the follies and frivolitiesof her day. There is no moral protest inher amused survey of that attractive invalid,Mme. de Brissac, who lies in bed so “curledand beautiful” that she turns everybody’shead. “I wish you could have seen,” writesMme. de Sévigné to her daughter, “the useshe made of her sufferings; of her eyes, ofher sighs, of her arms, of her hands languishingon the counterpane, of the situation, andthe compassion she excited. I was overcomewith tenderness and admiration as I gazed onthe performance, which seemed to me so fine.My riveted attention must surely have givensatisfaction; and bear in mind that it was forthe Abbé Bayard, for Saint Herens, for Montjeuand Plancy, that the scene was rehearsed.When I remember with what simplicity youare ill, you seem to me a mere bungler incomparison.”

This is good-natured ridicule, keen but notcondemnatory, without mercy, yet withoutupbraiding. Sainte-Beuve, who dearly lovesMme. de Sévigné, complains with reason thatshe is not even angry at things which ought toanger her, and that this gentle tolerance lackshumanity when cruelty and wrong-doing callfor denunciation. Yet who can remember solong and tenderly a friend fallen and disgraced?Who can extend a helping hand sofrankly to a fellow mortal? Who can love sodevotedly, or sacrifice herself with such cheerfulserenity at the shrine of her deep affections?Her memory comes down to us throughtwo centuries, enriched with graceful fancies.We know her as one good and gay, gentle andwitty and wise, who, by virtue of her supremeand narrowed genius, wrote letters unsurpassedin literature. “Keep my correspondence,”said Lady Mary Wortley Montaguin the heyday of her youth and pride. “Itwill be as good as Mme. de Sévigné’s, fortyyears hence.” But four times forty yearshave only served to widen the gulf betweenthese two writers, and to place them in partedspheres. Their work springs from differentsources, and is as unlike in inspiration as inform. “It is impossible,” says Sainte-Beuve,“to speak of women without first putting one’sself in a good humor by the thought of Mme.de Sévigné. With us moderns, this processtakes the place of one of those invocations orlibations which the ancients were used to offerup to the pure source of grace.” In the samedevout spirit I am glad to close my volumewith a few words about this incomparableletter-writer, with a little libation poured at hershadowy feet, that my last page may leave meand—Heaven permitting—my readers in agood humor, cheered by the pleasant memorieswhich gild a passing hour.

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