Part 5

Here let us approach with hesitation and timidity, for however dry and disagreeable a book may be, still it is a book. “Somebody loved it”. The man who evolved it, who brought it forth, who labored over it, who corrected the proofs, was pleased with it; deformed and misshapen though it may be in the eyes of others, it was beautiful to him. Moreover, much may after all be learned from the poorest of books; and the food from which I would turn in scorn, may to another be palatable. Therefore I wish it to be clearly understood that in making what are called “derogatory” remarks about any book, I am guiltless of the offence of setting up my own judgment and preference against the view and opinion of any one else whomsoever; I am merely expressing my own personal feelings. If it be asserted by some one who chances not to agree with me, that these feelings are of no importance to any one but to myself, I may reply that I admit it and that no one is obliged to read what I have written; and should he complain that he has paid “very hard cash” for my book and has a right to full consideration, I will answer, as Mr. Lang answered somebody,—that he should read Mazzini, and learn that man has no rights worth mentioning, only duties. Moreover I would say to him that if he can prove that he paid for the volume its full price, and did not pick it up at a discount in some second-hand book shop, that refuge of lame, halt and blind books, or at a bargain counter in a department store, I will cheerfully refund his money, provided he will furnish me with a sworn affidavit declaring solemnly that he sincerely admires the book which I detest. But even the omnivorous reader must like some books better than others. If, as was truly said, no cigars are bad, some are certainly more smokeable than others, and some pretty women are prettier than other pretty women. If the books I do not like were the only books in the world, I suppose that I would be fond of them as Frederick was of Ruth until he beheld the loveliness of Major-General Stanley’s numerous daughters.

One of the black sheep of my flock is called “Random Reminiscences: by Charles H. E. Brookfield”, published in 1902. The author is the son of Thackeray’s Brookfield, and his portrait shows what manner of man he must be. How any rational human being could write out or cause to be published such a flat, stale and unprofitable mess, passes understanding. The most wretched of anecdotes are retailed, and if he chances upon a fairly good one he spoils it in the telling. “I am not aware”, he says in his preface, “that I have included in this volume anything which appears to me of importance; I trust that I have not either committed the impertinence of expressing any views.” This may have been meant in a facetious way, but it is obviously so true that one is impelled to ask why on earth he wrote it. He is so proud of his pointless stories that he makes one long to go out and kill something, thus creating a counter-irritant. How can any one fail to give way to inextinguishable laughter over this final outburst of glee: “Thanks to Dr. Walther and his treatment, I put on nearly 2 stone weight in a little over two months. I was 10 stone 4 before I went, and 12 stone 2 when I left. And I am over 12 stone to-day, three years later”. From his humor I should think that he was heavier. I have been waiting patiently for a second edition to ascertain whether he has grown to any extent, but none has appeared. No wonder that he finished his autobiography with a quotation from a newspaper which said of him, on his supposed decease: “But, after all, it is at his club that he will be most missed”. Jolly dog, how he must have warmed the cockles of their hearts with his merry jests!

In the same corner with the jovial Brookfield and his “twelve stone” are gathered together the various biographies whose titles begin with “The True” or “The Real”. I confess that I have not read through “The True Thomas Jefferson”, although I am burdened with two copies, but I have ploughed through “The True Abraham Lincoln”, and found it an ordinary piece of hack-work, marred by blunders. The calm assumption which leads a writer to proclaim that he alone portrays “the true” and “the real”, as if all other accounts were false, is condemnatory at the outset. As for Jeaffreson’s lot,—“The Real Lord Byron” and “The Real Shelley”,—they are monuments of dullness, the subjects overloaded with petty details of no value to any one. Mr. John Cordy Jeaffreson, who was always publishing “Books About” something or somebody, has presented to mankind his “Recollections”, conspicuous chiefly for its covert sneers at Thackeray, whom he hated, and studied disparagement of the personal character of that giant who towered so far above Jeaffresonian pigmies. Jeaffreson’s books belong to the Sawdust School of literature. He has not even the brightness of Percy Fitzgerald, who has so long made the most of his stock in trade, a certain friendship and association with Dickens, and who in his two volumes of “Memories of an Author” is almost as bad as Jeaffreson at his best. It is true that Dickens had a personal liking for Fitzgerald, when the latter was a contributor to “All The Year Round”, but I believe that Charles Dickens the Younger not many years ago expressed some doubts as to the intimacy of the two men.

Jeaffreson was a weak and self-important person, jealous of his betters. George Somes Layard says, in his interesting “Life of Shirley Brooks”,[3] that Jeaffreson in his “Book of Recollections” wrote “with ill concealed envy of a far abler and more successful man than himself” a silly fling at Brooks concerning the name “Shirley”; and elsewhere refers to the “Recollections” as a “querulous and pawky book”. The characterization is undeniably just; plainly in accord with the opinion of the reading public; and the two pawky volumes rest peacefully in the trash corner.

In company with Jeaffreson will be found everything written by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, who, in a long life of devotion to the accumulation of miscellaneous information of doubtful value and to the parading of the name of Hazlitt, has caused a vast number of pages to be covered with typographical records of his diligence and of his unfailing capacity for making blunders. Full forty years ago he was unlucky enough to come into close contact with the keen lance of one James Russell Lowell, who riddled his editions of Webster and of Lovelace, included in John Russell Smith’s “Library of Old Authors”. Lowell wrote that “of all Mr. Smith’s editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt is the worst. He is at times positively incredible, worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying a good deal.”[4] Whether Hazlitt was worth flaying as Lowell flayed him, may be questioned. But Hazlitt still goes on, in his Boeotian way; always inept; sometimes so offensive that, as in the case of his “Four Generations of a Literary Family” it has been necessary to withdraw the work from circulation.[5] An example of his “foolish notions” may be seen in one of his latest books, “The Book-Collector” (1904) which has a sub-title composed of fifty-one words. Mr. Hazlitt announces the astonishing generalization that the autograph collector does not care for books or for manuscripts beyond the extent of a fly leaf or inscribed title-page, and that he is a modern and inexcusable Bagford who tears out the inscription and throws away the book. He cites the case of “a copy of Donne’s Sermons, with a brilliant portrait of the author—and a long inscription by Izaak Walton presenting the volume to his aunt. It was in the pristine English calf binding, as clean as when it left Walton’s hands _en route_ to his kinswoman, and such a delightful signature. What has become of it? It is sad even to commit to paper the story—one among many. An American gentleman acquired it, tore the portrait and leaf of inscription out, and threw the rest away”.

I believe him—to use the language of a mighty hunter—to be a meticulous prevaricator. If the tale be true, and I should like to have Mr. William Carew Hazlitt under cross-examination for a while, it only shows that there may be a few vandals in the tribe of autograph collectors, but no true collector would ever be guilty of such a wanton crime. Bagford tore out title-pages, but that affords no evidence that book-lovers are habitually given to the folly of tearing out title-pages. As for the case being “one of many”, I deny it; if he had known of another instance he would have gloried in the description of it. But he never knew law, logic or truth, and upon his indictment for silliness it would be necessary only to offer in evidence his books,—and rest.

But why should I get so very cross about poor old Hazlitt? The wisest thing I can do is to recite to him the touching verses of “You are old, Father William” and remonstrate gently with him in regard to his pernicious habit of incessantly standing upon his head. It will be a good plan to return to the favorite corner and soothe my ruffled spirits by reading Percy Greg’s comical “History of the United States”, or better still, the dear little story which Roswell Field wrote about “The Bondage of Ballinger”.

Whether so famous a poem as Young’s _Night Thoughts_ is entitled to the privileges of the pit of Acheron, may be matter for dispute; but as Goldsmith said of those gloomy lucubrations, a reader speaks of them with exaggerated applause or contempt as his disposition “is either turned to mirth or melancholy”. We have preserved “tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep”, and “procrastination is the thief of time,” but we know that the didactic parson’s famous poem is “hardly ever read now except under compulsion.” My chief grievance against the man who was compelled to

“Torture his invention To flatter knaves or lose his pension,”

is not, however, founded upon his lugubrious pentameters.

The man who turns down the corner of the leaf of a book is not only fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, but is well qualified to commit any mean crime in the calendar. If his memory is so poor that he cannot remember page or passage, let him make a small pencil note on the margin. Such a note may readily be removed by an eraser, but a “dog’s ear” can never be wholly removed. Its blight continues during the life of the book. Now Boswell records this sickening fact: “I have seen volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of _The Rambler_, in which he has marked the passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a corner of the page, and such as he rated in a supereminent degree are marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost.” I do not share in this sorrow; it is well that the testimony of such brutality should be effaced. Double folds! Insatiate archer, would not one suffice? Perhaps Johnson himself, Virginius-like, destroyed his offspring thus shamelessly violated.

It is often difficult to get out of corners; but before I escape, let me give to the dog’s-earing, nocturnally reflecting Young full credit for a single utterance—“Joy flies monopolists,”—which proves that it was not wholly in vain that he burned the midnight oil; for although he speaks in the present tense, it is manifest that the spirit of prophecy was strong within him. He looked ahead for more than a century and foresaw the day when “grafters” might be glorified and exalted, debauchees acclaimed us apostles of the people, and murderers feasted and honored, but monopolists hated, shunned and abhorred as miscreants whose sins can never be forgiven. Joyless indeed are those who dare to deprive their fellow beings of the inborn right to equality in everything; for we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal,—that is to say, with the right to do just as they please, to till the soil, to mine the earth, to invent the telegraph and the telephone, to manufacture steel, and to construct railways, but not to do it so well as to prevent any of the great people from doing the same thing. The abandoned wretch who, by his despicable brains, his virtuous life, and his pernicious industry, seeks to impair those rights in any degree, however trifling, must be prepared to bid farewell to happiness and contentment. If he is able to avoid the jail, it will be well for him to seek refuge in some secluded spot; let us say, in a peaceful library corner.

OF THE OLD FASHION

Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that “Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”

There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the Swedish _fogde_—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it despite the confident assertion of the _Century Dictionary_. It is not altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”

So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a young fogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.

Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that “still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with the dramatic works of this careless, _insouciant_ time; that Wordsworth has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified architecture? There was something impressive too about the old “Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”

It is delightful to be young and to indulge in the illusions of youth—a truism which it is safe to utter, for nobody will dispute it. “Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret,” said the strange, semi-oriental personage, an enigma in politics and a problem in literature, Benjamin Disraeli. Everybody knows the rude saying of old George Chapman, which it is almost an impertinence to quote, but every one does not remember whence it came—that young men think the old men are fools but old men know young men are fools. It is certain that we have cherished that idea in our minds for many centuries. Pope, in his epigrammatic way, remarked that “in youth and beauty wisdom is but rare,” but we cannot give him credit for originality in the utterance. We will go on with our regrets, our reproofs and our hesitancies, and in the course of time those who sneer at us now as cumbersome relics, _laudatores temporis acti_, mere maunderers enamored of an effete past, will take their turn, fill our places, and endure the pitying and condescending smiles of the succeeding generation. There is nothing new under the sun, and the man of to-day may well pause in his arrogant career to remember that he will quickly pass into the category of the obsolete.

Some of us who are beginning to descend that downward slope of life which soon becomes sadly precipitous, but who retain a vivid recollection of the long ago, are fond of recalling a period of New York which in this era of lavish expenditures, indiscriminating profuseness, and careless prodigality seems strangely simple. Those were the days when in sedate Second Avenue and Stuyvesant Square were the homes of dignified wealth, whose owners rather looked down upon Fifth Avenue as _parvenu_; and Forty-second Street was almost an outpost of civilization. We revelled in the delights of the ancient Philharmonic concerts and believed that Carl Bergmann was the last evolution of a conductor; later we recognized Theodore Thomas as the man who did more to develop a taste for good orchestral music in this country than any other one man who ever lived. We thronged the stalls of old Wallack’s, with its most excellent of stock-companies—something which has wholly disappeared—and we rejoiced in Dion Boucicault and Agnes Robertson. A little later we haunted the upper gallery of the Academy of Music in Fourteenth Street,—at least _I_ did, because of a confirmed stringency in the money market,—and cheered the magical top-notes of the ponderous but melodious Wachtel and the generous tones of that most inspiring of singers, the splendid Parepa-Rosa. We hailed with loud acclaims the manly and dignified Santley—more in his element in oratorio than in opera—and the royal contralto, Adelaide Phillips, long since forgotten except by the Old Guard who afterwards transferred their allegiance to Annie Louise Cary. It may have been a provincial time, but we did not think so; it was a good time, and we enjoyed it.

It seems but yesterday when all over the land flashed the news of Lincoln’s death, and the black draperies suddenly shrouded the streets while the triumphant note of Easter Sunday died away in a cry of lamentation. I was in old St. Bartholomew’s in Lafayette Place that Sunday, and the recollection of it will never be lost. Nor shall I forget the grief and alarm of a small band of Southerners, secessionists of the strongest type, domiciled in the same house with me, as they lamented that in the death of Abraham Lincoln the South had been deprived of its best friend, the man who would have made reconstruction a blessing instead of an affliction. They had been rebels, it is true, but they were conscious of the loftiness of the soul of that noble citizen who, with faults which are often the accompaniments of greatness, stood for all that was just and magnanimous in our national life.

Some of us have a clear recollection of the camping of soldiers in City Hall Park, the cheering of the multitude as the regiments of volunteers swung down Broadway on their march to Virginia, when we were striving to preserve the republic and the horror of civil war was present with us every hour. We were less cynical, less ambitious, less strenuous in those days, and I think we were more serene and sincere. We had serious imperfections, but we did not carry ourselves quite as mightily, and on the whole we had some creditable characteristics. There is no good reason why we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Were we so very stupid in the fifties? Was there not some true and honorable life in our social and literary world of that generation? Surely our newspapers were as worthy of respect as some of our contemporary journals with their blazing capitals, their columns of crime, their pages of the sensational, and their provoking condensed headlines which exasperate me by their airy flippancy. I sometimes wonder that nobody except myself utters a protest against those dreadful headlines. They reduce almost everything to vulgarity, and the affection of condensation is distinctly irritating. Most objectionable of all are the headlines followed by interrogation points, because they are misleading. If, for example, they say in capitals “Mr. Smith strikes his mother?” the average reader—and there is more of that sort than of any other—glancing over the pages misses the query and goes to his grave with the firm conviction that poor Smith was the most unmanly of brutes. I am not sure that the interrogation mark protects the proprietors against a libel suit.

It is true that in the fifties our art may have been of the tame and tidy sort, timorously clinging to the conventional; our financial enterprises were conducted on so small a scale that a million was a sum which made the banker’s heart palpitate with apprehensive emotion; our politics were concerned chiefly with the colored man and his relations to the State; in architecture our awful brown stone fronts were oppressing in a domineering way all the town in and above Fourteenth Street. But there was a certain dignity about it all, an absence of tawdriness, a savor of respectability.