Part 1

DOWN AT CAXTON’S.

BY WALTER LECKY, _Author of “Green Graves in Ireland,” “Adirondack Sketches,” etc._

BALTIMORE: JOHN MURPHY & CO. 1895.

COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY WM. A. MCDERMOTT.

PRESS OF JOHN MURPHY & CO.

I DEDICATE

_THIS SERIES OF SKETCHES_

DONE AT ODD MOMENTS STOLEN FROM THE BUSY LIFE OF A COUNTRY DOCTOR, IN THE WILDEST PART OF THE ADIRONDACKS, TO THAT DEAR FRIEND, WHO WROTE FOR ME AND OTHER WANDERERS—IDYLS OF A SUMMER SEA—

TO

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD

OF THE

CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D. C.

CONTENTS

Transcriber's Note: This table of contents was created by the transriber.

MEN. Richard Malcolm Johnston. Marion Crawford. Charles Warren Stoddard. Maurice Francis Egan. John B. Tabb. James Jeffrey Roche. George Parsons Lathrop. Rev. Brother Azarias.

WOMEN. Katherine Eleanor Conway. Louise Imogen Guiney. Mrs. Blake. Agnes Repplier.

A WORD. Literature and Our Catholic Poor.

MEN.

RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON.

In that charming and dainty series of books published under the captivating title of “Fiction, Fact and Fancy,” and edited by the gifted son of the prince of American literary critics, there is a volume with the companionable name of Billy Downs. It is as follows that Mr. Stedman introduces the creator of Billy Downs and a host of other characters, mostly types of Middle Georgia life, that shall live with the language. “So we reach the tenth milestone of our ramble, and while we are resting by the wayside let us hail the gentleman who is approaching and ask him for ‘another story.’ We who have heard him before know that he seldom fails to respond to such a request, and always, too, in a manner quite inimitable. As he comes nearer you may observe the dignified, yet courteous and kindly bearing of a gentleman of the old school. The white hair and moustache, the sober dress, betoken the veteran, although they are almost contradicted by eyes and an innate youthfulness in word and thought. It is not difficult to recognize in Colonel Richard Malcolm Johnston the founder of a school of fiction and the dean of Southern men of letters.” The Colonel is the founder of a school of fiction, if by that school, we understand those, who are depicting for us the Georgia life of the ante-bellum days. In no otherwise can we assent to Mr. Stedman’s phrase. For American critics to claim the dialect school of fiction as their own in origin, is on a par with their other critical achievements. Dialect was born a long time before Columbus took his way westward. The first wave of mankind leaving the parent stock, in their efforts to survive, carried with them the germ of dialect. Fiction in its portrayal of men and manners of a given period, was bound to reproduce it faithfully—the very least to give us a semblance of that life. This could not be done in many instances without the use of dialect. To do so were to deprive the portraiture of individuality.

Fiction produced on such lines would be worthless. Of late there has been much cavil against dialect writers. This cavil, strange to say, emanates from the Realists.

They lay down the absurd code, that Art is purely imitative. She plays but a monkey part. Her sole duty is to depict life, paying leading attention to the portrayal of corns, bunions, and other horny excrescences, that so often accompany her. Realists will not be persuaded that such excrescences are abnormal. From a jaundiced introspection of their own little life, they frame canons of criticism to guide the world. With these congenial canons lying before them, one is astonished, if such a phrase may be used in the recent light of that school’s pyrotechnic display, that they can condemn dialect. Granted, for the sake of argument, that Art is merely imitative, will not the first duty of the novelist be to reproduce the exact language, and that when done by the master-hand of a Johnston carries with it not only the speaker’s tone, but the power of producing a mental image of the speaker—the very acme of the Realists’ school? To paint a Georgia cracker speaking the ordinary Boston-English would be like crowning the noble brow of a South Sea native with a tall Boston beaver. The effort would be unartistic, the effect ludicrous. Colonel Johnston believes in the imitativeness of Art, to the extent of reproducing for us the peculiar dialect of Middle Georgia. He has informed us that there is not a phrase in his novels that he has not heard amid the scenes of his stories. To reproduce these is a distinct triumph of the novelist’s art, but the Colonel has done more; into his every character has he breathed a soul. His figures are not the automaton skeletons of the Realists, but living men and women who have earnestly played life on the circumscribed stage of Middle Georgia.

This life is fast passing away. Prof. Shaler, a competent authority, tells us: “At present the strong tide of modernism is sweeping over the old slave-holding States with a force which is certain to clear away a greater part of the archaic motives which so long held place in the minds of the people. With the death of this generation, which saw the rebellion, the ancient regime will disappear.” It can never be lost as long as the novels of Malcolm Johnston are extant. There, in days to come, by the cheery ingle-nook, will a new generation live over in his delightful pages the curious life of Georgia. Cuvier asked for a bone to construct his skeleton. The readers of the Dukesborough tales, Billy Downs, etc., will not only have the skeleton, but live men and women preserved for them by the novelist’s elixir. He has known his country and kept close to mother earth, having in his mind that “no language, after it has faded into diction, none that cannot suck up feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother earth of common folk, can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from page to page, but from man to man.... There is death in the dictionary.” That the Colonel’s language has sucked up feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother earth of common folk will be seen on every page. Let us take at random the communication of Jones Kendrick to his cousin Simeon Newsome, as to S’phrony Miller. Sim is a farmer lad overshadowed by the overpowering “dictionary use” of his Cousin Kendrick. Sim has gone a-wooin’ S’phrony. Kendrick hearing of this and urged by his mother and sister, comes to the conclusion that he would like to have S’phrony himself. This important fact he admits to Cousin Sim in the following choice morsel: Sim is overseeing his hands on the plantation; Kendrick approaches and is met by Sim. Kendrick speaks:

“Ma and sister Maria have been for some time specified. They have both been going on to me about S’phrony Miller in a way and to an extent that in some circumstances might be called obstropolus, and to quiet their conscience I’ve begun a kind of a visitation over there, and my mind has arriv at the conclusion that she’s a good, nice piece of flesh, to use the expressions of a man of the world, and society. What do you think, Sim, of the matter under consideration, and what would you advise? I like to have your advice sometimes, and I’d like to know what it would be under all circumstances and appearances of a case which, as it stands, it seems to have, and it isn’t worth while to conceal the fact that it does have, a tremendous amount of immense responsibility to all parties, especially to the undersigned, referring as is well known in books and newspaper advertisements to myself. What would you say to the above, Sim, in all its parts and parties?” It may interest the reader to know that Sim acquiesced “in all its parts and parties,” and that S’phrony became Mrs. Kendrick, while Sim took another mate. Of further interest to the imaginative young woman is the fact, that Mrs. Newsome and Mr. Kendrick perishing a few years later by some sort of quasi-involuntary but always friendly movements, executed in a comparatively brief time, S’phrony and Sim became one. In calling Johnston the dean of Southern men of letters, Stedman does not define his position. Page, the creator of Marse Chan, and one of the most talented of Southern dialect writers, negatively does so. In an article that has literary smack, but lacks critical perception, he rates him below Miss Murfree, James Lane Allen, and Cable. These three writers Page places at the head of Southern writers of fiction. Critics nowadays will adduce no proof; they simply affirm. The text of this discrimination should be the exactness of the character drawing, the life-like reproduction of environments, and the expertness of the dialect as a vehicle to convey the local flavor. It will hardly be gainsaid that Johnston knows his Georgia no less than Cable knows Louisiana. Johnston is a native of Georgia; the time of life most susceptible to local impressions was spent there. Cable’s boyhood was otherwise. It will not be thought of that in the painting of Creole life, Cable has excelled the painter of Georgia life. In the handling of dialect, Johnston and Harris touch the high water mark of Southern fiction. It was an old critical dictum that an author to succeed must be in sympathy with his subject; this may be affirmed of Johnston. It is otherwise with Cable, and especially with Lane, whose Kentucky pictures are often caricatures. Cable poses as the friend of the colored man. His pose is dramatic. It lends a charm to his New England recitations. We have a great love for champions of every kind. The most of Mr. Cable’s pages deal with Creole life, and for that life he has no sympathy. He paints it as essentially pagan, albeit it was essentially Catholic. A padre makes him sniff the air and paw ungraciously. The ceremonies of the church are so many pagan rites. Cable belongs to the school that contemns what it does not understand. His pictures of Creole life are untrue, and much as they were in vogue some years ago, are passing to the bourne of the forgotten. Johnston, although a living Catholic, fond of his church, and wedded to her every belief, draws an itinerant preacher of the Methodists with as much enthusiasm and sympathy as he would the clergy of his own church. He has no dislikes, nothing that is of man but interests this sunny-hearted romancer of the old South.

Strange as it may seem, the knowledge of his wonderful power of story-telling came late and in an accidental way. It is best described in his own words. “Story-writing,” said the Colonel, “is the last thing for me in literature. I had published two or three volumes on English literature, and in conjunction with a friend had written a life of Alexander Stephens, and also a book on American and European literature, but had no idea of story-writing for money. Two or three stories of mine had found their way into the papers before I left Georgia. I had been a professor of English literature in Georgia, but during the war I took a school of boys. I removed to Baltimore and took forty boys with me and continued my school. There was in Baltimore, in 1870, a periodical called the _Southern Magazine_. The first nine of my Dukesborough Tales were contributed to that magazine. These fell into the hands of the editor of _Harper’s Magazine_, who asked me what I got for them. I said not a cent, and he wanted to know why I had not sent them to him. ‘Neelers Peeler’s Conditions’ was the first story for which I got pay. It was published in the _Century_, over the signature of Philemon Perch. Dr. Holland told Mr. Gilder to tell that man to write under his own name, adding that he himself had made a mistake in writing under a pseudonym. Sydney Lanier urged me to write, and said if I would do so he would get the matter in print for me. So he took ‘Neelers Peeler’s Conditions,’ and it brought me eighty dollars. I was surprised that my stories were considered of any value. I withdrew from teaching about six years ago, and since that time have devoted myself to authorship. I have never put a word in my book that I have not heard the people use, and very few that I have not used myself. Powelton, Ga., is my Dukesborough. I was born fourteen miles from there.

“Of the female characters that I have created, Miss Doolana Lines was my favorite, while Mr. Bill Williams is my favorite among the male characters. I started Doolana to make her mean and stingy like her father, but I hadn’t written a page before she wrenched herself out of my hands. She said to me, ‘I am a woman, and you shall not make me mean.’ These stories are all of Georgia as it was before the war. In the hill country the institution of slavery was very different from what it was in the rice region or near the coast. Do you know the Georgia negro has five times the sense of the South Carolina negro? Why? Because he has always been near his master, and their relations are closer. My father’s negroes loved him, and he loved them, and if a negro child died upon the place my mother wept for it. Some time ago I went to the old place, and an old negro came eight miles, walked all the way, to see me.

“He got to the house before five o’clock in the morning, and opened the shutters while I was asleep. With a cry he rushed into the room. ‘Oh, Massa Dick.’ We cried in each other’s arms. We had been boys together. One of my slaves is now a bishop—Bishop Lucius Holsey, one of the most eloquent men in Georgia.”

These charming bits of autobiography show us the sterling nature of Malcolm Johnston, a nature at once cheerful, kind and loving. It is the object of such natures, in the pessimistic wayfares of life, to make friends, illuminating them with sunshine and tickling them with laughter.

MARION CRAWFORD.

In front of the Ara Coeli I stood. A swarthy Italian was telling of the dramatic death of Cola di Rienzi. His English was lightly worn, but it seemed to please his audience, and it was for that purpose they had paid their lire. The crazy-quilt language of the cicerone and his audacious way of handling history, made him cut an attractive figure in the eyes of most tourists, whose desires are amusement rather than study. As a type, to use a phrase borrowed from the school of psychological novelism, he was a study. To the student Rome is a city of absorbing interest, to the ordinary American bird of passage a dull place. It all depends on your point of view. If you are a scholar, a collector of old lace, or a vandal, Rome is your happy hunting ground. If these pursuits do not interest you, Roman beggars with all sorts and conditions of diseases, sometimes by nature, mostly by art, Roman fleas, and the gaunt ghosts of the Campagna quickly drive you from the capital of the Cæsars and Popes. A few other annoyances might be added, such as sour wine, whose mist fumes are not to be shriven by your bottle-let of eau de Cologne, garlic on the fringe of decay, and the provoking smell of salt fish in the last stage of decomposition. But you have come to Rome; it is a name to conjure with, and despite the drawbacks, you must have a glimpse, an ordinary bowing acquaintance, with the famed old dame. At the office, an English office, in the Piazza di Spagna, you have asked for a “droll guide.” Who could listen to a scholarly one amid such active drawbacks as wine, fleas and fish? Michael Angelo Orazio Pantacci is your man. What do you care for good English? Did you not leave New York to leave it behind? What do you care for Roman history? Pantacci is your man, and his lecture on Cola di Rienzi is a masterpiece. A stranger joined our little crowd. Pantacci at that moment had attained his descriptive high-water mark. His pose and voice were touchingly dramatic. Cola was, as he expressed it, “to perish.” The stranger smiled and passed on. His smile was a composite affair. It was easy to see in it Michael Angelo’s historical duplicity and our ignorant simplicity. The stranger was tall, with the shoulders slightly stooping, a nose as near an approach to the Grecian as an American may come, a heavy black mustache, ruddy cheeks, that whispered of English food mellowed with the glowing Chianti. Who is that man? I said to my companion, whose eyes had followed the stranger rather than Pantacci. “That,” said he, “is Marion Crawford, the author of the Saracenesca books. You remember reading them at Albano.” Tell me something about him. He is a very clever man. Cola has perished; let us leave Pantacci. On the way to Cordietti’s tell me something of his life. He knows how to tell a story, an art hardly to be met with in contemporary fiction. Fiction has abrogated to herself the whole domain of life, and thus the art of telling a story for the story’s sake is lost. Fiction has a mission. She freights herself with all isms. Scott, Manzoni, even the great wizard of Spanish fiction, could they live again, were failures. Introspection is the cult, and, happily for their fame, they knew nothing of it. These great masters told us how scenes of life were enacted. Why, they left to the inquisitive and later-day brood of commentators. Since then the all absorbing scientific spirit prevails, and we moderns brush away the delightful humor of Dickens for the analytical puzzles of Henry James; the keen satire of Thackeray for the coxcomberies of George Meredith. Fairy cult interests none, modern children are ancient men. Scepticism is rampant, and the cause of it is, in a great manner, due to the modern novelist. This product of the 19th century world-spirit coolly tells us that romance lies dead. Realism has taken her place. If we are to believe the theories of its votaries, it is without an ideal—a mere anatomical transcript of man. What this theory leads to is well illustrated by the gutter filth of Zola and Catulle Mendes. It makes novel writing a trade. One ceases to be astonished at the output, if he thoroughly grasps the difference between a tradesman and an artist. Trade is a word much used by realists. Grant Allen, writing of that realistic necromancer, Guy de Maupassant, has nothing apter to define his position than the phrase “he knows his trade.” In point of fact, Grant Allen enunciates a truth in this phrase, one that might be carried still further, by saying that his whole school are journeymen laborers, tradesmen, if you prefer, turning out work, tasteless and crude, at the bidding of the erubescent young person of the period. It is readily assumed that work of this kind is not, despite the word-jugglery of their school, realism. It does not deal with the true man, but with a phrase, and that abnormal. A better phrase in use in speaking of the works of this school is, “literature of disease.” The artist who lives must have a model, and that we call the ideal. The nearer he approaches this the more lasting his work. All the great artists had ideals. Workmen may be guided by the rule of thumb. The first lesson a great artist learns is, “The art that merely imitates can only produce a corpse; it lacks the vital spark, the soul, which is the ideal, and which is necessary in order to create a living organic reality that will quicken genius and arouse enthusiasm throughout the ages.” The gulf between the trade-novelist and the artist-novelist is of vital importance. The former believes that art is simply imitation, the latter, that art is interpretation. One is a stone-cutter, the other a sculptor.

Crawford’s canon is that art is interpretative, not imitative, and, moreover, he has a story to tell and tells it for the story’s sake. He has no affinity with that school so pointedly described by the Scotch novelist, Barrie, as the one “which tells, in three volumes, how Hiram K. Wilding trod on the skirt of Alice M. Sparkins without anything coming of it.” “Cordietti’s,” said my friend, “give the order and I will tell you what I know of Crawford.” Paulo, said I to the waiter, some Chianti, and—well, a pigeon. “Crawford,” said my friend, “was born in Rome about thirty-five years ago. His career has been a strange one, full of life. His early years were spent in Rome, where his father was known as a sculptor, his boyhood in the vicinity of Union Square, his early manhood in England and India. In the latter country he was the editor, proof-reader, typesetter of a small journal in the natives’ interest. As such he was a thorn to the notorious freak, Blavatsky. Crawford is an American by inheritance, an Italian by breeding, an Englishman by training, an Indian by virtue of writing about India with the knowledge of a native. In 1873, by the financial panic, Mrs. Crawford lost her large fortune, and Marion was forced to shift for himself. He became a journalist, and as such wandered over most of the interesting part of the globe. On his return to New York, at the request of his uncle, Sam Ward, the epicurean, who had discerned his kinsman’s rare power of story-telling, he wrote his first book, Mr. Isaacs. It was a success. Of the writing of that book, Crawford has told us it was “very curious. I did not imagine that I possessed a faculty for story-writing, and I prepared for a career very different from the career of a novelist. Yet I have found that all my early life was an unconscious preparation for that work. My boyhood was spent in Rome, where my parents had lived for many years. There I was put through the usual classical training—no, it was not the usual one, for the classics are much better taught in Italy than in this country. A boy in Italy by the time he is twelve is taught to speak Latin, and his training is so thorough that he can read it with ease. From Rome I went to Cambridge, England, and remained at the university several years. Then I studied for a couple of years at the German universities. During this time I went in for the sciences, and I expected to devote myself to scientific work. Finally I went off to the East, where I did a good deal of observing, and continued my studies of the Oriental languages, in which I had taken considerable interest. It was while I was in the East that I met Jacobs, the hero of Mr. Isaacs. Many of the events I have recorded in Mr. Isaacs were the actual experiences of Jacobs.”