Part 7

A friend of mine, a dweller in the city, a lover of red bricks, one to whom the sound of the dray-cart merrily grinding on the pavement is sweeter music than a burst of woodland song, has tardily conceded that the Adirondacks, on a summer day, is pleasant. I value his testimony and record it with pleasure. Let us be thankful for small favors when cynics are the donors. For me these woods, lakes and crystal streams hold an indescribable charm. They are the true abode of man. Here is liberty, while the city is but a cage, with its thousands uttering the plaintive cry of Sterne’s prisoned starling, “I cannot get out.” For the hum of wheels we have the songs of birds, the music of waterfalls, the purr of mountain brooks and the harmonies of the winds playing through the thousand different species of trees, each one differing in melody, but combining in one grand symphony. Orchestras are muffled music when compared to nature’s lute. The pipes of Pan is but a poet’s struggle to embody in speech such a symphony. For the city’s smells, that not even a Ruskin could paint, albeit they are far from elusive, we have the mountain air that has dallied with the streams and stolen the fragrance of a thousand clover fields. Every man to his taste. There is no disputing of this. Lamb loved bricks and Wordsworth such scenes as ours; yet, Lamb would be as sadly missed from our libraries as Wordsworth. Swing my hammock in the shade of yonder pines, good Patsy. A robin is piping his sweetest notes to his brooding spouse, the Salmon river runs at my feet, biting the sandy shore, laughing loud when a saucy stone falls in its current. From over the hills comes the scent of new-mown hay; bless me! this is pleasant. To add to this enjoyment you have brought a book—something bright, you tell me. I’ll soon see. And gliding into my hammock, I said my first good morning to Agnes Repplier. It was a breezy good morning, one of those where the hand unconsciously goes out as much as to say: Old fellow, you don’t know how glad I am to see you. There was no friend with a white cravat standing on the first page to introduce us, and tell us that the authoress bore in her book a fecund message to struggling humanity, and that the major part of that same humanity could not see it; hence it was his duty to stand at the portal and solve the riddle. There was no begging for recognition on the score of ancestors, fads or isms. I am Agnes Repplier, said the book; how do you like me? A few pages perused, and my own voice amusingly fell on my ears, saying first class. Here was a woman who thought—not the trivial thought that nauseates in the books of so many literary women—but virile aggressive thought, that provokes, contradicts, and, like Hamlet’s ghost, will not be downed. This thought is folded in a garment, whose many hues quicken the curiosity and make her pages a continual feast of wit, droll irony, and illuminative criticism all curiously and harmoniously blended. Her pages are rich in suggestion, apt in quotation. You are constantly aroused, put on your guard, laughingly disarmed, and that in a way that Lamb would have loved. She has no awe in the presence of literary gods. Lightly she trips up to them with her poniard, shows by a pass that they are made of mud, and that the aureole that encircles them is but the work of your crude imagination. Clearing away your shreds and patches she puts the author in a plain suit before you, and, how you wonder, that with all your boasted knowledge you have called for years a jackdaw a peacock!

How delightful to watch this critic armed _cap-a-pie_, demolishing some fad, that has masqueraded for years as genuine literature. Is it little Lord Fauntleroy, a character sloppy, inane, impossible to real life, yet hugged to the heart by the commonplace. Miss Repplier keenly surveys her ground, as an artist would the statue of his rival, notes the foibles, cant, false poses, and crazy-quilt jargon used to deck pet characters. Experience has taught her that you cannot combat seriously the commonplace. “The statesman or the poet,” says Dudley Warner, “who launches out unmindful of this, will be likely to come to grief in his generation.” Sly humor, pungent sarcasm, are the weapons effectively used. The little Lord is unrobed, and the life that seemed so full of charity and virtue, becomes but a mixture of hypocrisy and snobbery. Yet, if some of our critics could, “all the dear old nursery favorites must be banished from our midst, and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished exclusively on Little Lord Fauntleroy, and other carefully selected specimens of milk and water diet.” The dear land of romance, in its most charming phase, that phase represented by Red Riding Hood, Ali Baba, Blue Beard, and the other heroes of our nurseryhood must be eliminated, for children are no longer children, in the old sense of believing “in such stuff” without questioning. American children, at any rate, are too sensitively organized to endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we are told, and it is added, “no mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated brutality.” These are the empty sayings of the realists, who would have every child break its dolls to analyze the sawdust. The most casual observer of American homes knows that our children will not be fed on such stuff as realists are able to give, but will turn wistfully back to those brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid past, and of which no hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier so well puts it, “we could not banish Blue Beard if we would. He is as immortal as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who, thank Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown-up—will still tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big brave brothers come galloping up the road.” Ferocity, brutality, if you will, may couch on every page, but this is much better than the sugared nothingness of Sunday school tales, and beats all hollow, as the expression goes, the many tricks perpetrated on children by the school of analytical fiction. Children will read Blue Beard, and thank Heaven, as grown-up men, for such a childish pleasure, adding a prayer for her who wrote the “Battle of the Babies.” Bunner and others have accused Miss Repplier of ignoring contemporary works, of rudely closing in their face her library door and saying he who enters here must have outgrown his swaddling clothes, must have rounded out his good half-century. This may be one of Bunner’s skits. Even if it were not, there is more than one precedent to follow. Hazlitt, in his delightful chat on the “Reading of Old Books,” begins his essay, “I hate to read new books.” This author has the courage of his convictions; you do not grope in the dark to know why. Here is the reason, and it is easier to assent to it than to deny it. “Contemporary writers may generally be divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely, and like a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish fad, which spoils a delicate passage;—another inspires us with the highest respect for his personal talents and character, but does not come quite up to our expectation in print.” All these contradictions and petty details interrupt the calm current of our reflections. These are sound reasons; as if to clinch them he adds, “but the dust, smoke, and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality.”

Miss Repplier, an admirer of Hazlitt, and if one may hazard a guess, her master in style, would not go so far. She believes in keeping up with a decent portion of current literature, and “this means perpetual labor and speed,” whereas idleness and leisure are requisite for the true enjoyment of books. To read all the frothings of the press for the sake of being called a contemporary critic were madness. She concurs with another critic that reading is not a duty, and that no man is under any obligation to read what another man wrote. When Miss Repplier stumbles across an unknown volume, picking it up dubiously, and finds in it an hour of placid but genuine enjoyment, although it is a modern book, wanting in sanctifying dust, she will use all her art to make in other hearts a loving welcome for the little stranger. “A By-Way in Fiction” tells in her own way, of a recent book born of Italian soil and sunshine, “The Chevalier of Pensieri Vani.” It is the essayist’s right to read those books, ancient or modern, that are to her taste, and it is a bit of impertinence in any writer to particularly recommend to Miss Repplier a list of books, which she is naturally indisposed to consider with much kindness, thrust upon her as they are, like paregoric or porous plaster. “If there be people who can take their pleasures medicinally, let them read by prescription and grow fat.” Our authoress can do her own quarrying. One of the darts thrown at this charming writer is, that she would have children pore through books at their own sweet, wild will, unoppressed by that modern infliction—foot-notes. That, when a child would meet the word dog, an asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note occupying a page and giving all that science knows about that interesting animal. This is precisely the privilege that your modern critic will not allow. He will have his explanations, his margins, “build you a bridge over a rain-drop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing irons, yet when perchance you stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold! he is never there to grasp it.” What does a boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want with these atrocities? The imagery that peoples his mind, the music that sweeps through his soul, these, and not your stilted erudition, are the milk and honey of boyhood. “I once knew a boy,” says Miss Repplier, in that sparkling defense, ‘Oppression of Notes,’ “who so delighted in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real man described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by the Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman holiday; historically and geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing intelligent, only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts.” Had the reader stopped the course of the swinging verse to explain these unknown words, boyish happiness would have flown, oppression become complete, and let us hope sleep would have rescued the bored boy from such an ordeal.

Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side of our essayist. In his essay “On Myself” he relates the charm of verse, falling on his boyish ear, without comprehending fully its purport. “I believe I can tell the particular little chance that filled my head first with such chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont to lie in my mother’s parlor (I know not by what accident, for she herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened to fall upon, and was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, giants, and monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had read him all over, before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.” The charm of Miss Repplier’s pages lies in their good sense. She is a lover of the good and beautiful, a hater of shams and shoddies. Everything she touches becomes more interesting, whether it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats, Babies, or the New York Custom House. Like Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of old books, finding in them the pure silent air of immortality, she will welcome graciously any new book whose worth is its passport.

Agnes Repplier was born in the city of brotherly love more than thirty years ago. Her father was John Repplier, a well-known coal merchant. Her earliest playmates were books. Her mother a brilliant and lovable woman, fond of books, and, as a friend of her’s informed me, a writer of ability, watched over and directed the education of her more brilliant daughter. Under such a mother, amid scenes of culture, Agnes grew up, finding in books a solace for ill-health that still continues to harry her. When she entered the arena of authorship, by training and study she was well equipped. At once she was reckoned as a sovereign princess of “That proud and humble ... Gipsey Land,” one of the very elect of Bohemia. She came, as Stedman says, “with gentle satire or sparkling epigram to brush aside the fads and fallacies of this literary _fin de siècle_, calling upon us to return to the simple ways of the masters.” Her charming volumes should be in the hands of every student of literature as a corrective against the debasing theories and tendencies of modern book-making. The student will find that if she does not know all things in heaven and on earth, she may plead in the language of Little Breeches:

“I never ain’t had no show; But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir On the handful o’ things I know.”

A WORD.

LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR.

We are told, with some show of truth, that this age shall be noted in history as one given to the study of social problems. The contemporary literature of a country is a good index to what people are thinking about. Magazines are, as a rule, for their time, and deal with the forces upward in men’s minds. The most cursory glance at their contents will show the predominance of the Social Problem treated from some phase or other. The best minds are engaged as partisans. Social science may be said to be the order of the day. It has crushed poetry to the skirts of advertising, romance is its happy basking ground. The drama has made it its own. There are some, fogies of course, so says your sapient scientist, who believe that the social science so spasmodically treated in current literature is but a passing fad, and that poetry shall be restored to her old quarters, romance amuse as of old, and the drama be winnowed of rant, scenic sensation, and bestial morality. These dreams may be vain, but then even fogies have their hopes. A branch of this science—the tree is overshadowing—treats of the literature and the masses. Anything about the masses interests me.

When I read the other day, “Literature and the Masses; a Social Study,” among the contents of a _fin de siècle_ magazine, I would have pawned my wearing apparel rather than go home without it. Its reading was painful, as all reading must be where the author knows less about his subject than the ordinary reader. Later, another article fell in my way, dealing with the same subject. Its author had more material, but his use of it was clumsy. It was while reading this article, that I noted the utter stupidity with which things Catholic are treated by the ordinary literary purveyor. These ephemeral pen-wielders seem to hold the most fantastic notions of the Church. What Azarias says of Emerson is true of them: “They seek truth in every religious and philosophical system outside of the teachings of the Catholic Church.” They will not drink from Rome. To correct all this author’s errors is not my plan. In this paper I restrict myself to a part of the same subject, Literature and Our Catholic Poor. I prefer an independent study to patchwork. It is the usual thing in such studies to present credentials. I present mine. Five years’ life in the tenement districts of New York and other great cities of the Union, in full contact, from the peculiarity of my position, with the poor. During these years I was led to make a study of their reading. This study, to be intelligible, must be prefaced by a few hints on their life and environment. It is useless to deny the often-repeated assertion that their lot in the great cities is hard and crushing. It is a continual struggle for nominal existence. The children commence work at a premature age. Their education is meagre and broken. Marriage is entered in early life, without the slightest provision. To these marriages there is little selection. The girls have been brought up in factories, household restraint frets their soul. Of household economy, so necessary to the city toiler, they know nothing. If ends meet it is well. If not, there is trust and sorrow. The day of their marriage means a few stuffy rooms, badly ventilated, filled with the most bizarre and useless furniture put in by shylock, who will, in the coming years, exact ten times their value. Thus started, children are born, puny and sickly, prey of physician and druggist. If these children survive, at an early age they follow the father and mother by entering foundries and factories to toil life’s weary round away. When they die the family is pauperized for years. It is a common plaint of the tenements that “I would have been worth something if my boy had not died.” Every death is not only a drain on the immediate family, but on their friends, who are supposed to turn out and give “the corpse a decent burial.” The decent burial means coaches, flowers and whiskey. The most casual observer must notice the giant part liquor plays, in the lives of the poor. Liquor and its concomitant, tobacco, in the deadly form of cigarettes, are known to the boy. He has been brought up in that atmosphere. His father has his cheap, ill-smelling cigar and frothy pint for supper. His mother and a few gossiping friends have chased the heavy day with a few pints “because they were dry.” He delights in being the Mercury of the “growler.” Hanging by the balustrade he sips the beer, “just to taste it.” That taste, alas, lingers through life. As he grows older it becomes more refined. His teachers are the sumptuous, dazzling bar-rooms guarding each city corner, while betraying the nation. The owners of these vice palaces are wise in their generation. For his stuffy home, broken furniture and cheerless aspects, they show him wide, airy rooms, polished furniture, bevelled glass mirrors, dazzling light, music, gaiety, companionship, and the illusive charm of revelry. The reading matter in such places is on a par with the other attractions. It is sensational. Its authors are skilled in the base development of the passions. It smacks obscenity, and early dulls the intellect to finer things. To be enmeshed in its threads is the greatest sorrow of a young life. When the bar-room does not allure, there is another siren to be taken into account. It is the promiscuous gathering at the neighbor’s house who has been so unfortunate as to find a music dealer to trust him with a piano at three times its price. Here gather the Romeos and Juliets to

“Sing and dance And parley vous France, Drink beer Alanna And play on the grand piano.”