Part 5

Two curious stories having relation to the ghostly character of the mirror will best serve to illustrate my text. The first is found in Shelley’s journal; one of the inexhaustible store supplied to the poet by “Monk” Lewis, and is about a German lady who, dancing with her lover at a ball, saw in a glass the reflection of her dead husband gazing at her with stern, reproachful eyes. She is said to have died of terror. The second tale is infinitely more picturesque. In the church of Santa Maria Novella at Florence is the beautiful tomb of Beata Villana, the daughter of a noble house, and married in extreme youth to one of the family of Benintendi. Tradition says that she was very fair, and that, being arrayed one night for a festival, she stood looking long in the mirror, allured by her own loveliness. Suddenly her eyes were opened, and she saw, close by her side, a demon dressed with costly raiment like her own, and decked with shining jewels like those she wore upon her arms and bosom. Appalled by this vision of evil, Beata Villana fled from the vanities of the world, and sought refuge in a convent, where she died a holy death in 1360, being then but twenty-eight years of age. Her marble effigy rests on its carven bed in the old Florentine church, and smiling angels draw back the curtains to show her sweet, dead beauty, safe at last from the perilous paths of temptation. In such a legend as this there lingers for us still the elements of mystery and of horror which centuries of prosaic progress are powerless to alienate from that dumb witness of our silent, secret hours, the mirror.

GIFTS.

There is a delightful story, which we owe to Charles Lever’s splendid mendacity, of an old English lady who sent to Garibaldi, during that warrior’s confinement at Varignano, a portly pincushion well stocked with British pins. Her enthusiastic countrywomen had already supplied their idol with woolen underwear, and fur-lined slippers, and intoxicating beverages, and other articles equally useful to an abstemious prisoner of war in a hot climate; but pins had been overlooked until this thoughtful votary of freedom offered her tribute at its shine.

Absurd though the tale appears, it has its counterparts in more sober annals, and few men of any prominence have not bewailed at times their painful popularity. Sir Walter Scott, who was the recipient of many gifts, had his fair share of vexatious experiences, and laughs at them somewhat ruefully now and then in the pages of his journal. Eight large and very badly painted landscapes, “in great gilded frames,” were given him by one “most amiable and accomplished old lady.” She had ordered them from an impoverished amateur whom she desired to befriend, and then palmed them off on Sir Walter, who was too gentle and generous to protest. A more “whimsical subject of affliction” was the presentation of two emus by a Mr. Harmer, a settler in Botany Bay, to whom Scott had given some useful letters of introduction. “I wish his gratitude had either taken a different turn, or remained as quiescent as that of others whom I have obliged more materially,” writes Sir Walter in his journal. “I at first accepted the creatures, conceiving them, in my ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrots, which, though I do not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure, if hung up in the hall among the armor. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! They might eat up my collection of old arms, for what I know.”

Finally, like the girl who was converted at a revival, and who gave her blue ribbons to her sister because she knew they were taking her to hell, Scott got himself out of the scrape by passing on the emus, as a sort of feudal offering, to the Duke of Buccleugh, and leaving that nobleman to solve as best he could the problem of their maintenance. The whole story is very much like the experience of Mr. James Payn’s lawyer friend, to whom a “grateful orphan” sent from the far East a dromedary, with the pleasant assurance that its hump was considered extremely delicate eating. As this highly respected member of the London bar could not well have the dromedary butchered for the sake of its hump,--even if he had yearned over the dish,--and as he was equally incapable of riding the beast to his office every morning, he considered himself fortunate when the Zoölogical Gardens opened their hospitable gates and the orphan’s tribute disappeared therein, to be seen and heard of no more.

Charles Lamb, on the other hand, if we may trust the testimony of his letters, appears to have derived a keen and kindly pleasure from the more reasonable and modest presents of his friends. Perhaps, like Steele, he looked upon it as a point of morality to be obliged to those who endeavored to oblige him. Perhaps it was easy for one so lovable to detect the honest affection which inspired these varied gifts. It is certain we find him returning genial thanks, now to Hazlitt for a pig, now to Wordsworth for a “great armful” of poetry, and now to Thomas Allsop for some Stilton cheese,--“the delicatest, rainbow-hued, melting piece I ever flavored.” He seems equally gratified with an engraving of Pope sent by Mr. Procter, and with another pig,--“a dear pigmy,” he calls it,--the gift of Mrs. Bruton. Nor is it only in these letters of acknowledgment--wherein courtesy dispenses occasionally with the companionship of truth--that Lamb shows himself a generous recipient of his friends’ good will. He writes to Wordsworth, who has sent him nothing, and expresses his frank delight in some fruit which has been left early that morning at his door:--

“There is something inexpressibly pleasant to me in these presents, be it fruit, or fowl, or brawn, or what not. Books are a legitimate cause of acceptance. If presents be not the soul of friendship, they are undoubtedly the most spiritual part of the body of that intercourse. There is too much narrowness of thinking on this point. The punctilio of acceptance, me-thinks, is too confined and strait-laced. I could be content to receive money, or clothes, or a joint of meat from a friend. Why should he not send me a dinner as well as a desert? I would taste him in all the beasts of the field, and through all creation. Therefore did the basket of fruit of the juvenile Talfourd not displease me.”

It is hard not to envy Talfourd when one reads these lines. It is hard not to envy any one who had the happiness of giving fruit, or cheese, or pigs to Charles Lamb. How gladly would we all have brought our offerings to his door, and have gone away with bounding hearts, exulting in the thought that our pears would deck his table, our pictures his wall, our books his scanty shelves! “People seldom read a book which is given to them,” observes Dr. Johnson, with his usual discouraging acumen; but Lamb found leisure, amid heavy toil, to peruse the numerous volumes which small poets as well as big ones thought fit to send him. He accepted his gifts with a charming munificence which suggests those far-off, fabulous days when presents were picturesque accessories of life; when hosts gave to their guests the golden cups from which they had been drinking; and sultans gave their visitors long trains of female slaves, all beautiful, and carrying jars of jewels upon their heads; and Merlin gave to Gwythno the famous hamper which multiplied its contents an hundredfold, and fed the starving hosts in storm-swept Caradigion. In those brave years, large-hearted men knew how to accept as well as how to give, and they did both with an easy grace for which our modern methods offer no adequate opportunity. Even in the veracious chronicles of hagiology, the old harmonious sentiment is preserved, and puts us to the blush. St. Martin sharing his cloak with the beggar at the gates of Tours was hardly what we delight in calling practical; yet not one shivering outcast only, but all mankind would have been poorer had that mantle been withheld. King Canute taking off his golden crown, and laying it humbly on St. Edmund’s shrine, stirs our hearts a little even now; while Queen Victoria sending fifty pounds to a deserving charity excites in us no stronger sentiment than esteem. It was easier, perhaps, for a monarch to do a gracious and a princely deed when his crown and sceptre were his own property instead of belonging to the state; and picturesqueness, ignore it as we may, is a quality which, like distinction, “fixes the world’s ideals.”

These noble and beautiful benefactions, however, are not the only ones which linger pleasantly in our memories. Gifts there have been, of a humble and domestic kind, the mere recollection of which is a continual delight. I love to think of Jane Austen’s young sailor brother, her “own particular little brother,” Charles, spending his first prize money in gold chains and “topaze crosses” for his sisters. What prettier, warmer picture can be called to mind than this handsome, gallant, light-hearted lad--handsomer, Jane jealously insists, than all the rest of the family--bringing back to his quiet country home these innocent trophies of victory? Surely it was the pleasure Miss Austen felt in that “topaze” cross, that little golden chain, which found such eloquent expression in Fanny Price’s mingled rapture and distress when _her_ sailor brother brought her the amber cross from Sicily, and Edmund Bertram offered her, too late, the chain on which to hang it. It is a splendid reward that lies in wait for boyish generosity when the sister chances to be one of the immortals, and hands down to generations of readers the charming record of her gratitude and love.

By the side of this thoroughly English picture should be placed, in justice and in harmony, another which is as thoroughly German,--Rahel Varnhagen sending to her brother money to bring him to Berlin. The letter which accompanies this sisterly gift is one of the most touching in literature. The brilliant, big-hearted woman is yearning for her kinsman’s face. She has saved the trifling sum required through many unnamed denials. She gives it as generously as if it cost her nothing. Yet with that wise thrift which goes hand in hand with liberality, she warns her brother that her husband knows nothing of the matter. Not that she mistrusts his nature for a moment. He is good and kind, but he is also a man, and has the customary shortsightedness of his sex. “He will think,” she writes, “that I have endless resources, that I am a millionaire, and will forget to economize in the future.”

Ah, painful frugality of the poor Fatherland! Here is nothing picturesque, nor lavish, nor light-hearted, to tempt our jocund fancies. Yet here, as elsewhere, the generous soul refuses to be stinted of its joy; and the golden crown of King Canute is not more charming to contemplate than are the few coins wrested from sordid needs, and given with a glad munificence which makes them splendid as the ransom of a prince.

HUMOR: ENGLISH AND AMERICAN.

Nations, like individuals, stand self-betrayed in their pastimes and their jests. The ancient historians recognized this truth, and thought it well worth their while to gossip pleasantly into the ears of attentive and grateful generations. Cleopatra playfully outwitting Anthony by fastening a salted fish to the boastful angler’s hook is no less clear to us than Cleopatra sternly outwitting Cæsar with the poison of the asp, and we honor Plutarch for confiding both these details to the world. Their verity has nothing to do with their value or our satisfaction. The mediæval chroniclers listened rapturously to the clamor of battle, and found all else but war too trivial for their pens. The modern scholar produces that pitiless array of facts known as constitutional history; and labors under the strange delusion that acts of Parliament, or acts of Congress, reform bills, and political pamphlets represent his country’s life. If this sordid devotion to the concrete suffers no abatement, the intelligent reader of the future will be compelled to reconstruct the nineteenth century from the pages of “Punch” and “Life,” from faded play-bills, the records of the race-track, and the inextinguishable echo of dead laughter.

For man lives in his recreations, and is revealed to us by the search-light of an epigram. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure. The laugh that we enjoy at our own expense betrays us to the rest of the world, and the humorists of England and America have been long employed in pointing out with derisive fingers their own, and not their neighbor’s shortcomings. If we are more reckless in our satire, and more amused at our own wit, it is because we are better tempered, and newer to the game. The delight of being a nation, and a very big nation at that, has not yet with us lost all the charm of novelty, and we pelt one another with ridicule after the joyously aggressive fashion of schoolboys pelting one another with snowballs. Already there is a vast array of seasoned and recognized jokes which are leveled against every city in the land. The culture of Boston, the slowness of Philadelphia, the ostentation of New York, the arrogance and ambition of Chicago, the mutual jealousy of Minneapolis and St. Paul,--these are themes of which the American satirist never wearies, these are characteristics which he has striven, with some degree of success, to make clear to the rest of mankind. Add to them our less justifiable diversion at official corruption and mismanagement, our glee over the blunders and rascalities of the men whom we permit to govern us, and we have that curious combination of keenness and apathy, of penetration and indifference which makes possible American humor.

Now Englishmen, however prone to laugh at their own foibles, do not, as a rule, take their politics lightly. Those whom I have known were most depressingly serious when discussing the situation with friends, and most disagreeably violent when by chance they met an opponent. Neither do they see anything funny in being robbed by corporations; but, with discouraging and unhumorous tenacity, exact payment of the last farthing of debt, fulfilment of the least clause in a charter. Our lenity in such matters is a trait which they fail to understand, and are disinclined to envy. One of the most amusing scenes I ever witnessed was an altercation between an exceedingly clever Englishwoman, who for years has taken a lively part in public measures, and a countrywoman of my own, deeply imbued with that gentle pessimism which insures contentment, and bars reform. The subject under discussion was the street-car service of Philadelphia (which would have been primitive for Asia Minor), and the Englishwoman was expressing in no measured terms her amazement at such comprehensive and unqualified inefficiency. In vain my American friend explained to her that this car-service was one of the most diverting things about our Quaker city, that it represented one of those humorous details which gave Philadelphia its distinctly local color. The Englishwoman declined to be amused. “I do not understand you in the least,” she said gravely. “You have a beautiful city, of which you should be proud. You have disgraceful streets and trams, of which you should be ashamed. Yet you ridicule your city as if you were ashamed of that, and defend your trams as if you were proud of them. If you think it funny to be imposed on, you will never be at a loss for a joke.”

Yet corruption in office, like hypocrisy in religion, has furnished food for mirth ever since King Log and King Stork began their beneficent reigns. Diogenes complained that the people of Athens liked to have the things they should have held most dear pelted with dangerous banter. Kant found precisely the same fault with the French, and even the history of sober England is enlivened by its share of such satiric laughter. “Wood was dear at Newmarket,” said a wit, when Sir Henry Montague received there the white staff which made him Lord High Treasurer of England, for which exalted honor he had paid King James the First full twenty thousand pounds. The jest sounds so light-hearted, so free from any troublesome resentment, that it might have been uttered in America; but it is well to remember that such witticisms pointed unerringly to the tragic downfall of the Stuarts. Indeed, the gayest laugh occasionally rings a death-knell, and so our humorists wield a power which could hardly be entrusted into better hands. “Punch” has the cleanest record of any English journal. It has ever--save for those perverse and wicked slips which cost it the friendship of stouthearted Richard Doyle--allied itself with honor and honesty, and that sane tolerance which is the basis of humor. “Life” has fought an even braver fight, and has been the active champion of all that is helpless and ill-treated, the advocate of all that is honorable and sincere. The little children who crawl, wasted and fever-stricken, through the heated city streets, the animals that pay with prolonged pain for the pleasures of scientific research,--these hapless victims of our advanced civilization find their best friend in this New York comic paper. The girl whose youth and innocence are bartered for wealth in the open markets of matrimony, sees no such vigorous protest against her degradation as in its wholesome pages. It is scant praise to say that “Life” does more to quicken charity, and to purify social corruption than all the religious and ethical journals in the country. This is the natural result of its reaching the proper audience. It has the same beneficent effect that sermons would have if they were preached to the non-church-going people who require them.

When we have learned to recognize the fact that humor does not necessarily imply fun, we will better understand the humorist’s attitude and labors. There is nothing, as a rule, very funny, in the weekly issues of “Punch,” and “Puck,” and “Life.” Many of the jokes ought to be explained in a key like that which accompanied my youthful arithmetic; and those which need no such deciphering are often so threadbare and feeble from hard usage, that it is scarcely decent to exact further service from them. It has been represented to us more than once that the English, being conservative in the matter of amusement, prefer those jests which, like “old Grouse in the gunroom,” have grown seasoned in long years of telling. “Slow to understand a new joke,” says Mrs. Pennell, “they are equally slow to part with one that has been mastered.” But there are some time-honored jests--the young housekeeper’s pie, for example, and the tramp who is unable to digest it--which even a conservative American, if such an anomaly exists, would relinquish dry-eyed and smiling. It is not for such feeble waggery as this that we value our comic journals, but for those vital touches which illuminate and betray the tragic farce called life. “Punch’s” cartoon depicting Bismarck as a discharged pilot, gloomily quitting the ship of state, while overhead the young emperor swaggers and smiles derisively, is in itself an epitome of history, a realization of those brief bitter moments which mark the turning-point of a nation and stand for the satire of success. “Life’s” sombre picture of the young wife bowing her head despairingly over the piano, as though to shut out from her gaze her foolish, besotted husband, is an unflinching delineation of the most sordid, pitiful and commonplace of all daily tragedies. In both these masterly sketches there is a grim humor, softened by kindliness, and this is the key-note of their power. They are as unlike as possible in subject and in treatment, but the undercurrent of human sympathy is the same.

Is it worth while, then, to be so contentious over the superficial contrasts of English and American humor, when both spring from the same seed, and nourish the same fruit? Why should we resent one another’s methods, or deny one another’s success? If, as our critics proudly claim, we Americans have a quicker perception of the ludicrous, the English have a finer standard by which to judge its worth. If we, as a nation, have more humor, they have better humorists, and can point serenely to those unapproached and unapproachable writers of the eighteenth century, whose splendid ringing laughter still clears the murky air. It is true, I am told now and then, with commendable gravity, that such mirth is unbecoming in a refined and critical age, and that, if I would try a little harder to follow the somewhat elusive satire of the modern analyst, I should enjoy a species of pleasantry too delicate or too difficult for laughter. I hesitate to affirm coarsely in reply that I like to laugh, because it is possible to be deeply humiliated by the contempt of one’s fellow-creatures. It is possible also to be sadly confused by new theories and new standards; by the people who tell me that exaggerated types, like Mr. Micawber and Mrs. Gamp, are not amusing, and by the critics who are so good as to reveal to me the depths of my own delusions. “We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English say of us,” writes Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. “We have recovered our balance. We know that since ‘Gulliver’ there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to Knickerbocker’s ‘New York;’ that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the ‘Biglow Papers.’”

Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving to be the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle satire of the American alongside of those trenchant and masterly pages which constitute the landmarks of literature? “Swift,” says Dr. Johnson, with reluctant truthfulness, “must be allowed for a time to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation.” He is a writer whom we may be permitted to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars, still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial lustre of Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope to “recover our balance” by confounding values, a process of self-deception which misleads no one but ourselves.

Curiously enough, at least one Englishman may be found who cordially agrees with Mr. Warner. The Rev. R. H. Haweis has enriched the world with a little volume on American humorists, in which he kindly explains a great deal which we had thought tolerably clear already, as, for example, why Mark Twain is amusing. The authors whom Mr. Haweis has selected to illustrate his theme are Washington Irving, Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Artemus Ward, Mark Twain and Bret Harte; and he arranges this somewhat motley group into a humorous round-table, where all hold equal rank. He is not only generous, he is strictly impartial in his praise; and manifests the same cordial enthusiasm for Boston’s “Autocrat” and for “The Innocents Abroad.” Artemus Ward’s remark to his hesitating audience: “Ladies and gentlemen! You cannot expect to go in without paying your money, but you can pay your money without going in,” delights our kindly critic beyond measure. “Was there ever a wittier motto than this?” he asks, with such good-natured exultation that we have a vague sense of self-reproach at not being more diverted by the pleasantry.