Part 6

Now Mr. Haweis, guided by that dangerous instinct which drives us on to unwarranted comparisons, does not hesitate to link the fame of Knickerbocker’s “New York” with the fame of “Gulliver’s Travels,” greatly to the disadvantage of the latter. “Irving,” he gravely declares, “has all the satire of Swift, without his sour coarseness.” It would be as reasonable to say, “Apollinaris has all the vivacity of brandy, without its corrosive insalubrity.” The advantages of Apollinaris are apparent at first sight. It sparkles pleasantly, it is harmless, it is refreshing, it can be consumed in large quantities without any particular result. Its merits are incontestible; but when all is said, a few of us still remember Dr. Johnson--“Brandy, sir, is a drink for heroes!” The robust virility of Swift places him forever at the head of English-speaking satirists. Unpardonable as is his coarseness, shameful as is his cynicism, we must still agree with Carlyle that his humor, “cased, like Ben Jonson’s, in a most hard and bitter rind,” is too genuine to be always unloving and malign.

The truth is that, when not confused by critics, we Americans have a sense of proportion as well as a sense of humor, and our keen appreciation of a jest serves materially to modify our national magniloquence, and to lessen our national self-esteem. We are good-tempered, too, where this humor is aroused, and so the frank ignorance of foreigners, the audacious disparagement of our fellow countrymen, are accepted with equal serenity. Newspapers deem it their duty to lash themselves into patriotic rage over every affront, but newspaper readers do not. Surely it is a generous nation that so promptly forgave Dickens for the diverting malice of “Martin Chuzzlewit.” I heard once a young Irishman, who was going to the World’s Fair, ask a young Englishman, who had been, if the streets of Chicago were paved, and the question was hailed with courteous glee by the few Americans present. Better still, I had the pleasure of listening to a citizen of Seattle, who was describing to a group of his townspeople the glories of the Fair, and the magnitude of the city which had brought it to such a triumphant conclusion. “Chicago, gentlemen,” said this enthusiastic traveler in a burst of final eloquence, “Chicago is the Seattle of Illinois.” The splendid audacity of this commended it as much to one city as to the other; and when it was repeated in Chicago, it was received with that frank delight which proves how highly we value the blessed privilege of laughter.

Perhaps it is our keener sense of humor which prompts America to show more honor to her humorists than England often grants. Perhaps it is merely because we are in the habit of according to all our men of letters a larger share of public esteem than a more critical or richly endowed nation would think their labors merited. Perhaps our humorists are more amusing than their English rivals. Whatever may be the cause, it is undoubtedly true that we treat Mr. Stockton with greater deference than England treats Mr. Anstey. We have illustrated articles about him in our magazines, and incidents of his early infancy are gravely narrated, as likely to interest the whole reading public. Now Mr. Anstey might have passed his infancy in an egg, for all the English magazines have to tell us on the subject. His books are bought, and read, and laughed over, and laid aside, and when there is a bitter cadence in his mirth, people are disappointed and displeased. England has always expected her jesters to wear the cap and bells. She would have nothing but foolish fun from Hood, sacrificing his finer instincts and his better parts on the shrine of her own ruthless desires, and yielding him scant return for the lifelong vassalage she exacted. It is fitting that an English humorist should have written the most sombre, the most heart-breaking, the most beautiful and consoling of tragic stories. Du Maurier in “Peter Ibbetson” has taught to England the lesson she needed to learn.

The best-loved workers of every nation are those who embody distinctly national characteristics, whose work breathes a spirit of wholesome national prejudice, who are children of their own soil, and cannot, even in fancy, be associated with any other art or literature save the art or literature of their fatherland. This was the case with honest John Leech, whom England took to her heart and held dear because he was so truly English, because he despised Frenchmen, and mistrusted Irishmen, and hated Jews, and had a splendid British frankness in conveying these various impressions to the world. What would Leech have thought of Peter Ibbetson watching with sick heart the vessels bound for France! What a contrast between the cultured sympathy of Du Maurier’s beautiful drawings, and the real, narrow affection which Leech betrays even for his Staffordshire roughs, who are British roughs, be it rememberd, and not without their stanch and sturdy British virtues. He does not idealize them in any way. He is content to love them as they are. Neither does Mr. Barrie endeavor to describe Thrums as a place where any but Thrums people could ever have found life endurable; yet he is as loyal in his affection for that forbidding little hamlet as if it were Florence the fair. Bret Harte uses no alluring colors with which to paint his iniquitous mining camps, but he is the brother at heart of every gambler and desperado in the diggings. Humanity is a mighty bond, and nationality strengthens its fibres. We can no more imagine Bret Harte amid Jane Austen’s placid surroundings, than we can imagine Dr. Holmes in a mining-camp, or Henry Fielding in Boston. Just as the Autocrat springs from Puritan ancestors, and embodies the intellectual traditions of New England, so Tom Jones, in his riotous young manhood, springs from that lusty Saxon stock, of whose courage, truthfulness, and good-tempered animalism he stands the most splendid representative. “The old order is passed and the new arises;” but Sophia Western has not yet yielded her place in the hearts of men to the morbid and self-centred heroines of modern fiction. Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, perhaps, belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs--“the nicest little delicate things--rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit.” Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London streets,

“Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,”

rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without peer.

THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY: A SPECULATION.

Mr. Frederick Harrison, in a caustic little paper on the Æsthete, has taken occasion to say some severely truthful things anent the dreary grandeur of rich men’s houses, where each individual object is charming in itself, and out of harmony with all the rest. “I believe,” he observes sadly, “that the camel will have passed through the eye of the needle before the rich man shall have found his way to enter the Kingdom of Beauty. It is a hard thing for him to enjoy art at all. The habits of the age convert him into a patron, and the assiduity of the dealers deprive him of peace.”

Is it, then, the mere desire to be obliging which induces a millionaire to surround himself with things which he does not want, which nobody else wants, and which are perpetually in the way of comfort and pleasure? Does he build and furnish his house to support the dealers, to dazzle his friends, or to increase his own earthly happiness and well-being? The serious fashion in which he goes to work admits of no backsliding, no merciful deviations from a relentless luxury. I have seen ghastly summer palaces, erected presumably for rest and recreation, where the miserable visitor was conducted from a Japanese room to a Dutch room, and thence to something Early English or Florentine; and such a jumble of costly incongruities, of carved scrolls and blue tiles and bronze screens and stained glass, was actually dubbed a home. A home! The guest, surfeited with an afternoon’s possession, could escape to simpler scenes; but the master of the house was chained to all that tiresome splendor for five months of the year, and the sole compensation he appeared to derive from it was the saturnine delight of pointing out to small processions of captive friends every detail which they would have preferred to overlook. It is a painful thing, at best, to live up to one’s bricabrac, if one has any; but to live up to the bricabrac of many lands and of many centuries is a strain which no wise man would dream of inflicting upon his constitution.

Perhaps the most unlovely circumstance about the “palatial residences” of our country is that everything in them appears to have been bought at once. Everything is equally new, and equally innocent of any imprint of the owner’s personality. He has not lived among his possessions long enough to mould them to his own likeness, and very often he has not even selected them himself. I have known whole libraries purchased in a week, and placed _en masse_ upon their destined shelves; whole rooms furnished at one fell swoop with all things needful, from the chandelier in the ceiling to the Dresden figures in the cabinet. I have known people who either mistrusted their own tastes, or who had no tastes to mistrust, and so surrendered their houses to upholsterers and decorators, giving them _carte blanche_ to do their best or worst. A room which has been the unresisting prey of an upholsterer is, on the whole, the saddest thing that money ever bought; yet its deplorable completeness calls forth rapturous commendations from those who can understand no natural line of demarcation between a dwelling-place and a shop. The same curious delight in handsome things, apart from any beauty or fitness, has resulted in our over-ornamented Pullman cars, with their cumbrous and stuffy hangings; and in the aggressive luxury of our ocean steamers, where paint and gilding run riot, and every scrap of wall space bears its burden of inappropriate decoration. To those for whom a sea voyage is but a penitential pilgrimage, the fat frescoed Cupids and pink roses of the saloons offer no adequate compensation for their sufferings; whitewash and hangings of sackcloth would harmonize more closely with their sentiments. Yet these ornate embellishments pursue them now even to the solitude of their staterooms, and the newest steamers boast of cabins where the wretched traveler, too ill to arise from his berth, may be solaced by Cupids of his own frisking nakedly over the wash-bowl, and by pink roses in profusion festooning his narrow cell. If he can look at them without loathing, he is to be envied his unequaled serenity of mind.

It is strange that the authors who have written so much about luxury, whether they praise it satirically, like Mandeville, or condemn it very seriously, like Mr. Goldwin Smith, or merely inquire into its history and traditions, like that careful scholar, M. Baudrillart, should never have been struck with the amount of discomfort it entails. In modern as in ancient times, the same zealous pursuit of prodigality results in the same heavy burden of undesirable possessions. The youthful daughter of Marie Antoinette was allowed, we are told, four pairs of shoes a week; and M. Taine, inveighing bitterly against the extravagances of the French court, has no word of sympathy to spare for the unfortunate little princess, condemned by this ruthless edict always to wear new shoes. Louis XVI. had thirty doctors of his own; but surely no one will be found to envy him this royal superfluity. He also had a hundred and fifty pages, who were probably a terrible nuisance; and two chair-carriers, who were paid twenty thousand livres a year to inspect his Majesty’s chairs, which duty they solemnly performed twice a day, whether they were wanted or not. The Cardinal de Rohan had all his kitchen utensils of solid silver, which must have given as much satisfaction to his cooks as did Nero’s golden fishing-hooks to the fish he caught with them. M. Baudrillart describes the feasts of Elagabalus as if their only fault was their excess; but the impartial reader, scanning each unpalatable detail, comes to a different conclusion. Thrushes’ brains, and parrots’ heads, peas mashed with grains of gold, beans fricasseed with morsels of amber, and rice mixed with pearls do not tempt one’s fancy as either nourishing or appetizing diet; while the crowning point of discomfort was reached when revolving roofs threw down upon the guests such vast quantities of roses that they were well-nigh smothered. Better a dish of herbs, indeed, than all this dubious splendor. Nothing less enjoyable could have been invented in the interests of hospitality, save only that mysterious banquet given by Solomon the mighty, where all the beasts of the earth and all the demons of the air were summoned by his resistless talisman to do honor to the terrified and miserable banqueters.

“Le Superflu, chose très-nécessaire,” to quote Voltaire’s delightful phrase, is a difficult thing to handle with propriety and grace. Where the advantages of early training and inherited habits of indulgence are lacking, men who endeavor to spend a great deal of money show a pitiful incapacity for the task. They spend it, to be sure, but only in augmenting their own and their neighbors’ discomfort; and even this they do in a blundering, unimaginative fashion, almost painful to contemplate. The history of Law’s Bubble, with its long train of fabulous and fleeting fortunes, illustrates the helplessness of men to cope with suddenly acquired wealth. The Parisian nabob who warmed up a ragout with burning bank notes, that he might boast of how much it cost him, was sadly stupid for a Frenchman; but he was kinder to himself, after all, than the house-painter who, bewildered with the wealth of Fortunatus, could think of nothing better to do with it than to hire ninety supercilious domestics for his own misusage and oppression. Since the days of Darius, who required thirty attendants to make his royal bed, there probably never were people more hopelessly in one another’s way than that little army of ninety servants awaiting orders from an artisan. The only creature capable of reveling in such an establishment was the author of “Coningsby” and “Lothair,” to whom long rows of powdered footmen, “glowing in crimson liveries,” were a spectacle as exhilarating as is a troop of Horse Guards to persons of a more martial cast of mind. Readers of “Lothair” will remember the home-coming of that young gentleman to Muriel Towers, where the house steward, and the chief butler, and the head gardener, and the lord of the kitchen, and the head forester, and the grooms of the stud and of the chambers stand in modest welcome behind the distinguished housekeeper, “who curtsied like the old court;” while the underlings await at a more “respectful distance” the arrival of their youthful master, whose sterling insignificance must have been painfully enhanced by all this solemn anticipation. “Even the mountains fear a rich man,” says that ominous Turkish proverb which breathes the corruption of a nation; but it would have been a chicken-hearted molehill that trembled before such a homunculus as Lothair.

The finer adaptability of women makes them a little less uncomfortable amid such oppressive surroundings, and their tamer natures revolt from ridiculous excess. They listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of Polonius, and their habit is occasionally costlier than their purses can buy; witness that famous milliner’s bill for fifteen thousand pounds, which was disputed in the French courts during the gilded reign of Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punishment of their extravagances falls on themselves or on their husbands. They do not, as is the fashion with men, make their belongings a burden to their friends. It is seldom the mistress of a curio-laden house who insists with tireless perseverance on your looking at everything she owns; though it was a woman, and a provincial actress at that, raised by two brilliant marriages to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who came to Abbotsford accompanied by a whole retinue of servants and several private physicians, to the mingled amusement and despair of Sir Walter. And it was a flower girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired wealth in the most sumptuous entertainments ever known even to that city of costly caprice. But for stupid and meaningless luxury we must look, after all, to men: to Caligula, whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank out of an ivory trough; to Condé, who spent three thousand crowns for jonquils to deck his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of Albuquerque, who had forty silver ladders among his utterly undesirable possessions. Even in the matter of dress and fashion, they have exceeded the folly of women. It is against the gallants of Spain, and not against their wives, that the good old gossip James Howell inveighs with caustic humor. The Spaniard, it would seem, “tho’ perhaps he had never a shirt to his back, yet must he have a toting huge swelling ruff around his neck,” for the starching of which exquisitely uncomfortable article he paid the then enormous sum of twenty shillings. It was found necessary to issue a royal edict against these preposterous decorations, which grew larger and stiffer every year, even children of tender age wearing their miniature instruments of torture. “Poverty is a most odious calling,” sighs Burton with melancholy candor; but it is not without some small compensations of its own. To realize them, we might compare one of Murillo’s dirty, smiling, half-naked beggar boys with an Infanta by Velasquez, or with Moreelzee’s charming and unhappy little Princess, who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-trimmed stomacher, gazes at us with childish dignity from the wall of Amsterdam’s museum. Or we might remember the pretty story of Meyerbeer’s little daughter, who, after watching for a long time the gambols of some ragged children in the street, turned sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic resignation, “It is a great misfortune to have genteel parents.”

LECTURES.

“Few of us,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot in one of his most cynical moods, “can bear the theory of our amusements. It is essential to the pride of man to believe that he is industrious.”

Now, is it industry or a love of sport which makes us sit in long and solemn rows in an oppressively hot room, blinking at glaring lights, breathing a vitiated air, wriggling on straight and narrow chairs, and listening, as well as heat and fatigue and discomfort will permit, to a lecture which might just as well have been read peacefully by our own firesides? Do we do this thing for amusement, or for intellectual gain? Outside, the winter sun is setting clearly in a blue-green sky. People are chatting gayly in the streets. Friends are drinking cups of fragrant tea in pleasant lamp-lit rooms. There are concerts, perhaps, or _matinées_, where the deft comedian provokes continuous laughter. No; it is not amusement that we seek in the lecture-hall. Too many really amusing things may be done on a winter afternoon. Too many possible pleasures lie in wait for every spare half-hour. We can harbor no delusions on that score.

Is it industry, then, that packs us side by side in serried Amazonian ranks, broken here and there by a stray and downcast man? But on the library shelves stand thick as autumn leaves the unread books. Hidden away in obscure corners are the ripe old authors whom we know by name alone. The mist of an unspoken tongue veils from us the splendid treasures of antiquity, and we comfort ourselves with glib commonplaces about “the sympathetic study of translations.” No; it can hardly be the keen desire of culture which makes us patient listeners to endless lectures. Culture is not so easy of access. It is not a thing passed lightly from hand to hand. It is the reward of an intelligent quest, of delicate intuitions, of a broad and generous sympathy with all that is best in the world. It has been nobly defined by Mr. Symonds as “the raising of the intellectual faculties to their highest potency by means of conscious training.” We cannot gain this fine mastery over ourselves by absorbing--or forgetting--a mass of details upon disconnected subjects,--“a thousand particulars,” says Addison, “which I would not have my mind burdened with for a Vatican.” If we will sit down and seriously try to reckon up our winnings in years of lecture-going, we may yet find ourselves reluctant converts to Mr. Bagehot’s cruel conclusions. It is the old, old search for a royal road to learning. It is the old, old effort at a compromise which cheats us out of both pleasure and profit. It is the old, old determination to seek some short cut to acquirements, which, like “conversing with ingenious men,” may save us, says Bishop Berkeley, from “the drudgery of reading and thinking.”

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other. At times we envy the happy Hermit of Prague, who never saw pen or ink; at times we think somewhat wistfully of the sedate and dignified methods of the past, when students, to use Sir Walter Scott’s illustration, paid their tickets at the door, instead of scrambling over the walls to distinction. It shows a good deal of agility and self-reliance to scale the walls; and such athletic interlopers, albeit a trifle disordered in appearance, are apt to boast of their unaided prowess: how with “little Latin and less Greek” they have become--not Shakespeares indeed, nor even Scotts--but prominent, very prominent citizens indeed. The notion is gradually gaining ground that common-school education is as good as college education; that extension lectures and summer classes are acceptable substitutes for continuous study and mental discipline; that reading translations of the classics is better, because easier, than reading the classics themselves; and that attending a “Congress” of specialists gives us, in some mysterious fashion, a very respectable knowledge of their specialties. It is after this manner that we enjoy, in all its varied aspects, that energetic idleness which Mr. Bagehot recommends as a deliberate sedative for our restless self-esteem.