Part 9

On their own part, how benevolent are the estranged allies far away! how ready to resume "the league of heart to heart" with some soul a little primal! Any one, indeed, may tame a wild thing by no deeper necromancy than a succession of suppers and of kind words. Animals are disinterested also, and ready to serve without rewards. Ravens are gentle marketers for Elijah; the lions purr about the prophet Daniel; the shyest fish swim into Thoreau's hand; S. Francis, in the tenderest of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and reasons with the wicked wolf who sacks the Umbrian villages. He offers him free and ample maintenance, promises him immunity from the hunters, and brings him down among the women and children, to pledge himself to better behavior on his apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a very great fool: he was only Adam sane again, and interharmonized with the physical universe. The majority of infants still show pleasure at the sight of a beetle, or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills it; but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure is. The fatuous parents, however, are certain to change all that: toads, be it known, produce warts, and beetles sting. A lizard on a tree-trunk, a mink in the creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone wall, (charming persons exclusively minding their own business,) are at all times providentially provided for our sweet little boys to kill. Strange that, whereas, by Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures had our communications with creatures in one kindly language, we should now roam over the face of the earth, everywhere accosting our demonstrable superiors with a gun! Mr. Bryan, candidate for the Presidency of the United States, went into the forest, the other day, for rest and recreation, and had a stroke of luck: he shot something. It was a beautiful doe. We learn from the newspapers that she had "stood looking at him, without any fear." Here is your typical high treason in these nice matters. Who will say but that the doe was about to give some sign? _Ça donne furieusement à penser._ Blind bullies, sodden usurpers that we are! It is our dense policy to rebuff the touching advances of our old allies and kindred. Not Rhoecus only instinctively bruises the ambassador bee, and stifles the immortal message.

If the Oriental religions have any mission to discharge in our behalf, let them teach us speedily, through any gracious superstition whatsoever, their grave respect for animal life. When we are thoroughly converted, we shall not only cease to vivisect, but manumit our slaves of the exhibition-hall and the Zoo: we shall hear no longer from the lion-house the fell foreboding sound, as of Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring the gods for vengeance upon Rome. The captives have borne their fate, yet not quite dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, day by day, something of themselves hard to part with; and they know it: but they are no atheists. Outside is the hateful city, but the sun also, bringing strange fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. So much lies back of them, in that cell of humiliation, where they were not born! What if there should be freedom again for them, beyond death? Some thought as profound surges this morning in a vast antiphonal cry among the tanks and cages, and shakes, in passing, the soul of man.

"O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum, O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem."

1896.

ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS

IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its fair showing, it seems incredible that the important thesis hereto affixed as a title went a-begging among those hair-splitting philosophers. Since Aristotle himself overlooked it, Duns Scotus and the noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de Hohenheim himself, were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon of whose understanding was much larger than the hemisphere of this world," neither unearthed the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.

It is reserved therefore, for some modern inquirer to establish, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were theoretical merely; and at what age the grandams (for the condition of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to begin operations.

It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle and enfeebled: whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this new, leisurely, mild, and genteel trade could be acquired with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo leading hosts when past his October, are kittenish and irreverend figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother, learning, with melancholy energy, to suck eggs.

We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses, who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night. But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the shaggy lords of creation, by whom the innutritious properties of the shell were happily unsuspected.

By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved? Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history. One bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage under consideration permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have

"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"

and which has come even to the notice of grave inductive theologians: _videlicet_, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority of existence. For had it been otherwise, one's grandmother would been early acquainted with the very article which her posterity recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care, they taught her to utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her time of life.

Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as did the bulla of the lad, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of the social code. But the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent, austere, meditative pastime, is no more, and the glory of grandams is extinguished forever.

The dreadful civility of our western woodsmen, the popular dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting,--the casting of eggs wherefrom the element of youth is wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears to be a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the world, among disagreeing kinswomen; the very primordial battle, where reloading was superfluous, where every shell told, whose blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail. What havoc over the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies! What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts trickled unwelcome moisture: a terror not unshared in the recesses of the coast:--

"_Intus aquæ dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo, Nympharum domus._"

One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the superb spirits of Richelieu and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the great Revolution. What marvel, if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of the "she-citizens," they vowed never, never to teach another grandmother to suck eggs! So it was, maybe, that the abused custom was lost from the earth.

Nay, more; its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. _Sus Minervam_ is Cicero's elegant equivalent; and Partridge says to Tom Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster: "Polly Matete cry town is my daskalon": the English whereof runneth: Teach your grandmother how to suck eggs! Is not the phrase the cream of scorn, the catchword of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a one-year's colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into the most amiable of professions, was nothing better, in memory, than an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to aspire now to the chair of that professorship.

Let some reformer, who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not averse to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of his regard from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar sneer. Shall such be thy mission, reader? We would wish the extended acquaintance with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the liberal palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_; and joy for many a year of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life; but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our English speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.

1885.

WILFUL SADNESS IN LITERATURE

"Leave things so prostitute, And take the Alcaic lute!" BEN JONSON.

MR. MATTHEW ARNOLD, in the preface to the first edition of his collected poems (1853) withdrew from circulation, and gave reasons for withdrawing, his splendid _Empedocles on Etna_. Nothing in Mr. Arnold's career did him more honor than that fine scrupulousness leading him to decry his dramatic masterpiece as too mournful, too introspective, too unfruitful of the cheer and courage which it is the business of poets to give to the world. He says of it, that it belongs to a class of faulty representations "in which suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic: the representation of them in poetry is painful also." The same verdict that condemns the stagnant sadness of _Empedocles_, reacts upon Clough's _Dipsychus_, to some of us the most attractive of modern monodies, on Marlowe's _Faustus_, and on _Hamlet_ itself. But every one of these is an inestimable experience to the happy and the virtuous who love the intimate study of humanity, and are made, by the perusal, more thoughtful and tender. On none but general considerations, could Mr. Arnold have attempted to suppress _Empedocles_. The great rules of æsthetics, as for ethics, must be for the many, not for the few; and the many are neither happy nor virtuous: and it may well seem a sort of treachery in a man of genius to speak aloud at all, in our vast society of the desponding and the unspiritual, unless he can speak the helping word. This cannot be sufficiently insisted upon before young writers, who are too ready to burst in upon us with their Ahs and Welladays, and to set up, at twenty, for jaded cynics, and lovers who have loved, according to their own pinched measure, too well. Some public censor, a Stoic having a heart, and perfect control of it, should be appointed, in every township, to kill off whatever is uselessly doleful, in the egg, and spread abroad the right idea of what is fit to be uttered in this valley of tears. The elect should be supplied with Empedocleian extras: but the multitude which can be impressed by their intrinsic evil should never be incited to approach their extrinsic beauty.

The play which leaves us miserable and bewildered, the harrowing social lesson leading nowhere, the transcript from commonplace life in which nothing is admirable but the faithful skill of the author,--these are bad morals because they are bad art. With them ranks the invertebrate poetry of two and three generations ago, which has bequeathed its sickly taint to its successor in popular favor, our modern minor fiction. Authors are, in a sense, the universal burden-bearers: those who can carry much vicariously, without posing or complaining. Mr. Arnold's penance for his melancholy is a noble spectacle; and it will always do what he feared _Empedocles_ would fail to do, "inspirit and rejoice the reader." The ancients stepped securely in this matter of sadness; for piety, retribution, awe, spring from every agony of Oedipus and Orestes. Many of the Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible; but they compel men to think, and teach more humanities than a university course. Mr. Meredith's influence, in our own day, is not such as will induce you to sit shaking your maudlin head over yourself and all creation; neither--need it be added?--is Mr. Stevenson's. Mr. Henry James has just said of Mr. Lowell: "He is an erect fighting figure on the side of optimism and beauty." What made Browning exceedingly popular at last, was his courage in overthrowing blue devils.

"What had I on earth to do With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?"

His many and unique merits have small share in the result.

Now, wilful sadness, as Plato thinks, as the Schoolmen heartily thought after him, is nothing less than an actual crime. Sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly uttered, and adjusted, in the utterance, to the eternal laws, is not so. It is well to conceal the merely painful, as did the Greek audiences and the masters of their drama. That critic would be crazy, or excessively sybaritic, who would bar out the tragic from the stage, the studio, the orchestra, or the library shelf. Melancholy, indeed, is inseparable from the highest art. We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery over it in the least, as well as in the greatest: a melancholy like that of Burns, truth itself, native dignity itself; or the Virgilian melancholy of Tennyson in his sweet broodings over the abysses of our unblest life, and the turn of his not hopeless thought and phrase. We can demand, in these matters, the insincerity of the too-little, rather than the cant of the too-much. The danger of expressing despondency is extreme. The maudlin shoots like a parasite from the most moving themes, and laughter dogs us in our rapt mood. It was not without reason that Thackeray made fun of Werther. What Sidney sweetly calls--

"Poore Petrarch's long-deceasèd woes,"

stirred up the scepticism of one Leigh Hunt, and of the indelicate public after him. No poet can put fully into words the ache and stress of human passion: no very wise poet will ever try to do so, save by the means of reserves, elisions, evasions. The pathos which goes deep is generally a plain statement, not a reflection. The old ballad, _Waly, Waly_, for instance, is a terrible thing to get away from, dry-eyed. Nothing is so poignant, at times, in poetry, as a mere obituary announcement. Hear the long throbbing lines of the old elegy supposed to be by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke:

"Learning her light hath lost, Valor hath slain her knight: Sidney is dead, dead is my friend, dead is the world's delight."

Or Chapman:

"For now no more of Oeneus' race survived: they all were gone. No more his royal self did live; no more his noble son, The golden Meleager now: their glasses all were run."

The heartbreaking climax of _Lear_, the bursting-point of so much grandeur and so much suffering, is a dying commonplace almost grotesque: "Pray you, undo this button." But to harrow us is another affair altogether. Plato could never forgive a subject not inevitable, chosen simply because it is in itself piteous or startling, and invites the rhetorical gabble which its creator, after one fashion or another, can spend upon it.

The French and their followers have driven us into a demand for decency, and unmuzzled pessimism is no more decent than the things oftener named and contested by our worthiest critics. What use have we for any Muse, be she the most accomplished in the world, who lives but to be, in a charming phrase of Southey's, "soothed with delicious sorrow"? Art has little to do with her: for art is made of seemly abstinences. The moment it speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases to represent a choice and a control of its own material, ceases to be, in short, an authority and a mystery, and prefers to set up for a mere Chinese copy of life,--just so soon its birthright is transferred. "I answer paradoxically, but truly, I think truly," that even Beauty has her responsibilities, and Art her ideals of conduct. Nay, she has her definite dogma. "Our only chance," says Addington Symonds in a private letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, "seems to me to maintain, against all appearances, that evil can never, and in no way, be victorious."

We owe our gratitude to the men of letters who deliberately undertake to be gay: for nobody expects unconscious and spontaneous gayety in books nowadays. The modern spirit has seen to that. No thanks of ours are too good even for the bold bad Mr. Henley, who is so acrid towards Americans: for he is the one living poet already famous, who has struck, and means to strike, the very note of "How happy is he born and taught," and "Shall I, wasting in despair." But if our dilettantes lament a withered wildflower, or praise a young face, they feel that they have done enough towards clearing the air, and justifying "the ways of God to man." It is inconvenient to have the large old fundamental feelings: to be energetic, or scornful, or believing. The fashionable poetic utterance is dejected, and of consummate refinement; _le besoin de sentir_ is about it like a strange fragrance. We have had disheartening modern music, and of the highest order, too long. Beginning with Byron, and, in a far different manner, with Shelley, we may count those problems of our life few indeed which have lacked the poor solution of a protest or a tear. Wordsworth was the last great man

----"contented if he might enjoy The things that others understand."

Yet Wordsworth counts for little in this case, since he had no marked constitutional sensitiveness. The lyres of "Parnaso mount" have grown passive and unpartisan. They have ceased to rouse us, and we have ceased to wonder at them because of it. To sigh, to scowl, to whimper, is the ambition of minstrels in the magazines; of the three, whimpering is the favorite. Now, to "make a scene" is not mannerly, even on paper. Before the implacable Fates we may as well be collected. It seems less than edifying to ask the cold one, though in enchanting numbers, whether her bosom be of marble, or of her ghost whether it will not visit us in the garden. Yet such attitudinizing pathos, impossible so long as faith was general, and true emotion therefore unexhausted, the pathos of the decadence, the exaggeration of normal moods and affectation of more than is felt, _l'expression forte des sentiments faibles_,--is the prevailing feature of current verse. Rather, to be quite accurate, it was the prevailing feature a moment ago. There are, in the east, other portents more significant. It is indicative not only of his middle age, but of something touching ourselves and our to-morrow, that Mr. Swinburne, let us say, is less stormy and maledictionary, and longs not so incessantly to be laid in the exquisite burial-places of his imagination. They that wail well in duodecimo may presently be accused of giddiness and shallow thought. For literature, at last, is picking up heart: health and spring and fight are re-establishing themselves. Out of the alcoves of time, certain sunny faces of old look fatherly and smiling, as the vapors disperse. Hail also, young meek out-riders, morning-colored contemporaries! At least, you are of excellent cheer. You have done with sourness, and

----"hear it sweep In distance down the dark and savage vale."

Change is at hand. The Maypole is up in Bookland.

1892.

AN INQUIRENDO INTO THE WIT AND OTHER GOOD PARTS OF HIS LATE MAJESTY, KING CHARLES THE SECOND

SCENE: Saint James's Park, on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of May. Edward Clay, with a twig of oak stuck in his hat is on the bank of the little lake, feeding the water-fowl. Percy Wetherell, a fellow-author, and Rhoda, his wife, who are crossing the bridge, perceive him.

MRS. WETHERELL

See! there's our dear Mr. Clay. What is he doing that for?

WETHERELL

The motive must be pure benevolence. Give me a little start, and I will run him down. [_Followed by Rhoda, he goes down the steps, close to his friend's shoulder, observes the decoration, and utters in a sepulchral tone: "Long live Oliver!" Clay looks up, and smiles, still breaking his biscuit. Finally he speaks_:]

CLAY

You have guessed it: I am keeping Restoration Day. It struck me as a pleasing rite to come up here and feast the descendants of King Charles the Second's water-fowl. I have to lecture on him to-night.

MRS. WETHERELL

King Charles the Second! Why, Mr. Clay, I thought he was the dreadfullest person!

WETHERELL

Easy now, my only love: don't hurt Edward's little feelings. He is a notorious Carolian specialist, a quasi-Cavalier, a pre-Jacobite, a seventeenth-centurion, and all that.

MRS. WETHERELL

Oh! a Royalist, a White Rose man? I never dreamed it.

CLAY

Nothing so concrete, Mrs. Wetherell. Only, you see, I honestly like the rogue; people don't understand him. If I had your husband's leisure, I should never rest until I had moused in the archives at first hand, and said the authentic last good word for him. There would be no end of fun in it, and fun and justice are a fine pair.

WETHERELL

That green bird on your boot will choke himself. It is wonderful how tame they are!--I thought you knew more than anybody alive, on that subject, these ten years.

CLAY

I might say with Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: "I have thought more than I have read, and read more than I have written."

MRS. WETHERELL

Do you really mean to make people like him? They taught us in the school-books that he was a bad good-for-nothing king.

WETHERELL

Perhaps, as Mark Twain might allege, he did not choose to consider himself as being in "the king business." He was a choice wag, at any rate.

CLAY

Yes: though not much worse than you. And he was the last Mind we have seen, or shall ever see, on the throne.

WETHERELL

Owch! Treason! She is all she should be, God bless her.

CLAY