Chapter I: Part 1

ESSAYS IN MINIATURE

Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series.

MERRY TALES.
BY MARK TWAIN.
THE GERMAN EMPEROR AND HIS EASTERN NEIGHBORS.
BY POULTNEY BIGELOW.
PADDLES AND POLITICS DOWN THE DANUBE.
BY POULTNEY BIGELOW.
SELECTED POEMS.
BY WALT WHITMAN.
AUTOBIOGRAPHIA: THE STORY OF A LIFE.
BY WALT WHITMAN.
DON FINIMONDONE: CALABRIAN SKETCHES.
BY ELISABETH CAVAZZA.
THE MASTER OF SILENCE: A ROMANCE.
BY IRVING BACHELLER.
WRITINGS OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS.
EDITED BY PAUL LEICESTER FORD.
ESSAYS IN MINIATURE.
BY AGNES REPPLIER.
MR. BILLY DOWNS AND HIS LIKES.
BY RICHARD MALCOLM JOHNSTON.

Bound in Illuminated Cloth, each, 75 Cents. Complete Set, 10 Volumes, in Box, $7.50.

⁂ _For Sale by all Booksellers, or sent postpaid, on receipt of price, by the Publishers_,

CHAS. L. WEBSTER & CO., NEW YORK.

Fiction, Fact, and Fancy Series

EDITED BY ARTHUR STEDMAN

ESSAYS IN MINIATURE

ESSAYS IN MINIATURE

BY
AGNES REPPLIER

New York
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.
1892

Copyright, 1892,
CHARLES L. WEBSTER & CO.
(_All rights reserved._)

PRESS OF
JENKINS & MCCOWAN,
NEW YORK.

CONTENTS

PAGE

OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS 11

TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER 28

THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES 45

CONVERSATION IN NOVELS 59

A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS 70

A BY-WAY IN FICTION 87

COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE 104

MR. WILDE’S _Intentions_ 121

HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY 129

CHILDREN IN FICTION 144

THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS 157

THE CHARM OF THE FAMILIAR 171

OLD WORLD PETS 182

BATTLE OF THE BABIES 195

THE NOVEL OF INCIDENT 207

ESSAYS IN MINIATURE

OUR FRIENDS, THE BOOKS

There is a short paragraph in Hazlitt’s _Conduct of Life_ that I read very often, and always with fresh delight. He is offering much good counsel to a little lad at school, and when he comes to a matter upon which most counselors are wont to be exceedingly didactic and diffuse—the choice of books—he condenses all he has to say into a few wise and gentle words that are well worth taking to heart:

“As to the works you will have to read by choice or for amusement, the best are the commonest. The names of many of them are already familiar to you. Read them as you grow up with all the satisfaction in your power, and make much of them. It is perhaps the greatest pleasure you will have in life, the one you will think of longest, and repent of least. If my life had been more full of calamity than it has been (much more than yours, I hope, will be) I would live it over again, my poor little boy, to have read the books I did in my youth.”

In all literature there is nothing truer or better than this, and its sad sincerity contrasts strangely with the general tone of the essay, which is somewhat in the manner of Lord Chesterfield. But here, at least, Hazlitt speaks with the authority of one whose books had ever been his friends; who had sat up all night as a child over _Paul and Virginia_, and to whom the mere sight of an odd volume of some good old English author, on a street stall, brought back with keen and sudden rapture the flavor of those early joys which he remembered longest, and repented least. His words ring consolingly in these different days, when we have not only ceased reading what is old, but when—a far greater misfortune—we have forgotten how to read “with all the satisfaction in our power,” and with a simple surrendering of ourselves to the pleasure which has no peer. There are so many things to be considered now besides pleasure, that we have well-nigh abandoned the effort to be pleased. In the first place, it is necessary to “keep up” with a decent proportion of current literature, and this means perpetual labor and speed, whereas idleness and leisure are requisite for the true enjoyment of books. In the second place, few of us are brave enough to withstand the pressure which friends, mentors and critics bring to bear upon us, and which effectually crushes anything like the weak indulgence of our own tastes. The reading they recommend being generally in the nature of a corrective, it is urged upon us with little regard to personal inclination; in fact, the less we like it, the greater our apparent need. There are people in this world who always insist upon others remodeling their diet on a purely hygienic basis; who entreat us to avoid sweets or acids, or tea or coffee, or whatever we chance to particularly like; who tell us persuasively that cress and dandelions will purify our blood; that celery is an excellent febrifuge; that shaddocks should be eaten for the sake of their quinine, and fish for its phosphorus; that stewed fruit is more wholesome than raw; that rice is more nutritious than potatoes;—who deprive us, in a word, of that hearty human happiness which should be ours when dining. Like Mr. Woodhouse, they are capable of having the sweetbreads and asparagus carried off before our longing eyes, and baked apples provided as a substitute.

It is in the same benevolent spirit that kind-hearted critics are good enough to warn us against the books we love, and to prescribe for us the books we ought to read. With robust assurance they offer to give our tutelage their own personal supervision, and their disinterested zeal carries them occasionally beyond the limits of discretion. I have been both amazed and gratified by the lack of reserve with which these unknown friends have volunteered to guide my own footsteps through the perilous paths of literature. They are so urgent, too, not to say severe, in their manner of proffering assistance: “To Miss Repplier we would particularly recommend”—and then follows a list of books of which I dare say I stand in open need; but which I am naturally indisposed to consider with much kindness, thrust upon me, as they are, like paregoric or a porous plaster. If there be people who can take their pleasures medicinally, let them read by prescription and grow fat! But let me rather keep for my friends those dear and familiar volumes which have given me a large share of my life’s happiness. If they are somewhat antiquated and out of date, I have no wish to flout their vigorous age. A book, Hazlitt reminds us, is not, like a woman, the worse for being old. If they are new, I do not scorn them for a fault which is common to all their kind. _Paradise Lost_ was once new, and was regarded as a somewhat questionable novelty. If they come from afar, or are compatriots of my own, they are equally well-beloved. There can be no aliens in the ranks of literature, no national prejudice in an honest enjoyment of art. The book, after all, and not the date or birthplace of its author, is of material importance. “It seems ungracious to refuse to be a _terræ filius_,” says Mr. Arnold; “but England is not all the world.” Neither, for that matter, is America, nor even Russia. The universe is a little wider and a little older than we are pleased to think, and to have lived long and traveled far does not necessarily imply inferiority. The volume that has crossed the seas, the volume that has survived its generation, stand side by side with their new-born American brother, and there is no lack of harmony in such close companionship. Books of every age and of every nation show a charming adaptability in their daily intercourse; and, if left to themselves, will set off each other’s merits in the most amiable and disinterested manner, each one growing better by contact with its excellent neighbor. It is only when the patriotic critic comes along, and stirs up dissensions in their midst, that this peaceful atmosphere is rent with sudden discord; that the English book grows disdainful and supercilious; the American, aggressive and sarcastic; the French, malicious and unkind. It is only when we apply to them a test which is neither wise nor worthy that they show all their bad qualities, and afford a wrangling ground for the ill-natured reviewers of two continents.

There is a story told of the Russian poet, Pushkin, which I like to think true, because it is so pretty. When he was carried home fatally wounded from the duel which cost him his life, his young wife, who had been the innocent cause of the tragedy, asked him whether there were no relatives or friends whom he wished to see summoned to his bedside. The dying man lifted his heavy eyes to the shelf where stood his favorite books, and murmured faintly in reply, “Farewell, my friends.” When we remember that Pushkin lived before Russian literature had become a great and dispiriting power, when we realize that he had never been ordered by critics to read Turguéneff, never commanded severely to worship Tolstoi or be an outcast in the land, never even reveled in the dreadful gloom of Dostoïevsky, it seems incredible to the well-instructed that he should have loved his books so much. It is absolutely afflicting to think that many of these same volumes were foreign, were romantic, perhaps even cheerful in their character; that they were not his mentors, his disciplinarians, his guides to a higher and sadder life, but only his “friends.” Why, Hazlitt himself could have used no simpler term of endearment. Charles Lamb might have uttered the very words when he closed his patient eyes in the dull little cottage at Edmonton. Sir Walter Scott might have murmured them on that still September morn when the clear rippling of the Tweed hushed his tired heart to rest. I think that Shelley bade some swift, unconscious farewell to all the dear delights of reading, when he thrust into his pocket the little volume of Keats, with its cover bent hastily backward, and rose, still dreamy with fairy-land, to face a sudden death. I think that Montaigne bade farewell to the fourscore “every-day books” that were his chosen companions, before turning serenely away from the temperate pleasures of life.

For all these men loved literature, not contentiously, nor austerely, but simply as their friend. All read with that devout sincerity which precludes petulance, or display, or lettered asceticism, the most dismal self-torment in the world. In that delicious dialogue of Landor’s between Montaigne and Scaliger, the scholar intimates to the philosopher that his library is somewhat scantily furnished, and that he and his father between them have written nearly as many volumes as Montaigne possesses on his shelves. “Ah!” responds the sage with gentle malice, “to write them is quite another thing; but one reads books without a spur, or even a pat from our Lady Vanity.”

Could anything be more charming, or more untrue than this? Montaigne, perched tranquilly on his Guyenne hill-slope, may have escaped the goad; but we, the victims of our swifter day, know too well how remorselessly Lady Vanity pricks us round the course. Are we not perpetually showing our paces at her command, and under the sharp incentive of her heel? Yet Charles Lamb, in the heart of London, preserved by some fine instinct the same intellectual freedom that Montaigne cherished in sleepy Gascony. He too was fain to read for pleasure, and his unswerving sincerity is no less enviable than the clearness of his literary insight. Indeed, while many of his favorite authors may have no message for our ears, yet every line in which he writes his love is pregnant with enjoyment; every word expresses subtly a delicious sense of satisfaction. The soiled and torn copies of _Tom Jones_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_ from the circulating library, which speak eloquently to him of the thousand thumbs that have turned over each well-worn page; the “kind-hearted play-book” which he reaches down from some easy shelf; the old _Town and Country Magazine_ which he finds in the window-seat of an inn; the “garrulous, pleasant history” of Burnet; the “beautiful, bare narrative” of _Robinson Crusoe_; the antiquated, time-stained edition of “that fantastic old great man,” Robert Burton; the Folio Beaumont and Fletcher—all these and many more are Lamb’s tried friends, and he writes of them with lingering affection. He is even able, through some fine choice of words, to convey to us the precise degree and quality of pleasure which they yield him, and which he wins us to share, not by exhortations or reproaches, but gently, with alluring smiles, and hinted promises of reward. How craftily he holds each treasured volume before our eyes! How apt the brief, caressing sentence in which he sings its praises!—“The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.” “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. Who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.” “Winter evenings—the world shut out—with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the _Tempest_, or his own _Winter’s Tale_.”

In fact, the knowledge of when to read a book is almost as valuable as the knowledge of what book to read, and Lamb, as became a true lover of literature, realized instinctively that certain hours and certain places seem created expressly for the supreme enjoyment of an author, who yields to these harmonious surroundings his best and rarest gifts. To pick up _The Faerie Queene_ as a stop-gap in the five or six impatient minutes before dinner, to carry _Candide_ into the “serious avenues” of a cathedral, to try and skim over Richardson when in the society of a lively girl—Lamb knew too well that these unholy feats are the accomplishments of an intellectual acrobat, not of a modest and simple-hearted reader. Hazlitt also was keenly alive to the influences of time and place. His greatest delight in poring over the books of his youth lay in the many recollections they aroused of scenes and moments rich in vanished joys. He opened a faded, dusty volume, and behold! the spot where first he read it, the day it was received, the feeling of the air, the fields, the sky, all returned to him with charming distinctness, and with them returned his first rapturous impression of that long-closed, long-neglected romance: “Twenty years are struck off the list, and I am a child again.” Mr. Pater lays especial emphasis on the circumstances under which our favorite authors are read. “A book,” he says, “like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way; and often, by some happy accident, ranks with us for something more than its independent value.” Thus it is that Marius and Fabian, nestled in the ripened corn amid the cool brown shadows, receive from the _Golden Ass_ of Apuleius a strange keen pleasure; each lad taking from the story that which he is best fitted to absorb; each lad as unmindful of the other’s feelings as of the grosser elements in the tale. For without doubt a book has a separate message for every reader, and tells him, of good or evil, that which he is able to hear. Plato, indeed, complains of all books that they lack reticence or propriety toward different classes of persons, and his protest embodies the aversion of the flexible Greek mind for the precision of written literature. A poem or an oration which, crystallized into characters, speaks to all alike, and reveals itself indiscriminately to everybody, is of less value to the ancient scholar than the poem or oration which lingers in the master’s mind, and maintains a delicate reserve toward the inferior portion of the community. Plato is so far removed from the modern spirit which seeks to persuade the multitude to read Shakespeare and Milton, that he practically resents their peering with rude, but pardonable curiosity, into the stately domains of genius. We have now grown so insistently generous in these matters that our unhappy brothers, harassed beyond endurance, may well envy the plebeian Greeks their merciful limitations; or wish, with the little girl in _Punch_, that they had lived in the time of Charles II., “for then education was very much neglected.” But strive as we may, we cannot coerce great authors into universal complaisance. Plato himself, were he so unfortunate as to be living now, would recognize and applaud their manifest reserves. Even to the elect they speak with varying voices, and it is sometimes difficult to believe that all have read alike. When _Guy Mannering_ was first given to the public, who awaited it with frantic eagerness, Wordsworth thoughtfully observed that it was a novel in the style of Mrs. Radcliffe. Murray, from whom one expects more discernment, wrote to Hogg that _Meg Merrilies_ was worthy of Shakespeare; “but all the rest of the novel might have been written by Scott’s brother, or any other body.” Blackwood, about the same time, wrote to Murray: “If Walter Scott be the author of _Guy Mannering_, he stands far higher in this line than in his former walk.” One of these verdicts has been ratified by time, but who could suppose that Julia Mannering and honest Dandy Dinmont would ever have whispered such different messages into listening ears!

And it is precisely because of the independence assumed by books, that we have need to cherish our own independence in return. They will not all be our friends, and not one of them will give itself freely to us at the dictation of a peremptory critic. Hazlitt says nobly of a few great writers, notably Milton and Burke, that “to have lived in the cultivation of an intimacy with such works, and to have familiarly relished such names, is not to have lived in vain.” This is true, yet if we must seek for companionship in less august circles, there are many milder lights who shine with a steady radiance. It is not the privilege of every one to love so great a prose writer as Burke, so great a poet as Milton. “An appreciation of _Paradise Lost_,” says Mr. Mark Pattison, “is the reward of exquisite scholarship;” and the number of exquisite scholars is never very large. To march up to an author as to the cannon’s mouth is at best but unprofitable heroism. To take our pleasures dutifully is the least likely way to enjoy them. The laws of Crete, it is said, were set to music, and sung as alluringly as possible after dinner; but I doubt if they afforded a really popular pastime. The well-fed guests who listened to such decorous chants applauded them probably from the standpoint of citizenship, rather than from any undisguised sentiment of enjoyment, and a few degenerate souls must have sighed occasionally over the joys of a rousing and unseemly chorus. We of to-day are so rich in laws, so amply disciplined at every turn, that we have no need to be reminded at dinner of our obligations. A kind-hearted English critic once said that reading was not a duty, and had therefore no business to be made disagreeable; and that no man was under any obligation to read what another man wrote. This is an old-fashioned point of view, which has lost favor of late years, but which is not without compensations of its own. If the office of literature be to make glad our lives, how shall we seek the joy in store for us save by following Hazlitt’s simple suggestion, and reading “with all the satisfaction in our power”? And how shall we insure this satisfaction, save by ignoring the restrictions imposed upon us, and cultivating, as far as we can, a sincere and pleasurable intercourse with our friends, the books?

TRIALS OF A PUBLISHER

In reading the recently published _Memoirs and Correspondence of John Murray_, a very interesting and valuable piece of biography—albeit somewhat lengthy for these hurried days—we are forcibly impressed with one surprising truth which we were far from suspecting in our ignorance—namely, that the publisher’s life, like the policeman’s, is not a happy one, but filled to the brim with vexations peculiarly his own. It was as much the fashion in Murray’s time as it is in ours to bewail the hard fate of down-trodden authors, and to hint that he who prints the book absorbs the praise and profit which belong in justice to him who writes it. In fact, that trenchant and time-honored jest, “Now Barabbas was a publisher,” dates from this halcyon period when _Marmion_ was sold for a thousand guineas, and the third canto of _Childe Harold_ for nearly twice that sum. Murray himself possessed such influence in the literary world that the battle with the public was thought to be half won when a book appeared armed with the sanction of his name. He was a man of wealth, too, of social standing, of severe and fastidious tastes; exactly fitted by circumstances, if not by nature, to play the autocratic _rôle_ popularly assigned to all his craft, to crush the aspiring poet in the dust, to freeze the budding genius who sought assistance at his hands, to override with haughty arrogance the wan and needy scholar who waited at his door. Instead of this, we see him enduring with lamblike gentleness an amount of provocation which would have hallowed a mediæval saint, and which seems to our undisciplined spirits as wantonly exasperating and malign.

In the first place, his Scotch allies, Constable and the ever-sanguine James Ballantyne, appeared to have looked upon the English firm as an inexhaustible mine of wealth, from which they could, when convenient, draw whatever they required. Ballantyne, especially, required so much, and required that much so often, that Murray was obliged to sever a connection too costly for his purse. Then his partial ownership of _Blackwood’s Magazine_ was for years a thorn in his flesh, and there is something truly pathetic in his miserable attempts to modify the personalities of that utterly irrepressible journal. “In the name of God,” he writes vehemently to William Blackwood, “why do you seem to think it necessary that each number must give pain to some one?” Even the _Quarterly_, his own literary offspring, and the pride and glory of his heart, was at times but a fractious child, and cost him, after the fashion of children, many sleepless nights. Gifford, the editor, was incurably unbusinesslike in his habits, and never could understand why subscribers should complain and raise a row because the magazine chanced to be a month or six weeks late. It was sure to appear some time, and they had all the pleasure of anticipation. It was a point of honor with him, also, to conceal the names of his contributors, so that when offence was given to anybody—which was pretty nearly always—the aggrieved person immediately attacked Murray in return. There are hosts of letters in these volumes from indignant authors who express themselves with true British candor because the _Quarterly_ has assailed their books, or their friends’ books, or their friends’ friends’ books, or their pet politicians, or their most cherished political schemes. There are hosts of other letters which merely record a distinctly unfavorable opinion of the magazine’s literary qualities, and which lament with pitiless sincerity that the last number hardly contained a single readable article.

All these annoyances, however, prickly though they appear, are but trifles in comparison with the extraordinary demands made upon Murray as a publisher. Impecunious playwrights, like poor Charles Maturin, pelt him with unsalable dramas and heartrending appeals for help. Impecunious essayists, like Charles Marsh, send papers to the _Quarterly_, and—before they are read—request fifteen pounds, “as money on manuscript deposited.” Impecunious patriots, like Foscolo—that bright particular star of sentimental Liberals—demand loans of a thousand pounds, to be repaid with literary work. Impecunious poets, like James Hogg, borrow fifty pounds with the lofty patronage of sovereigns. It is very amusing to note the tone assumed by the Ettrick Shepherd in his intercourse with a man of Murray’s influence and position. When he is in a good humor, that is, when he has negotiated a successful loan, he writes in this generous fashion: “Though I have heard some bitter things against you, I never met with any man whatever who, on so slight an acquaintance, has behaved to me so much like a gentleman.” Or again, “You may be misled, and you may be mistaken, my dear Murray, but as long as you tell me the simple truth as plainly, you and I will be friends.” If things go haltingly, however, and there is a delay in forwarding cheques, this magnificent condescension sharpens into angry protest. “What the deuce,” he writes vehemently, “have you made of my excellent poem,[1] that you are never publishing it, while I am starving for money, and cannot even afford a Christmas goose to my friends?” When a new edition of _The Queen’s Wake_ was printed in Edinburgh, a very handsome quarto selling for a guinea—which seems a heart-breaking price—Murray with his usual generosity subscribed for twenty-five copies; whereupon we find Hogg promptly acknowledging this munificence by begging him to persuade others to do likewise. “You must make a long pull and a strong pull in London for subscriptions,” he writes, with enviable composure, “as you and Mr. Rogers are the principal men I have to rely on.” There is something very tranquillizing in the gentle art of shifting one’s burdens to other shoulders. Genius flourishes like the mountain oak when it can strike root in the money-boxes of less gifted friends.

If tact and patience were both required in soothing Hogg’s petulant vanity and in providing for his extravagant habits, the task became harder and more thankless when Leigh Hunt presented himself in the field. I can imagine few things more delightful than to have had money transactions with a person of Leigh Hunt’s peculiar and highly original methods. He was a kind of literary Oliver, crying perpetually for more. When the _Story of Rimini_ was still uncompleted, it was offered by the poet to Murray with this diverting assurance:

“Booksellers tell me I ought not to ask less than four hundred and fifty pounds (which is a sum I happen to want just now), and my friends, not in the trade, say I ought not to ask less than five hundred, with such a trifling acknowledgment upon the various editions, after the second and third, as shall enable me to say that I am still profiting by it.”

Murray, evidently disconcerted by the coolness of this proposal, writes back with veiled and courteous sarcasm, suggesting that the manuscript be offered upon these terms to other publishers. Should they refuse to accept it, he is willing to print a small edition at his own expense, and divide the profits with the author, to whom the copyright shall be restored. Rather to our amazement, and perhaps to Murray’s, Leigh Hunt closes immediately with this very moderate offer; and as soon as the book appears he writes again, begging to have part of the money advanced to him. Murray’s reply is eminently characteristic of the man. The poem, he says, is selling well. Should the entire edition be exhausted, which he doubts not will be the case, the poet’s share of the profits would amount to exactly forty-eight pounds and ten shillings. He takes pleasure in enclosing a cheque for fifty pounds, and only asks that a receipt may be sent him for the same. The receipt is not sent until ten days are past, when it arrives accompanied by a long letter in which Leigh Hunt enlarges upon his pecuniary troubles—concerning these he is as explicit as Micawber—and proposes that Murray should now purchase the copyright of _Rimini_ for four hundred and fifty pounds, and let him have the money at once. Unhappily, the answer to this admirable piece of negotiation has been lost, but it was evidently too patronizing to please the poet, who was as sensitive as he was insatiable. The next letter we have from him sharply reminds Murray that he is not seeking for assistance, but merely endeavoring to transact a piece of business which would involve no possible risk for any one. Finally the poor harassed publisher persuades him with soft words to sell the copyright of _Rimini_ to another firm, and there must have been a deep breath of relief drawn in Albemarle Street when the matter was at last adjusted, and the troublesome correspondence ceased. In fact, there is a letter from Blackwood frankly congratulating Murray on his escape. “I dare say you are well rid of Leigh Hunt,” writes this experienced ally to his fellow-sufferer; “and I really pity you when I think of the difficulty you must often have in managing with authors, and particularly with the friends of authors whom you wish to oblige.”

One of those whom Murray wished eagerly to oblige, until he found the task too costly for his purse, was Madame de Staël. For the English and French editions of her work on Germany he paid no less than fifteen hundred pounds, and speedily found himself a loser by the transaction. Gifford, who had scant liking for the celebrated “hurricane in petticoats,” writes to him on the occasion with gentle malice, and a too evident amusement at his discomfiture: “I can venture to assure you that the hope of keeping her from the press is quite vain. The family of Œdipus were not more haunted and goaded by the Furies than the Neckers, father, mother, and daughter, have always been by the demon of publication. Madame de Staël will therefore write and print without intermission.” Not without being well paid, however; for three years later we find the Baron de Staël writing to Murray in his mother’s name, and demanding four thousand pounds for her three-volume work, _Des Causes et des Effets de la Révolution Française_. “My mother _insists_ upon four thousand pounds, besides a credit in books for every new edition,” says this imperative gentleman, somewhat in the manner of a footpad; to whom Murray responds with much tranquillity, thanking him for his “obliging letter,” and intimating that he and Longman together are willing to pay one thousand pounds for the first French and English editions, and three hundred and fifty pounds for the second. Madame de Staël indignantly repudiates this offer, declaring that twenty-five hundred pounds is the least she can think of taking, and that the book will be a bargain at such a price. Murray, who knows something about bargains, and who has been rendered more cautious than usual by his experience with _L’Allemagne_, declines such palpable risks, and excuses himself from further negotiations. _La Révolution Française_ did not appear until after Madame de Staël’s death, when it was published by Messrs. Baldwin and Cradock, and proved a lamentable failure, people having begun by that time to grow a trifle weary of such a thrice-told tale.

The most amusing and at the same time most pathetic bit of correspondence in these two big volumes relates to a translation of _Faust_, which Coleridge, so eminently qualified for the task, offers to write for Murray. He unfolds his views in a letter as long as an average essay—or what we call an essay in these degenerate days—evincing on every page a superb contempt for the reading public, which was expected to buy the book, a painful reluctance to “attempt anything of a literary nature with any motive of pecuniary advantage”—which does not prevent him from doing some elaborate bargaining later on—and a tendency to plunge into intellectual abstractions, calculated to chill the heart of the stoutest publisher in Christendom. There is one incomparable paragraph which Coleridge alone could have written, and a portion of which—only a portion—I cannot refrain from quoting:

“Any work in Poetry strikes me with more than common awe, as proposed for realization by myself, because from long habits of meditation on language, as the symbolic medium of the connection of Thought with Thought as affected and modified by Passion and Emotion, I should spend days in avoiding what I deemed faults, though with the full foreknowledge that their admission would not have offended three of all my readers, and might perhaps be deemed beauties by three hundred—if so many there were; and this not out of any respect for the public (_i.e._, the persons who might happen to purchase and look over the book) but from a hobby-horsical, superstitious regard to my own feelings and sense of Duty. Language is the sacred Fire in this Temple of Humanity, and the Muses are its especial and vestal priestesses. Though I cannot prevent the vile drugs and counterfeit Frankincense which render its flames at once pitchy, glowing, and unsteady, I would yet be no voluntary accomplice in the Sacrilege. With the commencement of a Public, commences the degradation of the Good and the Beautiful—both fade and retire before the accidentally Agreeable. _Othello_ becomes a hollow lip-worship; and the _Castle Spectre_, or any more peccant thing of Froth, Noise, and Impermanence, that may have over-billowed it on the restless sea of curiosity, is the true Prayer of the Praise and Admiration.”

Fancy the feelings of a poor publisher assailed with this raging torrent of words! Murray, stemming the tide as best he can, replies in a short, businesslike note, proposing terms—not very liberal ones—for the desired translation. Whereupon Coleridge writes a second letter, actually longer than the first, intimating that a hundred pounds is but scant remuneration for such a piece of work, “executed as alone I can or dare do it—that is, to the utmost of my power; for which the intolerable Pain, nay the far greater Toil and Effort of doing otherwise, is a far safer Pledge than any solicitude on my part concerning the approbation of the Public.”

Finally, the undertaking was abandoned, and the English-speaking world lost its single chance of having _Faust_ adequately translated; lost it, I truly believe, through the reluctance of even a patient man to stomach any further correspondence.

Trials of a very different order poured in on Murray through his connection with Lord Byron, an honor which was not altogether without thorns. People who thought Byron’s poetry immoral wrote frankly to Murray to say so. People who did not think Byron’s poetry immoral wrote quite as frankly to complain of those who did. His noble lordship himself was at times both petulant and exacting, and there is a ring of true dignity in the following remonstrance offered by the publisher to the peer, by “Mr. Bookseller Murray,” as Napier contemptuously calls him, to the poet whose good qualities he was so quick to understand:

“I assure you,” he writes, “that I take no umbrage at irritability which will occasionally burst from a mind like yours; but I sometimes feel a deep regret that in our pretty long intercourse I appear to have failed to show that a man in my situation may possess the feelings and principles of a gentleman. Most certainly do I think that, from personal attachment, I could venture as much in any shape for your service as any of those who have the good fortune to be ranked amongst your friends.”

In fact, the friends of authors were too often, as Blackwood hinted, the sources of Murray’s severest trials. Friends are obliging creatures in their way, and always ready to give with lavish hearts their wealth of criticism and opinion. There is a delightful letter from the Rev. H. H. Milman, Dean of St. Paul’s, offering to Murray his sadly unreadable poem _Belshazzar_, with this timely intimation: “I give you fair warning that all the friends who have hitherto seen it assure me that I shall not do myself justice unless I demand a very high price for it.” Murray, in reply, hints as urbanely as he can that, as it is he and not Mr. Milman’s friends who is to pay the price, he cannot accept their judgment in the matter as final; he is compelled to take into consideration his own chances of profit. Throughout all his correspondence we note this tone of careful self-repression, of patient and courteous kindness. Now and then only, particularly trying letters appear to have been left unanswered, as though the limits of even his endurance had been reached. When we remember that the _Quarterly_ was the cherished idol of his life, and that his pride and delight in it knew no bounds, we can dimly appreciate his feelings on receiving the following lines from Southey, whose principal income for years had been derived from the magazine’s most liberal and open-handed payments. “It is a great price,” writes the author of _Thalaba_, who has just pocketed a comfortable sum, “and it is very convenient for me to receive it. But I will tell you, with that frankness which you have always found in my correspondence and conversation, that I must suspect my time might be more profitably employed (as I am sure it might be more worthily) than in writing for your journal, even at that price.”

I am not wont to peer too closely into the secrets of the human heart, but I would like to know exactly how Murray felt when he read that letter. “Let me at least be eaten by a lion!” says Epictetus. “Let me at least be insulted by a genius!” might well have been the publisher’s lament.

THE OPPRESSION OF NOTES

That innocent nondescript, the average reader, is suffering very sorely at the present day from what might be justly called the oppression or tyranny of notes. I hear, indeed, from time to time, bitter complaints of editorial inaccuracy, of the unscholarly treatment of quite forgotten masterpieces by the industrious gentlemen who seek to reintroduce them to the public; but such inaccuracy can wound only the limited number who know more than the editor, and who in their secret souls are not sorry to prove him wrong. The average reader, even though he hold himself to be of moderate intelligence, is happily ignorant of such fine shadings, and only asks that he may enjoy his books in a moderately intelligent manner; that he may be helped over hedges and ditches, and allowed to ramble unmolested where the ground seems tolerably smooth. This is precisely the privilege, however, which a too liberal editor is disinclined to allow. He will build you a bridge over a raindrop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side with ingenious alpenstocks and climbing-irons; yet when, perchance, you stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold, he is never there to grasp it. He merely refers you, with some coldness, to a remote authority who will give you the assistance you require when you have reached the end of your journey. Mr. Ritchie, for example, who has recently edited a volume of Mrs. Carlyle’s early letters, expects you patiently to search for the information you want in Mr. Froude’s pages, which is always a disheartening thing to be asked to do. Yet when Jeanie Welsh, writing cheerfully of an inconstant lover, says, “_Mais n’importe!_ It is only one more Spanish castle demolished; another may start up like a mushroom in its place;” an explanatory note carefully reveals to you that “Spanish castle” really means “château en Espagne”—a circumstance which even Macaulay’s schoolboy would probably have deciphered for himself.

If it be hard on the average reader to be referred chillingly to modern writers who are at least within approachable distance, it is harder still to be requested to look up classical authorities. If it be hard to be told occasionally by that prince of good editors, Mr. Alfred Ainger, to please turn elsewhere for the little bits of information which we think he might give us about Charles Lamb, it is harder still to have Mr. Wright refuse to translate for us Edward Fitzgerald’s infrequent lapses into Greek. What is the use of saying in a note “v. 9” when Fitzgerald quotes Herodotus? If I can read the quotation for myself, I have no need to hunt up v. 9; and if I can’t, v. 9 is of no use to me when found. Even “Hor. Od. I. 4, 14, 15,” is not altogether satisfactory to the indifferent scholar, for whom Fitzgerald himself had such generous sympathy, and for whom his translations were avowedly undertaken.

These are merely cases, however, in which notes refuse to be helpful; they are apt to become absolutely oppressive when accompanying older writers. A few years ago I bought a little English edition of the _Religio Medici_, to which are added the _Letter to a Friend_ and _Christian Morals_. The book is one of Macmillan’s Golden Treasury Series, and is edited by Mr. W. A. Greenhill, who opens with an “Editor’s Preface,” eighteen pages long, and fairly bristling with knowledge points. After this come a “Chronological Table of Dates, Connected with Sir Thomas Browne,” two pages long; “Note on the Discovery of the Remains of Sir Thomas Browne in 1840,” two pages; “Brief Notices of Former Editors of the _Religio Medici_,” four pages; “List of Editions of _Religio Medici_,” thirteen pages; “Collations of Some Old Editions of _Religio Medici_,” three pages; “List of Editions of _Letter to a Friend_ and _Christian Morals_,” five pages; “_Addenda et Corrigenda_,” one page. Having thus laboriously cleared the way, we are at last gladdened by a sight of the _Religio Medici_ itself, which, together with the _Letter_ and _Christian Morals_, occupies two hundred and thirty pages. Then, following close, like the mighty luggage of a Persian army, come an array of “Notes Critical and Explanatory,” eighty-eight pages; and an Index just sixty-nine pages long. Thus it will be seen that two hundred and five pages of editorial work are deemed necessary to elucidate two hundred and thirty pages of Sir Thomas Browne, which seems like an intolerable deal of sack for such a quantity of bread. To compress all this into a small volume requires close printing and flimsy paper, and the ungrateful reader thinks in his hardened heart that he would rather a little more space had been given to the author, and a little less to the editor, who is for most of us, after all, a secondary consideration. It is also manifestly impossible, with such a number of notes, even to refer to them at the bottom of the page; yet without this guiding finger they are often practically useless. We are not as a rule aware, when we read, what information we lack, and it becomes a grievous duty to examine every few minutes and see if we ought not to be finding something out.

A glance at the notes themselves is very discouraging:

“P. 10, l. 14, directed, A to E, G; direct, F, H to L.

“P. 10, l. 16, rectified, A to I; rectified, J, K, L.

“P. 10, l. 28, consist, A to J; resist, K, L.”

Reading with such helps as these becomes a literary nightmare:

“P. 8, l. 8, distinguished] Chapman (R) and Gardiner (W) read ‘being distinguished.’

“P. 8, l. 8, distinguished not only] Wilkin (T) read ‘not only distinguished.’”

And this is weirder still:

“P. 59, l. 4, antimetathesis, C to M; antanaclasis, A, B; transposition of words, N, O.”

It may easily be surmised that eighty-eight pages of such concentrated and deadly erudition weigh very heavily on the unscholarly soul. We are reminded forcibly of the impatience manifested by Mr. E. S. Dallas, in _The Gay Science_, over Person’s notes on Euripides, from which he had hoped so much and gleaned so little; which were all about words and less than words—syllables, letters, accents, punctuation.

“Codex A and Codex B, Codex Cantabrigiensis and Codex Cottonianus, were ransacked in turn to show how this noun should be in the dative, not in the accusative; how that verb should have the accent paroxytone, not perispomenon; and how, by all the rules of prosody, there should be an iambus, not a spondee, in this place or that.” The lad who has heard all his college life about the wonderful supplement to the _Hecuba_ turns to it with wistful eyes, expecting to find some subtle key to Greek tragedy. “Behold, it is a treatise on certain Greek metres. Its talk is of cæsural pauses, penthemimeral and hephthemimeral, of isochronous feet, of enclitics and cretic terminations; and the grand doctrine it promulgates is expressed in the canon regarding the pause which, from the discoverer, has been named the Porsonian—that when the iambic trimeter after a word of more than one syllable has the cretic termination included either in one word or in two, then the fifth foot must be an iambus. The young student throws down the book thus prefaced and supplemented, and wonders if this be all that giants of Porsonian height can see or care to speak about in Greek literature.”

But then be it remembered that Euripides, as edited by Porson, was intended for the use of scholars, and there exists an impression—perhaps erroneous—that this is the sort of food for which scholars hunger and thirst. Sir Thomas Browne has, happily, not yet passed out of the hands of the general reader, whose appetite for intellectual abstraction and the rigors of precision is distinctly moderate, and in whose behalf I urge my plea to-day.

After the oppressively erudite notes come those which interpret trifles with painstaking fidelity, and which reveal to us the meaning of quite familiar words. In Ferrier’s admirable edition of the _Noctes Ambrosianæ_, for example, we are told with naïve gravity that “wiselike” means “judicious,” that “glowering” means “staring,” that “parritch” is “porridge,” that “guffaw” is a “loud laugh,” that “douce” is “sedate,” that “gane” is “gone,” and that “in a jiffy” means “immediately.” But surely the readers of Christopher North do not require information like this. “Douce” and “parritch” and “guffaw” are not difficult words to understand, and “in a jiffy” would seem to come within the intellectual grasp of many who have not yet made the acquaintance of the alphabet.

It may be, however, that there are people who really like to be instructed in this manner, just as there are people who like to go to lectures and to organ recitals. It may even be that a taste for notes, like a taste for gin, or opium, or Dr. Ibsen’s dramas, increases with what it feeds on. In that tiny volume of _Selected Poems_ by Gray which Mr. Gosse has edited for the Clarendon Press, there are forty-two pages of notes to sixty pages of poetry; and while some of them are valuable and interesting, many more seem strangely superfluous. But Mr. Gosse, who has his finger on the literary pulse of his generation, is probably the last man in England to furnish information unless it is desired. He knows, better than most purveyors of knowledge, what it is that readers want; he is not prone to waste his precious minutes; he has a saving sense of humor; and he does not aspire to be a lettered philanthropist fretting to enlighten mankind. If, then, he finds it necessary to elucidate that happy trifle, _On the Death of a Favorite Cat_, with no less than seven notes, which is at the rate of one for every verse, it must be that he is filling an expressed demand; it must be that he is aware that modern students of Gray—every one who reads a poet is a “student” nowadays—like to be told by an editor about Tyrian purple, and about Arion’s dolphin, and about the difference between a tortoise-shell and a tabby. As for the seven pages of notes that accompany the _Elegy_, they carry me back in spirit to the friend of my childhood, Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond, who was expected to understand every word of every poem she studied. What a blessing Mr. Gosse’s notes would have been to that poor, dear, misguided little girl, who rashly committed the _Elegy_ to memory because, in honest, childish fashion, she loved its pretty sound! Who can forget the pathetic scene where she attempts to recite it, and has only finished the first line,

“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,”

when Godfrey, whom I always thought, and still think, a very disagreeable boy, interrupts her ruthlessly.

“‘What is meant by the “curfew”? What is meant by “tolls”? What is a “knell”? What is meant by “parting day”?’

“‘Godfrey, I cannot tell the meaning of every word, but I know the general meaning. It means that the day is going, that it is evening, that it is growing dark. Now let me go on.’

“‘Go on,’ said Godfrey, ‘and let us see what you will do when you come to “the boast of heraldry,” to “the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,” to the “village Hampden,” to “some mute inglorious Milton,” and to “some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood,” you who have not come to Cromwell yet, in the history of England.’”

No wonder poor Rosamond is disheartened and silenced by such an array of difficulties in her path. It is comforting to know that Godfrey himself comes to grief, a little later, with _The Bard_, and that even the wise and irreproachable Laura confesses to have been baffled by the lines,

“If aught of oaten stop or pastoral song
May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear.”

“Oaten stop” was a mystery, and “eve” she thought—and was none the worse for thinking it—meant our first great erring mother.

No such wholesome blunders—pleasant to recall in later, weary, well-instructed days—would be possible for Miss Edgeworth’s little people if they lived in our age of pitiless enlightenment, when even a book framed for their especial joy, like _The Children’s Treasury of English Song_, bristles with marginal notes. Here Rosamond would have found an explanation of no less than forty-eight words in the _Elegy_, and would probably have understood it a great deal better, and loved it a great deal less. It is healthy and natural for a child to be forcibly attracted by what she does not wholly comprehend; the music of words appeals very sweetly to childish ears, and their meaning comes later—comes often after the first keen unconscious pleasure is past. I once knew a tiny boy who so delighted in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it to him over, and 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 or sagacious in his enjoyment; only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason of strong words, and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping thoughts. But what child who reads Cowper’s pretty remonstrance to his spaniel, and the spaniel’s neat reply, wants to be told in a succession of dismal notes that “allures” means “tempts,” that “remedy” means “cure,” that “killing time” means “wasting time,” that “destined” means “meant for,” and that “behest” means “command”? Cowper is one of the simplest of writers, and the little boys and girls who cannot be trusted unarmed in his company had better confine their reading to _Robinson Crusoe in Words of One Syllable_, or to the veracious pages of _Mother Goose_. But perhaps the day is not far distant when even _Mother Goose_ will afford food for instruction and a fresh industry for authors, and when the hapless children of the dawning century will be confronted with a dozen highly abbreviated and unintelligible notes referring them to some Icelandic Saga or remote Indian epic for the bloody history of the _Three Blind Mice_.

CONVERSATION IN NOVELS

A great many years ago, when I was a little girl, I used to know a dear, placid, sunny-tempered old lady who was stone-deaf and an insatiable novel-reader. She always came to our house bearing a black bag which held her jointed ear-trumpet, and she always left it with a borrowed novel under her arm. As she had reached that comfortable period of life when a book is as easily forgotten as read, our slender library supplied all her demands, on the same principle of timely reappearance which makes an imposing stage army out of two dozen elusive supernumeraries. She had a theory of selection all her own, and to which she implicitly trusted. She glanced over a story very rapidly, and if it had too many solid, page-long paragraphs—reflections, descriptions, etc.—she put it sadly but steadfastly aside. If, on the contrary, it was well broken up into conversations, which always impart an air of sprightliness to a book, she said she was sure she would like it, and carried it off in triumph.