Chapter II: Part 2

Those were not days, be it remembered, when people wrote fiction for the sake of introducing discussions. There still lingered in the novelist’s mind the time-worn heresy that he had a story to tell, and that his people must act as well as talk. The plot—delightful and obsolete word!—was then in good repute, and conversation was mainly useful in helping on the tale, in providing copious love scenes, and, with really good novelists, in illustrating and developing character. Thomas Love Peacock’s inimitable dialogues had indeed been long given to the world; but quiet people of restricted cultivation knew nothing of them, and would have found it difficult to realize their loss. I can hardly fancy our dear old friend reading and enjoying the delicious war of words in _Crotchet Castle_, and I should be grieved to think of her suddenly confronted with those scraps of sententious wisdom, in which its author took a truly impish and reprehensible delight. Such a sentiment as “Men have been found very easily permutable into ites and onians, avians and arians,” might have sorely puzzled her benign and tranquil soul.

Yet no one can accuse Peacock of writing his novels in order to express his own personal convictions. The fact is that, after reading them, we are often very much in the dark as to what his convictions were. We know he loved old things better than new ones, and wine better than water; and that is about as far as we can follow him with security. “The intimate friends of Mr. Peacock may have understood his political sentiments,” says Lord Houghton disconsolately, “but it is extremely difficult to discover them from his work.” His people simply talk in character, sometimes tiresomely, sometimes with unapproachable keenness and humor, and the scope of his stories hardly permits any near approach to the fine gradations, the endless variety, of life. Mr. Chainmail never opens his lips save in praise of feudalism. Mr. Mac Quedy discusses political economy only. Even the witty Dr. Folliott, “a fellow of infinite jest,” seldom gets beyond the dual delights of Greek and dining. It is all vastly piquant and entertaining, but it is leagues away from the casual conversation, the little leisurely, veracious gossip in which Jane Austen reveals to us with merciless distinctness the secret springs that move a human heart. She has scant need to describe her characters, and she seldom takes that trouble. They betray themselves at every word, and stand convicted on their own evidence. We are not warned in advance against Isabella Thorpe. We meet her precisely as Catherine meets her in the Pump-room at Bath, where the young lady speedily opens her lips, and acquaints us in the most vivacious manner with her own callous folly and selfishness. Every syllable uttered by Mrs. Norris is a new and luminous revelation; we know her just that much better than we did before she spoke. Even _Sense and Sensibility_, by no means the best of Miss Austen’s novels, starts with that admirable discussion between Mr. John Dashwood and his wife on the subject of his mother’s and sisters’ maintenance. It is a short chapter, the second in the book, and at its close we are masters of the whole situation. We have sounded the feeble egotism of Mr. Dashwood, and the adroit meanness of his spouse. We know precisely what degree of assistance Elinor and Marianne are likely to receive from them. We foresee the relation these characters will bear to each other during the progress of the story, and we have been shown with delicious humor how easy and pleasant is the task of self-deception. That a girl of nineteen should have been capable of such keenly artistic work is simply one of the miracles of literature; and the more we think about it, the more miraculous it grows. The best we can do is to bow our heads, and pay unqualified homage at its shrine.

Some portion of Jane Austen’s ability for portraying character in conversation is discernible in at least one of her too numerous successors in the craft. The authoress of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ and of _Cecilia de Noël_ has already proven to the world how deft and skilful is her manipulation of that difficult medium, drawing-room gossip. It would be unjust and absurd to compare her stories, slight and unsubstantial as pencil sketches, with the finished masterpieces of English fiction; but there are touches in these modern tales which convince even a casual reader of splendid possibilities ahead. The setting of _Mademoiselle Ixe_ is so fine, the lightly drawn English people who surround the mysterious governess and her still more mysterious victim are so real, that we cease to ask ourselves obtrusive questions concerning the purpose and utility of the crime. Better still are some of the scenes in _Cecilia de Noël_, where Lady Atherley’s serene and imperturbable good sense tempers the atmosphere, and gives exactly the proper effect to her husband’s rather long-winded eloquence, to Mrs. Mostyn’s amiable and cruel evangelism, and to Mrs. Molyneux’s amusing eccentricities. All these characters have individuality of their own, and all reveal themselves through the intricacies of conversation, while occasionally there is a felicitous touch worthy of Jane Austen’s hand; as when Lady Atherley listens tranquilly to Mrs. Mostyn’s tirade against the ritualistic curate, and evolves from it the one judicious conclusion that he is evidently an Austyn of Temple Leigh, and that it would be desirable to ask him to dinner.

The real drawback to Lanoe Falconer’s art is, not the brevity of her work, but the fact that her people cannot develop on purely natural lines, because they are hampered by the terrible necessity of illustrating a moral; and even in their most unguarded moments the task assigned them is never wholly laid aside. It is seldom that a good tract is a good story too, and all the novelist’s skill is powerless to impart a vivid semblance of truth to characters who have to “talk up” to a given subject, and teach a given lesson. The inartistic treatment of material results, curiously enough, in weakening our sense of reality; yet if the authoress of _Cecilia de Noël_ would consent, for a few short years, to abandon social and spiritual problems, to concern herself as little with Nihilism as with eternal punishment, but to be content, as Jane Austen was content, with telling a story, perhaps that story might be no unworthy successor of those matchless tales which are our refuge and solace in these dark days of ethical and unorthodox fiction.

There is a great deal of charming conversation, which is not as well known as it should be, in the best novels of Anthony Trollope. He gives his characters plenty of time and opportunity to talk, without forcing them into arbitrary channels; and occasionally, as with Mrs. Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly, and Lady Glencora, he persuades them to let us know exactly what kind of people they are. Above all, there is such an air of veracity about his causeries that the most skeptical reader listens to them without a shadow of doubt. Who can ever forget Bertie Stanhope intimating to Bishop Proudie that he had once thought of being a prelate himself, or Lady Glencora’s midnight confidences to Alice, or that crucial contest between Dr. Tempest and Mrs. Proudie! What pleasant wrangling goes on in Mrs. Dobbs Broughton’s room over the memorable picture of Jael, when Dalrymple desires his model to lean forward, throwing her weight on the nail, and Miss Van Siever not unnaturally suggests that such an action would probably have awakened Sisera before the murder was done! It all seems idle enough—this careless, lively talk—but is by no means purposeless. Life is built up of such moments, and if we are to live with the people in books, it must be through little confidences on their parts and sympathy on ours; it must be through unconscious confidences on their parts and unrestricted sympathy on ours.

Now, if a novelist permits his characters to talk at us, the charm of unconsciousness is gone. If we feel for a moment they are uttering his sentiments for our approval or conversion, we cease to sympathize because we cease to believe. There is a clever and suspiciously opportune conversation in _David Grieve_ between that sorely tried hero and an intelligent workingwoman in the Champs Elysées upon the relative merits of l’Union Légale and l’Union Libre. It is, of course, a highly dispassionate discussion, intended as an appeal to reason and not to conscience; therefore the old-fashioned arguments of right and wrong, God and the Church, are carefully omitted. It fits in neatly with David’s experiences, and places the whole matter in a singularly lucid light before the reader’s eyes. Its one serious drawback is that we can never persuade ourselves to believe that it ever took place. The Frenchwoman is brought so suddenly up to the mark; she says so plainly that which Mrs. Humphry Ward thinks she ought to say; she is so charmingly unprejudiced and convincing, that we lose all faith in her before she has spoken a dozen words. The correctness of her views counts for nothing. “When we leave out what we don’t like, we can demonstrate most things,” says the late Rector of Lincoln; and it is at least doubtful whether men and women ever live virtuous lives on the strength of an argument. Lady Bertram, of _Mansfield Park_, remarking placidly from her sofa, “Do not act anything improper, my dears; Sir Thomas would not like it,” may not exert a powerful influence for good; but who has any shadow of doubt that those are her very words? They are spoken—as they should be—to her daughters, and not to us. They are spoken—as they should be—by Lady Bertram, and not by Jane Austen. Therefore we listen with content, and take comfort in the thought that, whatever severities may be inflicted on us by the novelists of the future, it is not in the power of progress to deprive us of the past.

A SHORT DEFENCE OF VILLAINS

Amid the universal grayness that has settled mistily down upon English fiction, amid the delicate drab-colored shadings and half-lights which require, we are told, so fine a skill in handling, the old-fashioned reader misses, now and then, the vivid coloring of his youth. He misses the slow unfolding of quite impossible plots, the thrilling incidents that were wont pleasantly to arouse his apprehension, and, most of all, two characters once deemed essential to every novel—the hero and the villain. The heroine is left us still, and her functions are far more complicated than in the simple days of yore, when little was required of her save to be beautiful as the stars. She faces now the most intricate problems of life; and she faces them with conscious self-importance, a dismal power of analysis, and a robust candor in discussing their equivocal aspects that would have sent her buried sister blushing to the wall. There was sometimes a lamentable lack of solid virtue in this fair dead sister, a pitiful human weakness that led to her undoing; but she never talked so glibly about sin. As for the hero, he owes his banishment to the riotous manner in which his masters handled him. Bulwer strained our endurance and our credulity to the utmost; Disraeli took a step further, and Lothair, the last of his race, perished amid the cruel laughter of mankind.

But the villain! Remember what we owe to him in the past. Think how dear he has become to every rightly constituted mind. And now we are told, soberly and coldly, by the thin-blooded novelists of the day, that his absence is one of the crowning triumphs of modern genius, that we have all grown too discriminating to tolerate in fiction a character who we feel does not exist in life. Man, we are reminded, is complex, subtle, unfathomable, made up of good and evil so dexterously intermingled that no one element predominates coarsely over the rest. He is to be studied warily and with misgivings, not classified with brutal ease into the virtuous and bad. It is useless to explain to these analysts that the pleasure we take in meeting a character in a book does not always depend on our having known him in the family circle, or encountered him in our morning paper; though, judged even by this stringent law, the villain holds his own. Accept Balzac’s rule, and exclude from fiction not only all which might not really happen, but all which has not really happened in truth, and we would still have studies enough in total depravity to darken all the novels in Christendom.

What murder of romance was ever so wanton, so tragic, and so sombre as that which gave to the Edinburgh highway the name of Gabriel’s Road? There, in the sweet summer afternoon, fresh with the breath of primroses and cowslips, the young tutor cut the throats of his two little pupils, in a mad, inexplicable revenge for their childish tale-bearing. Taken red-handed in the deed, he met with swift retribution from the furious populace; and the same hour which witnessed the crime saw his pinioned corpse dangling from the nearest tree, with the bloody knife hung in awful mockery around its neck. Thus the murder and its punishment conspired to make the lonely road a haunted path, ghost-ridden, terrible; where women shivered and hurried on, and little boys, creepy with fear, scampered by, breathless, in the dusk; seeing before them always, on the ragged turf, two small, piteous, blood-smeared bodies, and hearing ever, overhead, the rattle of the rusty knife against the felon’s bones. The highway, with its unholy associations discreetly perpetuated in its name, became an education to the good people of Edinburgh, and taught them the value of emotions. They must have indistinctly felt what Mr. Louis Stevenson has so well described, the subtle harmony that unites an evil deed to its location. “Some places,” he says, “speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots, again, seem to abide their destiny, suggestive and impenetrable.” And is all this fine and delicate sentiment, all this skillful playing with horror and fear, to be lost to fiction, merely because, as De Quincey reluctantly admits, “the majority of murderers are incorrect characters”? May we not forgive their general incorrectness for the sake of their literary and artistic value? Shall Charles Lamb’s testimony count for nothing, when we remember his comfortable allusion to “kind, light-hearted Wainwright”? And what shall we think of Edward Fitzgerald, the gentlest and least hurtful of Englishmen, abandoning himself, in the clear and genial weather, to the delights of Tacitus, “full of pleasant atrocity”?

Repentant villains, I must confess, are not greatly to my mind. They sacrifice their artistic to their ethical value, and must be handled with consummate skill to escape a suspicious flavor of Sunday-school romance. The hardened criminal, disarmed and converted by the innocent attractions of childhood, is a favorite device of poets and story-writers who cater to the sentiments of maternity; but it is wiser to lay no stress upon the permanency of such conversions. That swift and sudden yielding to a gentle emotion or a noble aspiration, which is one of the undying traits of humanity, attracts us often by the very force of its evanescence, by the limitations which prove its truth. But the slow, stern process of regeneration is not an emotional matter, and cannot be convincingly portrayed with a few facile touches in the last chapter of a novel. Thackeray knew better than this, when he showed us Becky Sharp touched and softened by her good little sister-in-law; heartsick now and then of her own troublesome schemes, yet sinking inevitably lower and lower through the weight of overmastering instincts and desires. She can aspire intermittingly to a cleaner life, but she can never hope to reach it. The simple literature of the past is curiously rich in these pathetic transient glimpses into fallen nature’s brighter side. Where can we see depicted with more tenderness and truth the fitful relenting of man’s brutality, after it has wrought the ruin it devised, than in the fine old ballad of _Edom O’Gordon_? The young daughter of the house of Rodes is lowered from the walls of the burning castle, and the cruel Gordon spears transfix her as she falls. She lies dead, in her budding girlhood, at the feet of her father’s foe, and his heart is strangely stirred and troubled when he looks at her childish face.

“O bonnie, bonnie was hir mouth,
And cherry were hir cheiks,
And clear, clear was hir yellow hair,
Whereon the reid bluid dreips.

“Then wi’ his spear he turned hir owre,
O gin hir face was wan!
He sayd, ‘You are the first that eir
I wisht alive again.’

“He turned hir owre and owre again,
O gin hir skin was whyte!
‘I might hae spared that bonnie face
To hae been sum man’s delyte.’”

It is pleasant to know that the ruthless butcher was promptly pursued and slain for his crime, but it is finer still to realize that brief moment of bitterness and shame. I have sometimes thought that Rossetti’s Sister Helen would have gained in artistic beauty if, after those three days of awful watching were over, after the glowing fragment of wax had melted in the flames, and her lover’s soul had passed her, sighing on the wind, there had come to the stricken girl a pang of supreme regret, an impulse of mad desire to undo the horror she had wrought. The conscience of a sinner, to use a striking phrase of Mr. Brownell’s, “is doubtless readjusted rather than repudiated altogether,” and there is an absolute truthfulness in these sudden relapses into grace.

For this reason, doubtless, I find Mr. Blackmore’s villains, with all their fascination and power, a shade too heavily, or at least too monotonously darkened. Parson Chowne is a veritable devil, and it is only his occasional humor—manifested grimly in deeds, not words—which enables us to bear the weight of his insupportable wickedness. The introduction of the naked savages as an outrage to village propriety; the summons to church, when he has a mind to fire the ricks of his parishioners,—these are the life-giving touches which mellow down this overwrought figure, this black and scowling thunderbolt of humanity. Perhaps, also, Mr. Blackmore, in his laudable desire for picturesqueness, lays too much stress on the malignant aspect, the appropriate physical condition of his sinners. From Parson Chowne’s “wondrous unfathomable face,” which chills every heart with terror, to the “red glare” in Donovan Bulrag’s eyes, there is always something exceptional about these worthies, to indicate to all beholders what manner of men they are. One is reminded of Charles II. protesting, not unnaturally, against the perpetual swarthiness of stage villains. “We never see a rogue in a play but we clap on him a black periwig,” complained the dark-skinned monarch, with a sense of personal grievance in this forced association between complexion and crime. It was the same subtle inspiration which prompted Kean to play Shylock in a red wig that suggested to Wilkie Collins Count Fosco’s admirable size. The passion for embroidered waistcoats and fruit tarts, the petted white mice, the sympathetic gift of pastry to the organ-grinder’s monkey, all the little touches which go to build up this colossal, tender-hearted, remorseless, irresistible scoundrel are of interest and value to the portrait, but his fat is as essential as his knavery. It is one of those master strokes of genius which breaks away from all accepted traditions to build up a new type, perfect and unapproachable. We can no more imagine a thin Fosco than a melancholy Dick Swiveller, or a light-hearted Ravenswood.

Mr. Andrew Lang, who enjoys upon all occasions the courage of his convictions, has, in one of those pleasant papers, “At the Sign of the Ship,” given utterance to a sentiment so shockingly at variance with the prevalent theory of fiction, that the reader is divided between admiration for his boldness and a vague surprise that a man should speak such words and live. There is a cheerfulness, too, about Mr. Lang’s heterodoxy, a smiling ignorance of his own transgression, that warms our hearts and weakens our upbraiding. “The old simple scheme,” he says, “in which you had a real unmitigated villain, a heroine as pure as snow or flame, and a crowd of good ordinary people, gave us more agreeable reading, and reading not, I think, more remote from truth, than is to be found in Dr. Ibsen’s _Ghosts_ or in his _Pillars of Society_.” Now to support such a statement would be unscrupulous; to condemn it, dispiriting; but I wonder if the “real unmitigated villain” is quite so simple a product as Mr. Lang appears to imagine. May not his absence from literature be owing as much to the limitations as to the disregard of modern realists? Is he, in truth, so easily drawn as to be unworthy of their subtle and discriminating pens? Is Sir Giles Overreach a mere child’s toy in comparison with Consul Bernick, and is Brian de Bois-Guilbert unworthy to rank with Johann Tönnesen and Oswald Alving? A villain must be a thing of power, handled with delicacy and grace. He must be wicked enough to excite our aversion, strong enough to arouse our fear, human enough to awaken some transient gleam of sympathy. We must triumph in his downfall, yet not barbarously nor with contempt, and the close of his career must be in harmony with all its previous development. Mrs. Pennell has told us the story of some old Venetian witches, who were converted from their dark ways, and taught the charms of peace and godliness; but who would desire or credit the conversion of a witch? The potency of evil lies within her to the end; and when, by a few muttered words, she can raise a hell storm on the ocean; when her eye’s dim fire can wither the strength of her enemy; or when, with a lock of hair and a bit of wax, she can consume him with torturing pain, who will welcome her neighborly advances? The proper and artistic end of a witch is at the stake—blue flames curling up to heaven, and a handful of gray ashes scattered to the wind; or, by the working of a stronger spell, she may be stiffened into stone, and doomed to stand forever on some desolate moor, where, underneath starless skies, her evil feet have strayed; or perhaps that huge black cat, her sinister attendant, has completed his ninth year of servitude to nine successive witches, and, by virtue of the power granted him at their expiration, he may whisk her off bodily on St. John’s Eve, to offer her a living holocaust to Satan. These are possibilities in strict sympathy with her character and history, if not with her inclinations; the last is in especial accordance with sound Italian tradition, and all reveal what Heine calls “the melancholy pleasurable awe, the dark sweet horror, of Mediæval ghost fancies.” But a converted witch, walking demurely to vesper service, gossiping with good, garrulous old women on the doorstep, or holding an innocent child within her withered arms—the very thought repels us instinctively, and fires us with a sharp mistrust. Have a care, you foolish young mother, and snatch your baby to your breast; for even now he waxes paler and paler, as those cold, malignant heart-throbs chill his breath, and wear his little life away.

The final disposition of a mere earthly villain should likewise be a matter of artistic necessity, not a harsh trampling of arrogant virtue upon prostrate vice. There is no mistake so fatal as that of injustice to the evil element of a novel or a play. We all know how, when Portia pushes her triumphant casuistry a step too far, our sympathies veer obstinately around to Shylock’s side, and refuse to be readjusted before the curtain falls. Perhaps Shakespeare intended this,—who knows?—and threw in Gratiano’s last jeers to madden, not the usurer, but the audience. Or perhaps in Elizabeth’s day, as in King John’s, people had not grown so finical about the feelings of a Jew, and it is only the chilly tolerance of our enlightened age which prevents our enjoying as we should the devout prejudices of our ancestors. But when, in a modern novel, guiltless of all this picturesque superstition, we see the sinner treated with a narrow, nagging sort of severity, our unregenerate nature rebels stoutly against such a manifest lack of balance. Not long ago, I chanced to read a story which actually dared to have a villain for a hero, and I promised myself much pleasure from so original and venturesome a step. But how did the very popular authoress treat her own creation? In the first place, when rescued from a truly feminine haze of hints, and dark whispers, and unsubstantiated innuendoes, the hapless man is proven guilty of but three offences: he takes opium, he ejects his tenants, and he tries, not very successfully, to mesmerize his wife. Now, opium-eating is a vice, the punishment for which is borne by the offender, and which merits as much pity as contempt; rack-renting is an unpardonable, but not at all a thrilling misdemeanor; and, in these days of psychological research, there are many excellent men who would not shrink from making hypnotic experiments on their grandmothers. In consequence, however, of such feeble atrocities, the hero-villain is subjected to a species of outlawry at the hands of all the good people in the book. His virtuous cousin makes open and highly honorable love to his virtuous wife, who responds with hearty alacrity. His virtuous cousin’s still more virtuous brother comes within an ace of murdering him in cold blood, through motives of the purest philanthropy. Finally, one of these virtuous young men lets loose on him his family ghost, deliberately unsealing the spectral abiding-place; and, while the virtuous wife clings around the virtuous cousin’s neck, and forbids him tenderly to go to the rescue, the accommodating spirit—who seems to have no sort of loyalty to the connection—slays the villain at his own doorstep, and leaves the coast free for a second marriage service. Practically, the device is an admirable one, because, when the ghost retires once more to his seclusion, nobody can well be convicted of manslaughter, and a great deal of scandal is saved. But, artistically, there is something repellent in this open and shameless persecution; in three persons and a hobgoblin conspiring against one poor man. Our sentiment is diverted from its proper channel, our emotions are manifestly incorrect.

“How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner,” asks Mr. Vincent Crummles, “if there isn’t a little man contending against a big one?—unless there’s at least five to one, and we haven’t hands enough for that business in our company.” What would the noble-hearted Mr. Crummles have thought of reversing this natural order of things, and declaring victory for the multitude? How would human nature, in the provinces, have supported so novel and hazardous an innovation? Why should human nature, out of the provinces, be assumed to have outgrown its simple, chivalrous instincts? A good, strong, designing, despicable villain, or even villainess, a fair start, a stout fight, an artistic overthrow, and triumphant Virtue smiling modestly beneath her orange blossoms—shall we ever be too old and world-worn to love these old and world-worn things?

A BY-WAY IN FICTION

Now and then the wearied and worn novel-reader, sick unto death of books about people’s beliefs and disbeliefs, their conscientious scruples and prejudices, their unique aspirations and misgivings, their cumbersome vices and virtues, is recompensed for much suffering by an hour of placid but genuine enjoyment. He picks up rather dubiously a little, unknown volume, and, behold! the writer thereof takes him gently by the hand, and leads him straightway into a fair country, where the sun is shining, and men and women smile kindly on him, and nobody talks unorthodox theology, and everybody seems disposed to allow everybody else the privilege of being nappy in his own way. When to these admirable qualities are added humor and an atmosphere of appreciative cultivation, the novel-reader feels indeed that his lines have been cast in pleasant places, and he is disposed to linger along in a very contented and uncritical frame of mind.

There has come to us recently a new and beautiful edition of such a little book, published in America, but born of Italian soil and sunshine. It has for a title _The Chevalier of Pensieri-Vani, together with Frequent Allusions to the Prorege of Arcopia_, which, is rather an unmerciful string of words to describe so gay and easy-going a narrative. It is the first full-fledged literary venture of its author, Mr. Henry Fuller, also known as Stanton Page, whose New England grandfather was a cousin of Margaret Fuller’s. The story, which is not really a story at all, but a series of detached episodes, rambles backward and forward in such a bewildering fashion that the chapters might be all rearranged without materially disturbing its slender thread of continuity. It is equally guiltless of plot or purpose, of dramatic incidents or realistic details. The Chevalier may be found now in Pisa, now in Venice, now in Ostia or Ravenna, never driven by the vulgar spur of necessity, always wandering of his own free and idle will. He is accompanied sometimes by his friend Hors-Concours, an Italianized Frenchman from Savoy, and sometimes by the Prorege of Arcopia, the delightful Prorege, who gives to the book its best and most distinctive flavor. At once dignified and urbane, conscious of his exalted position, and convinced that he fills it with equal grace and correctness, this superb official moves through the tale in an atmosphere of autocratic reserve, tempered with the most delicate courtesy. His ministerial views are as unalterable as the rocks, and as sound; but he listens to the democratic ravings of his young American _protégé_, Occident, with the good-humored indulgence one accords to a beloved and precocious child. It must be confessed that Occident fails to make his arguments very convincing, or to impress his own personality with any degree of clearness upon the reader’s mind. He is at best only a convenient listener to the Prorege’s delicious theories; he is of real value only because the Prorege condescends to talk to him. When he ventures upon a truly American remark about trying “to find the time” for something, his august friend reminds him, with dignity, that “the only man to be envied was the man whose time was in some degree his own, and the most pitiable object that civilization could offer was the rich man a slave to his chronometer. Too much had been said about the dignity of labor, and not enough about the preciousness of leisure. Civilization in its last outcome was heavily in the debt of leisure, and the success of any society worth considering was to be estimated largely by the use to which its _fortunati_ had put their spare moments. He wrung from Occident the confession that, in the great land of which Shelby County may be called the centre, activity, considered of itself and quite apart from its objects and its results, was regarded as a very meritorious thing; and he learned that the bare figure of leisure, when exposed to the public gaze, was expected to be decorously draped in the garment of strenuous endeavor. People were supposed to appear busy, even if they were not. This gave the Prorege a text for a little disquisition on the difference between leisure and idleness.”

In fact, a beautiful, cultivated, polished, unmarred, well-spent inactivity is the keynote of this serene little book; and to understand its charm and meaning we have but to follow the Chevalier, in the second chapter, to Pisa—to Pisa the restful, where “life is not strongly accentuated by positive happenings, where incident is unusual, and drama quite unknown.” The Chevalier’s windows, we are told, faced the north, and he sat and looked out of them rather more than active persons would deem pleasant or profitable. It even happened that the Prorege remarked this comfortable habit, and demanded of his friend what it was he looked at, inasmuch as there seemed to be no appreciable change from day to day. To which the Chevalier, in whom “Quietism was pretty successfully secularized; who knew how to sit still, and occasionally enjoyed doing so,” replied with great acumen that what _had_ gone on was quite as interesting to him as what was going on, and that nothing was more gratifying, from his point of view, than that very absence of change which had taken his Excellency’s attention—since any change would be a change for the worse.

He is destined, as it chances, to prove the truth of his own theories, for it is in Pisa, of all places, that he is tempted to throw aside for once his _rôle_ of contemplative philosopher, and to assume that of an active philanthropist, with very disastrous results. There is an admirable satire in the description of the two friends, Pensieri-Vani and Hors-Concours, gravely plotting to insure the success of an operatic _débutante_, to bring her out in the sunshine of their generous patronage, and with the direct approval of the Prorege himself, who kindly consents to sit in the front of a middle box, and to wear a round half-dozen of his most esteemed decorations. Unhappily, an Italian audience does not like to have its enthusiasm expressed for it, even by such noble and consummate critics. As each well-arranged device of flowers or love-birds in a gilded cage is handed decorously forward, the house grows colder and more quizzical, until the _débutante_ sees herself on the extreme verge of failure, and, putting forth all her powers in one appealing effort, she triumphs by dint of sheer pluck and ability over the fatal kindness of her friends. The poor Chevalier, who has in the meantime left the theatre with many bitter self-communings, receives his lesson in a spirit of touching humility, recognizing at once his manifest limitations. “He perceived that he was less fitted to play the part of special providence than he had previously supposed; and he brought from this experience the immeasurable consolation that comes from knowing that very frequently in this sadly twisted world, things, if only left to their own courses, have a way of coming out right in the end.”

The Pisan episode, the delicious journey of the Prorege and Pensieri-Vani in search of the “Madonna Incognita,” a mysterious and illusive Perugino which turns out, after all, to be a Sodoma, and the memorable excursion to Ostia, are the finest and best-told incidents in the book. The story of the Iron Pot is too broadly farcical, too Pickwickian in its character, to be in harmony with the rest of the narrative; the Contessa’s fête at Tusculum is so lightly sketched as to be absolutely tantalizing; and the practical jokes which that lady and the Prorege delight in playing upon one another are hardly as subtle and acute as we would like to find them. Indeed, the Prorege’s conduct on board his own yacht is so deeply objectionable that I, for one, positively refuse to believe he was ever guilty of such raw rudeness. It is not kind or right in Mr. Fuller to wickedly calumniate this charming and high-bred gentleman whom he has given us for a friend. Neither is the battle of the Aldines as thrilling as might be expected, probably because it is impossible to accept the Duke of Avon and Severn upon any terms whatever. Occident, the American, is misty and ill-defined; but he does not lack proportion, only vitality. The English duke is a mistake throughout, a false note that disturbs the atmosphere of serene good temper which is the principal attraction of the book; an effort on the author’s part to be severe and cynical, just when we were congratulating ourselves that severity and cynicism were things far, far remote from his tolerant and kindly spirit.

The excursion to Ostia, however, is enough to redeem the whole volume from any charge of ill-nature; for if the Contessa does seize this opportunity to play one of her dubious tricks upon the Prorege, it is not until the little group of friends have proved themselves gentle, and sympathetic, and full of fine and generous instincts. It is a delicious bit of description throughout. La Nullaniuna has been crowned the day before at her Tusculum fête as “the new Corinne,” and naturally feels that her proper cue is that of “genius-blasted fragility,” overpowered and shattered by her own impassioned burst of song. With her is the widowed Princess Altissimi, her cherished friend and foil, a sombre beauty of a grave and chastened demeanor, against whose dark background the Contessa, “who was fully as flighty, and capricious, and _théâtrale_ as a woman of semi-genius usually finds it necessary to be, posed and fidgeted to her heart’s content.” The Prorege, sublimely affable as ever, Pensieri-Vani, and young Occident, eager and radiant, make up the party; and after the little inn has furnished them with a noonday meal of unusual profusion and elegance, they visit the adjoining church at the instigation of the Princess Altissimi, who is anxious to see what this solitary and humble temple is like. All that follows is so exquisite that I must quote it as it stands, in proof of the author’s faculty for delicate and sympathetic delineation:

“They were met on the threshold by the single priest in charge, a dark and sallow young man of peasant extraction, whose lonely battle with midsummer malaria had left him wholly gaunt and enervate. He saluted them with the deference which the Church sometimes shows to the World, though he was too true an Italian to be awed, or even embarrassed by their rank; and he brightened up into something almost like eagerness as he offered to do the honors of his charge. The Prorege indulgently praised the wretched frescoes which he exhibited so proudly, and the Contessa called up a flickering smile of pleasure in his emaciated face as she feigned an enthusiasm for the paltry fripperies of the high altar. This appreciative interest emboldened him to suggest their ascent to the gallery, where, from his manner, the great treasure of the church was to be revealed. The great treasure was a small cabinet organ, and Occident—triumphing in the ubiquity of the Western genius, yet somewhat taken back by this new illustration of the incongruities it sometimes precipitated—read upon it a name familiar to his earliest years. The priest, who evidently conceived it an impossibility for his beloved instrument to be guilty of a discord of any kind whatever, pleaded with a mute but unmistakable pathos that its long silence might now be ended; and the Princess, motioning Pensieri-Vani to the keyboard, sang this poor solitary a churchly little air, with such a noble seriousness and such a gracious simplicity as to move, not only him, but all the others too. Occident, in particular, who kept within him quite unimpaired his full share of that fund of sensibility which is one of the best products of Shelby County, and who would have given half his millions just then to have been able to sit down and play the simplest tune, implored Pensieri-Vani in looks, if not in words, to do for him what he himself was so powerless to compass; and the Cavaliere, who, like a good and true musician, preferred support from the lowest quarter to indifference in the highest, kept his place until their poor host, charmed, warmed through and through, attached again to the great body of humanity, could scarcely trust himself to voice his thanks. But the Princess whispered in the Cavaliere’s ear, as his series of plain and simple little tunes came to an end, that he had not lost since she last heard him.”

There is nothing finer in the story than this, perhaps nothing quite so good, though all of Pensieri-Vani’s journeys are fruitful in minute incidents of a pleasant and picturesque quality. It is curious, too, to see how the Chevalier, who, except for that catlike scratching about the Aldines, is the gentlest and least hurtful of men, manifests at times a positive impatience of his own refined and peaceful civilization, a breathless envy of sterner races and of stormier days. When he discovers the tomb of the old Etrurian warrior, he is abashed and humbled at the thought of that fierce spirit summoned from thirty centuries of darkness to see the light of this invertebrate and sentimental age; requested to forget his deep draughts of blood and iron, and to contentedly “munch the dipped toast of a flabby humanitarianism, and sip the weak tea of brotherly love.” When he stands in the dim cathedral of Anagni, and contemplates the tombs of the illustrious Gaetani family, and the mosaics which blazon forth their former splendors, he shrinks with sudden shame from the contrast between his feeble, forceless will and the rough daring of that mighty clan. “The stippling technique of his own day seemed immeasurably poor and paltry compared with the broad, free, sketchy touch with which these men dashed off their stirring lives; and he stood confounded before that fiery and robust intensity which, so gloriously indifferent to the subtilties of the grammarian, the niceties of the manicure, and the torments of the supersensitive self-analyst, could fix its intent upon some definite desire, and move forward unswervingly to its attainment. Poor moderns! he sighed, who with all our wishing never reach our end, and with all our thinking never know what we really think.”

These unprofitable musings of the Chevalier’s seem to reflect some recurring discontent, some restless, unchastened yearnings on the part of the author himself; but they find no echo in the serene breast of the Prorege. He at least is as remote from envying the hostilities of the past as he is innocent of aspiring to the progressiveness of the future. He is fully alive to the merits of his own thrice-favored land, where the evil devices of a wrong-headed generation have never been suffered to penetrate: “Arcopia, the gods be praised, was exempt from the modern curse of bigness. One chimney was not offensive; but a million made a London. One refuse-heap could be tolerated; but accumulated thousands produced a New York. A hundred weavers in their own cottages meant peaceful industry and home content; a hundred hundred, massed in one great factory, meant vice and squalor and disorder. Society had never courted failure or bid for misery more ardently than when it had accepted an urban industrialism for a basis.... Happily the Arcopian population, except a fraction that followed the arts and another fraction that followed the sea, was largely agricultural, and exhibited in high union the chief virtue and the chief grace of civilized society—order and picturesqueness. The disturbing and ungracious catch-word, ‘Égalité,’ had never crossed the Arcopian sea; if the Prorege had not been tolerably sure that his mild sway was to be undisturbed by the clangor of cantankerous boiler-makers and the bickerings of a bumptious, shopkeeping _bourgeoisie_, he would never have undertaken the task at all. He regarded himself as a just, humane, and sympathetic ruler, but he believed that every man should have his own proper place and fill it.”

Such are the views smilingly detailed to the puzzled and outraged Occident, who, having been nourished in boyhood on the discourses of rustic theologians, and the forensics of Shelbyville advocates, finds it difficult to assimilate his own theories of life with a civilization he so imperfectly understands. He doubts his ability to take the European attitude, he doubts the propriety of the attitude when taken, and the struggle ends in the usual manner by his marrying a wife, and going back to Shelby County to be a good citizen for the rest of his days. Hors-Concours, mindful of the duties entailed on the proprietor of a small patrimony and an ancient name, espouses with becoming gravity and deliberation the Princess Altissimi. The Prorege retires to Arcopia the blessed, whither we would fain follow him if we could; and Pensieri-Vani, left desolate and alone, consoles himself with the reflection that life has many sides, and that Italy has not yet given up to him all she has to give: “Others might falter; but he was still sufficient unto himself, still master of his own time and his own actions, and enamored only of that delightful land whose beauty age cannot wither, and whose infinite variety custom can never stale.”

COMEDY OF THE CUSTOM HOUSE

There is no place in the world where human nature is so thoroughly human or so purely natural as on the New York docks, when a great steamer load of returning travelers are being put through the _peine forte et dure_ of the United States custom house. Everybody is striving to play a part, to assume an air of indifference which he does not feel, and of innocence which he knows to be fallacious; and, like Mrs. Browning’s Masker, everybody betrays too plainly in his “smiling face” and “jesting bold” the anxiety that preys upon his vitals. Packed snugly away in that wilderness of trunks and boxes are hundreds, nay, thousands, of pretty trifles, which it is the painful duty of every man, and the proud ambition of every woman, to carry in unscathed and undetected. The frank, shameless delight which a woman takes in smuggling has long puzzled the male moralist, who, following the intricacies of the feminine conscience, can find no satisfactory explanation of this by-path. He cannot bring her to understand why, when she has purchased and paid for an article, it should not be hers to take where she likes, to deal with as she pleases; and a dozen discourses on political economy and the laws of nations leave her unshaken in this simple and primitive conception. As the English are said to argue best in platoons, so a woman argues best in action; and, while her husband or brother is proving to her in the clearest possible fashion that a high protective tariff is a blessing to the land, she is assiduously storing away embroidered table covers, and silk stockings, and silver spoons, and tortoise-shell combs, and tiny jeweled pins, and bits of frail Venetian glass, wherever her practiced eye tells her they will best escape detection. In the abstract, of course, dear Edwin is right—he always is—but she is far too busy with her task to enter into abstractions just now. Whatever mental subtlety she possesses is reserved for a much more important ordeal—that of getting clear, with a clean conscience, from the searching questions of the inspector. “When I am asked if I have any presents I always answer no,” said a devout, church-going woman to me one day, “because I do not consider them presents until I give them away.”

The grim, perplexed seriousness with which the customs officers play their part makes a delightful foil (for the spectators) to the nimble, elusive mental movements of their adversaries; and it is in the conflict between aggressor and aggrieved, between invader and invaded, that the humors of our great national institution develop their choicest bloom. The fortunes of war which recently delayed my own boxes and my hoped-for escape, gave me, by way of compensation, an easy opportunity of observing and enjoying the experiences of other people, and I was encouraged in my diversion by the too evident glee of one of the minor actors in the strife. She was a very pretty girl, this gay young combatant, not more than sixteen years old, and she sat kicking her heels on somebody else’s trunk, while she watched with enviable composure the overhauling of her own. I had seen her often during the homeward voyage, and had spoken to her once or twice as she tripped endlessly up and down the deck in company with every man and boy on board; taking them impartially, one by one, and seeming to be on the same mysterious terms of intimacy with all. She had a traveling companion in the shape of a mother who adored her fretfully, and whom she treated with finely mingled affection and contempt. She never spoke of this relative without the prefix “poor.” “Poor mother is awfully sick to-day,” she would say in her shrill, high-pitched voice, with a laugh which showed all her little white teeth, and sounded a trifle unsympathetic in our ears. But five minutes later she was helping “poor mother” to her steamer chair, wrapping her up skilfully in half a dozen rugs and shawls, bullying the deck steward to bring her some hot bouillon, bullying her to drink the bouillon when brought, listening to her manifold complaints with an indulgent smile, and flatly refusing to obey, when entreated to put on a warmer jacket.

“Poor mother is always worrying about wraps,” was her only acknowledgment of the maternal solicitude; and even this remark was made, not to her prostrate parent, but to the youth who was waiting to bear her away.

The pair had been traveling alone all summer, but were met on the docks by a person whom they both called “cousin Jim,” and who assured them in a hearty, offhand manner that he would have them safe through the custom house in five minutes; a miscalculation, as it turned out, of quite three-quarters of an hour. Malignant fate assigned them an inspector who settled down to his search like an Indian to the war trail, and who seemed possessed with the idea that the wealth of the Indies lay secreted somewhere in those two shabby, travel-worn boxes. Whether this man was really enamored of his disagreeable task, whether he conscientiously believed that the United States would be impoverished and her industries crippled by the contents of that modest luggage, or whether he had been too pliable on former occasions, and seized this chance to assert his general incorruptibility, it would be hard to determine; but while older and less ardent officials lifted out trays and turned over corners in a purely perfunctory manner, seeing nothing, and seeking to see nothing of what lay beneath, this red-hot zealot went thoroughly and exhaustively to work upon the limited materials before him. Now the particular irritation of the custom house lies, not in the fact of your trunk being searched, but of your neighbor’s trunk escaping; and the sharpest sting is when you chance to know that your neighbor is carrying in unmolested ten times the value of your dutiable articles. If Miss Maisie, kicking her heels and smiling affably, did not realize the hardship of her position, Miss Maisie’s mother—she never had any other name, her sole claim to distinction resting on her daughter—felt it very keenly. She stood, anxious and angry, by the side of the inspector, protesting fretfully at each new in-road, and appealing for sympathy to her companions.

“It’s a perfect shame, the way he has rumpled your dresses, Maisie, and upset that tray you packed so nice and close. You will never be able to get the things back again in the world, and, if you do, one half of them will be broken before we reach home. And there’s your new fur cape all out of fold. I told you to wear it, or carry it in on your arm. No! that is not a present; at least I think not, is it, Maisie?” as a small brown paper parcel, carefully tied, was held up by the inspector for scrutiny.

“I can’t tell till I open it,” said the girl, reaching over, and very deliberately unfastening the string. “You don’t remember what this is, do you, mother? Oh! I see—a piece of camphor. No, it’s not a present. We brought it from America. Lasts beautifully, doesn’t it?” returning the parcel with a smile. “Would you mind wrapping it up again? It’s so very hard to tie anything in gloves.”

Apparently the inspector did mind, for he jerked the lump of camphor unwrapped into the trunk, and made a vicious scoop among the layers of neatly packed clothing. “Is this a present, then?” he asked, drawing to light a flat oblong white box, and snapping the cord that bound it. Inside, resting on pink cotton wool, was a small silver-backed hand-mirror of fine workmanship. “Surely this must be a present?” he repeated, with the triumphant air of one who has dragged a secret crime to justice.

Maisie’s mother looked nervous, and fidgeted visibly, but Maisie herself was imperturbable. “You are mistaken; it is not,” she said, without a tremor.

The man glanced at her sharply, and shrugged his shoulders. “You keep it very nicely put away for an article in use,” he hinted, turning over the box once or twice with manifest doubt and reluctance. “And these—are all these your own, too?” unearthing from some secret receptacle six little card-cases of blue leather, and spreading them out jeeringly in a row.

“I told you not to get so many, Maisie, but you would do it,” said her mother, in the hopeless tone of a convicted criminal.