Chapter III: Part 3

“They were such bargains, I couldn’t resist them,” answered the girl sorrowfully. “Yes, they are presents; at least five of them are. I guess I will keep one for myself, and save that, any way. Just put one of them back, please. And oh, dear! do you have to lift out that heavy tray? There are nothing but clothes at the bottom of the trunk.”

“Nothing at all but clothes,” interposed her mother peevishly. “I don’t see why you have to go through everything in this fashion.”

“Nothing at all but clothes,” repeated cousin Jim, who had hitherto stood staring silently at the confusion before him. “Can’t you take the ladies’ word for it, when they assure you there is nothing underneath but clothes?”

“My dear sir,” said the inspector, exasperated into insolence, “I should be very glad to take any lady’s word, but I can’t. I’ve learned a great deal better.”

Maisie’s mother colored hotly, with the righteous indignation of a woman who lies easily, and is accused of falsehood; but Maisie, screwing her pretty head on one side, winked at me in shameless enjoyment of the situation. “He’ll find I’m right this time,” she whispered; “but wasn’t it lucky he got it into his stupid brain that the glass must be a present! If he had said ‘commission’ now, I should have been caught, and the friend I bought it for would be simply furious if I had to pay duty on it. Poor mother insisted that I should not take a single commission this summer, so I only have very few; just that glass, and some gloves, of course, and a feather collar, and half a dozen pairs of stockings, and a little silk shawl from Rome. One girl did ask me to buy her a dress in Paris, but I wouldn’t do it; and another wanted a pair of blue slippers, but fortunately I forgot her size; and another—”

“Maisie, dear, do put back your things now,” interrupted her unhappy parent, who by this time was on the verge of tears. “The inspector has finished with your trunk, and is going to mine. And please be careful of your cape! I wish you had worn it instead—”

“Instead of my old one?” said the girl hastily, smoothing down, as she spoke, a very handsome and palpably new piece of sealskin on her shoulders. “Poor mother is so blundering,” she sighed softly in my ear. “I am wearing this cape for Dr. Hunsdale. He is bringing it home to his sister, and of course wouldn’t have any shadow of a chance with it himself. Indeed, he intended to declare it, which would have been a dreadful shame. So I just offered to pack mine and wear this one. Lots of girls do, you know. I’ve got a watch here for another man, too,” lightly touching the châtelaine by her side. “Not a gold one. Only a little silver thing he bought for _his_ sister, who is a child. Poor mother doesn’t know about that, or she would be more miserable still; and she is pretty miserable now, isn’t she?” contemplating her perturbed relative with gentle disfavor. “You see, she worries so, she makes that man believe we have something tremendously valuable somewhere, and he is bent on finding it out. There, he’s after our Roman blankets; but those are for ourselves, and, what is more,” raising her voice, “we have had them in use for nearly three months.”

“Three months isn’t long enough,” returned the official surlily. “You must have had them in use a year, to bring them in free.”

“A year!” echoed Maisie, opening her round eyes with innocent amazement. “If you knew much about Roman blankets, you wouldn’t expect anybody to use them for a year, and then think them worth bringing home. What a thrifty lot the custom-house people must be! Poor mother! She never expected to pay for those, and it does seem a little hard on her. But what’s that he’s got now? Oh! _do_ look!” for the inspector had grabbed something loosely wrapped in white tissue paper, and was holding it aloft with an exultant shake, and an “I’ve-tracked-you-at-last” expression. Down fell a rubber shoe, of unmistakable American manufacture, but richly crusted with layers of foreign mud. It flopped modestly into the bottom of the trunk, and was greeted with a ringing laugh of genuine, uncontrolled delight. “That’s a present,” sobbed the girl, literally choking with mirth, “and very valuable. We brought it from the South Kensington, and are going to send it to the Metropolitan Museum as soon as we reach home.”

“Maisie, how can you be so foolish!” protested her mother, roused by desperation to some faint semblance of authority, and visibly anxious to propitiate the inspector, who looked ominously angry. “If you will wrap such absurd things in white tissue paper, naturally people think they are of some value.”

“But we had so much tissue paper in London, and nothing else to wrap with,” was the very reasonable reply. “Fifteen sheets the tailor sent home with my one frock, and I am keeping most of it to use at Christmas time. Poor old shoe!” lifting it tenderly out of the trunk; “if mud were a dutiable article—and I only wonder it isn’t—you would come very expensive just now. Swiss mud, too, I do believe, never brushed off since that day at Grindelwald, and quite a relic. Don’t you think,” turning suddenly to me, “don’t you really think all this is fearfully funny?”

In one sense I did, though the fun was of a strictly esoteric character, not appealing broadly to the crowd. But then Mr. Saintsbury assures us that real fun seldom does. Poor mother’s sense of humor was plainly unequal to the demand made upon it; cousin Jim, who had not spoken since his first repulse, looked more bewildered than amused; and even the inspector did not seem vastly entertained by the situation. The trunks had been examined, and their contents sadly disarranged; the handbags searched, and found to contain only toilet articles and underwear; the steamer rugs, unrolled, revealed nothing more precious than an old magazine and four battered French novels. As a result of over half an hour’s inquisition, the authorities had possessed themselves of two well-worn Roman blankets, a pretty, inexpensive little fan, painted on brown linen, a beer mug of Munich ware, and those five blue card-cases that had been so cheap in Paris. It hardly seemed as if the spoils were worth the conflict, or as if the three dollars and ninety cents duty charged on them could be a serious addition to the revenues of the United States. But the home-coming of one poor woman had been marred, and no salt-tax of ancient France was ever paid with more manifest reluctance and ill-will.

“It’s the burning injustice of the thing I mind, Maisie,” was the vehement protest hurled at the inspector’s back. “There were plenty of people all around whose trunks were hardly touched. I watched one man myself, and he never lifted out a single thing—just turned the corners a little, and smoothed all down again. He was examining the Hardings’s luggage, too, and I know they have five times as much as we have—really costly, beautiful things—and they never paid a cent.”

“But we didn’t pay a great deal,” returned the girl cheerfully. She was down on her knees now, deftly rearranging the disordered trunks. “Think of all our man might have found, and didn’t.”

“Think of the shameful condition he left our clothes in!” said her angry mother. “It is an outrage. And those blankets! Everybody brings them, and nobody but ourselves has to pay. The Hardings had them, I know, and so did Miss Rebecca Chambers, and Mrs. Starr; and they all came in free.”

“Yes, but Mr. Maitland was charged four dollars duty on a pair he bought for twenty shillings in London, and he presented them to the custom-house officers rather than give their value over again,” said Maisie triumphantly.

“Did he, really?” cried her mother, brightening up wonderfully under the beneficent influence of other people’s misfortunes. “What a shame! Four dollars duty on twenty-shilling blankets! I never heard of anything so preposterous.”

“Yes, and Dr. Carson gave them a silver watch he had brought over for his little boy, rather than pay the duty on that, it was so high,” continued Maisie, who seemed to know the fate and fortunes of every passenger on board.

Her mother’s face relaxed from fretfulness into smiles. “I wonder he doesn’t sue the government, or something,” she remarked, with feminine vagueness. “I am sure I should. It is a good thing, Maisie, we had no watches to bring.”

The girl chuckled softly, and shook the little châtelaine by her side. “Yes, it _is_ a good thing,” she said, with an air of simple conviction. “After all, we did get off pretty cheap. And it was almost worth the money to see the delicious flourish with which that muddy old overshoe tumbled on the scene. Don’t _you_ think,” turning once more appealingly to me, “that three dollars and ninety cents was little enough to pay for such a sight?”

Perhaps I did. A laugh is always worth its price, and in these serious days grows rare at any figure. Besides, when a great republic condescends to play an active part in even an indifferent comedy, it is ill-timed to grumble at the cost.

MR. WILDE’S _INTENTIONS_

Ever since the first printers with misguided zeal dipped an innocent world in ink, those books have been truly popular which reflected faithfully and enthusiastically the foibles and delusions of the hour. This is what is called “keeping abreast with the spirit of the times,” and we have only to look around us at present to see the principle at work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling us to the heart, and sad-voiced novelists entreating us at every turn to try to cultivate indecorous conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased to be a medium of delight. Even nihilism, which is the only form of relief that true earnestness permits, is capable of being overstrained, and some narrowly conservative people are beginning to ask themselves already whether this new development of “murder as a fine art” has not been sufficiently encouraged. Out of the midst of the gloom, out of the confusion and depression of conflicting forms of seriousness, rises from London a voice, clear, languid, musical, shaken with laughter, and speaking in strange, sweet tones of art and beauty, and of that finer criticism which is one with art and beauty, and claims them forever as its own. The voice comes from Mr. Oscar Wilde, and few there are who listen to him, partly because his philosophy is alien to our prevalent modes of thought, and partly because of the perverse and paradoxical fashion in which he delights to give it utterance. People are more impressed by the way a thing is said than by the thing itself. A grave arrogance of demeanor, a solemn and self-assertive method of reiterating an opinion until it grows weighty with words, are weapons more convincing than any subtlety of argument. “As I have before expressed to the still reverberating discontent of two continents”—this is the mode in which the public loves to have a statement offered to its ears, that it may gape, and wonder, and acquiesce.

Nothing can be further from such admirable solidity than Mr. Wilde’s flashing sword-play, than the glee with which he makes out a case against himself, and then proceeds valiantly into battle. There are but four essays in the volume, rather vaguely called _Intentions_, and of these four only two have real and permanent value. “The Truth of Masks” is a somewhat trivial paper, inserted apparently to help fill up the book, and “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” is visibly lacking in sincerity. The author plays with his subject very much as his subject, “kind, light-hearted Wainwright,” played with crime, and in both cases there is a subtle and discordant element of vulgarity. It is not given to our eminently respectable age to reproduce the sumptuous and horror-laden atmosphere which lends an artistic glamor to the poisonous court of the Medicis. This “study in green” contains, however, some brilliant passages, and at least one sentence—“The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists”—that must make Mr. George Moore pale with envy, when he reflects that he missed saying it, where it belongs, in his clever, truthful, ill-natured paper on “Mummer-Worship.”

The significance and the charm of Mr. Wilde’s book are centred in its opening chapter, “The Decay of Lying,” reprinted from _The Nineteenth Century_, and in the long two-part essay, entitled “The Critic as Artist,” which embodies some of his most thoughtful, serious, and scholarly work. My own ineffable content rests with “The Decay of Lying,” because, under its transparent mask of cynicism, its wit, its satire, its languid mocking humor, lies clearly outlined a great truth that is slipping fast away from us—the absolute independence of art—art nourished by imagination and revealing beauty. This is the hand that gilds the grayness of the world; this is the voice that sings in flute tones through the silence of the ages. To degrade this shining vision into a handmaid of nature, to maintain that she should give us photographic pictures of an unlovely life, is a heresy that arouses in Mr. Wilde an amused scorn which takes the place of anger. “Art,” he says, “never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.” That we should understand this, it is necessary to understand also the “beautiful untrue things” which exist only in the world of fancy; the things that are lies, and yet help us to endure the truth. Mr. Wilde repudiates distinctly and almost energetically all lying with an object, all sordid trifling with a graceful gift. The lies of newspapers yield him no pleasure; the lies of politicians are ostentatiously unconvincing; the lies of lawyers are “briefed by the prosaic.” He reviews the world of fiction with a swift and caustic touch; he lingers among the poets; he muses rapturously over those choice historic masterpieces, from Herodotus to Carlyle, where “facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.” He laments with charming frankness the serious virtues of his age. “Many a young man,” he says, “starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration, which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels that are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.” Surely this paragraph has but one peer in the world of letters, and that is the immortal sentence wherein De Quincey traces the murderer’s gradual downfall to incivility and procrastination.

“The Critic as Artist” affords Mr. Wilde less scope for his humor and more for his erudition, which, perhaps, is somewhat lavishly displayed. Here he pleads for the creative powers of criticism, for its fine restraints, its imposed self-culture, and he couches his plea in words as rich as music. Now and then, it is true, he seems driven by the whips of our modern Furies to the verge of things which are not his to handle—problems, social and spiritual, to which he holds no key. When this occurs, we can only wait with drooping heads, and what patience we can muster, until he is pleased to return to his theme; or until he remembers, laughing, how fatal is the habit of imparting opinions, and what a terrible ordeal it is to sit at table with the man who has spent his life in educating others rather than himself. “For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and often ultimately lost.” I like to fancy the ghost of the late Rector of Lincoln, of him who said that an appreciation of Milton was the reward of consummate scholarship, listening in the Elysian Fields, and nodding his assent to this much-neglected view of a much-disputed question. Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn. We are growing rich in lectures, but poor in scholars, and the triumph of mediocrity is at hand. Mr. Wilde can hardly hope to become popular by proposing real study to people burning to impart their ignorance; but the criticism that develops in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment is the criticism that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.

HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY

“There does not, at this blessed moment, breathe on the earth’s surface a human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures o’ body or soul.” So speaks the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his content, contemplating with moist eyes the groaning supper-table, laden with a comfortable array of solid viands; after which fair and frank expression of his views we are somewhat pained to hear him denouncing in no measured terms “the awful and fearsome vice o’ gluttony,” as evidenced occasionally in women. His companions, too, those magnificent fellow-feeders, have a great many severe things to say about gudewives who betray a weakness for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitatingly affirms that such a one, “eating for the sake of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each mouthful virtually breaks all ten of the commandments.” This is the language of an ascetic rather than of a _bon vivant_, but we are in some measure reassured when the same Mr. Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although roast goose always disagrees with him, yet he never refuses it, believing that to purchase pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true philosophy; whereupon the Shepherd, not to be outdone, gives it as his unreserved opinion that, in winter-time at least, “eating for eating’s sake, and in oblivion o’ its feenal cause, is the most sacred o’ household duties.”

From these somewhat inharmonious sentiments we reluctantly infer that gluttony is a vice—or a virtue—for man only, and that woman’s part in the programme is purely that of a ministering angel. Adam was made to eat, and Eve to cook for him, although, even in this humble sphere, she and her daughters have been doomed to rank second in command. Excellent in all things, but supreme in none, they have never yet scaled the dazzling heights of culinary fame. The records of antiquity make no mention of their skill; the middle ages grant them neither praise nor honor; and even as late as Dr. Johnson’s day they labored hard for scanty recognition. It is very painful to hear the great sage speaking lightly of our grandmother’s oracle, Mrs. Glasse, and declaring with robust contempt that women were fit to spin, but not to write a book of cookery. Yet for how many years had they modestly held their peace; profiting, doubtless, in many a roomy kitchen and in many a well-stocked buttery by the words of wisdom which vainglorious men let fall; and only now and then giving help and counsel to one another by means of little private recipe-books, which were circulated among a few noble families, and were considered as their own exclusive property and pride.

Opulence and a taste for display, upon the one side, and the natural conservatism of the great Saxon stock, upon the other, fought the battle of the table from the days of the Black Prince down to those of Anthony Trollope, and will, in all probability, fight it to the end. “A cod’s head for fourpence, and nine shillings’ worth of condiments to serve with it,” was the favorite sarcasm which greeted the growing extravagance of the rich middle classes. Those costly “subtleties” imported from French kitchens in the fifteenth century met with a sturdy opposition from British free-men, who, even while they gaped and marveled, resented such bewildering innovations. The pelican sheltering her young, and Saint Catherine, book in hand, disputing with the doctors, which figured among the dishes at the coronation of Henry V.; the hundred and four “dressed” peacocks, trailing their plumes gorgeously over the table at the consecration of Archbishop Neville, affronted more than one beef-eating gentleman, and exasperated more than one porridge-eating churl. From France, too, came certain heresies regarding the fitness of food which Englishmen had for centuries devoured and digested. Queen Elizabeth dined upon whale; Cardinal Wolsey, who was something of an epicure, and who first taught us that strawberries and cream were intended by a beneficent nature to set off each other’s merits, did not disdain to have a young porpoise served up at one of his banquets. Fish soup was a delicacy, and we are even assured by antiquarians that the grampus, or sea-wolf, was freely eaten by our strong-stomached ancestors.

But foreign cooks looked doubtfully upon these national dainties, and, in place of the old-time gravies, which were simply the broths in which meat had been boiled, flavored with a little ginger and sugar, delicate and highly seasoned sauces were devised for the tempting of weary appetites. Italy sent forks—those curious and uncanny implements—which were received with scornful indignation, as calculated to destroy the simplicity and manliness of Great Britain. Spoons and knives were held in slight esteem, for good soup could be swallowed from the bowl, and his sacred Majesty, Charles XII. of Sweden, was not the only monarch who buttered his bread with his royal thumb. But forks were contemptible affectations. As honest Master Breton observed, he had done no foul work, and handled no unwholesome thing, and consequently had no need of an instrument with which to make hay of his food and pitch it into his mouth. So, too, the time-honored custom of man and wife eating out of one trencher was falling into rapid disuse, and Walpole tells us that the old Duke and Duchess of Hamilton were the last couple in England who retained the fashion of their youth. Meats were growing daintier and dearer all the while. The ordinary or inn dinner, which in Elizabeth’s day cost sixpence, had risen to tenpence in the reign of George I., and soon crept up to a shilling. In every generation there were plenty of grumblers to lament over the good old times that had fled, and we catch the echo of this undying cry in the modern protests against unwelcome fashions. Thackeray and Trollope railed perpetually at that feeble striving after an impossible elegance which had well-nigh destroyed the cheery conviviality of their youth; and Peacock, the prince of good livers, with whom the pleasures of the intellect and the appetite walked amicably hand in hand, has recorded his still more vehement denunciation: “I detest and abominate,” says Mr. Macborrowdale, “the idea of a Siberian dinner, where you just look on fiddle-faddles, while your meal is behind a screen, and you are served with rations like a pauper.”

The scorn of the true Briton for alien delicacies was repaid with interest by the Frenchman, who regarded his neighbor’s groaning table very much as we might regard the doubtful provender of a cannibal chief. The contempt for frog-eating foreigners, on the one hand, was not greater than the contempt for beef-eating islanders, on the other; in fact, all nations, from Egypt down, seem to have cherished a wholesome dislike and distrust for each other’s food. The British officer who, at the attack on Cadiz, shouted to his men, “You Englishmen, who are fed upon beef, don’t surely mean to be beaten by a d—d lot of Spaniards, who live on oranges!” made a stronger appeal to human nature than did Napoleon with his famous “forty centuries;” and the reverse of the medal may be seen in Talleyrand’s description of England, as a land where there were twenty-four religions and only one sauce. Twenty-four religions would make but a poor showing in these days, when even a serious novel can beget a new one; but sauces are not so lightly called into being. Those “slibber sops” which brought “queesiness to the stomach and disquiet to the mind” of John Lyly were hard to rout from the field; and they were still holding their own when Brillat-Savarin, the most serene and kindly of epicures, first visited Great Britain. With Savarin, eating was more than a mere vulgar pleasure; it was a solemn and yet exquisite duty which man owed to himself, and to a generous nature that had yielded him up her bounties for this purpose. Mr. Birrell says that Burke’s letters on carrots “tremble with emotion,” and there is a like earnestness about all of Savarin’s recipes; a pathetic anxiety lest some ingredient should be omitted or ill-used. For fish he entertains a profound respect; for game, a manly affection; for pastries, a delicate regard; but truffles are the beloved darlings of his heart. It contents him greatly to sit at table with congenial spirits; to watch “the eagerness of desire, the ecstasy of enjoyment, and, finally, the perfect repose of bliss on every countenance,” when the noble meal is ended. Surely even the Reign of Terror might have dealt tenderly with such a man as this, since patriots are unswerving eaters, and it behooved them to remember that “the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a new planet.”

All of Savarin’s apothegms evince the same frank and warm-hearted regard for the welfare of others; the same unremitting anxiety to teach them what to eat and how to eat it. He entreats us never to forget that, when we have invited a man to dine, we have, for a short time at least, his happiness in our hands. The dinner table, he reminds us, is the only place where men are not hopelessly bored for the first hour, and during that hour it is our privilege to make them enamored of life. A cook is, in his eyes, a true scientist, with mighty capacities for good and evil. He believes, with Baudelaire, that such a one should have the soul of a poet, and—like the too fastidious Parisian, who declared that between Mme. du Deffand’s _chef_ and the Marquise de Brinvilliers “there was only the difference of intention”—Savarin has no words of reproach strong enough for those who debase and shame their noble calling. He is prompt to recognize the exigencies of a slender purse, and unwearying in his efforts to provide _menus_ fitted to its limitations; but his notions of economy are somewhat like those of the little French princess, who said that rather than starve she would live on bread and cheese. The famous _omelette au thon_, for instance, with all its air of pastoral simplicity, contains the roes of two carp, a piece of tunny, an eschalot, twelve eggs, and a number of other ingredients which would hardly recommend it to a poor country parsonage. As for the Abbé Chevrier’s spinach, which was warmed up with butter for seven days before it reached the acme of delicacy, we can only wonder at the admirable patience of the Abbé’s cook, who would return seven times with unremitting industry to the consideration of a single dish.

It will be observed, however, how many gastronomical triumphs we owe to clerical genius, or to the researches of the true philosopher. Lord Bacon thought it no shame to bend his mighty mind to kitchen problems, and Dr. Nowel, the learned and pious dean of St. Paul’s, was rightfully proud of the bottled beer which he first gave to his astonished and grateful country. The earliest list of recipes in England was the work of an archbishop. The Jesuits in the seventeenth century carried the turkey from its native haunts, and introduced it to the best French society, who received it with the rapture it deserved. The famous _mayonnaise_ is not the only delicacy which Richelieu bequeathed to the world; Talleyrand devoted one hour out of every busy day to the exclusive companionship of his cook; and the Regent Orleans was pleased to give his own name to the bread of his own baking.

What a kindly spirit of good-fellowship we discern in the frank epicureanism of Sydney Smith! what generous sympathy for a _bon vivant_ whose lines have led him into desert places! “Luttrell came over for a day,” he writes, “from whence I know not, but I thought not from good quarters; at least he had not his usual soup and patti look. There was a forced smile upon his countenance which seemed to indicate plain roast and boiled, a sort of apple-pudding depression, as if he had been staying with a clergyman.” How creditable, too, is his anxiety to please Luttrell, when that amiable sybarite becomes _his_ guest! “Mrs. Sydney,” he declares, “grows pale with alarm as the rich dishes are uncovered;” and yet so admirable a housewife might have shared in the superb confidence of Lord Worcester when cautioned by Sir Henry Halford to leave all such indiscreet messes alone. “Side dishes,” said the great physician, “are poison.” “Yours may be,” retorted Lord Worcester; “and I should never dream of eating them, but mine are a very different story.” So, too, were Sydney Smith’s, and the celebrated salad which gained for him nearly as wide a reputation as his wit was only one of many famous recipes, and probably no greater in its way than the mysterious pudding whose secret he imparted as an especial favor to the importunate Lady Holland. Those who had the happiness of sitting at his table rose from it with tranquil gratitude, “serenely full,” and conscious, let us hope, of his own graceful sentiment,

“Fate cannot harm me—I have dined to-day.”

There is one more subject to consider; one more aspect of the case, fraught with tender and melancholy associations. Like the lost joys of our youth; like the taste for apple-dumplings, which Lamb recognized as belonging only to those whose innocence was unimpaired; like the vanishing of gentle thoughts with a growing distaste for asparagus; so is the sorrowful blank left in our lives by the recollection of noble dishes that have been, and that are no longer. What of that lost recipe of Menander’s for fish sauce—an ambrosial sauce whose fame has flitted down to us from dim ages, and the eating of which would have filled to the brim Dr. Johnson’s cup of happiness? And what of its modern counterpart, now also gone forever, the famous green sauce which La Coste offered to Sir Thomas Dundas at the Duke of York’s table, whispering to him with unctuous fervor, “_Avec cette sauce là, on pourrait manger son grand-père_”? What of the bream-pie that disappeared with the good monks, driven from British soil, and the mere recollection of which caused Peacock to bewail in spirit the too rapid dissolution of the monasteries? And what of sack—_Falstaff’s_ sack—that made England the merry England of yore, and that took flight, like some old-fashioned genius, before the sombre days that were to follow? Surely if we knew its secret, we should learn how to laugh once more.

But alas! this may not be. We have but the memories of past good cheer; we have but the echoes of departed laughter. In vain we look and listen for the mirth that has died away. In vain we seek to question the gray ghosts of old-time revelers.

“Still shall this burden their answer bear,
What has become of last year’s snow?”

CHILDREN IN FICTION

Mr. Rudyard Kipling has prefaced his little volume of _Child Stories_ with a modest intimation that he finds the subject almost beyond his grasp. He says:

“Only women understand children thoroughly; but if a mere man
keeps very quiet, and humbles himself properly, and refrains
from talking down to his superiors, the children will sometimes
be good to him, and let him see what they think about in
the world. Yet, even after patient investigation and the
condescension of the nursery, it is hard to draw babies.”

This sounds disarming, and at the same time strikes a popular note respecting these fortunate little people, who, after having been considered for many years as unworthy of the novelist’s regard, have now suddenly grown too complex and subtle for him to hope to understand. Mr. Kipling himself approaches them with great caution, and treats them with careful conventionality, except in that pitiful bit of realism, “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” where the misery and swift deterioration of a child are almost too painfully portrayed. Punch, with his dim comprehension of his own unhappiness, and his pathetic attempts to be friendly and “oblige everybody;” Punch, swaying alternately from clumsy deception to helpless rage, badgered into sullenness, and betrayed by the inherent weakness of his poor, peace-loving little soul, is a picture burdened with bitter truth, drawn with revengeful fidelity. Once, I am sure, a half-blind, solitary boy measured those lonely rooms in hand spans: “fifty down the side, thirty across, and fifty back again—one hundred and eighty-one exactly from the hall door to the top of the first landing.” Once, I am sure, he knocked his blundering head against the walls, and upset the glasses that he tried to grasp, in the gathering gloom of his doubly darkened life.

But when we turn from the sad sincerity of “Black Sheep” to the brighter atmosphere of the other tales, we find nothing very genuine or convincing about the happier children who figure in them. “Drums of the Fore and Aft” is an exceedingly clever story, and Lew and Jakin may be typical British drummer boys, but to the uninitiated reader they seem a trifle over-drawn both for good and evil. They know so much and talk so marvelously; they are so very bad and so very upright; and they insert such a bewildering number of “bloomin’s” into their conversation, that, like the eternal “well” with which Mr. Howells’s women begin all their sentences, the word loses its _vraisemblance_ through unbearable repetition. “His Majesty the King,” even when we forgive him his cumbersome title which destroys all good-fellowship at once, is a child dear to story-writers, and consecrated to their uses for many years, but so exceedingly rare in every-day-life that he has to be taken strictly on faith; while “Wee Willie Winkie” is even more unveracious in his character. These wonderful babes, with their sense of honor, and chivalry, and manhood, these Bayards in pinafores, these miniature editions of King Arthur and Sir Launcelot rolled into one, are picturesque possibilities only when we have forgotten what an earthly little animal a real boy is. Willie Winkie rides into a forbidden and dangerous country to protect and rescue a woman nearly old enough to be his mother. He is keenly and conscientiously distressed because, having been told to keep within doors, he has thus “bwoken” his “awwest;” but he feels it his paramount duty to pursue and guard from evil the able-bodied betrothed of his father’s friend. When Miss Allardyce accommodates herself to circumstances by promptly wrenching her ankle, and the pair are surrounded by ruffians of the skulking, cowardly Indian type whom Mr. Kipling paints with such generous scorn, we are gravely told: “Then rose from the rock Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race, aged six and three-quarters, and said briefly and emphatically, ‘_Jao!_’” What “_Jao_” means is lost to our occidental ignorance, but the effect is magical. The twenty armed men thus confronted and defied are awed into milder measures, and finally routed with shame, while the hero of the hour restores the prostrate heroine unharmed—save for the wrenched ankle—to her lover’s anxious embraces.

This is very amusing, but a little absurd, and a little vulgar as well. It strikes that jarring note of provincialism which Matthew Arnold condemns with all the weight of his critical eloquence in Kinglake’s “Invasion of the Crimea.” “Wee Willie Winkie, child of the Dominant Race,” is on a literary level with the description of Marshal St. Arnaud, cowed by “the majesty of the great Elchi’s Canning brow and tight, merciless lips;” a style of writing bad enough in newspaper correspondence, but unpardonable in artistic fiction. How has it happened that Mr. Kipling, who tells us with such irresistible grace and simplicity the “Story of Muhammad Din,” should stray into mock heroics when handling the children of his own nation, the jolly well-bred little English lads, to whom all picturesque posing is an art unknown.

Perhaps the trouble lies in the curious but highly esteemed fallacy that the child of fiction is expected to be always precocious and sprightly, to emit sparks like a cat, and electrify the sluggish atmosphere about him. He does this at the expense alike of his sincerity and of his manners; we cannot accept him as a fact, and we don’t approve of him as a theory. A few years ago a critic in the _Contemporary Review_ protested very seriously against such writers as Florence Montgomery, “by whom the bloom of unconsciousness has been wiped from childhood, and boys and girls have learned to see themselves, not like old-fashioned children, as good and naughty, but as picturesque beings, whose naughtiness has an attractive charm, and whose very imperfections of dialect are worth accurate record.” Most of us are only too familiar with this kind of fiction, which for a time enjoyed such great and hurtful popularity. The patronizing attitude of children to their parents is sufficiently illustrated by the really nice little boy in “Transformed,” who calls his father “Puppy,” a most objectionable thing for a nice little boy to do; while what might be termed the corrective attitude of children to their parents is still more sharply defined by that unpleasant child, Nina Middleton, who sees so clearly, and suffers so intensely from the “careless superficiality” and rigid narrowness of the unfortunate couple whose painful privilege it was to have given her birth.

One of the latest types, however, to seize and hold the hearts of the big, sentimental, child-loving public is Mrs. Burnett’s Lord Fauntleroy, who maybe best described as the good little boy with the clothes. It is quite impossible to separate him in our minds from his wardrobe, to divest him of his velvet suits and sashes, his “rich Vandyke lace collar,” his leggings and neat little Oxford ties. He is always and in all places “a small copy of the fairy prince,” picturesquely grouped with a dog, or a cat, or a pony, as circumstances direct. We cannot be coarse enough to imagine him with cropped hair, and muddy boots, and a torn jacket, and a hole in his stocking, like so many, many real little boys who daily break their mothers’ hearts by their profound neglect of appearances. He is so ready in conversation, too, and pays such charming compliments to pretty young ladies, instead of hustling into corners and staring owlishly, after the fashion of those awkward little boys I know. And he is so very, very good! Not consciously and morbidly virtuous like that baby prig, Little Saint Elizabeth, who comes from the same hands, but artlessly and inevitably correct. He gives all his money to pay poor Michael’s rent, and we rejoice rightly in his generosity, with only one wistful recollection of that vastly different specimen of boyhood, for whose misdeeds Mr. Aldrich is responsible, and who spends his funds gloriously in indigestible treats to his friends. It is very charming in Lord Fauntleroy to offer his eager plea in behalf of the farmer Higgins, and probably just what any warm-hearted child would have done in his place; but we cannot but contrast his wonderful unconsciousness afterward, “not realizing his own importance in the least,” with the familiar figure of little Paul Dombey strutting up and down the room at Brighton, full of the new-blown dignity of being a financier, and lending young Gay the money for his uncle. It would take the sternest of moralists to object to Paul’s infantile strut; it would take the most trusting of sentimentalists to believe that Cedric is quite as innocently unconscious as he seems.

There is a remarkably nice little girl in that pleasant English novel, published a few years ago, _Sir Charles Danvers_—a little girl who can be safely recommended to all child-lovers, who will only wish they could hear a great deal more about her. Molly Danvers is not particularly precocious; she is not at all supersensitive, and we are not even told that she is pretty. There is absolutely no inventory given of her personal charms; and as to her clothes, “a white frock and two slim black legs” are casually mentioned on her first introduction, and we never hear another word about them. “A white frock and two slim black legs!” Could any description be more meagre? Imagine Little Saint Elizabeth, or Sara Crewe, reduced ruthlessly to a white frock, and not another allusion to their wardrobes in the whole course of their histories. But Molly doesn’t care. I have a suspicion that her white frocks don’t stay white very long, and that her slim black legs are better distinguished for activity than for grace. She is anything but heroic, and runs fleetly away from danger, leaving both her cousin and her donkey to their fate; but she has a loving little heart, nevertheless, and when her terrier dies, this heart is as nearly broken as a healthy little girl’s can be.

“‘He is _dead_, Uncle Charles. He was quite well, and eating
Albert biscuits with the dolls this morning, and now’—the rest
was too dreadful, and Molly burst into a flood of tears, and
burrowed with her head against the faithful waistcoat of Uncle
Charles—of Uncle Charles, the friend, the consoler of all the
ills that Molly had so far been heir to.

“‘Vic had a very happy life, Molly,’ said Charles, pressing the
little brown head against his cheek, and vaguely wondering what
it would be like to have any one to turn to in time of trouble.

“‘I always kept trouble from him except that time I shut him in
the door,’ gasped Molly. ‘I never took him out in a string, and
he only wore his collar—that collar you gave him that made him
scratch so—on Sundays.’

“‘And he was not ill a long time? He did not suffer any pain?’

“‘No, Uncle Charles, not much. But, though he did not say
anything, his face looked worse than screaming, and he passed
away very stiff in his hind-legs. Oh!’ (with a fresh outburst)
‘when cook told me that her sister that was in a decline had
gone, I never thought’ (sob, sob!) ‘poor Vic would be the
next.’”

This is not the less heartrending for being amusing, and that short sentence “his face looked worse than screaming” is a master-stroke of realistic description. On the whole, for ordinary family purposes, Molly Danvers is one of the nicest little girls I know; and if we seek—as many people rightly seek—for the poetry, the beauty of childhood, subtly transferred to paper, let us turn back a few years, and re-read for the fifth or the fiftieth time, as it chances, those seven delicious chapters of _Quatre-Vingt-Treize_, which describe a single day in the lives of the three babies, René Jean, Gros Alain, and Georgette. How many hours must Victor Hugo have watched patiently and gladly the ways of little children before he could paint them with such minute and charming truth, and what sheer delight is embodied in every line! They do nothing remarkable, these tiny French peasants; they say nothing worth noting; they are clothed in rags; they are alone all day; they are mischievous, healthy, and natural. They hang enchanted, all three, over a wood-louse, their curls touching, their breath suspended, their eyes fixed on the embarrassed insect: and we watch them with a joy and wonder equal to their own. “It is a she-creature,” announces René Jean, and Georgette laughs, Georgette who, at twenty months, has not yet acquired the art of conversation. She utters a single word from time to time, but sentences lie beyond her scope. She is occupied with grave thoughts, and when she breathes a soft monosyllable, her brothers pause encouragingly to listen. A belated bee comes buzzing in the window and departs.

“‘She is going home,’ said René Jean.

“‘It is a beast,’ said Gros Alain. ‘No,’ said René Jean, ‘it is
a fly.’ ‘A f’y,’ said Georgette.”

This is the extent of their conversational powers, and how very limited it seems. They do not talk, these babies; they act. They lay their destructive hands on the rare old folio of _Saint Bartholomew_, and tear out the leaves one by one, solemnly, innocently, conscientiously. Georgette, who cannot reach the volume, sits on the floor, and tears each leaf into little pieces with painstaking amiability; and all three are so happy over their self-appointed task. By the side of their absolute unconsciousness, the Willie Winkies and Lord Fauntleroys of romance grow suddenly Utopian and unreal. The chivalry, honor, generosity, loyalty, picturesqueness, and brilliancy, all the story-book virtues of story-book children, seem less winning and less dear than the birdlike contentment of three silent, sleepy little creatures, curled softly together, and painted by a master’s hand.

THREE FAMOUS OLD MAIDS

It is a curious fact that three of the most successful and eminent literary women in England—Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford—should have been typical old maids; not merely unmarried through stress of intervening circumstances—ill health, early disappointment, or a self-sacrificing devotion to other cares—but women whose lives were rounded and completed without that element which we are taught to believe is the main-spring and prime motor of existence. To understand how thoroughly this was the case, we have but to turn to a later and very different writer, Charlotte Brontë, who married when she was thirty-eight, and died one year afterward, and whose whole literary life was accordingly passed in spinsterhood. Yet if that very grave and respectable gentleman, the Rev. Mr. Nicholls, had never appeared upon the scene at all, it would have been impossible to call Miss Brontë a typical old maid. She had the outward signs of one, indeed, the prim demeanor, the methodical habits, the sarcastic attitude toward the male sex; but burning in every fibre of her being, and evident in every page of her writings, is that fierce unrest, that inarticulate, distressful longing of a woman who craves love. We can easily imagine Elizabeth Bennet, and the very sensible Elinor Dashwood, and even Emma Woodhouse, dearest and brightest of girls, slipping from their lovers’ grasp and growing into old maids as charming as was Miss Austen herself; but poor plain Jane Eyre, and that reticent little school-teacher, Lucy Snowe, are shaken and consumed with the passion of their own desires. Such women cannot walk from the cradle to the grave, handling their lives with delicate satisfaction and content; they must find what they need or die.

It is amusing to note how the various critics and biographers of Miss Austen, Miss Edgeworth, and Miss Mitford have debated and fretted over the painful lack of romance in their careers. Feminine critics, especially, find it difficult to believe that there is no hidden tale to tell, no secret and justifiable cause for this otherwise inexplicable behavior; and much time and patience have been exhausted in dragging shadowy memories to light. In the case of Miss Mitford, indeed, it seems quite hopeless to search for even the ghost of a love-story, and, although she certainly did devote her life with touching unselfishness to the comfort and support of a very exacting father, it cannot for a moment be urged that, in so doing, she relinquished any distinct desire or prospect of matrimony. Perhaps the exasperating qualities of her parent inclined her unconsciously to remain single; for, with all her unsparing devotion, she must, in the course of sorely tried years, have grown to regard men very much as Dolly Winthrop regarded them,—“in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome.” Mr. Mitford, a most genial and handsome old gentleman of the Turveydrop pattern, managed to keep his daughter’s hands full of work, and her heart full of love, and left her little chance or disposition for any wandering fancies. All the exuberant affection of her girlhood, all the mature attachment of later years, were concentrated upon him alone. Her youth waned, her freshness faded, her indomitable courage and cheerfulness quailed a little before the ever-increasing burdens of her life; but through it all, in joy and sorrow, no shadow of a suitor stands beckoning by her side. Her serene old age was haunted by no dim voices crying out of the past for the joy which had slipped from her grasp. She wrote love-stories by the score, always approaching the subject from the outside, and treating it with the easy conventionality, the generous yet imperfect sympathy of a warm-hearted woman not prone to analyze motives. They are very pleasant stories for the most part, sensible, healthy, and happy; but they are not convincing. The reader feels that if Polly did not marry Joe she would be just as well satisfied with William, and that if Edwin failed to win Angelina he would soon content himself with Dorothy. This is a comfortable state of affairs, and doubtless true to life; but it is not precisely the element which makes a successful love-tale. The fact is, Miss Mitford described things pretty much as she found them, not seeking to dive below the surface, and always adding a little sunshine of her own. She was a happy woman, save for some sad years of overwork, and her life was full of pleasant detail, of cherished duties, and of felicitous labor; but, from first to last, love had no part in it, and, fancy free, she never reckoned of her loss.