Chapter XIII: Front Matter (13)

Mrs. Bates hurried her guest over the stairway and through several halls and passages, and introduced her finally into a large and spacious room done in white and gold. In the glittering electrolier wires mingled with pipes, and bulbs with globes. To one side stood a massive brass bedstead full-panoplied in coverlet and pillow-cases, and the mirror of the dressing-case reflected a formal row of silver-backed brushes and combs.

"My bedroom," said Mrs. Bates. "How does it strike you?"

"Why," stammered Jane, "it's all very fine, but--"

"Oh, yes; I know what they say about it--I've heard them a dozen times: 'It's very big and handsome and all, but not a bit home-like. _I_ shouldn't want to sleep here.' Is that the idea?"

"About," said Jane.

"Sleep here!" echoed Mrs. Bates. "I _don't_ sleep here. I'd as soon think of sleeping out on the prairie. That bed isn't to _sleep_ in; it's for the women to lay their hats and cloaks on. Lay yours there now."

Jane obeyed. She worked herself out of her old blue sack, and disposed it, neatly folded, on the brocaded coverlet. Then she took off her mussy little turban and placed it on the sack. "What a strange woman," she murmured to herself. "She doesn't get any music out of her piano; she doesn't get any reading out of her books; she doesn't even get any sleep out of her bed." Jane smoothed down her hair and awaited the next stage of her adventure.

"This is the way." Mrs. Bates led her through a narrow side door.... "This is my office." She traversed the "office," passed into a room beyond, pushed Jane ahead of her, and shut the door....

The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a great and sudden surprise. Poor stupid, stumbling child!--she understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what footing she had been placed.

She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid was lined with faded and blotted green baize. On the floor there was an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern, and wholly threadbare as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal fire.

Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed, and motioned Jane to a small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.

"And now," she said, cheerily, "let's get to business. Sue Bates, at your service."

"Oh, no," gasped Jane, who felt, however dumbly and mistily, that this was an epoch in her life. "Not here; not to-day."

"Why not? Go ahead; tell me all about the charity that isn't a charity. You'd better; this is the last room--there's nothing beyond." Her eyes were twinkling, but immensely kind.

"I know it," stammered Jane. "I knew it in a second." She felt too that not a dozen persons had ever penetrated to this little chamber. "How good you are to me!"

Presently, under some compulsion, she was making an exposition of her small plan. Mrs. Bates was made to understand how some of the old Dearborn Seminary girls were trying to start a sort of club-room in some convenient down-town building for typewriters and saleswomen and others employed in business. There was to be a room where they could get lunch, or bring their own to eat, if they preferred; also a parlor where they could fill up their noon hour with talk or reading or music; it was the expectation to have a piano and a few books and magazines.

"I remembered Lottie as one of the girls who went with us there, down on old Dearborn Place, and I thought perhaps I could interest Lottie's mother," concluded Jane.

"And so you can," said Lottie's mother, promptly. "I'll have Miss Peters--but don't you find it a little warm here? Just pass me that hair-brush."

Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. "Isn't it a gem?" she asked, "I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you see--two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords, but simple catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter."...

She dropped her voice.

"Did you ever have a private secretary?"

"Me?" called Jane. "I'm my own."

"Keep it that way," said Mrs. Bates, impressively. "Don't ever change--no matter how many engagements and appointments and letters and dates you come to have. You'll never spend a happy day afterwards. Tutors are bad enough--but thank goodness, my boys are past that age. And men-servants are bad enough--every time I want to stir in my own house I seem to have a footman on each toe and a butler standing on my train; however, people in our position--well, Granger insists, you know."...

"And now business is over," she continued. "Do you like my posies?" She nodded towards the window where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row of flowers in a long narrow box blew about in the draft.

"Asters?"

"No, no, no! But I hoped you'd guess asters. They're chrysanthemums--you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they're the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass? How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of gladiolus and foliage in the front yard, one on each side of the steps? Still, in our position, I suppose it can't be helped. No; what I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford it I'm going to have a lot of phlox and London-pride and bachelor's-buttons out there in the back yard, and the girls can run their clothes-lines somewhere else."

"It's hard to keep flowers in the city," said Jane.

"I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in the front yard. I hated so to leave it behind--one of those little yellow brier roses. No, it wasn't yellow; it was just--'yaller.' And it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh, child"--wistfully--"if I could only smell it now!"

"Couldn't you have transplanted it?" asked Jane, sympathetically.

"I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach basket and fire shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow sand. To-day there's seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I've got from the old place is just this furniture of ma's and the wall-paper."

"The wall-paper?"

"Not the identical same, of course. It's like what I had in my bedroom when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to match it. At first I just tried on Twenty-second street. Then I went down-town. Then I tried all the little places away out on the West Side. Then I had the pattern put down on paper and I made a tour of the country. I went to Belvidere, and to Beloit, and to Janesville, and to lots of other places between here and Geneva. And finally--"

"Well, what--finally?"

"Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but--"

She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too quaintly ugly for anything?"

"It isn't any such thing," cried Jane. "It's just as sweet as it can be! I only wish mine was like it."

SARAH MARGARET FULLER

(MARCHIONESS OSSOLI)

(1810-1850)

"Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art, and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her.... It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any other." In the coolest way she said to her friends:--

"I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the
more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or
guards, still a queen....In near eight years' experience I
have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great
talent at explanation.... But in truth I have not much to
say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find
that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet
learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have
done in life has been to form my character to a certain
consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth
with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look
at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was
worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on
talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact
and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in
conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts.
They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they
tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart
hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak
points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
when we come to write, and without suggestion from another
mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in
us.... Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better,
because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship
to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but
never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel
inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow within me, I
am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought
into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible
for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force
to be either a genius or a character. One should be either
private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood
is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At
hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle."

All these naive confessions were made, it must be remembered, either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without fear of misinterpretation.

This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.

"He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as
early as possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical
sketch. "Thus I had tasks given me, as many and as various as
the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with
the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening
after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many
interruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he
was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his
ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till
the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally
stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of
the brain that made me a 'youthful prodigy' by day, and by
night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious
development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while
later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous
affections of all kinds.... I was taught Latin and English
grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six
years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily....
Of the Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the
sounds told the same story as the mythology; that the law of
life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern
composure.... With these books I passed my days. The great
amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling
which under other circumstances might have ripened thought,
was turned to learn the thoughts of others."

By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in 1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.

"I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first
half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six
years old. She had a face and a frame that would indicate
fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the
middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair
hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her
appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme
plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her
eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice,--all repelled; and I
said to myself, 'We shall never get far.' It is to be said
that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most
persons, including those who became afterwards her best
friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in
the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her
manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and
slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her
fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."

In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston, continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,' and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fraeulein Guenerode and Bettine von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling of the spirit in each soul,--an admixture of Platonism, Oriental pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.

Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder, nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even 'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia."

Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844)led Horace Greeley to offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Tribune. It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment authoritative. The best of her contributions to that journal were published, with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under the title of 'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).

In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed and written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps, the most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy in 1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republican ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while he was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their baby in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the siege of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hospital of the Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when Lowell was satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,'" says Mr. Higginson, "she was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century before." Her Southern nature and her longing for action and love had found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and son from Leghorn for America. But the vessel was wrecked off Fire Island within a day's sail of home and friends, and, save the body of her child and a trunk of water-soaked papers, the sea swallowed up all remnants of the happiness of her later life.

The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of letters about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to have possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in which she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life and movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and husband, and their child. And then she died.

The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has found expression in three notable biographies: 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by her brother; 'Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas Wentworth Higginson ('American Men of Letters Series'); and 'Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe ('Eminent Women Series').

GEORGE SAND

TO ELIZABETH HOAR

From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1847

You wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris, "Madame Sand." I find that all we had heard of her was true in the outline; I had supposed it might be exaggerated....

It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring letters, and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go quite ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me. I speak very bad French; only lately have I had sufficient command of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse. This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in vain for utterance.

The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume of a peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her goddaughter, whom she had brought from her province. She announced me as "Madame Salere," and returned into the ante-room to tell me, "Madame says she does not know you." I began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if she has received a letter from me." As I spoke Madame Sand opened the door, and stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I never shall forget her look at that moment. The doorway made a frame for her figure; she is large but well formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark-violet silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest taste; her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and ladylike dignity, presented an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar caricature idea of George Sand. Her face is a very little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on one side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was the expression of _goodness_, nobleness, and power that pervaded the whole,--the truly human heart and nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est vous," and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little study; we sat down a moment; then I said, "Il me fait de bien de vous voir," and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so developed in character, and everything that _is_ good in it so _really_ good. I loved, shall always love her.

She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez ecrit une lettre charmante." This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then went on as if we had always known one another.... Her way of talking is just like her writing,--lively, picturesque, with an undertone of deep feeling, and the same happiness in striking the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.... I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better.... For the rest, she holds her place in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered much, but she has also enjoyed and done much.

AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE

From 'At Home and Abroad'

The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe as to literature and the arts is still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and ignorant _valets de place_, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes,--lifts some mists from his horizon.

There are three species: First, the servile American,--a being utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by retailing which among those less traveled and as uninformed as himself he can win importance at home. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class,--a class which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However, though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance at present, they cannot continue long; our country is fated to a grand independent existence, and as its laws develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.

Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and proud of--he knows not what. He does not see, not he! that the history of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands, only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,--and no wonder, profoundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes severely pictures, feeling quite sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the rules of connoisseurs,--not feeling that to see such objects mental vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed at in art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a meaning; add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy of the class first specified.

The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to speak.

This is that of the thinking American,--a man who, recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects, and to give them a fair trial in his new world. And that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.

The history of our planet in some moments seems so painfully mean and little,--such terrible bafflings and failures to compensate some brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of men beneath the feet of a few, and these too often the least worthy; such a small drop of honey to each cup of gall, and in many cases so mingled that it is never one moment in life purely tasted; above all, so little achieved for humanity as a whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening to blot out the traces of each triumph,--that no wonder if the strongest soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many indolently console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes. Yes! those men _are_ worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a soul worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in the next sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of pure, generous love with which they began life! How blessed those who have deepened the fountains, and have enough to spare for the thirst of others! Some such there are; and feeling that, with all the excuses for failure, still only the sight of those who triumph gives a meaning to life or makes its pangs endurable, we must arise and follow.

A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE

LETTER TO R. W. EMERSON

From 'Memoirs': Paris, ----, 1846

I enjoyed the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much in my element in European society. It does not indeed come up to my ideal, but so many of the incumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water....

Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak first of the Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and appointed an evening to be passed at their house. That first time I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet humor,--full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a narrative ballad. He let me talk, now and then, enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired. That evening he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a story of some poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday lays aside the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading the 'Essays' and looking upon the sea....

The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which was a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author of a 'History of Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little,--of which one was glad, for that night he was in his acrid mood; and though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything he said....

Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, only harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,--happily not one invariable or inevitable,--that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharpness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.

Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arrogance there is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arrogance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the dragons. He sings rather than talks. He pours upon you a kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences, and generally catching up, near the beginning, some singular epithet which serves as a _refrain_ when his song is full, or with which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the stitches, if he has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the higher kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a minute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for all the spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk, like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly. Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him,--the Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invulnerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for good.

THOMAS FULLER

(1608-1661)

The fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller seems blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet and happy spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of Shakespeare and his brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine. In Fuller the world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes urbanity, the mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well satisfied with the kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity and the eternal problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of England clergyman, was no less a cavalier at heart than the most jaunty follower of King Charles. He had not the intensity of nature which characterizes the theologian by the grace of God. His 'Holy and Profane State,' his 'Good Thoughts in Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse Times,' evidence a comfortable and reasonable reliance on the Unseen; but they will not be read for their spiritual insight so much as for their well-seasoned and delightful English. That quaint and fragrant style of his lends charm even to those passages in which his thought is commonplace.

It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that posterity recognizes a man of marked intellectual power. His scholarship is exhibited in such a work as the 'Church History of Britain'; his peculiar faculty for happy description in the 'Worthies of England.' Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of his own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island; his love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same year as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyman of the same name as his own, he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men and things. His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.

His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded him opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of his day, and especially with its "gentry." By birth, education, and inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death he has devoted the last volume of his great work, the 'History of the Church of Britain.' Under the Protectorate, the genial priest and man of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like many others in Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puritan authorities, but was permitted to preach again in London by the grace of Cromwell. He was subsequently appointed chaplain to Charles II., but did not live long after the Restoration, dying of a fever in 1661.

An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was not inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back always to the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact which gives their permanent value to the 'History of the Church of Britain' and to the 'History of the Holy War.' These works bear witness to wide and patient research, to a thorough sifting of material. The antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its scholarly dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the 'Worthies of England.' Fuller's other writings may be of more intrinsic value, but it is through the 'Worthies' that he is remembered and loved. The book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an ancient flower garden, where blooms of every sort grow in lavish tangle. He considers the counties of England, one by one, telling of their physical characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of the princely children born in them, of the other "Worthies"--scholars, soldiers, and saints--who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller gathered his material for this variegated record from every quarter of his beloved little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he had many opportunities of visiting places and studying their people. As an incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ramblings of the old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering in their talk some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit of folk-lore. He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely families as familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk. Sometimes an exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as in this, of the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I.:--

She was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her
infancy, when not fully four years old. Being minded by those
about her to call upon God even when the pangs of death were
upon her, "I am not able," saith she, "to say my long prayer"
(meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I will say my short one,
'Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of
death.'" This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.

Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be numbered among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the world of letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of their readers.

THE KING'S CHILDREN

From 'The Worthies of England'

Katherine, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen Mary, was born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being at St. James), and survived not above half an hour after her baptizing; so that it is charity to mention her, whose memory is likely to be lost, so short her continuance in this life,--the rather because her name is not entered, as it ought, into the register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; as indeed none of the King's children, save Prince Charles, though they were born in that parish. And hereupon a story depends.

I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of kings born at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were ever faithfully paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record the names of such children in the register of St. Martin's. But the money being embezzled (we know by some, God knows by whom), no memorial is entered of them. Sad that bounty should betray any to baseness, and that which was intended to make them the more solemnly remembered should occasion that they should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the children of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to them;" for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the cause that we have been so often at a loss about the nativities and other properties of those of royal extraction.

A LEARNED LADY

From 'The Worthies of England'

Margaret More.--Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among men and learned statesmen. The reason is because of her unfeigned affection to her father, from whom she would not willingly be parted (and from me shall not be), either living or dead.

She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's house therein, and attained to that skill in all learning and languages that she became the miracle of her age. Foreigners took such notice thereof that Erasmus hath dedicated some epistles unto her. No woman that could speak so well did speak so little; whose secrecy was such, that her father intrusted her with his most important affairs.

Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a depraved place in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written "Nisi vos sinceritas" she amended it "Nervos sinceritas." Yea, she translated Eusebius out of Greek; but it was never printed, because J. Christopherson had done it so exactly before.

She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire, one of a bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's head was set up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would be cast into the Thames to make room for divers others (then suffering for denying the King's supremacy), she bought the head and kept it for a relic (which some called affection, others religion, others superstition in her), for which she was questioned before the Council, and for some short time imprisoned until she had buried it; and how long she herself survived afterwards is to me unknown.

HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.

From 'The Worthies of England'

It happened in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex, _animum et signum simul abjecit_,--betwixt traitor and coward,--cast away both his courage and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English. But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny, the doing of so foul a fact, until he was challenged in combat by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was confiscated to the King, and he himself, partly thrust, partly going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which, between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of his life.

THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER

From 'The Holy and Profane State'

There is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more necessary, which is so slightly performed. The reasons whereof I conceive to be these: First, young scholars make this calling their refuge; yea, perchance before they have taken any degree in the university, commence schoolmasters in the country, as if nothing else were required to set up this profession but only a rod and a ferula. Secondly, others who are able use it only as a passage to better preferment, to patch the rents in their present fortune, till they can provide a new one and betake themselves to some more gainful calling. Thirdly, they are disheartened from doing their best with the miserable reward which in some places they receive, being masters to their children and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown rich, they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves himself....

He studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were books, and ranks their dispositions into several forms. And though it may seem difficult for him in a great school to descend to all particulars, yet experienced schoolmasters may quickly make a grammar of boys' natures, and reduce them all--saving some few exceptions--to these general rules:--

1. Those that are ingenious and industrious. The conjunction of two such planets in a youth presages much good unto him. To such a lad a frown may be a whipping, and a whipping a death; yea, where their master whips them once, shame whips them all the week after. Such natures he useth with all gentleness.

2. Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the hare in the fable, that running with snails--so they count the rest of their schoolfellows--they shall come soon enough to the post, though sleeping a good while before their starting. Oh! a good rod would finely take them napping!

3. Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger they be, the more lees they have when they are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till they be clarified with age, and such afterwards prove the best. Bristol diamonds are both bright, and squared, and pointed by nature, and yet are soft and worthless; whereas Orient ones in India are rough and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit themselves afterwards the jewels of the country, and therefore their dullness at first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The schoolmaster deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy for a fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world can make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one minute before the hour Nature hath appointed.

4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correction may reform the latter, not amend the former. All the whetting in the world can never set a razor's edge on that which hath no steel in it. Such boys he consigneth over to other professions. Shipwrights and boat-makers will choose those crooked pieces of timber which other carpenters refuse. Those may make excellent merchants and mechanics who will not serve for scholars.

He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not leading them rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his precepts for children to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness of his own soul, that his scholars may go along with him.

ON BOOKS

From 'The Holy and Profane State'

It is a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by getting a great library. As soon shall I believe every one is valiant that hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good housekeeping by the smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as knowing that many of them--built merely for uniformity--are without chimneys, and more without fires.

Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first, voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over; secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions; thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look on them you look through them, and he that peeps through the casement of the index sees as much as if he were in the house. But the laziness of those cannot be excused who perfunctorily pass over authors of consequence, and only trade in their tables and contents. These, like city cheaters, having gotten the names of all country gentlemen, make silly people believe they have long lived in those places where they never were, and flourish with skill in those authors they never seriously studied.

LONDON

From 'The Worthies of England'

It is the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first for good government. There is no civilized part of the world but it has heard thereof, though many with this mistake: that they conceive London to be the country and England but the city therein.

Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, because of late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in buildings, Covent Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their fear) it will be found to burnish round about with new structures daily added thereunto.

It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to commerce, by the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was that when King James, offended with the city, threatened to remove his court to another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough) returned that "he might remove his court at his pleasure, but could not remove the river Thames."

Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of Rhodes; averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and customs of the Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no doubt knew of it) honoreth not this his etymology with the least mention thereof. As improbable in my apprehension is the deduction from Lud's-Town,--town being a Saxon, not British termination; and that it was so termed from Lan Dian, a temple of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is most likely in my opinion.

MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS

It is dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the pit of hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with the Devil's rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword; and from making of sport they come to doing of mischief.

A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from them who never invited it.

Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their power to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own crutches.

Learning has gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.

To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body; no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.

The lion is not so fierce as painted.

... Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room for wit; sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much room.

Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built many stories high.

The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

... One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue must be confuted by his conscience.

But our captain counts the image of God--nevertheless his image--cut in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest Moors he sees the representation of the King of Heaven.

EMILE GABORIAU

(1835-1873)

To speak of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He cannot be called the father of it; but the French novelist made his field so peculiarly his own, developed its type of human nature so painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation associated with it, that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to have outrivaled him.

Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inferieure, in 1835, Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into three or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul together; and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the private secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Feval. His first successful story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It was 'The Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper circumstances find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the astute Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized in the fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred it to another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tremendous success.

From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortunate. In rapid succession followed 'The Crime of Oreival' (1867); 'File No. 113' (1867); the elaborate 'Slaves of Paris' (1869); 'M. Lecoq' (1869),--in which title appears the name of the moving spirit of almost all the other stories; 'The Infernal Life' (1870); and four or five others. All these stories have been translated into almost every modern language that has a reading public. They brought Gaboriau a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valuable literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.