Chapter IV: Part 4

Socrates, it will be remembered, "corrupted the Athenian youth." Not one of them he moulded or breathed upon, except the transient pupil Alcibiades, turned his hand cordially to the practical, or ramped in the civic china-shop. What ghost is it which certain minds see upon the way, and which lessens their destined momentum? Something extra-rational, we may be sure: something with an august enchantment. They act under the impulse of an heroic fickleness, and forsake a known and very good result for "the things that are more excellent." The spectators can only wonder; the crucial third act has passed swiftly and in silence behind the curtain, and the rest of the drama sounds perverted and confused. A mere secular enthusiasm may have the power to draw a career to itself, absorb and devour it, and keep it shut forever from the chance of distinction in selfish and pleasant ways. But what shall be said for those who have become impassioned of the supernatural, beholding it in amaze, as Hubert the hunter beheld the holy sign between the antlered brows in the Aquitanian forest: a sight enough to stay them and carry them out of themselves, and change what was their prospect, because "the former things are passed away?" What of the allegiance to a cause, the espousal of hunger and thirst, the wilderness, and the scaffold, in the hope, never ultimately in vain, of awakening and bettering the world? "If the law require you to be the agent of injustice to another," wrote Thoreau, in his good manful essay on John Brown, "then I say to you, break the law. Let your life be a friction to stop the machine." Even thus have many gone under, of whom no audiences have heard, but whose love and wisdom feed the race, century after century. In our reckoning of the saints, we lose sight of half their meaning; for we cannot guess accurately which of them has lost most, humanly and æsthetically, nor how much any one individual has lost, by his chosen concentration on matters in which there is no general competition, and where there can be no established canons of criticism. Some saints, in a double sense, follow their vocations; they attain their only legitimate development in the cloister. But others are saints at a sacrifice. An infinite number of men and women, painfully approximating moral perfection, lose, either gradually, or at once and forever, in that supreme compensation, their aptitude for common affairs. "_Ejiciebas eas, et intrabas pro eis, omne voluptate dulcior_," says the son of Monica's tears, himself gloriously stricken out from the pagan roll of honor.

Such as these have outgrown their own existence; they become impalpable to the general apprehension; they have sold the mess of pottage again for the birthright of the sons of God. And God, in the audacious old phrase, has "destroyed" them. What they bade fair to be, or what they could have done, before they were crippled by vigils and visions, rolls back into the impossible and the unimagined. We have no clue to alienated souls: we can compute with those solely, who, as we say, get along and amount to something; and we seldom perceive what purely fortuitous reputations, what mere bright flotsam and jetsam, accidentally uppermost, are those whom we set first in a fixed place, and cry up as exemplars in art, trade, and policy. For what might have been is not this crass world's concern: her absent have no rights. The spiritual man is likely to be possessed of a divine indolence; would he strive, he is hampered and thwarted by the remembrance, or the forecast, of whiter ideals in Paradise. It is sometimes urged as a reproach against the courteous Latin nations that they lag behind in modern progressiveness; that they do not, like the Border lads, "march forward in order." The reproach is, at bottom, a delicate and exquisite compliment. With genius in their blood, and beauty never far from their hand, what wonder if they continue to be careless about rapid transit?

"I have seen higher, holier things than these,
And therefore must to these refuse my heart."

The endearing fable of elf-shot or bewitched children, little goose-girls waylaid on the hillside by fairies in green and silver, and enticed away, and set free after a while, though with the dream and the blight ever upon them, is, like most fables, deep as immortality. The mystic has already gone too far, and seen too much; he is useless at the plough: he is, as it were, one citizen less. The fine lines just quoted are from an expert in inaction, the poet who, among all others with an equal equipment in English letters, may be named pre-eminently as a failure: Arthur Hugh Clough. Let his lovers proclaim as much with gentle irony. Most poets, it may be, are heroes spoiled; they know somewhat of the unknown, and suffer from it; the usual measure of their esoteric worth must still be the measure of their mundane impracticability: like Hamlet, they have seen spirits, and forswear deeds for phrases. Artists and thinkers, in fact, must outwardly follow the profession of the queen bee, not as yet with honor, nor by general request. But they are omens; they are, let us hope, the type and the race, the segregated non-cohesive thing, the protest which counts. The noblest of them is least in love with civilization and its awards; but what they have not hoarded for themselves, strangers hoard for them; and because success is most truly to them a thing foregone, therefore they prevail forever. If they have not "made a living," they have, in the opinion of a young Governor of Massachusetts, a philosopher not of the Franklin breed,--"made a life."

1893.

QUIET LONDON

IF one had to try his hand at the eternal parallel of London and Paris (next weariest, in the scale of human comparisons, to that between D----s and T----y), or, indeed, of London with any city of known size, it might be said, in a word, that the chief variance between them is a variance of sound: and that under this, and expressed by it,--"alas, how told to them who felt it never?" as Dante sighs over the abstruse sweetness of his lady,--is a profound spiritual difference. Whatever tradition may say of

----"the chargeable noise of this great town,"

its instructed inhabitant knows it by strange whispers, meek undertones. Conceive anything more diverting than that a monstrous awe-engendering institution like the 'bus should be almost as deft and as still as a humming-bird! Monosyllables, and pipe-smoke, and sciential collecting of fares make up the rolling van masculine; ever and anon the less certain step and the swish of a skirt on the lurching stair, announce to the heroes of the serene height that

"Helen is come upon the wall to see."

With perfect skill, with masterful rapidity, the wheels slide over surfaces smooth as an almond-shell, in a mere ballroom jingle and rustle. Cabs are dragon-flies by day, and glowworms by night: they dart, noiseless, from north to west. Even the tuft-footed dray-horses vanish with such reverberation as might follow Cinderella's coach. Exquisite voices of children, soft and shy, fall like the plash of water on the open paths of the Parks. In the viscid openings of alleys off the Strand, in the ancient astonishing tinkerdom of Leather Lane, where villainous naphtha torches light up the green lettuce on peddler's carts, the pawnbroker's golden balls significant above, and a knot of Hogarth faces in the Saturday evening flare,--there also, are the cockney gamins with honey-bright hair: profiles which corroborate Millais' brush, and illustrate a lovely phrase of Mistral in _Mirèio_, "couleur de joue;" flushed little legs in ragged socks, which have piteously set out on the dark thoroughfares of life; voices, above all, which have often a low harp-like tone not to be heard elsewhere out of drawing-rooms. It is as if tremendous London, her teeming thoughts troubling her, said "Hush!" in the ear of all her own. Hyde Park orators are seldom brawlers; immense crowds, out for sight-seeing, are controlled by the gentlest of police, who say "Please," and are obeyed. Few stop to salute or exchange a word at the shelters. This is no experimental or villageous world: one man's affairs are in India, another's on the deep sea, and a third's in a cradle three stories up. Sidneys and pickpockets intermingle, each on a non-communicated errand. Here whisks a Turk, in his extraordinary unnoticed dress; and yonder, a sprout of a man who might have been bow-legged, had he any legs at all: nothing new goes at its value, nothing strange begets comment. The long-distance ironies, or intelligential buzz of street-life in New York, where folk go two and two, are here foreign and transatlantic indeed. The even pavements drink in all that might mean concussion, the soft golden air deadens it, the preoccupied seriousness of the human element contradicts and forbids it. An awful, endearing, melancholy stillness broods over the red roofs of High Holborn, and hangs, like a pale cloud, on the spires of the Strand, and the yellow-lustred plane tree of Cheapside: gigantic forces seem trooping by, like the boy-god Harpocrates, finger on lip. The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eye. The town wears the very color of silence. No one can say of S. Paul's that it is a talking dome, despite the ironic accident of the whispering gallery in the interior. Like Wordsworth upon Helvellyn, in Haydon's odd memorable portrait, it sees with drooped eyes, and exhorts with grand reticences and abstractions. Mighty stone broods above, on either hand, its curiously beautiful draperies of soot furled over the brow, in the posture of the speechless martyrs of Attic tragedy. There is an alchemic atmosphere in London, which interdicts one's perception of ugliness. At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day. Nothing in the world is so remote, so pensive, so musty-fragrant of long ago, as the antique City churches where the dead are the only congregation; where the effigies of Rahere the founder, Sir Nicholas Throgmorton, John Gower, and our old friend Stow are awake, in their scattered neighborhoods, to make the responses; and where the voices of the daily choir, disembodied by the unfilled space about, breathe ghostly four-part Amens, to waver like bubbles up and down the aisles. And to go thence into the highway creates no great jar. The tide there is always at the flood, and frets not. The perfectly ordered traffic, its want of blockade and altercation, the sad-colored, civil-mannered throng, the dim light and the wet gleam, make it as natural to be absent-minded at Charing Cross as in the Abbey. Shelley must have found it so; else whence his simile,

"The City's voice itself is soft like Solitude's."

There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to set in. A subdued mighty hum, as of "the loom of time," London lacks not; but a crass explosion never breaks it. The imponderable quiet of the vast capital completes her inscrutable charm. She has the effect of a muted orchestra on ears driven mad with the horrible din of new America. As still as her deep history on library shelves, so still are her pace and her purpose to-day: her grave passing, would, like Lincoln in camp, discourage applause. Everywhere is the acoustically perfect standpoint. The cosmic currents ripple audibly along.

"Therein I hear the Parcæ reel
The threads of life at the spinning-wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain."

Coal-smoke and river-fog are kind to the humanist. They build his priory cell, where he can sit and work on his illuminations, and know that he lays his colors true. "The man, sir, who is tired of London," said the great Doctor, in one of his profound generalities, "is tired of life."

At certain hours, the City is tenantless, and sunrise or sunset, touching the vidual tower of All Hallows Staining, gives it the pearl and carmine tints of a shell. At such a time you may wander in the very luxury of loneliness, from London Bridge to Lambeth, watching the long yards swing at their moorings by the palace wall, and Thames running tiger-coated to sea; and from the Gray's Inn limes pass on to an unvisited and noble old bronze of an inconsiderable Stuart, lustrous from the late shower, beyond whom are the forgotten water-stairs of Whitehall, above whom is his own starlit weather-vane, with "the Protestant wind still blowing." Where the Boar's Head was, where the Roman Baths are, in strange exchanges of chronology, where, in a twinkle, the merchants and journalists shall be, are the depopulated presence-halls in which you are

"In dreams a king, but waking, no such matter."

All that was temporal in them has been swallowed by the wave of the generations of men who are no more. Poet by poet, from the beginning, has known the look of London's void heart at night, and has had, next it, his keenest gust of sovereignty, on jealous marches when his own footfall is soft as a forest creature's, for fear of man and of mortal interruption. The living are gone for the moment: the dead and their greatness are "nearer than hands and feet." The divinest quality of this colossal calm, "mirk miles broad," is that, to the sensitive mind, it is a magic glass for musings. In such a mysterious private depth Narcissus saw himself, and died of his own beauty. The few who have had eternity most in mind, have worshipped London most; and their passion, read of in biographies, has expanded, insensibly, the imagination of the many. The terror of the vast town lies on any thoughtful spirit; but without some touch or other of golden casuistry, of neo-Platonism, none can sincerely adore her. For the adorable in her is man's old adoration itself, breathed forth and crystallized. That indeed, is the everlasting delight: London has nothing so simple in her bosom as instinctive charm. She is the dear echo, the dear mirror, of humanity. The Charles Lamb who was wont to relieve his tender overburdened spirit by a plunge in the surging crowd, and who was not ashamed that he had wept there, "for fulness of joy at so much life," might be the first to apply to the majestic and bitter mother who bred him, the illumining line of Alfred de Musset:

"_Car sa beauté pour nous, c'est notre amour pour elle._"

She gives us freedom, recollection, reverence; and we attribute to her the sweetness of our own dispositions at her knee. Blessing us with her silence, the glad incredible thing, she lets us believe we have discovered it, as a fresh secret between lover and lover.

On Sundays, too, the dreary English Sundays of old complaint, what idyllic opportunity wastes itself at the door! Hampstead and Blackheath are efflorescent with the populace, but dark London wears her troth-plight ring of meditation. Her church-bells, indeed, speak: there is a new one at every turning, like the succession of perfumes as you cross a conservatory, and felt as a discord no more than these. Good to hear are the chimes of S. Giles Cripplegate, the aged bells of S. Helen, with their grace-notes and falling thirds, the great octave-clash of Wren's cathedral, which booms and sprays like the sea on the chalk-cliffs almost within its sight. And the ghosts are out again under the eaves of Little Britain and Soho. It is usually on Sundays, or at night, that you may view the young Cowley (curled up, among the geraniums, on the window-ledge of the Elizabethan house next S. Dunstan's-in-the-West) reading Spenser, his light bronze curls curtaining the folio page; and a figure of uncontemporaneous look, coming heavily from the Temple gateway, almost opposite, with a black band on his sleeve, is saying brokenly to himself: "Poor Goldy was wild, very wild; but he is so no more."

The elective London of choicest companionship, of invited sights and sounds, of imperial privacy, is always open to the explorer: "London small and white and clean," walled and moated, fairer than she ever was at any one time, warless, religious, pastoral, where hares may course along the friendly highway, and swans breast the unpolluted Fleet. Like the gods, you may, if you will, apprehend all that has ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, seize the little which is perfect and durable, and live in it: "in the central calm at the heart of agitation." By so much as London and her draggled outer precincts are bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, cruel, and senseless, victory is the larger for having found here a spiritual parterre of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, owing to respect towards those who yet believe in her, whose presence imposes upon her, in romantic tyranny, the remembrance of what she has been to her saints, that she does, in reality, walk softly, speak low, as if her life-long orgies were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful lover, the happy innocent look becoming the young Republic of Selected Peace. Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his ear:

"O stay heere! for to thee
England is only a worthy gallerie
To walk in Expectation: till from thence
Our greatest King call thee to His presènce."

O stay here! Who would not be such a city's citizen?

1890.

THE CAPTIVES

THE lions at the Zoo "bring sad thoughts to the mind": they chiefly, for they are the most impressive figures among our poor hostages. The pretty moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsating along their tawny sides, seem but so many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle enough to move your own. Couchant, with a droop of the bearded chest, or erect, with an eternal restless four steps and back again, they drag through, in public, their defeated days. It is inconceivable that we should attach the idea of depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count against him that he can kill those of us who are adjacent, and juicy! In the roomy name of reciprocity, why not? Yet what he can do, he leaves undone. A second glance at him corrects inherited opinion:

"I trow that countenance cannot lie."

Benignity sits there, and forbearance; else we know not what such things mean. Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, make one remember no blood-curdling hap; but rather the gracious legendry of long ago: how a lion buried the Christian penitent in the lone Egyptian sands, and another gambolled in the thronged Coliseum, kissing the feet of the Christian youth, when the task laid upon him, in his hunger, was to rend his body in twain. Something about the lion reminds one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. This great intellectual mildness, when blended with enormous power (power which in him must be expressed physically, or we were too dull to feel it), appears to some merely sly and sinister. Incredible goodness we label as hypocrisy. For the ultimate quality in the expression of the lion is its sweetness. He may be, as one hears him called, the king of brutes, but the gentleman among brutes he is, beyond a doubt. He has tolerance, dignity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With passing accuracy, Landor or William Morris, is often described as "leonine"; but the real lion-men of England are the thin and mild dynamos: Pitt, Newman, Nelson. In these are the long austere lines of the cheek, the remote significant gaze, the look of inscrutable purpose and patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon his Hippolyta, of the lion in the masque of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_: "A very gentle beast, and of a good conscience."

Year after year, so long as the splendid creatures are cheapened "to make a Roman holiday," they move not so much under protest as with black sullen fatalism. We have all seen them rise to the lash in the hands of a spangled circus female, who must end, forsooth, by inserting her pomatumed head in their too-enduring jaws; and it is not unusual for them to spring at the just-closed door, with the fell strength of that soft and terrible left fore-paw. Their action is, of course, perfunctory; and since they are notoriously brave, and not to be cowed, obedience in them has a strange pathos. They are trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and fire cannon, and jump hoops; yes, even to scowl and swear, to the terror of "men, women and Herveys," between the scenes of their bitter comedy; yet the clown's circumstance cannot touch a hair of those mournful magnific heads. Their sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and a patter of foolish nuts and cookies; and, from a dream of the fragrant jungles and the torrents of home, they come anew upon the cyclorama of human faces, and the babble of foreign tongues. They live no longer from hand to mouth, as they do in their native haunts; their needs, nay, their whims, are studied and gratified; they serve painters, naturalists, schoolboys; they give employment; they call forth thought, love, courage. And many sympathizers and well-wishers are shortsighted enough to congratulate caged animals, and think them happily circumstanced. Your point of view depends, perhaps, on how much passion for out-of-doors, for solitude, is in your own blood; and on your sense of the lengths to which human interference may go with the works of God. We give these lives subjected to our laudable curiosity, strange exchanges: for moss knee-deep, and the dews and aroma of the woody ground, a raised sawdust floor; and for an outlook through craggy glens,

"Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,"

a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a stucco sky which has not the look of Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any more.

Our father Adam is said to have dwelt in peace with all the beasts in his Garden. And there is no evidence in the Mosaic annals that it was they who became perverted, and broke faith with man! Marry, man himself, in the birth of his moral ugliness, set up the hateful division, estranged these inestimable friends, and then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, subjugates, and kills the beings braver, shrewder, and more innocent than he. He has wrested from its beautiful meaning his "dominion over them." Power made him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its victims hate and revenge and fear, and from the footfall of man all creation flees away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most telling allegory, where the cultured Houyhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen angel of the lower order:

"The King, from height of all his painted glory,"

has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, breathing dual impiety against his Maker and his mates. Save him, there is no other perverted animal; not one clad otherwise, or minded otherwise, than his archetype. Men in sealskins; women in swansdown, with heron-aigrettes; children in cocoon-spun silk, their hands and feet in strange sheathings torn from the young of the goat and the cow;--what are these but ludicrous violators of the decencies of the universe? If there be beasts in Heaven "with eye down-dropt" upon the temperate and polar zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is, moreover, part of our plot to deny them immortality, and to attempt to interpose our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, between them and their Author, towards whom they yet bear an unshamed front. For man the animal is but a beggarly lump. He has never shown himself so provident as the ant, so ingenious as the beaver, so faithful as the dove, so forgiving as the hound. His senses are eternally below par; his artistic faculties are befogged. The humblest thrush is an architect and musician by eldest family tradition, while it takes him a thousand years to conceive an ogee arch and a viol d'amore. And having driven from his pestilential company the whole retinue of dear esquires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim them to his service. The horse came back, generously hiding his apprehensions; the pig and the hen mechanically, at the prospect of free bed and board; the dog with his glad conciliation, the cat with her aristocrat reserves. These abide with us, suffer through us, are persuasive and voluble, and endeavor to reconcile us with the great majority of wild livers, from whom we are divorced. In vain do they so press upon us our own lack of logic. We address them individually: "You, O immigrant, are personally pleasing unto me; but your fellows, your blood-relations, your customs in your own country,--_ach Himmel_!" Our popular speech insults them at every turn: "as silly as a goose," "as vain as a peacock," "as ugly as a rat," "as obstinate as a mule," "as cross as a bear," "as dirty as a dog," "as sick as a dog," "to be hanged like a dog," "a dog's life," "Cur!" "Puppy!" Surely, no class of creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth century, have ever undergone such groundless contumely. Every word of Shylock's famous plea stands good for them, as also its close. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and, if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." When we hear of a writer who advises the practice of "courtesy" towards animals, and of a little girl who hoarded up wisdom from the speech of a turtle, our memories couple them as Alice--and Sir Arthur Helps--in Wonderland. If it be in _Utopia_ alone that murderous "sport" is impossible, and that only there it breeds rational pity when after a day's run, "a harmless and fearfull Hare should be devour'd by strong, fierce, and cruell Dogges," how far are we not from the time when modern conscientiousness shall make us just even to the exiles pent in a menagerie? Our laws deal with these in a spirit of the most flagrant injustice. While every jury allows for reprisals, when dealing with human crime, no biped else, and no quadruped, with however blameless a record, under whatever provocation, can be allowed an instant's hearing, when so much as suspected of a transgression. A leopard here at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific cause. He is tired of being enslaved, and would resume sincerity. He offends; he is executed, leaving ineradicable influences among the cages, as if their Danton had gone by, audible again: "_Que mon nom soit flétri; que la France soit libre!_" Or the keeper abominably abuses a certain elephant, a very saint for patience, a genius for cleverness, a hero for humor; and six years after, the same elephant, in another duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly cracks him against a wall. A dozen influential persons plead, as defence for the assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of character; but the public blood is up: he has to die. To some reforms we shall never come, for thought about them is deadened in us by the operation of our accursed generic pride. Our codes approximate too painfully to the largeness of the universal plan. We have, indeed, conceived of other suns, other systems, than ours; but the hope is slight that we can ever admit beasts, not to certain terms of equality with our own esteemed species, but even to the personal pronoun, and a place in the divine economy. Arrogance is bad for us, and bad for them. The very bliss of power is to protect and forbear; could we learn it, we might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, in the maintenance of penal laws against our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that, as yet, we know no better. As we are drowned in ignorance, it is inconceivable that we shall be hanged for sacrilege! Could we analyze the impressions of uncultivated persons, received from the centaurs in the Parthenon frieze, or the Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should probably discover that these are looked upon as mere monsters: a compound of man and horse, or of woman and lioness, the conception of which is abhorrent and distressing to the mind. (It is to be hoped that there are "stuck-up" horses and lionesses to adopt the corresponsive view). But the artists of the race, from the world's beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have gone on creating these mythic "monsters." Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids with silver and vermilion scales, and angels borne on vast white gull-like wings: dear non-anatomical shapes, for the most part, full of odd charm, and of a spiritual application which will last out until we are humble and humorous enough to read it. Nor, on second thought, can we fail to see gravest changes adumbrating the subject. The Latin nations lag behind in conciliations, and England leads. There were not many, long ago, who passed the fraternal word to beasts: those who did so, Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the flower of their kind, and not without suspicion of "queerness." Lord Erskine, less than three generations back, suffered great obloquy for his championship of what we are almost ready to concede as the "rights" of animals. Coleridge was well laughed at for saluting the ass's little foal as his brother. But Burns was not laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake for his fly. And there is no single characteristic of modern life so novel, so significant, as the yearning affectionateness with which our youngest poets allude to fauna, and so adorn a moral. The habit has grown with them, until every Pan's pipe breathes sweet pieties to the less articulate world. A line of Celia Thaxter, addressed to a mussel on the stormy Maine strand, has been their unconscious key-note.

"Thou thought of God! ... what more than thou am I!"

For Darwin has come and gone, and cut our boast from under us.

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

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

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

1896.

ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS

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

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

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

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

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

"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1885.

WILFUL SADNESS IN LITERATURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Poore Petrarch's long-deceasèd woes,"

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

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

Or Chapman:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1892.

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

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

MRS. WETHERELL

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

WETHERELL

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

CLAY

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

MRS. WETHERELL

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

WETHERELL

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

MRS. WETHERELL

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

CLAY