Chapter V: Part 5

Clio is the most shamelessly unreliable of the Muses. She selects her favorites with the autocratic partiality of the Russian Catherine, decorates them with questionable honors, enriches them with other people’s spoils, admires them to her heart’s content, and thrusts them serenely to the front to receive the approbation of the world. Occasionally she wearies of one or the other, and flings him lightly down from the pedestal he has adorned so bravely. Occasionally, having a fine feminine sense of humor, she is pleased to play with our credulity, and, dressing up a man of straw, she assures us smilingly that he is real flesh and blood, and worthy of our sincerest admiration. And all this while, her best and noblest meet with stiffly measured praise, and her strong sons are passed indifferently by. It is at least amusing to think of the relative positions occupied by the true mountaineer Scanderbeg, and the mythical mountaineer William Tell. The one sleeps unremembered with scanty, hard-won fame; the other carries such a weight of laurels that poets, wearied with singing his praises, have been driven in despair to sing the praises of those who praise him, as Coleridge piped to the Duchess of Devonshire,--

“Splendor’s fondly fostered child,”

because, in a moment of mild enthusiasm, she addressed some well-meant but highly inefficient verses to the platform from which Tell did not shoot the tyrant Gessler.

If the heroic struggle for a national life is at all times the most engrossing picture the world’s history has to show us, where shall we look for a more vivid illustration of the theme than in the long and bitter contest between cross and crescent, between the steady, relentless encroachment of the Turkoman power, and the vain and dauntless courage which opposed it? The story of the early Ottomans is one of wasteful and inexorable conquest, unrelieved by any touches of humanity, or any impulses towards a higher civilization. To the ferocious and impetuous pride of the barbarian they added an almost inconceivable wariness and patience; they knew when to wait and when to strike; they were never unduly elated by victory, and never demoralized by defeat. That strange dream of their founder Othman which won for him his Cilician wife, the mysterious vision of the full moon resting in his bosom, and of the stately tree that sprang therefrom, must have dimly hinted to the savage chief of the glory that was to be. When in his sleep he placed Constantinople as a jewel upon his swarthy finger, he felt the coming of shrouded things, and, believing the prophecy would be fulfilled in his descendant, he saluted his bride as the mother of a mighty race of kings. It was this firm conviction of future greatness which made him seek for his son Orchan a fairer and nobler wife than could be found in the black tents of his followers; and, true to the instincts of his race, he despoiled an enemy to enrich his own hearth. A Greek captain, in command of the castle of Belecoma, was betrothed to the beautiful daughter of a neighboring Christian chief. On their marriage night Othman surprised the wedding party as they rode through the dark mountain passes. The short and desperate conflict which ensued could have but one bitter ending. “The bridegroom was slain, and his Greek bride, the Lotus-flower of Brusa, was swept off by the Turkoman robbers to their lair, to become the spouse of their leader’s son.”[4]

[4] _The Early Ottomans_, by Dean Church.

Orchan was a mere boy when he received this ravished prize, the fair booty of a barbarous strife. Fifty years later, when hair and beard were white with age, he married again; and this time his bride was the daughter of a Christian emperor, not stolen away from friends and kindred, but given to him publicly with superb ceremonies, and a ghastly mockery of rejoicing. In fifty years the Ottoman power had grown into such fierce and sinister lustihood that Theodora, daughter of the Emperor Cantacuzene, was assigned as a precious hostage and seal of friendship between her father and his dreaded Turkish ally. The church refused her blessing to this unholy sacrifice, and, amid the pomp and majesty of imperial nuptials, there was lacking even the outward form of Christian marriage. From that date the tide of Turkish conquest spread with devastating rapidity. The impetuous encroachments of Orchan, the steady and irresistible advances of Amurath, became under Bajazet a struggle for life and death, not with the enfeebled powers of Greece, but with a rival conqueror who had swept from the broad Tartar steppes to subdue and lay waste the Eastern world. Eight dynasties had already been destroyed, eight crowned heads had been laid low, when Timour, grimly ready for a ninth victim, encountered the hitherto invincible sultan. They met, and Bajazet, who had seen the flower of French and German chivalry perish at his command, who had sat at his tent-door to witness the day-long massacre of Christian prisoners, and who had shadowed the very walls of Constantinople,--Bajazet was crushed like a worm by the lame, white-haired old Tartar, and, eating out his heart with dull fury, died in shameful captivity. But his race survived, vigorous, elastic, defiant, and renewed its strength with amazing swiftness under Mahommed the Restorer and Amurath the Second, whose reign was one long conflict with the Greek Emperor Manuel, with Sigismund of Hungary, and, hardest of all to subdue, with those warlike Sclavonic tribes who, often defeated but never conquered, maintained with superb courage the freedom of their mountain fastnesses. It was an unknown Servian soldier who slew Amurath the First in the very moment of his triumph; it was the Albanian chief Scanderbeg who repulsed Amurath the Second, and hurled him back to die, shamed and heart-broken, at Adrianople.

Pride of race, love for his native land, shame at prolonged captivity, and fury at heaped-up wrongs,--all these conflicting passions united themselves in the breast of this implacable warrior, and urged him relentlessly along his appointed path. He was the outcome of that ruthless policy by which the Turks turned the children of the cross into defenders of the crescent, a policy pursued with almost undeviating success since Black Halil, a century and a half before, had urged the training of Christian boys into a school of Moslem soldiers. What gives to the history of Scanderbeg its peculiar significance, and its peculiar ethical and artistic value is the fact that he avenged, not only his own injuries, but the injuries of countless children who, for over a hundred and fifty years, had been snatched from their homes, families, and faith to swell the ranks of an infidel foe. Wherever the tide of Ottoman battle raged most fiercely, there, savage, dark, invincible, stood the Janissaries, men suckled on Christian breasts and signed with Christian baptism, now flinging away their lives for an alien cause and an alien creed, fighting with the irresistible courage of fanaticism against their birthright and their kindred. Never before or since, in the history of all the nations, has a system of proselytizing been attended with such tremendous results. The life-blood of Christendom was drained to supply fresh triumphs for its enemies, and the rigorous discipline of a monastic training moulded these innocent young captives into a soldiery whose every thought and every action was subordinate to one overpowering influence, an austere, unquestioning obedience to the cause of Islam.

With the example of this extraordinary success always before their eyes, it is little wonder that the Turks regarded the children of the vanquished as so many docile instruments to be fashioned by rigid tutelage into faithful followers of the Prophet, and the first step towards this desired goal lay in their early adoption of the Mohammedan faith. No pang of pity, no sentiment of honor, interfered with this relentless purpose. When John Castriota, the hereditary lord of Croia, yielded up his four sons as hostages to Amurath the Second, he relied on the abundant promises made him by that sovereign, who had, on the whole, a fair reputation for keeping his royal word. The lads were carried to Adrianople and reared in the sultan’s palace, where one at least of the little prisoners attracted dangerous notice by his vivacity and grace,--inheritances, it is said, from his beautiful mother, Voisava. The fair-haired boy, then only eight years old, became first the plaything of the seraglio, and afterwards the jealously guarded favorite of Amurath himself. He was carefully taught, and was forced to conform to the ceremonial rites of the Ottomans, and to make an open profession of his new creed, receiving on this occasion the name of Scanderbeg, a name destined to carry with it a just retribution in the universal terror it excited. How much of Christian belief still lingered in the child’s soul, or how much he gained afterwards from the Albanian soldiers who had access to him, it is impossible to say. Young as he was, he had learned, amid the unutterable treachery and corruption of an Eastern court, to hide his emotions under an impenetrable mask, so that even Amurath, cruel, wily, and suspicious, found himself baffled by this Greek boy, whose handsome face betrayed to none the impetuous anger that consumed him. At nineteen he had command of five thousand horsemen, and enjoyed the title of pasha, a barren honor for one soon to be robbed of his birthright. After the close of the Hungarian war John Castriota died, and Amurath, ignoring his plighted faith, seized Croia in the name of the captive princes, ruthlessly extinguished its civil and religious liberties, turned the churches into mosques, and treated the whole country as a defeated and dependent province. Scanderbeg’s three brothers were conveniently removed by poison; he himself, the object of a curious affection on the sultan’s part, was watched with jealous and exacting eyes, and for a while it seemed as though the free-born mountain chief would add one more to the long list of Turkish proselytes and favorites, silenced with doubtful titles, bought with dishonorable wealth.

But it was a time of waiting, a time ominous with delay. The heir of Croia, mute, patient, and resolved, bided with steady self-control the hour when he could strike a single blow for faith and freedom. It came with the breaking out of fresh Hungarian troubles: with the defiance sent by John Hunyadi and his forces drawn up on the banks of the Moravia. While the Ottoman armies were engaged in this most disastrous conflict, Scanderbeg threw off his long-endured disguise, possessed himself by an unscrupulous device of his native city, and put all who opposed him to the sword. From that day until his death, forty years later, the record of his life is one perpetual heroic struggle to preserve the hard-won liberty of Epeiros, a struggle without intermission or relief, without rest for the victor or pity for the vanquished. His scornful indifference to pressing dangers was in itself the best of tonics to a people naturally brave, but taught by bitter experience to fear the inexorable Turkish yoke. Scanderbeg feared nothing; with him, indeed, fear was swallowed up in hatred. He understood perfectly the nature of the warfare in which he was engaged; he knew that, with adroitness and vigilance, every dark pass and every rocky crag became his friend and ally. He knew, too, the slender resources of the country, and never committed the mistake of taking more men into the field than he could manage and support. When Amurath sent an army of forty thousand soldiers to punish Croia, and bring back the rebel chief “alive or dead” to Adrianople, Scanderbeg limited his own forces to seven thousand foot and eight thousand horse, when he might, had he chosen, have trebled that number. With this compact body of picked and hardy warriors he lay in wait for the enemy, entrapped them by a feigned retreat into a narrow defile, and, hemming them in on either side, filled up the valley with their slain. Over twenty thousand Turks perished in that dreadful snare, many of them being trampled down by their helpless and panic-stricken countrymen. It was Scanderbeg’s first decisive victory, and a grim warning to Amurath of the possibilities that awaited him in the future. It gave to Croia a breathing spell, and to its victorious army the rich spoils of an Ottoman camp, so that those who had gone forth meagrely on foot returned well armed and bravely mounted to their rock-built citadel.

Had this sudden and bewildering success been followed up by a vigorous aggressive warfare on the part of Servia, Hungary, and Poland, then all in arms against their common foe; had the allied powers listened to the mountain chiefs, or to the burning remonstrances of Cardinal Julian, the pope’s legate, the Turks might have been driven forcibly back from Europe, and long centuries of suffering and dishonor spared to Christendom. But the lord of Servia, George Brankovich, yearned for his children whom Amurath held as hostages; Ladislaw, king of Hungary and Poland, was weary of the perpetual strife; even Hunyadi’s fiery voice was silenced; and a treaty of peace was signed with an enemy who might then, and then only, have been crushed. This treaty, shameful in itself, was still more shamefully broken in the following year, when the Christian hosts again took the field, only to be utterly routed in the terrible battle of St. Martin’s Eve. Never was disaster more complete: Ladislaw’s severed head, borne on a pike over the Ottoman ranks, struck terror and despair into the hearts of his followers; Hunyadi, after a vain, furious effort to redeem this ghastly symbol of defeat, fled from a field red with his countrymen’s blood; the papal legate and two Hungarian bishops perished in the thickest of the fray. It was the beginning of the end, and four years later the cause of Christendom received its deathblow at Kossova, when Hunyadi, beaten finally back from Servia, was taught by the bitterness of defeat that his name no longer sounded ominously, as of old, in the ears of his Moslem foe. Only Scanderbeg remained unsubdued amid his mountain peaks, and Amurath, flushed with conquest, now turned his whole attention to the final punishment of this audacious rebel.

The scale on which the invasion of Croia was planned shows in itself how deep-seated was the sultan’s anger, and how relentless his purpose. One hundred and sixty thousand men were assembled in Adrianople, the ablest generals were united in command, and Mohammed, his savage son and successor, accompanied the expedition, filled with fierce hopes of vengeance. Resistance seemed almost vain, but Scanderbeg, in no way disturbed by the coming storm, prepared with characteristic coolness to meet it at every point. He ordered all who dwelt in the open country or in unprotected villages to destroy their harvests and to quit their homes, so that the enemy might find no resources in the scorched and deserted fields. The women and children, the aged and infirm, were sent either to the sea-coast or out of the kingdom, many of them as far away as Venice. The fortifications of Croia were repaired; the garrison was strengthened and put under command of a brave and able governor, and Scanderbeg himself, with only ten thousand men, took the field, ready to waylay and harass Amurath at every step of his difficult and dangerous march. The first severe fighting was done before the walls of Setigrade, a strongly guarded town which made a gallant resistance, repulsing the Turks again and again, and only yielding when a traitor, bought by the sultan’s gold, poisoned the fountains which supplied the city with water. From this point the invading army marched on to Croia, covered the surrounding plains, planted their cannon--then an imposing novelty in warfare--before its massive gates, and summoned the garrison to surrender. A defiant refusal was returned; the Ottomans stormed the walls, and were repulsed with such fury that over eight thousand Janissaries perished in the combat, while Scanderbeg, poised like an eagle on the cliffs, waited until the battle was at its height, and then sweeping down on the unconscious foe, forced their trenches, fired the camp, and drove all before him with terrible havoc and slaughter. By the time Mohammed could rally his scattered forces, the Epeirots were off and away, with little scathe or damage to themselves; and this exasperating method of attack was the weapon with which the mountain chief finally wore out the courage and endurance of the invaders. Every inch of ground was familiar to him, and a snare to his enemies. Did Mohammed, burning with rage, scale the hills in pursuit, a handful of men held him at bay; while Scanderbeg, appearing as if by magic on the other side of the camp, chose this propitious moment for an attack. By day or night he gave the enemy no truce, no respite, no quarter. Two hours out of the twenty-four he slept, and all the rest he spent in unceasing, unwearying, unpitying warfare; until the Turks, harassed by a danger ever present but never visible, lost heart and trembled before the breathless energy of their foe. They were beginning also to suffer from a scarcity of provisions, and Scanderbeg took excellent care that this trouble should not be too speedily relieved. The supplies, brought at an immense cost from Desia, were intercepted and carried off triumphantly to the hills, and the unhappy Ottomans, starved in camp and slaughtered out of it, realized with ever-increasing dismay the unenviable nature of their position.

It must be admitted, in justice to the Epeirots, that the success of Scanderbeg’s manœuvres rested exclusively on their absolute and unquestioned fidelity. Swift and sure information was brought him of every movement on the enemy’s part, and vigilant eyes kept watch over every rocky pass that gave access to his haunts. For once Amurath’s gold was powerless to buy a single traitor, and the systematic perfidy by which the Turks were accustomed to steal what they could not grasp failed for once of its prey. After a fruitless effort to undermine the rock on which Croia was founded, the sultan sought to corrupt first the governor and then the garrison with dazzling offers of advancement, but all the wealth in Adrianople could not purchase one poor Christian soldier. Baffled and heart-sick with repeated failure, Amurath at last offered to raise the siege and depart, on payment of a small yearly sum, a mere nominal tribute to salve his wounded pride. Even this trifling concession was sternly refused by Scanderbeg, who would yield nothing to his hated foe. Then for the first time the sultan understood the relentless nature of this man whom he had petted as a child and wronged as a boy, whom he had held a helpless hostage in his hands, and who now defied him with unutterable aversion and scorn. Abandoning himself to grief, fury, and despair, he tore his white beard, and recalled his countless triumphs in the past, only to compare them with this shameful overthrow. He who had seen the allied powers of Christendom suing at his feet, to be humbled in his old age by an insignificant Illyrian chieftain! The blow broke his proud heart, and on his death-bed he conjured his son to avenge his name and honor. Gladly Mohammed undertook the task, but the present was no time for its fulfillment. The siege of Croia was raised, the dejected Moslem army straggled homewards, cruelly harassed at every step by their unwearied foe, and Scanderbeg once more entered his native city amid the acclamations of a brave people, born again to freedom, and wild to welcome their deliverer.

It is pleasant to think that, before being called a third time into the field, even this indomitable fighter found a little leisure in which to marry a wife, and to cultivate the arts of peace. Domestic tranquillity ran but a slender chance of palling on its possessor in those stirring days; but Scanderbeg made the most of his limited opportunities. He carried his bride in triumph to every corner of his little kingdom, he labored hard to restore those habits of thrift and industry which perpetual warfare roots out of every nation, and he wisely refrained from overtaxing the narrow resources of his people. When his purse was empty, he looked to his enemies and not to his friends for its replenishment; and that stout old adage, “The Turk’s dominions are Scanderbeg’s revenues,” is a sufficient witness to his admirable financiering. He realized fully that the legacy of hate bequeathed by Amurath to Mohammed would bear bitter fruits in the hands of that fierce and able monarch, and so employed every interval of peace in strengthening himself for the struggle that was to follow. Twice again during his lifetime was Epeiros invaded by the Ottomans; and Scanderbeg, driven from his lair, was hunted like a deer from hill to hill, now lying in covert, now fiercely resisting, but unconquered always. Wily offers of friendship from the sultan were received with a not unnatural suspicion, and courteously declined; hired assassins were detected, and delivered up to a prompt and pitiless justice. For forty years this Albanian soldier defended his mountain eyrie from a power vast enough to destroy two empires, and cruel enough to make the whole Eastern world tremble. Constantinople fell, while Croia stood unharmed. The last news brought to Scanderbeg, as he lay dying at Lyssa, was that the Turks had invaded the Venetian dominions. The feeble warrior raised himself in bed, and called for his sword and armor. “Tell them,” he gasped, “that I will be with them to-morrow,” and fell back fainting on his pillows. On the morrow he was dead.

ENGLISH RAILWAY FICTION.

Sandwiches, oranges, and penny novelettes are the three great requisites for English traveling,--for third-class traveling, at least; and, of the three, the novelette is by far the most imperative, a pleasant proof of how our intellectual needs outstrip our bodily requirements. The clerks and artisans, shopgirls, dressmakers, and milliners, who pour into London every morning by the early trains, have, each and every one, a choice specimen of penny fiction with which to beguile the short journey, and perhaps the few spare minutes of a busy day. The workingman who slouches up and down the platform, waiting for the moment of departure, is absorbed in some crumpled bit of pink-covered romance. The girl who lounges opposite to us in the carriage, and who would be a very pretty girl in any other conceivable hat, sucks mysterious sticky lozenges, and reads a story called “Mariage à la Mode, or Getting into Society,” which she subsequently lends to me,--seeing, I think, the covetous looks I cast in its direction,--and which I find gives as vivid and startling a picture of high life as one could reasonably expect for a penny. Should I fail to provide myself with one of these popular journals at the book-stall, another chance is generally afforded me before the train moves off; and I am startled out of a sleepy reverie by a small boy’s thrusting “A Black Business” alarmingly into my face, while a second diminutive lad on the platform holds out to me enticingly “Fettered for Life,” “Neranya’s Revenge,” and “Ruby.” The last has on the cover an alluring picture of a circus girl jumping through a hoop, which tempts me to the rashness of a purchase, circus riders being my literary weakness. I remember, myself, trying to write a story about one, when I was fourteen, and experiencing great difficulty from a comprehensive and all-embracing ignorance of my subject. It is but fair to the author of “Ruby” to say that he was too practiced a workman to be disconcerted or turned from his course by any such trivial disadvantage.

I should hardly like to confess how many coins of the realm I dissipated before learning the melancholy truth, that the seductive titles and cuts which form the _tours de force_ of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to the tales themselves, which are like vials of skimmed milk, labeled absinthe, but warranted to be wholly without flavor. Mr. James Payn, who has written very amusingly about the mysterious weekly journals which lie “thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa” upon the counters of small, dark shops, “in the company of cheap tobacco, hardbake, and, at the proper season, valentines,” laments with frank asperity that he can find in them neither dramatic interest, nor even impropriety. He has searched them patiently for something wrong, and his quest has been wholly unrewarded. Mr. Thomas Wright, in a paper published some years ago in the “Nineteenth Century,” makes a similar complaint. The lovely heroines of these stories are “virtuous even to insipidity,” and their heroes are so blamably blameless as to be absolutely revolting. Yet it has been my fate to encounter some very pretty villains in the course of my penny readings, and at least one specimen of the sinful gilded youth, who has “handsome blonde hair parted in the middle, a discontented mustache, a pale face and apathetic expression.” This scion of the aristocracy, I am grieved to say, keeps beautiful Jewesses on board his sumptuous yacht, and otherwise misbehaves himself after a fashion calculated to make his relatives and well-wishers more discontented even than his mustache. He has a lovely sister, Alma, with whom, we are assured, the Prince of Wales danced three times in one night, “and was also heard to express his admiration of her looks and her _esprit_ in some very emphatic superlatives, exciting a variety of comment and criticism.” Naturally, and all the more naturally because the fair Alma discreetly reserves her _esprit_ for royal ears and royal commendation, and is exceedingly chary of revealing any of it to interested readers, who are fain to know what kind of conversation the Prince found so diverting. From the specimens presented to our consideration, we are forced to conclude either that his Highness is easily satisfied in the matter of _esprit_, or that he has an almost superhuman power of detecting it when hidden from ordinary observation.

The wonderful dullness of penny fiction is not really due to the absence of incidents, of vice, or even of dramatic situations, but to the placidity with which these incidents or situations are presented and received. How can we reasonably be expected to excite ourselves over a catastrophe which makes little or no impression on the people most deeply concerned in it? When Bonny Adair engages herself, with guileless alacrity, to a man who has a wife already, the circumstance is narrated with a coolness which hardly allows of a tremor. The wife herself is not the hidden, mysterious, veiled creature with whom we are all familiar; not an actress, or a ballet girl, or an adventuress; but a highly respectable young lady, going into society, and drinking tea with poor Bonny at afternoon receptions. This would seem like a startling innovation, but as nobody else expresses any surprise at the matter, why should we? Bonny herself, it is explained, put no embarrassing questions to her suitor. “She was only a simple country maid. She knew that he loved her, and that was all she cared for.” Still, to drink tea amicably with the wife of her _prétendu_ is too much even for a simple country maid; and when Bonny is formally introduced to “Mrs. Alec Doyle,” she feels it time to withdraw from the scene and become a hospital nurse, until a convenient accident in the hunting-field removes the intrusive spouse, and reëstablishes her claim to the husband.

The same well-bred indifference is revealed in a more sensational story called “Elfrida’s Wooing,” where we have a villainous uncle foiled in his base plots; a father supposed to be drowned, but turning up just at the critical moment; a wicked lover baffled, a virtuous lover rewarded. This sounds promising, but in reality everything is taken with such wonderful calm that not a ripple of excitement breaks over the smooth surface of the tale. There is even an abduction, which surely cannot be an every-day occurrence in English clerical life,--I do not remember anything like it in one of Trollope’s novels,--and by mistake the wrong girl, the vicar’s daughter, is carried off by the rogues. But no matron of feudal times could have betrayed less annoyance at the incident than does the vicar’s wife. “Rupert,” she remarks placidly to her son, “it is your place to go and look for your sister.” “Where shall I go?” is the brother’s languid query. To which his mother retorts, with some fretfulness: “How can I tell you? If I knew, I should be able to send for her myself,”--a very simple and a very sensible way of stating the case; but it sounds as if the pet dog, rather than the only daughter of the family, had been spirited suddenly away.

The most striking instance, however, of that repose of mien which stamps the caste of penny-fiction characters I found in a delightful little romance entitled “Golden Chains,” where the heroine marries the villain to oblige a friend, and is rewarded for her amiability by being imprisoned in a ruined castle, situated vaguely “on a lonely hillside looking down upon the blue Mediterranean.” Apparently, nothing can be easier than to dispose of superfluous wives in this particular locality of Italy, for no impertinent questions are asked; and Ernestine, proving intractable, is left by her husband, Captain Beamish, an English officer of a type not yet elucidated by Rudyard Kipling, to starve quietly in her dungeon. She is prevented from fulfilling this agreeable destiny by the accidental drowning of the captain, and the accidental arrival of her lover,--the virtuous hero,--who is traveling providentially in the south of Europe, and who has a taste for exploring ruins. This gentlemanly instinct leads to the discovery of his beloved in a comatose condition, “but beautiful still,” though “her youthful roundness was gone forever.” Surely now, the reader thinks, there will be a scene of transport, of fierce wrath, of mingled agony and rapture. Nothing of the sort. Linden merely “lifts the fair head upon his arm,” and administers a dose of brandy. Then, as Ernestine’s eyes open, he murmurs, “‘Dearest, do you know me?’ ‘Yes,’ she faintly answered. ‘All is well, Nessa. You have been cruelly used, but all is well. You are safe with me. Tell me, dear one, you are glad to see me.’”

If she were not glad to see him, under the circumstances, it would indicate an extraordinary indifference, not so much to love as to life; and the modesty which, in such a case, could doubt a hearty welcome seems like an exaggerated emotion. But the hero of penny fiction is the least arrogant of mortals. He worships from afar, and expresses his affection in language which at times is almost obsequious in its timidity. He is never passionate, never exultant, never the least bit foolish, and never for a single moment relapses into humanity. Yet millions of people believe in him, love him, cherish him, and hail his weekly reappearance with sincere and unwearied applause.

The Unknown Public, that huge body of readers who meddle not with Ruskin, nor with Browning, nor with Herbert Spencer, who have no acquaintance with George Eliot, and to whom even Thackeray and Scott are as recondite as George Meredith and Walter Pater, has been an object of interest and curiosity to its neighbor, the Known Public, ever since Wilkie Collins formally introduced it into good society, more than thirty years ago. This interest is mingled with philanthropy, and is apt to be a little didactic in the expression of its regard. Wilkie Collins, indeed, after the easy-going fashion of his generation, was content to take the Unknown Public as he found it, and to wonder vaguely whether the same man wrote all the stories that were so fearfully and wonderfully alike: “a combination of fierce melodrama and meek domestic sentiment; short dialogues and paragraphs on the French pattern, with English moral reflections of the sort that occur on the top lines of children’s copybooks; descriptions and conversations for the beginning of the number, and a ‘strong situation’ dragged in by the neck and shoulders for the end.” It was in the Answers to Correspondents, however, that the distinguished novelist confesses he took the keenest delight,--in the punctilious reader, who is anxious to know the correct hour at which to visit a newly married couple; in the practical reader, who asks how to make crumpets and liquid blacking; in the sentimental reader, who has received presents from a gentleman to whom she is not engaged, and desires the editor’s sanction for the deed; in the timorous reader, who is afraid of a French invasion and of dragonflies. The scraps of editorial wisdom doled out to these benighted beings were, in Wilkie Collins’s opinion, well worth the journal’s modest price. He was rejoiced to know that “a sensible and honorable man never flirts himself, and ever despises flirts of the other sex.” He was still more pleased to be told, “When you have a sad trick of blushing, on being introduced to a young lady, and when you want to correct the habit, summon to your aid a serene and manly confidence.”

Members of the Known Public who explore the wilds and deeps of penny fiction to-day are less satisfied with what they see, less flippant in their methods of criticism, and less disposed to permit mankind to be amused after its own dull fashion. “Let us raise the tone of these popular journals,” is their cry, “and we shall soon have millions of readers taking rational delight in wholesome literature. Let us publish good stories at a penny apiece,--in fact, it is our plain duty to do so,--and these millions of readers will, with grateful hearts, rise up and call us blessed.” To which Mr. Payn responds mirthfully that the Unknown Public is every whit as sure of what it wants as the Known Public that aspires to teach it, and perhaps even a little surer. “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Wandering Jew,” “Ivanhoe,” and “White Lies” were all offered in turn at a penny apiece, and were in turn rejected. That it does occasionally accept better fiction, if it can get it cheap, we have the word of Mr. Wright, who claims to have been for years a member of this mysterious body, and to have an inner knowledge of what it likes and dislikes. “The Woman in White,” “Lady Audley’s Secret,” and “It is Never Too Late to Mend” are, he asserts, familiar names with a certain stratum of the Unknown Public; “Midshipman Easy” is an old friend, and “The Pathfinder” and “The Last of the Mohicans” enjoy a fitful popularity. But its real favorite, its admitted pride and delight, is Ouida. The “genteel young ladies of the counter,” and their hard-working sisterhood of dressmakers and milliners and lodging-house keepers, all accept Ouida as a literary oracle. “They quite agree with herself that she is a woman of genius. They recognize in her the embodiment of their own inexpressible imaginings of aristocratic people and things. They believe in her Byronic characters, and their Arabian-Nights-like wealth and power; in her titanic and delightfully wicked guardsmen; in her erratic or ferocious, but always gorgeous princes, her surpassingly lovely, but more or less immoral grand dames, and her wonderful Bohemians of both sexes. They believe, too, in her sheer ‘fine writing.’ Its jingle is pleasant to their senses, even though they fail to catch its meaning. Ouida’s work is essentially the acme of penny-serial style. The novelists of the penny prints toil after her in vain, but they do toil after her. They aim at the same gorgeousness of effect, though they lack her powers to produce it, to impress it vividly upon readers.”

It has not been my experience to find in these weeklies--and I have read many of them--even a dim reflection of Ouida’s meretricious glitter. A gentle and unobtrusive dullness; a smooth fluency of style, suggestive of the author’s having written several hundreds of such stories before, and turning them out with no more intellectual effort than an organ-grinder uses in turning the crank of his organ; an air of absolute unreality about the characters, not so much from overdrawing as from their deadly sameness; conversations of vapid sprightliness and an atmosphere of oppressive respectability,--these are the characteristics of penny fiction, if I may judge from the varied specimens that have fallen into my hands. The foreign scoundrels and secret poisoners, the sumptuous wealth and lavish bloodshed, that thrilled the boyhood of Mr. Wright have, I greatly fear, been refined out of existence. There is an occasional promise of this sort of thing, but never any adequate fulfillment. I once hoped much from the opening paragraph of a tale describing the virtuous heroine’s wicked husband in language which seemed to me full of bright auspices for his future:--

“The speaker was a fair, well-dressed man, in appearance about three-and-thirty. A yellow mustache increased the languid, _insouciant_ expression of his long, well-cut features, which were handsome, but, despite their delicacy, had a singular animal resemblance in them,--God’s image in the possession of a cool, unprincipled fiend, which now and then peered out of the pale blue eyes, half veiled by the yellow lashes.”

Yet, with all his advantages of physiognomy, the utmost this pale-eyed person achieves is to hang around in his wife’s way until she shoots him,--accidentally, of course,--and secures herself from any further annoyance.

In a taste for aristocracy, however, and a splendid contempt for trade, and “the city,” and the objectionable middle classes, our penny novelist surpasses even Ouida, and approaches more nearly to that enamored exponent of high life, Lord Beaconsfield. He will dance his puppets, as Tony Lumpkin’s boon companion danced his bear, “only to the very genteelest of tunes.” Mr. Edward Salmon, who has written with amazing seriousness on “What the Working Classes Read,” and who thinks it a pity “more energy is not exerted in bringing home to the people the inherent attractions of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lytton, and George Eliot,” makes the distinct assertion that socialism and a hatred of the fashionable world are fostered by the penny serials, and by the pictures they draw of a luxurious and depraved nobility. “The stories,” he says gravely, “are utterly contemptible in literary execution. They thrive on the wicked baronet, the faithless but handsome peeress, and find their chief supporters among shopgirls, seamstresses, and domestic servants. It is hardly surprising that there should exist in the impressionable minds of the masses an aversion more or less deep to the upper classes. If one of their own order, man or woman, appears in the pages of these unwholesome prints, it is only as a paragon of virtue, who is probably ruined, or at least wronged, by that incarnation of evil, the sensuous aristocrat, standing six feet, with his dark eyes, heavy mustache, pearl-like teeth, and black hair. Throughout the story the keynote struck is high-born scoundrelism. Every social misdemeanor is called in to assist the progress of the slipshod narrative. Crime and love are the essential ingredients, and the influence exercised over the feminine reader, often unenlightened by any close contact with the classes whom the novelist pretends to portray, crystallizes into an irremovable dislike of the upper strata of society.”[5]

[5] _The Nineteenth Century._

It is hard, after reading this extract, to believe that Mr. Salmon ever examined any of these “slipshod narratives” for himself, or he would know that the aristocrat of penny fiction is always fair. The stalwart young farmer, the aspiring artist, the sailor lover, may rival each other in dark clustering curls, but the peer, as befits his rank, is monotonously blonde.

“The dark was dowered with beauty,
The fair was nobly born.
In the face of the one was hatred;
In the face of the other, scorn.”

Mr. Hamilton Aïdé probably does not design his graceful verses as illustrations of weekly novelettes, but he understands better than Mr. Salmon the subtle sympathy between birth and coloring.

Neither have I discovered any socialistic tendency in these stories, nor any disposition to exalt the lower orders at the expense of the upper. The Clara Vere de Veres who smiled on me in the course of my researches were all as virtuous as they were beautiful, and their noble lovers were models of chivalry and truth. It was the scheming lawyer, the base-born, self-made man of business, who crept as a serpent into their patrician Eden, and was treated with the contempt and contumely he deserved. In one instance, such an upstart, Mr. John Farlow by name, ventures to urge upon an impoverished landholder his offers of friendship and assistance, and this is the spirit in which his advances are received:--

“The colonel shudders, as he gazes, half wearily, half scornfully, at the shapeless, squat figure of the Caliban-like creature before him. That he, Courtenay St. Leger Walterton, late in command of her Majesty’s Lancers, should have to listen respectfully to the hectoring of this low city rascal, while a horsepond awaits without, and a collection of horsewhips hang ready for instant application on the hunting-rack in the hall within! Yet it is so; he is wholly at this man’s mercy, and the colonel, like the humblest of mankind, is obliged to succumb to the inevitable.”

Now, since I turned the last page of “Ten Thousand a Year,” a long, long time ago, I have hardly met with a finer instance of aristocratic feeling than this, or a more crushing disdain for the ignoble creature known as a solicitor. Mr. John Farlow is of course a villain, but Courtenay St. Leger Walterton is not aware of this fact, and neither, in the beginning of the tale, is the reader. What we do know, however, is that, being a “low city rascal,” he naturally merits horsewhipping at the hands of a blue-blooded country squire. He would have deserved hanging, had the colonel been a duke, and perhaps that punishment might have been meted triumphantly out to him, for the penny novelist, with all his faults, still “loves his House of Peers.”

The task of providing literature for the Unknown Public is not the easy thing it seems to critics like Mr. Wright and Mr. Salmon. The Unknown Public has its literature already,--a literature which enjoys an enormous circulation, and gives absolute satisfaction. One publishing company alone, “for the people,” claims that its penny novelettes, issued weekly, reach seven millions of readers, and these seven millions are evidently content with what they receive. Mr. Andrew Lang is responsible for the statement that a story about a mill girl, which was printed in a Glasgow penny journal, so delighted the subscribers that they demanded it should be several times repeated in its columns. “There could not,” says Mr. Lang somewhat wistfully, “be a more perfect and gratifying success;” and publishers of ambitious and high-toned periodicals may well be forgiven for envying such a master-stroke. When were they ever asked to reprint a story, however vaunted its perfections, however popular it seemed to be? The heroine of this magic tale is defrauded of her inheritance by villains who possess sumptuous subterranean palaces and torture-chambers in “her own romantic town” of Glasgow, the last place in the world where we should reasonably expect to find them. “The one essential feature,” Mr. Lang observes, “in a truly successful tale is that there should be an _ingénue_, as pure as poor, who is debarred by conspiracies from the enjoyment of a prodigious fortune.” This is a favorite device with weekly papers at home, and the serial story, on either side of the Atlantic, is perforce a little more stirring in its character than that presented to us in finished form through the medium of the penny novelette. With the first, the “strong situation” is serviceable as a decoy to lure the reader into purchasing the following number. With the second, no such artifice is needed or employed. The buyer has his pennyworth already in hand; and a very good pennyworth it is, judged by quantity alone. Wilkie Collins tells us how he tried vainly to extract from a shopman an opinion as to which was the best journal to select, and how the shopman persisted, very naturally, in saying that there was no choice,--one was every bit as long as another. “Well, you see some likes one, and some the next. Take ’em all the year around, and there ain’t a pin, as I knows of, to choose between them. There’s just about as much in one as there is in its neighbor. All good penn’orths. Bless my soul! Just take ’em up and look for yourself! All good penn’orths, choose where you like.”

Exactly as if they were shrimps or periwinkles! Very good measure, if you chance to like the stuff! “Dorothy, a Home Journal for Ladies,” in a rather attractive pale green cover, gives you every week a complete story, nearly half the length of an average English novel, and fairly well illustrated with full-page cuts. Each number contains, in addition, Dorothy’s Letter-Box, where all reasonable questions are answered, and Dorothy’s Drawing-Room, with items of fashionable news,--the whereabouts of the Queen, and the interesting fact that “the Duke and Duchess of Portland have been living quietly and giving no parties at Langwell, the Duke being desirous of affording the Duchess every chance of better regaining her health.” Also Hints for Practical Dressmaking, by “Busy Bee;” Our Homes, by “Lady Bird;” an occasional poem; and Notes on Handwriting, where you may learn that you have “ambition, an ardent, tender, affectionate, and sensitive nature, easily impressed, and inclined to jealousy. There is also some sense of beauty, vivid fancy, and sequence of ideas.” Now and then a doubting maid sends a scrap of her lover’s penmanship to be deciphered, and receives the following gentle encouragement:--

“LOVE LIES BLEEDING.--I hardly like to say whether the writer of the morsel you inclose would make a good husband; but I should imagine him as thoughtful for others, romantic and loving, very orderly in his habits, and fairly well educated; rather hot-tempered, but forgives and forgets quickly.”

All this for a penny,--two cents of American money! No wonder “Dorothy” reaches her millions of readers. No wonder the little green books lie in great heaps on the counters of every railway station in England. She is, perhaps, the most high-toned of such weekly issues; but “The Princess,” in a bright blue cover, follows closely in her wake, with a complete story, illustrated, and Boudoir Gossip about Prince George of Wales, and Mrs. Mackay, and the Earl and Countess of Jersey. “Bow Bells” and “The Wide World Novelettes” are on a distinctly lower scale: the fiction more sensational, the cuts coarser, and the pink cover of “Bow Bells” flaunting and vulgar. “A Magazine of Short Stories” aims at being lively and vivacious in the style of Rhoda Broughton, and gives a good pennyworth of tales, verses, Answers to Correspondents, and a column of Familiar Quotations Verified that alone is worth the money. But the final triumph of quantity over quality, of matter over mind, is in the “Book for All,” published weekly at the price of one penny, and containing five separate departments, for women, girls, men, boys, and children. Each of these departments has a short illustrated story, poetry, anecdotes, puzzles, confidential talks with the editor, advice on every subject, and information of every description. Here you can learn “how to preserve your beauty” and how to make “royal Battenberg” lace, how to run a Texas ranch and how to go into mourning for your mother, how to cure stammering and how to rid a dog of fleas. Here you may acquire knowledge upon the most varied topics, from lung diseases in animals to Catherine of Russia’s watch, from the aborigines of Australia to scientific notes on the Lithuanian language. The Unknown Public must indeed be athirst for knowledge, if it can absorb such quantities week after week with unabated zeal; and, from the Answers to Correspondents, we are led to suppose it is ever eager for more. One inquiring mind is comforted by the assurance that “narrative monophone will appear in its turn,” and an ambitious but elderly reader is gently warned that “a person aged fifty might learn to play on the guitar, and perhaps be able to sing; but the chances are that, in both instances, the performance will not be likely to captivate those who are compelled to listen to it.” On the whole, after an exhaustive study of penny weeklies, I should say that, were I expected to provide a large family with reading matter and encyclopædic information at the modest rate of one dollar and four cents a year, the “Book for All” would be the journal of my choice.

It is not in penny fiction alone, however, that the railway book-stalls do a thriving trade. The shilling novels stand in goodly rows, inviting you to a purchase you are sure afterwards to regret. The average shilling novel in England differs from the average penny novel in size only; and, judged by measurement, the sole standard it is possible to apply, it should, to warrant its price, be about six times the length. “Lord Elwyn’s Daughter” and “The Nun’s Curse,” at a shilling each, bear such a strong family resemblance to their penny cousins, “Golden Chains” and “Her Bitter Burden,” that it needs their outward dress to distinguish them; and “Haunted” and “The Man who Vanished” carry their finest thrills in their title. Quite early in my search, I noticed at the Waterloo station three shilling novels,--“Weaker than Woman,” “Lady Hutton’s Ward,” and “Diana’s Discipline,” all advertised conspicuously as being by the author of “Dora Thorne.” Feeling that my ignorance of Dora Thorne herself was a matter for regret and enlightenment, I asked for her at once, to be told she was not in stock, but I might, if I liked, have “Lady Gwendolen’s Dream,” by the same writer. I declined “Lady Gwendolen,” and at the next station once more demanded “Dora Thorne.” In vain! The young man in attendance glanced over his volumes, shook his head, and offered me “Diana’s Discipline,” and a fresh book “The Fatal Lilies,” also by the author of “Dora Thorne.” Another stall at another station had all five of these novels, and a sixth one in addition, “A Golden Heart,” by the author of “Dora Thorne,” but still no “Dora.” Elsewhere I encountered “Her Martyrdom” and “Which Loved Him Best,” both stamped with the cabalistic words “By the Author of ‘Dora Thorne’;” and so it continued to the end. New stories without number, all from the same pen, and all countersigned “By the Author of ‘Dora Thorne,’” but never “Dora.” From first to last, she remained elusive, invisible, unattainable,--a Mrs. Harris among books, a name and nothing more.

Comedy is very popular at railway book-stalls: “My Churchwardens,” by a Vicar, and “My Rectors,” by a Quondam Curate; a weekly pennyworth of mild jokes called “Pick-Me-Up,” and a still cheaper and still milder collection for a half-penny called “Funny Cuts;” an occasional shabby copy of “Innocents Abroad,” which stands as the representative of American humor, and that most mysterious of journals, “Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,” which always conveys the impression of being exceedingly amusing if one could only understand the fun. Everybody--I mean, of course, everybody who rides in third-class carriages--buys this paper, and studies it soberly, industriously, almost sadly; but I have never yet seen anybody laugh over it. Mrs. Pennell, indeed, with a most heroic devotion to the cause of humor, and a catholic appreciation of its highways and byways, has analyzed Ally Sloper for the benefit of the Known Public which reads the “Contemporary Review,” and claims that he is a modern brother of old-time jesters,--of Pierrot, and Pulcinello, and Pantaleone; reflecting national vices and follies with caustic but good-natured fidelity. “While the cultured of the present generation have been busy proving their powers of imitation,” says Mrs. Pennell, “this unconscious evolution of a popular type has established the pretensions of the people to originality.” But, alas! it is not given to the moderately cultivated to understand such types without a good deal of interpretation; and merely buying and reading the paper are of very little service. Here are the pictures, which I am told are clever; here is the text, which is probably clever, too; but their combined brilliancy conveys no light to my mind. Ally Sloper leading “a local German band” at Tenby, Ally Sloper interviewing distinguished people, may, like Mr. F.’s aunt, be “ingenious and even subtle,” but the key to his subtlety is lacking. As for Tootsie, and The Dook Snook, and Lord Bob, and The Hon. Billy, and all the other members of this interesting family who play their weekly part in the recurring comedy, they would be quite as amusing to the uninitiated reader if they followed the example of the erudite Oxonian, and conversed in “the Ostiak dialect of Tungusian.”

By way of contrast, I suppose, the other comic weeklies preserve a simplicity of character which is equaled only by their placid and soothing dullness. It is easy to understand the amount of humor conveyed in such jests as these, both of which are deemed worthy of half-page illustrations.

“_Aunt Kate_ (in the park). Tell me, Ethel, when any of the men look at me.