A friend of mine, a dweller in the city, a lover of red bricks, one to
whom the sound of the dray-cart merrily grinding on the pavement is
sweeter music than a burst of woodland song, has tardily conceded that
the Adirondacks, on a summer day, is pleasant. I value his testimony
and record it with pleasure. Let us be thankful for small favors when
cynics are the donors. For me these woods, lakes and crystal streams
hold an indescribable charm. They are the true abode of man. Here is
liberty, while the city is but a cage, with its thousands uttering the
plaintive cry of Sterne’s prisoned starling, “I cannot get out.” For
the hum of wheels we have the songs of birds, the music of waterfalls,
the purr of mountain brooks and the harmonies of the winds playing
through the thousand different species of trees, each one differing in
melody, but combining in one grand symphony. Orchestras are muffled
music when compared to nature’s lute. The pipes of Pan is but a poet’s
struggle to embody in speech such a symphony. For the city’s smells,
that not even a Ruskin could paint, albeit they are far from elusive,
we have the mountain air that has dallied with the streams and stolen
the fragrance of a thousand clover fields. Every man to his taste.
There is no disputing of this. Lamb loved bricks and Wordsworth such
scenes as ours; yet, Lamb would be as sadly missed from our libraries
as Wordsworth. Swing my hammock in the shade of yonder pines, good
Patsy. A robin is piping his sweetest notes to his brooding spouse,
the Salmon river runs at my feet, biting the sandy shore, laughing
loud when a saucy stone falls in its current. From over the hills
comes the scent of new-mown hay; bless me! this is pleasant. To add
to this enjoyment you have brought a book—something bright, you tell
me. I’ll soon see. And gliding into my hammock, I said my first good
morning to Agnes Repplier. It was a breezy good morning, one of those
where the hand unconsciously goes out as much as to say: Old fellow,
you don’t know how glad I am to see you. There was no friend with a
white cravat standing on the first page to introduce us, and tell us
that the authoress bore in her book a fecund message to struggling
humanity, and that the major part of that same humanity could not see
it; hence it was his duty to stand at the portal and solve the riddle.
There was no begging for recognition on the score of ancestors, fads
or isms. I am Agnes Repplier, said the book; how do you like me? A
few pages perused, and my own voice amusingly fell on my ears, saying
first class. Here was a woman who thought—not the trivial thought that
nauseates in the books of so many literary women—but virile aggressive
thought, that provokes, contradicts, and, like Hamlet’s ghost, will not
be downed. This thought is folded in a garment, whose many hues quicken
the curiosity and make her pages a continual feast of wit, droll irony,
and illuminative criticism all curiously and harmoniously blended. Her
pages are rich in suggestion, apt in quotation. You are constantly
aroused, put on your guard, laughingly disarmed, and that in a way
that Lamb would have loved. She has no awe in the presence of literary
gods. Lightly she trips up to them with her poniard, shows by a pass
that they are made of mud, and that the aureole that encircles them is
but the work of your crude imagination. Clearing away your shreds and
patches she puts the author in a plain suit before you, and, how you
wonder, that with all your boasted knowledge you have called for years
a jackdaw a peacock!
How delightful to watch this critic armed _cap-a-pie_, demolishing
some fad, that has masqueraded for years as genuine literature. Is
it little Lord Fauntleroy, a character sloppy, inane, impossible to
real life, yet hugged to the heart by the commonplace. Miss Repplier
keenly surveys her ground, as an artist would the statue of his rival,
notes the foibles, cant, false poses, and crazy-quilt jargon used to
deck pet characters. Experience has taught her that you cannot combat
seriously the commonplace. “The statesman or the poet,” says Dudley
Warner, “who launches out unmindful of this, will be likely to come to
grief in his generation.” Sly humor, pungent sarcasm, are the weapons
effectively used. The little Lord is unrobed, and the life that seemed
so full of charity and virtue, becomes but a mixture of hypocrisy and
snobbery. Yet, if some of our critics could, “all the dear old nursery
favorites must be banished from our midst, and the rising generation
of prigs must be nourished exclusively on Little Lord Fauntleroy, and
other carefully selected specimens of milk and water diet.” The dear
land of romance, in its most charming phase, that phase represented
by Red Riding Hood, Ali Baba, Blue Beard, and the other heroes of our
nurseryhood must be eliminated, for children are no longer children,
in the old sense of believing “in such stuff” without questioning.
American children, at any rate, are too sensitively organized to
endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we are told,
and it is added, “no mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated
brutality.” These are the empty sayings of the realists, who would have
every child break its dolls to analyze the sawdust. The most casual
observer of American homes knows that our children will not be fed on
such stuff as realists are able to give, but will turn wistfully back
to those brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid
past, and of which no hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier so well
puts it, “we could not banish Blue Beard if we would. He is as immortal
as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this
uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who,
thank Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown-up—will
still tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big
brave brothers come galloping up the road.” Ferocity, brutality, if
you will, may couch on every page, but this is much better than the
sugared nothingness of Sunday school tales, and beats all hollow, as
the expression goes, the many tricks perpetrated on children by the
school of analytical fiction. Children will read Blue Beard, and thank
Heaven, as grown-up men, for such a childish pleasure, adding a prayer
for her who wrote the “Battle of the Babies.” Bunner and others have
accused Miss Repplier of ignoring contemporary works, of rudely closing
in their face her library door and saying he who enters here must
have outgrown his swaddling clothes, must have rounded out his good
half-century. This may be one of Bunner’s skits. Even if it were not,
there is more than one precedent to follow. Hazlitt, in his delightful
chat on the “Reading of Old Books,” begins his essay, “I hate to read
new books.” This author has the courage of his convictions; you do not
grope in the dark to know why. Here is the reason, and it is easier to
assent to it than to deny it. “Contemporary writers may generally be
divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we
are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to
think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or
to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary
fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely, and like
a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish fad, which spoils a
delicate passage;—another inspires us with the highest respect for
his personal talents and character, but does not come quite up to
our expectation in print.” All these contradictions and petty details
interrupt the calm current of our reflections. These are sound reasons;
as if to clinch them he adds, “but the dust, smoke, and noise of
modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of
immortality.”
Miss Repplier, an admirer of Hazlitt, and if one may hazard a guess,
her master in style, would not go so far. She believes in keeping up
with a decent portion of current literature, and “this means perpetual
labor and speed,” whereas idleness and leisure are requisite for the
true enjoyment of books. To read all the frothings of the press for
the sake of being called a contemporary critic were madness. She
concurs with another critic that reading is not a duty, and that no
man is under any obligation to read what another man wrote. When Miss
Repplier stumbles across an unknown volume, picking it up dubiously,
and finds in it an hour of placid but genuine enjoyment, although it
is a modern book, wanting in sanctifying dust, she will use all her
art to make in other hearts a loving welcome for the little stranger.
“A By-Way in Fiction” tells in her own way, of a recent book born of
Italian soil and sunshine, “The Chevalier of Pensieri Vani.” It is
the essayist’s right to read those books, ancient or modern, that
are to her taste, and it is a bit of impertinence in any writer to
particularly recommend to Miss Repplier a list of books, which she is
naturally indisposed to consider with much kindness, thrust upon her
as they are, like paregoric or porous plaster. “If there be people who
can take their pleasures medicinally, let them read by prescription
and grow fat.” Our authoress can do her own quarrying. One of the
darts thrown at this charming writer is, that she would have children
pore through books at their own sweet, wild will, unoppressed by that
modern infliction—foot-notes. That, when a child would meet the word
dog, an asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note occupying a page
and giving all that science knows about that interesting animal. This
is precisely the privilege that your modern critic will not allow. He
will have his explanations, his margins, “build you a bridge over a
rain-drop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side
with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing irons, yet when perchance you
stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold! he is never there to
grasp it.” What does a boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want with
these atrocities? The imagery that peoples his mind, the music that
sweeps through his soul, these, and not your stilted erudition, are the
milk and honey of boyhood. “I once knew a boy,” says Miss Repplier,
in that sparkling defense, ‘Oppression of Notes,’ “who so delighted
in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it
to him over and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what
a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real
man described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by
the Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman holiday; historically and
geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing
intelligent, only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason
of strong words and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping
thoughts.” Had the reader stopped the course of the swinging verse
to explain these unknown words, boyish happiness would have flown,
oppression become complete, and let us hope sleep would have rescued
the bored boy from such an ordeal.
Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side of our essayist. In his
essay “On Myself” he relates the charm of verse, falling on his boyish
ear, without comprehending fully its purport. “I believe I can tell
the particular little chance that filled my head first with such
chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember
when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont
to lie in my mother’s parlor (I know not by what accident, for she
herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there
was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened to fall upon, and
was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, giants, and
monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my
understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the
tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had
read him all over, before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a
poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.” The charm of Miss
Repplier’s pages lies in their good sense. She is a lover of the good
and beautiful, a hater of shams and shoddies. Everything she touches
becomes more interesting, whether it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats,
Babies, or the New York Custom House. Like Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of
old books, finding in them the pure silent air of immortality, she will
welcome graciously any new book whose worth is its passport.
Agnes Repplier was born in the city of brotherly love more than thirty
years ago. Her father was John Repplier, a well-known coal merchant.
Her earliest playmates were books. Her mother a brilliant and lovable
woman, fond of books, and, as a friend of her’s informed me, a writer
of ability, watched over and directed the education of her more
brilliant daughter. Under such a mother, amid scenes of culture, Agnes
grew up, finding in books a solace for ill-health that still continues
to harry her. When she entered the arena of authorship, by training and
study she was well equipped. At once she was reckoned as a sovereign
princess of “That proud and humble ... Gipsey Land,” one of the very
elect of Bohemia. She came, as Stedman says, “with gentle satire
or sparkling epigram to brush aside the fads and fallacies of this
literary _fin de siècle_, calling upon us to return to the simple ways
of the masters.” Her charming volumes should be in the hands of every
student of literature as a corrective against the debasing theories and
tendencies of modern book-making. The student will find that if she
does not know all things in heaven and on earth, she may plead in the
language of Little Breeches:
“I never ain’t had no show;
But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir
On the handful o’ things I know.”