professional lecturer or head mistress of a great school or college for
girls. I have tried the first business a little. Last month I delivered
a lecture on Quaternions. I got three for my audience; two came over
from the Institute, and one from that men's college which they try to
make out to be a university, and where no female is admitted unless she
belongs among the quadrupeds. I enjoyed lecturing, but the subject is
a difficult one, and I don't think any one of them had any very clear
notion of what I was talking about, except Rhodora,--and I know she did
n't. To tell the truth, I was lecturing to instruct myself. I mean to
try something easier next time. I have thought of the Basque language
and literature. What do you say to that?
The Society goes on famously. We have had a paper presented and read
lately which has greatly amused some of us and provoked a few of the
weaker sort. The writer is that crabbed old Professor of Belles-Lettres
at that men's college over there. He is dreadfully hard on the poor
“poets,” as they call themselves. It seems that a great many young
persons, and more especially a great many young girls, of whom the
Institute has furnished a considerable proportion, have taken to sending
him their rhymed productions to be criticised,--expecting to be praised,
no doubt, every one of them. I must give you one of the sauciest
extracts from his paper in his own words:
“It takes half my time to read the 'poems' sent me by young people
of both sexes. They would be more shy of doing it if they knew that I
recognize a tendency to rhyming as a common form of mental weakness,
and the publication of a thin volume of verse as prima facie evidence of
ambitious mediocrity, if not inferiority. Of course there are exceptions
to this rule of judgment, but I maintain that the presumption is always
against the rhymester as compared with the less pretentious persons
about him or her, busy with some useful calling,--too busy to be tagging
rhymed commonplaces together. Just now there seems to be an epidemic
of rhyming as bad as the dancing mania, or the sweating sickness.
After reading a certain amount of manuscript verse one is disposed to
anathematize the inventor of homophonous syllabification. [This phrase
made a great laugh when it was read.] This, that is rhyming, must have
been found out very early,
“'Where are you, Adam?'
“'Here am I, Madam;'
“but it can never have been habitually practised until after the Fall.
The intrusion of tintinnabulating terminations into the conversational
intercourse of men and angels would have spoiled Paradise itself. Milton
would not have them even in Paradise Lost, you remember. For my own
part, I wish certain rhymes could be declared contraband of written or
printed language. Nothing should be allowed to be hurled at the world or
whirled with it, or furled upon it or curled over it; all eyes should
be kept away from the skies, in spite of os homini sublime dedit; youth
should be coupled with all the virtues except truth; earth should
never be reminded of her birth; death should never be allowed to stop
a mortal's breath, nor the bell to sound his knell, nor flowers from
blossoming bowers to wave over his grave or show their bloom upon his
tomb. We have rhyming dictionaries,--let us have one from which all
rhymes are rigorously excluded. The sight of a poor creature grubbing
for rhymes to fill up his sonnet, or to cram one of those voracious,
rhyme-swallowing rigmaroles which some of our drudging poetical
operatives have been exhausting themselves of late to satiate with
jingles, makes my head ache and my stomach rebel. Work, work of some
kind, is the business of men and women, not the making of jingles!
No,--no,--no! I want to see the young people in our schools and
academies and colleges, and the graduates of these institutions,
lifted up out of the little Dismal Swamp of self-contemplating and
self-indulging and self-commiserating emotionalism which is surfeiting
the land with those literary sandwiches,--thin slices of tinkling
sentimentality between two covers looking like hard-baked gilt
gingerbread. But what faces these young folks make up at my good advice!
They get tipsy on their rhymes. Nothing intoxicates one like his--or
her--own verses, and they hold on to their metre-ballad-mongering as the
fellows that inhale nitrous oxide hold on to the gas-bag.”
We laughed over this essay of the old Professor; though it hit us pretty
hard. The best part of the joke is that the old man himself published
a thin volume of poems when he was young, which there is good reason to
think he is not very proud of, as they say he buys up all the copies he
can find in the shops. No matter what they say, I can't help agreeing
with him about this great flood of “poetry,” as it calls itself, and
looking at the rhyming mania much as he does.
How I do love real poetry! That is the reason hate rhymes which have not
a particle of it in them. The foolish scribblers that deal in them are
like bad workmen in a carpenter's shop. They not only turn out bad jobs
of work, but they spoil the tools for better workmen. There is hardly a
pair of rhymes in the English language that is not so dulled and hacked
and gapped by these 'prentice hands that a master of the craft hates to
touch them, and yet he cannot very well do without them. I have not
been besieged as the old Professor has been with such multitudes
of would-be-poetical aspirants that he could not even read their
manuscripts, but I have had a good many letters containing verses, and I
have warned the writers of the delusion under which they were laboring.
You may like to know that I have just been translating some extracts
from the Greek Anthology. I send you a few specimens of my work, with a
Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I hope you will find something of
the Greek rhythm in my versions, and that I have caught a spark of
inspiration from the impassioned Lesbian. I have found great delight
in this work, at any rate, and am never so happy as when I read from my
manuscript or repeat from memory the lines into which I have transferred
the thought of the men and women of two thousand years ago, or given
rhythmical expression to my own rapturous feelings with regard to them.
I must read you my Dedication to the Shade of Sappho. I cannot help
thinking that you will like it better than either of my last two, The
Song of the Roses, or The Wail of the Weeds.
How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I
have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I
want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one's self
to be such a noble and beautiful-creature; I want to wander in the woods
with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every
day's doings with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends
part at a port of embarkation: they embrace, they kiss each other's
cheeks, they cover their faces and weep, they try to speak good-by to
each other, they watch from the pier and from the deck; the two forms
grow less and less, fainter and fainter in the distance, two white
handkerchiefs flutter once and again, and yet once more, and the last
visible link of the chain which binds them has parted. Dear, dear,
dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that
we may never, never meet again.
Don't you want some more items of village news? We are threatened with
an influx of stylish people: “Buttons” to answer the door-bell, in place
of the chamber-maid; “butler,” in place of the “hired man;” footman
in top-boots and breeches, cockade on hat, arms folded a la Napoleon;
tandems, “drags,” dogcarts, and go-carts of all sorts. It is rather
amusing to look at their ambitious displays, but it takes away the good
old country flavor of the place.
I don't believe you mean to try to astonish us when you come back to
spend your summers here. I suppose you must have a large house, and I
am sure you will have a beautiful one. I suppose you will have some fine
horses, and who would n't be glad to? But I do not believe you will try
to make your old Arrowhead Village friends stare their eyes out of their
heads with a display meant to outshine everybody else that comes here.
You can have a yacht on the lake, if you like, but I hope you will pull
a pair of oars in our old boat once in a while, with me to steer you. I
know you will be just the same dear Euthymia you always were and always
must be. How happy you must make such a man as Maurice Kirkwood! And how
happy you ought to be with him!--a man who knows what is in books, and
who has seen for himself, what is in men. If he has not seen so much of
women, where could he study all that is best in womanhood as he can in
his own wife? Only one thing that dear Euthymia lacks. She is not quite
pronounced enough in her views as to the rights and the wrongs of
the sex. When I visit you, as you say I shall, I mean to indoctrinate
Maurice with sound views on that subject. I have written an essay for
the Society, which I hope will go a good way towards answering all the
objections to female suffrage. I mean to read it to your husband, if
you will let me, as I know you will, and perhaps you would like to hear
it,--only you know my thoughts on the subject pretty well already.
With all sorts of kind messages to your dear husband, and love to your
precious self, I am ever your LURIDA.
DR. BUTTS TO MRS. EUTHYMIA KIRKWOOD.
MY DEAR EUTHYMIA,--My pen refuses to call you by any other name.
Sweet-souled you are, and your Latinized Greek name is--the one which
truly designates you. I cannot tell you how we have followed you, with
what interest and delight through your travels, as you have told their
story in your letters to your mother. She has let us have the privilege
of reading them, and we have been with you in steamer, yacht, felucca,
gondola, Nile-boat; in all sorts of places, from crowded capitals to
“deserts where no men abide,”--everywhere keeping company with you in
your natural and pleasant descriptions of your experiences. And now that
you have returned to your home in the great city I must write you a few
lines of welcome, if nothing more.
You will find Arrowhead Village a good deal changed since you left it.
We are discovered by some of those over-rich people who make the little
place upon which they swarm a kind of rural city. When this happens
the consequences are striking,--some of them desirable and some far
otherwise. The effect of well-built, well-furnished, well-kept houses
and of handsome grounds always maintained in good order about them shows
itself in a large circuit around the fashionable centre. Houses get on
a new coat of paint, fences are kept in better order, little plots
of flowers show themselves where only ragged weeds had rioted, the
inhabitants present themselves in more comely attire and drive in
handsomer vehicles with more carefully groomed horses. On the other
hand, there is a natural jealousy on the part of the natives of the
region suddenly become fashionable. They have seen the land they sold at
farm prices by the acre coming to be valued by the foot, like the
corner lots in a city. Their simple and humble modes of life look almost
poverty-stricken in the glare of wealth and luxury which so outshines
their plain way of living. It is true that many of them have found them
selves richer than in former days, when the neighborhood lived on
its own resources. They know how to avail themselves of their altered
position, and soon learn to charge city prices for country products; but
nothing can make people feel rich who see themselves surrounded by men
whose yearly income is many times their own whole capital. I think it
would be better if our rich men scattered themselves more than they
do,--buying large country estates, building houses and stables which
will make it easy to entertain their friends, and depending for society
on chosen guests rather than on the mob of millionaires who come
together for social rivalry. But I do not fret myself about it. Society
will stratify itself according to the laws of social gravitation. It
will take a generation or two more, perhaps, to arrange the strata by
precipitation and settlement, but we can always depend on one principle
to govern the arrangement of the layers. People interested in the same
things will naturally come together. The youthful heirs of fortunes
who keep splendid yachts have little to talk about with the oarsman who
pulls about on the lake or the river. What does young Dives, who drives
his four-in-hand and keeps a stable full of horses, care about Lazarus,
who feels rich in the possession of a horse-railroad ticket? You
know how we live at our house, plainly, but with a certain degree of
cultivated propriety. We make no pretensions to what is called “style.”
We are still in that social stratum where the article called “a
napkin-ring” is recognized as admissible at the dinner-table. That fact
sufficiently defines our modest pretensions. The napkin-ring is the
boundary mark between certain classes. But one evening Mrs. Butts and
I went out to a party given by the lady of a worthy family, where the
napkin itself was a newly introduced luxury. The conversation of the
hostess and her guests turned upon details of the kitchen and the
laundry; upon the best mode of raising bread, whether with “emptins”
(emptyings, yeast) or baking powder; about “bluing” and starching and
crimping, and similar matters. Poor Mrs. Butts! She knew nothing more
about such things than her hostess did about Shakespeare and the musical
glasses. What was the use of trying to enforce social intercourse under
such conditions? Incompatibility of temper has been considered ground
for a divorce; incompatibility of interests is a sufficient warrant for
social separation. The multimillionaires have so much that is common
among themselves, and so little that they share with us of moderate
means, that they will naturally form a specialized class, and in virtue
of their palaces, their picture-galleries, their equipages, their
yachts, their large hospitality, constitute a kind of exclusive
aristocracy. Religion, which ought to be the great leveller, cannot
reduce these elements to the same grade. You may read in the parable,
“Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?” The
modern version would be, “How came you at Mrs. Billion's ball not having
a dress on your back which came from Paris?”
The little church has got a new stained window, a saint who reminds me
of Hamlet's uncle,--a thing “of shreds and patches,” but rather pretty
to look at, with an inscription under it which is supposed to be the
name of the person in whose honor the window was placed in the church.
Smith was a worthy man and a faithful churchwarden, and I hope posterity
will be able to spell out his name on his monumental window; but that
old English lettering would puzzle Mephistopheles himself, if he found
himself before this memorial tribute, on the inside,--you know he goes
to church sometimes, if you remember your Faust.
The rector has come out, in a quiet way, as an evolutionist. He
has always been rather “broad” in his views, but cautious in their
expression. You can tell the three branches of the mother-island church
by the way they carry their heads. The low-church clergy look down, as
if they felt themselves to be worms of the dust; the high-church priest
drops his head on one side, after the pattern of the mediaeval saints;
the broad-church preacher looks forward and round about him, as if he
felt himself the heir of creation. Our rector carries his head in the
broad-church aspect, which I suppose is the least open to the charge of
affectation,--in fact, is the natural and manly way of carrying it.
The Society has justified its name of Pansophian of late as never
before. Lurida has stirred up our little community and its neighbors, so
that we get essays on all sorts of subjects, poems and stories in large
numbers. I know all about it, for she often consults me as to the merits
of a particular contribution.
What is to be the fate of Lurida? I often think, with no little interest
and some degree of anxiety, about her future. Her body is so frail and
her mind so excessively and constantly active that I am afraid one or
the other will give way. I do not suppose she thinks seriously of ever
being married. She grows more and more zealous in behalf of her own sex,
and sterner in her judgment of the other. She declares that she never
would marry any man who was not an advocate of female suffrage, and as
these gentlemen are not very common hereabouts the chance is against her
capturing any one of the hostile sex.
What do you think? I happened, just as I was writing the last sentence,
to look out of my window, and whom should I see but Lurida, with a young
man in tow, listening very eagerly to her conversation, according to all
appearance! I think he must be a friend of the rector, as I have seen a
young man like this one in his company. Who knows?
Affectionately yours, etc.
DR. BUTTS TO MRS. BUTTS.
MY BELOVED WIFE,--This letter will tell you more news than you would
have thought could have been got together in this little village during
the short time you have been staying away from it.
Lurida Vincent is engaged! He is a clergyman with a mathematical
turn. The story is that he put a difficult problem into one of the
mathematical journals, and that Lurida presented such a neat solution
that the young man fell in love with her on the strength of it. I don't
think the story is literally true, nor do I believe that other report
that he offered himself to her in the form of an equation chalked on the
blackboard; but that it was an intellectual rather than a sentimental
courtship I do not doubt. Lurida has given up the idea of becoming
a professional lecturer,--so she tells me,--thinking that her future
husband's parish will find her work enough to do. A certain amount of
daily domestic drudgery and unexciting intercourse with simple-minded
people will be the best thing in the world for that brain of hers,
always simmering with some new project in its least fervid condition.
All our summer visitors have arrived. Euthymia Mrs. Maurice Kirkwood and
her husband and little Maurice are here in their beautiful house looking
out on the lake. They gave a grand party the other evening. You ought
to have been there, but I suppose you could not very well have left your
sister in the middle of your visit: All the grand folks were there, of
course. Lurida and her young man--Gabriel is what she calls him--were
naturally the objects of special attention. Paolo acted as major-domo,
and looked as if he ought to be a major-general. Nothing could be
pleasanter than the way in which Mr. and Mrs. Kirkwood received their
plain country neighbors; that is, just as they did the others of more
pretensions, as if they were really glad to see them, as I am sure they
were. The old landlord and his wife had two arm-chairs to themselves,
and I saw Miranda with the servants of the household looking in at
the dancers and out at the little groups in the garden, and evidently
enjoying it as much as her old employers. It was a most charming and
successful party. We had two sensations in the course of the evening.
One was pleasant and somewhat exciting, the other was thrilling and of
strange and startling interest.
You remember how emaciated poor Maurice Kirkwood was left after his
fever, in that first season when he was among us. He was out in a boat
one day, when a ring slipped off his thin finger and sunk in a place
where the water was rather shallow. “Jake”--you know Jake,--everybody
knows Jake--was rowing him. He promised to come to the spot and fish
up the ring if he could possibly find it. He was seen poking about with
fish-hooks at the end of a pole, but nothing was ever heard from
him about the ring. It was an antique intaglio stone in an Etruscan
setting,--a wild goose flying over the Campagna. Mr. Kirkwood valued it
highly, and regretted its loss very much.
While we were in the garden, who should appear at the gate but Jake,
with a great basket, inquiring for Mr. Kirkwood. “Come,” said Maurice to
me, “let us see what our old friend the fisherman has brought us. What
have you got there, Jake?”
“What I 've got? Wall, I 'll tell y' what I've got: I 've got the
biggest pickerel that's been ketched in this pond for these ten year.
An' I 've got somethin' else besides the pickerel. When I come to cut
him open, what do you think I faound in his insides but this here ring
o' yourn,”--and he showed the one Maurice had lost so long before. There
it was, as good as new, after having tried Jonah's style of housekeeping
for all that time. There are those who discredit Jake's story about
finding the ring in the fish; anyhow, there was the ring and there
was the pickerel. I need not say that Jake went off well paid for his
pickerel and the precious contents of its stomach. Now comes the chief
event of the evening. I went early by special invitation. Maurice took
me into his library, and we sat down together.
“I have something of great importance,” he said, “to say to you. I
learned within a few days that my cousin Laura is staying with a friend
in the next town to this. You know, doctor, that we have never met since
the last, almost fatal, experience of my early years. I have determined
to defy the strength of that deadly chain of associations connected
with her presence, and I have begged her to come this evening with the
friends with whom she is staying. Several letters passed between us,
for it was hard to persuade her that there was no longer any risk in my
meeting her. Her imagination was almost as deeply impressed as mine had
been at those alarming interviews, and I had to explain to her fully
that I had become quite indifferent to the disturbing impressions of
former years. So, as the result of our correspondence, Laura is coming
this evening, and I wish you to be present at our meeting. There is
another reason why I wish you to be here. My little boy is not far from
the age at which I received my terrifying, almost disorganizing shock.
I mean to have little Maurice brought into the presence of Laura, who is
said to be still a very handsome woman, and see if he betrays any hint
of that peculiar sensitiveness which showed itself in my threatening
seizure. It seemed to me not impossible that he might inherit some
tendency of that nature, and I wanted you to be at hand if any sign of
danger should declare itself. For myself I have no fear. Some radical
change has taken place in my nervous system. I have been born again, as
it were, in my susceptibilities, and am in certain respects a new man.
But I must know how it is with my little Maurice.”
Imagine with what interest I looked forward to this experiment; for
experiment it was, and not without its sources of anxiety, as it seemed
to me. The evening wore along; friends and neighbors came in, but
no Laura as yet. At last I heard the sound of wheels, and a carriage
stopped at the door. Two ladies and a gentleman got out, and soon
entered the drawing room.
“My cousin Laura!” whispered Maurice to me, and went forward to
meet her. A very handsome woman, who might well have been in the
thirties,--one of those women so thoroughly constituted that they cannot
help being handsome at every period of life. I watched them both as
they approached each other. Both looked pale at first, but Maurice soon
recovered his usual color, and Laura's natural, rich bloom came back by
degrees. Their emotion at meeting was not to be wondered at, but there
was no trace in it of the paralyzing influence on the great centres of
life which had once acted upon its fated victim like the fabled head
which turned the looker-on into a stone.
“Is the boy still awake?” said Maurice to Paolo, who, as they used to
say of Pushee at the old Anchor Tavern, was everywhere at once on that
gay and busy evening.
“What! Mahser Maurice asleep an' all this racket going on? I hear him
crowing like young cockerel when he fus' smell daylight.”
“Tell the nurse to bring him down quietly to the little room that leads
out of the library.”
The child was brought down in his night-clothes, wide awake, wondering
apparently at the noise he heard, which he seemed to think was for his
special amusement.