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.
“_Little Ethel._ It’s me they look at, aunty. You’re too old.”
“Dear friends again. _Madge_ (rather elderly). What do you think of my
new hat, Lily?
“_Lily._ It’s rather old-fashioned, dear, but it suits you.”
This is the very meekest of funning, and feminine tartness and juvenile
precocity must be at a low ebb with the Unknown Public when it can
relish such shadowy thrusts, even at increasing years, which, from
the days of the prophet to the days of Mr. Gladstone, have ever been
esteemed a fitting subject for mirth. The distance between the penny
dreadful and “Lorna Doone” is not vaster than the distance between
these hopeless jests and the fine cynicism, the arrowy humor, of Du
Maurier. Mrs. Pennell says very truely that Cimabue Brown and Mrs.
Ponsonby de Tomkyns would have no meaning whatever for the British
workman,--would probably be as great a mystery to him as The Dook Snook
and The Hon. Billy are to me. But Punch’s dear little lad who, on a
holiday afternoon, has caught only one fish, “and that was so young
it didn’t know how to hold on,” and the charitable but near-sighted
old lady who drops a penny into the hat of a meditative peer, come
within the scope of everybody’s comprehension. If more energy is to
be exerted “in bringing home to the people the inherent attractions
of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lytton, and George Eliot,”
according to the comprehensive programme laid out by Mr. Salmon, why
not, as a first step, bring home to them the attractions of a bright,
clean, merry jest? It might enable them, perhaps, to recognize the gap
between the humor of George Eliot and the humor of Captain Marryat, and
would serve to prick their dormant critical faculties into life.
The one sad sight at an English railway book-stall is the little array
of solid writers who stand neglected, shabby, and apart, pleading
dumbly out of their dusty shame for recognition and release. I have
seen Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest” jostled contemptuously into a corner.
I have seen “The Apostolic Fathers” hanging their hoary heads with
dignified humility, and “The Popes of Rome” lingering in inglorious
bondage. I have seen our own Emerson broken-backed and spiritless;
and, harder still, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” shorn of his
gay supremacy, frayed, and worn, and exiled from his friends. I have
seen “Sartor Resartus” skulking on a dark shelf with a yellow-covered
neighbor more gaudy than respectable, and I have seen Buckle’s boasted
“Civilization” in a condition that would have disgraced a savage.
These Titans, discrowned and discredited, these captives, honorable
in their rags, stirred my heart with sympathy and compassion. I
wanted to gather them up and carry them away to respectability, and
the long-forgotten shelter of library walls. But light-weight luggage
precluded philanthropy, and, steeling my reluctant soul, I left them
to their fate. Still they stand, I know, unsought, neglected, scorned,
while thousands of “Dorothys” and “Ally Slopers” are daily sold around
them. “How had the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, while the star
of these Cymry, his sons, had waned!” How shall genius be revered and
honored, when buried without decent rites in the bleak graveyard of a
railway book-stall?