Your very humble servant,
Wm: White.
Rev^d Wm: B. Sprague,
West Springfield,
Massachusetts.”
The Bishop was doubtless one of the last to transport into the
nineteenth century the use of frequent capitals, the archaic “ye” and
the quaint long “s’s” which are not “f’s” as many believe.
The subject of autographs is to me what King Charles’s head was to Mr.
Dick. That I am not alone in my infirmity is proved by a letter of James
Freeman Clarke, written in 1878, in which he acknowledges the receipt of
a catalogue of a German collection, and says, naively, “Notwithstanding
my professed indifference to any autographs except those of the Apostle
Paul, Alfred, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther and the like, I
confess that my mouth watered at the sight of so many of them. It was a
pleasure even to read the description and title”. These words, showing
that his indifference was a mere pretense, were written by a serious and
scholarly man, famous in his day as preacher, author and educator, and I
am sure that even his little pretense would soon have been abandoned if
I could only have been honored for a little while with his company at
the library table.
Almost every one finds it hard to understand as he attains the period
when juniors say to him, “Now, at _your_ time of life”—a form of
expression I have come to loathe—that he is really no longer—to use
another wretched locution,—“up to date”. I am beginning to comprehend
the feelings of some of the excellent bewigged old gentlemen of the
seventeen hundreds whose lives lapped over that mysterious one-hundredth
year which is just like any other year, but there is a weird something
about it, indescribable, impossible of definition, which makes it
different. I am certain that those of us who awoke on the morning of the
first day of January in the year of grace 1900, had a consciousness of
passing into a new age, although—not to revive the ancient controversy
but merely to assert the indisputable fact—the new century did not begin
until a year later. How painfully modern Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge
and Mr. Shelley must have seemed to the men who knew so well their
Crabbe and their Cowper. It has always been my opinion that the
unfortunates who happen to be born exactly in the middle of a century
are taken at an unfair advantage by those who arrive in a century’s
closing years or in its opening days. They grow old-fashioned so much
sooner. In Comyn Carr’s book of reminiscences (published in 1908)—by no
means one of those dull productions about which we were chatting a few
pages back—he says heroically that he is not very gravely discouraged by
occasionally finding himself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion,
but he groans over the revelation of a “cultivated young writer of the
newer school” that ‘among men of culture Dickens is now never read after
the age of fourteen!’ This cultivated young writer—we must take Mr.
Carr’s word as to his culture, for otherwise one would be likely to
consider him what Lord Dundreary called “wather an ass”—must have been
trying to impose upon the credulous old gentlemen, who frankly owns that
he was born in the misty mid-region of 1849. What pained me most was the
meek and submissive acquiescence of Carr in his relegation to the
category of back numbers at the surely not venerable age of fifty-nine.
As Thomas Bailey Aldrich said the day after his birthday, “It is
unpleasant to be fifty-nine, but it would be unpleasanter not to be,
having got started!” I insist, however, that it is not enough to warrant
the exile of any ordinary person from the realms of contemporaneous
interest. Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Browning, all great
Victorians, if an American may be reckoned in that class, are not, I
venture to say, as obsolete as the cultivated infant would have us
believe; if they were, there would not be so much said of them and
written of them in this fast aging first decade of the twentieth
century. Returning to Dickens, I prefer to the babe’s prattle of Carr’s
young interlocutor, the dictum of Chesterton, when he tells us “that
Dickens will have a high place in permanent literature there is, I
imagine, no prig surviving to deny.”
In a time so remote that I shrink from mentioning the date precisely, I
overheard a young prig say to the feminine companion whom he was
escorting to her home after listening to a lecture by Charles Sumner,
“he suits the masses”. It was a singularly inept remark as applied to
the stilted and artificial oratory of the pompous Senator; but the fact
that “he suits the masses” may well be cited to warrant the assurance of
the lasting quality of Dickens’ fame. The lesser lights are growing pale
and dim in comparison with his and with that of his illustrious compeer,
who ranks higher perhaps in the estimation of the “cultured” but no
higher in the favor of the general. Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Bronté,
Trollope, and George Eliot, if we may group together stars of such
varying magnitude, shine more feebly than they did while they were in
the full blaze of their glory. But when one takes from the shelf or from
the library table a volume of Dickens or of Thackeray, he may well
exclaim, as was said of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, “This is
no book; who touches this, touches a man.”
Many of us still retain an affection for Trollope, even if he was, as
some recent compilers of literary hand-books say, “one of the most
boisterous, tactless and unmetaphysical of writing men”—all the more
precious to me because of his unmetaphysicality. In novels “_à bas_
metaphysics!” If it be true, as these autocratic tyrants of taste aver,
that he “keeps his nose close down, dog-like, to the prosaic texture of
life,” he pursued the game to good purpose. To all lawyers, he must ever
be dear because of his delightful Old Bailey character of Chaffanbrass;
to all the clergy he must be a source of joy for his innumerable
bishops, rectors and curates; and to all physicians a lovable man for
Doctor Thorne. Was he not as much unlike Hawthorne as one novelist may
be unlike another, yet did not Hawthorne say that Trollope’s work
“suited” him? “They precisely suit my taste” wrote the author of the
Scarlet Letter, “solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef,
and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant
had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case,
with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not
suspecting that they were made a show of.” Yet in these days they cannot
be expected to compete with such illuminating representations of real
life as may be found in the pages of—let us say—Elinor Glyn, who
manifestly aspires to be the Aphra Behn of modern literature.
It is some consolation to realize that we commencing patriarchs are able
to get more satisfaction from our comfortable places at the library
table than others get from the seats of the mighty at horse-shows,
bridge tournaments, automobile contests, and golf competitions. An
enthusiastic golfer once confided to me that the most charming adjunct
of his sport was the shandygaff and the high ball which otherwise the
stern decree of the medical man would have denied to him. Let us say it
in all modesty and self-depreciation, we know so much more than is known
by the modern smooth-faced devotee of the safety razor, who freely
permits the unattractive contour of his mouth to betray the
imperfections of his character. I am convinced that if the customary
motor-car fiend would shroud his expression in hirsute concealment he
would appear far less fierce and domineering. If language was given to
us to conceal thought, surely beards were meant to hide brutality. Even
these young people will come in time to the consciousness of their
present ignorance and the realization of the truth that men learn by
experience. Aldrich—not Nelson, the tariff-king, but Thomas, a king of
modern American letters—said “I often feel sorry for actresses who are
always too old to play Juliet by the time they have learned how to do
it. I know how to play Hamlet and Romeo now, but my figure doesn’t fit
the parts.” Sad it is to reflect that our figures are unfitted for the
roles we would so hugely enjoy. Possibly it would be better for us if we
ventured more in the outer world and spent less time at the library
table; but we cannot always bestride the galloping horse or trifle with
the fascinating brassie. It will be only a few years before riders and
golfers alike will meet us in the fields where we will all be reduced to
socialistic uniformity, as I am taught to believe. Then, perhaps, I may
not regret that I yielded, willingly and lovingly, to the temptations of
the library table.