A DISTINGUISHED CHARACTER.

In order to prevent conjectures which might not be entirely pleasant to

one or two persons whom I have in my mind, I prefer to state, at once

and frankly, that I, Dionysius Green, am the author of this article. It

requires some courage to make this avowal, I am well aware; and I am

prepared to experience a rapid diminution of my present rather extensive

popularity. One result I certainly foresee, namely, a great falling-off

in the number of applications for autographs ("accompanied with a

sentiment"), which I daily receive; possibly, also, fewer invitations to

lecture before literary societies next winter. Fortunately, my recent

marriage enables me to dispense with a large portion of my popularity,

without great inconvenience; or, rather, I am relieved from the very

laborious necessity of maintaining it in the face of so many aggressive

rivalries.

The day may arrive, therefore, when I shall cease to be a Distinguished

Character. Since I have admitted this much, I may as well confess that

my reputation--enviable as it may be considered by the public--is of

that kind which seems to be meant to run for a certain length of time,

at the expiration whereof it must be wound up again. I was fortunate

enough to discover this secret betimes, and I have since then known

several amiable and worthy persons to slip out of sight, from the lack

of it. There was Mr. ----, for example, whose comic articles shook the

fat sides of the nation for one summer, and whose pseudonyme was in

everybody's mouth. Alas! what he took for perpetual motion was but an

eight-day clock, and I need not call your attention to the present dead

and leaden stillness of its pendulum.

Although my earliest notoriety was achieved in very much the same

way,--that is, by a series of comic sketches, as many of my admirers no

doubt remember,--I soon perceived the unstable character of my

reputation. I was at the mercy of the next man who should succeed in

inventing a new slang, or a funnier way of spelling. These things, in

literature, are like "fancy drinks" among the profane. They tickle the

palates of the multitude for a while, but they don't wear like the plain

old beverages. I saw very plainly, that much more was to be gained, in

the long run, by planting myself--not with a sudden and startling jump,

but by a graceful, cautious pirouette--upon a basis of the Moral and the

Didactic. I should thus reach a class of slow, but very tough stomachs,

which would require ample time to assimilate the food I intended to

offer. If this were somewhat crude, that would be no objection whatever:

they always mistake their mental gripings for the process of digestion.

Why, bless your souls! I have known Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy" to

fill one of them to repletion, for the space of ten years!

I owe this resolution to my natural acuteness of perception, but my

success in carrying it into execution was partly the result of luck. The

field, now occupied by such a crowd, (I name no names,) was at that time

nearly clear; and I managed to shift my costume before the public fairly

knew what I was about. I found, indeed, that a combination of the two

styles enabled me to retain much of my old audience while acquiring the

new. It was like singing a hymn of serious admonition to a lively,

rattling tune. One is diverted: there is a present sense of fun, while a

gentle feeling of the grave truths inculcated lingers in one's mind

afterwards. The pious can find no fault with the matter, nor the profane

with the manner. Instead of approaching the moral consciousness of

one's readers with stern, lugubrious countenance, and ponderous or

lamentable voice, you make your appearance with a smile and a joke,

punch the reader playfully in the ribs, and say, as it were, "Ha! ha!

I've a good thing to tell you!" Although I have many imitators, some of

whom have attained an excellence in the art which may be considered

classic, yet I may fairly claim to have originated this branch of

literature, and, while it retains its present unbounded popularity, my

name cannot wholly perish.

Nevertheless, greatness has its drawbacks. I appeal to all distinguished

authors, from Tupper to Weenie Willows, to confirm the truth of this

assertion. I have sometimes, especially of late, doubted seriously

whether it is a good thing to be distinguished. Alas! my dear young

gentleman and lady, whose albums would be so dismally incomplete without

my autograph ("accompanied with a sentiment"), would that you could

taste the bitter with the sweet,--the honey and aloes of an American

author's life! At first, it is exceedingly pleasant. You are like a

newly-hatched chicken, or a pup at the end of his nine-days' blindness.

You are petted, and stroked, and called sweet names, and fed with

dainties, and carried in the arms of the gentlemen, and cuddled in the

laps of the ladies. But when you get to be a big dog or a full-grown

game-cock, take care! If people would but fancy that you still wore your

down or silken skin, they might continue to be delighted with every

gambol of your fancy. But they suspect pin-feathers and bristles,

whether the latter grow or not; and, after doing their best to spoil

you, they suddenly demand the utmost propriety of behavior. However, let

me not anticipate. I can still call myself, without the charge of

self-flattery, a Distinguished Character; at least I am told so, every

day, each person who makes the remark supposing that it is an entirely

original and most acceptable compliment. While this distinction lasts,

(for I find that I lose it in proportion as I gain in sound knowledge

and independent common-sense,) I should like to describe, for the

contemplation of future ages, some of the penalties attached to

popularity at present.

I was weak enough, I admit, to be immensely delighted with the first

which I experienced,--not foreseeing whitherward they led. The timid,

enthusiastic notes of girls of fifteen, with the words "sweet" and

"exquisite," duly underscored, the letters of aspiring boys, enclosing

specimens of their composition, and the touching pleas of individuals of

both sexes, in reduced circumstances, were so many evidences of success,

which I hugged to my bosom. Reducing the matter to statistics, I have

since ascertained that about one in ten of these letters is dictated

either by honest sympathy, the warm, uncritical recognition of youth

(which I don't suppose any author would diminish, if he could), or the

craving for encouragement, under unpropitious circumstances of growth.

But how was I, in the beginning, to guess at the motives of the writers?

They offered sugar-plums, which I swallowed without a suspicion of the

drastic ingredients so many of them contained. Good Mrs. Sigourney kept

a journal of her experiences in this line. I wish I had done the same.

The young lady correspondent, I find, in most cases replies to your

reply, proposing a permanent correspondence. The young gentleman, who

desires, above all things, your "_candid opinion_ of the poems

enclosed,--be sure and point out the _faults_, and how they can be

_improved_"--is highly indignant when you take him at his word, and do

so. You receive a letter of defence and explanation, showing that what

you consider to be faults are not such. Moreover, his friends have

assured him that the poem which you advise him to omit is one of his

finest things! The distressed aspirant for literary fame, who only

requests that you shall read and correct his or her manuscript, procure

a publisher, and prefix a commendatory notice, signed with your name,

to the work, writes that he or she is at last undeceived in regard to

the character of authors. "I thank you, Mr. Green, for the _lesson_! The

remembrance of _your_ former struggles is _happily_ effaced in your

present success. It is hard for a heart throbbing with warmth to be

chilled, and a guileless confidence in human brotherhood to be crushed

forever! I will strive to bury my disappointed hopes in my own darkened

bosom; and that you may be saved from the experience which you have

prepared for another, is the wish of, _Sir_, yours, ----."

For a day or two I went about with a horrible feeling of dread and

remorse. I opened the morning paper with trembling hands, and only

breathed freely when I found no item headed "Suicide" in the columns. A

year afterwards, chance threw me in the way of my broken-hearted victim.

I declare to you I never saw a better specimen of gross animal health.

She--no, he (on second thoughts, I won't say which)--was at an evening

party, laughing boisterously, with a plate of chicken-salad in one hand

and a glass of champagne in the other.

One of my first admirers was a gentleman of sixty, who called upon me

with a large roll of manuscript. He had retired from business two years

before, so he informed me, and, having always been a great lover of

poetry, he determined to fill up the tedium of his life of ease by

writing some for himself. Now everybody knows that I am not a poet,--the

few patriotic verses which I wrote during the war having simply been the

result of excitement,--and why should he apply to me? O, there was a

great deal of poetry in my prose, he said. My didactic paper called

"Wait for the Wagon!" showed such a knowledge of metaphor! I looked over

the innumerable leaves, here and there venturing the remark that "rain"

and "shame" were not good rhymes, and that my friend's blank verse had

now and then lines of four and six feet. "Poetic license, sir!" was the

reply. "I thought you were aware that poets are bound to no rules!"

What could I do with such a man? What, indeed, but to return him the

manuscript with that combined gentleness and grace which I have

endeavored to cultivate in my demeanor, and to suggest, in the tenderest

way, that he should be content to write, and not publish? He got up,

stiffened his backbone, placed his conventional hat hard upon his head,

gave a look of mingled mortification and wrath, and hurried away without

saying a word. That man, I assure you, will be my secret enemy to the

day of his death. He is no doubt a literary authority in a small circle

of equal calibre. When my name is mentioned, he will sneer down my

rising fame, and his sneer will control the sale of half a dozen copies

of my last volume.

This is a business view of the subject, I grant; but then _I_ have

always followed literature with an eye to business. The position of a

popular writer is much more independent than that of a teacher or a

clergyman, for which reason I prefer it. The same amount of intellect,

made available in a different way, will produce material results just as

satisfactory. Compensation, however, is the law of the world; hence I

must pay for my independence; and this adventure with the old gentleman

is one of the many forms in which the payment is made.

When the applications for autographs first began to pour in upon me, I

gladly took a sheet of Delarue's creamiest note-paper and wrote thereon

an oracular sentence from one of my most popular papers. After a while

my replies degenerated to "Sincerely, Your Friend, Dionysius Green," and

finally, (daily blessings come at last to be disregarded,) no

application was favored, which did not enclose a postage-stamp. When

some school-boy requested an autograph, "accompanied with a sentiment,"

and forwarded slips of paper on behalf of "two other boys," I sometimes

lost my patience, and left the letters unanswered for a month at a

time. There was a man in Tennessee, just before the war, who had a

printed circular, with a blank for the author's name; and I know of one

author who replied to him with a printed note, and a printed address on

the envelope, not a word of manuscript about it!

Next in frequency are the applications for private literary

contributions,--such as epithalamia, obituaries, addresses for lovers,

and the like. One mourning father wished me to write an article about

the death of his little girl, aged four months, assuring me that "her

intellect was the astonishment of all who knew her." A young lady wished

for something that would "overwhelm with remorse the heart of a

gentleman who had broken off an engagement without any cause." A young

gentleman, about to graduate, offered five dollars for an oration on

"The Past and Probable Future History of the Human Race," long enough to

occupy twenty minutes in speaking, and "to be made very fine and

flowery." (I had a mind to punish this youth by complying with his

request, to the very letter!) It is difficult to say what people won't

write about, when they write to a Distinguished Character.

There is a third class of correspondents, whose requests used to

astonish me profoundly, until I surmised that their object was to

procure an autograph in a roundabout way. One wants to know who is the

publisher of your book; one, whether you can give the post-office

address of Gordon Cumming or Thomas Carlyle; one, which is the best

Latin Grammar; one, whether you know the author of that exquisite poem,

"The Isle of Tears"; and one, perhaps, whether Fanny Forrester was the

grandmother of Fanny Fern. And when you consider that what letters I get

are not a tithe of what older and more widely known authors receive, you

may form some idea of the immense number of persons engaged in this sort

of correspondence.

But I have not yet come to the worst. So long as you live at home,

whether it's in the city or country, (the city would be preferable, if

you could keep your name out of the Directory,) the number of applicants

in person is limited; and as for the letters, we know that the

post-office department is very badly managed, and a great many epistles

never reach their destination. Besides, it's astonishing how soon and

how easily an author acquires the reputation of being unapproachable. If

he don't pour out his heart, in unlimited torrents and cascades of

feeling, to a curious stranger, the latter goes away with the report

that the author, personally, is "icy, reserved, uncommunicative; in the

man, one sees nothing of his works; it is difficult to believe that that

cold, forbidding brow conceived, those rigid, unsmiling lips uttered,

and that dry, bloodless hand wrote, the fervid passion of"--such or such

a book. When I read a description of myself, written in that style, I

was furious; but I afterwards noticed that the number of my visitors

fell off very rapidly.

Most of us American authors, however, now go to the people, instead of

waiting for them to come to us. And this is what I mean by coming to the

worst. Four or five years ago, I determined to talk as well as write.

Everybody was doing it, and well paid; nothing seemed to be requisite

except a little distinction, which I had already acquired by my comic

and didactic writings. There was Mr. E---- declaiming philosophy; Drs.

B---- and C---- occupying secular pulpits; Mr. C---- inculcating loftier

politics; Mr. T---- talking about all sorts of countries and people; Mr.

W---- reading his essays in public; and a great many more, whom you all

know. Why should I not also "pursue the triumph and partake the gale"? I

found that the lecture was in most cases an essay, written in short,

pointed sentences, and pleasantly delivered. The audience must laugh

occasionally, and yet receive an impression strong enough to last until

next morning. The style which, as I said before, I claim to have

invented, was the very thing! I noticed, further, that there was a

great deal in the title of the lecture. It must be alliterative,

antithetical, or, still better, paradoxical. There was profound skill in

Artemus Ward's "Babes in the Wood." Such titles as "Doubts and Duties,"

"Mystery and Muffins," "Here, There, and Nowhere," "The Elegance of

Evil," "Sunshine and Shrapnel," "The Coming Cloud," "The Averted Agony,"

and "Peeps at Peccadillos," will explain my meaning. The latter, in

fact, was the actual title of my first lecture, which I gave with such

signal success,--eighty-five times in one winter.

The crowds that everywhere thronged to hear me gave me a new and

delicious experience of popularity. How grand it was to be escorted by

the president of the society down the central aisle, amid the rustling

sound of turning heads, and audible whispers of "There he is! there he

is!" And always, when the name of Dionysius Green was announced, the

applause which followed! Then the hush of expectation, the faint smile

and murmur coming with my first unexpected flash of humor

(_unexpectedness_ is one of my strong points), the broad laugh breaking

out just where I intended it, and finally the solemn peroration, which

showed that I possessed depth and earnestness as well as brilliancy!

Well, I must say that the applauses and the fees were honestly earned. I

did my best, and the audiences must have been satisfied, or the

societies wouldn't have invited me over and over again to the same

place.

If my literary style was so admirably adapted to this new vocation, it

was, on the other hand, a source of great annoyance. Only a small class

was sufficiently enlightened to comprehend my true aim in inculcating

moral lessons under a partly humorous guise. All the rest,

unfortunately, took me to be either one thing or the other. While some

invited me to family prayer-meetings, as the most cheering and welcome

relief after the fatigue of speaking, the rougher characters of the

place would claim me (on the strength of my earlier writings) as one of

themselves, would slap me on the back, call me familiarly "Dionysius,"

and insist on my drinking with them. Others, again, occupied a middle or

doubtful ground; they did not consider that my personal views were

strictly defined, and wanted to be enlightened on this or that point of

faith. They gave me a deal of trouble. Singularly enough, all these

classes began their attacks with the same phrase, "O, we have a right to

ask it of you: you're a Distinguished Character, you know!"

It is hardly necessary to say that I am of rather a frail constitution:

so many persons have seen me, that the public is generally aware of the

fact. A lecture of an hour and a quarter quite exhausts my nervous

energy. Moreover, it gives me a vigorous appetite, and my two

overpowering desires, after speaking, are, first to eat, and then to

sleep. But it frequently happens that I am carried, perforce, to the

house of some good but ascetic gentleman, who gives me a glass of cold

water, talks until midnight, and then delivers me, more dead than alive,

to my bed. I am so sensitive in regard to the relation of guest and host

that I can do naught but submit. Astraea, I am told, always asks for what

she wants, and does what she feels inclined to do,--indeed, why

shouldn't she?--but I am cast in a more timid mould.

There are some small country places which I visit where I have other

sufferings to undergo. Being a Distinguished Character, it would be a

neglect and a slight if I were left alone for two minutes. And the

people seem to think that the most delightful topic of conversation

which they can select is--myself. How weary of myself I become! I have

wished, a thousand times, that my popular work, "The Tin Trumpet," had

never been written. I cannot blame the people, because there are ----

and ----, who like nothing better than to be talked about to their

faces, and to take the principal part in the conversation. Of course the

people think, in regard to lecturers, _ex uno disce omnes_.

In travelling by rail, the same thing happens over and over. When I

leave a town in the morning, some one is sure to enter the car and greet

me in a loud voice: "How are you, Mr. Green? What a fine lecture you

gave us last night!" Then the other travellers turn and look at me,

listen to catch my words, and tell the new-comers at every station,

until I'm afraid to take a nap for fear of snoring, afraid to read lest

somebody should be scandalized at my novel, or to lunch lest I should be

reported as a drunkard for taking a sip of sherry (the physician

prescribes it) from a pocket-flask. At such times I envy the fellow in

homespun on the seat in front of me, who loafs, yawns, eats, and drinks

as he pleases, and nobody gives him a second glance.

When I am not recognized, I sometimes meet with another experience,

which was a little annoying until I became accustomed to it. I am the

subject of very unembarrassed conversation, and hear things said of me

that sometimes flatter and sometimes sting. It is true that I have

learned many curious and unsuspected facts concerning my birth,

parentage, history, and opinions; but, on the other hand, I am

humiliated by the knowledge of what texture a great deal of my

reputation is made. Sometimes I am even confounded with Graves, whom, as

an author, I detest; my "Tin Trumpet" being ascribed to him, and his

"Drippings from the Living Rock" being admired as mine! At such times,

it is very difficult to preserve my incognito. I have wondered that

nobody ever reads the truth in my indignant face.

As a consequence of all these trials, I sometimes become impatient,

inaccessible to compliment, and--since the truth must be told--a little

ill-tempered. My temperament, as my family and friends know, is of an

unusually genial and amiable quality, and I never snub an innocent but

indiscreet admirer without afterwards repenting of my rudeness. I have

often, indeed, a double motive for repentance; for those snubs carry

their operation far beyond their recipients, and come back to me

sometimes, after months or even years, in "Book Notices," or other

newspaper articles. Thus the serene path of literature, which the

aspiring youth imagines to be so fair and sunny, overspread with the

mellowest ideal tints, becomes rough and cloudy. No doubt I am to blame:

possibly I am rightly treated: I "belong to the public," I am told with

endless congratulatory iteration, and therefore I ought not to feel the

difference between the public's original humoring of my moods, and my

present enforced humoring of its moods. But I _do_ feel it, somehow. I

have of late entertained the suspicion, that I am not wholly the

creation of popular favor. "The public," I am sure, never furnished me

with my comic or my lively-serious vein of writing. If either of those

veins had not been found good, they would not have encouraged me to work

them. I declare, boldly, that I give an ample return for what I get, and

when I satisfy curiosity or yield to unreasonable demands upon my

patience and good-humor, it is "to boot."

Nevertheless, it is a generous public, on the whole, and gives trouble

only through thoughtlessness, not malice. It delights in its favorites,

because imagining that they so intensely enjoy its favor. And don't we,

after all? (I say _we_ purposely, and my publisher will tell you why.)

Now that I have written away my vexation, I recognize very clearly that

my object in writing this article is apology rather than complaint. All

whom I have ever rudely treated will now comprehend the unfortunate

circumstances under which the act occurred. If some one should visit me

to-morrow, I have no doubt he will write: "Mr. Dionysius Green is all,

and more than all, one would anticipate from reading his charming works.

Benevolence beams from his brow, fancy sparkles from his eyes, and

genial sympathy with all mankind sits enthroned upon his lips. It was a

rare pleasure to me to listen to his conversation, and I could but wish

that the many thousands of his admirers might enjoy the privilege of an

interview with so Distinguished a Character!"