national characteristics, whose work breathes a spirit of wholesome
national prejudice, who are children of their own soil, and cannot, even
in fancy, be associated with any other art or literature save the art or
literature of their fatherland. This was the case with honest John
Leech, whom England took to her heart and held dear because he was so
truly English, because he despised Frenchmen, and mistrusted Irishmen,
and hated Jews, and had a splendid British frankness in conveying these
various impressions to the world. What would Leech have thought of Peter
Ibbetson watching with sick heart the vessels bound for France! What a
contrast between the cultured sympathy of Du Maurier’s beautiful
drawings, and the real, narrow affection which Leech betrays even for
his Staffordshire roughs, who are British roughs, be it rememberd, and
not without their stanch and sturdy British virtues. He does not
idealize them in any way. He is content to love them as they are.
Neither does Mr. Barrie endeavor to describe Thrums as a place where any
but Thrums people could ever have found life endurable; yet he is as
loyal in his affection for that forbidding little hamlet as if it were
Florence the fair. Bret Harte uses no alluring colors with which to
paint his iniquitous mining camps, but he is the brother at heart of
every gambler and desperado in the diggings. Humanity is a mighty bond,
and nationality strengthens its fibres. We can no more imagine Bret
Harte amid Jane Austen’s placid surroundings, than we can imagine Dr.
Holmes in a mining-camp, or Henry Fielding in Boston. Just as the
Autocrat springs from Puritan ancestors, and embodies the intellectual
traditions of New England, so Tom Jones, in his riotous young manhood,
springs from that lusty Saxon stock, of whose courage, truthfulness, and
good-tempered animalism he stands the most splendid representative. “The
old order is passed and the new arises;” but Sophia Western has not yet
yielded her place in the hearts of men to the morbid and self-centred
heroines of modern fiction. Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more
than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, perhaps,
belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of
foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest
prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs--“the nicest little
delicate things--rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit.”
Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London
streets,
“Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,”
rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of
the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts
in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked
not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an
inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which
England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the
frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without peer.
THE DISCOMFORTS OF LUXURY: A SPECULATION.
Mr. Frederick Harrison, in a caustic little paper on the Æsthete, has
taken occasion to say some severely truthful things anent the dreary
grandeur of rich men’s houses, where each individual object is charming
in itself, and out of harmony with all the rest. “I believe,” he
observes sadly, “that the camel will have passed through the eye of the
needle before the rich man shall have found his way to enter the Kingdom
of Beauty. It is a hard thing for him to enjoy art at all. The habits of
the age convert him into a patron, and the assiduity of the dealers
deprive him of peace.”
Is it, then, the mere desire to be obliging which induces a millionaire
to surround himself with things which he does not want, which nobody
else wants, and which are perpetually in the way of comfort and
pleasure? Does he build and furnish his house to support the dealers, to
dazzle his friends, or to increase his own earthly happiness and
well-being? The serious fashion in which he goes to work admits of no
backsliding, no merciful deviations from a relentless luxury. I have
seen ghastly summer palaces, erected presumably for rest and recreation,
where the miserable visitor was conducted from a Japanese room to a
Dutch room, and thence to something Early English or Florentine; and
such a jumble of costly incongruities, of carved scrolls and blue tiles
and bronze screens and stained glass, was actually dubbed a home. A
home! The guest, surfeited with an afternoon’s possession, could escape
to simpler scenes; but the master of the house was chained to all that
tiresome splendor for five months of the year, and the sole compensation
he appeared to derive from it was the saturnine delight of pointing out
to small processions of captive friends every detail which they would
have preferred to overlook. It is a painful thing, at best, to live up
to one’s bricabrac, if one has any; but to live up to the bricabrac of
many lands and of many centuries is a strain which no wise man would
dream of inflicting upon his constitution.
Perhaps the most unlovely circumstance about the “palatial residences”
of our country is that everything in them appears to have been bought at
once. Everything is equally new, and equally innocent of any imprint of
the owner’s personality. He has not lived among his possessions long
enough to mould them to his own likeness, and very often he has not even
selected them himself. I have known whole libraries purchased in a week,
and placed _en masse_ upon their destined shelves; whole rooms furnished
at one fell swoop with all things needful, from the chandelier in the
ceiling to the Dresden figures in the cabinet. I have known people who
either mistrusted their own tastes, or who had no tastes to mistrust,
and so surrendered their houses to upholsterers and decorators, giving
them _carte blanche_ to do their best or worst. A room which has been
the unresisting prey of an upholsterer is, on the whole, the saddest
thing that money ever bought; yet its deplorable completeness calls
forth rapturous commendations from those who can understand no natural
line of demarcation between a dwelling-place and a shop. The same
curious delight in handsome things, apart from any beauty or fitness,
has resulted in our over-ornamented Pullman cars, with their cumbrous
and stuffy hangings; and in the aggressive luxury of our ocean steamers,
where paint and gilding run riot, and every scrap of wall space bears
its burden of inappropriate decoration. To those for whom a sea voyage
is but a penitential pilgrimage, the fat frescoed Cupids and pink roses
of the saloons offer no adequate compensation for their sufferings;
whitewash and hangings of sackcloth would harmonize more closely with
their sentiments. Yet these ornate embellishments pursue them now even
to the solitude of their staterooms, and the newest steamers boast of
cabins where the wretched traveler, too ill to arise from his berth, may
be solaced by Cupids of his own frisking nakedly over the wash-bowl, and
by pink roses in profusion festooning his narrow cell. If he can look at
them without loathing, he is to be envied his unequaled serenity of
mind.
It is strange that the authors who have written so much about luxury,
whether they praise it satirically, like Mandeville, or condemn it very
seriously, like Mr. Goldwin Smith, or merely inquire into its history
and traditions, like that careful scholar, M. Baudrillart, should never
have been struck with the amount of discomfort it entails. In modern as
in ancient times, the same zealous pursuit of prodigality results in the
same heavy burden of undesirable possessions. The youthful daughter of
Marie Antoinette was allowed, we are told, four pairs of shoes a week;
and M. Taine, inveighing bitterly against the extravagances of the
French court, has no word of sympathy to spare for the unfortunate
little princess, condemned by this ruthless edict always to wear new
shoes. Louis XVI. had thirty doctors of his own; but surely no one will
be found to envy him this royal superfluity. He also had a hundred and
fifty pages, who were probably a terrible nuisance; and two
chair-carriers, who were paid twenty thousand livres a year to inspect
his Majesty’s chairs, which duty they solemnly performed twice a day,
whether they were wanted or not. The Cardinal de Rohan had all his
kitchen utensils of solid silver, which must have given as much
satisfaction to his cooks as did Nero’s golden fishing-hooks to the
fish he caught with them. M. Baudrillart describes the feasts of
Elagabalus as if their only fault was their excess; but the impartial
reader, scanning each unpalatable detail, comes to a different
conclusion. Thrushes’ brains, and parrots’ heads, peas mashed with
grains of gold, beans fricasseed with morsels of amber, and rice mixed
with pearls do not tempt one’s fancy as either nourishing or appetizing
diet; while the crowning point of discomfort was reached when revolving
roofs threw down upon the guests such vast quantities of roses that they
were well-nigh smothered. Better a dish of herbs, indeed, than all this
dubious splendor. Nothing less enjoyable could have been invented in the
interests of hospitality, save only that mysterious banquet given by
Solomon the mighty, where all the beasts of the earth and all the demons
of the air were summoned by his resistless talisman to do honor to the
terrified and miserable banqueters.
“Le Superflu, chose très-nécessaire,” to quote Voltaire’s delightful
phrase, is a difficult thing to handle with propriety and grace. Where
the advantages of early training and inherited habits of indulgence are
lacking, men who endeavor to spend a great deal of money show a pitiful
incapacity for the task. They spend it, to be sure, but only in
augmenting their own and their neighbors’ discomfort; and even this they
do in a blundering, unimaginative fashion, almost painful to
contemplate. The history of Law’s Bubble, with its long train of
fabulous and fleeting fortunes, illustrates the helplessness of men to
cope with suddenly acquired wealth. The Parisian nabob who warmed up a
ragout with burning bank notes, that he might boast of how much it cost
him, was sadly stupid for a Frenchman; but he was kinder to himself,
after all, than the house-painter who, bewildered with the wealth of
Fortunatus, could think of nothing better to do with it than to hire
ninety supercilious domestics for his own misusage and oppression. Since
the days of Darius, who required thirty attendants to make his royal
bed, there probably never were people more hopelessly in one another’s
way than that little army of ninety servants awaiting orders from an
artisan. The only creature capable of reveling in such an establishment
was the author of “Coningsby” and “Lothair,” to whom long rows of
powdered footmen, “glowing in crimson liveries,” were a spectacle as
exhilarating as is a troop of Horse Guards to persons of a more martial
cast of mind. Readers of “Lothair” will remember the home-coming of that
young gentleman to Muriel Towers, where the house steward, and the chief
butler, and the head gardener, and the lord of the kitchen, and the head
forester, and the grooms of the stud and of the chambers stand in modest
welcome behind the distinguished housekeeper, “who curtsied like the old
court;” while the underlings await at a more “respectful distance” the
arrival of their youthful master, whose sterling insignificance must
have been painfully enhanced by all this solemn anticipation. “Even the
mountains fear a rich man,” says that ominous Turkish proverb which
breathes the corruption of a nation; but it would have been a
chicken-hearted molehill that trembled before such a homunculus as
Lothair.
The finer adaptability of women makes them a little less uncomfortable
amid such oppressive surroundings, and their tamer natures revolt from
ridiculous excess. They listen, indeed, with favor to the counsel of
Polonius, and their habit is occasionally costlier than their purses can
buy; witness that famous milliner’s bill for fifteen thousand pounds,
which was disputed in the French courts during the gilded reign of
Napoleon III. But, as a rule, the punishment of their extravagances
falls on themselves or on their husbands. They do not, as is the fashion
with men, make their belongings a burden to their friends. It is seldom
the mistress of a curio-laden house who insists with tireless
perseverance on your looking at everything she owns; though it was a
woman, and a provincial actress at that, raised by two brilliant
marriages to the pinnacle of fame and fortune, who came to Abbotsford
accompanied by a whole retinue of servants and several private
physicians, to the mingled amusement and despair of Sir Walter. And it
was a flower girl of Paris who spent her suddenly acquired wealth in the
most sumptuous entertainments ever known even to that city of costly
caprice. But for stupid and meaningless luxury we must look, after all,
to men: to Caligula, whose horse wore a collar of pearls, and drank out
of an ivory trough; to Condé, who spent three thousand crowns for
jonquils to deck his palace at Chantilly; to the Duke of Albuquerque,
who had forty silver ladders among his utterly undesirable possessions.
Even in the matter of dress and fashion, they have exceeded the folly of
women. It is against the gallants of Spain, and not against their wives,
that the good old gossip James Howell inveighs with caustic humor. The
Spaniard, it would seem, “tho’ perhaps he had never a shirt to his back,
yet must he have a toting huge swelling ruff around his neck,” for the
starching of which exquisitely uncomfortable article he paid the then
enormous sum of twenty shillings. It was found necessary to issue a
royal edict against these preposterous decorations, which grew larger
and stiffer every year, even children of tender age wearing their
miniature instruments of torture. “Poverty is a most odious calling,”
sighs Burton with melancholy candor; but it is not without some small
compensations of its own. To realize them, we might compare one of
Murillo’s dirty, smiling, half-naked beggar boys with an Infanta by
Velasquez, or with Moreelzee’s charming and unhappy little Princess,
who, in spreading ruff and stiff pearl-trimmed stomacher, gazes at us
with childish dignity from the wall of Amsterdam’s museum. Or we might
remember the pretty story of Meyerbeer’s little daughter, who, after
watching for a long time the gambols of some ragged children in the
street, turned sadly from the window, and said, with pathetic
resignation, “It is a great misfortune to have genteel parents.”
LECTURES.
“Few of us,” says Mr. Walter Bagehot in one of his most cynical moods,
“can bear the theory of our amusements. It is essential to the pride of
man to believe that he is industrious.”
Now, is it industry or a love of sport which makes us sit in long and
solemn rows in an oppressively hot room, blinking at glaring lights,
breathing a vitiated air, wriggling on straight and narrow chairs, and
listening, as well as heat and fatigue and discomfort will permit, to a
lecture which might just as well have been read peacefully by our own
firesides? Do we do this thing for amusement, or for intellectual gain?
Outside, the winter sun is setting clearly in a blue-green sky. People
are chatting gayly in the streets. Friends are drinking cups of fragrant
tea in pleasant lamp-lit rooms. There are concerts, perhaps, or
_matinées_, where the deft comedian provokes continuous laughter. No; it
is not amusement that we seek in the lecture-hall. Too many really
amusing things may be done on a winter afternoon. Too many possible
pleasures lie in wait for every spare half-hour. We can harbor no
delusions on that score.
Is it industry, then, that packs us side by side in serried Amazonian
ranks, broken here and there by a stray and downcast man? But on the
library shelves stand thick as autumn leaves the unread books. Hidden
away in obscure corners are the ripe old authors whom we know by name
alone. The mist of an unspoken tongue veils from us the splendid
treasures of antiquity, and we comfort ourselves with glib commonplaces
about “the sympathetic study of translations.” No; it can hardly be the
keen desire of culture which makes us patient listeners to endless
lectures. Culture is not so easy of access. It is not a thing passed
lightly from hand to hand. It is the reward of an intelligent quest, of
delicate intuitions, of a broad and generous sympathy with all that is
best in the world. It has been nobly defined by Mr. Symonds as “the
raising of the intellectual faculties to their highest potency by means
of conscious training.” We cannot gain this fine mastery over ourselves
by absorbing--or forgetting--a mass of details upon disconnected
subjects,--“a thousand particulars,” says Addison, “which I would not
have my mind burdened with for a Vatican.” If we will sit down and
seriously try to reckon up our winnings in years of lecture-going, we
may yet find ourselves reluctant converts to Mr. Bagehot’s cruel
conclusions. It is the old, old search for a royal road to learning. It
is the old, old effort at a compromise which cheats us out of both
pleasure and profit. It is the old, old determination to seek some short
cut to acquirements, which, like “conversing with ingenious men,” may
save us, says Bishop Berkeley, from “the drudgery of reading and
thinking.”
The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most
grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand,
and of scholarship on the other. At times we envy the happy Hermit of
Prague, who never saw pen or ink; at times we think somewhat wistfully
of the sedate and dignified methods of the past, when students, to use
Sir Walter Scott’s illustration, paid their tickets at the door,
instead of scrambling over the walls to distinction. It shows a good
deal of agility and self-reliance to scale the walls; and such athletic
interlopers, albeit a trifle disordered in appearance, are apt to boast
of their unaided prowess: how with “little Latin and less Greek” they
have become--not Shakespeares indeed, nor even Scotts--but prominent,
very prominent citizens indeed. The notion is gradually gaining ground
that common-school education is as good as college education; that
extension lectures and summer classes are acceptable substitutes for
continuous study and mental discipline; that reading translations of the
classics is better, because easier, than reading the classics
themselves; and that attending a “Congress” of specialists gives us, in
some mysterious fashion, a very respectable knowledge of their
specialties. It is after this manner that we enjoy, in all its varied
aspects, that energetic idleness which Mr. Bagehot recommends as a
deliberate sedative for our restless self-esteem.
Yet the sacrifice of time alone is worth some sorrowful consideration.
We laugh at the droning pedants of the old German universities who, in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, had well-nigh drowned the world
with words. The Tübingen chancellor, Penziger, gave, it is said, four
hundred and fifty-nine lectures on the prophet Jeremiah, and over
fifteen hundred lectures on Isaiah; while the Viennese theologian,
Hazelbach, lectured for twenty-two consecutive years on the first
chapter of Isaiah, and was cruelly cut off by death before he had
finished with his theme. But the bright side of this picture is that
only students--and theological students at that--attended these
limitless dissertations. Theology was then a battle-field, and the heavy
weapons forged for the combat were presumed to be as deadly as they were
cumbersome. During all those twenty-two years in which Herr Hazelbach
held forth so mercilessly, German maidens and German matrons formed no
part of his audience. They at least had other and better things to do.
German artisans and German tradesmen troubled themselves little about
Isaiah. German ploughmen went about their daily toil as placidly as if
Herr Hazelbach had been born a mute. The sleepy world had not then
awakened to its duty of disseminating knowledge broadcast and in small
doses, so that our education, as Dr. Johnson discontentedly observed of
the education of the Scotch, is like bread in a besieged town,--“every
man gets a little, but no man gets a full meal.”
What we lack in quantity, however, we are pleased to make up in variety.
We range freely over a mass of subjects from the religion of the
Phœnicians to the poets of Australia, and from the Song of Solomon to
the latest electrical invention. We have lectures in the morning upon
Plato and Aristotle, and in the afternoon upon Emerson and Arthur Hugh
Clough. We take a short course of German metaphysics,--which is supposed
to be easily compressed into six lectures,--and follow it up immediately
with another on French art, or the folk-lore of the North American
Indians. No topic is too vast to be handled deftly, and finished up in a
few afternoons. A fortnight for the Renaissance, a week for Greek
architecture, ten days for Chaucer, three weeks for anthropology. It is
amazing how far we can go in a winter, when we travel at this rate of
speed. “What under the sun is bringing all the women after Hegel?” asked
a puzzled librarian not very long ago. “There isn’t one of his books
left in the library, and twenty women come in a day to ask for him.” It
was explained to this custodian that a popular lecturer had been
dwelling with some enthusiasm upon Hegel, and that the sudden demand for
the philosopher was a result of his contagious eloquence. It seemed for
the nonce like a revival of pantheism; but in two weeks every volume was
back in its place, and the gray dust of neglect was settling down as of
yore upon each hoary head. The women, fickle as in the days of the
troubadours, had wandered far from German erudition, and were by that
time wrestling with the Elizabethan poets, or the constitutional history
of republics. The sun of philosophy had set.
One rather dismal result of this rapid transit is the amount of material
which each lecture is required to hold, and which each lecture-goer is
expected to remember. A few centuries of Egyptian history or of Mediæval
song are packed down by some system of mental hydraulic pressure into a
single hour’s discourse; and, when they escape, they seem vast enough to
fill our lives for a week. “When Macaulay talks,” complained Lady
Ashburton tartly, “I am not only overflowed with learning, but I stand
in the slops.” We have much the same uncomfortable sensation at an
afternoon lecture, when the tide of information, of dry, formidable,
relentless facts, rises higher and higher, and our spirits sink lower
and lower with every fresh development. “The need of limit, the
feasibility of performance,” has not yet dawned upon the new educators
who have taken the world in hand; and, as a consequence, we, the
students, have never learned to survey our own intellectual boundaries.
We assume in the first place that we have an intelligent interest in
literature, science, and history, art, architecture, and archæology;
and, in the second, that it is possible for us to learn a moderate
amount about all these things without any unreasonable exertion. This
double delusion lures us feebly on until we have listened to so much,
and remembered so little, that we are a good deal like the infant Paul
Dombey wondering in pathetic perplexity whether a verb always agreed
with an ancient Briton, or three times four was Taurus a bull.
“When all can read, and books are plentiful, lectures are unnecessary,”
says Dr. Johnson, who hated “by-roads in education,” and novel
devices--or devices which were novel a hundred and thirty years ago--for
softening and abridging hard study. He hated also to be asked the kind
of questions which we are now so fond of answering in the columns of our
journals and magazines. What should a child learn first? How should a
boy be taught? What course of study would he recommend an intelligent
youth to pursue? “Let him take a course of chemistry, or a course of
rope-dancing, or a course of anything to which he is inclined,” was the
great scholar’s petulant reply to one of these repeated inquiries; and,
though it sounds ill-natured, we have some human sympathy for the
pardonable irritation which prompted it. Dr. Johnson, I am well aware,
is not a popular authority to quote in behalf of any cause one wishes to
advance; but his heterodoxy in the matter of lectures is supported
openly by Charles Lamb, and furtively by some living men of letters,
who strive, though with no great show of temerity, to stem the
ever-increasing current of popular instruction. One eminent scholar,
being entreated to deliver a course of lectures on a somewhat abstruse
theme, replied that if people really desired information on that
subject, and if they could read, he begged to refer them to two books he
had written several years before. By perusing these volumes, which were
easy of access, they would know all that he once knew, and a great deal
more than he knew at the present time, as he had unhappily forgotten
much that was in them. It would be simpler, he deemed, and it would be
cheaper, than bringing him across the ocean to repeat the same matter in
lectures.
As for Lamb, we have not only his frankly stated opinion, but--what is
much more diverting--we have also the unconscious confession of a purely
human weakness with which it is pleasant to sympathize. Like all the
rest of us, this charming and fallible genius found that heroic efforts
in the future cost less than very moderate exertions in the present. He
was warmly attached to Coleridge, and he held him in sincere veneration.
When the poet came to London in 1816, we find Lamb writing to Wordsworth
very enthusiastically, and yet with a vague undercurrent of
apprehension:--
“Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighborhood of such a man
is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. ’Tis enough to
be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our
souls in quiet. If I lived with him, or with the author of ‘The
Excursion,’ I should in a very little time lose my own identity, and be
dragged along in the currents of other people’s thoughts, hampered in a
net.”