mind with pleasures, early pleasures especially, the memory of which
lingers with the sweetness of honey, then the pain of parting with
them is utterly disproportioned to their worth. I have never been able
to understand how people can rebind an old book, or reframe an old
picture, if the book or the picture have been in any way dear to them
for years. How strange and unfriendly these objects look in their new
dress! How remote they seem from the recollections hitherto aroused by
their presence! One of the minor grievances of my life is the gradual
disappearance from the theatres of all the old drop-curtains I can
remember since my childish days. Perhaps the new curtains are better
than the old ones—I hear persons say as much occasionally—but to me they
are simply hideous, because their native ugliness is unsoftened by any
gracious memory of those far-off nights when, feverish with delight, I
sat staring at the stretch of painted canvas, and anticipating all the
joys that lay behind. There was no moment of transport equal to that
which saw the slow ascent of the mystic veil, revealing inch by inch
the enchanted scenes beyond; and I still believe that if I could behold
once more those dear, familiar landscapes, some portion of the old, lost
pleasure would return. Three curtains are indelibly associated with
these hours of supreme happiness; and I recall them all three now as the
most beautiful pictures in the world. One—and this, I think, was the
first I ever saw—represented an Italian view, with a lively volcano in
the background, and, in front, a long-legged shepherd lad reclining on
the marble steps of a fountain, while his flock loitered lazily around.
Another displayed four stout and dropsical nymphs preparing for, or
resting from, a hunt; this fact being adroitly intimated by the presence
of some very long bows, and some very lean greyhounds. The third was a
seaport town, with vessels lying in harbor, and a little terrace running
to the water’s edge, on which terrace I have taken many a stroll in
spirit, waiting for the wonders to come. Not that the waits were ever
long in those vanished days. On the contrary, the whole evening flew by
on wings of fire, and the only thought that marred my perfect felicity
was the haunting consciousness that it would too soon be over. And the
theatres were never hot, or stuffy, or draughty, when I was a child; and
the lights were never glaring, but shone with a gentle radiance; and the
chairs were softer than down; and the music was noble and inspiring;
and the actors were men of genius; and the actresses were ravishingly
beautiful; and the scenery was sublime; and the plays were wondrously
witty; and the paste jewels were dazzling; and _ennui_ was unknown; and I
never, never, _never_, wished I had stayed at home. What new drop-curtain
hides from me now the rapturous illusions of my youth?
Another grievance, more palpable because less inevitable than the
replacing of worn-out theatre properties with fresh ones, is the passion
of publishers for altering the covers of their magazines. This is the
strangest act of vandalism that an unholy zest for novelty ever prompted
in the human bosom. Why a magazine cover is selected in the first place,
remains, in most cases, an unfathomed mystery. It is seldom a thing of
beauty, but, once associated with the agreeable visitor that every month
brings some new tidings to our door, it acquires for us all the subtle
charm of familiarity. Nothing can well be more stiff and ungraceful than
the design of _Blackwood_; that wilted, conventional border, and that
wreath of prickly Scotch thistles, defending rather than decorating the
vignette of the founder,
“With eyes severe and beard of formal cut.”
The whole cover seems to say, “Stand off, rash mortal! There is nothing
here for you!” Yet to lose it would be to lose an old, surly, faithful
and long-tried friend. I sometimes feel that _Blackwood_ is not as
readable as it was when I was a girl—it is the privilege of increasing
years to think all magazines were better when we were young—but for that
very reason I am glad to greet the ancient thistles that alone remain
defiant and unchanged.
American publishers, however, are as delighted to offer their readers a
new cover as a new story, and it is occasionally interesting to follow
a magazine through all its outer vicissitudes. There was a time when
_Saint Nicholas_ behaved like Harlequin in the pantomime, slipping into
fresh costumes with bewildering alertness and rapidity. _The Century_
has adopted a plan eminently fitted to confuse and distress people who
are in love with the familiar, and who have barely time to accustom
themselves to one of the picturesque young women on its cover, before
they are confronted with another. The only engaging and comforting thing
about these rival damsels is their strong family resemblance. They are
like the fair daughters of Doris, with faces “neither the same nor
different, but as those of sisters should be.” The wanton alterations
in _Harper’s Magazine_ are none the less heart-breaking for being so
trivial. As well rob us of an old friend altogether as tamper with his
absolute integrity. No one can claim for _Harper_ that its time-honored
cover has any rare artistic quality, any of that subtle and far-reaching
suggestiveness that we prize so wearily to-day. On the contrary, its
little boys scattering roses into nowhere, and its preposterous child
blowing soap bubbles on a globe belong distinctly to the cheerful school
of Philistia, and are not burdened with meanings of any kind. That makes
them so refreshing to our eyes; and besides I have always regarded them
with sincere affection, because of the pleasure they afforded me in
infancy. It was one of the unwritten laws of our nursery that, when a
new magazine arrived, the old one passed into our possession. We painted
all the pictures with water colors, and we cut out the little figures on
the cover for paper dolls. Not the child straddling over the globe! It
was impossible to make anything out of him, owing to his uncomfortable
position. But the lads in tunics we thought extremely pretty, especially
the one in the right-hand corner, whose head was as round as a bullet.
The left-hand boy had a slightly flattened skull, which destroyed his
perfect symmetry, though we occasionally remedied this defect by leaving
him a small portion of his basket, and pretending it was hair. Now,
alas! though the children still mount guard on their flower-wreathed
pedestals, and still scatter their roses in the air, some unkind hand has
wrought radical changes in their aspect. They have grown bigger, stouter,
and their decent little tunics, so nicely drawn up over one shoulder,
have been replaced by those absurd floating draperies which form the
conventional attire of seraphs and sea nymphs all the world over. Never
was there such an unhappy transformation. It is true that on the old
cover of _Bentley’s Magazine_—if we may trust the minute picture of it
on the face of _Littell_—the little figures with baskets were clad, or
unclad, in these same airy rags. But this fact does not reconcile me at
all. I never knew _Bentley’s_ boys, but I have known _Harper’s_ children
all my life, and I cannot bear to see them shivering month after month
in such ridiculous, inadequate sashes. What sort of paper dolls would
they have made for well-bred little girls? And why should they have been
deprived of their only garment to gratify a restless taste for change?
Well, it is useless to complain, for around us on every side people are
fretting, and have fretted for generations over the unloved monotony of
their surroundings. “It is not given to the world to be contented,” says
Goethe; and while life can never hurry on fast enough, or assume phases
new enough to please the majority of mankind, a few dissatisfied souls
will always cling perversely to the things which they have known, and
feel more keenly every year that all the vaunted delights of novelty and
progress are but a poor substitute for the finer charm of the familiar.
OLD WORLD PETS
We have grown to be very narrow-minded, very exclusive, and hopelessly
unimaginative in our choice of domestic pets. We love and cherish the
dog, and we have a sentiment, less universal but far more disinterested,
in favor of the beautiful and cold-hearted cat. We keep canaries in
gilded cages—and there the matter practically ends. A few rabbits in a
hutch—which are never petted—an occasional parrot feared by its master
and hated by its master’s friends; a little song-bird imprisoned now
and then, and slowly dying of despair; these are instances, happily too
infrequent to count very heavily in the scale. As a fact, many people
value the dog and cat for their serviceable qualities alone; exiling the
first to the kennel and the second to the kitchen, and liking both, as
Miss Mitford confessed she liked children, “in their place”—meaning any
place where she was not.
But when we turn back to the past we find, or think we find, a very
different state of affairs; an almost endless variety of little wild
creatures, tamed by luxury and love. The dog still holds his own, and we
need look no further than the _Odyssey_ to see, in the great hound Argus,
the splendid sagacity, the unswerving loyalty, which centuries have not
altered or impaired. I have always wished that Argus could have had Sir
Walter Scott, rather than the crafty Odysseus for a master. There is also
a pathetic dialogue in Theocritus between two old fishermen, who are so
poor they may not even own a watchdog to guard their scanty spoils:
“All things, all, to them seemed superfluity, for Poverty was
their sentinel. They had no neighbor by them, but ever against
their narrow cabin gently floated up the sea.”
Cats, too, were valued pets in former days, and probably found such easy
domesticity more to their tastes than the burdensome honors of Egypt. In
fact, when the Egyptian cat was not living in sanctified seclusion as
the friend and favorite of Pasht, she was apparently earning a laborious
livelihood as a retriever, if we may trust a relic of Egyptian art in
the British Museum, which shows us a magnificent animal carrying no less
than three struggling wild fowls in her mouth and claws. But when Puss
at last entered Greece and Rome, about the time of the Christian era, or
perhaps a century or two earlier, it was simply as a plaything; and Mr.
Pater in “Marius the Epicurean” describes very charmingly the snow-white
beast brought by one of the guests to a Roman banquet, and purring its
way among the wine-cups in response to caresses and coaxing words. Mrs.
Graham R. Tomson, that most winning chronicler of the cat’s vicissitudes
and triumphs, has also told us in graceful verse the history of a Greek
lover who loses his mistress because he dares not bring her from Egypt
one of these coveted and mysterious creatures:
“A little lion, small and dainty sweet,
(For such there be!)
With sea-grey eyes and softly stepping feet,
She prayed of me.
For this, through lands Egyptian far away
She bade me pass;
But, in an evil hour, I said her nay—
And now, alas!
Far-traveled Nicias hath wooed and won
Arsinoë
With gifts of furry creatures white and dun
From over-sea.”
In the Museum of Antiquities, at Bordeaux, there is a mutilated tomb of
the Gallo-Roman period showing still the indistinct outlines of a young
girl and her two pets; a cat clasped—very uncomfortably—in her arms, and,
at her feet, a dignified cock, which appears to be pecking viciously at
poor pussy’s drooping tail.
The few allusions we find to the cat in later Greek poetry are hardly of
a flattering nature. Theocritus makes the impatient Praxinoë, in his XVth
Idyl, say to her handmaid, “Eunoë, bring the water and put it down in
the middle of the room, lazy creature that you are! Cats like always to
sleep soft,”—quite as if it were disgraceful in them to enjoy their ease.
The same passage is interpreted somewhat differently, and in a still
more uncharitable spirit by Mr. Matthew Arnold: “Eunoë, pick up your
work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again! The
cats find it just the bed they like.” At least we know, by this token,
that Puss was an inmate—understood if not honored—of the Alexandrian
household. There is also a dog; for Praxinoë, on going out, bids Phrygia,
the nurse, “Take the child, and keep him amused; call in the dog, and
shut the street door.”
Perhaps it was the very diversity of pets that so often brought the
cat into disgrace. She is not wont to tolerate divided affections, and
the old primitive, savage instincts are very strong within her little
breast. Consequently, there comes down to us out of the past a bitter
wail of lamentation from foolish mortals who seem to have forgotten what
a natural and wholesome thing it is for one creature to devour another.
Agathias, a poet of the sixth century, has left us two mournful epigrams
upon a favorite partridge ruthlessly done to death by a swift-footed and
hungry cat:
“O my partridge! Poor exile from the rocks and the heath, thy
little willow house possesses thee no longer. No more dost thou
rustle thy wings in the warmth of the rising sun. A cat has
torn off thy head. I seized thy body and rescued it from his
cruel jaws. Let the earth lie not too lightly on thee, lest thy
enemy discover and drag thee from thy quiet grave.”
The second epigram is quite as disconsolate and more vengeful in its tone:
“The domestic cat which has eaten my partridge flatters himself
that he is still to live under my roof. No, dear bird, I will
not leave thee unavenged, but on thy grave will I slay thy
murderer. For thy shade, which roams tormented, cannot be
quieted until I shall have done that which Pyrrhus did upon the
grave of Achilles.”
As if these direful threats were not enough, Damocharis, a disciple of
Agathias, follows up the case with a third epigram in which he bewails
the cruelty of the cat, and compares it with burning eloquence to one
of Aktæon’s hounds, which devoured its own master. “Here is a pretty
pother about a partridge!” protests M. Champfleury, with the pardonable
irritation of one who is wont to deal leniently with the shortcomings
of his favorite animal, and who fails to sympathize with this excess of
grief. Pet partridges, indeed, are hardly in accord with modern taste,
which is apt to regard them from the same simple point of view as did
the cat of Agathias. Neither is the sparrow a popular plaything as in
the days when Lesbia wept inconsolably for her dead bird, and Catullus
sang in silvery strains to soothe her wounded heart. With what generous
sympathy the lover laments and calls on the Loves and Graces, and on all
the fair youths of Rome to lament with him this shocking and irreparable
loss:
“Dead my Lesbia’s sparrow is,
Sparrow that was all her bliss,
Than her very eyes more dear.”
How sombre is the picture he draws of the little petted creature that in
life never strayed from the white bosom of its mistress, and that now
must tread alone the gloomy pathway whence not even a bird may return. It
is really heartrending to listen to his grief:
“Out upon you and your power
Which all fairest things devour,
Orcus’ gloomy shades! that e’er
Ye took my Bird that was so fair.
“Ah! the pity of it! Thou
Poor Bird! thy doing ’tis that now
My Loved One’s eyes are swollen and red
With weeping for her darling dead.”[2]
Almost as pathetic, and quite as musical as this melancholy dirge, are
some of the epigrams to be found in that charming volume of translations
from the Greek Anthology, which Lilla Cabot Perry has aptly entitled
_From the Garden of Hellas_. Here we have graceful and tender verses
dedicated to the memory of pet beasts and birds and insects, one of them,
indeed, bewailing the hard fate of a locust and a cicada, which, beloved
by the same mistress, sleep, equally lamented, side by side:
“Unto the locust, nightingale of fields,
And the cicada, who was wont to drowse
Through summer heat amid the oaken boughs,
This common tomb the maiden Myro builds;
And, like a child, weeps that she could not save
These twain, her cherished playthings, from the grave.”
What can be prettier than such a requiem sung by Leonidas, and breathing
in every line a sentiment half natural, half assumed! We look back
into the past, and smile, but with no unfeeling mirth, to see the tiny
tomb with its cold and silent inmates whose shrill, amorous music is
hushed for evermore. Nor were they alone in their sad distinction, for
on every side other deserving insects were as decorously interred, and
as tunefully bewailed. The poet who mourned for the “maiden Myro’s”
playthings, was fain to sing with the same ready sympathy and the same
charming grace the praises of Philænida’s pet locust, loved and lost:
“What if small, O passer-by,
Be this stone! ’tis mine you see.
What if it you scarce descry!
Philænida gave it me.
“Praise her that she held me dear,
Me, her little locust, singing,
Whether in the stubble here
Or amid the bushes winging.
“Two long years she loved me well,
Loved my drowsy lullaby;
Me e’en dead did not repel,
As these verses testify.”
Another epigram by Mnasalcas bewails a similar loss, and inclines
us slowly to the painful conviction that all Greece must have been
in mourning for these short-lived insects, which, like poor Hinda’s
tantalizing gazelles, appear to have made a point of dying just when they
had grown most dear. It is a positive relief to find Meleager dedicating
his verses to a pet cicada which is still alive and enjoying its master’s
tender care:
“Cicada, you who chase away desire,
Cicada, who beguile our sleepless hours,
You song-winged muse of meadows and of flowers,
Who are the natural mimic of the lyre,
Chirp a familiar melody and sweet,
My weight of sleepless care to drive away;
Your love-beguiling tune to me now play,
Striking your prattling wings with your dear feet.
In early morning I’ll bring gifts to you
Of garlic ever fresh and drops of dew.”
There is an exquisite description in the first Idyl of Theocritus of a
deep bowl of ivy wood, the gift of a goatherd to the singer Thyrsis, on
which is carved, among other pastoral scenes, a boy weaving a locust cage
while he guards the vineyard from the foxes. Just such a dainty toy
he weaves as may well have been the habitation of those luxurious and
thrice-favored insects, the petted captives of Myro and fair Philænida:
“Now divided but a little space from the sea-worn old man is a
vineyard laden well with fire-red clusters, and on the rough
wall a little lad watches the vineyard, sitting there. Round
him two she-foxes are skulking, and one goes along the vine
rows to devour the ripe grapes, and the other brings all her
cunning to bear against the scrip, and vows she will never
leave the lad till she strand him bare and breakfastless.
But the boy is plaiting a pretty locust cage with stalks of
asphodel, and fitting it with reeds; and less care of his scrip
has he, or of the vines, than delight in his plaiting.”[3]
Kids and lambs are pastoral playthings which the rustic lovers of
Theocritus delight in offering to their fair ones; and in the Vth Idyl
Comatus complains to Lacon that he has given a bird to Alcippe and won
from her no kiss in return. Whereupon Lacon, in the true spirit of
amorous boastfulness, protests that he gave but a shepherd’s pipe to
his maiden, and sweetly she kissed and caressed him. A great hound,
strong enough to strangle wolves, a mixing bowl wrought by the hand of
Praxiteles, a vessel of cypress wood, a soft fleece from the newly shorn
ewe, and a brooding ring-dove are among the presents offered by these
shepherds in generous rivalry at the shrine of love.
But by far the most winning pet whose memory has come down to us
enshrined in Greek verse is the little wildwood hare, cherished by a
young girl, and sung by the poet Meleager. Gentler and more affectionate
than Cowper’s sturdy favorites, it shares with them a modest fame,
a quiet corner in the long gallery of prized and honored beasts. To
those who have loved Tiney and Puss from childhood, it is a pleasure to
see by their side this shrinking stranger, this poor little overfed,
much-caressed darling whose race was quickly run:
“From my mother’s teats they tore me,
Little long-eared hare, and bore me,
The swift-footed, from her breast.
Phanium, soft-handed, fed me
On spring flowers, and nourishèd me,
Fondling in her lap to rest.
“No more for my mother sighing,
Feasting daintily, then dying;
I by too much food was slain.
And she buried me with weeping
Near her house, that she, while sleeping,
Me in dreams might see again.”[4]
On what smooth Elysian sward does this little Grecian hare sport with
his English cousins? Fed, perchance, by Persephone’s white hand, they
gambol for evermore by the deep waters of Oblivion; and the gray ghosts,
flitting by, smile with sad eyes upon the nimble creatures who, shadows
in shadowland, yet bear in every limb rich memories of woodland glade,
and of the dear, life-giving soil of earth.
BATTLE OF THE BABIES
A warfare has been raging in our midst, the echoes of which have hardly
yet died sullenly away upon either side of the Atlantic. It has been a
bloodless and un-Homeric strife, not without humorous side-issues, as
when Pistol and Bardolph and Fluellen come to cheer our anxious spirits
at the siege of Harfleur. Its first guns were heard in New York, where
a modest periodical, devoted to the training of parents, opened fire
upon those time-honored nursery legends which are presumably dear to the
hearts of all rightly constituted babies. The leader of this gallant
foray protested vehemently against all fairy tales of a mournful or
sanguinary cast, and her denunciation necessarily included many stories
which have for generations been familiar to every little child. She
rejected _Red Riding Hood_, because her own infancy was haunted and
embittered by the evil behavior of the wolf; she would have none of
_Bluebeard_, because he was a wholesale fiend and murderer; she would
not even allow the pretty _Babes in the Wood_, because they tell a
tale of cold-hearted cruelty and of helpless suffering; while all
fierce narratives of giants and ogres and magicians were to be banished
ruthlessly from our shelves. Verily, reading will be but gentle sport in
the virtuous days to come.
Now it chanced that this serious protest against nursery lore fell into
the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang, the most light-hearted and conservative
of critics, and partial withal to tales of bloodshed and adventure. How
could it be otherwise with one reared on the bleak border land, and
familiar from infancy with the wild border legends that Sir Walter knew
and loved; with stories of Thomas the Rhymer, and the plundering Hardens,
and the black witches of Loch Awe! It was natural that with the echoes
of the old savage strife ringing in his ears, and with the memories of
the dour Scottish bogies and warlocks lingering in his heart, Mr. Lang
could but indifferently sympathize with those anxious parents who think
the stories of Bluebeard and Jack the Giant Killer too shocking for
infant ears to hear. Our grandmothers, he declared, were not ferocious
old ladies, yet they told us these tales, and many more which we were
none the worse for hearing. “Not to know them is to be sadly ignorant,
and to miss that which all people have relished in all ages.” Moreover,
it is apparent to him, and indeed to most of us, that we cannot take even
our earliest steps in the world of literature, or in the shaded paths of
knowledge, without encountering suffering and sin in some shape; while,
as we advance a little further, these grisly forms fly ever on before.
“Cain,” remarks Mr. Lang, “killed Abel. The flood drowned quite a number
of persons. David was not a stainless knight, and Henry VIII. was nearly
as bad as Bluebeard. Several deserving gentlemen were killed at Marathon.
Front de Bœuf came to an end shocking to sensibility, and to Mr. Ruskin.”
The _Arabian Nights_, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, _Paul and Virginia_—all the
dear old nursery favorites must, under the new dispensation, be banished
from our midst; and the rising generation of prigs must be nourished
exclusively on _Little Lord Fauntleroy_, and other carefully selected
specimens of milk-and-water diet.