Americanisms and Briticisms; with other essays on other isms

Front matter (continued 3)

Reading edition

That many readers should be bored by all of Zola's writing I can readily understand, for it is not always easy reading. That many more should be shocked by him is even more comprehensible, for he has a thick thumb and he makes dirty marks over all his work. That some even should be annoyed by M. Zola's method or irritated by his mannerisms, I can explain without difficulty. But what I cannot comprehend is that any one having read Une Page d'Amour or Germinal or L'Argent can deny that M. Zola is a very great force in fiction. But there are critics in Great Britain—and even in the United States, where we are less squeamish and less hypocritical—who refuse to reckon with M. Zola, and who pass by on the other side. A man must be strong of stomach to enjoy much of M. Zola's fiction; he must be feeble in perception if he does not feel its strength and its complex art. M. Zola's strength is often rank, no doubt, and there is a foul flavor about even his most forcible novels, which makes them unfit for the library of the clean-minded American woman. But in any exact sense of the word M. Zola's novels are not immoral, as the romances of M. Georges Ohnet are immoral, for example, or those of the late Octave Feuillet. Yet they are not spoon-meat for babes.

1891

III.—OF WOMEN'S NOVELS

THE reader of Humphrey Clinker—if that robust and sturdy British story has any readers nowadays, when the art of fiction has become so much finer and more subtile—will remember that little Tim Cropdale "had made shift to live many years by writing novels at the rate of £5 a volume; but that branch of business is now engrossed by female authors," so Smollett goes on to tell us, "who publish merely for the propagation of virtue, with so much ease and spirit and delicacy and knowledge of the human heart, and all in the serene tranquillity of high life, that the reader is not only enchanted by their genius but reformed by their morality." Humphrey Clinker was first published in 1771, the year of its author's death; and the names of the women of England who were writing novels six-score years ago are now forgotten. How many of the insatiate devourers of fiction who feed voraciously on the paper-covered volumes of the news-stand have ever heard of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph for example? Yet Charles James Fox called this the best novel of his age; and Doctor Johnson found great interest in following the misadventures of Miss Biddulph, and declared to the authoress that he knew not if she had a right, on moral principles, to make her readers suffer so much. The authoress of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph was Frances Sheridan, now remembered only because she was the mother of the author of the School for Scandal.

Mrs. Sheridan was an estimable woman, and it was not to her that Smollett turned the edge of his irony. There were in his day not a few fashionable ladies who, in "the serene tranquillity of high life," told stories that neither enchanted by their genius nor reformed by their morality. In most of the novels written by women in the second half of the eighteenth century, the morality is but little more obvious than the genius. Like the fashionable English novels of the first half of this century, now as carefully forgotten as the tales of Smollett's fair contemporaries, the female fiction with which Little Tim Cropdale found himself unable to compete was a curious compound of bad morals, bad manners, and bad grammar. Although stories by female authors who "publish merely for the propagation of virtue" and for the gratification of their own vanity are still to be found in London by any one who will seek on Mr. Mudie's shelves, the standard of female fiction has been greatly elevated in England since Miss Austen put forth her first modest story.

Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot followed in due season; and it would not now be possible to draw up a list of the ten greatest British novelists without placing on it the names of two or three women, at the least. There are diligent readers of fiction who would insist that the name of Mrs. Oliphant should be inscribed among the chosen few, by reason of certain of her earlier tales of Scottish life; and there are others equally insistent that the strange romances of the English lady who calls herself a French expletive entitle the name of "Ouida" to be placed on the roll of the chosen few. Indeed, the admiration of those who do admire this lady's stories is so ardent and fervid that I sometimes wonder whether the twentieth century will not see a Ouida Society for the expounding of the inner spiritual meaning of Under Two Flags and Held in Bondage.

In America, since the day when Susanna Rowson wrote Charlotte Temple, and more especially since the day when Mrs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, no list of American novelists could fairly be drawn up on which nearly half the names would not be those of women—even when one of these names might seem to be that of a man—like Charles Egbert Craddock's, for example. Colonel Higginson recently deplored the oblivion into which we have allowed the wholesomely realistic fiction of Miss Sedgwick to fall; and it has been remarked that the vigorous New England tales of Rose Terry Cooke never met with the full measure of success they deserved. But the authoress of Ramona, the authoress of That Lass o' Lowrie's, the authoress of Anne, the authoress of Faith Gartney's Girlhood, the authoress of Signor Monaldini's Niece, the authoress of John Ward, Preacher, the authoress of the Story of Margaret Kent, the authoress of Friend Olivia, and the authoresses of a dozen or of a score of other novels which have had their day of vogue, these ladies are able easily to prove that the field of fiction is being cultivated diligently by the women of America.

One of the cleverest novels recently published by any American woman is The Anglomaniacs, which came forth anonymously, but which Mrs. Burton Harrison has since acknowledged. It is a sketch only, a little picture of a corner of life, hardly more than an impression, but is brilliant in color and accurate in drawing. Limited as it is in scope and contracted as is its framework, it strikes me as the best reflection of certain phases of New York life since the author of the Potiphar Papers made fun of the Reverend Mr. Creamcheese. It echoes the talk of those who

"tread the weary mill

With jaded step and call it pleasure still."

And, better yet, it suggests the feelings which prompted the talk. At a recent meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt called Mr. Ward McAllister's Society as I Found It an "exposure of the 400;" and certainly it is difficult to believe that even 100 people of fashion could be found anywhere in New York as dull as those Mr. McAllister saw around him, as narrow-minded and as thick-witted. Mrs. Burton Harrison knows what is called Society quite as well as Mr. McAllister; and as she is a clever woman, those she sees about her are often clever also. The company of Anglomaniacs to which she invites our attention are not dullards, nor are they cads, even though an ill-natured philosopher might be moved to call them snobs. A good-natured philosopher would probably find them amusing; and he would make shift to enjoy their companionship, dropping easily into acquaintance and laughing with them quite as often as he laughed at them.

In these days, when hosts of honest people throughout the United States are reading with delighted awe long accounts of the manners and customs of a strange tribe of human creatures, the female of which is known as a "Society Lady" and the male as a "Clubman," it is pleasant to find novels of New York life written by ladies who move within the charmed circle of what is called Society, and who can write about the doings of their fellows simply and without either snobbish wonder or caddish envy. The authoress of The Anglomaniacs and the authoress of Mademoiselle Réséda see Society as it is, and they are not so dazzled by the unexpected glare that they need to put on sea-side spectacles to enable them to observe what is going on about them. It is an old saying that to describe well we must not know too well, for long knowledge blunts the edge of appreciation. But those who, having knowledge, seek rather to reveal than to describe, often render a more valuable service than the more superficial observers who offer us their first impressions. Something of this revelation of Society we find in Mrs. Harrison's brilliant sketch and in the stories of "Julien Gordon."

Thackeray complained that no British novelist had dared to describe a young man's life since Fielding wrote Tom Jones; and Mr. Henry James, praising George Sand, notes the total absence of passion in English novels. If this reproach is ever taken away from our fiction, it will be by some woman. Women are more willing than men to suggest the animal nature that sheathes our immortal souls; they are bolder in the use of the stronger emotions; they are more willing to suggest the possibilities of passion lurking all unsuspected beneath the placidity of modern fine-lady existence. Perhaps they are sometimes even a little too willing: as Mr. Warner reminded us not long ago, "it may be generally said of novelists, that men know more than they tell, and that women tell more than they know."

It is by slow degrees that woman forges forward and takes her place alongside man in the mastery of the fine arts. The Muses were all women, once upon a time, but those whom they visited were all men. The first art in which the woman made herself manifestly the equal of the man was the art of vocal music—or was it that of dancing? The daughter of Herodias was mistress of both accomplishments. Then in time woman divided the stage with man; the histrionic art was possessed by both sexes with equal opportunity; and who shall say that Garrick or Kean surpassed in power Mrs. Siddons or Rachel? Now prose fiction is theirs quite as much as it is man's; and when the Critic recently elected by vote the twenty foremost American women of letters, many more than half were writers of novels. The readers of Humphrey Clinker did not foresee Jane Austen and George Eliot and George Sand any more than little Tim Cropdale could.

1891

IV.—OF TWO LATTERDAY HUMORISTS

"WHOEVER and wherever and however situated a man is, he must watch three things—sleeping, digestion, and laughing," said Mr. Beecher; and he added with equal wisdom, "they are three indispensable necessities. Prayers are very well, and reading the Bible very well indeed; but a man can get along without the Bible, but he can't without the other three things." When a man has a clear conscience, good digestion ought to wait on appetite; and when he has a good digestion and a clear conscience, he ought to find it easy to sleep well. Yet as sleep is the only true friend that will not come at one's call, he may be wakeful despite his pure heart and quiet stomach; and in this case he may fairly resort to the Patent-office reports or the British comic papers, than which

"Not poppy, nor mandragora,

Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world"

are more potent soporifics. Many of the avowedly humorous publications of the day are better as a cure for sleeplessness than as a cause of laughter. Of all sad words of tongue or pen none is sadder than what is known in many a newspaper office as "comic copy." Wit cannot be made to order, and humor cannot be purchased by the yard, with a discount if the buyer takes the whole roll.

In the History of Henry Esmond—more veracious than many a more pretentious history of the reign of Queen Anne and of a broader truth—Thackeray speaks of the "famous beaux-esprits," who "would make many brilliant hits—half a dozen in a night sometimes—but, like sharp-shooters, when they had fired their shot, they were obliged to retire under cover till their pieces were loaded again and they got another chance at their enemy." And this figure expresses the exact fact; no wit is a breech-loader—still less is he a repeating rifle capable of discharging sixteen shots without taking thought. The readiest man must have time to reload and the most fertile must lie fallow now and again. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, even when he had most carefully prepared himself, did not sparkle in private conversation as he was able to make his characters scintillate through the long sittings of the scandalous college. If needs must and the devil drives a poor wretch to crack jokes unceasingly, then of necessity the edge of his wit will not be as keen nor the strokes of his humor as effective. And this is why the conducting of a comic paper is like the leading of a forlorn hope. Success can scarcely be more than a lucky accident. "'Tis not in mortals to command success," and if Cato and Sempronius were joint editors of a comic weekly it may be doubted whether they would even deserve it. Nor would the author of the tragedy from which this last quotation is taken have been a satisfactory office editor of a comic weekly, although he contributed to the Spectator the delightfully and delicately humorous sketch of Sir Roger de Coverley.

This is why the level of comic journalism is not as lofty as we could wish. This is why we frequently find poor jokes even in journals where every effort is made to provide good jokes. The supply is not equal to the demand, and the jokesmith often has to set his wits to work when the stock of raw material is running low. Punch and Puck are the representative comic weeklies of the two great branches of the English-speaking race. Punch has had a great past. It may even be questioned whether those who declare its decadence do not exaggerate its former merits almost as much as they do its present failings. It is vaguely remembered that in Punch Hood published the "Song of the Shirt" and Thackeray the Book of Snobs, and Douglas Jerrold the Story of a Feather, and it is often supposed that there was a time when all the clever men of London contributed their best things every week to Punch. But one has only to turn over the leaves of any of the earlier volumes of the British weekly to discover that if this ever were the case, then the clever men of London were a very dull lot. Punch is very much the same now that it was in the past. Hood contributed the "Song of the Shirt," and nothing else; Douglas Jerrold wrote the Story of a Feather—but who reads Douglas Jerrold nowadays? A'Becket composed a Comic History of England, and the few of us who have read it to-day feel as Dickens felt at the time, that it is dull and machine-made. Thackeray wrote Mr. Punch's Prize Novelists and the Snob Papers; and Thackeray was the "Fat Contributor;" and there has been no one like Thackeray since he left the paper.

But the pictures of Punch are as good now as ever they were; perhaps, taking one week with another, they are better. And the letter-press is very much what it has always been—rhymes, jingles, puns in profusion, topical allusions—"comic copy," in short. Now and then there is something in Punch which is still worth reading. There were Artemus Ward's papers a score of years ago, for instance, and there were more recently some of Mr. F. C. Burnand's earlier parodies and some of his earlier Happy Thoughts. Decidedly the most amusing prose which has appeared in Punch during the past four or five years is the series of overheard conversations called Voces Populi.

The author of Voces Populi is the "F. Anstey" who is well known in America as the writer of Vice Versa and of the Tinted Venus. It is an open secret that the real name of "F. Anstey" is Guthrie, just as everybody knows that the real name of "Mark Twain" is Clemens. (The conjunction of these names was fortuitous, but it serves to remind me that I once heard Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson say that the two strongest chapters in the fiction of the past ten years were to be found, one in the Giant's Robe of "F. Anstey" and the other in the Huckleberry Finn of "Mark Twain.") The first book of an unknown author has small chance of sudden success, and Vice Versa was Mr. Guthrie's first book. Fortunately it came into the hands of Mr. Andrew Lang a few days after it was published, and Mr. Lang was so taken with its freshness, its truthfulness to boy nature, and its almost pathetic humor that he wrote a column about it in the Daily News—a column of the heartiest appreciation. "It was Lang's review that made the success of Vice Versa," said Mr. Guthrie to me once in London, two or three years ago, when we were planning to write a story together. And it was Mr. Lang who afterwards introduced the author of Vice Versa to the staff of Punch.

In Voces Populi Mr. Guthrie has gathered a score and a half of fragmentary dialogues, casual, plotless, but never pointless. They are thumbnail sketches of British character, "At a Dinner Party," "At a Wedding," "At the French Play," "At a Turkish Bath," "In an Italian Restaurant," in "Trafalgar Square" during a demonstration, and in "A Show Place." They are photographic in their accuracy, making due allowance for humorous foreshortening. They hit off the foibles of fashionable frivolity; they depict with unfaltering exactness the inconceivable limitations and narrowness of the middle class; but where they are most abundantly and triumphantly successful is in the rendering of the lower orders of London. Mr. Guthrie has caught the cockney in the very act of cockneyism, and he has here pilloried him for all time, but wholly without bitterness or rancor. Mr. Guthrie knows his roughs, his ruffians, his house-maids, his travellers, "Third Class—Parliamentary," and his visitors to "An East-End Poultry Show;" he knows them through and through; he sees their weakness; and after all he is tolerant, he does not dislike them in his heart, he handles them as though he loved them. We confess his kindliness of touch, even though it moves us to no more friendly feeling of our own. "Vox populi, vox Dei," says the adage, as true as most adages; but these Voces Populi, if not "Voces diaboli," might at least be called to the witness-box by the devil's advocate. It is a terrible indictment of contemporary British manners that we hear in these conversations, humorous as they are; and the indictment is perhaps the severer in that it is wholly unconscious. It is quite unwittingly that Mr. Guthrie offers this evidence to prove the truth of Matthew Arnold's assertion that one could see in England "an aristocracy materialized and null, a middle class purblind and hideous, a lower class crude and brutal."

In this respect at least no greater contrast could be found to the Voces Populi of Mr. Guthrie, reprinted from the British Punch, than the Short Sixes of Mr. H. C. Bunner, reprinted from the American Puck. The impression with which one rises from the reading of Mr. Bunner's tales is as different as possible from that with which one rises from the reading of Mr. Guthrie's dialogues. In the one book we see the British selfish, brutal, narrow-minded; and in the other we see the Americans lively, kindly, good-humored. In each case the volume is made up of matter contributed week by week to a comic journal. If it be objected that the satirist is bound perforce to show the seamy side of human nature, the obligation ought to be equally respected on both sides of the Atlantic; and the fact is that Mr. Guthrie reports conversations which are very clever and very amusing, but which give us no liking for his fellow-countrymen; whereas Mr. Bunner's men and women we are ready and glad to take by the hand, even if we do not take them all to our hearts. Look down the dramatis personæ of Mr. Bunner's thirteen stories, and even the old curmudgeon who befools the little parson of one of "The Two Churches of Quawket" has humor enough to save him from hatred, and the little parson himself is pitiful rather than contemptible. Neither Colonel Brereton's Aunty nor the mendacious and persuasive colonel is a character whom any American would cross the street to avoid—far from it. And as for the pert young person who engages in "A Sisterly Scheme," and who is perhaps the most forward and objectionable young woman of recent fiction, where is the American who could object to her? Where, indeed, is the American who does not envy Muffets the fun of his courtship and the joy of his marriage?

George Eliot in one of her novels tells us that "a difference of taste in jests is a great strain on the affections"—a profound truth. There is little hope of happiness in a union where one party has a highly developed sense of humor and the other none at all. That is perhaps the reason why so few international marriages are happy. Certainly, the chief characteristic of the figures in Mr. Guthrie's little dramas is their absence of humor, and one of the chief characteristics of the people in Mr. Bunner's prose comedies is their abundance of humor. We laugh at the speakers in Voces Populi, while we laugh with the actors in Short Sixes. And we find in Mr. Bunner's book an unfailing variety, an unflagging ingenuity and an unforced humor, now rich and now delicate. We are delighted by wit, playful and incessant and never obtrusive. We discover ourselves to be dissolved in laughter, and often it is "the exquisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the reasoning faculty," as George Eliot called it in one of her letters. Never is it laughter that we ever feel ashamed of; near the smile there is often a tear, hidden, and to be found only by those who seek. "The Tenor," for example, which may seem to some hasty readers almost farcical, is in reality almost tragic, in that the heroine sees the shattering of an ideal and stumbles over the clay feet of her idol. The "Love Letters of Smith" are broadly funny, if you choose to think them so, but I feel sorry for the reader who pays that clever sketch the tribute of careless laughter only.

Next, perhaps, to Mr. Bunner's firm grasp of character, to his delicate perception, to his keen observation, to his faculty of hinting a pathetic undercurrent beneath the flow of humor, comes his felicity in suggesting the very essence of New York. Only three of the thirteen little tales are supposed to happen in this great city, and these are, perhaps, not likely to be the most popular; but they are enough to show again what Mr. Bunner had already revealed in the Story of a New York House and in the still uncollected Ballads of the Town, that he has a knowledge of this busy city possessed by no other American writer of fiction. It is knowledge not paraded in his pages, but it permeates certain of his characters. Take "The Tenor," for example. In that lively story the young girl, seeking out the being whom she has worshipped from afar, rashly ventures into the hotel where the singer and his wife live. She goes as a servant, and she has a chance interview with one of the employees of the house—"a good-looking, large girl, with red hair and bright cheeks." This young person sees the name "Louise Levy" on the heroine's trunk. "You don't look like a sheeny," she remarks promptly. "Can't tell nothin' about names, can you? My name's Slattery. You'd think I was Irish, wouldn't you? Well, I'm straight Ne' York. I'd be dead before I was Irish. Born here. Ninth Ward, an' next to an engine-house." Could anything be more intensely, impressively, essentially Manhattan than this little vignette framed in the doorway of a hotel?

There are those who choose to speak of Mr. Bunner as a humorist, because he is the editor of Puck. He is a humorist, no doubt, and his humor will endure, for it is founded on observation and on an understanding of his fellow-man. But he is a poet—as a true humorist must be. Perhaps his best story is "Love in Old Clothes," in which the humor and the poetry are inextricably blended, and in which there is a pure tenderness of touch I cannot but call exquisite. And yet, perhaps, I do not like it as well as the vigorous sketch called the "Zadoc Pine Labor Union." This is an object-lesson in Americanism; it is a model of applied political economy. And Zadoc Pine himself is one of the most direct and manly characters who has stepped from real life into literature. He has gumption and he has grit; he is an American as Benjamin Franklin was an American, and as Abraham Lincoln was. He could think as straight as he could shoot; and the tale of his rise in life is as potent a plea for freedom as Mr. Herbert Spencer's.

But about Mr. Bunner's writings I confess that I can never speak with the expected coldness of the critic, for the author is my friend for now many years. We have dwelt beneath the same roof for months at a time. We have exchanged counsel day and night; we have heard each other's plans and projects; we have read each other's manuscript; we have revised each other's proof-sheets; more than once we have written the same story together, he holding the pen, or I, as chance would have it. But shall friendship blind me to the quality of my comrade's art? When he puts forth a book, shall I pass by on the other side, silent, and giving no sign? That may be the choice of some, but it is not mine.

1891

By THOMAS W. HIGGINSON.

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The following have been changed from that in the printed book: the words thus modified is a foreign word,=>the word thus modified is a foreign word, unforgetable=>unforgettable (note of etext transcriber)