The Contributors' Club

THEY were five, and in a row-boat, floating down a Florida creek in this last month of March: four were women, one was a man; all were passably well-looking, all under forty, all more or less literary, and all good-natured. Three were, or had been, “ Contributors,” and two wanted to be, which does just as well. They were Miss Mary, Cream, Jane, and the Widow; and then there was the Judge.

Cream. In Kismet, you know, they talk about chameleons as though they belonged to Egypt as exclusively as the Sphinx; those on that sweet-gum make the tenth green and the twenty-sixth brown one I’ve seen this morning. By the way, did any of you notice how exactly the plot of Kismet was like that of Thomas Hardy’s Pair of Blue Eyes ?

The Judge. Plot is nothing.

Jane. That, Mary, is a mocking-bird; you can tell them by the pert twitch of their tails. And that is a blue bittern, or poor Job. And — Oh, do paddle us across, Judge! There’s a particularly big, horrible moccasin at the foot of that cypress, on the long moss. See him?

The Widow. Ugh! yes. Don’t go any nearer.

The Judge, contemplatively. About six feet long.

Cream. Do row away. We are not Elsie Venners.

The Judge, rowing down stream. Ladies, I should like to try an experiment. You are all more or less literary —

The Widow. “Generally less.” (The Crushed Tragedian.)

The Judge. All intelligent— The Others. Hear! Hear!

The Judge. You are not likely to confuse the Warners, mingle the Dodges, or mistake Charles Reade for Christian. Now, I want you to tell me, each one of you, on your honor, and without hesitation or attempt at deception, your favorite novel, —beginning with Jane.

Jane. The Mill on the Floss.

Cream. Les Trois Mousquetaires.

The Widow. Pickwick.

Miss Mary. The Heir of Redelyffe.

The Judge. As I have put you on your honor, I suppose I must believe you. But how in the world you can all leave out Fielding and Thackeray —

Cream. Because we are we, and not you.

Miss Mary. Judge, please stand up and pick that tree-orchid.

The Widow. We have more flowers now than we can carry, — loads.

Miss Mary. I did n’t want the pinxter flowers and Easter lilies; Cream would bring them. I only wanted those that do not grow at the North, —yellow jessamine, wild orange, the air-plants, the little pinguiculas,the chaptalias or Southern daisies, Cherokee roses, and —

The Judge. Now, ladies, having partially recovered from the Heir of Redclyffe, I ask you to mention, with equal frankness, your favorite poem.

Jane. Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality.

The Widow. Bret Harte’s Geological Society on the Stanislaus.

Cream. Evangeline.

Miss Mary. Lucille.

The Judge, despairingly, And Shelley? And Swinburne?

Cream, with excitement. An alligator! Hush, now. Paddle up softly, Judge. His head is turned the other way, and he can’t see around the corner of those great calash-tops of horn that protect his eyes. No pun intended, but he is a knobby fellow.

The Widow. Bang him on the back with the oar, Judge; let’s see him dive.

Cream. Not yet; I want to look at him. Why won’t they ever come out of the water and walk on the bank in profile, like sensible beasts? It’s the only good way to see them. They roar and snort here in the summer, they say, so that you can hear them ever so far, — miles.

The Judge. Now, ladies, as to tales of horror.

The Widow. Bang him on the back, first, Judge. There’s a tail of horror for you!

The Judge, rather severely. I was referring to stories and legends which have had such an effect upon you, for instance, as to keep you awake at night.

Miss Mary. Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Jane. Frankenstein.

Cream. A story published ever so many years ago in Harper’s Magazine, called What was It? I cannot think of it even now without shuddering.

The Widow. I think nothing ever kept me awake from horror, unless it was Salvini trying to play David Garrick.

Cream. Oh, you Sotherner!

The Judge. One more trial, and my experiments are over. Will you repeat to me any recent poem, or portion of a poem, which has impressed you sufficiently to remain in your memory. Don’t search; take the one that is there.

Cream. Well, then, here is mine.

Now, Mary, your turn.

Miss Mary, coloring. I would rather not tell.

The Others. Why?

Miss Mary. Because it is — a hymn.

Cream. Ask her no more. The moon may not agree, but I am “done gone shore ” it is a — Moody and Sankey.

Miss Mary. Yes, it is.

The Judge, with a sigh. Well, Jane.

Jane. Mine is not new, — 1875. So, not being within the conditions, I am excused.

The Judge. Nothing since?

Jane. Nothing.

The Judge. Then give it.

Jane. Well, then, —if I must.

Cream. Not quite fair, Jane; too sad. The Judge took off his hat; and in another minute I should have been crying.

Jane. You wanted the truth.

Cream. " When the war is over, let us sail among the islands of the Ægean, and be as young as ever.” (Landor. P. and A.) The war is over; and that is what we are doing now.

The Judge. You have not all of you given your quotations.

The Widow. No, I have not; here it is, the latest nonsense-verses by Lear, the inimitable author of those modern classics, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, and the immortal Jumblies. It is called the Pelican Chorus, and the effect is intensified if you pronounce it Pe-lican.

You remember the rows of pelicans at St. Augustine, sitting on Bird Island? There is a reminiscence of the Jumblies, too, in this epic. The Pe-licans’ daughter has married the King of the Cranes, and in the last verse the parents sing as follows: —

It was to the Chankly Bore, you remember, that the Jumblies sailed.

The other Ladies.

The Judge, discouraged. Am I to understand, ladies, that you have been perfectly truthful and honest in these selections?

The Others. Entirely so.

The Judge. All I can say, then, is that the mixture is most extraordinary. How you can —

Miss Mary. What is that dark thing in the water-lettuce along-side?

The Judge, hastily. Don’t be alarmed. He has been carried out, probably, on one of these floating islands. Sit perfectly still; I can disentangle the boat in a moment.

Cream. But what is it, any way; I cannot see.

The Judge. A rattlesnake. But —

Immediate shrieks, which end the conversation.

— A contributor raises a critical objection to Mr. Stedman’s strictures upon the confusion of prose and poetry in the popular use of those words. He makes a good point in saying that “ the real distinction is between prose and verse.” But his criticism of Mr. Stedman is based upon an absolute misquotation from the Victorian Poets. The passage (chapter on Robert Browning,page 299) is not, as he gives it, “ Poetry is beautiful thought expressed in musical words,” but, “It is beautiful thought expressed in rhythmical form, not half expressed or uttered in the form of prose.” Whether the original expression and the substitute are synonymous depends entirely on the matters involved in the context, before and after. It happens that the change is an important one, as Mr. Stedman is writing technically, and not essaying a general and philosophical adjustment of an old dispute. Your contributor’s oversight is an example of that indifference to precision in language of which Mr. Stedman complained. The latter’s phrase certainly is no complete definition of poetry, it being “essential to a complete definition that it should distinguish the thing defined from everything else.” But in the technical use of it, only to be learned from the context, it is what Whately calls an “accidental definition,” in respect to which Webster’s Dictionary may be consulted.

In the same (March) number of The Atlantic, Mr. Stedman, oddly enough, is censured by Mr. Piatt from an opposite point of view, that is, for saying of Hawthorne that

It seems to me that to any songster a measurable use of analogy and metaphor should be allowed. The poet evidently means that Hawthorne’s prose was so exquisite that, as a species of imaginative art, it was no less admirable than noble poetry. I suppose it is a poet’s office to convey his idea in the most compact or striking language consistent with good sense, — with “the sanity of true genius.” Pray, what has Mr. Piatt to say concerning Keats’s imaginative line in Isabella ?

Possibly that, as the man in fact was not yet murdered, Keats should have restricted himself to an exact and legal exposition of the status quo.

— “Set thine house in order,” said the prophet, and to-day there is much ado to obey the injunction. Until lately the three quarters of a man’s life which is spent within the inclosure of four walls, a ceiling, and a floor has been entirely unconscious of any influences shed upon it from these speechless surroundings. Wall-papers, colors, carpets, tables, and chairs were, to our fathers and grandfathers, only wall-papers, colors, carpets, tables, and chairs, and they were nothing more. Their household virtues flourished and brought forth fruit without the advantage of sympathy and encouragement from a properly adjusted background of accessories. In the academical pictures of the last century, the subjects had their being in the midst of vast conventional draperies and at the feet of architectural columns, which conveyed the idea of inclosure about as happily as the device of Bottom, the weaver. Now the figures of art are projected against possible backgrounds and details suggestive of sentiment and life. You may study archæology or contemporary decoration in the accessories of the pictures of Alma Tadema and of the modern genre painters. Sir Charles Grandison, Evelina, the Vicar of Wakefield, the heroines of Miss Austen, owed nothing to the fashion of tables and chairs, or to the surface treatment of walls and ceilings. Now the novelists give us veritable interiors, and are accurate in household luxuries. He whose office it is to “ present well ” in the modern comedy of life has no sinecure; the highest qualities available among the players are not too much for this function. If we are not curious in patterns and colors, if we are not fastidious in the matter of stuffs and furniture, it is because we are inaccessible to the finer emotions, and do not read the abundant literature of decoration.

In a recent essay by Mr. C. C. Townshend, an English architect, reference is made to a notice in the Edinburgh Review for April, 1807, of Mr. Thomas Hope’s work on Household Furniture and Internal Decoration, then just published. “ There is in England, we believe,” said the indignant reviewer, “a pretty general contempt for those who are habitually and seriously occupied about such paltry and fantastical luxuries; and at such a moment as the present we confess we are not a little proud of this Roman spirit, which leaves the study of those effeminate elegancies to slaves and foreigners, and holds it beneath the dignity of a free man to be eminently skilled in the decoration of couches and the mounting of chandeliers.”

But through no decadence in the patriotic virtues, I hope, through no corrupt preference for bondage in a gilded cage over “strenuous liberty” with horse-hair furniture, we have at length learned that art is

We are indebted to no great prophet or master for this new doctrine of life. It has come first from artists by example, afterwards from dilettanti and littérateurs by commentary. But the public has been prepared for the revolution by the natural growth of the age towards a belief that the development of the fitness of things is not to be obtained without regard to beauty.

To the literature of the subject we have had of late two notable accessions in The House Beautiful, by Mr. Clarence Cook, and Art Decoration applied to Furniture, by Mrs. Spofford. These writers are both Americans, both are practiced littérateurs, and both are on the side of the layman in art, — that is, they do not pretend to be technical; but they have by no means proved to be of equal merit in this new field. Perhaps from neither of them had we a right to expect any great flood of light on this subject; but such light as they have shed has for the most part come from one of the two. I dare to say that the male readers of Harper’s Bazar are rare enough to render Mrs. Spofford’s book, which is now reprinted from its pages, to them, at least, quite a new contribution. It has come like a sudden revelation, and enjoys the advantage of a surprise. On the other hand, Mr. Cook’s familiar talk has been amiably developed for a year past to the consciousness of both sexes in the pages of Scribner’s. I am bound to say that the lady has done her work well. The chapters in which she has presented, in historical succession, the development and characteristics of the Pompeiian, the Gothic (ancient and modern), the Renaissance of Louis Quatorze, Quinze, and Seize respectively, of Elizabeth, James, and Queen Anne, although sadly wanting in pertinent pictorial illustrations, are in every other respect excellent. Her authorities have been consulted with the diligence of the student, and the results set forth with the intelligence of a practiced hand and the elegance of a refined and sensitive spirit. The effort to define these successive styles of decoration has been made before in the South Kensington handbooks, but never before has the effort been crowned with a success so satisfactory. As a contribution to history, the connection which she traces between the forms of art and the spirit of the times out of which they unconsciously sprang is especially notable. The book is to be commended to all who seek, not for notions, but for knowledge.

Mr. Cook’s aim, on the other hand, I fancy, is to present rather notions than knowledge, although he formulates his idea in rather more literary fashion by protesting that he merely desires to express in furniture and decoration the proposition that “ simplicity seems to him a good part of beauty, and utility only beauty in a mask.” In striving to this end, it must be confessed, he “strictly meditates a thankless muse,” who inspires her votary to give utterance to no systematic scheme or ideal of decoration, without which, indeed, his House Beautiful must needs disappoint all who venture therein. In fact, it is not a house founded upon an idea; it is not a unity in the sense of art, as we had a right to expect from its title. With such a writing above its gate, we should have had the moral decorations and conscientious furniture which belong to this age of introversion developed and classified into a symmetrical system. We should have had principles of form and color roundly set forth and put in practice. But we wander with him through the four apartments of his house, from the entrance to the living-room, from the dining-room to the bed-room, well pleased with the grace and hospitality of our host, but astonished to find rather a museum of bric-à-brac than a succession of ideal rooms. They leave upon the mind no impression of color, without which there can be no spirit of grace, no poetry, in any furnishings. In fact, I fear that my host is color-blind, or, more probably perhaps, that he has no convictions or sentiment in this regard. To be sure, Mr. Cook is not an artist or a decorator; he is not professional in this sense, but he is known as a critic and a man of letters, and art has been taught to expect much from literature in these days. Thus, his fair competitor has, it seems to me, better understood the function of the literary craft in this new field. She points a moral in a very sensible fashion; she not only gives us wall-papers and carpets, but she gives us reasons why. She not only shows us forms of furniture, but she treats of the conditions of life out of which these forms developed, and thereby enables us to judge of their true significance, and helps to make us catholic to all honest forms of art, teaches us to avoid narrow prejudices, and to organize the inevitable eclecticism of our time. She seeks to make archæology useful to art. Mr. Cook is a collector of pretty things, concerning which his conversation is lively and entertaining, but it gives us no new thought; it does not lift us above the region of absolute exclusions and peremptory rules, into which the literary masters of art and the artistic masters of literature have plunged us, and from which we are not rescued by these beautiful pages. The book, in fact, is a series of effective drawings by Mr. Lathrop, and of clever designs by Mr. Sandier, beautifully engraved by Mr. Marsh, concerning which Mr. Clarence Cook indulges in a chatty, after-dinner monologue, bubbling and shallow, missing the serious points to be made, taking no note of any quality in the points by which the essential principles of decoration might have been illustrated; in short, the literary business of the book is of the slightest character, and affords little, if any, of that illumination which the subject so urgently needs.

We have been deceived; the House Beautiful is merely an Old Curiosity Shop. We have yet to seek for the ideal abode wherein art has established a condition of perfect fitness for all the appointments by which the life of the household may be made beautiful indeed.

— I like to mark coincidences, and especially when they are so extraordinary as two were that came to my attention last week. The first occurred at Naples. General Grant was embarking on an American man-of-war, and the cannon of the forts were roaring their salutes. At the same time the French mail steamer was entering the harbor, having on board the Japanese envoy to France. Deeming the firing to be in his honor, the Oriental returned the compliment by repeatedly bowing in the direction of the smoke, to the great amusement of his fellow-passengers.

The second instance comes nearer home. The legislature of Connecticut, warned by the earnest publications of the venerable ex-president of Yale of the laxity of the divorce laws of their State, lately did themselves honor by making them more rigid. It happened that after the writings of Dr. Woolsey had been well circulated in his State, and had created a sort of public opinion in favor of the view he took, a certain lecturer in Boston began to speak in the same line, and when the Connecticut legislature had completed its good action he lifted up his voice and cried to an admiring public, " Behold the power of the Boston Lectureship! ”

— An English writer, in treating the works of one whose genius has for twenty years illuminated the pages of The Atlantic, met the following passage: —

“ Take two such words as home and world. What can you do with chrome, or loam, or gnome, or tome ? You have dome, foam, and roam, and not much more, to use in your pome, as some of our fellow-countrymen call it.”

In a note the careful editor says, ” ‘Pome’ is a name given in America to a baked cake of maize or Indian meal, about the size of an apple, but seems to be used here in another sense.”

The italics are mine. A little learning is a dangerous thing. A reference to a dictionary would have shown that the “ cake ” is a “ pone,” which is not “ the size of an apple.” Common sense might have shown that the writer, who was discussing “ poetry,” referred to a careless pronunciation of the word “ poem.”

— There is one question which American writers have dragged out lately into philosophy and fiction, always handling it as timidly as if it were a wourali poison for the soul, and always dropping it hastily with a fit of shuddering. Sometimes it is orthodoxy which scares them off, sometimes the vulgar guesses of heterodoxy.

The subject is that inevitable legacy which every man inherits, that is neither money nor lands. How much does he inherit? What choice is left him in the portioning of such goods yonder?

Doctor Holmes began, in his Guardian Angel, to pry into the mystery, but suddenly covered it up reverently, turning off into the tenderest of love stories. He knows there are certain courts which ought never to be opened to the profane, though the majority hold that the time has come when all mysteries and all sciences, if worth knowing at all, can be condensed into a lecture or sprightly magazine article, and bought for a quarter of a dollar.

But the public does not relish this particular subject. A man is rather amused and curious about the tracing of his body back to its original elements, — so much lime, so much albumen, water so much. But begin to parcel out the live creature within him among his progenitors, — dramatic faculty to this grandfather, some temper to another, each whim of passion and appetite to some dead and gone source, — and he has an uneasy sense that you are tampering with his soul. Is it falling apart into a mere package of heirlooms?

Putting aside the religious view of the question altogether, however, here is a wide field for strange discoveries, waiting for some Schliemann in human nature. There are forgotten facts and obscure hints in each man’s own history, which startle him at times with a meaning which he dimly grasps. We talk of the subtle instinct of blood? Now, here is a man with some mental trait, some peculiar whim, which he has known as his own all of his life; it is a part of himself. In middle age he meets a far-off cousin, unknown before, who faces him with this bit of his ego. What kind of kinship do you call that? Where did this obscure force of connection begin, and where will it end?

Still more uneasy is the consciousness of this inexorable band linking us to some dead human being whom we never saw. A singular instance of this fell in my way last summer. There are many traditions, in the State where I was born, of a certain pioneer and Indian fighter in early times, of exceptional daring and slaying power. One story is that after terrible suffering in his old age, being in extremis, ho dragged himself out of bed, thrust on his hat, and, standing erect, cried, “Now, Death, do your worst!” and so fell dead. The descendants of this old man have been lazy, easy-going folk, with much general flabbiness of character. Last year, a young fellow from another county, a stranger in the neighborhood, was caught in a mill. While the people were clumsily trying to rescue him, the lad uttered no cry, and joked in a lazy, good-humored way. He died a minute or two after he was taken out, and he was found to be frightfully mangled. After death he was identified as a collateral descendant of the pioneer; he had, too, a remarkable birthmark, which had given his ancestor his name among the Indians.

The more one looks into this matter, the more uncomfortable one grows. Hawthorne somewhere says that a strongwilled man is a bugbear in the whole circle of his kinsfolk. But how shall we submit to the unknown strong-willed man away back in his grave, who has stamped his character, his prejudices, his very taste of palate or whim of stomach on generations who are still trooping into the world? Families of commonplace people develop the most unaccountable tendencies; the W’s cannot touch liquor without ending as drunkards; the C’s (sensitive, emotional, truthful folk) certainly are not to be trusted as far as money goes; the J’s all gravitate to the kennels where are the fighting dogs. How can you account for such paradoxes in character unless by the compelling force of some man back in the ages, of bigger and better stuff than they, who willfully chose evil, and set body and soul by it? The clock he wound up strikes feebly, running down in his descendants.

I have not the least doubt that all those petty antipathies, for which Shakespeare can render no firmer reason, — the nausea of this man at sight of a cat, of that when the bagpipe sings in the nose, and the like, — could be traced back to some real injury which the dominant grandfather had received from them. We are paying somebody’s grudge when we stamp on the innocent spider or grind a garter snake under our heel. Who will find out the secret of these dead Napoleons who rule us out of their graves?

— In reading Mr. Richard Grant White’s admirable paper on Americanisms, in the March number of The Atlantic, there occurred to me an example of that much-misunderstood class of expressions which he has apparently overlooked, or at least has not mentioned in this article. The use of the word mail to denote letters and newspapers coming through the post at one time to one address is a pure Americanism, “ Shall I bring your mail from the office? ” would be utterly unintelligible to an English ear.

— Can any one explain why English and American printers always put a circumflex accent over the first vowel in the word chalet ? Why not the acute accent or the diæresis? Either would be as admissible. Outside of French books I have never seen the word correctly printed except in the London edition of Marmorne. I thought I had found a second exception in the Boston reprint of that same novel, but the compositor, who started off all right, got discouraged, broke down, and ended by impaling himself on the accent. I suppose that nine authors out of ten write it châlet ; I write it châlet myself, and that is what makes me particularly severe on other persons guilty of the same stupidity.

— Let us suppose that a few hundred persons are killed every year in our streets by something falling upon them from the house-tops; let it be the general impression that this something is a loose brick. Then let us fancy that some matter-of-fact individual steps forward and says: “My friends, do not be excited; really, there is no cause for alarm; it was not a brick; there is not on record a single well-authenticated instance of a brick falling from a house-top.” To be sure, it was not a brick; it was a tile. There are men who will lay down their lives in defense of a distinction without a difference.

I think there is something not slightly comical in the attitude of those gentlemen who stand forth in the public prints with cards and certificates solemnly assuring us that hydrophobia is so rare a disease that not a single well-authenticated case of it can be cited. In the United States during the past eighteen months not fewer than one hundred and fifty persons have died horrible deaths resulting from the bites of dogs. If the information that they did not die of hydrophobia is not more consoling and satisfactory to the luckless victims than it presumably is to their surviving relatives. I fail to see that the point is worth insisting on. A hundred and fifty persons are bitten by dogs; these one hundred and fifty persons go mad, and die in indescribable agony. Now, whether you call that hydrophobia or cholera infantum does not matter a pin; they are dead all the same, and the cause of their death was one that might easily have been prevented. A single human life is more precious than that of the entire canine race, and I hold that every dog —

which is let run at large without a muzzle should instantly be shot or drowned. Then if anybody wishes to split technical hairs, there is no objection; it is a harmless amusement and does n’t hurt the hairs.

— I hear my scientific friends complain that the well-known lecturer, Rev. Joseph Cook, seldom gets his scientific facts just right. There is almost always some error, large or small, they say, showing a want of habitual accuracy of mind. This is their business; what strikes me is a similar inaccuracy often shown in his poetical quotations. Take, for instance, this from Lowell, with which he closed one of his lectures, not long ago: —

Thus it stands in the authorized and copyrighted report in the New York Independent, with the usual parenthetical [Applause] following. But in the original it stands as follows, those words being italicized which are altered or omitted by the lecturer: —

The lines are from The Present Crisis; the percentage of altered or omitted words is something formidable, and I must say that, considering the two as poets, I prefer Lowell to Cook. The most objectionable aspect of the matter is that the substitution of the vague phrase “ yet-veiled ” for the strong word “ scaffold ” seems deliberately done to conceal the omission of the finest line in the whole poem.

— Since the time seems to have come when a man’s expression of his wishes with regard to what is to be done after his death is violently and persistently opposed by all who survive him, is it not a good opportunity to suggest that perhaps respect has been paid for a long enough time to the doggerel over Shakespeare’s grave?

When we consider how little we know of the great poet, and the possibility of finding something more by an examination of his tomb, it seems as if, with proper care, an investigation might be made that would possibly reward the trouble. Perhaps some documents could be found that would give us precious knowledge; or it may not be too late to find some traces of the shape of Shakespeare’s skull. Such light would be of great value, and there is surely no sound reason to be urged against this step. It is easy to call one’s neighbors “ harpies,” “ ghouls,” and even “ vampires,” but there is no irreverence towards Shakespeare in this suggestion; indeed, it springs from a desire to learn more about his vague personality. Two centuries and a half have passed by without infringing this command of Shakespeare’s, and it is easy to suppose that if he had foreseen the admiration now felt for him he would have sanctioned what some will doubtless call a sacrilege. One thing is sure: if Schliemann, in his excavations, were to come across the tomb of Homer with curses like those quoted in Tristram Shandy against the man who should open it, nothing would prevent the modern investigator from going on in his good work. The reasons against it, however, would be quite as strong as in the case of Shakespeare. Is it not advisable, then, to avoid waiting till it is too late? That is to say, unless, as I may fear, it is too late already.

— I don’t believe there is any change between the social modes of past and present more significant than is the altered face of social gossip; that is, if the old dramatists have given us anything like the truth; and unless they have, their people could hardly impress us so potently as they do to-day. Supposing, however, that the Mrs. Candors and Sir Benjamin Backbites could again rehabilitate themselves in the flesh, and make morning calls among their social equals, how easily we can fancy the broad laugh with which they entered upon their old-time sport gradually dying away, until it subsided into petrified silence, as the altered tenor of modern gossip dawned upon them! How strangely out of tune would be their pitiless thrusts, however polished, amidst the moral refinements of our social criticisms, our quasi-benevolent analysis of person and motive, into which that old, ugly-sounding word scandal is now so often made to resolve itself ! The rampant, full-blooded, and perhaps somewhat honest style of rending an absent friend for an hour’s mad amusement would now nowhere be dubbed funny, but brutal!

Listen to two or three women of the polite world when they come together now to discuss the faults, foibles, or misfortunes of an acquaintance. Mark the accents of most catholic charity in which the thing is likely to be done, and how strictly the scientific method is held to. With scalpel and microscope in hand, the moral anatomy is carried on: every trait is severally classified; and, after the dissection is completed, some attempt may be made again to unite the fragments into a consistent whole. There may be a total absence of malice, as well as of any warm-blooded desire for sport at another’s expense. It is a purely mental exercise, with a dash of conscientious accuracy about it. The accuracy, of course, depends altogether upon the narrator’s discernment or imagination; for it partakes somewhat of the novelist’s art, brought to bear upon the nearest available subjects. And what an immense relief is thus afforded to a number of half - idle, would - be - intellectual women!

But, after all, is n’t the modern method of social gossip quite as despicable as the old, since its quasi-conscientiousness is more a matter of brain than of soul, of taste than of feeling?

I wish some clever story-teller, with the true touch for portrait - painting, would show the legitimate descendant of Mrs. Candor, —her own likeness, full length and breadth. She is too subtly analytical for the dramatist, and would elude the grasp of Sheridan himself to put in a telling light upon the stage. I used to think that real people, set within the prosaic light of every-day life, with common moral defects uncovered, and without any profound passion, or even crime, for a background, would make figures too sorry for our fiction; but since I read that remarkable novel Afterglow I think so no longer.

By the way, I don’t believe that story has got all the praise it has earned. It is a wonderful example of realistic art that can give us a dozen or so characters, with only two or three for whom we can feel anything like admiration or respect, and yet keep us from utterly despising the every-day crookedness and meanness of the others. How can we despise them, when we are imperceptibly made to feel that they are so much like — well, perhaps ourselves, or those we are obliged (for the want of better) to call our friends? Contrast the art here with some that is more lauded, — Daudet’s Sidonie, for example, who is allowed no flutterings of scruple, no hesitating weakness, in her well-mappedout career from childhood. We are forced to reject her as not of kin, and the obvious moral lesson of the author is made to count for less than he would have it, after all.

But most readers still want to know that a book has a moral lesson. Is it because the art of some of the best recent stories makes the moral less obvious that so many readers don’t exactly know what to believe about them?

-There is one feature of our domestic architecture which, like so many other of our American inconveniences and discomforts, has been transmitted from England: that is, our windows. It would perhaps be interesting to know how much, profanity and bad temper has been caused by our cumbrous mode of construction, the sashes sliding heavily in their frames and balanced by a rude system of weights. How often we rush to the window, panting for fresh air, only to find the sash swollen by the damp weather and stolidly resisting all our efforts to move it! We can get no good purchase; if there is a perpendicular middle sash we grasp it with our fingers, we grow red in the face, our hand slips, and crash goes our elbow through the glass. I believe there is hardly a house in the country where some of the windows are not in a chronic state of immovability. Everywhere on the continent of Europe casement windows are universal, swinging freely on their hinges and easy to manage. On a pleasant summer day, what a delight to throw open the entire large window space to the air, and feel yourself out-doors! With our style of window construction this is impossible; at the utmost but half the window opening can admit the air freely. If we will look outside, we generally have to duck our heads under the raised sash, and maintain an uncomfortable stooping, half-standing position. And if some one within the room happens suddenly to call our attention, we are apt to turn quickly and bump the backs of our heads against the sash’s sharp edge. On visiting Chester, England, I was delighted with the quaint picturesqueness of the old town. It reminded me of ancient Hildesheim. But somehow there was a difference; what was it? What gave the houses such a grim, " keep-outside ” expression ? Ah, the windows! It was a warm day in May, and some of the sashes were lowered a little at the top, and some were raised a little at the bottom, and the rows of fascinating facades were half spoiled by the insolent stare of glaring panes of glass. A fit symbol of buttonedup British exclusiveness! And as I glanced out of my tavern window at the vista of quaint gables, distorted through glass of doubtful transluceney, with a dozen or so of large flies imprisoned and buzzing noisily between the two sashes which kept out half of heaven’s air and kept in the hateful odors of weak tea, I thought, When I build a house it shall be in the Queen Anne style, but it must have casement windows.