The Contributors' Club

A GOOD deal has been written, of late, to show that Boston’s claim to musical culture and taste is not quite so valid as had been supposed. Exactly what claims to such culture we Bostonians have made and still make I do not know; but they are probably not, so large as have been imputed to us. T would by no means try here to gauge the musical culture of Boston, but humbly beg to suggest to those who have recently expressed such grave doubts as to its extent. that the line of argument they have hitherto pursued does not in the least serve to invalidate any claim to musical culture, taste, or discrimination we might be pleased to make for ourselves.

It is a sufficiently notorious fact that for the last few years the Boston public lias given very meagre support to worthy concert enterprises, both of our own artists and musical organizations, and of various celebrated performers who have visited our city. Neither Rubinstein, Von Biilow, nor Madame Essipoff succeeded in attracting paying audiences of a size at all commensurate with those artists’ reputation or intrinsic excellence. It is generally understood that Theodore Thomas could not make his Boston concerts pay, and as for the Harvard Musical Association, Heaven help that earnestly working body, for surely we tlo not! We have not shown sufficient enterprise to admit of an efficient and permanent orchestra’s being formed, so that the cream of our orchestral players have been forced to form private clubs for the performance of chamber music, and to travel through the country on concert expeditions in order to gain a decent livelihood.

This state of affairs is as deplorable as it is undeniably true. Tts effect is in every way had; Boston is fast falling from her position as a musical centre, in so far as opportunities for hearing good music well given are concerned, and is tending to take rank with Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other not musically influential cities.

This sad fact has been brought forward as an argument to prove our lack of musical culture. Yet it seems to me that it is in no way a fair criterion. It does not prove nor disprove one jot of the power of musical discrimination of our public. If it prove anything, it is that whatever of musical fibre there is in us is only culture, and nothing more. And I fear that this is painfully true to a great extentAs Anglo-Saxons we must say that what may he called the necessity of art, the natural hunger and thirst for the beautiful, tile desiderium pulchri, is not born in us. We have applied ourselves to music as an item of culture; we have, to the best of our abilities, refined our taste and sharpened our judgment; but we have not made music, good or bad, a necessary of life. We give every day stronger and stronger evidence of the factitious quality of our love for music, in that we are becoming more and more fastidious and super finical in our taste. We are no longer drawn to listen to music, unless it he the very best, and heard under the very best conditions. Unless we can have just what we want, we care nothing about it. Music is not a natural appetite with us. True, appetite is amenable to culture, and may become fastidious to a high degree. The epicure will not turn from woodcock to feast upon greens and bacon; yet let the most jaded bon vivant go hungry for a while, and he will find homely fare very relishing. But utdess tee can have ‘ \faisan a la Sainle-Alliance,” done to a turn, served on Kirk silver, and washed down with Romanee-Conti (to apply our not too limping simile to music), we prefer going hungry; in fact, we do not feel the pangs of hunger at all. What of musical culture we have in Boston — and I do not pretend to say liow much nor how little we have, for what I am writing is rather a plea for exactness than a defense — we have come at by dint of work, and it is so far honorable to us. Its extent may he very lawfully doubted; but surely our lack of enterprise in concert-going has nothing to do with it, one way or the other.

— The writer of the leading article in the October Atlantic has touched upon a most interesting subject in alluding to the change now going on in the practice of church-going. All that he says I find true, but he does not discuss the tendency of church development, and it is this of which I wish to speak. All are agreed that the idea of church-going as an act efficacious and soul-preserving in itself has passed away, and the audiences at old-fashioned churches have thinned accordingly. But with the increase of skepticism and of practical infidelity, ritualism and Catholicism have grown apace, nor are our “ orthodox ” or Unitarian churches on the point of becoming empty. Assuming that the New England church - goers of to-day would have been Calvinists forty years ago, it is evident that a differentiation has been taking place in the religious church-going public, and that with the continuance of this differentiation the divergence will ultimately become so great that the origin of the one branch in a religious stem will be entirely forgotten. Not only tlie ministers, but the considerable number of persons interested in the maintenance of a given “society,” try to provide substitutes of various kinds for tin' vanished belief in the efficacy of church-going in itself; and the result of their efforts is the gradual transformation of churches, especially in provincial towns, into a new and peculiar variety of club. We see people united by a loose tie paying a certain yearly tax, and coming together at stated intervals, sometimes for edification, but often solely for enjoyment; even on the former occasions instruction must be administered in an entertaining manner, and as to the latter, it is safe to say that the vestry kitchens and conversation rooms are of more importance in keeping up the society than is the pulpit, literally regarded. In this corporation the minister is naturally the leading figure, the all-important personage; but it is not in Ids capacity of preacher that he is so. He delivers sermons, as tlie president imparts his views to Congress, but there his responsibility, in this direction, ends. He is attentively listened to, partly from traditional respect (which will soon be extinct), but chiefly from the vague consciousness on the part of his hearers that ihe enjoyment of good things in connection with, but outside of, the sanctuary Inis put them under obligations which are best repaid in this way. That tlie minister preach well is a good thing, but it is no longer the main thing. It is of more importance that he have skill in raising money for benevolent objects, in arranging lectures and excursions, and other amusements; that he be able to advise young ladies about their art. reading, and old ones about their sons at college. Besides this he lias the marrying and the bury ing to do.

So many interests are thus bound up with parish organizations that there is no danger of their being given up as useless. And on tlie other hand, those emotional natures which must in some way pour forth their religious sentiment, those abnormally constituted persons who feel a greater need occasionally to be transported above tlie commonplace reality of daily life than a hankering after photographs and puddings, — these unfortunates will continue more and more to find a refuge in the bosom of the one Catholic and Apostolic church, or of its ritualistic follower.

— I am that gloomy contributor who was very much troubled, a few months ago, at the fashion which our printers have of decorating the first vowel in chalet with a circumflex accent. Having overthrown, shattered, and obliterated that other gloomy contributor, who had mildly remarked that our printers put the accent over the a because it was correct to do so (he misquoted the title of his authority, by the way), —having, J repeat, dispersed him, I supposed the matter ended. But it. seems that that mongrel Swiss-French word is never to ,et me have any peace. Here now is Mr. Henry James Jr. calling a cottage in the suburbs of Boston a chalet ! He does not place the phrase between the lips of one of his Europeans, where it would properly be at home, but he uses it in his own quality as narrator. “ The two occupants of the chalet dined together.” I protest, though perhaps it is no more than right that we should kindly adopt the word, having so barbarously humiliated it these many years by sticking a fool’s-cap on it. Yet if we must have a foreign name for our New England country-houses, 1 think villa preferable. Chalet implies at once too much and too little: it asks for waterfalls and Alpine vistas, and it suggests — a shed. Villa, on the other hand, is rather non-committal: it is nice and vague and “sloppy,” like the name Mr. Cummings gave his friend’s picture in a certain comedy printed a while ago in these pages. Moreover, the word is already domesticated among us. Do we not, without the slightest inclination to smile, speak of our villas at Newport ? I fancy that it is a kind of necessity for the American tourist, when he returns from abroad, to live in a palace, or a chateau, or a castle. Perhaps it is fair to let him have even a chalet, if he insists upon it.

— Reports come back from Paris that the chief point in the indictment against American art brought by all foreigners was the lack of originality, or rather nationality, of treatment. Our artists, with but one or two exceptions, were declared to be basely subservient to some foreign school, generally the French. Those who had escaped this thralldom, and ventured to offer genre pictures of American life, received the highest commendation, namely, that whatever their lack of mechanical skill they showed at least that certain creative power out of which every national school of art must be born.

Our young artists in (he Latin Quartier will no doubt have many a hearty laugh over this criticism. Most of them feel that they have left their country quite out of sight in their aisthetic progress. They go on diligently reproducing old monks and ballet-girls and Norman peasants, and would listen with calm amusement if you suggested that the interior of negro lmts or Indian wigwams, or the accessories of a pioneer’s life, or the faces of American women, were as picturesque and typical, and newer to the world at large, than any of these. Unluckily for themselves, they have not progressed far enough to see that the true historical and lasting painting must he made of scenes present to the painter’s eye and known to his heart.

Our literature has advanced a good deal farther and faster in the right idea than our art. Forty years ago we were precisely in the same condition as Germany before Goethe and Schiller came to waken her to the necessity of a national literature. The weakness in our position then was, not that Englishmen sneered at American books, but that Americans did not write them. Our literature was a weakly babe suckling the breast of an alien nurse who despised it. It is only lately that we have found out that our own mother has milk and to spare for her children. Irving himself, I have heard, wondered why his Spanish Papers and the histories written with exhaustive care so soon retired to the shelves of critics, while his idle tales of the Kaatskills became at once popular and immortal.

It is a fact that every attempt by Americans to portray American life lias received a more cordial welcome in England than at home. Even the vulgar braggadocio of Joaquin Miller was overlooked, and his work accepted with acclamation, because it. was indigenous in its flavor; it smelled of the soil from which it came, a soil unknown to Europeans. For the same reason Walt Whitman, Hawthorne, and Artemas Ward, all representative Americans of differing strains of blood, were more appreciated in England than here.

There is one drawback to the advance of our literature in this direction which probably may not suggest itself to the readers of The Atlantic. The life and manners of New England have been carefully painted by her sons, while the rest of the country, with its countless and widely differing phases of life, is almost, untouched. Western and Southern painters of scenery and human nature are slow to see that there is material close to their hands richer than any left untouched in New England hills. A few have seen it, however; but how grudging is the recognition given them by their own sections! There are the Egglestons, with their masterly photographs of life in Virginia and Indiana; DeForest, the only man who has painted the Carolinian fire-eaters; a new writer, Mary Dean, whose little studies of farm life in New York are fine and careful in detail as a picture of Meissonier. If Boston had brought forth these people, what would she not have made of them!

— An amazing ignorance exists among otherwise intelligent people in regard to the demands and rewards of literary labor, which is likely to he dispersed wholesomely by the breezy confidences of the Contributors’ Club, unless (I am not very weather-wise, yet it seems to me that cautionary signals are indicated at this point) individual publishers, authors, and critics should stir up therein a tu quoque typhoon, to the premature destruction of all concerned. What an old divine quaintly said of a brother clergyman’s prayers I say of the Club: “I don’t believe in making the throne of grace a whipping-post. ” But to return to our subject. Not long ago a much-knowing lady remarked incidentally, when a common acquaintance was named, “Isn’t it nice? — she sold her last book for ten thousand dollars!” To my gentle demurrer over the incongruity between such a sum and the worthy little book, which I had just accepted for our Sunday-school library, my informant replied, with vehement confidence, “ But I know it to be a fact! ” Knowing the book and knowing its publisher, the most cautious of his kind (if “ cautious ” is actionable in the Contributors’ Club court, I abjectly retract), I was not surprised to hear him say, a few weeks later, when I solemnly charged this prodigality upon him, “ We printed an edition of seven hundred copies. A good many are still on our shelves, and we pay her ten per cent, on retail price of each copy sold; they sell for one dollar.” In computation of which overhaul your Colburn’s Mental Arithmetic, and when found make a note of, For future estimates of literary profit and loss.

One thing which has not been touched upon in the discussion of authors’ experiences might, I think, be fittingly noticed here. When I was as yet guiltless of book-making — *1 ah, woful when! ” — I had the childish fancy that every author had somewhere within his domains (usually in the attic, if T remember rightly) a room piled to the ceiling with his own books, and that be had only to turn his hand over, so to speak, and straightway all his acquaintances, good, bad, and indifferent, were supplied cacli with a crisp, clean copy. What author so small as not to have encountered the reproach from dozens of friends, “Did you know that you never sent me a copy of that last book of yours? ” sometimes naively adding, “ And T should n’t have read it to this day if So-and-So had n’t lent it to me!” Can the Contributors’ Club delicately whisper to the uninitiated that an author generally has to pay as much for his own books and the periodicals containing his own articles as for a stranger’s, and that even were be indefinitely dead-lieadcd therefor, the probabilities are that he might prefer to present something less personal to his friend rather than seem in the least to coerce his favor? Certainly an author who “ was paid in books,” — a phrase 1 once beard with pleasure,—his own or another’s, would be an object of compassion to the enlightened.

How serious this little misconception may become is best shown by a frcsli example. A friend has recently published a technical work. I chanced to ask an acquaintance, if he had seen the book; be exclaimed with pronounced disgust, “ No, I have n’t; the miserable fellow never gave me a copy!” As this “miserable” to my certain knowledge had to pay five dollars for every copy after the two or three first specimens sent him from the press, it was not singular that his donations had not reached one who had no special interest in the subject matter, and only ordinary relations with the author. “ The world is wide; these things are small; they may he nothing, but” they amount to something when multiplied by one’s dear five hundred friends.

— I was unfortunately out of town at the last meeting of the Contributors’ Club, or T certainly should have laid down my knife and fork with astonishment at tiie Ignorance of the contributor who calls for a new pronoun. Y\ hat! has he never heard of the great grammarian who came into literature, saw the difficulty, and at once overcame it? I have forgotten his name, but how can I ever forget his admirable circular, in which he publishes the result of his wrestle with be, his, and him? It is before me, as I copy: “ The substitute for the three words which I now have the honor to propose is a word of two syllables, a compound of these two pronouns, suggestive of the singular number and possessive case, applicable as a pronoun for man or woman,” namely, hizer,— “ placed to hizer credit,” that is, to Ids or her credit, — and thus declined: tlesli, hizer, liimcr. “ Should this addition,” he adds, “ be acceptable to persons speaking and writing the English language, 1 will subsequently propose a number of new words, as analogous improvements.” It was in 1872 that lhis memorable circular was issued, and I myself drew up a paper with the heading: “ We the undersigned hereby agree to adopt hizer into the language,” and 'oak pains to circulate it amongst my friends. ’What, has become of the great philologist since? I have been anxiously waiting for the rest of his modern improvements. Has he joined the spelling reformers, and become engrossed in the arrangement of a new alphabet? Perhaps he is balancing the advantages of adopting or dispensing with the diacritical marks. But the discovery of hizer is enough for one man. Let him he the apostle of hizer, and leave the spelling reformers to follow at a respectful distance.

— In the Contributors’ Club, Atlantic Monthly, November, 1878, it is stated that a personal pronoun of the common gender and singular number is wanted in the English language. Che was proposed in 1851 or 1852. Nominative case, che, possessive, eher’s or cher, objective, cher.

— I am afraid that the contributor who discusses the secret of a book’s success (vide the October number of The Atlantic) has not quite settled the question. He says: “ In my opinion the secret of a literary hit was expressed by a young friend, herself a writer of no mean ability, when she said, ‘ The book that sells is the book that gets talked about.’ ” What a paradise were this for writers of no mean ability were that even half true in its intended sense! Then The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and the Twice Told Tales would have made Hawthorne a rich man in his prime, and been an inheritance to his children. No books, with possibly the exception of Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales, were ever more talked about than his. Yet during Hawthorne’s life his revenue from those marvelous fictions was less than the salary of a second-rate salesman in a dry-goods store of the period. I do not forget that Hawthorne, in the preface to the Twice Told Tales (1851), speaks of ldmself as having been for many wars the obscurest man of letters in America. That was while he was weaving for the magazines those enchanted webs which have caught us all. But from the moment those stories were collected in a volume, they began to he talked about, in the finest sense of the phrase. While the American Dickens of that singular epoch, the now-forgotten author of Puffer Hopkins, was innocently plucking at that popular laurel which looks so like the real thing (but has no root, being merely phantom leaves), the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne were passing into literature. And to-day? What name is pftener on the general lip? Who can think or speak of American letters without breathing the name of Hawthorne? It is a word to conjure with, not only here, but in England and in Italy. Yet if I were a publisher, and nothing but a publisher, i would prefer That Husband of Mine to a whole block of Houses like that of the Seven Gables. True enough, “ the book that sells is the book that gets talked about;’’but it by no means follow’s that the book which gets talked about is the hook that sells. “ [ write of one,” as Lowell says in his Memorise Positum, “ while with dim eyes I think of three ” or four authors who illustrate my argument much better than I wish. Their books get talked about at every refined fireside in the land; they are books which require only time to crystallize into classics; but they don’t sell. Possibly they reach a circulation of four or five thousand copies each; but Ido not call that selling in an age which buys——’s novels by the cart-load, and his poems by the thousand feet, like the merchandise and the lumber they are. In literary circles they are never mentioned except to be laughed at. On the ■other hand, what poet of our own generation has been more talked about (and in a way more calculated to provoke the curiosity of the indifferent reader) than Walt Whitman? Does the book that gets talked about necessarily sell? Do Walt Whitman’s labors of thirty years supply the necessities of his old age?

The author and publisher who held a confidential conversation in these pages several months ago seemed to me to he very level-headed gentlemen; but 1 wonder that they neglected, in bringing their argument to its delightfully inconclusive conclusion, to touch on this perplexing phase of the subject.

— Til. Bentzon, wdio is known on this side of the water by her admirable translations from American authors, is known in France as a novelist of unusual originality and power. Indeed, in such pictures of provincial French life as La Petite Perle, La Grande Saulicre, and Desiree Turpin she comes nearer to what is best in George Sand than any contemporary French author. Th. Bentzon has been for several years an industrious contributor to the Revue ties Deux Mondes, though the editor of the journal was unaware until quite recently that his valued correspondent was a woman. Madame Therese Blanc — there can he no impropriety in dropping a nom deplume which her talent has rendered useless as a disguise — belongs to an old French family, and is a highly accomplished woman. A portion of her girlhood was passed in England, to which fact we are indebted for the careful and scholarly translations of American works which have appeared from time to time during the last six or seven years in the Revue, She has a wide familiarity with every branch of American literature, and, curiously enough in one naturally a legitimist, she takes the deepest interest in the history of the socialistic movements in this country. The masterly paper on Nordhoff’s Communistic Societies of the United States, which appeared some time sinee in the Revue des Deux Mondes, was from the hand of Madame Blanc. But it was of her as a novelist that I wished to say a word. I notice that some one has had the good taste to translate one of Madame Blanc’s charming stories for Appleton’s library of foreign authors, and has been fortunate enough, or wise enough, to select her best. The plot of Un Remords, the novel in question, is singularly fresh and ingenious; there are two or three powerful and new situations in the story, and the characters throughout tire drawn with delicacy and firmness. Pierre Lieven, Manuela, M. Walrey, and his mother are notably fine characterizations. 1 have not. seen the translation of Un Remords, but unless it does injustice to the original the reader will look eagerly for other novels of Madame Blanc in the same form.