The Contributors' Club

IT is a very pleasant thing to finish reading a book and feel that one has made a charming new acquaintance. Men and women who are entirely congenial and delightful are by no means common in this world, even if one lives in the midst of its best society; and some of our dear friends are people who live all the year round in the little three-walled houses made by book-covers.Yet their every-day life is as real to us as our own ; their houses and their fortunes and misfortunes are well known to us, and we are sure of a thousand things about them that we never saw in print. The inner circle of our friends might be a broken one if it were not rounded and completed with such companionships as these. But one thinks not so much of the luxury of having these friendships as of the necessity for them, and of the good it does everybody to know nice people, of the elevating power a novel may have if it carries its readers among people worth knowing. It is certainly a great force in raising the tone of society ; it is a great help in the advance of civilization and refinement. A good story has a thousand readers where a biography has ten. Who is not better for having associated with the ladies and gentlemen to whom certain novelists have presented us ? One instinctively tries to behave his very best after meeting them, and admires their hospitality, their charity, their courage in adversity, their grace and good-breeding. How many tricks of speech and manner we have caught in such society! How often we have been moved to correct some carelessness or rudeness, of which we were unconscious until they taught us better! Trollope, Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Oliphant, a hundred others, have unwittingly done much more than entertain us with their stories : they have taught many people good manners ; they have set copies for us to follow in little things and great. To have spent a Week in a French Country House — as I hope we have all been lucky enough to do — will save us from seeming awkward on any repetition of that charming visit. If we have never been abroad at all we do not feel that when we are in France, by and by, and go down into the country, it will seem at all strange.

There is nothing like having read many English novels to make one feel at home in England. We know the fashion of doing things as well as Englishmen themselves, and we should not be surprised at the minor differences of speech and etiquette. We have ridden to hounds, and have dined in Trollope’s comfortable country houses, and have gone to the county balls, too often to be caught making mistakes ; we know the order in which people should go out to dinner, and the order of ecclesiastical rank in the cathedral towns. We have starred it in the provinces, and have spent many a gay and gallant London season. We have gone shooting and fishing through the Highlands and Ireland with as pleasant people as one may find in all Great Britain. We have grown so used to yachting in the Hebrides and all up and down the coast that it seems an old story to join a yacht’s company, and to watch the shore and the sunset, to see the daylight fade and the stars come out, as we ride at anchor in some picturesque Scotch harbor.

It is a pity that so little is known of our own pleasantest people from the story-books. The best of our gentlemen and ladies have kept very much to themselves; at any rate, they have few representatives in fiction, and do not mix much with the familiar types of character in American novels. Do they have themselves privately printed, and are they right to be so shy as they are, and to keep their fashion of doing things to themselves ? Are the authors who write about American life afraid of seeming to copy foreign stories if they say too much of the people who, from a social point of view, are best worth knowing and reading about? The country life and local dialects and peculiarities, with their ridiculousness and pathos, the energy and restlessness and flashiness and unconventionality, the ostentation, of Americans have been held up for us to look at again and again. There are many of our neighbors across the water who think that the American girl of the period, with whom they have become acquainted, is the best type that can be found. It is too bad that there have been so few stories of agreeable, highbred American men and women, and that our own best society has been so seldom represented in fiction. It is certainly not because it does not exist, and more books that show us such characters as these would do much good and give great satisfaction.

In the smaller country towns there are always persons who would have been much more lonely and far more eager for congenial companionship had it not been for their friendships with books. We can each speak with gratitude of our own best loved intimacies of this kind ; we can recall the worn copies of books that some of our elderly friends have treasured, and to which they cling eagerly and fondly. This grave and careful woman keeps to her early friendship with some old story-friend with a loyalty and wealth of association that have grown year by year ; and her daughter loves the Princess of Thule, and wishes she could have spent that year on Borva before the story began. She would like to wring Frank Lavender’s neck for him Sheila’s life before he came to the island was the life, of all others, that she likes best, and never has had a chance to link herself with as she has in the novel, that makes her familiar with it.

We sometimes grow tired of people in books whom we like at first ; we think they talk too much about themselves, or about nothing. But we can forget them without ever having to reproach ourselves with fickleness or disloyalty.

It is a great temptation to praise some characters who have been dear to me, but it is perhaps safer not to begin. In a novel entitled The Sunmaid I was lucky enough to meet a delightful woman, called the Princess. She is one of the most charming persons I have ever known, and, though little is said of her, I have kept the book carefully for her dear sake, and I shall read about her affectionately again and again. I think it is a great advantage to any one to know her. And there was Lily Dale, in the Small House at Allington. She was such a nice girl, and I used to feel dreadfully because she was so sad about Crosbie: but I long ago ceased to regret her disappointment. She had a pretty way of saying things, though I think of her now as being a great deal older than she was then, and we have not seen so much of each other of late years.

— Possibly we are too sweeping in our denunciation of slang phrases. Why should any expression that would add vigor, force, or grace to the language he excluded so rigorously from the correct vocabulary ? Many of the slang expressions are worthy, in directness and power, to be classed with the purest Anglo-Saxon,— are “sabre cuts of Saxon speech; ” and why may not cultured people not only add freshness and vigor to their own conversation, but also enrich the language, by introducing into polished speech and making classic some of those words and phrases now considered “ quite the thing ” for gamins only ? Thus, what could be more forcible, direct, and piquant than the slang phrase “ fire it out; ” and what could be more expressive of the burst of indignant energy with which a quick-tempered man will rid himself of some obnoxious thing than to say he fired it out ? What more happily translates into words the humbled acquiescence finally given by the convinced disputant than to say, “ I tumble to the racket ” ? Perhaps some of Shakespeare’s terse expressions, now thought to be jewels of speech, had a similar origin, it is possible that “ shuffle off this mortal coil,” or “ nip him in the bud,” struck just such shivering horror to the ears of Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Philip Sidney as polite culture now experiences when it hears “ put a mansard roof on him,” “ cheeky,” or “ too thin.” Why should it not be just as legitimate to say “ wade in ” as to speak of “ a sea of troubles ; ” and why has not one just as much meaning as the other? Why is not “your mind’s eye, Horatio,” just as reprehensible as its lineal descendant, “ all in your eye ” ? One is just as pure gold as the other; and why should one be legal tender in polished speech, while the other is a counterfeit coin ?

Proverbs, too, that “ hob-nailed philosophy,” in which the richer a language is the more forcible it is, and the more characteristic of those who use it, are closely akin in both form and spirit, as well as origin, with slang expressions. Many of these words and phrases that now sit in the ashes and perform menial tasks need only the godmother of daring genius to show them fit for courtly circles.

— It is a wonder that, since open fire-places have come to be a necessity with us, nobody has set the fashion of burning peat. On one of the railways that goes eastward from Boston I noticed the other day a peat bog, the working of which was evidently under careful oversight, and was being made at least a speculative, if not a permanent, business enterprise. The little blocks of turf were stacked up, ready for transportation, and the deep excavations indicated plainly that great quantities of this excellent fuel had already been carried away. I am waiting to catch the first whiff of peat smoke in some fashionable and æsthetic parlor, and I am surprised that nobody has burnt turf yet in Boston or New York. It would be a pleasing novelty; it makes a very good fire, and it suggests many Scotch and Irish reminiscences and associations that are dear to all our hearts. It might give a fresh impulse to literature ; coal fires have little kinship with poetry and romance, and wood fires have been Written about a good deal already. A peat fire would smoulder charmingly all the afternoon in a house that is overheated with steam or a furnace ; and at twilight how delightfully it would remind one of Robert Burns, and of Sir Walter Scott’s novels ! Perhaps, to a favored score or two of huntsmen, it would call up long tramps in misty weather over the moorlands in more recent times, and the coming home at night to warm one’s self by its dull glow; it would bring back the idle talk and laughter, the pride in the day’s success, the very hunger at supper-time, and even the taste of the smoky whisky that kept the fog and chill from being dangerous, and which had a flavor as if it were the water which had once put out exactly such a fire. In anticipation of the use of peat in æsthetic homes, some one would do well to secure a corner in the bogs that are scattered here and there all over the country, and are counted regretfully by their owners as nothing but waste land.

— A year or two ago there was some discussion in the Contributors’ Club as to whether a chalet should have a gableroof in print, as well as in fact. The word being a contraction of chastelet, it seemed proper to put the circumflex accent over the a. But this excellent argument a priori was quashed by the stubborn fact that the word chalet is written (and pronounced) without the accent by all French authorities. I have just stumbled upon another case of unaccountable omission of the circumflex in French. The word noce is a contraction of nopce. Indeed, BrillatSavarin assures us that the p was not silent in the expression “ nopces et festins,” common with a certain class of bourgeoisie in his day. Yet the o in noce has no circumflex, any more than the a in chalet. Stern rules do not help one in French much better than they do in English, and there are some curious freaks in the language, which even the French themselves cannot explain. For instance, who can account for the Académie’s command to pronounce je désire as if there were no acute accent over the first e ? Why is the so-called “ aspirated h ” practically silent in every word in which it occurs, in the French language, except in la haine, in which it is really an aspirate? Why is the name Montaigne pronounced like montagne? And, finally, what explanation can be given of the fact that the apparently vulgar pronunciation of “ quatre-

à-quatre ” has become so thoroughly authorized that even Delaunay, of the Comédie-Française, once said, “ Même en scène je dirais ‘ catte-à-catte ; ’bicn décidément ‘ quatre-à-quatre ’ n’est pas français ” ?