The Contributors' Club

WHEN the methods of science have been applied to literature we may look for a natural history of prefaces, and I have sometimes proposed to myself to be a pioneer in the field, by making a collection, and pinning the several specimens in readiness for the classifier and generalizer who is to come after me. I will leave to him the work of ordering under the heads, for instance, of the Apologetic Preface, the Last Confession Preface, the Swaggering Preface, the Breathless Preface, the Hat on the Side of the Head Preface, the Insinuating Preface, the Abject Preface, the Ill at Ease Preface, — all under the general head of the Unnecessary Preface.

As somebody has said, — I believe in poetry, but I quote as prose, — “A little preface is a dangerous thing.” There are few who can swing one and not hurt themselves. That is the reason why I do not mean to write a preface to my forthcoming Dissertation on Prefaces. The work will speak for itself, and will contain chiefly extracts from celebrated prefaces, and specimens of obscure but typical prefaces. Almost the last book which I took up, a book of stories, had a preface of several pages, in which the author betrayed all his weaknesses. Anybody else would have supposed he was telling stories for the entertainment of the public, but he insisted upon it, with tears in his eyes, that he was making a book on a new plan, and that a fine philosophical purpose ran through his scheme. “ The following stories,” he begins, “are fictions, having for their object the isolation and idealization of Southwestern Pennsylvania.” If this author had intended isolating his readers, he could not have set about the task more effectively. Then see how he proceeds to wind himself up, spinning a sentence like a shroud about himself : “ While the writer, as if he were the sum of his surroundings, and nothing more by inheritance or otherwise from another sphere, has endeavored to give expression to his environment in such a manner that the reader, in turning to the pages, may be moved and moulded approximately as much as if he were a traveler encompassed with the thousand and one objects in the relationships of reality which here are involved in an entanglement of ideas in fiction.” That is what I call a specimen of the breathless in art. A little further on is an example of the High Cockalorum Preface : “ Albeit in saying this, and leaving the reader to infer that from the diversity of objects in the writer’s environment there may be found reasonably a corresponding variety of ideas in his book, the writer is fully aware that the factors of fiction may be found anywhere except in an empty skull. Where the heart thrills and the brain thinks, the art of the story-teller will find in the little world of himself enough of the unshapen, the invisible, and the intangible to be moulded into being, that it may be seen and felt by others, which to accomplish is the fulfillment of his function as an artist, a poet, or what you will.” Since by this last gracious admission we are not shut up to looking upon the writer either as an artist or as a poet, we are prepared for his own subtle characterization of himself in the next paragraph : “ It may be said, indeed, that it is not the territory of Southwestern Pennsylvania, its fauna and flora, its soil and climate, and the accidental relationships that may be presented from time to time by the shifting parts,—it is not this, in reality, which the reader will expect to get in this book, but the ideal child of the writer’s environment, begotten in contemplation, and born with the ear-marks of its parentage, so palpable to the senses that it may be recognized as legitimate at birth.”The italics, as conscientious reviewers say, are our own. Has he not written himself down, as Dogberry longed to have Conrade write him down ?

After hearing what a fellow contributor had to say about the new profession of Vocophy, I turned eagerly to that book to see what light it could throw. There was no section devoted to preface-writers, but the apostle of Vocophy had ingenuously shown by his own preface how the thing could be done. That is a fine illustration of the Perfectly Sure of Myself Preface. It contains two paragraphs which have a more rocklike character than any we happen to have met with in the literature of prefaces : —

“ This work has been undertaken with the view to benefit every inhabitant on the face of our planet: not so much those who have passed the meridian of life as the young and middleaged, whose success depends upon the choice of the most fitting pursuit.

“ Its true worth can only be estimated by the reader or student who carefully reads and studies the work. To every nation on the earth it is of equal value.”

With the fine assurance of these words, compare the touching humility of the following, which I regard as the best specimen of the Ill at Ease Preface in my collection : —

“ To those who may favor these pages with perusal, I make this earnest request: that if they commence they will read all. Knowing that the best mode of dealing with doubts is to state and refute, successively, I regret that the plan of the present work forces a separation of the statement and refutation. To read one without the other were to defeat the object in view : hence my request.

“ Many of the subjects of thought are worn smooth with the touch of ages, so that hope for originality is as slender as the bridge of Al Sirat; but in the bulrush ark of self-confidence, pitched with Faith, I commit my first-born to the Nile of public opinion ; whether to perish by crocodile critics, or bask in the palace of favor, the Future alone must determine. May Pharaoh’s daughter find it.”

I do not know whether Pharaoh’s daughter found it or not. I found it, and set it afloat again now, in pursuit of the author’s expressive imagery, upon the broad bosom of the Atlantic.

— Does any one remember that a few years ago it was suggested that nervous invalids should go through a course of treatment called the color cure ? It now being the fashion to put little faith in medicine, one naturally counts up the other resources of the profession. The field of therapeutics has widened in some directions in these later days, but it ought to cover a greater space than it does now before unscientific people will resign themselves contentedly to ignoring of old-fashioned dosing. When one is in very bad pain there is a grim satisfaction in swallowing a large and disagreeable quantity of a historic and well-known drug. It seems like a much braver fight against the disease, and all theories vanish at such times from our minds. It interests young doctors more than it does their patients to let ailments alone, to see what will come of them. Leaving things to nature, when it is ill-nature, seems sometimes most unkind. I have spoken as if I were very fond of dosing, but that is not true, since I am more ready than most persons to accept the agreeable alternatives which are now at the command of the medical profession. I caught eagerly at the idea of the color cure, at any rate. It was proposed to make careful studies of the effect of different colors on the human mind and body, then have little rooms painted with the brilliant and inspiriting or the quiet and depressing tints, and the patients were to be locked into them for a suitable length of time every day; perhaps confined altogether. Scarlet is most invigorating and cheering in its effect upon the human mind. Let us imagine a person in most feeble condition, who has suffered some terrible strain or other, who cannot bear even the most delicate treatment with tonics. The skillful doctor of this new school reads the case at a glance and orders a very few minutes of the red room to be administered with great care. The light is shaded at first, and the duration and brilliancy of the color are increased from day to day, until the recovery is completed. For nervous people, who do not sleep or eat, — or think they do not, which makes them and other people just as unhappy, — for these sufferers, what adroit mingling of the red that cheers, and the blue that soothes and quiets, and the reddish-purple that enrages into a determination to escape from its discomfort into the light of day and sensible activity!

This subject seems to me to have been far less considered than it deserves. It never before occurred to me that some people’s characters may have been deeply influenced because the color of their complexions led them to surround themselves with certain shades and tints. A person who from her childhood has constantly been looking at blue things — wearing blue bonnets and blue gowns and blue ribbons, who has had blue paint and paper in her house wherever there was any excuse for it — cannot be what she might have been, with reds and yellows about her. By and by we may learn to dress with a view to the moral influence upon ourselves. Other people have a right to expect that we use all the means in our power for the up-building of our characters, and it may one day seem a low aim to wear this color or that simply because it is becoming. “ I am so quick-tempered,” one conscientious harassed soul will say, “ that I try never to look at anything but blues. I notice the bad effect at once of even sealing my letters with red wax.”

— I am sometimes, I may say frequently, inclined to echo Mérimée’s opinion of “cette vie de province,” which he held to be so unutterably wearisome, the ways of which were, as he said, so “entirely foreign” to his own “circle of thought.” His view may not take in the whole truth on the subject, but seizes at least its most obvious aspect. If Mérimée’s had been a nature more rounded and complete, had he been less a man of the world, and more a man to whom nothing human was of alien interest, he could not have so expressed himself without qualification. Yet, as I say, I am often disposed to pardon the frankness of his disgust when I am forced to realize the barrenness of town and country life, and how little satisfaction it affords for the social instincts, and how little stimulus to intellectual activity. The deficiency in the first respect is of more consequence than in the second; for we can live after a fashion, though certainly not the most enviable one, without sharers in our intellectual tastes or pursuits, but it is not a natural or healthy existence which lacks diversion and the refreshment of mingling with one’s kind for purposes other than of business. The truth seems to be that provincials do not very well understand the art of diverting themselves, and their social gatherings are apt to be the dullest affairs possible. I speak now of towns in which those who constitute society, so called, are above finding their pleasure in the homely recreations which serve to amuse the more rustic population of our villages. These towns are given to alternations of complete stagnation and spasmodic gayety: one winter sunk in a home-keeping lethargy, the next dancing violently every week, crowding the diversions of two seasons into one, and feeling a pleasing sense of dissipation in staying out till one in the morning. It is the kind of amusement they best enjoy. Let some one give an afternoon reception instead of a dancing party, where the only entertainment provided is conversation, and see how small will be the company, how few young men present, how languishing the talk. The affair is not a success. These people belong to the educated class ; why, then, this inability to amuse themselves ? It is not altogether easy to answer this question why. We do not expect a provincial society to rival that of a metropolis; we do not look to find the wit, the talent for epigram and repartee, the conversational brilliance, struck out from minds constantly strung up to concert pitch. There is not only an absence of this, however, but apparently a lack of any consciousness that every guest in a drawing-room is bound to contribute something toward the common entertainment. There is a strange incapacity in these educated people to talk on general subjects. The most quiet and unpretending person need not be entirely without ideas, or the power to take interest in impersonal matters. We provincials cannot and need not invite each other to houses filled with all the modern devices of elegant luxury ; our toilets need not attempt to emulate the costly ones of city dames; but at our modest gatherings we surely need not bore each other. The trouble at bottom must be that as individuals we fall short of being what we might, and, being separately uninteresting, we are none the less so taken collectively. There is a slouch in the provincial manner ; and with the inevitable dropping of mere formalities among those who know each other so well there is sometimes a dropping also of slight but essential courtesies. There is manifest in all this the want of an ideal, without which life must always be more or less of a failure ; in the social sphere, as in the spheres of politics, art, and religion, we cannot afford to dispense with an ideal.

— I have at times thought that the heart of primitive man might have been quarried in the stone age, there is so little evidence of his having been actuated by the “ sentiment of humanity ; ” especially does he seem to have been lacking in pitiful consideration for physical deformity or infirmity. Small compassion had he to bestow upon the hunch-backed, the knock-kneed, or the club-footed of his kind. When these did not inspire in his mind a superstitious terror, they appear to have been laid under contribution for his amusement. The troop of grewsome and malevolent semi-deities, such as the satyrs, the gorgons, Triton, and Polyphemus, all represented under a gnarled or distorted humanity, show how the Greek regarded corporal deformity. For instance, in the Iliad, the scurrilous dog Thersites has a body as crooked and malformed as his spirit is insolent and malicious. Again, the poor misshapen artisan god, Hephaistos (so cruelly knocked about in his babyhood), is made to serve as a laughing-stock for all the broad humor of Olympus. He is something of a clown, too, and enjoys simply enough the merriment he creates by hobbling about on his wretched legs to dispense the pacific nectar. Now, modern theogony (if we could have such a department) would have taken pity on the crippled divinity, and invested him with abundantly compensating attributes, perhaps giving him supremacy over poetry, music, and the remaining fine arts. But the Greek had no mind to apotheosize ugliness in this benign fashion. The same may be said of another race of the primitive man, still extant. An acquaintance of mine, who held a clerkship at an Indian agency in the West, related an amusing and significant incident, in this connection. The too “ friendly Indians ” of the neighborhood were in the habit of dropping in at his office, often to his great annoyance. At last he hit upon a plan whereby to discourage these frequent visits on the part of the red men. Possessing a lithe and supple frame, he contrived, by some gymnastic legerdemain, to throw his right shoulder and arm temporarily out of joint, thus giving himself the appearance of great deformity. This unannounced phenomenon so terrified the Indians that they stayed for no investigation, but got out-of-doors as soon as possible. The stratagem, as often as repeated, never failed to effect a clearance. The explanation of their fright lay in the fact that they supposed the white man to have been suddenly possessed by the devil, — all deformed bodies, according to their belief, offering special attraction, in the way of lodgings, to that ancient roamer. We have no theory to offer regarding this aboriginal notion, but would merely note that the feeling of repugnance towards physical deformity is still the first impulse, — the savage and the natural; while pity is the second thought, — the ingraft, it may be, of ages of civilization and moral evolution. Any departure from normality of form afflicts us beyond reason. One finger too many, or one too few, appears in the light of an intolerable monstrosity. In the case of Pericles, who wore a helmet to disguise the unnatural length of his head, we might suspect that he possessed an overplus of the quality known as “long-headedness.” A dwarfed body, we commonly infer, can hold but a dwarfed mind. Our fine Greek imagination does not readily conceive of a near-sighted poet, and the novelist is yet to come who has the courage to give us a hero with a positive squint, or even a cast, in his eyes. That slightest of all “ slight deformities,” the facial grimace or bias, is not destined to escape observation. Yet why should I be annoyed because, in a certain charming face, a little superciliary wrinkle or plait in the forehead has permanently drawn up the left eyebrow, thereby giving a certain quizzical expression to a face otherwise sweet and dignified ? Or why should I find satyrical suggestion in a certain pair of refractory ears set at an acute angle with the head, and wish that the owner would take thought and hide them under masses of hair, in the discreet style of Hawthorne’s faun ? Or why, looking in the glass, should I — But no one should be so foolish as to indicate the bad points of his own physiognomy. If he persist in so doing, let him beware of sensitive over-statement.

— Some years ago it was said of the Ode on Immortality that it is “ the highwater mark which the intellect has reached in this age.” I do not know precisely the year in which this sentence was written; it may have been truer then than at any time since, but it is certain it could not be said now with any degree of truth. Let us examine the famous Ode a little. What is the central thought of it condensed ? It is that the innocence and joyousness of childhood are indications of the divine origin of our being, and consequently intimations of our immortality. We should not presume that a poet was pretending in these stanzas to deal with his theme in the way of conclusive philosophic reasoning, were it not that this particular poet has been so generally valued as a philosophic thinker. He mourns that, though there was a time when every common sight of earth seemed “ appareled in celestial light,” this glory has now passed away for him. And his experience, he says, is that of all men, — the “ vision splendid ” always dies away and “ fades into the light of common day.” He tells us that “ heaven lies about us in our infancy.” The thought in this oft-quoted line is only measurably true; or rather it may be called measurably false. Properly speaking, heaven — the divine, spiritual essence of human nature — does not lie about our infancy, but about our maturer years. And this, for the reason that innocence is not righteousness, but a purely negative and passive state of soul; impossible and undesirable as a permanent state, and therefore not intended to be such. The innocence of childhood, then, which is mere ignorance of evil, and its joyousness, which is ignorance of misfortune, cannot be taken as even an intimation of immortality. If these characteristics of childhood were to be prized for their own sake, then the fact that they pass so soon would make them rather indications of lapse, failure, and decay. If they are of no lasting worth, but only lovely as temporary conditions befitting the beginning of conscious life, then, to be sure, they “ intimate ” nothing; but neither are they things whose loss is to be mourned. It is not worth while to consider if a writer’s thought is profound till it is first shown to be true; and if it is not true, there need be no questioning as to its profundity.

The short stanza following the one from which I have quoted is really fine and the best in the Ode : it is the stanza beginning, “ Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own.” Further on the poet returns to the thought with which he started, about the years that “bring the inevitable yoke,” but finds matter for rejoicing in the fact that “ nature yet remembers what was so fugitive.” But chiefly he raises his song of thanks and praise for childhood’s

This stanza illustrates the power of lines and phrases to suggest an impression of a deeper meaning than is really contained in them. All the clauses of the stanza refer back to the former line, “ Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” and are the evidences or manifestations of that fact. When a child puts its hand into the flame to convince itself that fire really burns, it may be said to be questioning obstinately of outward things, but in any less literal sense than this children do not question of outward objects or their own sensations; nothing is more noticeable in young children than their easy, undoubting acceptance of things which are all equally new, all equally strange, and therefore not at all strange to their unfledged intellects. It is a common saying that children can ask questions which it puzzles a wise man to answer; this is not, however, because he is unprovided with an answer intelligible to wisdom like his own, but only that such answer no childish intelligence can take in. To children, the world is, indeed, not realized, yet they have no misgivings about their place in it. Further on in the same stanza, the vagueness of the lines throws some doubt upon the poet’s meaning. Does he intend to say that a child’s “ shadowy recollections ” (of the heaven it came from ?) are really the “ master light of all our seeing; ” that they “ uphold and cherish ” us, and are “ truths that wake to perish never ” ? This last line in its context has no meaning ; taken by itself, it is a fine one, and the same may be said of others which have helped to make the reputation of the famous Ode. A poem, however, must be judged as a whole, not by detached lines or stanzas. The Ode in truth owes more to sound than sense. It is more uniformly poetic, more harmonious and fine in rhythm, than almost any of Wordsworth’s poems. Only a captious critic would be disposed to pick flaws in it, considered as a simple meditation on childhood; looked on as great intellectual achievement, a characteristic work of a great“ philosophic” poet, we may be allowed to take exceptions to it.