The Contributors' Club

TIIE other night, while turning over some old papers, I chanced on a copy of The Anti-Slavery Advocate for January 2, 1858, containing a rhymed letter addressed by Lowell to James Miller M’Kim, of Philadelphia. The verses appear to have been written in 1848, and as they are not included in any edition of the author’s poems they will be entirely fresh to the readers of the present generation, who can scarely fail to take delight in the racy portraits which the writer gives of certain notable leaders of the anti-slavery crusade. These portraits are etched with a skill that never goes out of fashion. In the course of the epistle Lowell performs several feats of rhyme which perhaps he would not care to repeat, and several feats of wit which no one but he could. I wish that I were able to persuade the chairman of the Contributors’ Club to print this delicious bit of vers de (abolition) sociélé in full ; but if its length render retrenchment necessary, I beg him to mark the excisions with a row of stars, to make up for the lost brilliancy.

LETTER FROM BOSTON.

DEAR M. —

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— It is a standing surprise to at least one contributor that civilized people should have allowed the word criticism to lose so much of its noble meaning that it has come to signify to most persons simply fault-finding. Its definition still remains in my largest dictionary, “ The art of judging with propriety of the beauties and faults of a literary performance, or of any production of the fine arts.” But when it is said that some one has criticised a picture or a book, it never occurs to us that the critic has simply praised it; we are only too sure that he has blamed it, and presented to his audience a list of its defects.

It seems to be a fixed conclusion in some people’s minds that they are superior to anything imperfect. If they are able to point out blemishes in a piece of work, it counts for so many proofs that they could employ a higher art, and that their standard is a better one than the artist’s. They do not like to give a thing unqualified praise, lest some one should suspect them of being ignorant and easy to please.

Now, there is nothing perfect in this world ; for, being of this world, each fraction or form of matter hears the world’s stamp of imperfection. From our own natures downward through the scale of animate and inanimate things we can always discover the flaw that might be called a seal of Time. Perhaps it is this which has made us instinctively anticipate immortality and eternity, but at least we need not manifest surprise and dismay at each new proof of the general law of incompleteness. Why can we not, however desirous of making our works and ways as good as possible, have patience, and quietly accept the nearly right, since it is all we shall ever get until we ourselves are fit to dwell amid perfection ? It would save us an immense amount of disappointment and self-discouragement and remorse. After a book is written, or a picture painted, or an hour has been spent delightfully with a friend, we always see or remember something that mars and spoils, something that keeps us from being satisfied, something that we worry about and wish otherwise. Yet we surely can tell ourselves, compassionately, that that is the flaw ; that is the stamp of this order of things : let us be thankful if the rest goes well.

Not to follow the moral and personal aspects too far, there are times when one grows most indignant with one’s neighbors, who go into studios, and talk wisely and indulgently, according to their lights, of what they see. An artist may have thought and dreamed for months about a picture, and at last puts his great plan on canvas as best he can, and looks at it longingly and lovingly, hoping that he has succeeded in expressing to other people something of his vision or his glimpse of beauty, the new truth of which he has learned some fragment. He has been reverent, fearful, and fall of ambition. No one knows better than he how sadly he has been baffled in trying to repeat what he has been taught. Yet one person comes in after another, measuring the lengths of the little fingers of his goddess, and finding one a little too short; or blaming him for his too green grass, or the size of his canvas, or the difference between his conception of a character or a sentiment and some other man’s. No wonder that he sighs and feels no is understood, and wishes that no one would speak. Complacent praise is as hard to bear as blame, when either comes from an observer who is really unfit to give any opinion at all. In the presence of a man who has studied his art carefully and faithfully, and who is a master of his business, I believe that we cannot be too reticent; and however little a piece of work may say to us, remember that it may be our fault only, and that we are listening to a foreign language, or to music beyond our comprehension. How often we are amazed, on reëxamining a picture or rereading a book which we had laughed at or found stupid a few years before, to find that added experience and growth of wisdom have made them speak to us clearly and nobly.

To bring the question down to art matters only, and to tell the story which has provoked me to this protest. An artist who has won for herself great admiration and repute told it to me,—an excellent example of the value of most persons’ criticism. She had made a sketch of a boy’s head, and a fond aunt came to see it in the studio. The visitor looked at it with an air of great pleasure, but of some responsibility, and said that the eyes seemed to her not quite good, and my friend promised to alter them. At the next visit great pleasure was expressed at the improvement, but some change about the nose was requested, which the artist, a little amused, agreed to make. On another day the hair was discovered to be a little too dark ; but on the fourth visit this intelligent aunt and a party of friends thought the likeness quite perfect, and the artist was forced to evade an answer when asked if the changes had not been fortunate, for indeed she had never found time to touch the portrait.

All of which is intended to prove that critics are sometimes foolish and ignorant of the least details of the work which they discuss and condemn ; that it is useless to look for perfection; consequently that we should do two things, — have the grace to be silent when we are not fit to give an opinion, and be patient with not only our undeveloped fellow-men, but also their uncompleted work.

— In a recent article the Atlantic Monthly reviewed three books in which is attempted what the reviewer styles the “ annexation of heaven.” Of Mrs. Oliphant’s A Little Pilgrim it is said that, “apart from its very tender illustration of a profound theme, it may be viewed as a work of literary art.” It is as such, I think, that many persons are interested by it who feel at the same time that such endeavors to picture the beyond are necessarily unsatisfactory, or that the theme is one on the whole best left to the private meditations of the Christian, especially when, as in this case, the literary treatment of it involves the introduction of the Divine Person on the scene. Mrs. Qliphant has, however, written another sketch, not so well known, I fancy, although equally worth notice as a piece of work. To my mind it is more successful than A Little Pilgrim, and for the reason that in it the author attempts only what is within the range of possibility to represent. The theme of A Beleaguered City is not religious, or not directly so ; it is a mystical, imaginative little tale, in which are described the experiences of the inhabitants of a French rural town, who are strangely driven out from their homes by visitants from another world. The supernatural visitation is wonderfully well told, with a vividness that makes it convincingly real, yet with a delicate reserve of detail, a calculated vagueness, that becomes thrillingly impressive. The most striking passages are those in which the mayor first feels the presence of the intruders, when he visits the town gates, and all of the short narrative of Paul Lecamus. The supernatural element is all-pervading, but without any undue insistence upon it. The matter-of-fact manner of the mayor’s narrative lends reality to the extraordinary events he recounts, while Lecamus’ relation of his special experience admirably completes the mayor’s by the difference of the impression produced upon his finer sensibilities. The conclusion of the whole matter is highly artistic. It is almost distressingly lifelike, — the perversion of fact, the aftergrowth of legend, the weakening sense among the townsfolk of any deep spiritual significance in the awful experience they have passed through. It seems to me that Mrs. Oliphant shows unusual power in this kind of writing. Her machinery is delicately contrived, and works with smoothness to produce the strongest effect with the least apparent force.

— I think that Mr. White is nearer right than the contributor to the February Club concerning the use of " as ” in place of “ that ” in New England. My experience, both in hearing and in the involuntary imitation of the speech of my country, teaches me that as is used when it is susceptible of being interpreted either that or whether, both used as conjunctions, but that it is not employed in place of the adjective pronoun that. Mr. White is therefore, I believe, right in pronouncing the dialect of Hannah Coffin incorrect, when she says, “ There ain’t no one here as knows,” as being used for who or that. The examples which the contributor gives, and which immediately occurred to me when I read Mr. White’s article, are familiar Yankee expressions, but as in them has a different meaning, “ I don’t know as I will,” “ I don’t remember as I did,” I ain’t sure as I did,” all may be filled out correctly, either as “ I don’t know whether I will — or did.” If that, and not whether, is supplied, it is simply a conjunction, bearing a more positive signification than whether, but the same part of speech, and in no sense whatever an equivalent for that, which is merely another form of who and which. In the phrase “ I told him as how,” as how is, again, only an inelegant substitute for the conjunction that, and is in no way related to the English use of as instead of a pronoun.

— There is one pageant which the Washington newspaper correspondents have neglected to report and describe. It is even possible that they have never witnessed it, though it is of daily occurrence, and requires neither fee, card, nor costume from those who attend. I may call it the processional and recessional of the crows, for it is a solemn coming and going, with a music peculiarly its own.

Every morning, about half an hour before sunrise, myriads of crows pass over the city in a northeasterly direction, on their way from their Virginia roosting-place, in the woods behind Arlington Heights, to their feeding-ground, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, past Capitol Hill and Kendall Green, and I know not how far beyond.

During the month of January I was frequently awakened shortly after six o’clock by their hoarse cawings, and from then until nearly eight they streamed steadily over; first a vanguard of two or three, then a bee-like swarm of a hundred in a group, then a dozen in a line, and so on, till the whole sky was as thickly sown with black spots as we ever see it at midnight with stars.

I often leave the upper half of my shutters open over night, that I may lie and watch them from my bed. It has a curious Japanese-screen-like effect, — the long succession of dusky birds, flying diagonally across the cold, gray square of sky, framed by my sash, one corner of the space hung with the bare stems and withered berries of last season’s woodbine.

On a clear day the crows fly very high — mere drifting specks of black, almost to be mistaken for charred bits blown from some chimney ; but on a foggy morning they descend so low as to look the size of pigeons, and when snow is falling they seem bewildered, flying hither and thither, with loud, scolding notes, coming down almost between the housetops, evidently out of their course, which in favorable weather is as straight as the flight of an arrow. Once when it was very clear and cold, I fancied that they were exhilarated by the keen air; for they soared and dived and circled, chasing each other in a dozen wild and graceful figures, — now high, now low. But this may have been only the friskiness of some of the juniors, incautiously left behind. They must number many thousands,for my every attempt to count, or even estimate them, ends in confusion and failure. There is a strange charm in watching their free, strong, tireless flight and apparently endless succession.

A little before sunset they begin to come swinging back, in the same scattering way, but with no frolicking and little sound, again covering over an hour in their transit. I especially remember one of those glorious, fervent sunsets in December, when the whole western sky was of the deepest orange, fading to pale blue overhead. As I came past the White House, the great silver shield of the full moon rose slowly behind New York Avenue Church. The broad street was thronged with saunterers, velvet and fur robed matrons, saucy-hatted girls, shrewd-faced politicians, and tattered but grinning Sambos; while far above all swept the black army of the crows, solemnly, silently, floating over the gay city, to the desolate woods beyond the yellow river.

— It seems such an easy thing for an author to give his autograph ! He must be a cross-grained, unaccommodating person, indeed, who refuses to scratch his name on a bit of cardboard or a slip of paper, when it would give somebody so much pleasure ! But the autograph-hunter has made it heavy work for the author who is unfortunate enough — he sometimes comes to regard it as a misfortune — to be popular. Every mail adds to his reproachful pile of unanswered letters. If he is not cautious, he will find himself in correspondence with so exigeant a crowd of persons that he will have no leisure left to attend to his proper profession.

When the autograph craze first began the disease was of a mild type. The collector was modestly content with a signature. That no longer satisfies. He wants a letter addressed to him personally — “ on any subject you please,” as a youthful fiend wrote to me the other day ! He wishes to flourish this letter in the faces of his hapless acquaintances, in order to prove that he is on familiar terms with the celebrated So-and So. The devices he employs to achieve this end are ingenious and inexhaustible. For example, he drops you a line to inquire in what year you first printed your beautiful poem entitled A Psalm of Life. If you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him that you are not the author of that poem, which he must have confused with your Rime of the Ancient Mariner — and there you are ! The insidious rogue knew very well that you did n’t write the Psalm of Life. Another trick is to inquire of you if your father’s middle name was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has probably been dead many years, and as perhaps he was not a distinguished man in his day, you are naturally touched that any one should have interest in him after this lapse of time. In the innocence of your heart you reply by the next mail that your father’s middle name was not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas — and there you are again !

A still more offensive, because disillusioning stratagem, is that of the correspondent who informs you that he is replenishing his library, and requests a detailed list of your works, with the respective dates of their publication, prices, etc. This has an air of business. The inference is that the correspondent, who writes in a brisk, commercial manner, wishes to fill out his collection of your books, or possibly to purchase a complete set in crushed Levant morocco. Lay not that flattering inference to thy soul, thou too unworldly dreamer ! A year or so later this same person, having forgotten that he has already demanded a chronological list of your writings, sends you another application, couched in the selfsame words ! The length of time it takes him to “replenish ” his library (with your works) is something pathetic. This particular species of autograph - hunter probably does not care a copper for your autograph from a literary point of view. From a mercantile point of view he cares a great deal, and likes to get three or four copies a year; for he compiles small volumes of autographs, and sells them. It must be a poor trade, however. If the same amount of persistence and industry it demands of him were put into a corner-grocery, he would speedily make his fortune.

A very dangerous type of autographhunter is the “sweet girl graduate,” whose scented missive takes wing from some suburban academy. If you put your name on that harmless - looking little card with the beveled gilt edges, you will bring the whole school down upon you within a month ! I have a friend who received in the course of three weeks no fewer than forty-seven scented missives, dated at Mrs. ——’s Institution for Young Ladies.

There is no author who does not justly feel complimented when his autograph is desired by some intelligent person, who has read his writings with discrimination. It is altogether another thing when he is importuned to give his time and attention to a crowd of idle boys and girls who “ collect ” autographs as they would collect postage-stamps, with no knowledge or interest in the matter beyond the inane ambition to get as many names as possible.

The letters which these persons write are not always too respectful or grammatical. “ As one of the leading authors of America, I would like to have your autograph,” is a stereotyped phrase. The writers frequently put in the shape of a demand what could be granted to them only through politeness. This sort of letter used especially to exasperate a certain famous poet whom I knew years ago. One day I was in his study, when he chanced to receive a singularly peremptory request for his autograph. He seized a pen and wrote, “ Sir, I consider your note impertinent, and I refuse to give you my autograph.” He was about to sign the declaration, when he saw the fun of the thing, and let me sign it for him.