The Contributors' Club

ANY New Englander whose recollection goes back to the years between 1840 and 1850, and who was in any degree related to what was called the Transcendental or Liberal movement, will have his memories and associations stirred to a lively degree by Mr. Higginson’s biography of Margaret Fuller. The book presents, as nothing has hitherto done, a picture of that vanished epoch and its actors, with their hopes at once unreasonable and infinite, their theories benevolent but impossible, their creeds flattering to the human heart but born of strange hallucinations instead of any real knowledge of the world they lived in. My individual reminiscences of those days would be faint had not family tradition kept certain figures alive in my remembrance. These odd and fantastic personages, who came and went at our house, belonged to a sort of phantasmagoria beyond my sympathies, but influenced my wonder and imagination like other unexpected phenomena I encountered. My father had not only become a Unitarian, but had built a church almost at his own expense, and was an eager propagandist. Leading Boston Unitarians were interested in the struggling society, and not only many of the most noted preachers of the day, but almost any enthusiast with a newly discovered Truth to impart, came to X, as I will call our little village. My father exercised unbounded hospitality, and invited all co-workers and all co-thinkers to visit him, and the result was that there were apt to be two or three brighteyed and long-haired zealots at our house every week. My father was a born lover of ideas, and for about ten years quite gave himself up to the study of new theories ; and whoever had a novelty was welcome, no matter, it seems to me now, how near its frontier line was to the wildest absurdity. “It’s hard work to tell which is Old Harry, when everybody’s got boots on,” as Mrs. Poyser said pithily, and in those days all ideas were equipped and were on the road.

Most of our visitors were vegetarians, and some of them confined themselves exclusively to one variety of food. Mr. —— ate rice, and hardly anything else; invariably remarking with an air of exhilaration when he helped himself to the last in the dish, “ When I get so I cannot eat rice, I think I shall die.” He throve under this diet, and had the loftiest theories concerning the ultimate possibilities of the human race when they should be brought to his way of thinking. It was, however, enough for him that he individually had satisfactorily reached the solution of the human problem, and he did not force his example upon others. He rose early, and as soon as he left his room took a tumbler, went to the well, and proceeded to drink glass after glass of water until breakfast was ready. “It purifies, it restores, it quickens me,” he would remark blandly at intervals to any one who looked on with admiration or terror, as the case might be. Mr. W——, on the other hand, was a fiery zealot in his views, and his life was embittered by the sight of my father’s family growing up in opposition to his own theories. “ Are we beasts of prey ? ” he would demand, “ that we should eat cooked meat? ” (sic). He stayed in our house for some weeks, and mounted his hobby, and rode it to such good effect that a sensible diminution was effected in the amount of animal food consumed at our table, and an increase in the way of baked potatoes, milk, etc. Animal food, he declared, destroyed vigor, by burning and otherwise consuming the tissues; it led to premature old age, loss of hair, teeth, etc. It induced alcoholism; being in itself a dangerous stimulant, it made the human body dependent on something that would excite. It caused restlessness. “ Do you wish to see your children nervous, restless, like lions or tigers ? ” he would ask. Now with a diet of potatoes and milk, the crotcheter declared, there was no possibility of disease entering the frame, and accordingly any one brought up on that diet might, so to speak, live forever, so exactly were the elements of the two combined calculated to restore waste and revive tissue, etc. Another favorite idea of Mr. W——’s was that the brain needed the direct action of the sun’s rays, and that, accordingly, every person should sit for at least an hour each day, with his head uncovered, in the sunshine. That he practiced this habit I well remember; for I can recall his rigid, upright figure, in a kitchen chair, established in the middle of the laundry-yard, while with the utmost good humor and decision he insisted that I should take off my head gear and keep him company. Another visitor, not a preacher, but a wild visionary in general, came to our house periodically, and always with some new fancy lodged in his brain. He was a man of much abstruse scientific knowledge, and was always inventing something which never succeeded; but he was a very dirty man, and his hands were at once our wonder and our disgust. On one occasion, when he made his appearance, my father rose to see him, extending his hand in welcome; but the visitor folded both his hands behind him, and said resolutely, “ My dear sir, you must excuse me, but I cannot shake hands with you ; I shake hands with no one. Too much of what is vital and spiritual essence is lost in this idle dalliance which the world calls ‘ friendly greeting.’ ” And we all rejoiced that his vital and spiritual essences were too precious to be wasted, for we did not like the touch of his hands. One visitor, who broached his least idea with a circumstance as if, at last, something of real importance were to be proclaimed to the world, delighted us children by saying upon his taking breakfast with us, “ Breakfast is my best meal ; it is, I may say, my only meal. When I eat my breakfast, I eat for the day.” He seemed to do so, but criticism of such an Homeric appetite was uncalled for, when he had told us he ate but once in the twenty-four hours. He had expected to leave in the morning, but the day turned out rainy, and he remained to dinner. Judge, then, of our amazement when, being helped bountifully for the second time, he remarked in a lazy, absent-minded way, “ This is my best meal; it is, I may say, my only meal,” etc. We laughed outright, alas, and had to be sent away from the table. Few of these thinkers and enthusiasts had any sense of humor. My father, however, when once driving one of them up the mountain, turned to him and said, “ Mr. ——, if I take you up to the top I shall insist that you preach me a sermon.” “ I will,” was the reply, “ and my text shall be, ‘ And the devil taketh him up to an exceeding high mountain.’” A constant lady visitor, M—— G——, who spent with us weeks at a time, was intensely interested in anything a little off color in the way of religious creeds. Theodore Hook, who when asked if he was willing to accept the Thirty-Nine Articles blandly replied, “ Oh, certainly ; forty, if you like,” was no circumstance to M—— G——, who would accept any theory or any creed, provided it conflicted with the orthodox views she had renounced. This promiscuous greed for novelty was, however, so much the mark of the period that it merely made her seem eager and hopeful, until, a few years afterwards, it carried her into Bloomer dress, and left her stranded at high tide as a silly woman whose good taste could not be trusted. One evening, at our house, she was conversing with a well-known lecturer on geology, whom she questioned incessantly.

“ How long, Mr. ——, do you suppose the world has existed? For an infinite time, I suppose.”

“ Infinite? Madam, infinite is a long word.”

“ But your discoveries all show that the accepted chronology is worthless. Don’t you suppose it has existed billions and billions, even trillions, of years ? ”

“I think a billion will do, madam,” said the geologist. “ Suppose, just to be fixed and definite, we say the world has existed a billion of years.”

“ But why,” said M—— G——, throwing her whole soul into the question,— “why be fixed, why be definite? Why dwarf the illimitable grandeur of scientific revelation for the sake of a feeble consistency with the accepted orthodox scheme of things ? Sir,” her eyes flashing, “ I would not, if I were you, consider a billion of years anything.”

In fact, the revolt against dogmatic creeds allowed new beliefs and dogmas which showed a wonderful receptivity on the part of these zealots. When phrenology, magnetism, and spiritualism, one after the other, were embraced, one saw that the person who begins by denying everything strikes an ultimate balance by believing everything.

— In the Grand Chorus of Birds as translated by Mr. Swinburne, the feathered folk, addressing the earth-bound human race, boast, —

moreover, flinging this twittered gibe : —

To this day, perhaps, the birds have retained a perception of the curious and mystified regard in which they are held by us; and so they amuse themselves now and then by setting us particularly difficult problems in divination. I had not been instructed in the rudiments of this science, else I should have understood with what purpose a small bird, one day last winter, flew to my window, and clinging to the sash for a full moment peered into the room; by its quick, critical glance seeming to say, “ So this is the sort of winter-lodge these human beings keep!” I was loath to accept so barren an interpretation of the bird’s action as that its object in flying to the window was merely to secure some cobwebbed speck that promised food. Very lately, also, as the chimney-swifts of the neighborhood were holding their usual evening muster, two of these birds flew into my chamber, hovered for a brief space uttering the short, shrill note characteristic of their kind, then out again, and away to join their comrades of the airy campus. I felt that my chamber had been singularly honored by these birds. Perhaps they had flown in to deliver an invitation, bidding my thoughts to come out and aloft into good company ; it so, to have mistaken their kind errantry would have been of a piece with the dull blunder of Rhœcus when he missed the wood-nymph’s message. In my augury there was something very auspicious about this visit from the chimneyswifts, but an octogenarian friend to whom I related the incident considered it in a more serious light. Had a bird come to her window — much more had it entered the room — she should have understood that a “ warning ” had been sent her. “ Depend upou it” (these were her words), “it means something, — just what I can’t tell now; but wait a spell, and you ’ll see ! ” That this cautious old soul has been able to keep her faith in supernatural monitions of this sort is probably owing to her discreet practice of waiting a “spell.” It has been observed that several days or even weeks may elapse before she finds the sequel which fits with nice precision the conditions of the portent. Now, as the sequel may pertain to calamity within her own household or that of a neighbor ; to nature’s mismanagement of rain, frost and heat forces; or even to disasters of a national character, something is sure to happen to justify her presagement of mischief. Allow her time enough, and she will give you a wholly satisfactory interpretation of any bird that may visit your casement. It is impossible that you will not admire the artless ingenuity of her post-fact prophecies.

— A literary friend of mine, who is a little irritable and subject to attacks of extreme views, has made a rather late discovery of the fine qualities of modern French literature. Accordingly, in order to be well off with the old love before being on with the new, he has taken to reviling the German. How many people, he wants to know, have gone to the study of German because of the alluring tradition that Carlyle was to “ find what he wanted there ” ? And of the number how many have come to make the reflection that if, indeed, he found it he must have taken it all away with him ? The trouble is, perhaps, that my friend went to the Germans for imaginative literature. And now he finds their literature essentially unpoetic. Their fiction, he says, is diffuse and tedious. In his worst moments he insists that their poetry is dull. At first attractive, the monotonous canter or jogtrot of its metres becomes wearisome, with the noisy click and clank of their consonant-encumbered rhymes. Moreover, it is always Blumen and Blumen, and never any particular species of flower ; always Duft and Luft, Klagen and Schlagen, Herz and Schmerz, and never any specific variety of sound, or color, or feeling. It is as if only the commonest aspects of nature or life had ever been apprehended, and these few meagre “ properties ” had been handed on from one poet to another as perpetual heirlooms. This is, no doubt, the exaggerated view of a late convert to another cultus. Yet it is no wonder that he is charmed with the recent school of French poets. How delicate, how subtile, how opalescent, with all manner of vanishing gleams of beauty, natural and spiritual, seems this poetry, compared with that of their more heavily moulded neighbors! The sonnets of Sully Prudhomme, for example, — it is impossible to translate them; tint and perfume have vanished from the pressed flower. But one is possessed to attempt it, as in the three sonnets offered here; —

SIESTE.

SIESTA.

ÉTHER.

THE CLOUD.

DE LOIN.

IN SEPARATION.

— It appears that the admirers of Balzac are not few in America, and I take it for granted that most of them have read Mr. Edgar Saltus’s charming little book, in which the great novelist and coffee-drinker is so cleverly sketched. Cleverly sketched, I say, but I must hasten to add that Mr. Saltus gives us something better than mere cleverness in his study. True enthusiasm is always infectious, and it is also a prime ingredient of genius; moreover, along with this enthusiasm, when our receptivity has been well fortified by a generous foretaste, there comes a faith in the genuineness of what is offered us. There is a zestful Franco-American flavor to Mr. Saltus’s style, and a peculiar, albeit at times rather elusive, freshness in his suggestions. Balzac is no babe to handle. One who comes upon him for the first time recoils from his mere bulk, as from an elephant; and the longer one studies him the huger he appears. Mr. Saltus is sincere, and well aware of the difficulties in his task, but, like David with the chosen stone in his sling, he goes to the venture enthusiastically and confidently. The result is something well worth careful reading. It condenses, to a degree, the chaotic profusion of the great Frenchman’s creations, and offers us something like a strong impressionistic sketch of a genius at once the greatest in some respects, and the most provokingly unsatisfactory in all respects, given to modern times. Upon reading Mr. Saltus’s book I asked myself the question, What would a Balzac do in America ? Where would he make his literary lair ? How would he go about collecting the materials for his American Comédie Humaine? How, in some dingy Boston or New York loft, with his old wrap around him, would he so brew his coffee as to draw from it the Contes Drolatiques of neologistic Young America ? What street would be the Rue Lesdiguières, out of whose cobwebbed garret should issue the strange stream whose current, blended of all the constants, the variables, and the increments of American life, would break down every barrier, and flood the whole field of fiction ? We have long been talking about the great American novel. Balzac’s colossal idea, the Comédie Humaine, would have been, could he have reduced it to shape, the great French novel; but, on the same scale, what would the American comédie be, and what man has the nerve to undertake to write it? Novelists of to-day think they are treading in Balzac’s tracks when they spin their slender story and draw it through a hundred eyelets of analysis, but they are as widely erring as are the linnet-voiced poets who fancy they resemble Shakespeare ! A novelist of Balzac’s breadth, depth, strength, and fearlessness, if he should suddenly appear in America, would be at once a joy and a terror; for he would run the gamut of our social, religious, commercial, and political sins and virtues, with a voice whose volume would be overwhelming, and whose compass would not be strained by the furthest extremities of exertion.

Théopbile Gautier, in his brilliant preface to the Fleurs du Mal of Charles Baudelaire, gives a curiously forcible suggestion of Balzac’s nerve power. At one of the meetings of le club des haschichins the members attempted to prevail on Balzac to taste the dawamesk. Says Gautier, “ In returning the spoonful of dawamesk (hasheesh) offered him, Balzac said that the experiment was not worth while, and that the hasheesh, he was quite sure, would have no effect on his brain. It was, perhaps, possible that this powerful brain, where reason sat enthroned, fortified by study, saturated with the subtile aroma of Mocha,— a brain that three bottles of the best wine of Vouvray could not in the least becloud, — would have been capable of resisting the fleeting intoxication of Indian hemp.”

We know with how many grains of salt we are permitted to take M. Gautier’s praise of his contemporaries when he gets it pitched in a high key, but there must have been a giantesque personality to call forth all that has been written of Balzac. Born at Tours, he drifted into Parisian life by the same channel that has since known so many provincial waifs, and found his way to novel-writing by the hardest and meanest turns. His methods were not those of M. Alphonse Daudet and the present realistic school of Parisian fiction-writers; yet, notwithstanding his prolixity, his coarse sensuality, and his singular liking for hideously abandoned people, one cannot help regretting that some of his masterly strength and virility has not descended to the novelists of to-day. I have often thought that a careful study of Balzac, not to imitate him, but to profit by his courage, his faithfulness, and his respect for details, would turn our younger novelists into a more desirable field with a wider horizon before them. Analysis is a great thing, but there is a very appreciable difference between the analysis that involves a deep and broad human interest and that which keeps us quibbling over what I should like to call psychal infinitesimals. It may be, however, that, after all, too much study of Balzac has led certain of our American analysts into the extremes of that hair-splitting dissection of motives of which we are all quite tired. I can readily see how this might be the case. A thorough-going admirer easily becomes an imitator, and an imitator, as a rule, gathers to himself, with provoking care, all the faults and but few of the excellences of his model. Conceding the fact that Balzac is the model, and admitting that certain American novelists are the imitators, why should we wonder that we are called upon by the latter to hold our breath while they cover a dozen pages with a description of the mental process by which an impecunious foreign nobleman screws his courage up to the point of proposing marriage to a “ vulgar American heiress, you know ! ”