The Contributors' Club

A CORRESPONDENT writes to me as follows : —

“It is believed by many that from the discussion now perplexing the nation concerning a proper memorial to General Grant the need we have of an American Pantheon or Westminster will make itself manifest. The principal arguments advanced in favor of such a project are, —

“ First, that unless the remains of America’s most honored dead are soon brought together their graves will be forgotten; and

“ Second, that the glories of the dead are belittled by the obscure and scattered places in which their remains at present repose.”

There are doubtless a dozen other arguments that might be brought forward in support of the plan indicated; but there remain about two thousand objections to it. As the Contributors’ Club could not begin to hold so many objections, I shall offer only two or three in outline, after remarking that the conditions which made, and make, Westminster Abbey are wholly lacking in this country, and will be forever lacking.

In the first place, we ought to have a single London, instead of six or seven, each vociferously claiming to be the only original genuine London, the one bright particular spot upon which the national mausoleum should be erected. In the second place, such an institution should be under the ægis of a great established church, in default of which our Pantheon would ultimately become the receptacle of extinct pugilists and those local statesmen who prepare themselves behind barroom counters for the toils (and spoils) of public life. With each change of the administration there would be a revolution in the management of the Pantheon, and a cry of “ Turn the rascals out!” With the straight Republicans in office, no horrible Mugwump, however distinguished, would be allowed sanctuary there; with the Democrats in power, the gates would be pitilessly slammed on the noses of defunct “ offensive partisans.” In the third place, the tomb at Mount Vernon and the romancer’s grave on the hillside in Sleepy Hollow (to mention no other shrines) are very well where they are, and no sensible person wants them removed. In regard to celebrities who may hereafter pass away — and here comes in a perplexing contingency — it is by no means certain that their families would look with favor on the Pantheon. They might prefer some baseball-ground, or Jones’s Wood, or the Point of Pines.

There is something very impressive and touching in the idea of a Poets’ Corner, where the sweet singers and sober historians and realistic novelists are peacefully brought together (however little they may have agreed with one another in the flesh), and flattered with statues and mural tablets ; but if the nation really wishes to honor that class of its unprotected but faithful children, and at the same time do honor to itself, let the nation make an equitable copyright treaty with England, and the literary fellers will provide their own headstones. Such a treaty would cost less than an attempt at an American Westminster Abbey, and would be greatly preferable to that amusing but, fortunately, impracticable piece of architecture.

A man of letters wants so many things before he wants to be buried — a comfortable income while living is so much more satisfactory to him than a sculptured monument when dead — that this talk about a national Pantheon, in the absence of an international copyright law, is, so far as he is concerned, a little exasperating. It falls coldly on his ear when he reflects how he is pillaged by foreign publishers, and that even his native land gives him only a few years’ proprietorship in the work of his own hand and brain.

— Has it been noted generally that Mr. Howe’s Story of a Country Town is a striking instance of the provincial influence in literature ? What a hopeless and depressing book it is ! One feels in reading it that the author has depicted his own weariness of his environment much more than he has portrayed the environment itself. A littérateur or an artist, whose lines of life are cast outside the great centres of thought, is very apt, I imagine, to fancy himself accursed of the gods and under the shadow of an immitigable evil. Such an one, if he chance to be enamored of realism, is sure to saturate his art work with an evasive but powerful reflex of his personal hopes and despairs. The preface to Mr. Howe’s story is a peculiarly bitter, almost hypochondriacal bit of realism; it is, in fact, sincerity so bald and autobiographically put that it has the ring of a bitterness too personal for the public ear. I do not mean criticism here, for, after all, this preface throws a strangely fascinating light forward over the whole length of the story, suggesting and resuggesting the fact that it could not have been written under any other than the bleakest provincial influences. The tragic force of Jane Eyre is not found in Mr. Howe’s story, but one is continually reminded of Charlotte Bronté, as one reads page after page of cheerless quasi-realism, gloomy, almost romantic, that affects one like a confession. The Story of a Country Town is, in fact, a romance. It is not true to Western life, which is the most cheerful and rollicking life in the world; but it is true to Mr. Howe’s disgust for its limitations, its lack of sympathy with art, its rawness, and its uninspiring air of mere largeness. Mr. Howe is a realist only in method. He is a visionary, a dreamer of weird dreams, a builder of strange, haunted castles. The people of his book are not the wide-awake, cheerful, energetic, virile Westerners whose achievements have astonished the world ; they are the creatures of a powerful imagination, laboring under galling restraints, and tinged —nay, deeply dyed—with the morbidness born of personal isolation and an inordinate longing for recognition. Nothing would seem more natural than for the provincial author, subjected, as he must be, to harrowing hindrances, vexations, and disappointments, to fall into a jaundiced state, and see everything around him through a cheerless mist. It would be a curious and interesting study for some patient investigator, this question of provincial literary life, and of the value of provincial literature. I imagine that an author horn and reared far from the great centres of culture, and who undertakes to achieve recognition with his pen at such a distance from all the strongest literary influences, may not be able to keep his own personal history out of his work. The world over, your provincial is a person who considers his special ambition the whole of life. Once he takes into his nostrils a whiff from the “ odorous Araby of art,” he begins longing “ to go on pilgrimages,” and to drink from the wells of a “ far countries.” Not often has this solitary victim of ambition that desperate energy which hurled Alphonse Daudet and his great predecessor, Balzac, into Paris ; but persistence and unlimited earnestness he is sure to possess. He becomes next to a monomaniac on the subject of authorship and his especial mission therein. He imagines rich pastures from which he is temporarily walled out, and he racks his brain over cunning plans for breaking in. The result is a sort of literature quite sui generis, having scarcely any element in it that would make it of kin to the great body of contemporaneous work. There is a flavor of genuine originality in these provincial literary fruits which gives them a value that is not to be overlooked or underestimated. Such books as the Story of a Country Town, Where the Battle was Fought, and the earlier stories of Cable come to us from outside the circle of the choir, so to speak, and bear upon their pages the impress of genius, growing and blowing in an atmosphere which, while not suited to its highest needs, has afforded it certain constituents so rare and fine that one doubts after all whether its loss is greater than its gain. It is a noteworthy fact that it evidently is hard for a provincial writer to be realistic in the accepted sense of the word. Mr. Howe, Miss Murfree, and Mr. Cable have struggled hard to be analysts ; but they have not yet got the poetry and romance, so dear to provincial hearts, quite subdued and repressed, nor have they been able to gain control of that kind of humor which is the fragrance of a literary vintage peculiar to the great centres of culture. Still, in place of these qualities, they have to offer a freshness and an air of concentrated earnestness seldom noticeable in the works of our sophisticated world-wise authors who toil in the great cities.

— Doubtless no article on a literary subject, lately written, has been more widely read, not to say conned and studied, than Mr. Stevenson’s article on Style, which appeared first in the Contemporary Review, and which has since been freely quoted and reprinted in the American magazines and journals. The fact is, that mighty little weapon which Bulwer thought so much of everybody is now trying to learn how to wield, and perhaps they all expect that Mr. Stevenson has disclosed some secrets. Rhythm he has taken for his theme, and though not so sensitive as some are to the influences of sound, we must admit that he has written a very ingenious and interesting paper, and because it is ingenious and interesting it will pay for at least one attentive reading; but as far as any practical assistance to the writer goes, the results of Mr. Stevenson’s lucubrations are nil. Nay, when we come to this sentence, “ The vowel demands to be repeated, the consonant demands to be repeated, and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied,” it seems to us that the plot thickens. Not that the circulation of practical hints in authorship is supposed by any means to have been the motive of Mr. Stevenson’s paper, or that those who have read it with so much eagerness were aware that there might have been a connection between their preferences for the article and their own aspirations, secret or otherwise. The fact, however, that there was, doubtless, such a connection remains true, and the most interested readers, without doubt, laid down the article, after reading it through, with some sense of disappointment. They vaguely expected that so much analysis would lead to something in the end. It is true the article has a conclusion, and a formal conclusion, too, with a summing-up of the points ; but it is a little too much like the famous conclusion of Rasselas, and — to carry the analogy further — the pursuit in question like the old pursuit of the phantom of hope. If it is inspiration that the reader wants, he had better by far take up such an article as Mr. Stevenson’s brilliant little essay entitled A Gossip of Romance.

Many were disappointed in George Eliot’s Life and Letters because she had so little to tell concerning her literary performance, and because they found so little apparent connection between her life and her work. Anthony Trollope was not so reticent, He took people literally behind the scenes, and showed them so much of his methods and machinery that even his admirers were disenchanted. But let those thus initiated try to produce a work similar to any work produced by Anthony Trollope, and what is the result? Who is it that can imitate him ? No work of Hawthorne’s was more eagerly sought for and read, at the time of publication, than his Note - Books, crude though the Notes were when compared with his finished work. This was because in the Note-Books Hawthorne’s admirers were allowed to follow him into his workshop, into his laboratory even, and find out his secret if they could. This they seem about to do, when the great master-workman turns his back upon them, as it were, and they miss the one process that determines the whole effect. The secret of original authorship is something that cannot be imparted. Inventions, methods, thoughts, ideas, may be communicated to one and another, but when it comes to style, le style c’est l’homme.