Les Gens De Ma Connaissance

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

Mr. Saintsbury in his sketch of Piron in A Frame of Miniatures recalls the story of the way in which the poet greeted the reading of a manuscript which a young author was submitting to him. “At each reminiscence, he (Piron) solemnly lifted his hat, until at last the author, nettled, asked him what was the matter. ‘C’est que j’ai la coutume de saluer les gens de ma connaissance,’ was the reply.”

It is not vouchsafed to many of us to have M. Piron’s opportunity for the retort courteous, nor perhaps, were the opportunity ours, should we seize it with such Gallic skill. But I fancy that most of us could follow, through some yellowing drawer-full of boyhood reflections and rejected manuscripts, the traces of “ les gens de nôtre connaissance,” — the unconscious echoes, when we first came under the thrall of some master spirit, — the little twists of phrase, the stylistic mannerisms, naïvely confessing at whose shrine we worshiped.

Not long ago, chance unearthed for me a little brown dog-eared volume, — the diary of a college boy. The bescrawled and dusty pages told of college scrapes and summer outings, of books bought and read and gravely judged. And whenever a new planet swam into his ken, the boyish style underwent a corresponding change.

“ Joyousest of joyous days,” I find recorded in a vacation period, “how fair hast thou been, and how much do I regret thy passing! By what Elysian stream have I wandered, and with what bliss played out for the passing moment my little rôle! Great hast thou been for me, O Day of Days, doubly great by reason of that pure damsel who paused with me beside the purling brook.”

Is it necessary to turn back a few pages and find: “Received from my father, Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia”? And why in these callous latter days should I recall that the “Elysian stream” bore the ignominious cognomen of Muddy Run, and that the “pure damsel” stepped not so lightly but that her well-shod feet left as distinct an impress in the soft Virginia soil as did her coquettish glances upon my impressionable heart ?

But the pure damsel passes, and Lamb gives place to another mood and style. There is no record of a new purchase — there is no need. For the young sentimentalist bounds suddenly into a somewhat incoherent transcendentalism, and his inspiration is unmistakable.

“These are kind people,” he writes, with a patronizing air which sits comically upon his eighteen years, “good people and not without somewhat to commend them, — but mere sitters by the chimneynook,— nought of the Heroic upon them. God Commonplace, a poor shambling creature, their deity. What know they of Manhood, of Herohood, the rude giants of the old world struggling through chaotic confusion, of Luther fighting the battle of the right against a world, of Cromwell raising his standard against monarchical injustice?” As a matter of fact, the good people probably knew their Carlyle much better than the callow stripling who was criticising them, — and probably entertained aspirations without parading them, into the bargain.

But no boy could pass through his literary nonage without coming at some time or other under the domination of the eighteenth-century Dictator. “The profusion of weighty volumes around me,” the diarist writes (it is winter, and the reference is doubtless to the sober college shelves), “ oppress (sic) me with the meagerness of my own intellectual life. Ah, that I may profit by the ‘present value of single minutes, and endeavour to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground! ’ ” And so, passim, with the sagest of reflections, in the weightiest of Johnsonese.

Sir Thomas Browne, from whom, with unconscious humor, he has quoted: “ It is an honorable object to see the reasons of other men wear our liveries, and their borrowed understandings do homage to the bounty of ours ” — Izaak Walton, conceitful Lyly, and glorious old Malory — with what unspoiled zest they are greeted, unconsciously echoed, freely plagiarized! Blessed boyhood discoveries I greet them again — les gens de ma connaissance — half envious of that first keen delight, that innocent privilege of plagiarism.