Atlantic Shop-Talk

‘As the frivolous chatter of the Syracusan ladies in Theocritus is still to be heard at every Hyde-Park review, as the Crispenus and Suffenus of Horace and Catullus still haunt our clubs and streets, as the personages of Chaucer and Molière and La Bruyère and Shakespeare still live and move in our midst — so the “Will Wimbles “ and “Ned Softlys,” the “Beau Tibbs’s” and the “Men in Black” are as familiar to us now as they were to the bewigged and be-powdered readers of the Spectator and the Citizen of the World. We laugh at them; but we sympathize with them, too; and find them on the whole more enduringly diverting than dissertations on the “Non-Locality of Happiness” or the “Position of the Pineal Gland.'”

So wrote Austin Dobson, best of interpreters and lovers of the Eighteenth Century. And what he suggested here in prose, he displayed again and again in verse—the permanent fascination of the century dominated in English letters by the ursine figure of the great Doctor, and brightened throughout its course by scores of more nimble shapes — masters and mistresses of the fancy of posterity. The Nineteenth Century folic were too much like us —God save the mark! our youngest Georgians will exclaim. Their predecessors of earlier periods are too remote to seem of anything but distant kin. Heaven knows, our Eighteenth Century forbears are far enough away from our own modernity; yet their wit and feeling have a piquant quality, a flavor of romance, which, for all their grandiosity, lie within our very reach and grasp.

So it is that books which picture the Eighteenth Century hold their sway. The old music of ' gigues, gavottes, and minuets’ rings through their pages on our ears. And here in this ‘shop’ of ours we like to catch the tunes and play them on new instruments. The old rhythms made themselves heard through Mr. Newton’sAmenities of Book-Collecting and A Magnificent Farce, contemporary as their author is with to-day — and to-morrow. They sound again, bewitchingly, in Professor Tinker’sYoung Boswell. And before the autumn of 1922 is far advanced they will be heard, with a peculiar clearness, in ‘The Ladies!' A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty, by E. Barrington. Readers of the Atlantic have made a preliminary acquaintance with ‘The Walpole Beauty,’ ‘The Mystery of Stella,’ and other remarkable blendings of fact and imagination which are to be brought together in this spirited volume, a charming product of fancy and scholarship. It will be a book — with its reproductions of old portraits — in which the heart of Austin Dobson himself would have found delight, perhaps all the more for not confining itself too strictly to the Eighteenth Century; for at one end it slips back into the Seventeenth through its dealing with Mistress Pepys, and, at the other, forward into the Nineteenth, in company with the ‘immortal Jane’s’ Elizabeth Bennet. Yes, Austin Dobson would have relished it; and the Atlantic Monthly Press holds the happy belief that the Eighteenth Century books which it is gradually adding to its list will make a permanent place in the affections of many readers.

In that these books are primarily biographical in character, they relate themselves to a field of literature in which our ‘shop’ has a special interest — the field of biography. The Letters of William James and the Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson, published respectively in 1920 and 1921, represent a type of publication to which the Atlantic Monthly Press, quite deliberately, is devoting particular attention. Within the readily discernible future, other books of this general character may be expected to issue from the Atlantic office. Among the first of them, scheduled for October publication, will be Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields, by M. A. DeWolfe Howe. Of this more anon. More also of Meade’s Headquarters, 1863-1865: Letters of Colonel Theodore Lyman from the Wilderness to Appomattox, which we are about to publish on behalf of the Massachusetts Historical Society. And more anon of a second book by the author of Collector’s Luck,Alice Van Leer Carrick, of two Christmas juveniles with colored illustrations, and of three Christmas ‘booklets’ of the same family with Christmas Eve on Beaton Hill. There are too many things to be talked about all at once.

The list of Atlantic Monthly Press publications is, indeed, beginning to attain proportions that tempt one to generalize about it. In the first place it may be said that it represents, in the field of books, the same standards and spirit that characterize the Atlantic Monthly. May this be interpreted by the observation that an intelligent interest in the realities of life and thought is not of necessity forbidding, and that many things hitherto reproachfully associated with a certain altitude of brow may be treated in the manner not inevitably productive of headaches? That, unless the Shop-Talker is much mistaken, is what many readers of the Atlantic have been discovering for themselves.

Now and then comes a lively reminder that the world does not change very much. It came to the Shop-Talker not long ago when he found, among some old manuscript letters he was looking over, the following, dated ‘Pittsburg, Pa. 8 Nov. '67.'

‘PUBLISHERS ATLANTIC MONTHLY: —
Will you permit some of the constant readers of the Atlantic to suggest to you, or the Editors, the propriety of withholding the remainder of “Rose Rollins” from any further exhibition of herself. For the reputation of the Magazine, the patience of its readers, and the pocket of the Publishers we d suggest this.
‘ The story is a disgrace to “Beadle’s Dime Novels,”containing neither sense nor respectable nonsense, but is low, coarse & intolerably silly, and we would be glad to see it strangled at its birth.
' READERS OF ATLANTIC.’

Fifty-five years ago! If there was a magazine in ancient Egypt, doubtless the editor received similar communications on papyrus. But were one of these to come to light it might be difficult to identify the story to which it referred. In the present instance nothing could have been simpler than to consult an index and learn that the unspeakable ‘Rose Rollins’ —’The Rose Rollins’ it really was, the name being that of a boat — proceeded from the pen of so blameless a writer as Alice Cary.

But stay! Is there any possible connection between the protest from Pittsburg and the classic sentence from a school composition on Whittier? You remember what the pupil wrote: ‘Whittier had many fast friends. Alice and Phœbe Cary were among the fastest.’

Their good name has survived both letter-writing and composition — and publishers go on, remaining in business even after failing to please everybody.

It is not often that a first edition turns out to be a second; yet something of this sort has happened in the case of William Lyman Underwood’sWild Brother. A California reader of the story has written to Mr. Underwood, telling him she heard him lecture several years ago at the Museum of Natural History in New York and relate the story of ‘Bruno,’ now widely known through his book; she Was writing letters at the time to our soldiers in France, and made this ‘ Strangest of True Stories from the North Woods’ the subject of one of them. She had been sending out the latest theatrical jokes, and the like — ‘And then,’ she writes to Mr. Underwood, ‘came the Bear story and they went wild over it. A captain, now a major, in Nevada, tells me he has part of the story I wrote. Says that at the time they had had no magazines or papers, and my letters were eagerly devoured and treasured and the Bear story went down the line. So you see, you did not know it, but your book is a “second edition.’”