The Contributors' Club

“ BECAUSE you are cultivated, shall there be no more cakes and ale? ”

With each degree of culture we attain, must there come also an anger against the one we have left? That is the question I wish to ask of the Contributors’ Club. As illustration, I give a recent conversation. It is from life. Present: Germanicus, Rhoda, Calypso, Penelope.

Calypso. The music at our theatres is really growing worse and worse; it is of the most trashy character. Those dying-away pianissimo effects, and those imitations, like the whip and sleigh-bells in the sleigh-ride galop,—could anything be worse?

Germanicus. Oh, it is light and gay; serves well enough to fill up the time.

Rhoda. We do not want high-art music between the acts.

Calypso. Then it would be better to have nothing, and not agonize people’s ears.

Germanicus. No agonizing; some people like that music.

Penelope. Yes; look at the success of Gilmore’s Garden. I have always said that Thomas was too classical for the popular taste.

Calypso (loftily). Theodore Thomas has accomplished a good deal. I give him high praise. The only fault I have to find is that he will put, now and then, frivolous pieces on his programmes.

The Others. The apostle of the classic. the pioneer of Wagner, and frivolity? What next?

Calypso. I repeat my remark : I pay my money to hear good music, and I am defrauded when a tinkling waltz is sliced in between two really good selections.

Penelope. And probably that very waltz was the piece which at least a quarter of the audience liked the best.

Calypso. Then let that quarter stay at home.

Penelope. I put it moderately when I said a quarter; outside of New York or Boston it would probably be a half; one forgets the army of obliging but unappreciative escorts. Germanicus takes you, I know. Does Germanicus enjoy Wagner? ”

Calypso. Oh, in music Germanicus does not count.

Penelope. Yet he likes the waltzes, I dare say (“Certainly!” from Germanicus), and why should he not have them? Be more patient, Calypso.

Calypso (vehemently). I cannot. I hate bad music. Now, there’s that Waiting —

Rhoda (rousing up). Waiting, did you say? One of the most beautiful songs I ever heard in my life!

Calypso. I know it is popular.

Rhoda. No, it is not, in the way you mean.

Calypso (scornfully). There are degrees.

Penelope (putting down her knitting). Now, this is precisely what I have always said, — culture brings with it impatience and even anger. If cultivated people would only hold their tongues, if they would only let their weaker brethren enjoy themselves in their own way, — but they never will. According to their own showing, they live in a constant state of acute suffering from the atrocious tastes of people around them. There seems to be more unhappiness than happiness in it; as Gwendolen said, they dislike what they don’t like more than they like what they like. There is Rhoda, who really has a chill when people read in her presence inartistic literature.

Rhoda. I confess it does enrage me to see persons on the cars — nice-looking persons, I mean — buying such a thing as That Husband of Mine!

Germanicus. Yet that is the very volume I shall buy myself to-morrow, on the train.

Rhoda. Et tu, Brute! Why ?

Germanicus. Because it is light. One cannot be always on Emerson.

Rhoda. But if you want fiction, why not take Harte or Aldrich ? Why read rubbish?

Penelope. You perceive that Rhoda is every bit as narrow and impatient as Calypso. Not long ago I was looking through the book-case to find some novels to send to my friend Cæsar, who was shut up at home with a cold. I had selected something by May Agnes Flemming, and something by Mrs. Southworth, when Rhoda, who had been watching me, rushed out and brought in one of Henry James Jr.’s books, and two of Tourguéneff’s. “ Here, take these,” she urged; “ don’t send that trash. ” “ I

beg your pardon,” I answered, “I am sending what Cœesar will read. “ Do you know she has never liked the man since; she cannot like people who read —

Rhoda. Such books. No, I cannot. I judge people by the books they read.

Penelope. There you are wrong. It may be only that they have not cultivated that particular taste. Who knows but that Bryant may delight in the rippling measures of the Strauss waltzes? And Theodore Thomas may be charmed with Helen’s Babies; or, at the Centennial Exhibition, last year, he may have preferred Frith’s Marriage of the Prince of Wales to any other picture.

Germanicus (didactically). The only good modern work there was that of Alma Tadema and Boughton.

Calypso. There was a Spanish picture I rather liked, — the Burial of St. Lawrence, by Vera.

Germanicus. Weak and sentimental.

Rhoda. Do you know which one I prefer among all our American pictures of the last ten years? Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front. There’s reality for you!

Germanicus. Crude.

Penelope. If you are speaking of pictures generally, I will confess that I went down mentally upon my very knees before that marvelous Last Token, in the Loan Collection at the Academy of Design.

Rhoda and Calypso. So did I.

Germanicus (impatiently). You are mistaken, all of you. That picture panders to a false taste.

Calypso. But if we liked it, Germanicus? If it haunted us for days? If it made us glow and weep in thinking of those times when men and women believed enough to die for their belief?

Germanicus. All wrong, — artistically.

Penelope. Last spring, I met Germanicus on the street, and he took me

down to theClub, to see the new

pictures. I found there the most delicious painting of a glowing October day, golden with sunshine, red with colored leaves, and stood some time looking at it. “ Oh, come away, come away,” said Germanicus, impatiently. “Don’t look at that thing.” And he bore me off to a melancholy November afternoon, with a gray sky, leaves all gone, and a sad forlornness. “There!” he said; “if you want autumn, this is like it.” It was, being the excellent work of McEntee. But why could he not let me enjoy my bright picture, too?

Germanicus. Because it was not good art.

Penelope. But if I did not know ? Germanicus. You ought to know. I have no patience —

Calypso and Rhoda. He has no patience! And he likes That Husband of Mine, and the Blue Danube!

Penelope. As I said before, cultivated people are too scornful, interfering, and impatient. Instead of enjoying themselves up in their own empyrean, where everybody is quite willing they should remain, they are forever coming downstairs to sneer at us, make remarks, and drag us, if they can, away from the objects of our humble preferences. I always knew —

Rhoda. We shall have to stop Penelope; she has got to “ always knew.”

Calypso (whispering). I have her. (Aloud) Penelope, what is your opinion of a play like The Mighty Dollar?

Penelope. I simply designate it as — popular.

Calypso. Did you not crush me for going to see it?

Penelope. I did. The stage is different; being flesh and blood, I maintain that it is more powerful for good or for ill than music, pictures, or books.

The Others. We dissent.

Penelope. I do not object to realism; but why not take the beautiful and heroic realisms of life instead of the crudely sensational and vulgar?

Germanicus. You want ideals.

Penelope. What is an ideal? It is the most perfect possible (not impossible) state of anything. Now, in portions of Romeo and Juliet, we have the perfection, the ideal, of young love. And in portions of Henry the Fifth, we have the splendid battle fervor of those old times when kings really did fight on foot at the head of their armies.

Germanicus (sarcastically). Oh, of course, — Rignold!

Penelope. Yes, of course Rignold. And why not? It is no small addition to the perfection of the play to have not only a fine actor but a superbly handsome man in the rôle of the fiery young king. Beauty does count, and I would not be sarcastic, Germanicus, about one of the settled and eternal verities. You threw me off the track; what I maintain is that persons of good taste should band themselves together to frown down all plays which —

Calypso. But I am devoted to Dundreary.

Rhoda. And I to Miss Multon.

Germanicus. And I to Sellers.

Penelope (with heat). It is a mystery to me —

Calypso (mimicking). Be more patient, dear Penelope.

Penelope. I cannot. I have studied the drama —

The Others. She has studied the drama.

Penelope. And I know —

The Others. She knows.

Rhoda. Look here; if each one of us should quote severely to his or her right-hand neighbor, as follow, “Because you are cultivated, shall there be no more cakes and ale? ”

Germanicus. There was once a man who was asked what orthodoxy was. He replied, “ Orthodoxy is ”—

The Others. Oh! oh! Assez!

— For reasons yet to be explained, the thoughts of nurslings in our day prematurely gravitate toward matrimony and kindred topics. When the dominie resigned his pulpit charge, a loving parishioner carried home the sad tidings, which were received by her baby of six summers with tears and the startling plaint, “ Why, mamma, I thought he would have married me!” The little woman had plainly forecast her destiny in detail, even to the choice of the officiating priest.

Another little maid in an adjoining town, whose invalidism had perhaps forced the growth of this species of wisdom, appalled her family one day by the abrupt announcement, apropos to nothing, “ I know what I shall do about it. There ’ll be a young gentleman calling on me some evening, and just as he is going away I shall ask him, ‘ Shall I say we are engaged ? ‘ ”

“ Good gracious, Minnie, what a shocking idea! ” shrieked her (much) oldest sister. “ That is n’t the way things are managed at all. A gentleman and lady become acquaintances, and after some time the gentleman asks the lady if she will marry him, and if she chooses she accepts. But a lady always waits to be asked. ”

“ Oh, Jane, are you sure it is so? Why, I should think you would be awfully discouraged ! ” How sharper than a serpent’s tooth the merciless nip of an irrepressible child!

Whatever may be the origin of this precocious appetite, it is forced to monstrous excess by nurses with their vulgar babble about little “ sweethearts” and “beaux,” by unthinking visitors, and often even by parents themselves. To all these the spectacle of the giant passion miniatured in a baby’s breast, and its expression in naïve lispings, is the diverting pastime of the moment, while to the little actor it may be the beginning of destruction, and at best must brush away some heart bloom which will be sorely missed whenever the hour to be perfected is come.

Do I exaggerate the gravity of this taint? It has really seemed to me that it is precisely here we are to look for the germ of that profanation of the holy sacrament of marriage whose rank growth is the offense of our day.

That “ wholesome neglect ” which was the stability of our grandmothers, we, and even our parents, have enjoyed but in rare instances, and to our children it is and will increasingly be, unless the gods forefend, an impossibility. For many years that sacred innermost, the nursery, has been dragged more and more into public view, and has become the richest quarry, for experimenting scientists and psychological speculators, and a fascinating pleasure-ground to us all.

Art and literature have conspired to provoke and chronicle the sayings and doings of childhood, and its most hidden emotions have been stimulated into conscious existence, and then ruthlessly uncovered and subjected to sharpest analyses for the entertainment of the blasé adult.

Childhood has no foe so insidious and deadly as the interrogation point. It should never be turned upon the heart or soul of a little child except under the guidance of loving wisdom, and even then most sparingly. Not only Mr. Wordsworth’s Practice of Lying, but all manner of hypocrisy and soul - destroying cant may be taught almost any little child, simply by pertinacious inquiry and “damnable iteration.” The fact that many children prove themselves thoroughly able to hold their own in all kinds of spiritual warfare, and display amazing skill in skirmishes about the region of the heart, only more seriously complicates the peril.

But even were it admitted that the sensibilities of some children may escape destruction or injurious blunting by early abuse, do not the signs of the times indicate the need of more provident delicacy of care on the part of parents and guardians ? They, at least, who have thrust life and all its awful possibilities upon another are surely bound to keep its springs sweet and unclogged to their utmost endeavor.

— Why do our novelists persist in turning their backs contemptuously on the whole farming population of the Middle States ? We have the New Englander in every genus and species preserved in the best of ink. There are two or three Californians, too, with whom we are familiar enough to desire no closer acquaintance; but the great trunk race of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, with the curious outgrowth in it of English, German, and Scotch-Irish traits, is hardly known in our literature. In the farmers of this stock, whether they raise wheat or cotton, these idiosyncrasies have hardened into very much the same character. Barring a few differences in his political creed and in his a’s and r’s, Jones of Pennsylvania is run into precisely the same mold as Jones of Georgia. They are church - going, unimaginative, domestic folk; hearty feeders, long-livers, keen-witted inside of a narrow circle, with a sound faith in their wives, foreign missions, and the man in their State who has managed to get the check line into his hands. They rarely disobey the check line. They never lift their eyes over the pale of their own sect or party to see what lies beyond. They accept whatever heaven their village preacher has imagined, and die contented to go to it. Their wives may become so intolerable to them that they wish them dead, but it does not occur to them to fall in love with another woman. There is a wide field of study in the modifications of this hard-sinewed, loyal character, which nobody but Dr. Eggleston is just now attempting to reap.

One of the most singular and pathetic phases in it is the widening gulf between the young and old in this class. Country people are apt to inveigh against the heartlessness of fashionable life and the supposed lack of feeling between parents and children trained in city habits. But it is a curious fact that whatever the distance may be between the latter while the child is a child, the similarity of education, tastes, and social duties begets a closer union between the adult son and daughter and their parents than is usually found in country-bred families. The wealthy planter in New York or Carolina falls into the same domestic habits as the cultured class in towns. But between the present generation of small farmers and the one which is fast pushing them out of place there is a space set never to be bridged over. If you could go into any farm-house on these wintry nights, you would find the young folk occupying the little parlor, with lights, music, jokes, and love-making; a little taint of vulgarity over all, probably, but plenty of hearty enjoyment. The grizzled old farmer would not be there. Perhaps, indeed, the vulgar taint arises from the fact that age of any kind would be out of place there. Ho sits by the kerosene lamp in the dingy dining-room, his feet on the stove, poring over his accounts or the county newspaper, while his wife nods over the stockings. The wit or wisdom inside may be fine or foolish, but they cannot criticise it. There is no companionship between them and their children. There may be respect, affection, gratitude, but no common habit of thought, no quick sympathy in opinion and taste. One reason for this is that they never share amusement together. Even the Scotch Covenanter, from whom many of them are descended, was a more cheerful, lighter - hearted fellow than the farmer Jones, He was by no means always the praying, disputing bore we have been taught to think him. Burns’s cotter, if he was like his brethren, took his cup of whisky and fiddled for the young folk to dance before he “ waled a portion with judicious care.” He and his son were pretty much on a level as to education. If tricks and dancing and long-winded gossip amused the old man, so they did the young one. Our farmer’s son has gone up on to a higher level. His father has pushed him there. He has been to a small Sectarian college and gathered lore enough to be ashamed of his father’s ignorance, and not wisdom sufficient to appreciate the sound sense and store of hard-earned experience which would outweigh grammars or lexicons.

So the breach widens. It is a phase of our social life which cannot last long. But a limner of human passions can find in the States none more pathetic or suggestive.

— I think both publishers and readers are beginning to perceive that singular gap in American literature which is filled in other countries by books of personal gossip, autobiographies, and private letters. Our history, for the lack of them, is as dry and as repulsive as an articulated skeleton. It creaks and shows the joints at every turn. During the last year we have had several strenuous efforts to supply this lack: there were Mrs. Adams’s Letters, the quality of which everybody knows; Mr. Breck’s Diary, accurate and amusing as far as it goes, and oddly impregnated with that terrapin and hock flavor inseparable from old Philadelphia; and Mrs. Benton-Frémont’s sketches, made here and there during her eventful life. Her work, as far as I know, is sui generis. She combines, as few Americans have done, the dramatic perception, broad culture, the ability to group and pose effects in natural or social scenery suggestively, and the willingness to remain herself a visible central figure. Books of this sort must be saturated with the personality of the writer, or they lose their vitality altogether. The man who quarrels with this sort of egotism loses its use. We must move with Pepys into his new house, and rejoice with him in the sight of Lady Castlemaine’s laced petticoats hung out to dry. We would see history through his eyes. What would our children give fifty years hence for a Pepys who had kept a diary through our late war! But he should have had that inordinate self-appreciation which makes a man believe himself the critical Eye of his times, and gives him absolute confidence in the breathless interest with which the world watches his every action. One such man, no matter how small or mean, who is able to paint his surroundings, and willing, like the noble lord, to ungirt himself for the public, will revive his age for posterity as not even gossipping Herodotus could do. Paul Potter’s bull makes us better acquainted with Dutch cattle than a dozen books on their breeds and anatomy. I doubt, however, if our literature will ever be rich in this class of writings.

The German is apt to look at himself and his times speculatively, and to write them down in a diary or letters, because he is a searcher after truth, and must hammer out of his relations with Hans and Katrina, next door, eternal verities on which to build a theory of the universe. The Frenchman does the same thing because life is a theatre to him, and he is actor and audience in one. He makes love with his whole heart, or weeps over his mother’s grave; and he stands apart at the same time and cries, Bravo! Throughout the whole range of French mémories or correspondance, from De Sévigné to Victor Hugo, runs this chipping of hands, this eager selfgratnlation. “Ah, Messieurs, what a lover you have here! What a son! Voilà!”

The American’s life is too hurried and dramatic to spare him time either to work it up into a system of philosophy, or to stand off and point out to the public its picturesque effects, as a show-man before a moving panorama. He is as willing as any other man to be observed, but he is seldom voluble about himself; his fear of ridicule is too keen for that. The hard-headed fellow does not write letters, because he knows in this busy time the best friend would be bored by his experiences or emotions, and besides, he wants them for the dinner-party tonight, or a magazine article. He does not keep a diary, because he knows he should be ashamed of his present self in a month’s time. He does not write his autobiography, because much friction with other men has taught him his own insignificance. But what a mistake he makes! Talk of the studies of human nature manufactured by metaphysicians or fiction - mongers! Suppose Abraham Lincoln had kept a diary,—or Jim Fisk!

— Concerning realism : If we are to have nothing else in literature and painting, would it not be well to drop the terms fiction and art entirely ? My friend the editor rather nonplused a would-be contributor, who was urging that his story was taken from “ real life,” by the statement that with the actual truth or falsity of the tale he had nothing whatever to do. He could only judge of its truthfulness to art, and in this respect he found it wanting. And the editor was right. The mere fact that certain enigmatical characters have existed, or certain remarkable coincidences have occurred, no more makes the records of them an artistic story than does the actual presence of a two-headed calf inside a circus side - show convert the painted semblance of it on the banner outside into a work of art. Novelists and artists seem to be cultivating their powers of observation and description at the expense of the imagination, forgetting that a healthy development of the latter is the more powerful aid to the highest intellectual life. There is a growing opinion that the bald, literal statement of any fragment of a life’s history must necessarily make a good story; that the exact reproduction of characters and incidents from real life is the only requisite in novel writing; in short, that fiction to be perfect must not be fiction at all, but truth. Now, although fiction must conform to the laws which govern in real life, nothing could be more dangerous to the growth of literature than this general application of the reverse (which is not true), that all life conforms to the laws which govern in fiction. The difference between the chronicling of fact and the writing of fiction will, I think, be evident if we compare for a moment the work of a historian with that of a novelist. Both have limitations, but of the most opposite kinds. One is hemmed in by facts, the other is restrained merely by the laws of art. Flights of the imagination which would be condemned in the historical record are applauded in the novel; while minute details, which are of inestimable value in the one, only serve to cumber and make heavy-laden the pages of the other. The historian can at most only restore by his research and decorate by the rich coloring of his diction a structure whose size and proportions were beforehand unchangeably fixed. The novelist, on the contrary, essays the creation of an entirely new edifice. The value of the work.of the historian is to be tested only by its conformity to a preëxisting plan, but the novelist assumes to be the sole architect and builder of the work he sets before us, and by the beauty and proportion of his creation must we judge of the genius of its creator.

That the mission of the novelist is not clearly enough recognized seems to me further proved by the fact that a certain modern author (who for obvious reasons shall be nameless) has thought it. necessary to tack on at the end of the strange story of a yet stranger woman the equally strange statement, in a novel, that the author has seen and talked with the heroine, and, therefore, presumably knows the story to be literally true. This is done with the naïve air of giving the book’s strongest possible raison d'être, when in reality it sinks it to the level of the police records at once. If there was not sufficient art in the book to make it appear plausible to the reader, does this simple statement mend the matter? To turn to the work of a better known and

usually more artistic writer: was the drowning of Grandcourt in Daniel Deronda, just when it was necessary to get him out of the way, any the less inartistic because such a man may in real life have met his fate under just those circumstances? It would be well for authors who hold facts to be the great desiderata in fiction to insert, instead of a preface, a list of affidavits, duly signed and sworn to, or better still append them as foot-notes, that the reader may at, once turn to them and be satisfied whenever he meets with any particularly glaring inconsistencies. True, the book would savor more of biography than of romance, but is not this what the age is craving, or rather what it is getting? Let the author ransack society and the newspapers if he desires; when he has found a character sufficiently abnormal to have his idiosyncrasies chronicled, let him straightway establish a court of inquiry, examine his witnesses, collate his testimony, and then, if he thinks it worth while, publish his record, with names, dates, and localities; but above all, let him call his book by its right name, for this species of writing is as far below artistic fiction as the genius of Boswell was below that of Thackeray. I would insist upon this distinction the more especially because the mind of the reader involuntarily assumes a more skeptical attitude upon turning from a novel to a biography. History must be verified; fiction must contain its verification within itself; and this same subtle distinction is preserved by the mind with reference to the moral qualities of real and ideal characters. There is a very perceptible difference, not only in quantity but in quality, between the antipathy aroused by the character of Grandcourt, in the novel above referred to, and the feelings which would be excited were we to read in the newspapers of an actual living, brutal, cold-blooded libertine. George Eliot has made the ideal characterization of all these traits attractive (for deny it as we will, Grandcourt is attractive) by their very analysis and exposition. No writer could do as much for a character which we know to be real without exaggerating his virtues, glossing over his faults, and palliating his vices, if not denying their existence altogether.

Upon sitting down to read a novel one does not care to know that the personages ever did live, or the incidents occur in real life. The natural and preferable presumption is that they did not, for this very presumption lifts the characters on to the plane of the ideal; and it is upon this ideal plane, parallel with yet above the real, that they must ever continue to move. The mind cannot permit them to descend from the one to the other without experiencing a violent shock. In judging of a portrait the friends of the sitter apply very different tests from those employed by the public. To the latter it is simply a picture, and must be judged by the laws of art. Yet who that has visited our Academy exhibitions has not wandered wearily past hundreds of square feet of canvas, covered with heads whose only merit was their possible resemblance to unknown originals ? It is on such occasions that one sighs for some law like that of the Greeks, which, according to Pliny, provided that while every conqueror in the Olympic games received a statue, a portrait statue was erected only to him who had been thrice victor. “ For,” says Lessing, commenting upon the passage, “ too many indifferent statues were not allowed among works of art.” If some such limitation was deemed necessary in the days of the Olympiads, when nature was producing her masterpieces, certainly no one will deny that there is more reason for it now.

In turning to other branches of art we find the same domination of realism to the exclusion of the ideal. This is especially true of figure and genre painting. Lessing’s remark that while “painting as imitative skill can express ugliness, painting as a fine art will not express it,” is forgotten or disbelieved; and Winkleman’s statement that although “ beauties as great as any of those which art has produced can be found singly in nature, yet in the entire figure nature must yield the palm to art,” is disregarded. But these were principles put forward by two of the world’s greatest art critics, and based upon an intimate acquaintance with genre art. This art was essentially ideal, and it is with the ideal that the true artist has to deal. It is in this respect that his work differs from that of the photographer and the newspaper reporter. We care not where he procures his materials, whether from the field of life or the yet more fertile one of the imagination; they must be remolded and adapted to this ideal world. If the artist fail in this, his whole work is a failure. All true art is life-like, but all life is by no means artistic; and it is the true artist who, selecting the parts which are, fuses them into perfect works, just as the Greeks modeled their masterpieces, not from one model only, but from the most perfect parts of many.

— It is not facts alone that are accumulated without assimilation by those who have mistaken notions about culture; that seems like a harmless amusement in comparison with the swift and reckless absorption of opinions, so commonly to be observed about us. it is true that there cannot fail to be considerable unanimity concerning matters of taste among people exposed to the same influences, but this cannot explain the monotony of fashionable verdicts. No trained choir could more sensitively follow its leader’s beck than do those anxious to prove their culture ; with but slight variety of adjective do they praise what seems good, with gentle deprecation do they condemn. Now it needs no public proclamation to tell us how immense is the difference between honest conviction and the willful adoption of others’ opinions. To believe that a thing is good because X says it is may be caused by humility or servility. The opinion of an expert is always entitled to respect, but not necessarily to blind acceptance. To say that no one’s opinion should be waited for and deferred to would be wholly to destroy the value of authority, and, moreover, it would be impossible entirely to eradicate respect for some persons’ opinions. One bows to them as to the verdict of a violinist about the value of a given violin. To distinguish between proper respect and unquestioning acceptance is a very nice and difficult matter. No general statement can be made that shall apply to all cases. It must be left for the conscience to decide between, on the one hand, the shameful thrusting one’s own opinion into the dark, as it were, and, on the other, a humble acknowledgment of one’s incompetence to decide for one’s self the matter in question. It would be the height of presumption for us all to keep reopening every difficult question; when we are ourselves unable to give a satisfactory explanation of this or that, it is only right to accept a current explanation which we know to be the correct one. It is not every one who is able to give a satisfactory account of his reasons for holding the views he does on the tariff or on finance, for instance, but a man agrees with certain other persons who have examined the whole matter and whose judgment he respects; he takes their views as he accepts the higher laws of astronomy without profound study of Newton’s Principia. This is a perfectly justifiable course of action. It may be argued that when carried too far it leads to humiliating subservience to fashionable notions; this is true, but when not carried too far, it is not an evil and is often the only way of avoiding absolute indifference. When no pretense is made that this policy is in all cases, the best possible, no harm is done; but what terms are too strong for the man who borrows his information or his opinions in this way, and then sets up to be an astronomer on this slender knowledge, or pretends to be an authority in finance? While it is perfectly fair to form our opinions in this manner, and to let them govern our own actions, it is a very different thing to give them out to others as our own original thought. Yet this strutting in borrowed plumage is one of the commonest of faults. By making themselves guilty of the misappropriation of others’ views and opinions, there are to-day many eloquent expounders of thoughts and sentiments which they only yesterday caught up from some other person’s lips. They know where to go for their opinions, and, having filled themselves with another’s inspiration, they set up for prophets and are puffed up with false pride. Instances will occur to every one: there are those who learn from a painter the technical phrases of his profession, and proceed therewith to intimidate awe-stricken hearers; others, again, cull musical phrases for conversational decoration; and so with other things. These people not only impose on those who listen to them, but they do a far worse thing in crushing out whatever originality of their own might once have existed. They learn to shut their eyes to faults which they cannot help detecting, quite as often as they must to simulate admiration for what really finds them cold. They are dishonest to their own convictions, besides being insincere in pretending all their new cleverness is their own. It is commonly supposed that the higher polish these added graces give fully outweighs the disadvantage of their ungenuineness; but without discussing further the morality of the subject, it is possible to point out the bad effects on the mind which is supposed to be improved. It is making one’s thoughts as purely a matter of conventionality as the choice of a hat or the cut of a coat. It makes glib-tongued, smooth-spoken models for general admiration and imitation, but it is a parrot - like memory to which the credit, such as it is, is due. It will be noticed that this method exactly goes against the true principle of culture, which is the unfolding of the intelligence, and while nourishing the faculties one really possesses, opening the mind to the influence of a greater variety of persons and subjects.

It is no sound objection to culture that it encourages dilettanteism, for it avowedly does that. It nowhere takes the place of the limited special education; it only bridges over the gaps without pretending to give mastership in anything. It is true that it will probably be found that the stronger the head the less justly can the charge of dilettanteism be brought; weak heads will appear injured by everything acquired from books, but this unsatisfactory result is not a fault of culture so much as a natural consequence of the feebleness of its votaries. To denounce culture on this account would be Very unjust, and in fact committing the same mistake which those people make who fancy that devotion to culture can change the quantity of a person’s mind. It may improve its quality, it may and often does improve the taste, but it adds nothing to the original amount; it puts that into good working order, and then its effect stops. Granting that culture is only beneficial, it is likely to bring in its wake a certain amount of pretense and unhealthy effort against which it is impossible to be too much on one’s guard. Culture is not merely the adding of statistics to the memory, but the enlarging of the mind, the opening of it to new and refining pleasures, the demonstration of the proper relation of one sort of mental occupation to another; it teaches humility, not vanity, in acquirements; sincerity, not affectation. A truly cultivated person no more obtrudes his knowledge on his fellow-beings than he does his skill, if he have any, in mental arithmetic. The cheap display of information is as senseless as any other exhibition of vanity; the information in itself is nothing unless there are lessons learned from it. The study of history, for instance, is not an exercise in learning dates, but a means of getting knowledge of human beings, of setting before us the experience of other people, of saving us from the common delusion that we alone have wisdom and that with us it will die. The advantage of studying pictures is not alone the familiarity we may acquire with the works of different painters such as would facilitate us in making a catalogue, but that new sense of appreciation of the painter’s art which shows us another way of looking at the world, which gives us new eyes, as it were, which opens to us new delights. These results, if fortunately they make their appearance, are parts of the benefits of culture; but because culture teaches its lessons only from a large number of examples, it seems to be supposed that in collecting examples all that is necessary is done, that the task of learning anything from them is useless drudgery, that the blessed work of culture is complete. Hence it is that we see people who cram their minds with ill-arranged items, parading them with the manner of those who regard themselves as triumphs of civilization, continually rejoicing over the new fact at their tongue’s end.

It is a mistake shared by many teachers and scholars that by judicious skimming of the surface, by making the most of the prominent points, by learning from compendiums some of the more important results, one may know a subject as well as those who have spent their lives over it, without the fatigue of mind and waste of time required to make one master of the minutiæ, which apparently are only learned to be forgotten. It is argued that even the most thorough students fail to retain more than certain general principles and vague results, while everything else, accumulated with much labor, is sure to crumble into oblivion; and that any one can make himself the equal of these students by learning these few surviving results. In fact, however, one is tolerably sure to learn but little more than an equally fragmentary portion of even this diminished amount, and there is totally lacking the skill and tact which only long practice can give, as well as the knowledge, next in value to a good memory, of where different matters can be found explained. This easy substitution of a thin, superficial layer of information for thorough knowledge can never be anything but harmful, when the pretense is made that it satisfactorily takes the place of anything genuine. It is not, as has been said, fragmentary knowledge which hurts a man, but the delusion that nothing else is necessary; that by hastily grasping a few facts any one can reach the level of the man who has acquired them in their proper order, compared them with others, and learned their use from practice.