The Contributors' Club

IT has recently become the fashion — for there are fashions in literature as in other things—to speak slightingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet. For example, the author of The Victorian Poets, a critic of unusual discrimination and appreciation, appears to regard him as a sort of trumpeter to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. To be sure, Hunt was not a Keats, nor a Shelley, nor a Coleridge, but he had sufficient individuality to be a Hunt. He was a delightful essayist,— quite unsurpassed, indeed, in his blithe way, — and as a poet he deserves to rank very high among the minor singers of his time. I should place him far above Barry Cornwall, who has not half the freshness, variety, and originality of Hunt. I instance Barry Cornwall because it has become the fashion, since his death, to praise him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck me as insufferably artificial, especially in his dramatic sketches. His verses in this kind are for the most part Elizabethan echoes. Of course a dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of his own age and atmosphere for inspiration; but he must be a dramatist to do it successfully. Barry Cornwall fell far short of filling the rôle; he got no further than the writing of brief, disconnected scenes and scraps of soliloquies, and never, I believe, produced a complete drama. If he did, it died. His chief claim to recognition and remembrance lies in his lyrics ; perhaps I should say in ten or twenty of his lyrics, for oblivion yawns for the rest. In these, as in his dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always affected. He studiously strives to reproduce in form and spirit the unpremeditated warblings of the early poets. Being a Londoner, he naturally sings much of rural English life, but his England is the England of two or three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say about the " falcon,” but the poor bird has always the air of beating its wings against the bookcases of a wellfurnished library. This well-furnished library was—if I may be allowed to use a mixed image — the rock on which Barry Cornwall split. He did not look into his own heart, and write: he looked into his books. An author, I repeat, need not confine himself to his individual experiences ; the world is all before him where to choose; but there are subjects which he had better not handle unless he have some personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of these. The man who sang,

(a couplet which Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never have permitted himself to sing about the ocean. His poem — and it is one of Barry Cornwall’s most popular lyrics — has neither savor nor salt. When I first read it, years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever laid eyes on any piece of blue water wider than the Thames at Greenwich (Grennidge is what the purists over there call it) ; and the other day, in running through Barry Cornwall’s Life and Letters, I was not so much surprised as amused to learn that he was never two miles from land in the whole course of his existence. Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the ocean in all its moods, piping such thin feebleness as

It required a man whose acquaintance with the sea was limited to a view of it from an upper window to do that. In brief, Barry Cornwall very seldom sounds a natural note, but when he does it is extremely sweet. That little ballad beginning,

was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh Hunt, though not lacking in mannerisms, was rich in the inspiration that came but rarely to his friend. Hunt’s verse is full of natural felicities. He was a scholar, also, but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew how to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp it with his own charming personality. In Hero and Leander there is one line which, to my thinking, is worth any fifty stanzas that Barry Cornwall ever wrote : —

— It is doubtful whether man to-day gives expression to his emotions with the same unrestraint which characterized him in the childhood of the race. The ages have taught him self-repression and concealment, thereby enhancing his problematic value in the eye of the metaphysician and the casuist. It would seem that average man, in ancient times, did not think about thinking, did not feel about feeling, as we “subjective” moderns have the unhappy gift of doing. Ancient man, if he thought, acted ; if he felt, acted : between the flash and the stroke there could be no counting. Consider the heroes of the Iliad. We are never for a moment in doubt as to the motions of their minds, or as to the temperature of their feelings. Especially notice, they did not shut up their griefs and feuds, suffering them to prey upon their hearts, but got speedy relief through the medium of strong and exuberant speech. They were remarkably prompt and powerful with their tears! Patroclus, beseeching Achilles to go to the aid of the Greeks, is described as pouring forth his tears like “ black steams from a lofty rock.” Elsewhere Achilles mingles his with the salt of the sea, as he strolls down the shore, wroth for the loss of rosy-cheeked Briseis. Chapman, in his Commentarius on this passage, reads us a quaintly eloquent vindication of the hero’s lachrymose indulgence. He shows the “ fitness of great men’s tears,” adducing sublime instances ; and finally asks, “Who can deny that there are tears of manliness and magnanimity as well as womanish and pusillanimous?”

Terrestrial existence is often likened to a “ vale of tears.” To our thinking, it would be a happier valley if there were more tears shed in it; it is arid and dusty for the want of a little kindly irrigation. How easily and abundantly the tears came in our childhood! What a sufficient solvent for all our troubles, then ! They were, perhaps, too lavishly poured out, leaving no reserve against a parched and evil day. We might have kept this comfortable acquaintance with tears, had we not, later on, put ourselves under discipline, always saying, “ How now, foolish rheum! ” as often as the flood-gates gave signs of lifting.

Three orders of tears may be noted, — tears of anger, tears of joy, tears of sorrow; and in each the same chemical components. The first pertains to children, and to those of a quick, choleric temperament. Such tears are geyserjets dashed over volcanic fires, fervent extinguishers, and not unaccompanied by vapor, smoke, and detonation. Yet in the tears of anger there is an unconscious clemency, since those who weep for wrath, in so doing, blunt and dull the fine edge of their retaliative purpose.

The tears of joy are so rare and so imperfectly authenticated that one is in doubt how to characterize them. Those prompt crystal witnesses, starting to the eyes of two friends who have met after long absence and estrangement, are not to be cross-questioned, lest they tell more on the side of grievous memories, grave errors and losses, than they prove for present joy. If there are any tears of unmingled joy, they belong to exceptionally sweet and buoyant natures, and to these only within the April bound of youth.

It has passed into half-proverbial acceptation that the heart of sorrow breaks unless the tears can be started. “ She must weep or she will die,” the attendants are made to say, in that song of Tennyson’s where the slain chieftain is brought home to his wife. Wise is the spiritual physician, who, in treating grief, prescribes tears. The remedy is a natural and beneficent one, as magical in its effect as laughter itself. There is an antiseptic in the salt of tears. Plentiful vitality and warmth are indicated in the free shedding of tears. It is well known that the dying do not weep.

I meet those who, I know, can ill afford the “ luxury of tears.” They are like those who work far into the night upon a costly and delicate fabric, which the least tear stain would injure. They dare not unbend from the austere, patient, or stolid habit they ordinarily maintain, lest mischief should enter through relaxation. They have an old standing account with Grief, but can never find time for the reckoning. I once heard one of these pathetic economists declare that the first thing she meant to do, on reaching heaven, was to “sit down and have a good cry ” !

— There is an obscure classic fable concerning a great rock, or stone, which one might lift with his little finger, but which he could not move at all if he made the mistake of exerting his whole strength upon it. The application is obvious enough. Such stones lie about in every man’s field, but the secret of how their vis inertiæ; may he overcome seems to be lodged with but few. The wouldbe movers tug and push and pry, but gain no purchase, move nothing. After a while, they let go the enterprise, and sit down, spent and breathless. Then, if I might, I would go to them, and tell them what I have heard about the motive power residing in the little finger. It would be a thankless task, since they would regard my advice either as illtimed pleasantry or as idle quixotism. In their defeat, they are comforted by the reflection that they put their “ whole heart and soul ” into the undertaking. It is for this that I quarrel with them, considering it a mistake to waste so much good strength where only the minimum was required. “ Life is serious.” Granted. It is even too serious to take seriously all that is in it. If one would have his way, it would be wisdom in him not to be too strenuous, but to proceed with all softness and smoothness and légéreté. The contrariousness that resides in mortal affairs is roused to resistance by the siege of the violent. Light - heartedness and (in the best sense) light-mindedness go with the winner. Fame, for example,

“ Makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease.”

It would seem that all the immortals whose favor we entreat are of this temper, all doting upon a “heart at ease.” Our best work is not done when we undertake it with a too burdensome sense of its gravity and importance. The workman, if indeed greater than his work (as the ancient poet pronounced him), can afford to look down upon it, treating it with an easy familiarity. Why tug and push at the stone, when the little finger is a sufficient lever ?

— Among the reforms, small and great, for which there is a crying need, one is in the department of book illustration. Publishers seem to have proved by experiment that a majority of readers prefer bad illustrations to none at all, and this fact reasonably explains our being continually called upon to confront hideous and uncouth, or lackadaisical and inane, as the case may be, representations of our favorite heroes and heroines, who have impressed themselves upon our mind’s eye with all the charming graces of person and surroundings ascribed to them by the author. But is it reasonable to expect an unoffending public to put up with such illustrations as make it perfectly evident that the “ artist ” has not taken the trouble to read the text of the book he illustrates?

In the American reprint of George Eliot’s works — which as to typography and general excellence compares favorably with Blackwood’s edition, sold at about three times the price — the illustrations are so perversely inappropriate as to be a positive annoyance. Glaring contradictions to the text occur in almost every picture contained in the two illustrated works of this edition which we have seen, but, in order to be brief, we will cite the errors noted in one only, Felix Holt.

The entire narrative covers a space of less than one year, and yet in the first picture of Harold Transome we see a slight, smooth-faced stripling of perhaps nineteen years, and in the last a stout, bewhiskered man of middle age.

Esther’s appearance and toilet, which happen to be described with great detail, are as totally misrepresented. Instead of the “ crown of plaits ” surmounting her curls, we have a wretched little screwed twist at the back of her head, such as the sweet and graceful Esther would not have tolerated for an instant.

But the crowning outrage is the portrayal of Felix himself. As a study for an æsthetic poet, he would not be very bad, especially in the picture which shows him leading the mob at Treby Manor, where “a lank, limp lily, with dank leaves dangling and flower-flap chilly ” would seem far more in keeping with his face and figure than the drawn sword in his hand. All the pictures of him are very irritating, but there is a climax to every enormity in the fact that Felix is represented, in each instance, with a carefully tied and eminently conventional cravat! The rest might have been borne, but this was a little too trying; and hence this protest !

— There is certainly such a thing as intellectual morale, and it may be almost as plainly recognized as the morale of character, to which, in a sort, it corresponds. We cannot help noting, in our friends and acquaintance, the presence or absence of this thing that I call intellectual morale, by which I mean the ability to keep up the mind’s tone under adverse circumstances; to keep alive its interest in intellectual concerns, when there is little or no external stimulus to so doing. To maintain this mental activity and interest under unfavorable conditions implies either a strong native bent toward intellectual matters, or else a force of mental character which wages a successful struggle against the temptation to listless indifference and inertia. That the mind should feel alert and active when it finds itself in a bracing atmosphere, in contact with other minds which are lively and busied with intellectual affairs, is only natural; but let the case be reversed, and the people about us be such as care nothing for the higher interests of the mind, and then comes the danger of gradual sinking into a state of mental torpor. And we might as well be without a mind as have one that has gotten into this drowsy habit. There are men like that English army officer I have read of, who, condemned to live for years outside of civilized society, never failed to change his undress for a full evening costume every time that he sat down to dine. More commonly, the man who for any reason is forced to live as a social hermit easily drops the habits of refined society, and acquires a slovenliness of dress and manner. And in the same way the intellectual solitary, whom circumstances keep at a distance from the world’s thought-exchanges, too often lapses into a demoralized condition : if the solitary be a woman, she learns to content herself with a novel ; if a man, with the newspaper. Not to be dependent on others, — that is strength, intellectual and moral. The man who educates himself in surroundings where ten other men would never get an education has intellectual morale. One of the most painful things we can see is the gradual loss of tone in an intellect once energetic and fruitful, which has fallen from its high estate not through any real decay of power, nor because debility has been brought upon it by external causes. Debarred from intercourse with congenial minds, and from that friction which keeps the mental faculty brightly polished and ready for use, the man’s mind has relaxed its exertions, and sunk into a lethargy of self-indulgent idleness, until it has become an effort to think consecutively, or even to follow the thoughts of others. It is hard, if not impossible, to wear the mind out; it is very easy to let it rust out. It is with our mental faculties as with our muscles : it they are not used they soon grow weak and flabby, unable to grasp and hold things firmly.

Marriage has undoubtedly much to do with the raising or the lowering of the intellectual tone; the influence, direct or indirect, of a mind of small culture and trivial tastes upon a higher intellect is, unfortunately, apt to be as great as, or greater than, the influence of the latter on the former.

— I fear Mr. Fiske favors too greatly the Scotch school of g'acialists, in his recent article on the Arrival of Man in Europe, when he states so confidently that Mr. Croll has proved his astronomical theory of glacial climates ; and in this there is something unsatisfactory to those readers who are too busy with their own affairs to attempt any personal study of original investigations, yet have a liking for popular science, and want some one else to harvest and thrash and winnow the abundant growths of the scientific field for them. Mr. Croll’s theory has not met with so much acceptance as is often supposed, and it is very hazardous to say that the “ primary cause of glaciation of the Northern hemisphere was a change in the shape of the earth’s orbit.” There are three points to which prominence is given, which may be here referred to : It is claimed, first, that the cold of an aphelion, eccentric winter would provide enough snow to last over the next summer. A heavy snow at one place means a plentiful supply of moisture from a correspondingly heavy evaporation somewhere else ; cold alone is powerless, as is shown by the Siberian and British American winters ; and Mr. Croll has not proved that the abundant supply of moisture was provided in his cold aphelion winters. Indeed, general cold is not the most characteristic element of a glacial climate. What is needed is warmth and evaporation at one place, with cold and condensation not far away; and these conditions are most naturally obtained by increased heat from the sun, and increased altitude of the land to be glaciated. Second, that the heat of the perihelion summers would not be effective, because it would be rendered latent in melting the snows of the cold winters. But this works almost equally well the other way : just as much heat as is hidden and lost to the summer must have been given out by condensation, aud so gained to the preceding winter. (I say almost equally well, because the winter heat is not given out quite as effectively as the summer heat is hidden.) Third, that the greater extremes of temperature between the equator and pole in the northern than in the southern hemispheres would strengthen the northeast and weaken the southeast trades; and consequently the Atlantic equatorial current would be driven to the south of Cape San Roque, and the North Atlantic and North Frigid zone thus lose a great amount of heat. If this were true, it might be added that they would lose equally in rain and snow fall, but it is not true. The line of equatorial calms along which the trades meet and rise — Croll’s median line — is the thermometrie equator; and at present this line is north of the geographic equator ; not because the southern hemisphere has its winter in aphelion, but because of the excess of land over water in the northern hemisphere. It is almost certain that it had the same position during the glacial period.

There is as yet no general agreement among physicists and geologists as to the cause and conditions of the glacial period. There are still too many unknown factors in the problem; and until these are found, and some general consent on a common explanation is reached, we cannot state positively that the true inwardness of this remarkable phase of the earth’s history is found. The reading public will fairly grow skeptical if our sure causes are changed too often ; the investigators must not cry proof till the proof is found. It was just this rash cry of proof, proof, when there was no proof, that brought discredit on the geologists of the last century, and caused them to say, Let us cease discoursing about the earth till we know more about it; let us give up geology for geognosy.

— The following exquisite sonnet, now for the first time in print, was addressed to Philip Bourke Marston by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in answer to a poetical protest on the part of Marston that Rossetti should neglect poetry for painting. The third line of the opening quatrain has reference to the touching fact that the younger poet is blind :