The Contributors' Club

IT is surprising that it did not long ago occur to the learned world that we ought to have a special dictionary for each successive period of life. Words mean one thing to youth, and quite another to age. There are certain terms in common use which have next to no significance for us until we arrive at years of discretion ; and, moreover, that age which is discreet on one subject may not yet have reached that point on another. Words are standing all along the highway of our life, like the bottles sealed with Solomon’s seal in the Arabian Nights ; the boy sees nothing in them, but one day or another the seal chips off at the stroke of some hard fact of existence, and out pours the skyobscuring gloom of some tremendous Afrite. Other words there are that have a meaning in youth, to be sure, but a quite distinct one from that of later years. We often wish the young and the old might be more companionable and communicative with each other; but how can they be ? They speak a different language. Plainly, the new series of adjustable dictionaries is a crying want. Dare we conjecture how they would treat such a word as “ love,” for example? For the period of early childhood it would possibly have some such definition as this : —

LOVE,n. [From anthropoid parentspeech, give ! (guv, love ; for change of g to l see Flimm, p. 1900).]

1. A strong attraction felt toward the source of supplies.

“ How touching the child’s love for its parent, even under the rod ! ”

2. A sense of cuddling warmth.

“ The kitten loves the hot brick.”

For the period of boyhood and girlhood the word would require a quite different treatment. Perhaps no living lexicographer would be equal to the task of preparing a perfectly adequate set of definitions for this volume of the series, but they might run somewhat after this fashion : —

LOVE,n. [From obscure root of celestial origin, lub ; hence also lubber, and Late African lubly.]

1. An auroral display of evanescent subjective anticipation.

“ Some one to love, one to caress ! ”

2. A deep intoxication of the emotional nature, accompanied with a persistent vision, but an otherwise complete intellectual paralysis.

3. A prolonged alternation of wild hope and insane despair.

For the period of middle life the definitions of the term would perhaps be more various still. This particular volume might, in fact, require a further subdivision into masculine and feminine nouns. Such as these might be some of the attempts at a mature explanation of the word : —

LOVE, n. [From popular speech, loaf, as in “ half a loaf is better than no bread.” Closely allied to life.]

1. Two hearts that beat as one. [Obsolete, or obsolescent.]

2. An intimate and affectionate companionship ; the most permanent and satisfactory where most nearly synonymous with friendship. [Good usage, but rare.]

“ Love me little, love me long ! ”

3. [Masc.] The power which society gives a man to shut a woman up in a cage and make a combined patent reversible pet and drudge of her. [Chiefly rural usage.]

4. [Fem.] The power which Providence has bestowed upon woman to subjugate, intimidate, and “ come round ” her mate. [Urban and humorous.]

5. [Masc.] The privilege of knocking down one’s consort on Saturday nights, and beating her with a kitchen chair. [Hibern. et Anglic.]

Fora still later age the version would again change, if indeed some editors would not prefer to leave out the word altogether. If retained it might read : —

LOVE, n. [Root found in sports of infancy. Merely a poetic term.]

1. An illusion of one’s early years.

2. A sweetmeat with which Nature bribes us to serve her own ends.

[Masc.] A rosy cloud in which the experienced goddess hides herself just when the exasperated hero is about to make an end of her.

4. [Fem.] The head with “ fair, large ears ” which any weaver will wear for young Titania its “ amiable cheeks ” to “ coy.”

But we must not stay to give extended specimens of this important lexicographical work. It is sufficiently evident, at a glance, how completely the definitions must differ for the various ages. “ Success,” for example, — how strange would seem the treatment of the word to the lad who should look into his father’s dictionary ! And so with “ fame,” and “ happiness,” and “ sorrow.” Certain venerated terms, too, there may be, which in the boy’s volume would stand with cheerful and attractive definitions, but in the old man’s would have some such astonishing comments and illustrations as would be best given in the safe guise of a dead language.

One advantage in this projected work is at once apparent. With the aid of the “ bright lexicon of youth ” the mature man will be able, perhaps, to read and understand the young person’s literary efforts, both in prose and verse. The boy and girl, in like manner, may then enter into the maturer literary work, and may at last comprehend the beauty and value of those books which we are always in vain calling upon them to like and admire. “ In vain,” as a matter of course ; for what should the neophaut lad know of the terrible meaning, for example, in Wordsworth’s

Or what should he see in Shakespeare’s

The words are meaningless till the boy becomes a man, and has gelebt und geliebt. The great writers are thus prevented, by the spell that is thrown upon their very language, from revealing the mysteries to any but those who have already been initiated. Their words are dumb ghosts, whose doom is that they may not speak until they be spoken to. Or we might say that the great literary artists have always written in sympathetic ink. The page is blank to the young heart, but as the man grows older, and the lines are exposed to the fires of life-experience, little by little the meaning comes out in characters of purple and gold.

— If nature were indeed a conscious personality, as they seem to imply who capitalize the noun and ascribe feminine gender, then Nature, I fear, would often laugh in her sleeve at the deliberate way in which we enter our claims upon her affection. Still, I should be quick to resent on her part any unkind mirth at our expense. Such as have long sought her in the same haunts, and have learned to love her through the gradual, quiet revealment of some homely and familiar landscape, such may well come to fancy that a certain small portion of Nature’s great heart beats a little quicker for them than for any other, and that she is under some delicate obligation for a peculiar, close appreciation which they alone are able to bestow. I know one who has a strong attachment for a particular low, smooth hill in near perspective from her window. If any special good fortune should ever come her way, she thinks its van will be seen pushing up over this favorite hill’s brow. The gentle slope has at one point a slight depression, which seems to her like a nestling-place between two green-mantled arms. The hill has no name in local geography, but by a limited circle acquainted with her partiality for this spot it is playfully termed the Bosom Friend. For myself, a rambler within small range, I observe that if I have been absent a longer time than usual from a certain rough field that has my warmest affection, I come to have a haunting sense of delinquency and of neglect to make the most of my privileges. What obscure but tender beauty may not have arisen since I was there to behold it! So unobtrusive are nature’s graces in this place that an unfamiliar visitor might easily miss them altogether. But I flatter myself I have the field’s looks and manners by heart! It is then but a step farther, and one that fancy readily takes, to assume that the field, missing its sworn lover and appreciator, sends a sigh of inquiry and regret through all its borders, and that on my approach it puts pleasure and expectancy into its air of welcome.

The artless and tender confidences which the Lover, in Tennyson’s poem, exchanges with the Talking Oak — that leafy patriarch so conversant with the fortunes of Sumner Place — touch us sympathetically, because, very likely, we too have at some time sought and found in Nature just such a garrulous but trusty confidant. Reading these lines of Wordsworth’s, —

do not we divine that, for the moment, the appealant felt himself to be held in conscious remembrance by the genii of his boyhood’s haunts ?

“ Neither shall his place know him any more,” says an Old Testament writer. “ Therefore his place shall mourn him,” might add the poet of nature, out of a secret fond persuasion that the mistress of his song would be uncommonly bereaved in the silence of her celebrant. We well know how Echo feeds upon the sweet strains of Bion; how, also, for the shepherd Lycidas,

It cannot be presumed that so great a goddess is moved for the untuneful laity in such degree as for the hierarchy, yet I suspect we are none of us quite free from a pleasing-melancholy feeling that our passing hence will exert some slight temporary sadness in the natural world, — a deeper sighing of the wind through the branches of our roof-tree, a wistfuller light at sunset upon all those places which have known us, but henceforward shall know us no more.

— Gratiano, as we all remember, insinuates that the easiest way to become accounted Sir Oracle is to preserve that silence which Carlyle praised and did not practice. Another method, also very effective, is to speak habitually in epigrams. There is a period in the life of enthusiastic youth when the soul is bent on discovering the occult secrets of character. A potent influence is exercised over such youth by the man who can, as it were, toss off a passion in a phrase ; who can classify and distinctly label specimens of his fellow-beings ; whose clear words seem to inclose, and still to disclose, the entire structure of some human creature, as the glass jar of a naturalist shuts in, yet displays, the complete sprawl of a helpless reptile. It is delightful to hear everything called by its proper name in this deft, Adam-like fashion. The clever mot is readily accepted. The speaker seems like a man fresh from a Creator’s hand, bringing with him some of the secrets of the great handicraft. It often takes large experience of men and moods, and a mental perspective illuminated by some distance in time from Sir Oracle’s speech, to reveal the fact that the names he gave were sometimes infelicitous, that the witty phrases did not always convey the truth.

I have in mind honored acquaintances who could describe me to myself, in sentences so weighty in philosophical sound that in more impressible years I have felt an absurd sort of moral obligation resting upon me to fit my character to them, in order to save so many wise words from being wasted. At other times, this summary disposal of my actualities and probabilities has roused an obstinate determination that I would not be what I was said to be, just because I was tired of hearing it said that so I was.

There is often an appropriate travesty in the epigrammatic descriptions of people which are given by a person of dexterous mind, the falsity of which is only made greater by their grinning resemblance to the fact. One feels the bitterness of recognition, yet honestly refuses to admit the truth of the portraiture. A venerable friend of mine, once feeling disposed towards moral instruction, caused to be read to a grandson, not quite six years old, the story of a dilatory and self-indulgent or otherwise sinful little boy of similar age. When the reading was finished she asked the child if it reminded him of anybody he knew. “ No,” said curly-head, “ it don’t.” She urged his further consideration of the question. “ Well,” said he, “ it don’t make me think of me, but I know that is what you mean.”

Possibly this experience, also, may have occurred to some who have unwillingly furnished subject matter for the epigrammatist to mark with amusement the not quite concealed chagrin with which a classifier of the human kind sees a creature, whom he thinks he has thoroughly analyzed, reveal idiosyncrasies inconsistent with his idea of its nature. It is as disappointing as if a rosetree, concerning which the botanist supposes he has set down everything in his book, should suddenly push out a cactus bud on its thorny little stem, and necessitate many corrections of proof sheets by its naughty denial of already expressed wisdom. Perhaps, on such occasions, Sir Oracle needs sympathy, not scorn, for his mistake, for it may be that he feels over a misapplied epithet as I — and possibly one or two others of my literary brethren — may have felt over a manuscript returned as “ not suited to the requirements ” of the case. But then human nature has no editor to whom the epigrammatist submits his opinions, and who may mortify him by refusing to receive them as worthy. It is only destiny which will not consider his cherished fancies, or observe the periods of his wit, and few things are easier than for the opinionative man not to see that destiny has put him in the wrong.

Men who are gifted with an extraordinary facility in describing traits of character should all be novelists. Then it would not matter whether they saw, or only imagined they saw, the peculiarities which they precipitate into crystalline words. If they did but hang their witty phrases, like prickly garlands, around the necks of fictitious persons, how edifying would be the sound and sight thereof ! Henry James has chosen this better way, and so he “ dares to write as ‘ clever’ as he can.” Yet one wishes he had refrained from saying that the departure of Ralph Touchett from Rome “ deprived Isabel of an interesting occupation : she had been constantly wondering what fine principle kept him alive.” This is rather shocking, when one considers that Ralph was Isabel’s nearest friend. It not only mars the pathos of the situation, but it blurs the delicacy of her character, to represent her as speculating thus because he dies so slowly. She blunders all through her history, but there was no need of such a blunder into wit as that, in telling her story.

What a relief it would have been to a long-suffering generation had Carlyle stabbed only creatures fashioned by his brain with his poignant fancies ! Then the clear thrust of the sword might have been noted with admiration, and there would have followed no scornful laughter, or cry of pain, when the blade struck wide of the central truth. As it is, who can restrain a smile, in which there is as much contempt as pity, at the conceit which prompted him to say a thing like this: “ Popular Sumner is off to Italy, the most popular of men, — inoffensive,like a worn sixpence that has no physiognomy left.” It is put so keenly that the keenness gives a sort of delight to the reader, but the immense absurdity of the characterization rushes over the mind like a flood, and drowns out the reverence one would fain keep for the Scotch philosopher. For the moment it is impossible not to surrender impotently to the thought that Carlyle was growling over a dyspepsia which failed to kill in less than fourscore years, and was contending with no worse fleshly enemies than roosters that crowed in the dawn ; while Sumner, he of “ no physiognomy,” battled with a whole angry people, endured the blows of an assassin, and struggled for years with the mortal hurt which, at last, laid him in the grave before he had lived out the allotted days of man. So the clever epigram can do nothing, after all, but fly along the breath of history, light as the feathery down of a faded dandelion before the laughter of a child, who tests with it his mother’s wish that he should go home.

— The memory, at best, is a queer faculty. It is laid down in the books as enabling us to look back and survey all our previous experiences ; but in fact it never gives us more than some jumble of broken bits of the past. Theoretically, it is a field-glass. Practically, it is a kaleidoscope. Or (to change the figure, as the wanton fancy likes to do, being even more crazy-quiltish, if anything, than its mother, the memory), while this faculty theoretically is a well-ordered cupboard, practically it is a great scrapbag. We go to it for our best coat, and pull out some sorry thing of shreds and patches. We ask for bread, and it gives us a stone ; for a fish, and it gives us a serpent, whose fangs and venom, mayhap, are as lively as ever.

There is one elfish trick that my own memory is fond of serving me, which may or may not be common to other browsers in the field of literature. Poetry gets remembered not only by its ideas, but by its rhythm and rhyme. The tune, so to speak, comes back to the mind as a thing by itself; and may bring with it the proper words, or may bring some other words, that happen to fit the same swing and cadence. Ruskin said what we rustic Yankees call a “ cute ” thing, when he suggested that we recognize people by their superficial, and not by their essential, characteristics. Few persons, perhaps, can recall accurately the eyes and mouth and expression of a friend, still less the definite points of his character. We remember him by some accidental trick, or cut of garment; by

So it is with our recollection of poetry. We recall the tune first, and the words afterward. At least, this is often true of verse that comes spontaneously to mind, as at odd moments the best verse is very apt to do. Sometimes in this way two poems that are dressed alike — that have, I mean, the same tune to them— will get completely mixed up together, and come to the mind in a curious mosaic. For instance, there is the ancient couplet, a favorite with one of my theological ancestors : —

This is apt to come unbidden to my mind, right in the midst of some totally alien affair, in this wicked shape : —

At other times only a word will be interjected, not from any other poem, but from outlying space in general. For example, the apostrophe to Tom Moore, with its “ double health to thee,” is addicted to this sort of beginning : —

And another equally venerable ditty is more likely than not to take the form, —

I remember that a whilom comrade of mine on vacation wanderings, a classical professor of most grave and quiet manners in term-time, used to wake up the woods, when we were off in the wilderness, with the stentorian chant, —

And the writer would whoop in reply, with vain attempt to match his treeechoing trump, —

In the same way and for the same reason, I am sometimes plagued, while engaged in the innocent act of writing verse, by the apparition of incongruous images or preposterous rhymes. While the right lobe of my brain with the utmost seriousness is formulating some tender line ending in “ hope,” the left lobe suddenly and impertinently suggests “ soap.” The serious right lobe maintains a severe attitude, and takes no notice of the malicious suggestion, which is straightway withdrawn. Once more the interrupted pitch-pipe of the muse murmurs “ hope,” and listens for fitting reply. “ Soap ! ” again bursts in the ridiculous left lobe. This time the serious mood distinctly indicates to the erring member that it is not to be trifled with ; that it is entirely in earnest; that it is thinking solely of “hope.” Precisely,” says the left lobe, in a sober tone, but with a twinkle in its front convolution ; “precisely — soap ! ”

— What a difference there is in people’s capacity for friendship, in respect to number as well as quality ! The character of some men’s affection is concentrative, that of others is expansive. Persons of any depth of feeling themselves are disposed to believe that this concentrativeness is an essential characteristic of the profounder sentiments, and that friendship in the highest sense of the word can be maintained with but very few.

Perhaps this notion may hold good in the general, yet there are men and women who have room in their hearts for the true, if not entirely equal, love of many friends. Madame de Staël’s friendships were as numerous as they seem to have been warm and lasting, and the late Dean Stanley serves as an example of the truth that one may draw close and maintain unbroken the bonds of friendship with many men of differing minds. Of course it is a question of temperament, and we cannot lay down a theory about it; but it seems to me that the most fortunate person is he whose affection goes out to embrace the wider circle and enrich himself by the larger exchange. Some cannot conceive of love except as a monopoly; they set small value on that which is shared with others.

But friendship need not be exclusive, like marriage ; it may be inclusive, like the love which takes in sisters and brothers. Yet, again, it is unlike the family relation, and perhaps the very sense of the delicacy of the tie that holds us, the consciousness of it as a voluntary bond which may at any time be severed at will, is one of the subtle charms of friendship. At the same time it is no contradiction to say that the feeling of the stability of the mutual affection constitutes the deepest satisfaction of a friendship proved by years.

Ideal friendships, it has been aptly said, are between ideal people, — hence their rarity ; yet there seems no reason why the ideal of this or any other human relation need include the absolute perfection of the human beings holding them. Love and friendship are not for creatures of some other than our mortal mould, but for men and women who must of necessity fall short even of their own vision of the best and highest. “ Friendship is a staff,” which no doubt too often “ breaks down under the load of our infirmities ; ” but the difference between hearts and any lifeless things is that the disunited members may be brought together, and where magnanimity is present as a cement be joined even more strongly than before. The larger our experience of friendship, I think, the less we are inclined to mourn any diminution of the brightness of our youthful ideal. We become reconciled to the discovery, so painful at first, that we have to forgive something to our nearest friends, if the name we have given our feeling has any reality in it; there even comes a certain joy in finding that we are thus able to forgive and go on loving.

To quote once more from that charming novel, But Yet a Woman, in which our countryman, Professor Hardy, has given us a picture of pure and noble friendship, “ all relationships grow closer through our poverty as well as wealth,” — a true saying, which most of us have verified in our experience. I once had a dear and true friend, whose only fault as toward me was this, that she did not need me as I needed her, and so I missed the joy of giving what it was my comfort to receive.

The preciousness of a friendship which not only rejoices and soothes the heart, but strengthens the spirit and lifts us continually to the level of our best selves, — who can estimate it ? It is valuable for the support of life as bread for the body’s need, far more indispensable to us than truffles and champagne.

To be chosen for a friend by a nobleminded man or woman, — is it not to receive a decoration of honor more significant than many a star and ribbon on a diplomate’s breast ?

Looking at my life. I can truly say with Shakespeare’s King Richard, “ I count myself in nothing else so happy, as in a soul remembering my good friends.”

— Whoever has been cast away in a remote Western village at some time of violent storms, when telegraphic communication with the rest of the world was suddenly suspended, knows the vexatious sign they hang out at the telegraph office, — “Wires down.” Similarly, there occur atmospheric disturbances between minds, having the effect of cutting off any intelligible intercourse. Sometimes, between ourselves and certain individual friends, it becomes a permanent condition of things. The wires are “down,” and never get put up again. Most of us find this to be the state of affairs in relation to the whole world on some particular subjects of thought and opinion. It may be one’s view regarding the sphere of women, or the real value of this and that popular author, or the true origin of certain observances: whatever it is, it results in practical isolation to that extent.

Even when the ordinary means of communication are open, we are far enough from having free intercourse between one mind and another. We like to take a superior tone toward the other animals, and talk about our immense advantage in being endowed with articulate speech. But in point of fact human words are very inadequate appliances for their purpose. This wonderful gift of speech is only relatively so. The monkeys — the old saying is — could talk well enough if they wanted to, but are afraid they would be set to work. They ought to tie up their tails and go at it, if that is all the obstacle ; for they do talk. So do the dogs, and there is no bird but talks as well as sings : the faun’s ears are not necessary to know that. Man’s speech is only a little more satisfactory. If we are content with it, it is only because we have never known anything better. Beings endowed with a really complete means of inter-communication might well (and perhaps do) look on our human efforts at speech with compassion, as we look at some intelligent dog when his speaking eye seems to blur with tears in his impossible yearning to tell us his thought. As they watch two human beings making desperate efforts to get their ideas imparted with anything like accuracy and completeness, “ Ah ! ” they may be overheard to exclaim, “ the poor intelligent creatures, — how hard they try to talk! It almost appears as if some time they might attain to it.” Very close friendship, or some exceptional variety of love, may occasionally seem for a time to span the chasm, but in reality there is no practicable bridge ; the rare thought that crosses safely from the one brain to the other is only some momentary electric spark, whose heat and force have enabled it for once to leap the dark void between them.

If the inadequacy of language is apparent enough with regard to definite ideas, it is still more painfully conspicuous when it comes to the subtleties of the mind ; those delicate nuances, for example, in which consists the irresistible comicality of a ludicrous incident or situation. There are such episodes in our life-experience that have a melancholy aspect in memory, from the fact that we never can by any possibility hope to make them appear as funny to anybody else as they were to ourselves. We may take the tack of telling the story with artistic simplicity, relying on the force of the naked facts, or we may give it any amount of ornate and ingenious elaboration; we may adopt the keep-perfectly-sober-yourself method of humorous narration, or the sympathetichilarity method, — it is all one: the listener never can see what we found to laugh at so much. It is like our own rainbow, — nobody else’s eyes ever can see it; and it gives a peculiar lonesomeness, for the time being, to human existence.

Such a case in the writer’s experience was that of a small relative, a young lady of some three summers. Sitting down with her usual abandon in the midst of her playthings on the floor, she suddenly heard a plaintive squawk beneath her. Quickly reaching down for the cause, she pulled out her crying-doll. “ Oh ! is that ’oo ?” said baby, surprised. “ I fought it was my mouf-organ ! ” Now I relate this domestic anecdote only as illustrative of a whole class of little incidents whose comicality never can be adequately conveyed to another. The funniness consisted in some intangible atmosphere, combined of many minute particulars, that cannot be trapped in clumsy speech and carried away.

Such another case is a reminiscence of a Down-East village. I was coming out of the post-office, when I met a pompous little person ; the distinguished citizen of the place, extremely nearsighted, with a small face incessantly alternating between cold disdain and a very squinted-up and perplexed look. He had just emerged from the grocery store, holding under one arm a number of irregular parcels that had already begun to shift and slide; and under the other was hugged one of those great long-oval watermelons, very heavy and slippery. As the packages slid, one back and another forward, and he writhed his small frame to guard both directions at once, I saw the watermelon begin to go. One knee was brought up to catch it, and then for an instant — too, too brief for me, but probably an eternity to him — it was a surprising study of how many simultaneous points of support can be developed out of one not specially well-constructed piece of human mechanism. His legs were thin, and attached in that free manner which suggests the universal joint of the ancient flail. His rapid combinations, his frantic efforts to utilize chin, elbows, knees, and hip-joints all at once, made a really remarkable sight. But I never shall be able to make any fellow-being share this memory with me. The delirious joy which that wild dance was for the moment capable of affording to the sorrowful human spirit must forever — I feel it — remain my own solitary possession.