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The late Chief Justice Chase once startled the writer of this by saying: “The wicked men are not in the penitentiary, they are in the churches. The criminals we convict are not wicked, they are simply weak—weak in character and weak in intellect. The men from whom society suffers are the cold, selfish, calculating creatures who not only keep clear of the courts but seek the churches, and deceive others as they deceive themselves and hope to deceive the Almighty.”
Sin is never so dangerous as when it gets to be respectable. The sanction of law, whether it gets to be such through custom or legal enactment, so nearly resembles the order of God that we accept it as such, and if it furthers our selfish greed we take it gladly.
The moral code, like that of municipal law, is made up of a few simple rules, easily understood, and the trouble comes in on the practice of the one and the application of the other. That church is divine which subordinates the rule to the practice, and has works as well as faith to testify to its commission. That is the true religion which leaves the sanctuary with the believer, and is with him at all hours, eats at his table, sleeps in his bed, and accompanies him to his labor. It never leaves him alone.
How we have separated the two, the precept from practice, this pulpit cult bears evidence. The high-toned infidel and lofty agnostic sneer at the humble Catholic who, in deepest contrition, confesses his sins to his spiritual adviser and goes forth relieved, probably to fall again. How much better it is to attend divine worship one day in seven, put on a grave countenance, and listen to eloquent discourses, more eloquent prayers, and heavenly music, and then go out with no thought of religion until the next Sunday returns for a like performance!
Two thirds of what comes under the head of moral conduct in one is pure selfishness. A man may be honest in his dealing, honorable in his conduct, a good citizen, a loving husband, and an affectionate father, and yet be without kindness, charity, faith, hope—in a word, all that brought Christ upon earth in His mission of peace.
One summer and autumn we lived at a mountain resort on the line of a great railroad. We saw, day after day, long lines of cattle-cars crowded with their living freight in a three-hundred-mile pull of intensest agony. The poor beasts were jammed against each other, unable to lie down,—to get under the hoofs of the others was death,—fighting, hungry, in the last stages of thirst, panting with tongues protruded, and their beautiful eyes staring with that expression of wild despair which the scent of blood brings to them, they rolled on to their far-off slaughter-houses with moans that were heart-breaking.
It was our fortune that same autumn to meet one of the cattle-merchants at church. He was there with his family. A stout, middle-aged man of eminent respectability, he was a church-member, and looked up to as a model citizen. We saw him listening to the eloquent sermon, and wondered if there were not a low, deep undertone of agony running through238the discourse. When the prayers were offered up he knelt humbly, and covered his face with his hands. Did they shut out the wild, despairing eyes of those suffering beasts?
Yet how amazed would that estimable citizen have been had his minister said to him: “You are railroading your soul to hell. Every moan of those tortured animals goes up to God for record. You are freighting disease to great cities, and the fevers and death are yet to be answered for by you—wretched sinner!”
There is not a fashionable church in any city of our land that has not within gunshot of its door great masses of starving, sinful, poverty-stricken humanity. Crowded into tenement-houses, from the damp cellars to the hot garrets, they make one wonder, not that they die, but that they live. No eloquent discourse on the righteousness of right and the sinfulness of sin; no well-balanced sentences of prayers, sent up on perfumed air to our heavenly Father; no deep-toned thunder set to music in hymns, ever reach their ears, or could, if they did, carry consolation to the sorrowful, or curing to the sick. And yet, from marble pulpits to velvet-cushioned pews, the work goes on.
We beg pardon: it does not go on. The well-meaning divines complain of non-attendance. They are startled by the fact that not one-tenth of our population of sixty millions are really attending church-members. What can be done to popularize the pulpit? There is but one way, and that is to make the people desire to attend. Time was when the great truths of Christianity were new to the human race. The multitudes were eager to hear of the revelation, and the Church sent out its missionaries to preach and teach mankind. So far as a knowledge of these truths is concerned, the civilized people have been taught. There is not a criminal in jail to-day but knows more theology than St. Paul. The people are weary of this everlasting thrash of theological chaff. The civilized world is fairly saturated with preaching, which has come to be stale, flat, and in every sense unprofitable.
Instead of asking the people to come to the church, let the church go to the people. This is the secret of the sneers attending the Catholic faith. There is, with it, very little preaching, but a great deal of practice. Its orphan asylums, its homes for the aged poor, its hospitals, to say nothing of its great body of devoted priests and holy sisters of charity, tell why it is that its temples are thronged, and its conversions almost miraculous.
It is a grave error to suppose that true religion is to be advanced through the intellect. It makes its appeal to the heart. If it is not a refuge to the woful wayfarers of earth, it is nothing. If the sorrowful may not find comfort; they who are in pain, patience and hope; if the poor may not get sympathy and aid, and the dying consolation, it is of doubtful good.
As for the preaching, all that we can say is, that when one produces evidence and proceeds to argue, he admits a doubt that neither evidence nor argument is of avail. God’s truths call for no evidence. If they are239not self-evident, no process of poor human reason can make them visible. An argument in behalf of such is a confession and a defeat. The man who undertakes to prove that the sun shines is insane and a bore.
The pulpit work of worthy divines who think aloud upon their legs has lost its attraction in losing its novelty. They imitate the late Henry Ward Beecher. And these immediate divines are filling their churches as merely platform-lecturers indulging in certain mental gymnastics that glitter and glisten like a winter’s sun on fields of ice. It is all brilliant and amusing to a few, but it is not religion.
“Died at New York, 28th of November, 1888, Mrs. Eleanor Boyle Sherman.”
The above simple announcement of a sad event was read through more tears than usually fall to the lot of one whose unassuming, quiet life was passed in the privacy of a purely domestic existence. This not because she was the wife of a noted officer, nor the daughter of one of Ohio’s most famous statesmen, but for the excellence of her character and the Christian spirit of her retired career, that made her life one long, continuous deed of goodness. If ever an angel walked on earth administering to the sorrows and sickness of those about her, that angel was Mrs. Sherman. Inheriting much of her great father’s fine intellect, she added a heart full to overflowing with the sweetest sympathy for affliction in others. Self-sacrifice was to her a second nature. She not only carried in patient humility the cares imposed upon her by our Saviour, but cheerfully took up the woful burdens of those whose failing spirits left them fainting on their way. Her exalted social position was no bar to the poor, downtrodden, and oppressed. Her hand like her heart was ever open.
The heroism of private life is little noted among us. Acting out great deeds of self-sacrifice in the silent, unseen walks of domestic existence, it lacks the sustaining plaudits of a thoughtless public, and has no incentive to effort other than that found in the conscious presence of an approving God, and no hope of recompense beyond the promised approval of the hereafter when our heavenly Father shall say, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”
No man, however exalted his position may be, or distinguished his services, is ever followed to his tomb by more real mourners than one carriage can convey. The crape-canopied hearse, the nodding plumes of woe, the wailing music of the hired bands, the long procession of slow-moving coaches, the tramp of hundreds, tell only of human vanity: we make our show of sorrow. One vehicle only holds hearts breaking in an agony of grief—hearts that know nothing in their woe of the dear one’s greatness; know only that he has gone from their household that his presence had made so happy. In his death the dear walls of that home were shattered, the fire240upon the hearth is dead, and the hard world darkened down to desolation’s nakedness. Could all who were favored in knowing this beautiful character, and blessed by her very presence, been called to form the funeral cortege, real heart-felt grief would have lived along the entire procession, and sobs, not strains of mournful music, would have broken on the ear. And in this procession would have been found not only the rich and well-born, clad in costly silks and furs, who had received from this gracious lady the divine influences of the Christian spirit, but the thinly clad poor, the dependent orphans, and helpless age. It is such a procession that does not disperse and disappear at the cemetery, but follows in prayer the mourned-for spirit to its home in heaven.
It is not for us to invade the sacred privacy of this lovely life. We owe an apology to her blessed memory for even this mention of her name. We know how she shrank from such while among us, and it is only as a duty to the living that we venture on this tribute to her excellence.
What we feel, and what must be felt by all, a pagan poet imbued unknowingly with the truest Christian impulses has sung in immortal verse:
“But thou art fled,Like some frail exhalation which the dawnRobes in its golden beams;—ah, thou hast fled!The brave, the gentle, and the beautiful,The child of grace and genius! Heartless thingsAre done and said i’ the world, and many wormsAnd beasts and men live on, and mighty earth,From sea and mountain, city and wilderness,In vesper low or joyous orison,Lifts still its solemn voice:—but thou art fled—Thou canst no longer know or love the shapesOf this phantasmal scene, who have to theeBeen purest ministers, who are, alas!Now thou art not!* * * * *“Art and eloquence,And all the shows of the world, are frail and vainTo weep a loss that turns their lights to shade.It is a woe ‘too deep for tears’ when allIs reft at once, when some surpassing Spirit,Whose light adorned the world around it, leavesThose who remain behind, not sobs nor groans,The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,But pale despair and cold tranquillity—Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.”
As a low, sweet echo to the music of those words, we add a tribute to the memory of this noble woman from the gifted pen of Helen Grace Smith:
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Ah! Death hath passed us by—hath passed us near;The swift, keen arrow cutting the light air,And falling where she stoodIn perfect motherhood,With silver crown of years upon her hair.The many years—the glorious full years,All shining with her charity and truth—How tenderly we traceTheir silent work of grace,Fulfilling the sweet promise of her youth!A life complete, yet lived not all in sun,But following sometimes through shadowed ways,Where sorrow and distressCried loud that she might blessWith her pure light the darkness of their days.Resplendent mission, beautiful as hisWho fought for her in fighting for his land—Who heard the loud acclaimThat gave his honored nameTo live wherever deeds of heroes stand.And she, the wife, the mother—ah! her tearsFell for the wounded sufferers and the dead—Fell for the poor bereaved,The helpless ones who grievedWhere ruin and despair lay thickly spread.Now peace—God’s peace—is brooding o’er the land,And peacefully she sleeps, her life-work done.We would not break that sleep,That rest so calm, so deep,That sweet reward by faithful service won.Only we kneel, as often she hath knelt,Where Heaven’s love lights up the quiet aisle,And, praying as she prayed,Our sorrow is allayed—Our grieving changed to gladness in God’s smile.
242THE PASSING SHOW.
The political season is over, and popular fancy lightly turns to thoughts of the drama. New York’s gay winter festivities are opening, and the theatres are nightly crowded with appreciative audiences. It would be strange indeed if, with upwards of twenty-five comfortable resorts for popular amusement in the metropolis, and a weekly change of attractions drawn from the best American and European sources, the most fastidious taste should fail to be pleased.
Probably the most successful of this year’s dramatic ventures is “The Yeomen of the Guard” at the Casino. The managers of that theatre have been wise to replace their variety-shows with this excellent comic opera. It steadily holds its own in spite of the critics, and after a three-months’ run continues as popular as ever. Mr. Aronson says it may remain at the Casino until the end of April. Gilbert and Sullivan’s productions are always new, always attractive. Each has a character of its own, yet no one could fail to detect the humor of Gilbert and the merry melodies of Sullivan in them all. If one may venture to compare their beauties, we should say that “Pinafore” excelled in vivacity—that peculiar sprightliness which the French callverve; “The Pirates” in humor; “Patience” and “Iolanthe” in satire—the one of a social craze, the other of political flunkeyism; and “The Yeomen of the Guard” in quaintness. The patter songs of the first are lacking in the last, hence its airs are not so dinned into one’s ears by the whistling youth of every street-corner, but the music is of a distinctly higher order. It is unfortunate that there is no change of scenery between the two acts. The dingy background of the Tower is not relieved by brilliance of costume, and the eye of the ordinary theatre-goer, accustomed to look for altered scenic effects, is disappointed at the repetition, only relieved by moonlight in the second act.
Some of the incidents of the play resemble “Don Cæsar de Bazan,” and are similarly worked out. Colonel Fairfax, imprisoned as a sorcerer, marries a young ballad-singer, who receives a hundred crowns, with the assurance that within an hour she will be a widow through her husband’s execution. He escapes, and is disguised as one of the Yeomen of the Guard, with whom, in spite of her vows, the young girl falls in love. A pardon for Fairfax arrives, his identity is established, the singer learns that the man she loves is already her husband, and all ends happily. In this transmutation of character, from the imprisoned sorcerer to one of the prison-keepers, we recognize the topsyturvydom of Gilbert, which is the distinguishing mark of his genius, from the Bab Ballads all through his later productions. In catchwords the present opera is lacking, and in the puns which never failed to draw out the “ohs” of the audience. But there is the same genial undercurrent of innocent humor which for years has amused the whole English-speaking public, and for which Mr. Gilbert243deserves the lasting gratitude of a world too much given to life-sadness and mental worry. If “a merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” it is safe to say that the prescriptions of this most ingenious dramatic author have effected more widespread good than those of the most celebrated followers of Æsculapius.
It is especially to its music that the operetta owes its success. In this production Sullivan has excelled his former efforts. The first chorus is very fine, and in orchestration Sir Arthur shows himself to be without a rival. Its pure melodies form a valuable addition to English music, and mark the growth of a new school of which he is the leader. The influence of Wagner is clearly seen in some of its majestic marches, but the English composer escapes the metaphysical and unintelligible harmonies of the German school. Sir Arthur has evidently aimed at producing a more classical composition than any of his previous works, and he has done this perhaps at some slight sacrifice of immediate popularity. The jingle of “Pinafore” and “The Pirates” is replaced by a more sober style, which is likely to produce a lasting impression on English music.
Mary Anderson captured the town, as usual, on her return from England early in November. Palmer’s theatre was so crowded that it was difficult to get a seat even four weeks in advance, and the audiences were so enthusiastic that their enthusiasm constituted quite an interruption to the play. She chose “The Winter’s Tale” as her opening piece, taking the parts both of Hermione the queen and of her daughter Perdita. Miss Anderson is the first actress who has ever dared to so interpret the play. She tried it at the London Lyceum, to the horror of the critics, but it proved a great success. The resemblance between Hermione and her daughter, which Shakespeare insists on so strongly, gave Miss Anderson the idea of trying both parts. This plan had the additional advantage, that the leading lady is not suppressed by being cut out of the act in which Hermione does not appear. Her studies abroad have undoubtedly improved “Our Mary.” The coldness and statuesqueness with which she has been reproached could not now be discovered by the most adverse critic. She is more womanly, softer, less angular, and more graceful. The programme at Palmer’s should have been varied so as to give the public opportunity to see her in the oldrôlesthat used to charm all beholders. One must not forget the exquisite scenery with which this piece has been set. It was used at the Lyceum, and, although it has been considerably cut down to fit the smaller stage of Palmer’s theatre, it is one of the best settings ever seen in this country.
Edwin Booth and Lawrence Barrett have been doing fairly with their Shakespearean revivals at the Fifth Avenue. There is no truth in the report that any difference has occurred between them. They will appear together at the Broadway Theatre next season, with better support, it is to be hoped, than they have recently had. Miss Mina Gale, who plays the leading female parts, however, is a promising young actress.
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Agnes Booth has scored a great triumph as Mrs. Seabrook in “Captain Swift” at the Madison Square. For painstaking attention to detail, nicety of intonation, and powerful expression, Agnes Booth is in the front rank of leading ladies. We have seen her in many society dramas, and in each she has shown a charming appreciation of all the requirements. At the Madison Square, with its cosey stage, the visitor forgets that he is one of the audience, and feels almost like an intruder upon a scene in a private drawing-room. The situations in “Captain Swift” are striking. The hero, an illegitimate son of Mrs. Seabrook, goes away in his youth to Australia, cracks a bank, and returns after many years, unconsciously to become a rival to the legitimate son for the affections of his cousin. The mother discovers his identity, and discloses it to him in order to prevent the ill-starred marriage. The mingled expression of shame, suffering, and maternal love in Agnes Booth’s face during this scene is one not soon to be forgotten. The audience remains spellbound for a moment, then a burst of enthusiastic applause crowns her effort. In the original play, as written by Mr. Haddon Chambers, the hero, being followed by an Australian detective, commits suicide. As altered for the American stage—by Mr. Boucicault, it is said,—Captain Swift, to relieve the Seabrook family from embarrassment, gives himself up to the officers of justice. In either case themoraleof the play—the portrayal of an absconding bank-burglar and horse-thief as polished, brave, generous, gentle—is to be regretted, as every apotheosis of vice should be. Mr. Barrymore, as Captain Swift, exhibits some capital acting, and Annie Russell makes a very graceful Mabel Seabrook.
Mrs. Burnett’s dramatization of her well-known story, “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” is attracting large crowds at the Broadway Theatre. It is peculiar in that it depends entirely for its success on the acting of a child, or rather children, Elsie Leslie and Tommy Russell alternating in the titlerôle. This arrangement has been adopted because the part is so long that it would be too fatiguing for a young child to play it night after night. Both the children show a delightful unconsciousness in the recitation of their lines, but Tommy’s natural boyishness fits the character rather better than Elsie’s assumed character, although her gracefulness charms the audience. The motive of the play, as in the story, is the love of a boy for his mother; and this makes it a great attraction for the ladies.
A pretty play is “Sweet Lavender” at the Lyceum. Its plot is simple. A young lawyer falls in love with his housekeeper’s gentle little daughter, but family pride prevents their union until, by the opportune failure of a bank, his fortunes are reduced to a level with hers. Its clever details and quiet humor make it well worth seeing. Pinero, the author, is a playwright skilled in the mechanical arrangement of his situations, and everything runs smoothly. Miss Louise Dillon as Lavender, fits the part exactly.
Thompson and Ryer’s play of “The Two Sisters” at Niblo’s made many friends, in spite of its somewhat threadbare theme. There was the typical245dissolute young man who seduces one of the sisters, and the benevolent hotel-keeper who befriends and marries the other. The villain murders his father, is arrested, and dies, while the betrayed girl is given a home by her sister’s husband. Some good singing is scattered throughout the play.
A similar drama, full of love and murder, was “The Fugitive,” by Tom Craven, which had a very brief run at the Windsor.
Vivacious Nelly Farren and the London Gaiety Company, which recently held the boards of the Standard Theatre in “Monte Christo, jr.,” gave New Yorkers an enlivening taste of English burlesque. The play is nothing, the dancing everything.
The German opera season is well under way. The Metropolitan Opera House opened with “The Huguenots,” which was followed by “William Tell” and “Fidelio.” Herr Anton Seidl, with his unrivalled orchestra, makes these productions of the great German and Italian composers a yearly treat to lovers of music, which is looked forward to with eagerness and parted from with regret.
“The Old Homestead” holds its own at the Academy of Music; the “Brass Monkey” at the Bijou has had a longer run than it deserves; Clara Morris has been appearing in Brooklyn; Louis James and Marie Wainwright are beginning their New York engagement. “She” was pronounced a great success in Boston, over $1600 being taken in at one performance. Mr. Boucicault is conducting his Madison Square theatre-school of acting with patience and confidence, although the results thus far are not very promising. Of the eighty pupils, the men are awkward and the women lack talent. However, as Mr. Boucicault said, if but three or even one out of the eighty should come to dramatic eminence, it would be well worth all the trouble.
Our German fellow-citizens are to be congratulated on the opening of Mr. Amberg’s new theatre in Fifteenth Street. The location is central, the house is well built, the company good, and the repertory includes drama, comedy, farce, and comic opera.
There have not been many dramatic events abroad this season. The new Shaftesbury Theatre in London is possessed of such a wonderful fire-proof curtain that a few weeks ago the audience had to be dismissed because they could not raise it. “Captain Swift” proved a great success, financially, at the Haymarket, and “Nadjy” is attracting crowds at the Avenue Theatre. At Terry’s, “Dream Faces,” a one-act play, and “The Policeman,” a three-act farce, had good houses. Grace Hawthorne has just had to pay a hundred pounds to the owners of some lions. She was seeking to produce an English version of “Theodora,” and engaged a den of lions twelve months in advance of the time she wanted them. She demurred to paying for the animals that she had not used, but the case went against her. On the Continent there is not much doing. P. A. Morin, the dean of Holland’s dramatists and actors, recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his first appearance, his golden jubilee, at246Amsterdam. It is announced that Patti will sing in “Romeo and Juliet,” at the Grand Opera House, Paris, giving three performances for one thousand dollars each.
More attention than usual is being paid just now to the development of musical taste on both sides of the water. Mr. Walter Damrosch has been lecturing in New York on Symphony. The Liederkranz and the Symphony Society have been giving enjoyable concerts; and Herr Moriz Rosenthal, the pianist, has met with a success that has only been rivalled in late years by Joseffy.
REVIEWS.
When the late George Butler, quite regardless of fact, and for the fun of the thing, telegraphed from Long Branch to Dion Boucicault at New York, that Billy Florence and Jack Raymond had been saved from a watery grave by a huge Newfoundland, Boucicault responded, “God is good to the Irish.” This sentence, so often quoted, passed, without its point, among the masses. What Dion caught on the nib of his pen and wired to the world was the fact that these two famous comedians, with their English names, were Irish by birth, instincts, and blunders. The people that present to the earth the only race that has wit for its national trait never had two more striking illustrations of the fact than in these stage delineators of genius. Raymond is in his grave, and the inevitable dust of forgetfulness is gathering upon his tomb. But Florence, so kindly known throughout the land as Billy Florence, is yet alive, and very much alive. The evidence of this fact is before us in a book entitledFlorence Fables(Belford, Clarke & Co.). Those so-called fables are not fables, but fiction without morals, but full of interest, which is much better, and come to the readerin theshape of love-stories, odd adventures, and strange incidents at home and in foreign lands.
The book is sure of a wide sale, for the multitudes that have seen Florence in his merry performances, and learned to love as well as enjoy this finished comedian behind the footlights, will be curious to learn how he appears as an author. But they “who come to scoff” will hold on to enjoy. The name is enough to attract; the book itself is sufficiently charming to entrance the reader.
In the last issue ofBelford’swe gave a specimen of the humor: to find the pathos and the true love the reader must consult the volume.
Divided Lives, a novel, by Edgar Fawcett (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—There is no more charming writer of English fiction than Edgar Fawcett, and the volume before us is one of his best. He builds upon the English method, animated by the French motive, and deepens the shallow affection of the first to the unfathomable depths of human passion to be found in the last. His dramatic ability holds one to the interest of his book whether247it has plot or not. Of course he has his faults. His characters are known to us mostly by name, labelled, as it were, and he will at any time sacrifice one or a dozen to work up a dramatic effect. Then he has affectations, not precisely of style, but of phraseology, that irritate; and he cannot resist putting smart speeches into the mouths of everybody. Here is an example:
“Indeed, no,” Angela replied, “there never was a more devoted friend than Alva is. To leave her charming home, and all her gay town life, for weeks, just that she may be near me! It is something to vibrate through one’s entire lifetime.”
This is said by a little girl to her lover, and the lover responds:
“It teaches me a lesson. What is easier than to misjudge our fellow-creatures, and how wantonly we’re forever doing it! We are all like a lot of mountebanks behind an illuminated sheet. The uncouth shadows we cast there are the world’s misrepresentation of us.”
As these young people were desperately in love with each other, but then just engaged, this sort of talk, however clever, is as much out of place and jarring on one as would be the murder scene from Macbeth.
Edgar Fawcett is given to a delineation of social life in New York. This is a wide and varied field, and the author makes it intensely interesting. We have called attention, however, to the fact that he is not altogether correct. The English motive, of turning the interest upon social caste, is not true when applied to our mixed condition. We have no aristocratic class, as recognized in England; and the assumption of such in real life is too ludicrous and unreal for the purpose of the novelist. Mere wealth without culture, and culture without wealth, contend in a mixed condition with each other, without supplying the interest to be found in earnest endeavor to overcome unjust distinctions and power. When Mr. Fawcett does deal with a class he is not always just. In hisMiriam Balestier, published in the November number ofBelford’s, by far the most artistically beautiful work from the pen of our author, he by implication attacks an entire profession that has held through generations not only the admiration but love of the public. There is absolutely nothing in the vocation of an actor that either degrades or demoralizes. On the contrary, there is much to elevate and refine—the work sustained by art found in painting and music, the thought and feelings of the poets; and while this is meant to amuse, the stage has been the most potent factor in not only furthering civilization and culture in the masses, but awaking in the hearts of the many the loftiest patriotism known to humanity. It has awakened a deeper feeling for the home, a firmer trust in the law of right, and a stronger faith in virtue than aught else of human origin. That taints, stains, and abuses have attached is no fault of the drama. One could as well attack the bar or the pulpit because a few unworthy members have disgraced themselves, as to hold the stage responsible for the recognized evils that have fastened themselves to a part. That we have senseless burlesques and lascivious exhibits of nakedness at a majority of our248theatres is the fault of the patrons, not the stage. The manager, like any other dealer in commercial wares, caters to the taste of his customers, and the stage is no more responsible for their productions than the street is for the wretched street-walker.
So long as citizens take their wives and children to witness the shameless productions, so long will the managers produce them, and when remonstrated with, shrug their shoulders, and ask, “Well, what would you?” The pulpit denounces the drama, but leaves untouched their congregations in their patronage of its abuse. The great city of New York, for example, lately entertained a convocation of Protestant clergymen, met to consider the sad fact that they were preaching to empty churches, and to devise means through which to awaken the religious conscience of the multitude. They went to their meetings along streets where every other house was a saloon, where the beastly American practice of “treating” makes each a door to ruin; and they passed corners where the walls were aflame with pictured advertisements of naked legs, bare bosoms, and faces fairly enamelled with sin. One reads their debates with amazement. Their clerical minds were troubled with what? The doings of “papists,” as Catholics were designated.
Our pen has carried us from our author. Of course Mr. Fawcett will say—and say with truth—that his strictures were aimed at the abuse and not the legitimate use of the drama. But his fault was that he does not make this clear, and by intimation he leaves himself open to the charge.
Aside from this, his work is a work of genius; and his story of the little girl who struggled with such vain endeavor against her environment will live among the noblest productions of fiction given us.
The Professor’s Sister, by Julian Hawthorne (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—This is the most successful work of a successful novelist, and holds the reader entranced from the first page till nearly the last. We say reader, but not all readers. Mr. Hawthorne is as peculiar in his work as his eminent father was, with a more select audience. He is at home in the wild, weird production of humanity, touched and marked by a spiritualism that is far above and beyond the average readers of romance. If it calls for as much culture, in its way, to enjoy a work of art as its creation called for in the artist, Mr. Hawthorne’s fictions demand the same tastes and thought the author indulges in. The little girl who craves love-stories, or the traveller upon the cars who picks up a book to lose in its pages the wearisome sense of travel, will scarcely select theProfessor’s Sister, and if he or she does, will wonder what in the name of Heaven it is all about.
There is another class, however, that will read with avidity and interest every page of this book, and this class grows wider in our midst every day. One meets at every turn a man or woman who will tell, in a matter-of-fact way generally, that is positively comical, of some experience he or she has249had with spooks. This, not the old-fashioned experience with ghosts. All that has long since been relegated to the half-forgotten limbo of superstitious things. One hears of communions with the dead, told off as one would tell of any ordinary occurrence common to our daily life. This is the natural reaction of the human mind against the scientific materialism of the day, that seeks to poison and destroy all religious faith. Religion is as necessary to health of mind as pure air is to that of body, and when deprived of either, we struggle for loop-holes of light and breath with instinctive desperation. Shut out the light of heaven from the soul, be it in library or laboratory, and one sickens and resists.
Mr. Hawthorne wisely lays the scene of his story in Germany. The rarefied condition of the German mind is recognized the world over, and through the everlasting smoke of philosophers’ and students’ pipes one is prepared for all sorts of fantastic shapes moving through the mist. The author opens with a talk on occult subjects that sounds like voices heard in a fog-bank. With the reader thus prepared, he plunges him into a drama where substantial men and women mingle with spirits, and the strange story does overcome us like a summer’s cloud, without our special wonder.
We have said the story holds one spellbound till near the end. Thedénoûmentis not good. “Calling spirits from the vasty deep” is much easier than disposing of them after they come. To give a satisfactory explanation of the mystery, and to exorcise the spirit back to rest, make no easy task, and Mr. Hawthorne is not to blame for finding it difficult.
We cannot drop the book without calling attention to the author’s happy use of English, in depicting character. Here is a specimen:
“Madame Hertrugge was white, red, and black. Her skin was white, her cheeks and lips red, her hair, eyes, and eyebrows black. Her mouth was beautifully formed, and firm, with a firm chin. Her eyes were rather full, imperious, and ardent. She was overflowing with vitality. The hand which she extended to one in greeting was soft but strong, with long fingers. She was dressed in black, as became her recent widowhood; but she had not the air of mourning much. She was sensuous, voluptuous, but there was strength behind the voluptuousness. You received from her a powerful impression of sex. Every line of her, every movement, every look, was woman. And she made you feel that she valued you just so far as you were man. You might be as nearly Caliban as a man can be, but if you were a man she would consider you. You might court her successfully with a horsewhip, but if she felt the master in you, and were convinced that you were captivated by her, she would accept you. It was ludicrous to think of the senile old merchant having married such a creature. In fact, marriage, viewed in connection with this woman, seemed an absurdity. There was nothing holy about her, nothing reserved, nothing sacred. I don’t mean that she was not ladylike, as the phrase is. She knew the society catechism, and practised it to a nicety, but like a clever actress, rather than by instinct or sympathy. It was obvious that she didn’t value respectability and propriety the snap of her white fingers, save as a means to an end; and if she were in the companyof onewhom she trusted250intimately, she would laugh those popular virtues to scorn with her warm, insolent breath. As it was, all the forms and ceremonies in the world could not disguise her. Her very dress suggested rather than concealed what was beneath it. She was a naked goddess—a pagan goddess—and there was no help for it. She made you realize how powerless our nice institutions are in the presence of a genuine, rank human temperament.
“And be it here observed that I am here writing of her as a temperament, and nothing more. I knew nothing of her former life and experience. I had no reason to think that her conduct has ever been less than unexceptionable. But the facts about her were insignificant compared with her latent possibilities. Circumstances might hitherto have been adverse to her development; but opportunity—rosy, golden, audacious opportunity—was all she needed. She certainly bore no signs of satiety; she had nothing of theblaséair. She was thirsty for life, and she would appreciate every draught of it. She was impatient to begin. And, contemplating her abounding, triumphant, delicious well-being, it seemed as if she might maintain the high-tide of enjoyment until she was a hundred. It really inclined one to paganism to look at her.”
What Dreams May Come, by Frank Lin (Belford, Clarke & Co.).—This is a cleverly constructed story of English life by an American pen, and the average reader is kept in doubt as to the sex of the author. There is a clear, incisive style of the masculine sort on one page that indicates the man; there is a treatment of female wearing apparel on another that gives proof of the feminine. With us there is one feature that solves the doubt. The pages abound in convictions. Now the female mind, as a general thing, is not given to doubt. When a woman believes anything she believes it, and her faith is as firm as the solid rock. She stands “on hardpan,” to use a phrase common to the Pacific slope. Although the book is built on dreams, the theory of heredity it is written to promulgate is no dream in the mind of this fair author. We have called attention to the fact that the use of the novel to illustrate some doctrine, philosophical or religious, is really an abuse. One takes up such form of fiction to be amused, and one feels put upon and abused to find it an essay more or less learned on life and things. If a little information can be injected in the story unbeknownst, like the parson’s liquor told of by President Lincoln, well and good; but it is rarely done successfully. If philosophy is indulged in, one quickly detects the bald head and wrinkled brow; if it is religion, the cloven hoof or wicked tail of Satan betrays the author.
When it was once proposed by a staff officer to drive an obnoxious guest from headquarters by a liberal use of burnt brimstone, General Sherman said, “That is high strategy in its way, but it is not war.” “When one goes a turkey-hunting one does not care to be killed by bears,” said an old hunter; and when a seeker after amusement, to be found in a love-story, opens what purports to be a novel, it is shocking to find it a learned treatise on some abstruse subject.
The book before us is another illustration of this defect. It opens with251an exquisite picture of Constantinople a hundred years since. In this prologue some wicked conduct is rather hinted at than told. After this the story opens and moves on pleasantly enough, until the fact is developed that the hero and heroine are reproductions of the sinful grandfather and grandmother long since lost to the census-taker of the British empire. What was evil in the ancestors is an innocent love in the descendants; and the fair author exhibits considerable power by preserving the sanity of her characters, to say nothing of that of the reader, in the complications and situations that follow.
The book is of interest to us, not so much for what it accomplishes, as the promise of better things. It exhibits all the qualities necessary to a successful writer of fiction. There is a keen appreciation of character, a love of nature, and a clear, incisive style that make a combination which if properly directed insures success.
THE PASSING OF THE YEAR.
Like some triumphal Orient pageantryBeheld afar in slow and stately march,Glittering with gold and crimson blazonry,Till lost at length through many a dusky arch—I saw the day’s last clustering spears of lightEnter the cloudy portals of the night.The wind, whose brazen clarions had blownImperious fanfarons before the sunAll the brief winter afternoon, died down,And in the hush of twilight, one by one,Like maidens leaning from high balconies,The early stars looked forth with lustrous eyes.Then came the moon like a deserted queen,In blanchèd weed and pensive loneliness;Not as she rises in midsummer green,Hailed by a festal world in gala dress,With thin sweet incense swung from buds and leaves,And strident minstrelsy of August eves;But treading in cold calm the frozen plain,With bare white feet and argent torch aloft,Unheralded through all her drear domain,Save where the cricket sang in sheltered croft,And, faintly heard in fitful monotone,A solitary owl made shuddering moan.
Charles Lotin Hildreth.
252THE LION’S SHARE.
By Mrs. Clark Waring.
“Where’s that cow?”
The speaker was old Farmer Creecy. He was coming up the back steps, and his words were addressed to his wife, who was manipulating an archaic churn on the back porch.
“What cow?” sharply retorted Mrs. Creecy, startled out of all knowledge of four-footed beasts by the unexpectedness of the question.
“What cow!Look here, now, Alvirey, have you got any sense at all? How many cows have we got? Can’t you count that far? Don’t you know how many?”
Alvirey did. Looking like a sheep being led to the slaughter, and feeling worse than two sheep under such circumstances, she hung her head low, and answered, meekly:
“One cow.”
“Then I ask you, again, where is that cow?”
“And why do you ask me that, Jacob Creecy? You know as well as I do where she is. She’s down in the meadow.”
“And where’s Mell?”
“Down there, too. They ain’t nobody else to keep Sukey out the corn.”
“Ain’t, hey? Ha! ha! ha! That’s all you know about it! Where does you keep your senses, anyhow, Alvirey? Out o’ doors? Because, I ain’t never had the good luck to find any of ’em at home, yet, as often as I’ve called! This very minute there’s somebody else down in the meadow long side o’ Mell.”
“Why, who, Jacob? Who can it be?”
“You wouldn’t guess in a month o’ Sundays, Alvirey. Not you! Guessing to the point ain’t in your line. It’s that chap what’s staying over at the Guv’ner’s, who looks like he had the title-deeds of the American continent stuffed loose in his vest-pocket.”
“You don’t say so! Lor’! Jacob, what does he want down there with Mell?”
“What does he want? If you had a single grain of sense, Alvirey, you’d know without any telling. He wants to make a fool of her! That’s what a man generally has in view when he runs after a woman. But, I am a thinking, that chap won’t make no fool out of Mell, for Mell’s got a long head, like her old daddy, and a tongue of learning to back it! Just you keep on a saying nothing. You never missed getting things into a mess yet, as I knows on, ’cept when you let ’em alone. I’ll shut down on him right away, and then I’ll beblarstedif Mell can’t take care of herself! Don’t be nowise uneasy, Alvirey. Mell takes after her old dad.”
Alvirey did not return immediately to her churning. She craned her neck and got on her tiptoes, and gazed curiously after her husband as his stout figure rolled heavily to the edge of the breezy woodland, and thence253beyond to the newly cleared grounds, and onward still to that narrow path among the pines, whose turf-margined and daisy-dotted track was a covert way to the meadow. Presently, through its mazy windings and the medium of a hazy summer atmosphere, Mr. Creecy came in sight of a youthful Jersey, sedately cropping some tender blades of grass on the enticing borderland of a promising cornfield, and a young girl not far away seated on an old stump in a shady nook under a clump of trees. Her costume consisted principally of an airy muslin frock, nebulous in figure, and falling about her in simple folds, and a white sun-bonnet, which was a bonnet and something more—to be explicit, an artistic elaboration of tucks and puffs and piled-on embroideries, beneath which peeped forth a face as prodigal of blooming sweets as a basket heaped with spring flowers.
At her feet lounged in careless fashion a young man. He was lithe and straight, and had that striking cast of countenance which catches the observant eye on first sight. This look of distinction, which in him was as marked in form as in feature, has been called, not inaptly, thoroughbredness. A self-made man never has it. All that a man may do will not put it upon himself, but his son possesses it as an heritage.
Looking upon such persons, we know intuitively that they have always had the best of everything, beginning from their cradle, the best ofitskind.
Not always strong, these thoroughbred faces are generally attractive. The one before us possesses both strength and beauty. We may consider it foremost among his first-rate advantages.
Seeing this huge monster of humanity bearing down upon them, slow-wabbling, like a proboscidian mammal, fast-puffing, like a steam locomotive, the young man lifted himself to a sitting posture, and without any suspicion as to the true state of the case, remarked to his companion:
“Here comes a doughty old customer, upon my word! ‘What tempest, I trow, threw this whale with so many tons of oil’——”
The young lady cleared her throat—she cleared it point-blankly.
“Excuse me, but, perhaps you do not know, that is—is—my father.”
Stammering forth these words, she at the same time turned very red in the face.
This was slightly awkward, or would have been to another. As for this young man, he did not mind a little thing like that.
“I did not know it,” he told the girl, unruffled; “I crave your pardon. The fact is, it is an habitual failing of mine to make sport of fat people. The lubberly clumsiness of a huge corporation of human flesh is to me so irresistibly comic! My mother tells me a dreadful day of retribution is coming—a day, wherein I shall be fifty and fat, and a fit subject for the ridicule of others.”
“I cannot discern the foreshadows of such a day,” replied the girl, glancing with unconscious approbation at the admirable outlines of a figure whose proportions were well-nigh faultless. She fingered nervously at her bonnet-strings, smiled a panic-stricken little smile, broke out into a cold sweat of fearful expectation, and through all the horrors of the situation, tried her best to emulate the young man’s inimitable air of cultured composure. He got up at this juncture from the ground, not hastily, not awkwardly, but in his own time and at his own pleasure, and standing there, entirely at his ease, looked every inch the living exemplar of that expressive little phrase—“don’t-care.”
Some persons object to being interrupted, he did not.
The girl stood up, too, but stood with such a difference! More and more disconcerted she became with every passing second, so ashamed was she254of her unsightly old father, in his blue cotton farm clothes, dirty and baggy, and his red cotton handkerchief—no redder than his face—so ashamed, and with such a sense of guilt in her shame! Truth to tell, the contrast between the two men thus confronted, was almost startling; the bloated ungainliness of the one, the sinewy shapeliness of the other; the misshapen grotesqueness of the one, and the sculpturesque comeliness of the other. It was a contrast painful to any intelligent observer, and for the poor girl before us, about to introduce a lover of such mold to a father of such aspect, it was like being put to the rack.
“Mr. Devonhough, father.”
“Mr.Who?” gasped a big voice, struggling out from smothered depths of grossness.
“Mr. Devonhough,” repeated the daughter, looking all manner of ways, “a friend of the Rutlands.”
“How does ye, Mr. Deviloh?” inquired the old farmer, in his exceedingly countrified, agonizingly familiar manner; extending a big, rough, red, and very filthy hand to be shaken by this exquisite sprig of refined gentility. Mr. Devonhough, needless to mention, touched it as gingerly as if it had been a glaringly wide awake and aggressively disposed Cobra de Capello. He endured the ceremony in silence, however; about as much as could be reasonably expected from one so superbly self-controlled.
“What will father do next?” wondered the perturbed young lady, in burning suspense. What he did was to stare unmercifully into the young man’s face, as if every separate feature was a distinct and incomprehensible phenomenon, and, afterward, inspect him with due carefulness, and at his very deliberate leisure, from the hat on his head to the shoes on his feet.
Mr. Devonhough did not flinch. Some persons object to being stared at; he did not. It is very foolish to mind such things. And besides, he had eyes as well as this old Brobdingnagian, and knew how to use them to quite as good a purpose. While the bellicose Creecy took in slowly the outward manifestations of this bland young stranger, the young stranger himself, in about two seconds and a half, had cross-examined every constituent element in the old man’s body, and thoroughly analyzed even the marrow in his bones.
We have intimated that the old man’s figure was bad; his face was a dreadful climax to a bad figure, so marred it was by worry, so battered by time, so travel-stained on life’s rough journey, so battle-scarred in life’s hard strife. Behind this forbidding frontage, the old man kept in store a good, sound heart; but what availed that to his present inquisitor? A good, sound heart in an ugly body, is the last thing a young man looks for in this world, or cares to find.
From the inspection of so much ugliness, Mr. Devonhough glanced towards the daughter; it was merely a glance, for with a delicate sense of feeling, he quickly looked away in an opposite direction. Flushed she was with shame, ill at ease, ready to cry out with a bitter cry, accusingly towards heaven, unspeakably humiliated; but, withal, a winsome lass, so fresh and fair, so pretty. Such a father! Such a girl! In heaven’s name how do such things come about?
Satisfied with his investigations, Mr. Creecy now remarked, quite cheerfully:
“I s’pose, sir, you air a drover?”
“A drover? No, sir; as far as I am able to judge, I am not. More, I cannot say, as I do not know what you mean.”