Down at Caxton's 13

Down at Caxton's 13

American children, at any rate, are too sensitively organized to

endure the unredeemed ferocity of the old fairy stories, we are told,

and it is added, “no mother nowadays tells them in their unmitigated

brutality.” These are the empty sayings of the realists, who would have

every child break its dolls to analyze the sawdust. The most casual

observer of American homes knows that our children will not be fed on

such stuff as realists are able to give, but will turn wistfully back

to those brave old tales which are their inheritance from a splendid

past, and of which no hand shall rob them. As Miss Repplier so well

puts it, “we could not banish Blue Beard if we would. He is as immortal

as Hamlet, and when hundreds of years shall have passed over this

uncomfortably enlightened world, the children of the future—who,

thank Heaven, can never, with all our efforts, be born grown-up—will

still tremble at the blood-stained key, and rejoice when the big

brave brothers come galloping up the road.” Ferocity, brutality, if

you will, may couch on every page, but this is much better than the

sugared nothingness of Sunday school tales, and beats all hollow, as

the __EXPRESSION__ goes, the many tricks perpetrated on children by the

school of analytical fiction. Children will read Blue Beard, and thank

Heaven, as grown-up men, for such a childish pleasure, adding a prayer

for her who wrote the “Battle of the Babies.” Bunner and others have

accused Miss Repplier of ignoring contemporary works, of rudely closing

in their face her library door and saying he who enters here must

have outgrown his swaddling clothes, must have rounded out his good

half-century. This may be one of Bunner’s skits. Even if it were not,

there is more than one precedent to follow. Hazlitt, in his delightful

chat on the “Reading of Old Books,” begins his essay, “I hate to read

new books.” This author has the courage of his convictions; you do not

grope in the dark to know why. Here is the reason, and it is easier to

assent to it than to deny it. “Contemporary writers may generally be

divided into two classes—one’s friends or one’s foes. Of the first we

are compelled to think too well, and of the last we are disposed to

think too ill, to receive much genuine pleasure from the perusal, or

to judge fairly of the merits of either. One candidate for literary

fame, who happens to be of our acquaintance writes finely, and like

a man of genius; but unfortunately has a foolish fad, which spoils a

delicate passage;—another inspires us with the highest respect for

his personal talents and character, but does not come quite up to

our expectation in print.” All these contradictions and petty details

interrupt the calm current of our reflections. These are sound reasons;

as if to clinch them he adds, “but the dust, smoke, and noise of

modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of

immortality.”

 

Miss Repplier, an admirer of Hazlitt, and if one may hazard a guess,

her master in style, would not go so far. She believes in keeping up

with a decent portion of current literature, and “this means perpetual

labor and speed,” whereas idleness and leisure are requisite for the

true enjoyment of books. To read all the frothings of the press for

the sake of being called a contemporary critic were madness. She

concurs with another critic that reading is not a duty, and that no

man is under any obligation to read what another man wrote. When Miss

Repplier stumbles across an unknown volume, picking it up dubiously,

and finds in it an hour of placid but genuine enjoyment, although it

is a modern book, wanting in sanctifying dust, she will use all her

art to make in other hearts a loving welcome for the little stranger.

“A By-Way in Fiction” tells in her own way, of a recent book born of

Italian soil and sunshine, “The Chevalier of Pensieri Vani.” It is

the essayist’s right to read those books, ancient or modern, that

are to her taste, and it is a bit of impertinence in any writer to

particularly recommend to Miss Repplier a list of books, which she is

naturally indisposed to consider with much kindness, thrust upon her

as they are, like paregoric or porous plaster. “If there be people who

can take their pleasures medicinally, let them read by prescription

and grow fat.” Our authoress can do her own quarrying. One of the

darts thrown at this charming writer is, that she would have children

pore through books at their own sweet, wild will, unoppressed by that

modern infliction—foot-notes. That, when a child would meet the word

dog, an asterisk would not hold him to a foot-note occupying a page

and giving all that science knows about that interesting animal. This

is precisely the privilege that your modern critic will not allow. He

will have his explanations, his margins, “build you a bridge over a

rain-drop, put ladders up a pebble, and encompass you on every side

with ingenious alpen-stocks and climbing irons, yet when perchance you

stumble and hold out a hand for help, behold! he is never there to

grasp it.” What does a boy, plunging into Scott or Byron, want with

these atrocities? The imagery that peoples his mind, the music that

sweeps through his soul, these, and not your stilted erudition, are the

milk and honey of boyhood. “I once knew a boy,” says Miss Repplier,

in that sparkling defense, ‘Oppression of Notes,’ “who so delighted

in Byron’s description of the dying gladiator that he made me read it

to him over and over again. He did not know—and I never told him—what

a gladiator was. He did not know that it was a statue, and not a real

man described. He had not the faintest notion of what was meant by

the Danube, or the Dacian mother or a Roman holiday; historically and

geographically, the boy’s mind was a happy blank. There was nothing

intelligent, only a blissful stirring of the heartstrings by reason

of strong words and swinging verse, and his own tangle of groping

thoughts.” Had the reader stopped the course of the swinging verse

to explain these unknown words, boyish happiness would have flown,

oppression become complete, and let us hope sleep would have rescued

the bored boy from such an ordeal.

 

Cowley, full of good sense, is on the side of our essayist. In his

essay “On Myself” he relates the charm of verse, falling on his boyish

ear, without comprehending fully its purport. “I believe I can tell

the particular little chance that filled my head first with such

chimes of verse as have never since left ringing there. For I remember

when I began to read, and to take some pleasure in it, there was wont

to lie in my mother’s parlor (I know not by what accident, for she

herself never in her life read any book but of devotion), but there

was wont to lie Spenser’s works; this I happened to fall upon, and

was infinitely delighted with the stories of the knights, giants, and

monsters, and brave houses, which I found everywhere there (though my

understanding had little to do with all this), and by degrees with the

tinkling of the rhyme and dance of the numbers, so that I think I had

read him all over, before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a

poet as immediately as a child is made an eunuch.” The charm of Miss

Repplier’s pages lies in their good sense. She is a lover of the good

and beautiful, a hater of shams and shoddies. Everything she touches

becomes more interesting, whether it be Gastronomy, Old Maids, Cats,

Babies, or the New York Custom House. Like Lamb and Hazlitt, a lover of

old books, finding in them the pure silent air of immortality, she will

welcome graciously any new book whose worth is its passport.

 

Agnes Repplier was born in the city of brotherly love more than thirty

years ago. Her father was John Repplier, a well-known coal merchant.

Her earliest playmates were books. Her mother a brilliant and lovable

woman, fond of books, and, as a friend of her’s informed me, a writer

of ability, watched over and directed the education of her more

brilliant daughter. Under such a mother, amid scenes of culture, Agnes

grew up, finding in books a solace for ill-health that still continues

to harry her. When she entered the arena of authorship, by training and

study she was well equipped. At once she was reckoned as a sovereign

princess of “That proud and humble ... Gipsey Land,” one of the very

elect of Bohemia. She came, as Stedman says, “with gentle satire

or sparkling epigram to brush aside the fads and fallacies of this

literary _fin de siècle_, calling upon us to return to the simple ways

of the masters.” Her charming volumes should be in the hands of every

student of literature as a corrective against the debasing theories and

tendencies of modern book-making. The student will find that if she

does not know all things in heaven and on earth, she may plead in the

language of Little Breeches:

 

“I never ain’t had no show;

But I’ve got a middlin’ tight grip, sir

On the handful o’ things I know.”

 

 

 

 

A WORD.

 

 

 

 

LITERATURE AND OUR CATHOLIC POOR.

 

 

We are told, with some show of truth, that this age shall be noted in

history as one given to the study of social problems. The contemporary

literature of a country is a good index to what people are thinking

about. Magazines are, as a rule, for their time, and deal with the

forces upward in men’s minds. The most cursory glance at their contents

will show the predominance of the Social Problem treated from some

phase or other. The best minds are engaged as partisans. Social

science may be said to be the order of the day. It has crushed poetry

to the skirts of advertising, romance is its happy basking ground.

The drama has made it its own. There are some, fogies of course, so

says your sapient scientist, who believe that the social science so

spasmodically treated in current literature is but a passing fad, and

that poetry shall be restored to her old quarters, romance amuse as of

old, and the drama be winnowed of rant, scenic sensation, and bestial

morality. These dreams may be vain, but then even fogies have their

hopes. A branch of this science—the tree is overshadowing—treats of the

literature and the masses. Anything about the masses interests me.

 

When I read the other day, “Literature and the Masses; a Social Study,”

among the contents of a _fin de siècle_ magazine, I would have pawned

my wearing apparel rather than go home without it. Its reading was

painful, as all reading must be where the author knows less about his

subject than the ordinary reader. Later, another article fell in my

way, dealing with the same subject. Its author had more material, but

his use of it was clumsy. It was while reading this article, that I

noted the utter stupidity with which things Catholic are treated by the

ordinary literary purveyor. These ephemeral pen-wielders seem to hold

the most fantastic notions of the Church. What Azarias says of Emerson