III
Another phase of French influence one finds in the work of Agnes Repplier, perhaps the leading writer of "the light essay"—the term is her own—in the later years of the period. Born of French parentage in Philadelphia, educated at a convent where prevailed French language and ideals, she was Gallic both by temperament and training. She was not influenced as Cable undoubtedly was influenced and Hearn: there is small trace in her essays of French style echoed consciously or unconsciously. The influence was deeper, it was temperamental and racial, manifesting itself spontaneously in the display of those literary qualities that we associate with the word "French." Her favorite reading was largely in the English. She read enormously and she read note-book in hand. She added, moreover, culture and impressions by much residence abroad, and when she began to write it was with rich store of material. She began deliberately and she worked like a true classicist, leisurely, with no genius, and no message to urge her on. Her delight it was to talk about her reading, to add entertaining episodes, to embroider with witty observation and pithy quotation or epigram. Save for the autobiographical study "In Our Convent Days," her writings mostly deal with the world of books.
Miss Repplier first came into notice in 1886 when one of her essays came to Aldrich, who was delighted with it and who made haste to introduce her to the Atlantic circle. Two years later came her first book, Books and Men, and since that time her essays, goodly in number and scattered through many magazines, have become a well-known feature of the times. Themes she takes to suit her fancy, apparently at random, though more often phases of her beloved "happy half century": "A Short Defense of Villains," "Benefits of Superstition," "The Deathless Diary," "The Accursed Annual," "Marriage in Fiction," and all other topics pertinent to Dr. Johnson's little world. She adds not much to our knowledge, and she comes not often to any new conclusions, but she is so companionable, so sparkling and witty, that we can but read on with delight to the end. We are in an atmosphere somehow of old culture and patrician grace, of courtliness and charm:
Thou mindest me of gentle folks—
Old gentlefolks are they—
Thou sayst an undisputed thing
In such a solemn way.
A little of feminine contrariness there may be, perhaps, at times. A thing has been generally disparaged: she will defend it. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison may be mentioned: "I think, myself, that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled," she will retort. "He is not half such a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with such ample detail through so many leisurely volumes." And her protest becomes almost acrimonious if anything of the new be flippantly boasted of as superior to the old:
"We have long ago ceased to be either surprised, grieved, or indignant at anything the English say of us," writes Mr. Charles Dudley Warner. "We have recovered our balance. We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to Knickerbocker's New York; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the Biglow Papers."
Does this mean that Mr. Warner considers Washington Irving to be the equal of Jonathan Swift; that he places the gentle satire of the American alongside of those trenchant and masterly pages which constitute the landmarks of literature? "Swift," says Dr. Johnson, with reluctant truthfulness, "must be allowed for a time to have dictated the political opinions of the English nation." He is a writer whom we may be permitted to detest, but not to undervalue. His star, red as Mars, still flames fiercely in the horizon, while the genial luster of Washington Irving grows dimmer year by year. We can never hope to "recover our balance" by confounding values, a process of self-deception which misleads no one but ourselves.
Realism, the new smartness of Western veritism, the cry that romance is dead, and that Walter Scott is outworn, found in her no sympathy. Her heart was in the eighteenth century rather than in what she has called "this overestimated century of progress." And so thoroughly convinced is she, it is impossible not to agree with her:
Lord Holland, when asked by Murray for his opinion of Old Mortality, answered indignantly: "Opinion? We did not one of us go to bed last night! Nothing slept but my gout." Yet Rokeby and Childe Harold are both in sad disgrace with modern critics and Old Mortality stands gathering dust on our book-shelves.... We read The Bostonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham with a due appreciation of their minute perfections; but we go to bed quite cheerfully at our usual hour, and are content to wait an interval of leisure to resume them. Could Daisy Miller charm a gouty leg, or Lemuel Barker keep us awake till morning?
A paragraph like this may be said to contain all the various elements of her style:
There are few things more wearisome in a fairly fatiguing life than the monotonous repetition of a phrase which catches and holds the public fancy by virtue of its total lack of significance. Such a phrase—employed with tireless irrelevance in journalism, and creeping into the pages of what is, by courtesy, called literature—is the "new woman." It has furnished inexhaustible jests to Life and Punch, and it has been received with all seriousness by those who read the present with no light from the past, and so fail to perceive that all femininity is as old as Lilith, and that the variations of the type began when Eve arrived in the Garden of Paradise to dispute the claims of her predecessor. "If the fifteenth century discovered America," says a vehement advocate of female progress, "it was reserved for the nineteenth century to discover woman"; and this remarkable statement has been gratefully applauded by people who have apparently forgotten all about Judith and Zenobia, Cleopatra and Catherine de Medici, Saint Theresa and Jeanne d'Arc, Catherine of Russia and Elizabeth of England, who played parts of some importance, for good and ill, in the fortunes of the world.
Here is the note of dissent from the widely accepted; the appeal to antiquity; the pithy quotation; the allusion that takes for granted a cultivated reader; the sprightly tripping of sentences; the witty turn; and the atmosphere of feminine vivacity and brilliance. Apt quotations sparkle from every paragraph. Often she opens breezily with a quotation; she illustrates at every point with epigrams and witty sayings from all known and unknown sources; and she ends smartly by snapping the whip of a quotation in the final sentence or paragraph.
The bent of her work, taking it all in all, is critical, and often in her criticism, especially her criticism of literature, she rises to the point of distinction. One may quote paragraphs here and there that are as illuminating as anything in American criticism. She is quick to see fallacies and to press an absurd deduction to its ridiculous end. She illumines a whole subject with a paragraph. This for example on Hamlin Garland:
Mr. Hamlin Garland, whose leaden-hued sketches called—I think unfairly—Main-Traveled Roads have deprived most of us of some cheerful hours, paints with an unfaltering hand a life in which ennui sits enthroned. It is not the poverty of his Western farmers that oppresses us. Real biting poverty, which withers lesser evils with its deadly breath, is not known to these people at all. They have roofs, fire, food, and clothing. It is not the ceaseless labor, the rough fare, the gray skies, the muddy barn-yards, which stand for the trouble in their lives. It is the dreadful weariness of living. It is the burden of a dull existence, clogged at every pore, and the hopeless melancholy of which they have sufficient intelligence to understand. Theirs is the ennui of emptiness, and the implied reproach on every page is that a portion, and only a portion, of mankind is doomed to walk along these shaded paths; while happier mortals who abide in New York, or perhaps in Paris, spend their days in a pleasant tumult of intellectual and artistic excitation.
And few have put their criticism into more attractive form. It is penetrating and true and in addition it has a sparkle and wit about it that makes it anything but dry reading. Who has written more sympathetically, more understandingly, more delightfully about Charles Lamb than she if one takes her work all together. Here is a glimpse, yet how illuminating:
Truest of all, is Charles Lamb who, more than any other humorist, more than any other man of letters, belongs exclusively to his own land, and is without trace or echo of foreign influence. France was to Lamb, not a place where the finest prose is written, but a place where he ate frogs—"the nicest little delicate things—rabbity-flavored. Imagine a Lilliputian rabbit." Germany was little or nothing, and America was less. The child of London streets,
"Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,"
rich in the splendid literature of England, and faithful lover both of the teeming city and the ripe old books, Lamb speaks to English hearts in a language they can understand. And we, his neighbors, whom he recked not of, hold him just as dear; for his spleenless humor is an inheritance of our mother tongue, one of the munificent gifts which England shares with us, and for which no payment is possible save the frank and generous recognition of a pleasure that is without a peer.
But critic in the sense that Paul Elmer More is a critic, she certainly is not. She is temperamental rather than scientific. She makes brilliant observations, but she has no system, no patient analytical processes. She is, like Henry James, a critic by flashes, but those flashes often illuminate the whole landscape.
She is a suggestive writer, a writer who makes her reader think, who restores him as the dynamo restores the battery. Her world is a small one and it is not necessarily American, but it is intensely alive. In her own "happy half century," quoting Dr. Johnson, discoursing of Fanny Burney or Hannah More, or when telling of her cat or of the mystic lore of cats quoting Montaigne and Loti, or of those still more feminine topics: mirrors, spinsters, letters, the eternal feminine, she induces "electrical tingles of hit after hit." Her work must be classed with that of Lamb, of Loti, of Hearn, as work peculiarly personal, work that makes its appeal largely on account of the surcharged individuality behind it.
With Miss Repplier's essays may be classed those of Samuel McChord Crothers (1857——), Edward S. Martin (1856——) and Louise Imogen Guiney, who wrote for cultured people on topics for the most part drawn from the world of books. The work of Dr. Crothers is the most distinctive of the three. His wisdom, his delicate humor, his unfailing sense of values have made his papers, the most of them published in the Atlantic, a source of real delight and profit to an increasing circle. His books, like those of Miss Repplier, may be safely placed in the trunk when one starts on his summer's vacation and can take but few. They are wise, still books that one may live with.