VII
This last impression had indeed everything to gain from the sad rigour of steps retraced, an inevitable return to the North (in the interest of a directly subsequent, and thereby gracelessly roundabout, move Westward); and I confess to having felt on that occasion, before the dire backwardness of the Northern spring, as if I had, while travelling in the other sense, but blasphemed against the want of forwardness of the Southern. Every breath that one might still have drawn in the South—might if twenty other matters had been different—haunted me as the thought of a lost treasure, and I settled, at the eternal car-window, to the mere sightless contemplation, the forlorn view, of an ugly—ah, such an ugly, wintering, waiting world. My eye had perhaps been jaundiced by the breach of a happy spell—inasmuch as on thus leaving the sad fragments there where they had fallen I tasted again the quite saccharine sweetness of my last experience of Palm Beach, and knew how I should wish to note for remembrance the passage, supremely charged with that quality, in which it had culminated. I asked myself what other expression I should find for the incident, the afternoon before I left the place, of one of those mild progresses to the head of Lake Worth which distil, for the good children of the Pair, the purest poetry of their cup. The poetic effect had braved the compromising aid of the highly-developed electric launch in which the pilgrim embarks, and braved as well the immitigable fact that his shrine, at the end of a couple of hours, is, in the vast and exquisite void, but an institution of yesterday, a wondrous floating tea-house or restaurant, inflated again with the hotel-spirit and exhaling modernity at every pore.
These associations are—so far as association goes—the only ones; but the whole impression, for simply sitting there in the softest lap the whole South had to offer, seemed to me to dispense with any aid but that of its own absolute felicity. It was, for the late return at least, the return in the divine dusk, with the flushed West at one’s right, a concert of but two or three notes—the alignment, against the golden sky, of the individual black palms, a frieze of chiselled ebony, and the texture, for faintly-brushed cheek and brow, of an air of such silkiness of velvet, the very throne-robe of the star-crowned night, as one can scarce commemorate but in the language of the loom. The shore of the sunset and the palms, what was that, meanwhile, like, and yet with what did it, at the moment one asked the question, refuse to have anything to do? It was like a myriad pictures of the Nile; with much of the modern life of which it suggested more than one analogy. These indeed all dropped, I found, before I had done—it would have been a Nile so simplified out of the various fine senses attachable. One had to put the case, I mean, to make a fine sense, that here surely then was the greater antiquity of the two, the antiquity of the infinite previous, of the time, before Pharaohs and Pyramids, when everything was still to come. It was a Nile, in short, without the least little implication of a Sphinx or, still more if possible, of a Cleopatra. I had the foretaste of what I was presently to feel in California—when the general aspect of that wondrous realm kept suggesting to me a sort of prepared but unconscious and inexperienced Italy, the primitive plate, in perfect condition, but with the impression of History all yet to be made.
Of how grimly, meanwhile, under the annual rigour, the world, for the most part, waits to be less ugly again, less despoiled of interest, less abandoned to monotony, less forsaken of the presence that forms its only resource, of the one friend to whom it owes all it ever gets, of the pitying season that shall save it from its huge insignificance—of so much as this, no doubt, I sufficiently renewed my vision, and with plenty of the reviving ache of a question already familiar. To what extent was hugeness, to what extent could it be, a ground for complacency of view, in any country not visited for the very love of wildness, for positive joy in barbarism? Where was the charm of boundless immensity as overlooked from a car-window?—with the general pretension to charm, the general conquest of nature and space, affirmed, immediately round about you, by the general pretension of the Pullman, the great monotonous rumble of which seems forever to say to you: “See what I’m making of all this—see what I’m making, what I’m making!” I was to become later on still more intimately aware of the spirit of one’s possible reply to that, but even then my consciousness served, and the eloquence of my exasperation seems, in its rude accents, to come back to me.
“I see what you are not making, oh, what you are ever so vividly not; and how can I help it if I am subject to that lucidity?—which appears never so welcome to you, for its measure of truth, as it ought to be! How can I not be so subject, from the moment I don’t just irreflectively gape? If I were one of the painted savages you have dispossessed, or even some tough reactionary trying to emulate him, what you are making would doubtless impress me more than what you are leaving unmade; for in that case it wouldn’t be to you I should be looking in any degree for beauty or for charm. Beauty and charm would be for me in the solitude you have ravaged, and I should owe you my grudge for every disfigurement and every violence, for every wound with which you have caused the face of the land to bleed. No, since I accept your ravage, what strikes me is the long list of the arrears of your undone; and so constantly, right and left, that your pretended message of civilization is but a colossal recipe for the creation of arrears, and of such as can but remain forever out of hand. You touch the great lonely land—as one feels it still to be—only to plant upon it some ugliness about which, never dreaming of the grace of apology or contrition, you then proceed to brag with a cynicism all your own. You convert the large and noble sanities that I see around me, you convert them one after the other to crudities, to invalidities, hideous and unashamed; and you so leave them to add to the number of the myriad aspects you simply spoil, of the myriad unanswerable questions that you scatter about as some monstrous unnatural mother might leave a family of unfathered infants on doorsteps or in waiting-rooms. This is the meaning surely of the inveterate rule that you shall multiply the perpetrations you call ‘places’—by the sign of some name as senseless, mostly, as themselves—to the sole end of multiplying to the eye, as one approaches, every possible source of displeasure. When nobody cares or notices or suffers, by all one makes out, when no displeasure, by what one can see, is ever felt or ever registered, why shouldn’t you, you may indeed ask, be as much in your right as you need? But in that fact itself, that fact of the vast general unconsciousness and indifference, looms, for any restless analyst who may come along, the accumulation, on your hands, of the unretrieved and the irretrievable!”
I remember how it was to come to me elsewhere, in such hours as those, that south of Pennsylvania, for instance, or beyond the radius of Washington, I had caught no glimpse of anything that was to be called, for more than a few miles and by a stretch of courtesy, the honour, the decency or dignity of a road—that most exemplary of all civil creations, and greater even as a note of morality, one often thinks, than as a note of facility; and yet had nowhere heard these particular arrears spoken of as matters ever conceivably to be made up. I was doubtless aware that if I had been a beautiful red man with a tomahawk I should of course have rejoiced in the occasional sandy track, or in the occasional mud-channel, just in proportion as they fell so short of the type. Only in that case I shouldn’t have been seated by the great square of plate-glass through which the missionary Pullman appeared to invite me to admire the achievements it proclaimed. It was in this respect the great symbolic agent; it seemed to stand for all the irresponsibility behind it; and I am not sure that I didn’t continue, so long as I was in it, to “slang” it for relief of the o’erfraught heart. “You deal your wounds—that is the ‘trouble,’ as you say—in numbers so out of proportion to any hint of responsibility for them that you seem ever moved to take; which is the devil’s dance, precisely, that your vast expanse of level floor leads you to caper through with more kinds of outward clumsiness—even if also with more kinds of inward impatience and avidity, more leaps and bounds of the spirit at any cost to grace—than have ever before been collectively displayed. The expanse of the floor, the material opportunity itself, has elsewhere failed; so that what is the positive effect of their inordinate presence but to make the lone observer, here and there, but measure with dismay the trap laid by the scale, if he be not tempted even to say by the superstition, of continuity? Is the germ of anything finely human, of anything agreeably or successfully social, supposably planted in conditions of such endless stretching and such boundless spreading as shall appear finally to minister but to the triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the raw? Oh for a split or a chasm, one groans beside your plate-glass, oh for an unbridgeable abyss or an insuperable mountain!”—and I could so indulge myself though still ignorant of how one was to groan later on, in particular, after taking yet further home the portentous truth that this same criminal continuity, scorning its grandest chance to break down, makes but a mouthful of the mighty Mississippi. That was to be in fact my very next “big” impression.
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E.C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.
CHAPMAN & HALL’S NEW BOOKS
H. G. WELLS on America.
The Future in America
A Search after Realities.
By H. G. WELLS,
Author of “Anticipations,”
“Mankind in the Making,”
“A Modern Utopia,” &c.
Demy 8vo.
10s. 6d. net.
The Future in America is an attempt to make a comprehensive picture of one intelligent visitor’s impression of America as a whole. It contains some vivid description of the town scenery of America, but it aims to be much more than a record of things seen. There is a close and intimate criticism of the economic process, enlivened by thumbnail sketches of typical personalities, and a wide and acute review of the American mind.
Mr. Wells gives impressions of several American universities, makes a vigorous onslaught on the culture of Boston and the refinement of Washington; there are conversations with the President, Mr. Booker T. Washington, and other typical figures.
Prince Kropotkin’s New Book.
The Conquest of Bread
By PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN,
Author of “Fields, Factories, and Workshops,”
“The Memoirs of a Revolutionist,” &c.
Demy 8vo.
10s. 6d. net.
This brilliantly-written, sincere, and penetrative study of modern conditions of life and labour, by one of the foremost sociologists of his age, must appeal to any one who is interested in the common welfare of humanity. Examples are drawn from every European country, and a definite programme laid down for the amelioration of contemporary hardships and inequalities.
New Work by L. T. HOBHOUSE.
Morals in Evolution
A Study in Comparative Ethics.
By L. T. HOBHOUSE,
Author of “The Labour Movement,”
“The Theory of Knowledge,”
“Mind in Evolution,”
“Democracy and Reaction,” &c.
Two Volumes,
Demy 8vo.
21s. net.
This book deals historically with the private and the moral consciousness in man. It falls into two parts. The first deals with custom, i.e. the rules of conduct which are generally recognised in any society. The most important of these are discussed under different heads, e.g. laws of marriage and the position of women; class relations, caste, slavery and free labour; the laws of war; commercial and private property; methods of providing for the poor. In each case the attempt is made to sketch in outline the changes encountered as we pass from the lowest savagery to contemporary civilisation. The second volume deals with the ideas lying at the root of custom, i.e. principally in religion on its ethical side. Primitive religions are briefly examined, and the principal ethical features of the great world religions are passed in review. The ethical doctrines of Confucius and of ancient and modern moral philosophy are next dealt with, and the work concludes with certain inferences as to the general trend of ethical development.
A New Study of Rousseau.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
A New Criticism.
By FREDERIKA MACDONALD,
Author of “Iliad of the East,”
“Studies in the France of Voltaire and Rousseau.”
With Numerous Illustrations, Facsimiles, &c.
Two Volumes,
Demy 8vo.
24s. net.
This book claims to contain one of the most important literary revelations ever made. The author has discovered that the original documents upon which the existing view of Rousseau’s life and character is based were entirely falsified by his enemies, and photographs are given to show where the corrections have been made. The result is that the whole story of Rousseau’s life will have to be reconsidered, and that all existing biographies must be rectified.
The author contributes an introduction in which she states the purpose and the method of her new criticism. The body of the book is divided into five parts: Part I. showing the actual conditions of the question before the new criticism commenced; Part II. giving details of the historical inquiry, documentary proofs that Madame D’Epinay’s “Memoirs” represent an instrument of the plot to create a false reputation for Rousseau, and to hand it down to posterity; Part III. is devoted to the plan and purpose of the false history of Rousseau interpolated in Madame D’Epinay’s work, the mythical Jean Jacques of Grimm and Diderot, and Diderot’s Tablettes and the legend of Rousseau’s seven crimes; Part IV. deals with the legend of Rousseau’s seven crimes; whilst Part V. treats of the correspondance littéraire: the second instrument of the plot.
A number of photographs and facsimiles of manuscripts are supplied with the text.
New Carlyle Letters.
Carlyle and the London Library
A Collection of Original Letters to
W. D. Christie on the Founding of
the London Library in 1841.
By THOMAS CARLYLE.
Arranged by MARY CHRISTIE, and Edited by FREDERIC HARRISON, Litt.D.
Crown 8vo.
3s. 6d. net.
Every one knows that it is to the energies of Thomas Carlyle that London owes the great library bearing its name. Experiencing the great disadvantage of not having books of reference at hand to work from, and the utter impossibility of working on such gigantic schemes as his were at the British Museum, he set on foot an agitation. The end was recognised as good, and the great men of the day took up the cause and carried it through. This little volume comprises the collection of letters written by Carlyle to W. D. Christie, which brought about the establishment of the valuable institution known as the London Library, in St. James’s Square, now looked upon as indispensable.
The Economics of the Future.
The Return to the Land
By SENATOR JULES MELINE,
Leader of the Moderate Republicans in France: Former Minister of Agriculture; Minister of Commerce; Premier. With a Preface by Justin McCarthy.
Crown 8vo.
5s. net.
Mr. Justin McCarthy, in his Preface, says:—“This book seems to me destined to make a deep mark upon the age. Senator Jules Méline, leader of the Moderate Republicans in France, was Minister of Agriculture in the Cabinet of Jules Ferry from 1883 to 1885; was elected President of the representative chamber of France in 1889; and in 1896 became Prime Minister, an office which he resigned not long after, having found probably that his political views were not radical enough for the public opinion of the country. The book is remarkable in every sense. With all its practical teaching, with its minute and careful instruction on manufacturing and industrial questions, there is not a dull page in it from first to last. M. Méline has much of the feeling of the poet as well as the reasoning power of the practical and the scientific teacher. Even where the reader may not accept all the principles of political economy on which M. Méline founds many parts of his case, that reader, if he have an appreciative mind, cannot fail to admire the sincerity, the power, and the persuasiveness of the author.
“The great object of the book is to convince the world that the return to the land, and to the work which the land still offers in all or most countries, is now the nearest and the surest means for the mitigation or the removal of the troubles which have come on the working populations everywhere, and that the present is the appropriate time for the beginning of such a movement.
“The reader who begins this volume with nothing more than a creditable desire to learn something about the development of manufacturing industry here, there, and everywhere, soon finds himself absorbed in M. Méline’s exposition as much as if he were reading a story of magic from the Thousand and One Nights.”
Reminiscences of an Actor.
Joseph Jefferson
Reminiscences of a Fellow-Player.
By FRANCIS WILSON,
Author of “The Eugene Field I Knew,”
“Recollections of a Player,” &c., &c.
With 33 Portraits and other Illustrations.
Demy 8vo.
10s. 6d. net.
It is seldom that a biographic volume brings together more fitly the subject and the chronicler than does this juxtaposition of Joseph Jefferson and Francis Wilson. Men in the same profession, they were still further sympathetic by reason of their love of good books and good pictures, and through their kindly and humorous view of human nature, and in their enjoyment of the oddities of every-day life and character. For many years Mr. Wilson was a hero-worshipper of Joseph Jefferson; as a small boy he rubbed against him in the street, in order, boy-fashion, to feel that he had touched the hem of his garment. When he grew to know the man, he set down from time to time a full record of Jefferson’s charming conversation. During the weeks of the all-star tour he made a further record of the table-talk of Mr. Jefferson when surrounded with that splendid body of actors which included Mrs. Drew, William H. Crane, the Hollands, Julia Marlowe, Nat Goodwin, Fanny Rice, Robert Taber, and Mr. Wilson himself. It was a company to draw out the best of Jefferson’s varied experiences, and the best was set down by Mr. Wilson, and has been reproduced in this delightful volume of reminiscences. Mr. Wilson has written one of those books about the American stage that is sure to have a permanent place; and moreover, by the good taste with which he has written it, and by the excellent literary skill which he has shown, he has produced a volume worthy of very high praise as a literary performance.
A Study of Hypnotism.
Hypnotism and Spiritism
A Critical and Medical Study.
By Dr. GIUSEPPE LAPPONI,
Chief Physician to Their Holinesses Leo XIII. and Pius X.;
Professor of Anthropology in the Academy at Rome.
Translated by Mrs. Philip Gibbs.
Crown 8vo.
6s.
This book, which has made a tremendous stir upon the Continent, traces the study of Hypnotism and Spiritism from the earliest ages to the present day, and defines the future of the science and its probable bearing upon national life.
A New Work by CHARLES G. HARPER.
The Old Inns of Old England
A Picturesque Account of the Ancient
and Storied Hostelries of our own
Country.
By CHARLES G. HARPER,
Author of “The Stage Coach and Mail in Days of Yore,”
“The Brighton Road,” &c., &c.
With upwards of 200 Illustrations, chiefly by the Author.
Two Volumes,
Demy 8vo.
Gilt Top,
42s. net.
Principal Chapters: General History of Inns—Pilgrims’ Inns and Monastic Hostels—Inns in Literature—Pickwickian Inns—Dickensian Inns—Inns of Old Romance—Rural Inns—Inns with Relics and Curiosities—Rhymes and Inscriptions—Visitors’ Books—Innkeepers’ Epitaphs—Signs Painted by Artists—Queer Signs in Quaint Places—Historic Inns—Highwaymen’s Inns—The Highest Inns in England—Ingle-Nooks—Inns Retired from Business.
It is somewhat singular that no book has hitherto been published dealing either largely or exclusively with inns and their story. This vacant niche in the literature of the road is filled by the present volumes, the latest in the series of works on the Historic Roads of England, and the literature of travel in general, written by Mr. Charles G. Harper, and intended eventually to comprise every aspect of our ancient highways, and the life upon them in days of yore. It is believed that, while, of necessity, not every picturesque inn could be mentioned or illustrated in two large volumes, a fully representative set has been included.
As in his earlier works, the author’s aim has been the entirely modern one of seeking to amuse and interest the general reader, and the book is therefore in no sense an architectural or antiquarian disquisition.
A Study in Sociology.
The Polish Jew
His Social and Economic Value.
By BEATRICE C. BASKERVILLE.
Demy 8vo.
10s. 6d. net.
“Many of the facts set forth in the book are so much at variance with accepted opinions of the Polish Jew—both in Great Britain and the United States of America—that I have been advised to preface them with the assurance that they are not the outcome of a short visit to Poland, but the result of eight years’ residence in the country. During this time I have had every opportunity of observing the Polish Jew both in the towns and settlements, and have been in contact with the leaders of thought on all sides of the question from the Anti-Semite to the Jewish nationalist. I have witnessed the growth of that revival which has now spread throughout most of the settlements and all the large ghettos of the country, and which has engendered hostility to the Gentile and revolution against the powers that be. The fact that thousands of the men and women here discussed annually emigrate to compete with the English-speaking nations, has caused me to investigate their social and economic value the more carefully, both for the sake of the pauper aliens themselves and for that of the people among whom they eventually settle.”—Extract from Author’s Preface.
THE NATIONAL EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF
Charles Dickens
Including upwards of One Hundred and Thirty Articles now collected for the first time.
HIS
LETTERS, SPEECHES, PLAYS, and POEMS,
TOGETHER WITH
FORSTER’S LIFE OF THE AUTHOR.
The pictures, numbering upwards of 850, comprise all the Original Illustrations; with a complete series of Portraits, Additional Illustrations, Facsimiles and Reproductions of Handwriting, many of which have not been included in any collected edition of the novelist’s works; the whole printed upon India Paper, and mounted on Plate paper.
Strictly limited to 750 sets for England and America. Complete in 40 Volumes.
Royal 8vo. Price 10s. 6d. net per vol.
The National Edition of the Works of Charles Dickens is designed to rank as the final and definitive edition of his works, and to serve as a worthy memorial to the connection which has subsisted for over seventy years between the firm of Chapman and Hall and the immortal memory of Charles Dickens. It is by far the most handsome edition of Dickens ever placed upon the market, and being strictly limited in number is likely to take its place in a very short time among those treasures of the booklover which change hands at highly enhanced prices.
The edition is being printed by Messrs. T. and A. Constable of Edinburgh, His Majesty’s Printers, in a type newly cast for the purpose, upon pure rag paper of the highest quality.
THE TEXT.—The text used is that which was corrected by Charles Dickens himself in the last two years of his life, and therefore contains all the copyright emendations which he made when the volumes passed for the last time through his hands.
The edition contains all the collected papers from whatever source that seemed worthy of permanent association with the name of their author—from The Examiner, Daily News, Household Words, All the Year Round, over 130 in all—the most notable of these being all Dickens’s contributions to Household Words, some 90 in number, which have been identified for the first time by indisputable evidence.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS.—As regards the choice of illustrations, the Publishers’ plan has been to include only those pictures which were drawn for their editions during the life of the author, and which may therefore be held to have received his personal approbation. Under this arrangement they are able to reproduce for the first time in a Collected Edition a number of illustrations not usually associated with the novels, and the utmost care has been taken to do justice to the artists’ workmanship. The original illustrations are printed from a duplicate set of the steel plates on the best India paper and mounted on plate paper—a process which gives a greatly refined value to the delicacy of the original steel plates.
THE ARTISTS.—Dickens, as is well known, took the keenest possible interest in the illustrations to his books, and was very particular over the choice of the artists. At the same time, his work offered such infinite possibilities to pen and pencil, that all the best talent of his time was eager to be employed in his service, with the result that the muster-roll of the artists represented in the present edition contains the names of all the leading masters of Black and White throughout the Victorian Era. It may be said without exaggeration that the illustrations alone form an historical picture gallery of their time, as will be admitted when the following list is studied and understood.
ARTISTS REPRESENTED.
George Cruikshank.
Hablot K. Browne (Phiz).
Robert Seymour.
John Leech.
R. W. Buss.
C. R. Leslie, R.A.
Frank Stone, A.R.A.
T. Webster, R.A.
George Cattermole.
Daniel Maclise, R.A.
H. Warren.
Kenny Meadows.
Richard Doyle.
J. Mahony.
E. G. Dalziel.
G. J. Pinwell.
W. Maddox.
J. Absolon.
F. Corbeaux.
Marcus Stone, R.A.
Clarkson Stonefield, R.A.
Samuel Palmer.
F. W. Topham.
Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A.
Sir John Tenniel, R.A.
Fred. Walker.
Arthur Boyd Houghton.
W. P. Frith, R.A.
F. A. Fraser.
H. French.
Townley Green.
Charles Green.
Sir Luke Fildes, R.A.
Charles Alston Collins.
THE ADDITIONAL ILLUSTRATIONS will be—
All the original covers, printed from the wood blocks on tinted paper.
All the pictorial covers of the “People’s Edition,” printed from the wood blocks on tinted paper.
The steel vignette title-pages to the “Library Edition.”
The frontispieces of the First Cheap Edition, by Leslie, Webster, A. Boyd Houghton, Frank Stone, Marcus Stone, R.A., Stanfield, Phiz, Cruikshank, and others.
The plates by Phiz, Buss, Leech, Cruikshank, Maddox, Warren, Absolon, Corbeaux, Frank Stone, and others, which were either cancelled from the original edition or appeared separately as sets of extra illustrations.
The frontispieces and other plates from “Master Humphrey’s Clock,” which, on account of their size, do not appear in other editions.
The illustrations which appeared only in the first editions of “A Child’s History of England” and “Pictures from Italy,” by F. W. Topham and Samuel Palmer respectively.
All these pictures will be printed from the steel plates and wood blocks, where they exist, or from carefully reproduced blocks, on India paper, and will be mounted, as in the cases of the other pictures.
ITS COMPLETENESS.—The edition therefore may claim to represent all the authoritative literature emanating from the pen of Dickens, combining with this rich material a unique pictorial record of the association of contemporary art with the work of the greatest novelist of his generation. It will be issued at the rate of two volumes monthly, with one or two rare exceptions, when three volumes will appear together.
THE BINDING.—The edition will be bound by Messrs. James Burn and Co., of Kirby Street, Hatton Garden, in olive-green sateen, with a full gold design on the back and side, and gilt top.
Full detailed 8 pp. Prospectus on Application.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.
- Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.