Great is the power of humbug, I repeat, with an air of imparting a new and important truth. I have just been reading—in a corner—a sketch of James Kent by Mr. James Brown Scott. He says of Charles Sumner that he, said Sumner, was “an ornament of the bar as he later was an ornament of the Senate”. But Sumner was not a real lawyer; he was not fitted for the conflicts of the bar. There is nothing like the battles of the law to take the vanity and pomposity out of a man. I do not wish to be understood as saying that there are no vain or pompous members of the legal profession, but they seldom win much respect or distinction. I doubt even if Sumner can justly be called “an ornament of the Senate”. He never did anything, he never originated anything; he only “orated”, so that in a sense he may have been ornamental; surely not useful. His speeches were carefully prepared and rehearsed; he was weak in debate. If any one cares to waste time upon the speech for which he was caned by Preston Brooks, he will be amazed at the scurrility of the language and the indecency of the vituperation. It is hard to believe that a man of his stalwart frame could be permanently injured by the blows of a light stick such as the one which Brooks used that day. The assault was a wicked performance, but Washington laughed in its sleeve over the outcry which the castigated one made about it. In those days the anti-slavery speakers were hunting for martyrdom, and Sumner made the most of his beating. In course of time, he was supplanted, as a martyr, by the deified horse-thief and murderer, John Brown. When the Senator assumed to dictate to Grant, he found his well-merited fate, and he has passed into oblivion. His useful, modest, hard-working colleague, Henry Wilson, as earnest and enthusiastic an opponent of slavery as Sumner was, is far better entitled to be called “an ornament of the Senate” than his more cultured but less effective associate.
Down in a quiet corner hides an humble cloth-clad little book which scarcely any one cares for except myself, and its interest to me comes less from its mild satire than from my affection for its author. “Salander and the Dragon, by Frederick William Shelton, M.A. Rector of St. John’s Church, Huntington, N. Y.”, with its Goodman, its Duke d’Envy, its Gudneiburud, Drownthort, and all the other parodies of Bunyan’s nomenclature, makes dull reading for the present generation, and it may be that my liking for it is only a form of perverse vanity. As I glance over the faded leaves, they bring before me the gentle, scholarly Shelton, who had been my father’s class-mate at Princeton—delightfully old-fashioned in the time when I had a boyish acquaintance with him. He was quite like his books, small, decorous, with a gleam of the humorous mingled with reflective sadness. I can fancy his shudder of dismay over most of our present-day sensational, highly-colored “literature” falsely so-called. I never knew more than two persons who had ever read “Salander”. But it aroused my indignation a year or two ago to read in a flippant review published in one of our magazines, a contemptuous reference to Doctor Shelton, whose nature and whose style were too sweet and pure for the taste of the pert, feminine scribbler.
Near the unoffending duodecimo is the well-beloved “Squibob Papers”, not as good as the immortal “Phoenixiana” which George Derby’s friends induced him to publish in the middle fifties, a famous precursor of our later and more elaborate “books of American humor”. My copy is not of the issue of 1859, but one which was printed by Carleton in 1865, after the author’s death. As most people know, poor Derby, who died at thirty-eight, was an officer of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, or, in his own words, “a Topographical Engineer who constantly wears a citizen’s dress, for fear some one will find it out.” Comparing them with the Engineers, he remarked that “the Corps of Topographical Engineers was only formed in 1838, while the Engineers date from the time when Noah, sick of the sea, landed and threw up a field-work on Mount Ararat”. It was an odd training school for a humorist, but Derby did not need much training.
His “great railroad project” of “The Belvidere and Behrings’ Straits Union Railroad”, with its branches to the North Pole “to get the ice trade”, to Kamchatka “to secure the seal trade for the Calcutta market”, and to Cochin China “to secure the fowl trade”, reads very much like the prospectus of an exceedingly modern enterprise. His “Sewing Machine with Feline Attachment”, by which a cat, induced by a suspended mouse, operates the mechanism, is an ingenious device, and he records that he “has seen one cat (a tortoise-shell) of so ardent and unwearying disposition, that she made eighteen pairs of men’s pantaloons, two dozen shirts, and seven stitched shirts, before she lay down exhausted”. The Fourth of July Oration, commemorating our forefathers who “planted corn and built houses, killed the Indians, hung the Quakers and Baptists, burned the witches and were very happy and comfortable indeed, and fought the battle named ‘the battle of Bunker Hill’, on account of its not having occurred on a hill of that name”, should never be forgotten if only for the story of the boy who picked his nose on the Fourth of July because it was Independence Day. Not very refined fun, you may say, but food for laughter, and with no taint of a peculiar kind of vulgarity which mars the fun of certain more classic fooling.
Among the tenants of the corner is a cheap and shabby American edition, in two fat, awkward volumes, of my pet novel, “Ten Thousand a Year”, much pawed over and alas! dog’s eared; while the first English edition, in three volumes, (Blackwood, 1841, “original cloth”), is seldom aroused from its serene repose on a conspicuous shelf. Ten thousand pounds a year then stood for colossal wealth; and when my boyish mind first applied itself to the study of the fitful fortunes of Tittlebat Titmouse, that income still appeared to represent riches beyond the dreams of avarice. When I began the study of law, I was one day toiling over Kent’s Commentaries, and the senior partner, bluff and kindly Aaron J. Vanderpoel, came upon me suddenly, crying out “What are you reading, young man?” I confessed, with the conscious pride which one feels when detected in doing something supposed to be virtuous, that I was reading Kent. “Don’t read Kent!” he shouted, “read ‘Ten Thousand a Year’”. Perhaps his advice was good; at all events I took it, and I did not tell him that I knew it already from cover to cover.
It is the best “lawyer’s novel” ever written, even if it is full of doubtful law. For the hundredth time you will follow with eager interest the progress of the great suit of Doe ex dem. Titmouse vs. Jolter, and await in breathless suspense the momentous decision of Lord Widdrington upon the question of the admission of that famous deed with the erasure, however well you may know that he is sure to exclude it; a ruling undeniably wrong, but if his lordship had held otherwise the story must have come to a sudden and ignominious close at the end of the first volume. This would have been a calamity, although the Aubreys and their woes become quite fatiguing and Oily Gammon turns out to be “more kinds of a villain” than is to be met with in actual life. He deserved a different fate; he ought to have married Kate Aubrey, and lived unhappily ever afterwards. I refuse to believe that he was guilty of the meaner crimes attributed to him in the account of his dying moments; but Warren probably thought that as Gammon had to die, he might as well depart this life in the odor of perfect villainy. He, Gammon, was a liar, thief, perjurer, forger—almost a murderer; but his crowning act of infamy was to devise an elaborate method of suicide to defraud a life-insurance company. If he had lived a little longer, he might have been found giving a rebate or riding on a Third Avenue car without paying his fare.
Warren had about all the worst faults chargeable against a novelist, yet the book has life. It may not be found in the drawing room or on my lady’s table, or in the languid hands of those who continually do recline on the sunny side of transatlantic steamers, but it endures. The account of the election in which, to my secret satisfaction, Titmouse defeats Mr. Delamere, is far better than Dickens’s attempt to describe the Eatanswill contest and fully as good as Trollope’s effort in the same field. Mr. Delamere, one of those impeccable figureheads created chiefly for the purpose of providing a husband for the equally impeccable young female angel who is so transcendently pure that she blushes deeply at the mere thought of a lover, oblivious of the fact that her adored parents must at some time have surrendered shamelessly to the sway of Cupid, is almost too noble for words; and as for Charles Aubrey, did not Thackeray pronounce him to be the greatest of all snobs? But he is such a precious snob.
Yet after we leave the nobility and gentry we find an abundance of humanity in the numerous “characters” who throng the pages, particularly among the lawyers. They would be just as well off without their impossible names which give them an air of unreality. But at that time it was a favorite custom of fiction-writers to label their personages with tags, and if Dickens may be pardoned for his Verisophts and his Gradgrinds, and Thackeray for Mr. Deuceace, Warren may surely be forgiven for Quicksilver, Subtle, Tag-rag and Going-Gone; and the world will continue to apply the name of “Quirk, Gammon and Snap” to attorneys’ firms as long as we have those useful adjuncts of civilization. In my time I have known several Quirks, not a few Gammons, and many Snaps. Snap is a sort of lawyer whom only a lawyer could conceive of; and Gammon, stripped of the basest of his qualities, may be encountered a dozen times a day between the Court House and the Battery.
Not far removed from the company of Titmouse and Gammon, is “Trilby”; the copy with the autograph letter of Du Maurier to Osgood, not the elaborately bound assemblage of the original Harper chapters, whose illustrations are so much more attractive than those in the later-published book, with the cancelled pages about Lorrimer and Joe Sibley which so offended the shrinking, diffident Whistler that they were remorselessly cut out—Whistler, who never hurt the feelings of a friend or learned “the gentle art of making enemies”. Then there are “The Bab Ballads”, and Lear’s “Nonsense Book,” and Alice, my Lady of Wonderland, and my Lady of Looking Glass country, whom so many adore and so many fail to comprehend. For there are myriads who, like the little Scotch lad, can see nothing in Carroll’s playful extravagances except that they contain “a great deal of feection”.
It is sad that the modern disposition to overdo everything should have so trampled upon such a delicious thing as “Trilby”; made it so common; worn it threadbare; and when it was no longer fresh, thrown it aside like a shattered toy. It is a manifestation of the childishness of the multitude which goes wild over some temporary hero and then lets him fall into the limbo of the forgotten when there are none so poor to do him reverence. There must be some magical elixir in “Pinafore”, for although thirty years have gone by since it sprang into universal favor, it still survives, is laughed at and admired, and is even quoted in after-dinner speeches. The mention of these speeches, without which no public or semi-public dinner is considered to be worth eating, brings painful reflections. We seem to be losing the art; perhaps we are approaching the heaviness and prosiness of our English cousins on such occasions. It is a melancholy thought that some reformers have introduced the plan of hearing the speeches first and devouring the dinner afterwards; and very lately diners were encouraged by the engraved announcement on the cards of invitation, that there would be “only six speeches, strictly limited to ten minutes each”. Yet, as a rule, the speakers are not burning for an opportunity to talk; they may truly say, as a beloved college president was wont to remark to a disorderly class, disturbing his lecture with horse-play, “Young men, this may be a bore to you but it is infinitely more of a bore to me.” There is difficulty in adjusting a speech to the tastes of the present-day dinner crowds; the time of the unending stream of anecdotes has passed, with its everlasting “that reminds me”, and it seems to be succeeded by an epidemic of the serious, which is not easily dealt with in the presence of a mob flushed with champagne and shrouded in tobacco-smoke. Some resort to epigram, but in fifteen minutes the epigram begins to degenerate into jerky twaddle and palls upon the jaded appetite. Now and again the orator exhibits an inclination to do what our newspapers are forever howling about—to “probe” something or somebody; but probing is always a painful operation and frequently does much more harm than good. It is not given to many to be really entertaining in discourse, so that our few entertainers are sadly overworked. This unhappy condition of affairs has brought us to the latest stage of infamy, when post-prandial talkers demand pay for their performances: and we may expect to see the day or the night, when the star of the evening will refuse to rise in his place and do his act until the pecuniary reward has been tendered to him in specie, bills, or certified cheque. Fancy the toast-master’s emotions if as he begins the familiar “We have with us to-night” he is interrupted by a cry from the hired guest, “You’re a saxpence short!”