“Torture his invention
To flatter knaves or lose his pension,”
is not, however, founded upon his lugubrious pentameters.
The man who turns down the corner of the leaf of a book is not only fit for treason, stratagems and spoils, but is well qualified to commit any mean crime in the calendar. If his memory is so poor that he cannot remember page or passage, let him make a small pencil note on the margin. Such a note may readily be removed by an eraser, but a “dog’s ear” can never be wholly removed. Its blight continues during the life of the book. Now Boswell records this sickening fact: “I have seen volumes of Dr. Young’s copy of The Rambler, in which he has marked the passages which he thought particularly excellent, by folding down a corner of the page, and such as he rated in a supereminent degree are marked by double folds. I am sorry that some of the volumes are lost.” I do not share in this sorrow; it is well that the testimony of such brutality should be effaced. Double folds! Insatiate archer, would not one suffice? Perhaps Johnson himself, Virginius-like, destroyed his offspring thus shamelessly violated.
It is often difficult to get out of corners; but before I escape, let me give to the dog’s-earing, nocturnally reflecting Young full credit for a single utterance—“Joy flies monopolists,”—which proves that it was not wholly in vain that he burned the midnight oil; for although he speaks in the present tense, it is manifest that the spirit of prophecy was strong within him. He looked ahead for more than a century and foresaw the day when “grafters” might be glorified and exalted, debauchees acclaimed us apostles of the people, and murderers feasted and honored, but monopolists hated, shunned and abhorred as miscreants whose sins can never be forgiven. Joyless indeed are those who dare to deprive their fellow beings of the inborn right to equality in everything; for we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created free and equal,—that is to say, with the right to do just as they please, to till the soil, to mine the earth, to invent the telegraph and the telephone, to manufacture steel, and to construct railways, but not to do it so well as to prevent any of the great people from doing the same thing. The abandoned wretch who, by his despicable brains, his virtuous life, and his pernicious industry, seeks to impair those rights in any degree, however trifling, must be prepared to bid farewell to happiness and contentment. If he is able to avoid the jail, it will be well for him to seek refuge in some secluded spot; let us say, in a peaceful library corner.
OF THE OLD FASHION
Speaking appreciatively a few nights ago at the club, concerning a recent magazine article on “Prescott, the Man,” I was reminded by a youthful university graduate of only twenty-five years standing, that “Prescott is an old-fashioned historian.”
There is much that is amusing in the attitude of the self-sufficient present towards the things of the past and there is also an element of the pathetic. I am often called an “old fogy,” an epithet whose origin and derivation are uncertain, but whose meaning is reasonably plain. Nobody who ever had the name applied to him was oppressed by any doubt about its signification. Some authorities tell us that it comes from the Swedish fogde—one who has charge of a garrison,—but I question it despite the confident assertion of the Century Dictionary. It is not altogether inappropriate, because old fogies are compelled to hold the fort against all manner of abominations. They are the brakes on the electric cars of modern pseudo-progress. Thackeray speaks of “old Livermore, old Soy, old Chutney the East India director, old Cutler the surgeon,—that society of old fogies, in fine, who give each other dinners sound and round and dine for the mere purpose of guttling.”
So the term is always associated with the stupid and the ridiculous, used with regard to “elderly persons who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the young.” Nobody ever refers to a young fogy, although most of us know many exceedingly dull-witted young people who have no sympathy with the amusements and pursuits of the aged or even of the middle-aged. One class is no more worthy of contempt than the other. The adolescents who find their highest form of entertainment in “bridge” are at least as deserving of pity as the semi-centenarian who prefers to pass his evenings among his books and his pictures or to devote them to Shakespeare and the musical glasses. There are some delights about the library fireside which compare favorably with those of the corridors of our most popular hostelry.
Certain kindly critics have insisted that my own literary tastes were acquired in the year 1850. I am not sure that the despised tastes formed in those commonplace, mid-century days are to be esteemed more highly than the tastes of our own self-satisfied times, but a good deal may be said in their favor. Perhaps the past is not always inferior to the present. There are varying opinions on the subject, from the familiar saying of Alfonso of Aragon, quoted by Melchior, immortalized by Bacon, and paraphrased by Goldsmith—that saying about old wood, old wine, old friends, and old authors—to the dogmatic declaration of Whittier that “still the new transcends the old.” It may occur to antiquated minds that there are some elements of excellence about old plays compared with the dramatic works of this careless, insouciant time; that Wordsworth has some merits which are superior to those of the worthy gentleman who now fills the office of Laureate, and that possibly the poetry of the last few years is not entitled to boast itself greatly beside that of the early nineteenth century—the poetry of Scott, of Byron, of Shelley and of Keats. But we have the telephone and the trolley-car, the automobile, the aeroplane, and the operation for appendicitis; and we admire our progress, the wonderful growth of the material, the mechanical, and the million-airy, while a few may pause to ask whether good taste and good manners have grown as greatly. Some of our older buildings for example are assuredly far better to look at than the lofty structures of steel which tower in lower New York and make of our streets darksome canons where the light of day scarcely penetrates and where the winds of winter roar wildly about our devoted heads as we struggle, hat-clutching, to our office doorways. May we not cite the City Hall and the Assay Office as honorable specimens of dignified architecture? There was something impressive too about the old “Tombs,”—replaced not long ago by a monstrosity;—a structure which a lady recently told me was once referred to by an English friend who had never been in New York, as “the Westminster Abbey of America.”