Your very humble servant,
Wm: White.
Revd Wm: B. Sprague,
West Springfield,
Massachusetts.”
The Bishop was doubtless one of the last to transport into the nineteenth century the use of frequent capitals, the archaic “ye” and the quaint long “s’s” which are not “f’s” as many believe.
The subject of autographs is to me what King Charles’s head was to Mr. Dick. That I am not alone in my infirmity is proved by a letter of James Freeman Clarke, written in 1878, in which he acknowledges the receipt of a catalogue of a German collection, and says, naively, “Notwithstanding my professed indifference to any autographs except those of the Apostle Paul, Alfred, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Martin Luther and the like, I confess that my mouth watered at the sight of so many of them. It was a pleasure even to read the description and title”. These words, showing that his indifference was a mere pretense, were written by a serious and scholarly man, famous in his day as preacher, author and educator, and I am sure that even his little pretense would soon have been abandoned if I could only have been honored for a little while with his company at the library table.
Almost every one finds it hard to understand as he attains the period when juniors say to him, “Now, at your time of life”—a form of expression I have come to loathe—that he is really no longer—to use another wretched locution,—“up to date”. I am beginning to comprehend the feelings of some of the excellent bewigged old gentlemen of the seventeen hundreds whose lives lapped over that mysterious one-hundredth year which is just like any other year, but there is a weird something about it, indescribable, impossible of definition, which makes it different. I am certain that those of us who awoke on the morning of the first day of January in the year of grace 1900, had a consciousness of passing into a new age, although—not to revive the ancient controversy but merely to assert the indisputable fact—the new century did not begin until a year later. How painfully modern Mr. Wordsworth, Mr. Coleridge and Mr. Shelley must have seemed to the men who knew so well their Crabbe and their Cowper. It has always been my opinion that the unfortunates who happen to be born exactly in the middle of a century are taken at an unfair advantage by those who arrive in a century’s closing years or in its opening days. They grow old-fashioned so much sooner. In Comyn Carr’s book of reminiscences (published in 1908)—by no means one of those dull productions about which we were chatting a few pages back—he says heroically that he is not very gravely discouraged by occasionally finding himself ranked as a champion of an outworn fashion, but he groans over the revelation of a “cultivated young writer of the newer school” that ‘among men of culture Dickens is now never read after the age of fourteen!’ This cultivated young writer—we must take Mr. Carr’s word as to his culture, for otherwise one would be likely to consider him what Lord Dundreary called “wather an ass”—must have been trying to impose upon the credulous old gentlemen, who frankly owns that he was born in the misty mid-region of 1849. What pained me most was the meek and submissive acquiescence of Carr in his relegation to the category of back numbers at the surely not venerable age of fifty-nine. As Thomas Bailey Aldrich said the day after his birthday, “It is unpleasant to be fifty-nine, but it would be unpleasanter not to be, having got started!” I insist, however, that it is not enough to warrant the exile of any ordinary person from the realms of contemporaneous interest. Dickens, Thackeray, Hawthorne, Tennyson, Browning, all great Victorians, if an American may be reckoned in that class, are not, I venture to say, as obsolete as the cultivated infant would have us believe; if they were, there would not be so much said of them and written of them in this fast aging first decade of the twentieth century. Returning to Dickens, I prefer to the babe’s prattle of Carr’s young interlocutor, the dictum of Chesterton, when he tells us “that Dickens will have a high place in permanent literature there is, I imagine, no prig surviving to deny.”
In a time so remote that I shrink from mentioning the date precisely, I overheard a young prig say to the feminine companion whom he was escorting to her home after listening to a lecture by Charles Sumner, “he suits the masses”. It was a singularly inept remark as applied to the stilted and artificial oratory of the pompous Senator; but the fact that “he suits the masses” may well be cited to warrant the assurance of the lasting quality of Dickens’ fame. The lesser lights are growing pale and dim in comparison with his and with that of his illustrious compeer, who ranks higher perhaps in the estimation of the “cultured” but no higher in the favor of the general. Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Bronté, Trollope, and George Eliot, if we may group together stars of such varying magnitude, shine more feebly than they did while they were in the full blaze of their glory. But when one takes from the shelf or from the library table a volume of Dickens or of Thackeray, he may well exclaim, as was said of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, “This is no book; who touches this, touches a man.”
Many of us still retain an affection for Trollope, even if he was, as some recent compilers of literary hand-books say, “one of the most boisterous, tactless and unmetaphysical of writing men”—all the more precious to me because of his unmetaphysicality. In novels “à bas metaphysics!” If it be true, as these autocratic tyrants of taste aver, that he “keeps his nose close down, dog-like, to the prosaic texture of life,” he pursued the game to good purpose. To all lawyers, he must ever be dear because of his delightful Old Bailey character of Chaffanbrass; to all the clergy he must be a source of joy for his innumerable bishops, rectors and curates; and to all physicians a lovable man for Doctor Thorne. Was he not as much unlike Hawthorne as one novelist may be unlike another, yet did not Hawthorne say that Trollope’s work “suited” him? “They precisely suit my taste” wrote the author of the Scarlet Letter, “solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef, and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” Yet in these days they cannot be expected to compete with such illuminating representations of real life as may be found in the pages of—let us say—Elinor Glyn, who manifestly aspires to be the Aphra Behn of modern literature.