Another grievance, more palpable because less inevitable than the replacing of worn-out theatre properties with fresh ones, is the passion of publishers for altering the covers of their magazines. This is the strangest act of vandalism that an unholy zest for novelty ever prompted in the human bosom. Why a magazine cover is selected in the first place, remains, in most cases, an unfathomed mystery. It is seldom a thing of beauty, but, once associated with the agreeable visitor that every month brings some new tidings to our door, it acquires for us all the subtle charm of familiarity. Nothing can well be more stiff and ungraceful than the design of Blackwood; that wilted, conventional border, and that wreath of prickly Scotch thistles, defending rather than decorating the vignette of the founder,
“With eyes severe and beard of formal cut.”
The whole cover seems to say, “Stand off, rash mortal! There is nothing here for you!” Yet to lose it would be to lose an old, surly, faithful and long-tried friend. I sometimes feel that Blackwood is not as readable as it was when I was a girl—it is the privilege of increasing years to think all magazines were better when we were young—but for that very reason I am glad to greet the ancient thistles that alone remain defiant and unchanged.
American publishers, however, are as delighted to offer their readers a new cover as a new story, and it is occasionally interesting to follow a magazine through all its outer vicissitudes. There was a time when Saint Nicholas behaved like Harlequin in the pantomime, slipping into fresh costumes with bewildering alertness and rapidity. The Century has adopted a plan eminently fitted to confuse and distress people who are in love with the familiar, and who have barely time to accustom themselves to one of the picturesque young women on its cover, before they are confronted with another. The only engaging and comforting thing about these rival damsels is their strong family resemblance. They are like the fair daughters of Doris, with faces “neither the same nor different, but as those of sisters should be.” The wanton alterations in Harper’s Magazine are none the less heart-breaking for being so trivial. As well rob us of an old friend altogether as tamper with his absolute integrity. No one can claim for Harper that its time-honored cover has any rare artistic quality, any of that subtle and far-reaching suggestiveness that we prize so wearily to-day. On the contrary, its little boys scattering roses into nowhere, and its preposterous child blowing soap bubbles on a globe belong distinctly to the cheerful school of Philistia, and are not burdened with meanings of any kind. That makes them so refreshing to our eyes; and besides I have always regarded them with sincere affection, because of the pleasure they afforded me in infancy. It was one of the unwritten laws of our nursery that, when a new magazine arrived, the old one passed into our possession. We painted all the pictures with water colors, and we cut out the little figures on the cover for paper dolls. Not the child straddling over the globe! It was impossible to make anything out of him, owing to his uncomfortable position. But the lads in tunics we thought extremely pretty, especially the one in the right-hand corner, whose head was as round as a bullet. The left-hand boy had a slightly flattened skull, which destroyed his perfect symmetry, though we occasionally remedied this defect by leaving him a small portion of his basket, and pretending it was hair. Now, alas! though the children still mount guard on their flower-wreathed pedestals, and still scatter their roses in the air, some unkind hand has wrought radical changes in their aspect. They have grown bigger, stouter, and their decent little tunics, so nicely drawn up over one shoulder, have been replaced by those absurd floating draperies which form the conventional attire of seraphs and sea nymphs all the world over. Never was there such an unhappy transformation. It is true that on the old cover of Bentley’s Magazine—if we may trust the minute picture of it on the face of Littell—the little figures with baskets were clad, or unclad, in these same airy rags. But this fact does not reconcile me at all. I never knew Bentley’s boys, but I have known Harper’s children all my life, and I cannot bear to see them shivering month after month in such ridiculous, inadequate sashes. What sort of paper dolls would they have made for well-bred little girls? And why should they have been deprived of their only garment to gratify a restless taste for change?
Well, it is useless to complain, for around us on every side people are fretting, and have fretted for generations over the unloved monotony of their surroundings. “It is not given to the world to be contented,” says Goethe; and while life can never hurry on fast enough, or assume phases new enough to please the majority of mankind, a few dissatisfied souls will always cling perversely to the things which they have known, and feel more keenly every year that all the vaunted delights of novelty and progress are but a poor substitute for the finer charm of the familiar.
OLD WORLD PETS
We have grown to be very narrow-minded, very exclusive, and hopelessly unimaginative in our choice of domestic pets. We love and cherish the dog, and we have a sentiment, less universal but far more disinterested, in favor of the beautiful and cold-hearted cat. We keep canaries in gilded cages—and there the matter practically ends. A few rabbits in a hutch—which are never petted—an occasional parrot feared by its master and hated by its master’s friends; a little song-bird imprisoned now and then, and slowly dying of despair; these are instances, happily too infrequent to count very heavily in the scale. As a fact, many people value the dog and cat for their serviceable qualities alone; exiling the first to the kennel and the second to the kitchen, and liking both, as Miss Mitford confessed she liked children, “in their place”—meaning any place where she was not.
But when we turn back to the past we find, or think we find, a very different state of affairs; an almost endless variety of little wild creatures, tamed by luxury and love. The dog still holds his own, and we need look no further than the Odyssey to see, in the great hound Argus, the splendid sagacity, the unswerving loyalty, which centuries have not altered or impaired. I have always wished that Argus could have had Sir Walter Scott, rather than the crafty Odysseus for a master. There is also a pathetic dialogue in Theocritus between two old fishermen, who are so poor they may not even own a watchdog to guard their scanty spoils: