In his descriptions of eating and drinking, Scott stands midway between the snug, coarse, hearty enjoyment of Dickens, and the frank epicureanism of Thackeray, and he easily surpasses them both. With Dickens, the pleasure of the meal springs from the honest appetites which meet it—appetites sharpened often by the pinching pains of hunger. With Thackeray, it is the excellence of the entertainment itself which merits approbation. With Scott, it is the spirit of genial good-fellowship which turns a venison pasty into a bond of brotherhood, and strengthens, with a runlet of canary, the human tie which binds us man to man. Dickens tries to do this, but does not often succeed, just because he tries. A conscious purpose is an irresistible temptation to oratory, and we do not want to be preached to over a roast goose, nor lectured at through the medium of pork and greens. Scott never turns a table into a pulpit; it is his own far-reaching sympathy which touches the secret springs that move us to kind thoughts. Quentin Durward’s breakfast at the inn is worthy of Thackeray. Quentin Durward’s appetite is worthy of Dickens. But Quentin Durward’s host—the cruel and perfidious Louis—ah! no one but Scott would have dared to paint him with such fine, unhostile art, and no one but Scott would have succeeded.
In point of detail, however, Dickens defies competition. Before his vast and accurate knowledge the puny efforts of modern realism shrink into triviality and nothingness. What is the occasional dinner at a third-class New York restaurant, the roast chicken and mashed potatoes and cranberry tart, eaten with such ostentatious veracity, when compared to that unerring observation which penetrated into every English larder, which lifted the lid of every pipkin, and divined the contents of every mysterious and forbidding meat pie! Dickens knew when the Micawbers supped on lamb’s fry, and when on breaded chops; he knew the contents of Mrs. Bardell’s little saucepan simmering by the fire; he knew just how many pigeons lurked under the crust of John Browdie’s pasty; he knew every ingredient—and there are nearly a dozen of them—in the Jolly Sandboys’ stew. There was not a muffin, nor a bit of toasted cheese, nor a slab of pease-pudding from the cook-shop, nor a rasher of bacon, nor a slice of cucumber, nor a dish of pettitoes eaten without his knowledge and consent. And, as it cost him no apparent effort to remember and tell all these things, it costs us no labor to read them. We are naturally pleased to hear that Mr. Vincent Crummles has ordered a hot beefsteak-pudding and potatoes at nine, and we hardly need to be reminded—even by the author—of the excellence of Mr. Swiveller’s purl. The advantage of unconscious realism over the premeditated article is a lack of stress on the author’s part, and a corresponding lack of fatigue on ours.
Thackeray reaches the climax of really good cooking, and, with the art of a great novelist, he restrains his gastronomic details, and keeps them within proper bounds. Beyond his limits it is not wise to stray, lest we arrive at the land of gilded puppets, where Disraeli’s dukes and duchesses feast forever on ortolans, and pompetones of larks, and lobster sandwiches; where young spendthrifts breakfast at five o’clock in the afternoon on soup and claret; and where the enamored Lothair feeds Miss Arundel “with cates as delicate as her lips, and dainty beverages which would not outrage their purity.” The “pies and preparations of many lands” which adorn the table of that distinguished dinner-giver, Mr. Brancepeth, fill us with vague but lamentable doubts. “Royalty,” we are assured, “had consecrated his banquets” and tasted of those pies; but it is the province of royalty, as Mr. Ruskin reminds us, to dare brave deeds which commoners may be excused from attempting. Hugo Bohun, at the Duke’s banquet, fired with the splendid courage of his crusading ancestry, dislodges the ortolans from their stronghold of aspic jelly, and gives to the entertainment that air of glittering unreality which was Disraeli’s finest prerogative, and which has been copied with facile fidelity by Mr. Oscar Wilde. “I see it is time for supper,” observes the æsthetic Gilbert of the dialogues. “After we have discussed some Chambertin and a few ortolans, we will pass on to the question of the critic, considered in the light of the interpreter.” And when we read these lines, our lingering doubts as to whether Gilbert be a man or a mere mouthpiece for beautiful words, “a reed cut short and notched by the great god Pan for the production of flute-melodies at intervals,” fade into dejected certainty. That touch about the ortolans is so like Disraeli, that all Gilbert’s surpassing modern cleverness can no longer convince us of his vitality. He needs but a golden plate to fit him for the ducal dining-table, where royalty, and rose-colored tapestry, and “splendid nonchalance” complete the dazzling illusion. After which, we may sober ourselves with a parting glance at the breakfast-room of Tillietudlem, and at the fare which Lady Margaret Bellenden has prepared for Graham of Claverhouse and his troopers. “No tea, no coffee, no variety of rolls, but solid and substantial viands—the priestly ham, the knightly surloin, the noble baron of beef, the princely venison pasty.” Here in truth is a vigorous and an honorable company, and here is a banquet for men.
IN BEHALF OF PARENTS.
It is a thankless task to be a parent in these exacting days, and I wonder now and then at the temerity which prompts man or woman to assume such hazardous duties. Time was, indeed, when parents lifted their heads loftily in the world; when they were held to be, in the main, useful and responsible persons; when their authority, if unheeded, was at least unquestioned; and when one of the ten commandments was considered to indicate that especial reverence was their due. These simple and primitive convictions lingered on so long that some of us can perhaps remember when they were a part of our youthful creed, and when, in life and in literature, the lesson commonly taught was that the province of the parent is to direct and control, the privilege of the child is to obey, and to be exempt from the painful sense of responsibility which overtakes him in later years. In very old-fashioned books, this point of view is strained to embrace some rather difficult conclusions. The attitude of Evelina to her worthless father, of Clarissa Harlowe to her tyrannical parents, seemed right and reasonable to the generations which first read these novels, while we of the present day are amazed at such unnatural submissiveness and loyalty. “It is hard,” says Clarissa’s mother, in answer to her daughter’s despairing appeals, “if a father and mother, and uncles and aunts, all conjoined, cannot be allowed to direct your choice;” an argument to which the unhappy victim replies only with her tears. How one longs to offer Mrs. Harlowe some of these little manuals of advice which prove to us now so conclusively that even a young child is deeply wronged by subjection. “Looked at from the highest standpoint,” says one of our modern mentors, “we have no more right to interfere with individual choice in our children than we have to interfere with the choice of friends;” a statement which, applied as it is, not to marriageable young women, but to small boys and girls, defines matters explicitly, and does away at once and forever with all superannuated theories of obedience.
A short perusal of these text-books of training would lead the uninitiated to conclude that the children of to-day are a down-trodden race, deprived of their natural rights by the ruthless despotism of parents. It is also indicated with painful and humiliating distinctness that adults have no rights—at least none that children are bound to respect—and that we have hardened ourselves into selfishness by looking at things from a grown-up, and consequently erroneous, point of view. For example, to many of us it is an annoyance when a child wantonly destroys our property. This is ungenerous. “With anointed eyes we might often see in such a tendency a great power of analysis, that needs only to be understood to secure grand results;”—which reflection should make us prompt to welcome the somewhat disastrous results already secured. I once knew a little boy who, having been taken on a visit to some relatives, succeeded within half an hour in purloining the pendulums of three old family clocks, a passion for analysis which ought to have made him one of the first mechanics of his age, had not his genius, like that of the political agitator, stopped short at the portals of reconstruction.
It is hard to attune our minds to a correct appreciation of such incidents, when the clocks belong to us, and the child doesn’t. It is hard to be told that our pendulums are a necessary element, which we do wrong to begrudge, in the training of a boy’s observation. All modern writers upon children unite in denouncing the word “don’t,” as implying upon every occasion a censure which is often unmerited. But this protest reminds me of the little girl who, being told by her father she must not say “I won’t,” innocently inquired: “But, papa, what am I to say when I mean ‘I won’t’?” In the same spirit of uncertainty I would like to know what I am to say when I mean “don’t.” Auretta Roys Aldrich, who has written a book on “Children—Their Models and Critics,” in which she is rather severe upon adults, tells us a harrowing tale of a mother and a five-year-old boy who sat near her one day on a railway train. The child thrust his head out of the window, whereupon the mother said tersely: “Johnnie, stop putting your head out of the window!” That was all. No word of explanation or entreaty softened this ruthless command. Whether Johnnie obeyed or not is unrevealed, being a matter of no importance; but, “as they left the car,” comments the author, “they left also an aching in my heart. I longed to clasp the mother in my arms, for she, too, had been the victim of misunderstanding; and show her, before it was too late, how she was missing the pure gold of life for herself and her little boy.” Happily, before long, another mother entered, and her child also put his head as far as he could out of that troublesome window, which nobody seemed to have the sense to shut. Observing this, his wise parent sat down by his side, “made some pleasant remark about the outlook,” and then gradually and persuasively revealed to him his danger, discussing the matter with “much candor and interest,” until he was finally won over to her point of view, and consented of his own free will, and as a rational human being, to draw in his little head.
I think this double experience worth repeating, because it contrasts so pleasantly with the venerable anecdote which found its way into all the reading books when I was a small child, and illustrated the then popular theory of education. It was the story of a mother who sees her boy running rapidly down a steep hill, and knows that, almost at his feet, lies an abandoned quarry, half hidden by underbrush and weeds. Sure of his obedience, she calls sharply, “Stop, Willie!” and the child, with a violent effort, stays his steps at the very mouth of the pit. Had it been necessary to convince him first that her apprehensions were well grounded, he would have broken his neck meanwhile, and our school-books would have had one tale less to tell.
Still more astounding to the uninitiated is another little narrative, told with enviable gravity by Mrs. Aldrich, and designed to show how easily and deeply we wound a child’s inborn sense of justice. “A beautiful boy of four whose parents were unusually wise in dealing with him”—it is seldom that a parent wins this degree of approbation—possessed a wheelbarrow of his own, in which he carried the letters daily to and from the post-office. One morning he was tardy in returning, “for there was the world to be explored” on the way; and his mother, growing anxious, or perhaps desiring her mail, followed him to know what was the matter. She met him at the post-office door, and seeing in the barrow an envelope directed to herself, she rashly picked it up and opened it. Edwin promptly “raised a vehement cry of protest.” That letter, like all the rest, had been given to him to carry, and no one else was privileged to touch it. Swiftly and repentantly his mother returned the unfortunate missive, but in vain. “The wound was too deep, and he continued to cry ‘Mamma, you ought not to have done it!’ over and over again between his sobs.” In fact he “refused to be comforted,”—comforted!—“and so was taken home as best he could be, and laid tenderly and lovingly in bed. After sleeping away the sharpness of sorrow and disappointment, and consequent exhaustion, the matter could be talked over; but while he was so tired, and keenly smarting under the sense of injustice done him, every word added fuel to the flame.... His possessions had been taken away from him by sheer force, before which he was helpless. That his indignation was not appeased by putting the letter back into his keeping, showed that he was contending for a principle, and not for possession or any selfish interest.”
Readers of George Eliot may be pleasantly reminded of that scene in the “Mill on the Floss” where Tom Tulliver unthinkingly withdraws a rattle with which he has been amusing baby Moss, “whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it taken away from her remained in all its force.” But to some of us the anecdote of Edwin and his wheelbarrow is more disheartening than droll. The revelation of such admirable motives underlying such inexcusable behavior puzzles and alarms us. If this four-year-old prig “contending for a principle and not for possession” be a real boy, what has become of all the dear, naughty, fighting, obstinate, self-willed, precious children whom we used to know; the children who contended joyously, not for principle, but for precedence, and to whom we could say “don’t” a dozen times a day with ample justification. Little boys ought to be the most delightful things in the world, with the exception of little girls. It is as easy to love them when they are bad as to tolerate them when they are good. But what can we do with conscientious infants to whom misbehavior is a moral obligation, and who scream in the public streets from an exalted sense of justice?