This is the very meekest of funning, and feminine tartness and juvenile precocity must be at a low ebb with the Unknown Public when it can relish such shadowy thrusts, even at increasing years, which, from the days of the prophet to the days of Mr. Gladstone, have ever been esteemed a fitting subject for mirth. The distance between the penny dreadful and “Lorna Doone” is not vaster than the distance between these hopeless jests and the fine cynicism, the arrowy humor, of Du Maurier. Mrs. Pennell says very truely that Cimabue Brown and Mrs. Ponsonby de Tomkyns would have no meaning whatever for the British workman,—would probably be as great a mystery to him as The Dook Snook and The Hon. Billy are to me. But Punch’s dear little lad who, on a holiday afternoon, has caught only one fish, “and that was so young it didn’t know how to hold on,” and the charitable but near-sighted old lady who drops a penny into the hat of a meditative peer, come within the scope of everybody’s comprehension. If more energy is to be exerted “in bringing home to the people the inherent attractions of Shakespeare, Scott, Marryat, Dickens, Lytton, and George Eliot,” according to the comprehensive programme laid out by Mr. Salmon, why not, as a first step, bring home to them the attractions of a bright, clean, merry jest? It might enable them, perhaps, to recognize the gap between the humor of George Eliot and the humor of Captain Marryat, and would serve to prick their dormant critical faculties into life.
The one sad sight at an English railway book-stall is the little array of solid writers who stand neglected, shabby, and apart, pleading dumbly out of their dusty shame for recognition and release. I have seen Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest” jostled contemptuously into a corner. I have seen “The Apostolic Fathers” hanging their hoary heads with dignified humility, and “The Popes of Rome” lingering in inglorious bondage. I have seen our own Emerson broken-backed and spiritless; and, harder still, “The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table” shorn of his gay supremacy, frayed, and worn, and exiled from his friends. I have seen “Sartor Resartus” skulking on a dark shelf with a yellow-covered neighbor more gaudy than respectable, and I have seen Buckle’s boasted “Civilization” in a condition that would have disgraced a savage. These Titans, discrowned and discredited, these captives, honorable in their rags, stirred my heart with sympathy and compassion. I wanted to gather them up and carry them away to respectability, and the long-forgotten shelter of library walls. But light-weight luggage precluded philanthropy, and, steeling my reluctant soul, I left them to their fate. Still they stand, I know, unsought, neglected, scorned, while thousands of “Dorothys” and “Ally Slopers” are daily sold around them. “How had the star of this daughter of Gomer waxed, while the star of these Cymry, his sons, had waned!” How shall genius be revered and honored, when buried without decent rites in the bleak graveyard of a railway book-stall?
Transcriber’s Notes
Simple typographical errors were corrected.
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.