J. A. H.
SEASONABLE READING.
I once wrote for a monthly magazine an out-door paper—a summer study, intended to enliven the reader's feeling rather than enlighten his understanding—and timed the production of it so that it should appear during the winter. The thought that it would be read only by bright firesides cheered me not a little in the writing. The editor, endeavoring to propitiate that thoughtless creature, "the general reader"—in matters of art but another name for "the general prejudice" or "the general ignorance"—notified me in January that he would prefer to hold the contribution till summer came again, when it would be regarded as "more appropriate, and just the thing to be read under green arbors and spreading beeches." I was glad to know that he thought it just the thing to be read anywhere, but nevertheless resolved to lay before the general reader, or the general prejudice, or the general ignorance, my little protest.
Most people are aware that the effects of Nature are so evanescent that the painter generally makes his study as if he were observing an eclipse. Down go a few strokes; into the spaces go notes, signs, symbols—all in the shortest kind of shorthand. Six months afterward, when the picture is made amid other scenes, the sketch and notes are used, to be sure, so far as they go, but the artist uses his good memory more. All people know that a book or canvas gives us not Nature, but an interpretation, a translation, a few selections, a memory of Nature. If the work be good, we are glad to abstract our eyes, for the time, from all else. We can do this best when the scene from which the work was studied is shut farthest away from sight. Summer landscapes themselves are one thing, and we enjoy them in summer: such landscapes utilized—they cannot be reproduced—by art, are another thing, and these we enjoy at the winter fireside, when the eye sees nothing without except leaden clouds and effacing snow. Not even the average American would take a landscape-painting under his arm if he wished to get the good of it, and go set it up in the glare of an open harvestfield or in the darkness of a deep wood, although these objects may have made the picture. He would enjoy Nature just as well, no doubt, during such a proceeding, but would he get the good of art? What would the painter do to the critic or buyer who subjected his work to such a test? Poison him at the very least. And this is what the literary artist should complain of, rather than desire, at the hands of an editor. He should not want the little bit that he selected, narrowed, intensified, idealized, and then imperfectly transcribed from memory, brought out and set up before a reader whose eye is filled at every glance with the overpowering and inexhaustible realities of Nature herself.
Just the thing to read in the blistering days of July, if anything can be read then, is a graphic description of a snowstorm, or a lively account of the way a polar bear invaded the ice-hut of a benumbed Eskimo, or a history of the Washington Monument: something cold. Ice is as grateful in your dog-day literature as in your August julep. No one will hold that at such a time he prefers to contemplate a picture of Sahara or of a frying-pan. On the same principle, let us have, in art, our green leaves and warm colors amid the frosts of midwinter. Only the atmospheric extremes, summer and winter, can be seriously considered in "seasoning" periodical literature, the months our almanacs call spring being neither one thing nor another. In capricious April, however, a vision of golden and placid October would seem to be the proper thing, as would the freshness of May in the mellow melancholy of autumn. If editors receive more censures than compliments for publishing certain articles, into which the element of "news" does not enter, six months after the seasons of which they treat, there is one obscure contributor at least who considers the necessity a virtue.
C. H.
[According to the theory of "C. H.," the Christmas number of a magazine should be filled with midsummer idyls, while Christmas carols would be the appropriate reading in July or August. He thinks this would provide a grateful relief—like ice on a hot day or a blazing log on a cold one—from the effects of any intensity of temperature in the opposite seasons. But this is confounding sensations with mere conceptions, and seeking to "cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast." The ice cools and the fire warms, but a description of one or the other in place of the reality would make its absence only the more intolerable. Reynolds the dramatist tells us that one of his summer pieces was damned, owing to a scene in which the actors were served with plentiful libations of cool drinks—a tantalizing spectacle that drew a storm of hisses from the hot and thirsty audience. We hope the editor whom "C. H." has so inconsiderately assailed may not be tempted to revenge himself by exposing his contributor to a similar mishap.—Ed.]
A HINT FOR THE CENTENNIAL.
The interest in the approaching Centennial celebration at Philadelphia is daily widening and extending, and if those entrusted with its management prove themselves competent for the work, and show that they are duly inspired with its breadth and its significance to the world, before the end of the present year there will not be a hamlet in the land whose citizens are not made prouder of their nationality and individually anxious to contribute something to its glory. It should be made the grandest occasion of the kind which the world has ever witnessed, for if it be anything less than that, it will fail to respond to the honest aspirations and generous pride of the American heart. Aside from the museum proper—the collection of past and present manufactures, past and present implements of industry—every day should witness some grand tournament, like that trial of grain-reapers which took place at the exposition at Paris in 1855. The scene was a splendid field of grain forty miles from the city. Three machines—one English, one French (from Algiers), and one American—were the weapons of the contest. The audience was a crowd of curious witnesses gathered from every quarter of the globe. At a signal from the judges' stand the fine machines started and moved each over its allotted acre, cutting down and raking the grain like magic. The Algerian machine did its work in seventy-two minutes, the English in sixty-six, and the American in twenty-two minutes! A French journal at the time said of the American machine, "It did its work in the most exquisite manner, not leaving a single spear ungathered, and it discharged the grain in the most perfect shape, as if placed by hand for the binders. It finished its piece most gloriously." The contest was finally narrowed down to three reapers, all American, and the champion won its laurels amid the most deafening shouts of applause.