When he leaves other writers and has recourse to his own pen, matters are but indifferently mended. The slovenliness of his style is extraordinary. "Ought a gentleman," he quotes from Thackeray, "to be a loyal son, a true husband, an honest father? Ought his life to be decent, his bills to be paid, his tastes to be high and elegant, his aims in life to be noble?" "Yes," responds the astute essayist, "he should be all these, and somewhat more; and these all men can be, and women, too." What is the English of this gibberish? "In Miss Thackeray's excellent novel, the 'Story of Elizabeth,' there is a somewhat new point in such books." He tells us that General Blücher "had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them, like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl,"—that in every state people may be cheerful; "the lambs skip, birds sing and fly joyously, puppies play, kittens are full of joyance, the whole air full of careering and rejoicing insects, that everywhere the good outbalances the bad, and that every evil that there is has its compensating balm." And in face of such slop-work he dares to speak of having "formed his style"!
And, stranger still, a book which indulges in these pranks has gone to a third edition in the land of Addison and Macaulay! Moreover, our copy belongs to this veritable third edition, whose preface informs us that "the Essays have undergone a careful revision." What must have been the glories of the first edition?
The style is not more hopelessly muddled than the sentiment. The man's skull seems to be undergoing a perpetual house-cleaning. His intellectual furniture is always at sixes and sevens. It would be very strange, if so wide a rover and so indefatigable a collector should never by any chance come back with some valuable specimens for his cabinet; but the few curiosities displayed as his own property have so very awkward an air in his wilderness of common pebbles, that we have a deep inward conviction that they are stolen, though the theft may be an unconscious one. Moreover, if he ever lights on a genuine gem, he cannot keep his hands off it, but paws it over and over till it is as lustreless as its companions. He seems to have an organic inaptitude for combination. He lays a fact down and straightway forgets where he put it, what it was for, or what manner of fact it was, and goes serenely on with his argument as if no such fact existed. Some of his facts are of such a nature that the pity is not that he occasionally forgets them, but that he ever remembered them. To show that old truths are "now proved to have been lies," he quotes,—
"Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love,"
and adds this comment,—"Well, we know now that the sun does not move, and that the stars are not fire; that the voices of the learned, who held up these things as immutable truths, were unconsciously lying after all." Yet any astronomical horn-book would have told our philosopher, that, if one scientific theory is firmly founded on truth, it is that the sun does move; and for the matter of the stars, it is as likely to be fire as anything else. "William Penn," he says elsewhere, "is now tainted, and Washington suspected." By whom? and of what?—will this new historian inform us? "Great artists think differently, as witness wondrous Giotto, the shepherd boy, and our own clever, but mediocre Opie." A man may mistake a mediocre painter for a great artist and only err in judgment, but that he should in the same breath proclaim him to be both is a marvel of stultification. "All men are not born equal," he says, presumptuously dabbling in politics and drawing his feeble bow against the Declaration of Independence,—"all men are not equally wise, gifted, clever, strong, handsome, or tall. The brains of one nation and the brains of one man are superior in weight, form, and activity to the brains of another nation or another man." "The framers of the celebrated American Declaration knew just as well as we do that they were preaching a doctrine of romantic falsehood." A moment or two after this fine philosophical distinction and this courteous and eminently Gentle assertion,—but quite long enough for him to have forgotten both,—he makes another affirmation, that equality exists "in the grave and in the church." How, then? Are men equally wise, gifted, clever, strong, handsome, or tall in church? "A hundred years after death we may weigh the dust of the greatest hero, and it is no more than that of the poorest beggar; and the name that remains is as light and useless as the dust." But if the great hero were very strong and tall and the poor beggar a feeble dwarf, the dust of the one would be appreciably more than that of the other, And what means this Daniel come to judgment by teaching that a hero's name is light and useless? We had supposed it was agreed among all civilized people that a nation's heroic memories are her most priceless possessions. We ask the question simply as a rhetorical one. We are perfectly aware that the author means nothing. He seldom does mean anything. And if he did, he is the last person to whom we should apply for any exact definition of his meaning. He uses words with very little comprehension of their ordinary meaning; of the delicacy or the force of language he has no sort of conception. He grasps at the skirts of any notion that flutters through his disorderly mind, fastens to it the word that comes first to hand, and sets it fluttering again. Juxtaposition is his all-sufficient substitute for connection, and "a moment's time, a point of space," between two statements is fatal to his arguments. "We all differ. Therefore," is his extraordinary inference, "every individual should live, not for himself, but to be valuable to others; for," and here we turn another of his inexplicable corners, "it would be sheer midsummer madness to preach up that all are equally valuable." Consequently we embark on his sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in entire ignorance of the point where they will land us. He takes Mr. Helps to task for bowing the knee to the Moloch of success in writing Mr. Stephenson's life, accuses Mr. Stephenson of borrowing and purloining ideas, yet himself constantly holds him up to admiration as a hero. The putting down of the Slaveholders' Rebellion is to him a mere "blundering into slaughter"; but the Crimean War "showed that heroism is not yet extinct in high life"; and in the Indian Mutinies, we, the English, "were attacked, undermined, betrayed," and that rebellion was quelled with "courage, skill in arms, anything you will, or all things combined, and God's blessing chief of all, which enabled us to preserve a mighty empire." Of these "high people" he advises us to "adopt the polish, suavity, and politeness, one towards another, which, with few exceptions, they all have," only two pages after he has illustrated "vulgar curiosity in high life" by telling us how, "at an entertainment given by the Prince and Princess of Wales, to which, of course, only the very cream of the cream of society was admitted, there was such a pushing and struggling to see the Princess ... that a bust of the Princess Royal was thrown from its pedestal and damaged, and the pedestal upset; the ladies, in their eagerness to view the Princess, coolly took advantage of the overthrown pillar by standing on it." In one place he testifies that "the majority of men's wives in the upper and middle classes fall far short of that which is required of a good wife. They are not made by love, but by the chance of a good match. They are the products of worldly prudence, not of a noble passion.... The consequence is, that after the first novelty has passed away, the chain begins to rub and the collar to gall." A little later in the same essay he gives an ideal wife, and says,—"It is not too much to say that the great majority of wives equal this ideal." "By far the larger portion of marriages are happy ones ... and ... of men's wives we still can write ... 'her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day,' &c., &c." "Women," he says, "differ from men in this respect. They all, very properly, look forward to marriage." So, we suppose, men do not look forward to marriage; or if they do, it is improperly. "Nay, the great majority [of women], even in our factitious state of society, are utterly dependent upon it." That is, if society were not factitious, every woman, without exception, would be utterly dependent upon marriage for a living. "The majority of girls are looking forward to be married at an early age, and are in despair of being left old maids when they are twenty-one." As usual, he means the contrary of what he says,—not that girls hope to be old maids till they are twenty-one and then settle down into the certainty that they must become wives, but that they hope to be wives and are in despair at being old maids by the time they are twenty-one. The difficult task of evolving his meaning from his words is, to be sure, entirely a work of supererogation on our part, as the statement he means and the statement he makes are usually alike baseless. But we choose to free him from the meshes in which he has entangled himself and give him a chance to run for his life.
The brilliancy and originality of his views on social questions appear in such startling announcements as "Woman should be true to herself." "Woman was created to be a wife and a mother." "The accomplished woman in these days of general education is, however, a grand mistake." "Why should lovely woman ever condescend to dabble in political economy? Can a gentleman be a gentleman when logic requires the truth? Will dry dissertation fill up the place of compliment and flowery talk? Will agricultural measures,—Mill on Liberty,—Buckle on Civilization,—High, Low, or Middle Church,—Pleiocene periods,—Hind's new comet, and the division of labor, suffer us to enjoy life as we used, and to amuse ourselves with the innocent prattle of ladies' tongues?" Rosy, posy, pinky, honey, peppermint, and sugar-plummy! "One part of management in husbands lies in a judicious mixture of good-humor, attention, flattery, and compliments." Here, helping him to his meaning, which he flounders after in vain through a page of wish-wash, we may explain that he is not speaking, as would naturally be supposed, of the manner in which husbands manage wives, but, advancing in his usual crab-fashion, of the manner in which wives manage husbands; nor by flattery let it be imagined for a moment that he means flattery, but "an offered flower, a birthday gift, a song when we are weary, a smile when we are sad, a look which no eye but our own will see," in which, if truth is, as has been said, "a fixed central sun," our comet must be considered in its perihelion. And having thus set him on his feet again, let us see whether he can stand by himself a tottering moment or two.
The preventive of these ill-assorted marriages (which for the greater part are never made) is, if the young men "only chose by sense or fancy, or because they saw some good quality in a girl,—if they were not all captivated by the face alone," (Query: What is being captivated by a face but choosing by fancy? and what is choosing by sense but choosing by some good quality?) "every Jill would have her Jack, and pair off happily, like the lovers in a comedy." At the same time he agrees with Swift that the reason why so many marriages are unhappy is because young ladies spend their "time in making nets and not in making cages."
We have said that the Gentle Man is dull even when he hates. It is true, so far as he has anything to do with expressing his hatred; yet the time for the publication of his dulness is so inaptly—or perhaps we should rather say so aptly—chosen, that the incongruity awakens our sense of the ridiculous, while a certain childlike confidingness with which he credits any statement that makes against the objects of his dislike comes nearer to amusing us than anything else in the book. America is his bête noir. It points the moral of every sad tale. "Vulgarity, hoydenishness, coarseness, and the contempt which accompanies these qualities, are the effects of bad manner and manners. It may pervade a whole nation, as it has done the Americans." What the particular "it" is which pervades us, we cannot, and the Gentle Man, also, "true to himself," cannot say; but there it is. A nation is exhorted to politeness; for, "sitting with their legs over the chair-back of another, carrying bowie-knives, cutting the furniture, and spitting in a circle around them, are not only national faults, but absolutely sins amongst Americans." Call a spade a spade, and speak not as in "America, where they talk of the 'stands' of the tables, not daring to say 'legs'; and a young lady will be highly offended, if you dare to ask her to take a leg of a fowl or a breast of a turkey. There the latter is called 'bosom'; and a mock modesty, which to us seems highly improper, has altered some round dozen of good, sound English words, which our best and purest girls use without so much as thinking upon them." Avoid exaggeration, for in America "it produces a general decay of truth and a boastful habit of exaggeration, for which the nation has grown famous, and at which its best friends are truly grieved." (Oh!) ... "They have asserted so long that they are the finest and best nation in the world, and they have come out so poorly under trial, that, what with a remembrance of the old story and the presence of the new, the English thinker is completely puzzled.... So general was the falsification, that the best men in the Northern States no longer credited a Government despatch or a general's 'order';... and the sad state into which the great nation has fallen has arisen from the spread of that vile disease, a love of exaggeration." His profound political penetration is evinced by the sagacious remark, that "America, the disciple of Lafayette (!) and French doctrines, determined to propagate liberty by enslaving six millions of brothers." His opinion of the character and career of our late beloved President—a name almost too pure and now too sacred to be mentioned here—is for once succinctly given,—"A cunning attorney sits upon a chair he cannot fill, and is leading a party and country to destruction." "With all his undoubted conceit and endurance, with his keenness for praise and for being talked about, we doubt whether there are many more miserable men in the world than President Abraham Lincoln. The bitter, bitter tears which Louis XVI. ... shed because of his own unfitness have been chronicled; but he, knowing his incompetence, was born to the estate of king; the American President wriggled himself forward into notoriety." "To an American, all the world seemed bound up in his Boston or Philadelphia.... He could whip John Bull, and John Bull could whip all the world. As, since that, he has been 'whipped into a cocked hat' by his own relations, we hope some of the conceit has been taken out of him." Yes, unhappy that we are, the secret is at last revealed. We carry bowie-knives in our breast-pockets (venturing to discard for once, under the protection of our Transatlantic Mentor, the usual term of bosom-pocket). We dine off the stands of fowl. We have come out poorly under trial, our finances are deranged, our country bankrupt, our confidence in Government lost, and we have no loyalty, because there is nothing to be loyal to. We are tossing on a sea of anarchy, we are rushing on to ruin, we have been braggart in peace and cowardly in war, and are at this moment whipped by our own relations into such a cocked hat as was never before seen. We do not credit the order to stop recruiting, and we have no belief in the evacuation of Richmond. We are confident that Sherman is gasping in the last ditch, that Jefferson Davis is dictator at Washington, and that General Grant is flying in his wife's gown before the victorious legions of Lee.
In his preface, the writer of this book repels the charge of being like Thackeray and Dickens. We can assure him, that, with an American public, he may spare himself that trouble. He is not in the smallest danger of being mistaken for either of those eminent writers. He is so entirely unlike them that we do not for a moment suspect him of having attempted to imitate them. We do not even reckon him their disciple, nor Bacon's, nor Montaigne's, nor Steele's, nor any other's whose plan he professes himself to have adopted; for a disciple is a learner, which the Gentle Man seems never capable of becoming. Good and bad alike, he is a feeble and confused echo of all men's notions, but the steadfast adherent of none. The snob's soul within him bows down to the authority of great men, yet he produces their great thoughts in disjointed and distorted shape. He does not scruple to sneer where sneers are safe, blind to the glaring fact that sneers are never safe for him. Bold behind his Tory bulwarks, he warns boys against adopting Mr. Bright's opinions, and so becoming "selfish, calculating, cold; as careless of true nobility of purpose and of soul and as worshipful of material success as Mr. Bright himself;" and he has his little fling at Tupper, in common with many another literary drummer-boy who would earn a cheap reputation for valor by attacking what his superiors have already demolished. We should scorn to parry the puny thrust of this Liliputian at the noble name which America delights to honor, or to repel the charge of coldness against that great heart whose burst of anguish over the grave of his friend, and our friend, and humanity's, awoke an answering sob in a thousand homes of this Western World; but we beg to assure this fine old English Gentle Man and scholar, that, reading these essays, we are ready to pronounce Mr. Tupper a master of style and his philosophy a striking and valuable treatise.
We really beg pardon of our readers for covering so much space with this flummery. We intended to despatch it with a thrust or two; but when our pen was once caught in the flimsy stuff, it was difficult to withdraw it again without bringing away considerable portions of the tangle. Moreover, a book of so much pretension is not to be as lightly passed by as its humbler brethren. A book that comes to us in fair type and fine paper, bearing the imprint of a well-known and highly respected publishing house,—a book that invokes the first names in literature and meddles with the higher laws of life, that takes on the airs of a censor and pushes forward into the guild of genius, that by the assumption of its tone and the broadcast scatteration—depend upon it, that is the word—of its odds and ends of learning, or by what hocus-pocus we know not, has attained to a third edition in a country proud of the accuracy and elegance of its scholarship, and that now brings its brazen face to our doors, seeking a welcome at the hearthstones which it has insulted, is not to be dismissed with a simple "Not at home." We have chosen rather to pillory the pretender, pelting him only with such missiles as his own pockets furnished. We now discharge him from custody, bidding him and all his kind bear in mind the assurance, that, while for English genius, English wisdom, English truth, and English love, we have only admiration and gratitude, the time has gone by for English charlatanry to expect from our hands anything but the scourging it deserves.