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The Galaxy, April, 1877

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Title: The Galaxy, April, 1877

Author: Various


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GALAXY, APRIL, 1877 ***




Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier and the Online
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THE GALAXY.

VOL. XXIII.--APRIL, 1877.--No. 4.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1877, by SHELDON &
CO., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.




THE THÉÂTRE FRANÇAIS.

M. Francisque Sarcey, the dramatic critic of the Paris "Temps," and the
gentleman who, of the whole journalistic fraternity, holds the fortune
of a play in the hollow of his hand, has been publishing during the
last year a series of biographical notices of the chief actors and
actresses of the first theatre in the world. "Comédiens et Comédiennes:
la Comédie Française"--such is the title of this publication, which
appears in monthly numbers of the Librairie des Bibliophiles, and is
ornamented on each occasion with a very prettily etched portrait, by M.
Gaucherel, of the artist to whom the number is devoted. By lovers of
the stage in general, and of the Théâtre Français in particular, the
series will be found most interesting; and I welcome the pretext for
saying a few words about an institution which--if such language be not
hyperbolical--I passionately admire. I must add that the portrait is
incomplete, though for the present occasion it is more than sufficient.
The list of M. Sarcey's biographies is not yet filled up; three or
four, those of Mme. Favart and of MM. Fèbvre and Delaunay, are still
wanting. Nine numbers, however, have appeared--the first being entitled
"La Maison de Molière," and devoted to a general account of the great
theatre; and the others treating of its principal _sociétaires_ and
_pensionnaires_ in the following order:

    Regnier,
    Got,
    Sophie Croizette,
    Sarah Bernhardt,
    Coquelin,
    Madeleine Brohan,
    Bressant,
    Mme. Plessy.

(This order, by the way, is purely accidental; it is not that of age or
of merit.) It is always entertaining to encounter M. Francisque Sarcey,
and the reader who, during a Paris winter, has been in the habit, of a
Sunday evening, of unfolding his "Temps" immediately after unfolding
his napkin, and glancing down first of all to see what this sturdy
_feuilletoniste_ has found to his hand--such a reader will find him in
great force in the pages before us. It is true that, though I myself
confess to being such a reader, there are moments when I grow rather
weary of M. Sarcey, who has in an eminent degree both the virtues and
the defects which attach to the great French characteristic--the habit
of taking terribly _au sérieux_ anything that you may set about doing.
Of this habit of abounding in one's own cause, of expatiating,
elaborating, reiterating, refining, as if for the hour the fate of
mankind were bound up with one's particular topic, M. Sarcey is a
capital and at times an almost comical representative. He talks about
the theatre once a week as if--honestly, between himself and his
reader--the theatre were the only thing in this frivolous world that
is worth seriously talking about. He has a religious respect for his
theme, and he holds that if a thing is to be done at all, it must be
done in detail as well as in the gross.

It is to this serious way of taking the matter, to his thoroughly
businesslike and professional attitude, to his unwearying attention to
detail, that the critic of the "Temps" owes his enviable influence and
the weight of his words. Add to this that he is sternly incorruptible.
He has his admirations, but they are honest and discriminating; and
whom he loveth he very often chasteneth. He is not ashamed to commend
Mlle. X., who has only had a curtsey to make, if her curtsey has been
_the_ curtsey of the situation; and he is not afraid to overhaul M. A.,
who has delivered the _tirade_ of the play, if M. A. has failed to hit
the mark. Of course his judgment is good; when I have had occasion to
measure it, I have usually found it excellent. He has the scenic
sense--the theatrical eye. He knows at a glance what will do, and what
won't do. He is shrewd and sagacious and almost tiresomely in earnest,
but this closes the list of his attractions. He is not witty--to speak
of; and he is not graceful; he is heavy and common, and above all what
is familiarly called "shoppy." He leans his elbows on his desk, and
does up his weekly budget into a parcel the reverse of coquettish. You
can fancy him a grocer retailing tapioca and hominy--full weight for
the price; his style seems a sort of integument of brown paper. But the
fact remains that if M. Sarcey praises a play, the play has a run; and
that if M. Sarcey says it won't do, it does not do at all. If M. Sarcey
devotes an encouraging line and a half to a young actress, mademoiselle
is immediately _lancée_; she has a career. If he bestows a quiet
"bravo" on an obscure comedian, the gentleman may forthwith renew his
engagement. When you make and unmake fortunes at this rate, what
matters it whether you have a little elegance the more or the less?

Elegance is for M. Paul de St. Victor, who does the theatres in the
"Moniteur," and who, though he writes a style only a trifle less
pictorial than that of Théophile Gautier himself, has never, to the
best of my belief, brought clouds or sunshine to any playhouse. I may
add, to finish with M. Sarcey, that he contributes a daily political
article--generally devoted to watching and showing up the "game" of the
clerical party--to Edmond About's journal, the "XIXième Siècle"; that
he gives a weekly _conférence_ on current literature; that he "confers"
also on those excellent Sunday morning performances now so common in
the French theatres, during which examples of the classic repertory
are presented, accompanied by a light lecture upon the history and
character of the play. As the commentator on these occasions M. Sarcey
is in great demand, and he officiates sometimes in small provincial
towns. Lastly, frequent playgoers in Paris observe that the very
slenderest novelty is sufficient to insure at a theatre the (very
considerable) physical presence of the conscientious critic of the
"Temps." If he were remarkable for nothing else, he would be remarkable
for the fortitude with which he exposes himself to the pestiferous
climate of the Parisian temples of the drama.

For these agreeable "notices" M. Sarcey appears to have mended his pen
and to have given a fillip to his fancy. They are gracefully and often
lightly turned; occasionally, even, the author grazes the epigrammatic.
They deal, as is proper, with the artistic and not with the private
physiognomy of the ladies and gentlemen whom they commemorate; and
though they occasionally allude to what the French call "intimate"
matters, they contain no satisfaction for the lovers of scandal. The
Théâtre Français, in the face it presents to the world, is an austere
and venerable establishment, and a frivolous tone about its affairs
would be almost as much out of keeping as if applied to the Académie
herself. M. Sarcey touches upon the organization of the theatre, and
gives some account of the different phases through which it has passed
during these latter years. Its chief functionary is a general
administrator, or director, appointed by the State, which enjoys this
right in virtue of the considerable subsidy which it pays to the house;
a subsidy amounting, if I am not mistaken (M. Sarcey does not mention
the sum), to 250,000 francs. The director, however, is not an absolute,
but a constitutional ruler; for he shares his powers with the society
itself, which has always had a large deliberative voice.

Whence, it may be asked, does the society derive its light and its
inspiration? From the past, from precedent, from tradition--from the
great unwritten body of laws which no one has in his keeping, but many
in their memory, and all in their respect. The principles on which the
Théâtre Français rests are a good deal like the common law of
England--a vaguely and inconveniently registered mass of regulations
which time and occasion have welded together, and from which the
recurring occasion can usually manage to extract the rightful
precedent. Napoleon I., who had a finger in every pie in his dominion,
found time during his brief and disastrous occupation of Moscow to send
down a decree remodelling and regulating the constitution of the
theatre. This document has long been a dead letter, and the society
abides by its older traditions. The _traditions_ of the Comédie
Française--that is the sovereign word, and that is the charm of the
place--the charm that one never ceases to feel, however often one may
sit beneath the classic, dusky dome. One feels this charm with peculiar
intensity as a newly arrived foreigner. The Théâtre Français has had
the good fortune to be able to allow its traditions to accumulate. They
have been preserved, transmitted, respected, cherished, until at last
they form the very atmosphere, the vital air, of the establishment. A
stranger feels their superior influence the first time he sees the
great curtain go up; he feels that he is in a theatre which is not as
other theatres are. It is not only better, it is different. It has a
peculiar perfection--something consecrated, historical, academic. This
impression is delicious, and he watches the performance in a sort of
tranquil ecstasy.

Never has he seen anything so smooth, and harmonious, so artistic and
complete. He heard all his life of attention to detail, and now, for
the first time, he sees something that deserves the name. He sees
dramatic effort refined to a point with which the English stage is
unacquainted. He sees that there are no limits to possible "finish,"
and that so trivial an act as taking a letter from a servant or
placing one's hat on a chair may be made a suggestive and interesting
incident. He sees these things and a great many more besides, but at
first he does not analyze them; he gives himself up to sympathetic
contemplation. He is in an ideal and exemplary world--a world that has
managed to attain all the felicities that the world we live in misses.
The people do the things that we should like to do; they are gifted
as we should like to be; they have mastered the accomplishments that
we have had to give up. The women are not all beautiful--decidedly
not, indeed--but they are graceful, agreeable, sympathetic, ladylike;
they have the best manners possible, and they are delightfully well
dressed. They have charming musical voices, and they speak with
irreproachable purity and sweetness; they walk with the most elegant
grace, and when they sit it is a pleasure to see their attitudes. They
go out and come in, they pass across the stage, they talk, and laugh,
and cry, they deliver long _tirades_ or remain statuesquely mute; they
are tender or tragic, they are comic or conventional; and through it
all you never observe an awkwardness, a roughness, an accident, a
crude spot, a false note.

As for the men, they are not handsome either; it must be confessed,
indeed, that at the present hour manly beauty is but scantily
represented at the Théâtre Français. Bressant, I believe, used to be
thought handsome; but Bressant has retired, and among the gentlemen of
the troupe I can think of no one but M. Mounet-Sully who may be
positively commended for his fine person. But M. Mounet-Sully is, from
the scenic point of view, an Adonis of the first magnitude. To be
handsome, however, is for an actor one of the last necessities; and
these gentlemen are mostly handsome enough. They look perfectly what
they are intended to look, and in cases where it is proposed that they
shall _seem_ handsome, they usually succeed. They are as well mannered
and as well dressed as their fairer comrades, and their voices are no
less agreeable and effective. They represent gentlemen, and they
produce the illusion. In this endeavor they deserve even greater credit
than the actresses, for in modern comedy, of which the repertory of the
Théâtre Français is largely composed, they have nothing in the way of
costume to help to carry it off. Half a dozen ugly men, in the periodic
coat and trousers and stove-pipe hat, with blue chins and false
moustaches, strutting before the footlights, and pretending to be
interesting, romantic, pathetic, heroic, certainly play a perilous
game. At every turn they suggest prosaic things, and their liabilities
to awkwardness are increased a thousand fold. But the comedians of the
Théâtre Français are never awkward, and when it is necessary they solve
triumphantly the problem of being at once realistic to the eye and
romantic to the imagination.

I am speaking always of one's first impression of them. There are spots
on the sun, and you discover after a while that there are little
irregularities at the Théâtre Français. But the acting is so
incomparably better than any that you have seen, that criticism for a
long time is content to lie dormant. I shall never forget how at first
I was under the charm. I liked the very incommodities of the place; I
am not sure that I did not find a certain mystic salubrity in the bad
ventilation. The Théâtre Français, it is known, gives you a good deal
for your money. The performance, which rarely ends before midnight, and
sometimes transgresses it, frequently begins by seven o'clock. The
first hour or two is occupied by secondary performers; but not for the
world at this time would I have missed the first rising of the curtain.
No dinner could be too hastily swallowed to enable me to see, for
instance, Mme. Nathalie in Octave Feuillet's charming little comedy of
"Le Village." Mme. Nathalie was a plain, stout old woman, who did the
mothers, and aunts, and elderly wives; I use the past tense because she
retired from the stage a year ago, leaving a most conspicuous vacancy.
She was an admirable actress, and a perfect mistress of laughter and
tears. In "Le Village" she played an old provincial _bourgeoise_ whose
husband takes it into his head, one winter night, to start on the tour
of Europe with a roving bachelor friend, who has dropped down on him at
supper-time, after the lapse of years, and has gossiped him into
momentary discontent with his fireside existence. My pleasure was in
Mme. Nathalie's figure when she came in dressed to go out to vespers
across the _place_. The two foolish old cronies are over their wine,
talking of the beauty of the women on the Ionian coast; you hear the
church bell in the distance. It was the quiet felicity of the old
lady's dress that used to charm me; the Comédie Française was in every
fold of it. She wore a large black silk mantilla, of a peculiar cut,
which looked as if she had just taken it tenderly out of some old
wardrobe where it lay folded in lavender, and a large dark bonnet,
adorned with handsome black silk loops and bows. Her big pale face had
a softly frightened look, and in her hand she carried her neatly kept
breviary. The extreme suggestiveness, and yet the taste and temperance
of this costume, seemed to me inimitable; the bonnet alone, with its
handsome, decent, virtuous bows, was worth coming to see. It expressed
all the rest, and you saw the excellent, pious woman go pick her steps
churchward among the puddles, while Jeannette, the cook, in a high
white cap, marched before her in sabots, with a lantern.

Such matters are trifles, but they are representative trifles, and they
are not the only ones that I remember. It used to please me, when I had
squeezed into my stall--the stalls at the Français are extremely
uncomfortable--to remember of how great a history the large, dim
_salle_ around me could boast: how many great things had happened
there; how the air was thick with associations. Even if I had never
seen Rachel, it was something of a consolation to think that those very
footlights had illumined her finest moments, and that the echoes of her
mighty voice were sleeping in that dingy dome. From this to musing upon
the "traditions" of the place, of which I spoke just now, was of course
but a step. How were they kept? by whom, and where? Who trims the
undying lamp and guards the accumulated treasure? I never found out--by
sitting in the stalls; and very soon I ceased to care to know. One may
be very fond of the stage, and yet care little for the green room; just
as one may be very fond of pictures and books, and yet be no frequenter
of studios and authors' dens. They might pass on the torch as they
would behind the scenes; so long as, during my time, they didn't let it
drop, I made up my mind to be satisfied. And that one could depend upon
their not letting it drop became a part of the customary comfort of
Parisian life. It became certain that the "traditions" were not mere
catchwords, but a most beneficent reality.

Going to the other Parisian theatres helps you to believe in them.
Unless you are a voracious theatre-goer you give the others up; you
find they don't pay; the Français does for you all that they do and so
much more besides. There are two possible exceptions--the Gymnase and
the Palais Royal, The Gymnase, since the death of Mlle. Desclée, has
been under a heavy cloud; but occasionally, when a month's sunshine
rests upon it, there is a savor of excellence in the performance. But
you feel that you are still within the realm of accident; the
delightful security of the Rue de Richelieu is wanting. The young lover
is liable to be common, and the beautifully dressed heroine to have an
unpleasant voice. The Palais Royal has always been in its way very
perfect; but its way admits of great imperfection. The actresses are
classically bad, though usually pretty, and the actors are much
addicted to taking liberties. In broad comedy, nevertheless, two or
three of the latter are not to be surpassed, and (counting out the
women) there is usually something masterly in a Palais Royal
performance. In its own line it has what is called style, and it
therefore walks, at a distance, in the footsteps of the Français. The
Odéon has never seemed to me in any degree a rival of the Théâtre
Français, though it is a smaller copy of that establishment. It
receives a subsidy from the State, and is obliged by its contract to
play the classic repertory one night in the week. It is on these
nights, listening to Molière or Marivaux, that you may best measure the
superiority of the greater theatre. I have seen actors at the Odéon, in
the classic repertory, imperfect in their texts; a monstrously
insupposable case at the Comédie Française. The function of the Odéon
is to operate as a _pépinière_ or nursery for its elder--to try young
talents, shape them, make them flexible, and then hand them over to the
upper house. The more especial nursery of the Français, however, is the
Conservatoire Dramatique, an institution dependent upon the State,
through the Ministry of the Fine Arts, whose budget is charged with
the remuneration of its professors. Pupils graduating from the
Conservatoire with a prize have _ipso facto_ the right to _débuter_ at
the Théâtre Français, which retains them or lets them go, according to
its discretion. Most of the first subjects of the Français have done
their two years' work at the Conservatoire, and M. Sarcey holds that an
actor who has not had that fundamental training which is only to be
acquired there, never obtains a complete mastery of his resources.
Nevertheless some of the best actors of the day have owed nothing to
the Conservatoire--Bressant, for instance, and Aimée Desclée, the
latter of whom, indeed, never arrived at the Français. (Molière and
Balzac were not of the Academy, and so Mlle. Desclée, the first actress
after Rachel, died without acquiring the privilege which M. Sarcey says
is the day-dream of all young theatrical women--that of printing on
their visiting cards, after their name, _de la Comédie Française_.)

The Théâtre Français has, moreover, the right to do as Molière did--to
claim its property wherever it finds it. It may stretch out its long
arm and break the engagement of a promising actor at any of the other
theatres; of course after a certain amount of notice given. So, last
winter, it notified to the Gymnase its danger of appropriating Worms,
the admirable _jeune premier_, who, returning from a long sojourn
in Russia, and taking the town by surprise, had begun to retrieve the
shrunken fortunes of that establishment.

On the whole, it may be said that the great talents find their way,
sooner or later, to the Théâtre Français. This is of course not a rule
that works unvaryingly, for there are a great many influences to
interfere with it. Interest as well as merit--especially in the case of
the actresses--weighs in the scale; and the ire that may exist in
celestial minds has been known to manifest itself in the councils of
the Comédie. Moreover, a brilliant actress may prefer to reign supreme
at one of the smaller theatres; at the Français, inevitably, she shares
her dominion. The honor is less, but the comfort is greater.

Nevertheless, at the Français, in a general way, there is in each case
a tolerably obvious artistic reason for membership; and if you see a
clever actor remain outside for years, you may be pretty sure that,
though private reasons count, there are artistic reasons as well. The
first half dozen times I saw Mlle. Fargueil, who for years ruled the
roost, as the vulgar saying is, at the Vaudeville, I wondered that so
consummate and accomplished an actress should not have a place on the
first French stage. But I presently grew wiser, and perceived that,
clever as Mlle. Fargueil is, she is not for the Rue de Richelieu, but
for the Boulevards; her peculiar, intensely Parisian intonation would
sound out of place in the Maison de Molière. (Of course if Mlle.
Fargueil has ever received overtures from the Français, my sagacity is
at fault--I am looking through a millstone. But I suspect she has not.)
Frédéric Lemaître, who died last winter, and who was a very great
actor, had been tried at the Français and found wanting--for those
particular conditions. But it may probably be said that if Frédéric was
wanting, the theatre was too, in this case. Frédéric's great force was
his extravagance, his fantasticality; and the stage of the Rue de
Richelieu was a trifle too academic. I have even wondered whether
Desclée, if she had lived, would have trod that stage by right, and
whether it would have seemed her proper element. The negative is not
impossible. It is very possible that in that classic atmosphere her
great charm--her intensely _modern_ quality, her supersubtle
realism--would have appeared an anomaly. I can imagine even that her
strange, touching, nervous voice would not have seemed the voice of the
house. At the Français you must know how to acquit yourself of a
_tirade_; that has always been the touchstone of capacity. It would
probably have proved Desclée's stumbling-block, though she could utter
speeches of six words as no one else surely has ever done. It is true
that Mlle. Croizette, and in a certain sense Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, are
rather weak at their _tirades_; but then old theatre-goers will tell
you that these young ladies, in spite of a hundred attractions, have no
business at the Français.

In the course of time the susceptible foreigner passes from that
superstitious state of attention which I just now sketched to that
greater enlightenment which enables him to understand such a judgment
as this of the old theatre-goers. It is borne in upon him that, as the
good Homer sometimes nods, the Théâtre Français sometimes lapses from
its high standard. He makes various reflections. He thinks that Mlle.
Favart rants. He thinks M. Mounet-Sully, in spite of his delicious
voice, insupportable. He thinks that M. Parodi's five-act tragedy,
"Rome Vaincue," presented in the early part of the present winter, was
better done certainly than it would have been done upon any English
stage, but by no means so much better done than might have been
expected. (Here, if I had space, I would open a long parenthesis, in
which I should aspire to demonstrate that the incontestable superiority
of average French acting to English is by no means so strongly marked
in tragedy as in comedy--is indeed sometimes not strongly marked at
all. The reason of this is in a great measure, I think, that we have
had Shakespeare to exercise ourselves upon, and that an inferior
dramatic instinct exercised upon Shakespeare may become more flexible
than a superior one exercised upon Corneille and Racine. When it comes
to ranting--ranting even in a modified and comparatively reasonable
sense--we do, I suspect, quite as well as the French, if not rather
better.) Mr. G. H. Lewes, in his entertaining little book upon "Actors
and the Art of Acting," mentions M. Talbot, of the Français, as a
surprisingly incompetent performer. My memory assents to his judgment
at the same time that it proposes an amendment. This actor's special
line is the buffeted, bemuddled, besotted old fathers, uncles, and
guardians of classic comedy, and he plays them with his face much more
than with his tongue. Nature has endowed him with a visage so admirably
adapted, once for all, to his rôle, that he has only to sit in a chair,
with his hands folded on his stomach, to look like a monument to
bewildered senility. After that it doesn't matter what he says or how
he says it.

The Comédie Française sometimes does weaker things than in keeping M.
Talbot. Last autumn, for instance, it was really depressing to see
Mlle. Dudley brought all the way from Brussels (and with not a little
flourish either) to "create" the guilty vestal in "Rome Vaincue." As
far as the interests of art are concerned, Mlle. Dudley had much better
have remained in the Flemish capital, of whose language she is
apparently a perfect mistress. It is hard, too, to forgive M. Perrin
(M. Perrin is the present director of the Théâtre Français) for
bringing out "L'Ami Fritz" of M. Erckmann-Chatrian. The two gentlemen
who write under this name have a double claim to kindness. In the first
place, they have produced some delightful little novels; every one
knows and admires "Le Conscrit de 1813"; every one admires, indeed, the
charming tale on which the play in question is founded. In the second
place, they were, before the production of their piece, the objects of
a scurrilous attack by the "Figaro" newspaper, which held the authors
up to reprobation for having "insulted the army," and did its best to
lay the train for a hostile manifestation on the first night. (It may
be added that the good sense of the public outbalanced the impudence of
the newspaper, and the play was simply advertised into success.) But
neither the novels nor the persecutions of M. Erckmann-Chatrian avail
to render "L'Ami Fritz," in its would-be dramatic form, worthy of the
first French stage. It is played as well as possible, and upholstered
even better; but it is, according to the vulgar phrase, too "thin" for
the locality. Upholstery has never played such a part at the Théâtre
Français as during the reign of M. Perrin, who came into power, if I
mistake not, after the late war. He proved very early that he was a
radical, and he has introduced a hundred novelties. His administration,
however, has been brilliant, and in his hands the Théâtre Français has
made money. This it had rarely done before, and this, in the
conservative view, is quite beneath its dignity. To the conservative
view I should humbly incline. An institution so closely protected by a
rich and powerful State ought to be able to cultivate art for art.

The first of M. Sarcey's biographies, to which I have been too long in
coming, is devoted to Regnier, a veteran actor, who left the stage four
or five years since, and who now fills the office of oracle to his
younger comrades. It is the indispensable thing, says M. Sarcey, for
a young aspirant to be able to say that he has had lessons of M.
Regnier, or that M. Regnier has advised him, or that he has talked
such and such a point over with M. Regnier. (His comrades always speak
of him as M. Regnier--never as simple Regnier.) I have had the fortune
to see him but once; it was the first time I ever went to the Théâtre
Français. He played Don Annibal in Emile Augier's romantic comedy of
"L'Aventurière," and I have not forgotten the exquisite humor of the
performance. The part is that of a sort of seventeenth century Captain
Costigan, only the Miss Fotheringay in the case is the gentleman's
sister, and not his daughter. This lady is moreover an ambitious and
designing person, who leads her threadbare braggart of a brother quite
by the nose. She has entrapped a worthy gentleman of Padua, of mature
years, and he is on the eve of making her his wife, when his son, a
clever young soldier, beguiles Don Annibal into supping with him, and
makes him drink so deep that the prating adventurer at last lets the
cat out of the bag, and confides to his companion that the fair
Clorinda is not the virtuous gentlewoman she appears, but a poor
strolling actress who has had a lover at every stage of her journey.
The scene was played by Bressant and Regnier, and it has always
remained in my mind as one of the most perfect things I have seen on
the stage. The gradual action of the wine upon Don Annibal, the
delicacy with which his deepening tipsiness was indicated, its
intellectual rather than physical manifestation, and, in the midst of
it, the fantastic conceit which made him think that he was winding his
fellow drinker round his fingers--all this was exquisitely rendered.
Drunkenness on the stage is usually both dreary and disgusting; and I
can remember besides this but two really interesting pictures of
intoxication (excepting always, indeed, the immortal tipsiness of
Cassio in "Othello," which a clever actor can always make touching).
One is the beautiful befuddlement of Rip Van Winkle, as Mr. Joseph
Jefferson renders it, and the other (a memory of the Théâtre Français)
the scene in the "Duc Job," in which Got succumbs to mild inebriation,
and dozes in his chair just boosily enough for the young girl who loves
him to make it out.

It is to this admirable Emile Got that M. Sarcey's second notice is
devoted. Got is at the present hour unquestionably the first actor at
the Théâtre Français, and I have personally no hesitation in accepting
him as the first of living actors. His younger comrade, Coquelin, has,
I think, as much talent and as much art; but the older man Got has the
longer and fuller record, and may therefore be spoken of as the master
_par excellence_. If I were obliged to rank the half dozen _premiers
sujets_ of the last few years at the Théâtre Français in their absolute
order of _talent_ (thank Heaven, I am not so obliged!), I think I
should make up some such little list as this: Got, Coquelin, Mme.
Plessy, Sarah Bernhardt, Mlle. Favart, Delaunay. I confess that I have
no sooner written it than I feel as if I ought to amend it, and wonder
whether it is not a great folly to put Delaunay after Mlle. Favart. But
this is idle.

As for Got, he is a singularly interesting actor. I have often wondered
whether the best definition of him would not be to say that he is
really a _philosophic_ actor. He is an immense humorist, and his
comicality is sometimes colossal; but his most striking quality is the
one on which M. Sarcey dwells--his sobriety and profundity, his
underlying element of manliness and melancholy, the impression he gives
you of having a general conception of human life and of seeing the
relativity, as one may say, of the character he represents. Of all the
comic actors I have seen he is the least trivial--at the same time that
for richness of detail his comicality is unsurpassed. His repertory is
very large and various, but it may be divided into two equal
halves--the parts that belong to reality and the parts that belong to
fantasy. There is of course a vast deal of fantasy in his realistic
parts and a vast deal of reality in his fantastic ones, but the general
division is just; and at times, indeed, the two faces of his talent
seem to have little in common. The Duc Job, to which I just now
alluded, is one of the things he does most perfectly. The part, which
is that of a young man, is a serious and tender one. It is amazing that
the actor who plays it should also be able to carry off triumphantly
the frantic buffoonery of Maître Pathelin, or should represent the
Sganarelle of the "Médecin Malgré Lui" with such an unctuous breadth of
humor. The two characters, perhaps, which have given me the liveliest
idea of Got's power and fertility are the Maître Pathelin and the M.
Poirier, who figures in the title to the comedy which Emile Augier and
Jules Sandeau wrote together. M. Poirier, the retired shop-keeper who
marries his daughter to a marquis and makes acquaintance with the
incommodities incidental to such a piece of luck, is perhaps the
actor's most elaborate creation; it is difficult to see how the
portrayal of a type and an individual can have a larger sweep and a
more minute completeness. The _bonhomme_ Poirier, in Got's hands,
is really great; and half a dozen of the actor's modern parts that I
could mention are hardly less brilliant. But when I think of him I
instinctively think first of some rôle in which he wears the cap and
gown of the days in which humorous invention may fairly take the bit in
its teeth. This is what Got lets it do in Maître Pathelin, and he leads
the spectators' exhilarated fancy a dance to which their aching sides
on the morrow sufficiently testify.

The piece is a _réchauffé_ of a mediæval farce, which has the credit of
being the first play not a "mystery" or a miracle piece in the records
of the French drama. The plot is of the baldest and most primitive. It
sets forth how a cunning lawyer undertook to purchase a dozen ells of
cloth for nothing. In the first scene we see him in the market-place,
bargaining and haggling with the draper, and then marching off with the
roll of cloth, with the understanding that the shop-man is to call at
his house in the course of an hour for the money. In the next act we
have Maître Pathelin at his fireside with his wife, to whom he relates
his trick and its projected sequel, and who greets them with Homeric
laughter. He gets into bed, and the innocent draper arrives. Then
follows a scene of which the liveliest description must be ineffective.
Pathelin pretends to be out of his head, to be overtaken by a
mysterious malady which has made him delirious, not to know the draper
from Adam, never to have heard of the dozen ells of cloth, and to be
altogether an impossible person to collect a debt from. To carry out
this character he indulges in a series of indescribable antics,
out-Bedlams Bedlam, frolics over the room dressed out in the
bed-clothes and chanting the wildest gibberish, bewilders the poor
draper to within an inch of his own sanity, and finally puts him
utterly to rout. The spectacle could only be portentously flat or
heroically successful, and in Got's hands this latter was its fortune.
His Sganarelle, in the "Médecin Malgré Lui," and half a dozen of his
characters from Molière besides--such a part, too, as his Tibia, in
Alfred de Musset's charming bit of romanticism, the "Caprices de
Marianne"--have a certain generic resemblance with his treatment of the
figure I have sketched. In all of these the comicality is of the
exuberant and tremendous order, and yet, in spite of its richness and
flexibility, it suggests little connection with high animal spirits. It
seems a matter of invention, of reflection and irony. You cannot
imagine Got representing a fool pure and simple--or at least a passive
and unsuspecting fool. There must always be an element of shrewdness
and even of contempt; he must be the man who knows and judges--or at
least who pretends. It is a compliment, I take it, to an actor, to say
that he prompts you to wonder about his private personality; and an
observant spectator of M. Got is at liberty to guess that he is both
obstinate and proud.

In Coquelin there is perhaps greater spontaneity, and there is a not
inferior mastery of his art. He is a wonderfully brilliant, elastic
actor. He is but thirty-five years old, and yet his record is most
glorious. He too has his "actual" and his classical repertory, and here
also it is hard to choose. As the young _valet de comédie_ in Molière,
Regnard, and Marivaux, he is incomparable. I shall never forget the
really infernal brilliancy of his Mascarille in "L'Etourdi." His
volubility, his rapidity, his impudence and gayety, his ringing,
penetrating voice, and the shrill trumpet-note of his laughter, make
him the ideal of the classic serving-man of the classic young
lover--half rascal and half good fellow. Coquelin has lately had two or
three immense successes in the comedies of the day. His Duc de
Sept-Monts, in the famous "Etrangère" of Alexandre Dumas, last winter,
was the capital creation of the piece; and in the revival, this winter,
of Augier's "Paul Forestier," his Adolphe de Beaubourg, the young man
about town, consciously tainted with _commonness_, and trying to shake
off the incubus, seemed, while one watched it and listened to it, the
last word of delicately humorous art. Of Coquelin's eminence in the old
comedies M. Sarcey speaks with a certain picturesque force: "No one is
better cut out to represent those bold and magnificent rascals of the
old repertory, with their boisterous gayety, their brilliant fancy, and
their superb extravagance, who give to their buffoonery _je ne sais
quoi d'épique_. In these parts one may say of Coquelin that he is
incomparable. I prefer him to Got in such cases, and even to Regnier,
his master. I never saw Monrose, and cannot speak of him. But good
judges have assured me that there was much that was factitious in the
manner of this eminent comedian, and that his vivacity was a trifle
mechanical. There is nothing whatever of this in Coquelin's manner.
The eye, the nose, and the voice--the voice above all--are his most
powerful means of action. He launches his _tirades_ all in one breath,
with full lungs, without bothering too much over the shading of
details, in large masses, and he possesses himself only the more
strongly of the public, which has a great sense of _ensemble_. The
words that must be detached, the words that must decisively 'tell,'
glitter in this delivery with the sonorous ring of a brand-new louis
d'or. Crispin, Scapin, Figaro, Mascarille have never found a more
valiant and joyous interpreter."

I should say that this was enough about the men at the Théâtre
Français, if I did not remember that I have not spoken of Delaunay. But
Delaunay has plenty of people to speak for him; he has, in especial,
the more eloquent half of humanity--the ladies. I suppose that of all
the actors of the Comédie Français he is the most universally
appreciated and admired; he is the popular favorite. And he has
certainly earned this distinction, for there was never a more amiable
and sympathetic genius. He plays the young lovers of the past and the
present, and he acquits himself of his difficult and delicate task with
extraordinary grace and propriety. The danger I spoke of a while
since--the danger, for the actor of a romantic and sentimental part, of
being compromised by the coat and trousers, the hat and umbrella of the
current year--are reduced by Delaunay to their minimum. He reconciles
in a marvellous fashion the love-sick gallant of the ideal world with
the "gentlemanly man" of to-day; and his passion is as far removed from
rant as his propriety is from stiffness. He has been accused of late
years of falling into a mannerism, and I think there is some truth in
the charge. But the fault in Delaunay's situation is certainly venial.
How can a man of fifty, to whom, as regards face and figure, Nature has
been stingy, play an amorous swain of twenty without taking refuge in a
mannerism? His mannerism is a legitimate device for diverting the
spectator's attention from certain incongruities. Delaunay's
juvenility, his ardor, his passion, his good taste and sense of
fitness, have always an irresistible charm. As he has grown older he
has increased his repertory by parts of greater weight and sobriety--he
has played the husbands as well as the lovers. One of his most recent
and brilliant "creations" of this kind is his Marquis de Presles in "Le
Gendre de M. Poirier"--a piece of acting superb for its lightness and
_désinvolture_. It cannot be better praised than by saying it was
worthy of Got's inimitable rendering of the part opposed to it. But I
think I shall remember Delaunay best in the picturesque and romantic
comedies--as the Duc de Richelieu in "Mlle. De Belle-Isle"; as the
joyous, gallant, exuberant young hero, his plumes and love knots
fluttering in the breath of his gushing improvisation, of Corneille's
"Menteur"; or, most of all, as the melodious swains of those charmingly
poetic, faintly, naturally Shakespearian little comedies of Alfred de
Musset.

To speak of Delaunay ought to bring us properly to Mlle. Favart, who
for so many years invariably represented the object of his tender
invocations. Mlle. Favart at the present time rather lacks what the
French call "actuality." She has made this winter an attempt to recover
something of that large measure of it which she once possessed; but I
doubt whether it has been completely successful. M. Sarcey has not yet
put forth his notice of her; and when he does so it will be interesting
to see how he treats her. She is not one of his high admirations. She
is a great talent which has passed into eclipse. I call her a great
talent, although I remember the words in which M. Sarcey somewhere
speaks of her: "Mlle. Favart, who, to happy natural gifts, _soutenu par
un travail acharné_, owed a distinguished place," etc. Her talent is
great, but the impression that she gives of a _travail acharné_ and of
an insatiable ambition is perhaps even greater. For many years she
reigned supreme, and I believe she is accused of not having always
reigned generously. However that may be, there came a day when Mlles.
Croizette and Sarah Bernhardt passed to the front, and the elder
actress receded, if not into the background, at least into what
painters call the middle distance. The private history of these events
has, I believe, been rich in heart-burnings; but it is only with the
public history that we are concerned. Mlle. Favart has always seemed to
be a powerful rather than an interesting actress; there is usually
something mechanical and overdone in her manner. In some of her parts
there is a kind of audible creaking of the machinery. If Delaunay is
open to the reproach of having let a mannerism get the better of him,
this accusation is much more fatally true of Mlle. Favart. On the other
hand, she knows her trade as no one does--no one, at least, save Mme.
Plessy. When she is bad she is extremely bad, and sometimes she is
interruptedly bad for a whole evening. In the revival of Scribe's
clever comedy of "Une Chaine," this winter (which, by the way, though
the cast included both Got and Coquelin, was the nearest approach to
mediocrity I have ever seen at the Théâtre Français), Mlle. Favart was,
to my sense, startlingly bad. The part had originally been played by
Mme. Plessy; and I remember how M. Sarcey in his _feuilleton_ treated
its actual representative. "Mlle. Favart does Louise. Who does not
recall the exquisite delicacy and temperance with which Mme. Plessy
rendered that difficult scene in the second act?" etc. And nothing
more. When, however, Mlle. Favart is at her best, she is prodigiously
strong. She rises to great occasions. I doubt whether such parts as the
desperate heroine of the "Supplice d'une Femme," or as Julie in Octave
Feuillet's lugubrious drama of that name, could be more effectively
played than she plays them. She can carry a great weight without
flinching; she has what the French call her "authority"; and in
declamation she sometimes unrolls her fine voice, as it were, in long
harmonious waves and cadences, the sustained power of which her younger
rivals must often envy her.

I am drawing to the close of these rather desultory observations
without having spoken of the four ladies commemorated by M. Sarcey in
the publication which lies before me; and I do not know that I can
justify my tardiness otherwise than by saying that writing and reading
about artists of so extreme a personal brilliancy is poor work, and
that the best the critic can do is to wish his reader may see them,
from a quiet _fauteuil_, as speedily and as often as possible. Of
Madeleine Brohan, indeed, there is little to say. She is a delightful
person to listen to, and she is still delightful to look at in spite of
that redundancy of contour which time has contributed to her charm. But
she has never been ambitious, and her talent has had no particularly
original quality. It is a long time since she created an important
part; but in the old repertory her rich, dense voice, her charming
smile, her mellow, tranquil gayety, always give extreme pleasure. To
hear her sit and _talk_, simply, and laugh and play with her fan, along
with Mme. Plessy, in Molière's "Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes," is an
entertainment to be remembered. For Mme. Plessy I should have to mend
my pen and begin a new chapter; and for Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt no less a
ceremony would suffice. I saw Mme. Plessy for the first time in Emile
Augier's "Aventurière," when, as I mentioned, I first saw Regnier. This
is considered by many persons her best part, and she certainly carries
it off with a high hand; but I like her better in characters which
afford more scope to her talents for comedy. These characters are very
numerous, for her activity and versatility have been extraordinary. Her
comedy of course is "high"; it is of the highest conceivable kind, and
she has often been accused of being too mincing and too artificial. I
should never make this charge, for, to me, Mme. Plessy's _minauderies_,
her grand airs and her arch-refinements, have never been anything but
the odorous swayings and queenly tossings of some splendid garden
flower. Never had an actress grander manners. When Mme. Plessy
represents a duchess, you have to make no allowance. Her limitations
are on the side of the pathetic. If she is brilliant, she is cold; and
I cannot imagine her touching the source of tears. But she is in the
highest degree accomplished; she gives an impression of intelligence
and intellect which is produced by none of her companions--excepting
always the extremely exceptional Sarah Bernhardt. Mme. Plessy's
intellect has sometimes misled her--as, for instance, when it whispered
to her, a few years since, that she could play Agrippine in Racine's
"Britannicus," when that tragedy was presented for the _débuts_ of
Mounet-Sully. I was verdant enough to think her Agrippine very fine;
but M. Sarcey reminds his readers of what he said of it the Monday
after the first performance. "I will not say"--he quotes himself--"that
Mme. Plessy is indifferent. With her intelligence, her natural gifts,
her great situation, her immense authority over the public, one cannot
be indifferent in anything. She is therefore not indifferently bad. She
is bad to a point which cannot be expressed, and which would be
afflicting for dramatic art if it were not that in this great shipwreck
there rise to the surface a few floating fragments of the finest
qualities that nature has ever bestowed upon an artist."

Mme. Plessy retired from the stage six months ago, and it may be said
that the void produced by this event is irreparable. There is not only
no prospect, but there is no hope of filling it up. The present
conditions of artistic production are directly hostile to the formation
of actresses as consummate and as complete as Mme. Plessy. One may not
expect to see her like, any more than one may expect to see a new
manufacture of old lace and old brocade. She carried off with her
something that the younger generation of actresses will consistently
lack--a certain largeness of style and robustness of art. (These
qualities are in a modified degree those of Mlle. Favart.) But if the
younger actresses have the success of Mlles. Croizette and Sarah
Bernhardt, will they greatly care whether they are not "robust"? These
young ladies are children of a later and eminently contemporary type,
according to which an actress undertakes not to interest, but to
fascinate. They are charming--"awfully" charming; strange, eccentric,
and imaginative. It would be needless to speak specifically of Mlle.
Croizette; for although she has very great attractions, I think she may
(by the cold impartiality of science) be classified as a secondary, a
less inspired, and (to use the great word of the day) a more "brutal"
Sarah Bernhardt. (Mlle. Croizette's "brutality" is her great card.) As
for Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt, she is simply, at present, in Paris, one of
the great figures of the day. It is hard to imagine a more brilliant
embodiment of feminine success. It is hard to imagine a young woman
leading a more complete and multifold existence. The intellectual
fermentation of a productive, creative (and most ambitious) artist, the
splendors of a princess, the glories of a celebrity, and various other
matters besides--these are a sufficiently interesting combination. But
as an artist, as I have said, Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt would almost
deserve a chapter for herself.

HENRY JAMES, JR.




MISS MISANTHROPE.

BY JUSTIN MCCARTHY.




CHAPTER VII.

ON THE BRIDGE.


There was one walk of which Minola Grey was especially fond, and which
she loved to enjoy alone. It led by a particular track through Regent's
Park, avoiding for the most part the frequented paths, and bringing her
at one time to the summit of a little mound or knoll, from which she
could look across broad fields where sheep were grazing, and through
clumps of trees and over hedges, and from which, by a happy
peculiarity, all sight of the beaten and dusty avenues of the park was
shut out. The view from this little eminence was perhaps most beautiful
on a moist and misty day. There the soft, loving, artistic breath of
the rain-charged clouds breathed tenderly on the landscape, and effaced
any of the harsher, or meaner, or in any way more prosaic details.
There the gazer only saw a noble expanse of delicious green grass and
darker hedgerows, and trees of dun and gray, and softly-mottled
moss-grown trunks, and here and there a bed of flowers, and all under a
silver-gray atmosphere that almost seemed to dissolve while the eye
rested on it. When Minola had looked long enough on the scene opening
below the mound, she then usually pursued her course by devious ways
until she reached one of the bridges of the canal, and there she made
another halting place. The scene from the canal-bridge, unlike that
from the mound, looked best on a bright, breezy day, of quick changing
lights and shadows. There the brown water of the canal sparkled and
gladdened in the sun, and Minola, leaning over the little bridge, and
fixing her eyes on the water as it rippled past the nearer bank, might
enjoy, for the hour, the full sensation of one who floats in a boat
along a stream, and watches the trees and grasses of the shore. The
place was quiet enough, and rich enough in trees and shrubs, and little
reeds quivering out of the water, to seem, at least in Minola's pleased
eyes, like a spot on the bank of the canal far in the country, while
yet there was to her the peculiar and keen delight of knowing herself
in London. Sometimes, too, a canal boat came gliding along, steered by
a stalwart and sunburnt woman in a great straw bonnet, and the boat and
the woman brought wild and delicious ideas of far-off country places,
with woods and gipsies, and fresh, half savage, half poetic life.
Minola extracted beautiful pictures and much poetry and romance from
that little bridge over the discolored canal, creeping through the
heart of London.

The population of London--even its idlers--usually move along in tracks
and grooves. Where some go, others go; where few go, at last none go.
It is wonderful what hours of almost absolute solitude Minola was able
to enjoy in the midst of Regent's Park. Voices, indeed, constantly
reached her: the cries and laughter of children, the shoutings of
cricketers, the dulled clamor of the metropolis itself. These reached
her as did the bleating of sheep and the tinkle of their bells, the
barking of dogs, and occasionally the fierce, hoarse, thrilling growl
or roar of some disturbed or impatient animal in the Zoölogical Gardens
near at hand. But many and many a time Minola lounged for half an hour
on her little knoll or on her chosen bridge, without seeing more of man
or woman than of the lions in their cages on the other side of the
enclosure. There was a particular hour of the day, too, when the park
in general was especially deserted, and it appears almost needless to
say that this was the time selected usually by Miss Grey for her
rambles. It was sometimes a curious, half sensuous pleasure for her
thus alone, amid the murmur of the trees, to fancy herself, for the
moment, back again within sight of the mausoleum at Keeton, where she
had spent so many weary and solitary hours, and then, awaking, to
rejoice anew in her freedom and in London.

It was a fortunate and kindly destiny which assigned to our heroine a
poetess for a companion. Much as she loved occasional solitude, Minola
loved still better the spirit of fidelity to the obligations of true
_camaraderie_, and if Miss Blanchet had had any manner of work to
do, from the mending of a stocking to the teaching of a school, in
which Minola could possibly have assisted her, Minola would never have
thought of leaving her to do the work alone. Or even if Miss Blanchet
had work to do in which Minola could not have helped her, but to which
her presence would be any manner of encouragement, Minola would have
stayed with her, and never dreamed of play while her companion had to
be at work. But we may safely appeal to all the poets of all time to
say whether anybody ever desired companionship while engaged in the
composition of poetry. Sappho herself could have well dispensed with
the society of Phaon at such a moment. It is true that Corinne threw
off some of her grandest effusions in full face of an admiring crowd,
and recited them not only with Lord Nelvil, but at him. Corinne,
however, was of the improvisatrice class, to which Mary Blanchet did
not profess to belong; and we own, moreover, to a constant suspicion
that Corinne must have sat up late for many previous nights getting her
improvisations by heart. At all events Miss Blanchet was not Corinne,
and required seclusion, and much thought, and comparison of rhymes, and
even looking out in dictionaries, in order to the composition of her
poems. At the present time Minola was well aware that her friend had a
new collection of poems on hand, and that the poems would be churned
off with less difficulty if the author were occasionally left to
herself for an hour or two. Therefore Minola was free to go into
Regent's Park, with untroubled conscience and light heart. The woman
who was not a poet revelled in the rustling branches and the sight of
the soft grass, and was filled with glad visions and dreams by the
flowing even of a poor, clouded, slow canal stream, and was rapt into
the ideal at the sight of a reed growing in the water and shaken by the
wind. The poetess remained at home in a dull room, and hammered out
rhymes with the help of a dictionary.

But, to do Minola justice, she was not wholly given up, even in these
free and lonely hours, to the sweet, innocent sensuousness that fills
certain beings when amid trees and the sounds of flowing water. She had
many scruples about the possible selfishness of her life, and wondered
whether it was not wrong thus to live, and whether it was not through
some fault of hers that no opportunity presented itself to her of doing
any good for man or woman. She asked herself sometimes whether she had
not been impatient and wilful in her dealings with the people at home.
She still, when in a self-questioning and penitential mood, thought and
spoke of Keeton as "home," and whether she had not done wrong in
leaving the material enclosure of any place bearing even by tradition
the name of home, for a life of freedom which some censors might have
thought unwomanly. There are metaphysicians who hold that, although man
of his nature has no intuitive knowledge, yet that the accumulated
experience of generations supplies gradually for men, as they are born,
a something which is like intuition to start with, and which they could
not now start clear of. So the experience or the traditions of
generations form a sort of factitious and accumulated conscience for
women independent of any abstract or eternal laws, and amounting in
strength to something like intuition. Over this shadow they cannot
leap. Minola, filled as she was with a peculiarly independent spirit,
and driven by circumstances to consider its indulgence a right and even
a duty, could not keep from the occasional torment of a doubt whether
there must not be something wrong in the conduct of any woman who,
under any circumstances, leaves voluntarily, and while she is yet under
age, the home of her childhood, and takes up her abode among strangers,
without guardians, mistress of herself, and in lodgings.

Perhaps some such ideas were in Minola's mind when she left Mary
Blanchet, a few mornings after the meetings described in the last
chapter, and set out for a pleasant lonely walk in Regent's Park.
Perhaps it was the very pleasure of the walk, and the loneliness, now
missed for some days, that made her dread being selfish, and sent her
down into a drooping and penitent reaction. "This will never do," she
kept thinking. "I ought to try to do something for somebody. I am
growing to think only of myself--and I broke away from Keeton because I
was getting morbid in thinking about myself."

It was in this remorseful condition of mind that she approached her
favorite mound, longing for an hour of quiet delight there, and half
ashamed of her longing. When she had nearly reached its height, she
discerned that the fates had seemingly resolved to punish her for her
love of solitariness, by decreeing that her chosen retreat should that
day be occupied. There was a seat on which she usually sat, and now a
man was there. That was bad enough, but she could in an ordinary case
have passed on, and sought some other place. Now, however, she saw that
that was denied to her; for the intruder was Mr. Victor Heron, and at
the sound of her footstep he looked round, recognized her, and was
already coming toward her, with hat uplifted and courteous bow.

The very rapid moment of time between Minola's first seeing Mr. Heron
and his recognizing her had enabled her quick eyes to perceive that
when he thought himself alone he was anything but the genial and joyous
personage he appeared in company. At first Miss Grey's attention was
withdrawn from her own disappointment by the air of melancholy and even
of utter despondency about the face and figure of the seated man. He
sat leaning forward, his chin supported by one hand, his eyes fixed
moodily on the ground. He seemed to have no manner of concern with air,
or sky, or scene, and his dark-complexioned face gave the impression of
one terribly at odds with fortune. Minola felt almost irresistibly
drawn toward one who seemed unhappy. Her harmless misanthropy went out
at a breath in the presence of any man who appeared to suffer.

But the change which came over Mr. Heron when he saw her can only be
likened to that which would be made by the sudden illumination of a
house that a second before was all dark, and seemingly tenantless. He
came to meet her with sparkling eyes and delighted expression. Mr.
Heron, it should perhaps be explained, considered himself so much older
than Miss Grey, so entirely an experienced, mature, not to say outworn
man, that he did not think of waiting to see whether Miss Grey was
inclined to encourage a renewal of the acquaintance. He considered it
his duty to be polite and friendly to the pretty girl he had met at
Money's, and whom he assumed to be poor, and wanting in friends.

"How fortunate I am to meet you here to-day!" he said. "You remember
me, I hope, Miss Grey? I haven't called you Miss Money this time. Come
now--don't say you have forgotten me."

"I could not say I had forgotten you, for it would not be true, Mr.
Heron."

"Thank you; that was very prettily said, and kindly."

"Was it? I really didn't mean it to be either pretty or kind--only the
truth."

"I see, you go in for being downright, and saying only what you mean. I
am very glad. So do I, and I am very much delighted to meet you here,
Miss Grey. Come, you won't say as much for me?"

"I cannot say that I was glad to see anybody just here; this place is
always deserted, except by me."

"You come here often, and you are sorry to have your retreat broken in
upon? Don't hesitate to say so, Miss Grey, and I will promise not to
come into this part of the park--or into any part of the park for that
matter--any more. Why should I disturb you?"

He spoke with such earnestness and such evident sincerity that Minola
began to feel ashamed of her previous ungraciousness.

"That would be rather hard upon you, and a little arrogant on my part,"
she said smiling. "The park isn't mine, and, if it were, I am sure I
could not be selfish enough to wish to shut you out from any part of
it. But I am in the habit of being a good deal alone; and I fear it
makes me a little rude and selfish sometimes. I was thinking of that
just as I came up here, and saw you."

"Then you saw me before I saw you?"

"Oh, yes."

"I am afraid you must have seen a very woe-begone personage."

"Yes; you seemed unhappy, I thought."

"There is something sympathetic about you, Miss Grey, for all your
coldness and loneliness."

"Surely," said Miss Grey, "a woman without some feeling of sympathy
would be hardly fit to live."

"You think so?" he asked quite earnestly and gravely. "So do I--so do I
indeed. Men have little time to sympathize with men--they are all too
busy with their own affairs. What should we do but for the sympathy of
women? Now tell me, why do you smile at that? I saw that you were
trying not to laugh."

"I could not help smiling a little, it was so thoroughly masculine a
sentiment."

"Was it? How is that now?" His direct way of propounding his questions
rather amused and did not displease her. It was like the way of a
rational man talking with another rational being--a style of
conversation which has much attraction for some women.

"Well, because it looked upon women so honestly as creatures only
formed to make men comfortable, by coming up and sympathizing with them
when they are in a humor for sympathy, and then retiring out of the way
into their corner again."

"I can assure you, Miss Grey, that never has been my idea--nothing of
the kind, indeed. To tell the truth, I have not known much about the
sympathy of women and all that. I have lived awfully out of the world,
and I never had any sisters, and I hardly remember my mother. I know
women chiefly in poems and romances, and I believe I generally adopt
the goddess theory. In honest truth, most women do seem to me a sort of
goddesses."

"You will not be long in England without unlearning that theory," Miss
Grey said. "Our writers seem to have hardly any subject now but the
faults and follies of women. One might sometimes think that woman was a
newly-discovered creature that the world could never be done wondering
at."

"Yes, yes; I read a good deal of that sort of thing out in the
colonies. But I have retained the goddess theory, so far at least. Mrs.
Money seems to me a sort of divinity. Miss Money is a born saint; she
ought to go about with a gilt plate round her head. Miss Lucy Money
seems like a little angel of light. Are you smiling again? I do assure
you these are my real feelings."

"I was not smiling at the idea, but only at the difference between it
and the favorite ideas of most people at present, even of women about
women."

"May I walk a little with you," Mr. Heron said, "or will you sit and
rest here, if you are tired, and we will talk? Don't stand on formality
and send me away, although I will go if you like, and not feel in the
least offended. But if we might talk for a little, it would give me
great pleasure. You said just now that you did not wish to be selfish.
It will be very unselfish and very kind if you will let me talk to you
a little. I felt very wretched when you came up--quite in a suicidal
frame of mind."

"Oh, no! Pray don't speak in that way. You do not mean it I am sure."

"In one sense I do mean it--that is, it is quite true that I should not
have thrown myself into the water or blown my brains out; that sort of
thing seems to me like abandoning one's post without orders from
headquarters. But I felt in the condition of mind when one can quite
understand how such things are done, and would be glad if he were free
to follow the example. For _me_ that is a great change in itself," the
young man added with some bitterness.

"What can I do for him?" Miss Grey asked herself mentally. "Nothing but
to show him the view from the canal bridge. There is nothing else in my
power."

"There is a very pretty view a short distance from this," she said; "a
view from a bridge, and I am particularly fond of looking from bridges.
Should you like to walk there?"

"I should like to walk anywhere with you," Victor Heron said, with a
look of genuine gratefulness, which had not the faintest breath of
compliment in it, and could only be accepted as frank truth.

Perhaps, if Miss Grey had been a town-bred girl, she might have
hesitated about setting out for a companionable walk in the park with a
young man who was almost a stranger to her. But, as it was, she
appeared to herself to have all the right of free action belonging to
one in a place of which the public opinion can in no wise touch her.
She acted in London as freely as one speaks with a friend in a foreign
hotel room, where he knows that the company around are unable to
understand what he is saying. In this particular instance, however,
Minola hardly thought about the matter at all. There was something in
Heron's open and emotional way which made people almost at the first
meeting cease to regard him as a stranger. Perhaps, if Minola had
thought over the matter, she might have cited in vindication of her
course the valuable authority of Major Pendennis, who, when asked
whether Laura might properly take walks in the Temple Gardens with
Warrington, eagerly said, "Yes, yes, begad, of course, you go out with
him. It's like the country, you know; everybody goes out with everybody
in the Gardens; and there are beadles, you know, and that sort of
thing. Everybody walks in the Temple Gardens." Regent's Park, one would
think, ought to come under the same laws. There are beadles there, too,
or guardian functionaries of some sort, although it may be owned that
in their walk to and from the canal bridge Heron and Minola encountered
none of them.

It is doubtful whether Heron at least would have noticed such a
personage even had they come in their way, for he talked nearly all the
time, except when he paused for an answer to some direct question, and
he seldom took his eyes from Minola's face. He was not staring at her,
or broadly admiring her; nor, indeed, was there anything in his manner
to make it certain that he was admiring her at all, as man
conventionally is understood to admire woman. But he had evidently put
Miss Grey into the place of a sympathetic and trusted friend, and he
talked to her accordingly. She was amused and interested, and she now
and then kept making little disparaging criticisms to herself, in order
to sustain her place as the cool depreciator of man. But she was very
happy for all that.

One characteristic peculiarity of this sudden and singular
acquaintanceship ought to be mentioned. When people still read "Gil
Blas" they would have remembered at once how the waiting-woman received
delightedly the advances of Gil Blas, believing him to be a gentleman
of fortune, and how Gil Blas paid great court to the waiting-woman,
believing her to be a lady of rank. The pair of friends in Regent's
Park were drawn together by exactly opposite impulses: each believed
the other poor and unfriended. Minola was under the impression that she
was giving her sympathy to a ruined and unhappy young man, who had
failed in life almost at the very beginning, and was now friendless in
stony-hearted London. Victor Heron was convinced that his companion was
a poor orphan girl, who had been sent down by misfortune from a
position of comfort, or even wealth, to earn her bread by some sort of
intellectual labor, while she lived in a small back room in a depressed
and mournful quarter of London.

He told her the story of his grievance; it may be that he even told her
some parts of it more than once. It was a strange sensation to her, as
she walked on the soft green turf, in the silver gray atmosphere, to
hear this young man, who seemed to have lived so bold and strange a
life, appealing to her for an opinion as to the course he ought to
pursue to have his cause set right. The St. Xavier's Settlements do not
geographically count for much, and politically they count for still
less. But when Mr. Heron told of his having been administrator and
commandant there; of his having made treaties with neighboring kings
(she knew they were only black kings); of his having tried to put down
slavery, and to maintain what he persisted in believing to be the true
honor of England; of war made on him, and war made by him in
return--while she listened to all this, it is no wonder if our romantic
girl from Duke's Keeton sometimes thought she was conversing with one
of the heroes and master-spirits of the time. He made the whole story
very clear to her, and she thoroughly understood it, although her
imagination and her senses were sometimes disturbed by the tropic glare
which seemed to come over the places and events he described. At last
they actually came to be standing on the canal bridge, and neither
looked at the view they had come to see.

"Now what do you advise?" Heron said, after having several times
impressed some particular point on her. "I attach great importance to a
woman's advice. You have instincts, and all that, which we haven't; at
least so everybody says. Would you let this thing drop altogether, and
try some other career, or would you fight it out?"

"I would fight it out," Minola said, looking up to him with sparkling
eyes, "and I would never let it drop. I would make them do me justice."

"Just what I think; just what I came to England resolved to do. I hate
the idea of giving in; but people here discourage me. Money discourages
me. He says the Government will never do anything unless I make myself
troublesome."

"Well, then, why not make yourself troublesome?"

"I have made myself troublesome in one sense," he said, with a vexed
kind of laugh, "by haunting ante-chambers, and trying to force people
to see me who don't want to see me. But I can't do any more of that
kind of work; I am sick of it. I am ashamed of having tried it at all."

"Yes, I couldn't do that," Minola said gravely.

"Then," Heron said, with a little embarrassment, "a man--a very kind
and well-meaning fellow, an old friend of my father's--offered to
introduce me to Lady Chertsey--a very clever woman, a queen of society,
I am told, who gets all the world (of politics, I mean) into her
drawing-room, and delights in being a sort of power, and all that. She
could push a fellow, they say, wonderfully if she took any interest in
him. But I couldn't do that, you know."

"No? Why not?"

"Well, I shouldn't care to be introduced to a lady's drawing-room with
the secret purpose of trying to get her to do me a service. There seems
something mean in that. Besides, I have a cause (at least, I think I
have) which is too good to be served in that kind of way. If I can't
get a hearing and justice from the Government of England and the people
of England for the sake of right and for the claims I have, I will
never try to get it through. Oh, well, perhaps, I ought not to say what
I was going to say."

"Why not?" Minola asked again.

"I mean, perhaps I ought not to say it to you."

"I don't know really. Tell me what it is, and then I'll tell you
whether you ought to say it."

He laughed. "Well, I was only going to say that I don't care to have my
cause served by petticoat influence."

"I think you are quite right. If I were a man, I should think petticoat
influence in such a matter contemptible. But why should you not like to
say so?"

"Only because I was afraid you might think I meant to speak
contemptuously of the influence and the advice of women. I don't mean
anything of the kind. I have the highest opinion of the advice of women
and their influence, as I have told you already; but I couldn't endure
the idea of having a lady, who doesn't know or care anything about me
and my claims, asked by somebody to say a word to some great man or
some great man's wife, in order that I might get a hearing. I am sure
you understand what I mean, Miss Grey."

"Oh, yes, I never should have misunderstood it; and I know that you are
quite right. It would be a downright degradation."

"So I felt. Anyhow, I could not do it. Then there remains the making
myself troublesome, as Money advises----"

"Yes, what is that?"

"Getting my case brought on again and again in the House of Commons,
and having debates about it, and making the whole thing public, and so
forcing the Government either to do me justice or to satisfy the
country that justice has already been done," he said bitterly.

"That would seem to me a right thing to do," Miss Grey said; "but I
know so little that I ought not to offer a word of advice."

"Oh, yes, I should trust to your feelings and instincts in such a case.
Well, I don't like, somehow, being in the hands of politicians and
party men, who might use me and my cause only as a means of annoying
the Government--not really from any sense of right and justice. I don't
know if I make myself quite understood; it is hard to expect a lady,
especially a young lady, to understand these things."

"I think I can quite understand all that. We are not so stupid as you
seem to suppose, Mr. Heron."

"Stupid? Didn't I tell you of my goddess theory?"

"Some of the goddesses were very stupid I always think. Venus was
stupid."

"Well, well; anyhow you are not Venus."

"No, indeed."

"In that sense I mean. Then I do succeed in making myself understood?"

"Oh, yes!" She could see that he was looking disappointed at her
interruption and her seeming levity, which was indeed only the result
of a momentary impulse to keep up to herself her character as a scorner
of men. "I think I understand quite clearly that you fear to be made
the mere instrument of politicians; and I think you are quite right. I
did not think of that at first, but, now that you explain it, I am sure
that you are right."

He nodded approvingly. "Then comes the question," he said, "what is to
be done?"

Leaning against the bridge, he thrust his hands into his pockets, and
stood looking into her face, as if he were really waiting for her to
solve the problem for him.

"That is entirely beyond me," she said. "I know nothing; I could not
even guess at what ought to be done."

"No? Now here is my idea. Why not plead my cause myself?"

"Plead your cause yourself? Can that be done?"

"Yes; myself--in Parliament."

Minola's mind at once formed and framed a picture of a stately
assembly, like a Roman Senate, or like the group of King Agrippa,
Festus, Bernice, and the rest, and Mr. Heron pleading his cause like
Cicero or Paul. The thing seemed hardly congruous. It did not seem to
her to fall in with modern conditions at all. Her face became blank;
she did not well know what to answer.

"Are people allowed to do such things now, in England?" she asked--"to
plead causes before Parliament?"

An odd idea came up in her mind, that perhaps by the time this strange
performance came to be enacted, Mr. Augustus Sheppard might be in
Parliament, and Mr. Heron's enthusiastic eloquence would have to be
addressed to him. She did not like the idea.

"You don't understand," Heron said. "You really don't this time. What I
mean is to get into Parliament--be elected for some place, and then
stand up and make my own fight for myself."

She kindled at the idea.

"Oh, yes, of course! How stupid I am not to see at once! That is a
splendid idea; the very thing I should like to do if I were a man and
in your place."

"You really think so?"

"Indeed I do. But then----" And she hesitated, for she feared that she
had been only encouraging him to a wild dream. "Does it not cost a
great deal of money to get into Parliament?"

"No; I think not; not always at least. I should look out for an
opportunity. I have money enough--for me. I'm not a rich man, Miss
Grey, but my father left me well enough off, as far as that goes; and
you know that in a place like St. Xavier's one couldn't spend any
money. There was no way of getting rid of it. No, my troubles are none
of them money troubles. I only want to vindicate my past career, and so
to have a career for the future. I ought to be doing something. I feel
in an unhealthy state of mind while all this is pressing on me. You
understand?"

"I can understand it," Miss Grey said, turning to leave the bridge, and
bestowing one glance at the yellow, slow-moving water, and the reeds
and the bushes, of which she and her companion had not spoken a word.
"It is not good to have to think of oneself. But you are bound to
vindicate yourself; that I am sure is your duty. Then you can think of
other things--of the public and the country."

"He is rich," she thought, "and he is clever and earnest, in spite of
his egotism. Of course he will have a career, and be successful. I
thought that he was poor and broken down, and that I was doing him a
kindness by showing sympathy with him."

They went away together, and Heron, delighted with her encouragement
and her intelligence, unfolded splendid plans of what he was to do. But
Minola somehow entered less cordially into them than she had done
before, and Mr. Heron at last became ashamed of talking so much about
himself.

"I hope we shall meet again," he said as she stopped significantly at
one of the gates leading out of the park, to intimate that now their
roads were separating. "I wish you would allow me to call and see you.
I do hope you won't think me odd, or that I am presuming on your
kindness. I am a semi-barbarian, you know--have been so long out of
civilization--and I haven't any idea of the ways of the polite world."

"Nor I," said Minola. "I have come from utter barbarism--from a country
town."

"But I do hope we shall meet again, for you are so sympathetic and
kind."

She bade him good day, and nodded with a friendly smile, but made no
answer to the repeated expression of his hope, and she hastened away.

Heron could not endure walking alone just then. He hailed a hansom and
disappeared.

"How vain men are!" Minola thought as she went her way. "How
egotistical they all are!" Of course she assumed herself to have
obtained a complete knowledge of all the characters of men. "How
egotistic he is! Of course he tells his whole story to every woman he
meets. Lucy Money no doubt has it by heart."

She did not remember for the moment that her own favorite hero was
likewise somewhat egotistical and effusive, and that he was very apt to
pour out the story of his wrongs into the ear of any sympathetic woman.
But she was disappointed with herself and her friend just now, and was
not in a mood to make perfectly reasonable comparisons.




CHAPTER VIII.

A "HELPER OF UNHAPPY MEN."


Mrs. Money had one great object in life. At least, if it was not an
object defined and set out before her, it was an instinct: it was to
make people happy. She could not rest without trying to make people
happy. The motherly instinct, which in other women is satisfied by
rushing at babies wherever they are to be seen, and ministering to
them, and fondling them, and talking pigeon-English to them, exuberated
in her so far as to set her trying to do the mother's part for all men
and women who came within her range, even when their years far exceeded
hers. There was one great advantage to herself personally in this: it
kept her content in what had come to be her own sphere. One cannot go
meddling in the affairs of duchesses and countesses, and Ministers of
State, with whatever kindly desire of setting everything to rights and
making them all happy. People of that class give themselves such
haughty airs that they would rather remain unhappy in their own way
than obtain felicity at the hand of some person of inferior station. So
Mrs. Money believed; and perhaps one secret cause of her dislike to the
aristocracy (along with the avowed conviction that the aristocratic
system had somehow misprized and interfered with her husband) was the
feeling that if she were among them, they would not allow her to do
anything for them. She therefore maintained a circle of which she
herself was the queen, and patroness, and Lady Bountiful. She busied
herself about everybody's affairs, and was kind to everybody, without
any feeling of delight in the mere work of patronizing, but out of a
sheer pleasure in trying to make people happy. Naturally she made
mistakes, and the general system of her social circle worked so as to
occasion a continual change, a passing away of old friends and coming
in of new. As young men rose in the world and became independent, as
girls got married and came to consider themselves supreme in their own
sphere, they tended to move away from Mrs. Money's influence. Even the
grateful and the generous could not always avoid this. For beginners in
any path of life she was the specially appointed helper and friend; and
next to these she might be called the patron saint of failures. In her
circle were young poets, painters, lawyers, novelists, preachers,
ambitious men looking out for seats in Parliament, or beginners in
Parliament; also there were the gray old poets whom no one read; the
painters who could not get their pictures exhibited or bought; the men
who were in Parliament ten or twenty years ago, and got out and never
could get in again; and the inventors who could not impress any
government or capitalist with a sense of the value of their
discoveries. No front-rank, successful person of any kind was usually
to be found in Mrs. Money's rooms. Her guests were the youths who were
putting their armor on for the battle, and the worn-out campaigners who
had put it off defeated.

Naturally, when Minola Grey came in Mrs. Money's way, the sympathy and
interest of the kindly lady were quickened to their keenest. This
beautiful, motherless, fatherless, proud, lonely girl--not so old as
her own Theresa, not older than her own Lucy--living by herself, or
almost by herself, in gloomy lodgings in the heart of London--how could
she fail to be an object of Mrs. Money's deep concern? Of course Mrs.
Money must look into all her affairs, and find out whether she was
poor; and in what sort of way she was living; and whether the people
with whom she lodged were kind to her.

Mary Blanchet's pride of heart can hardly be described when an open
carriage, with a pair of splendid grays, stopped at the door of the
house in the no-thoroughfare street, and a footman got down and
knocked; and it finally appeared that Mrs. Money, Miss Money, and Miss
Lucy Money had called to see Miss Grey. Miss Grey, as it happened, was
not at home, although the servant at first supposed that she was; and
thus the three ladies were shown into Minola's sitting-room, and there
almost instantly captured by Miss Blanchet. We say "almost" because
there was an interval long enough for Lucy to dart about the room from
point to point, taking up a book here, a piece of music there, an
engraving, a photograph, or a flower, and pronouncing everything
delightful. The room was old-fashioned, spacious, and solid, very
unlike the tiny apartments of the ordinary West End lodging; and, what
with the flowers and the books, it really looked rather an attractive
place to enthusiastic eyes. Miss Money kept her eyes on the ground for
the most part, and professed to take little notice of the ordinary
adornments of rooms; for Miss Money was a saint, and was furthermore
engaged to a man not far from her father's years, who, having made a
great deal of money at the Parliamentary bar, was now thinking of
entering the Church, and had already set about the building of a temple
of mediæval style, in the progress of which Miss Money naturally was
deeply interested.

Miss Blanchet was in a flutter of excitement as she entered the
sitting-room. As she was crossing its threshold she was considering
whether she ought to present a copy of her poems to each of the three
ladies or only to Mrs. Money; or whether she ought to tender the gift
now or send it on by the post. The solemn eyes and imposing presence of
Mrs. Money were almost alarming, and the trailing dresses and feathers
of all the ladies sent a thrill of admiration and homage into the heart
of the poetess--everything was so evidently put on regardless of
expense. Little Mary had always been so poor and so stinted in the
matter of wardrobe that she could not help admiring these splendidly
dressed women. Mary, however, luckily remembered what was due to the
dignity of poetic genius, and did not allow her homage to show itself
too much in the form of trepidation. She instantly put on her best
company manners, and spoke in the sweetly measured and genteel tone
which she used to employ at Keeton, when she had occasion to
interchange a word with the judges, or the sheriffs, or some eminent
counsel.

"Minola will be home in a few moments--a very few," Miss Blanchet said.
"Indeed, I expect her every minute. I know she would be greatly
disappointed if she did not see you."

"Oh, I am not going without seeing Nola!" said Lucy.

"I am Minola's friend," Mary explained with placid dignity. "I may
introduce myself. My brother, I know, has already the honor of your
acquaintance. I am Miss Blanchet."

"Mr. Herbert Blanchet's sister?" Mrs. Money said in melancholy tone,
but with delighted eyes. "This is indeed an unexpected and a very great
pleasure."

"Why, you don't mean to say you are Herbert Blanchet's sister?" Lucy
exclaimed, seizing both the hands of the poetess. "He's the most
delightful creature, and a true poet. Oh, yes, a man of genius!"

The eyes of Mary moistened with happiness and pride.

"Herbert Blanchet is my brother. He is much younger than I; I need
hardly say that. I used to take care of him years ago, almost as if I
were his mother. We were a long time separated; he has been so much
abroad."

The faithful Mary would not for all the world have suggested that their
long separation was due to any indifference on the part of her brother.
Indeed, at the moment she was not thinking of anything of the kind,
only of his genius, and his beauty, and his noble heart.

"He never told me he had a sister," Mrs. Money said, "or I should have
been delighted to call on you long ago, Miss Blanchet. It is your
brother's fault, not mine. I shall tell him so."

"He did not know that I was coming to London," Mary was quick to
explain. "He thought I was still living in Keeton. I only came to
London with Minola."

"Oh! You lived in Keeton then always, along with Miss Grey!"

"How delightful!" Lucy exclaimed, desisting from her occupation of
opening books and turning over music; "for you can tell us all about
Nola and her love story."

"Her love story?" Mrs. Money repeated, in tones of melancholy inquiry.

"Her love story!" Miss Blanchet murmured tremulously, and wondering who
had betrayed Minola's secret.

"Oh, yes," said Lucy decisively. "I know there's some love
story--something romantic and delightful. Do tell us, Miss Blanchet."

Even the saint-like Theresa now showed a mild and becoming interest.

"It's not exactly a love story," Miss Blanchet said with some
hesitation, not well knowing what she ought to reveal and what to keep
back. "At least it's no love affair on Minola's part. She never was in
love--never. She detests all love-making--at least she thinks so," the
poetess said with a gentle sigh. "But there was a gentleman who was
very much in love with her."

"Oh, she must have had heaps of lovers!" interposed Lucy.

Miss Blanchet then told the story of Mr. Augustus Sheppard, and how he
was rich and handsome--at least rather handsome, she said--and how he
wanted to marry Minola; and her people very much wished that she would
have him, and she would not; and how at last she hastened her flight to
London to get rid of him. All this was full of delightful interest to
Lucy, and still further quickened the kindly sympathy of Mrs. Money.
Then Mary Blanchet went into a long story about the death of Minola's
mother and the second marriage of Minola's father, and then the
father's death and the stepmother's second marriage, and the discomfort
of the home which fate had thus provided for Minola. She expatiated
upon the happiness of the sheltered life Minola had had while her
mother was living, and the change that came upon her afterward, until
the only doubt Mrs. Money had ever entertained about Minola--a doubt as
to the perfect propriety and judgment of her coming to live almost
alone in London--vanished altogether, and she regarded our heroine as a
girl who had been driven from her home instead of having fled from it.

Mrs. Money delicately and cautiously approached the subject of Minola's
means of subsistence. On this point no one could enlighten her better
than Miss Blanchet, who knew to the sixpence the income and expenditure
of her friend. Well, Minola was not badly off for a girl, Mrs. Money
thought. A girl could live nicely and quietly, like a lady, but very
quietly, on that. Besides, some rich man would be sure to fall in love
with her.

"But she ought to have a great deal of money," the poetess eagerly
explained, very proud of her leader's losses. "Her father was a rich
man, quite a rich man, and he had quarrelled with her brother, and she
ought to have all the money, only for that second marriage." Indeed,
Miss Blanchet added the expression of her own profound conviction that
there must have been some queer work--some concealment or
something--about Mr. Grey's property, seeing that so little of it came
to Minola.

"I'll get Mr. Money to look into all that," Mrs. Money said decisively.
"He understands all about these things, and nothing could be hidden
from him."

Miss Blanchet modestly intimated that she had confided her suspicions
to her brother, and begged him to try and find out something.

"Oh, he never could understand anything about it!" Lucy said. "Poets
never know about these things. It's just in papa's line. He'll find
out. They can't baffle him. I know they have been cheating Nola--I know
they have! I know there's a will hidden away somewhere, making her the
rightful heir or whatever it is."

"About this gentleman--this lover. Is he a nice person?" Mrs. Money
began.

"Mr. Augustus Sheppard?" Mary asked, mentioning his name for the first
time in the conversation.

"Augustus Sheppard! Is that his name?" Lucy demanded eagerly.

"Why then, papa knows him! Indeed he does. I do declare papa knows
everything!"

"Why do you think, dear, that he knows this gentleman?"

"Because I heard him asking Nola about Mr. Augustus Sheppard the other
day, mamma, in our drawing-room."

"He couldn't have known this, I think," Miss Blanchet said.

"Oh, no, I suppose not; but he knows him, and he'll tell us all about
him. Why wouldn't Nola have him, Miss Blanchet?"

"He is rather a formal sort of person, and heavy, and not the least in
the world poetic or romantic; and Minola does not like him at all. She
doesn't think his feelings are very deep; but there I am sure she is
wrong," the poetess added emphatically. "She has never had occasion to
make a study of human feelings as others have."

"You think he has deep feelings?" Mrs. Money asked, turning the full
light of her melancholy eyes upon Mary, and with her whole soul already
in the question.

"Oh, yes; I know he has. I know that he will persevere, and will try to
make Minola marry him still. He is a man I should be afraid of if he
were disappointed. I should indeed."

"Mamma, don't you think we had better have Nola to stay with us for a
while?" Lucy asked. "Miss Blanchet could describe him, or get a
photograph, and we could give orders that no such man was ever to be
admitted if he should call and ask to see her. Some one should always
go out with her, or she should only go in the carriage. I dread this
man; I do indeed. Miss Blanchet is quite right, and she knows more than
she says, I dare say. Such terrible things have happened, you know. I
read in a paper the other day of a young man who fell in love with a
girl--in the country it was, I think, or in Spain perhaps, or
somewhere--and she would not marry him; and he hid himself with a long
dagger, and when she was going to church he stabbed her several times."

"I don't think Mr. Augustus Sheppard would be likely to do anything of
that kind," Miss Blanchet said. "He's a very respectable man, and a
steady, grave sort of person."

"You never can tell," Lucy declared. "When those quiet men are in love
and disappointed, they are dreadful! I've read a great many things just
like that in books."

"Well, dear," Mrs. Money said, "we'll ask your papa. If he knows this
gentleman--this person--he can tell us what sort of man he is. It
doesn't seem that he is in London now."

"He may have come to-day," said Lucy.

Miss Theresa looked at her watch.

"Mamma dear, I don't think Miss Grey is coming in just yet, and it's
growing late, and I have to attend the Ladies' Committee of the Saint
Angulphus Association, at four."

"You go, mamma, with Theresa," Lucy exclaimed. "I'll wait; I must see
Nola. I begin to be alarmed. It's very odd her staying out. I think
something must really have happened. That man may have been in town,
waiting somewhere. You go. When I have seen Nola, and am satisfied that
she is safe, I can get home in the omnibus, or the underground, or the
steamboat, or somehow. I'll find my way, you may be sure."

"My dear," her mother said, "you were never in an omnibus in your
life."

"Papa goes in omnibuses, and he says he doesn't care whether other
people do or not."

"But a lady, my dear----"

"Oh, I've seen them in the streets full of women! They don't object to
ladies at all."

"But my dear young lady," Miss Blanchet pleaded, "there is not the
slightest occasion for your staying. Mr. Sheppard isn't at all that
kind of person. Minola is quite safe. She is often out much later than
this, although I confess that I did expect her home much earlier
to-day."

"I'll stay till Nola comes," the positive little Lucy declared, "unless
Miss Blanchet turns me out; and there's an end of that. So, mamma dear,
you and Tessy do as you please, and never mind me."

"When Minola does come----" Mary Blanchet began to say.

"When she does come?" Lucy interrupted in portentous accents. "Say if
she does come, Miss Blanchet."

"When she does come, please don't say anything of Mr. Sheppard. Of
course she would not like to think that we spoke about such a subject."

"Oh, of course, of course!" all the ladies chorused, with looks
expressive of immense caution and discretion; and in true feminine
fashion all honestly assuming that there could be nothing wrong in
talking over anybody's supposed secrets so long as the person concerned
did not know of the talk.

"I see Miss Grey," said the quiet Theresa suddenly. She had been
looking out of the window to see if the carriage was near. As a
professed saint she had naturally less interest in ordinary human
creatures than her mother and sister had.

"Thank heaven!" Lucy exclaimed.

"Dear Lucy!" Theresa interposed in tones of mild remonstrance, as if
she would suggest that not everybody had a right to make reference to
heaven, and that heaven would probably resent any allusion to it by the
unqualified.

"Well, I am thankful that she is coming all the same; but I wish you
wouldn't call her Miss Grey, Tessy. It seems cold and unfriendly. Call
her Nola, please."

Mary Blanchet went to the door and exchanged a brief word or two with
Minola, in order that she might be prepared for her visitors. Minola
came in, looking very handsome, with her color heightened by a quick
walk home and the little excitement of her morning.

"How lovely you are looking, Nola, dear!" Lucy exclaimed, after the
first greetings were over. "You look as if you had been having an
adventure."

"I have had a sort of adventure," Minola answered with a faint blush.

The one thought went through the minds of all her listeners at the same
moment, and it shaped itself into a name--"Mr. Augustus Sheppard." All
were silent and breathless.

"It was not much," Minola hastened to say. "Only I met Mr. Victor Heron
in Regent's Park, and I have been walking with him."

Most of her listeners seemed relieved.

"I wish I had met him," Lucy blurted out. "He is very handsome, and I
should like to have walked with him. Oh, what nonsense I am talking!"
and she grew red, and jumped up and looked out of the window.

Then they all talked about something else, and the visit closed with a
promise that Minola and Mary Blanchet would present themselves at one
of Mrs. Money's little weekly receptions, out of season, which was to
take place the following evening; and after which Mrs. Money hoped to
decoy them into staying for the night. Mary Blanchet went to bed that
night in an ecstasy of happiness, only disturbed now and then by a
torturing doubt as to whether Mrs. Money would be equally willing to
receive her if she had known that she had been the keeper of the
court-house at Keeton; and whether she ought not to forewarn Mrs. Money
of the fact; and whether she ought not, at least, to call Minola's
attention to the question, and submit to her judgment.




CHAPTER IX.

IN SOCIETY.


Mr. Money was not a very regular visitor at his wife's little
receptions out of the season. In the season, and when they had larger
and more formal gatherings, he showed himself as much as was fitting
and regular; for many of the guests then were virtually his guests,
persons who desired especially to see him, and of whose topics he could
talk. A good many foreign visitors were there usually--scientific men,
and railway contractors, and engineers, and shipbuilders, from Germany,
Italy, and Russia, and of course the United States, who looked upon Mr.
Money as a person of great importance and distinction, and would not
have cared anything about most of Mrs. Money's guests.

The foreigners were curiously right and wrong. Mr. Money was a person
of importance and distinction. Every Londoner who knew anything knew
his name, and knew that he was clever and distinguished. If a Russian
stranger of rank were dining with a Cabinet minister, and were to
express a wish to see and know Mr. Money, the minister would think the
wish quite natural, and would take his friend down to the lobby of the
House of Commons, and make him acquainted with Mr. Money. We have all
been foreigners ourselves somewhere, and we know how our longing to see
some celebrity, as we suppose, of the land we are visiting, some one
whose name was familiar to us in England, has been occasionally checked
and chilled by our finding that in the celebrity's own city no one
seems to have heard of him. There are only too many celebrities of this
kind which shine, like the moon, for those who are a long way off. But
Mr. Money was a man of mark in London, as well as in St. Petersburg and
New York. Therein the foreigners found themselves right. Yet Mr.
Money's position was somewhat peculiar for all that, in a manner no
stranger could well appreciate. The Cabinet minister did not ask Mr.
Money to meet his friend at dinner; or, at all events, would never have
been able to say to his friend, "Money? Oh, yes! Of course you ought to
know him. He is coming to-morrow to dine with us. Won't you come and
meet him?" The most the Cabinet minister would do would be to get up a
little dinner party, suitably adjusted for the express purpose of
bringing his friend and Mr. Money together. It would be too much to say
that Mr. Money was under a cloud. There rather seemed to be a sort of
faint idea abroad that he ought to be, or some day would be, under a
cloud, no one knew why.

No such considerations as these, however, would have affected the
company who gathered round Mrs. Money in the out-of-season evenings, or
could have been appreciated by them. They were, for the most part,
entirely out of Mr. Money's line. He came among them irregularly and at
intervals; and if he found there any man or woman he knew or was taken
with, he talked to him or her a good deal, and perhaps, if it were a
man, he carried him and one or two others off to his own study or
smoking-room, where they discoursed at their ease. Sometimes Lucelet
was sent to her papa, if he was not making his appearance in the
drawing-room, to beg him to accomplish some such act of timely
intervention. Somebody, perhaps, presented himself among Mrs. Money's
guests who was rather too solid, or grave, or scientific, or political,
to care for the general company, and to be of any social benefit to
them; or some one, as we have said, in whose eyes Mr. Money would be a
celebrity, and Mrs. Money's guests counted for nothing. Then Lucy went
for her father, if he was in the house, and drew him forth. He was
wonderfully genial with his womankind. They might disturb him at any
moment and in any way they chose. He seemed to have as little idea of
grumbling if they disturbed him as a Newfoundland dog would have of
snapping at his master's children if they insisted on rousing him up
from his doze in the sun.

Mr. Money talked very frankly of his daughters and their prospects
sometimes.

"My girls are going to marry any one they like," he would often say;
"the poorer the better, so far as I am concerned, so long as they like
the girls and the girls like them." As chance would have it, a rich man
fell in love with Theresa, and she, in her quiet, sanctimonious way,
loved him, and that was settled.

"Now, Lucelet, look out for yourself," Mr. Money would, say to his
blushing daughter. "If you fall in love with some fine young fellow, I
don't care if he hasn't sixpence. Only be sure, Mrs. Lucelet, that you
are in love with him, and that he is in love with you, and not with
your expectations."

Lucelet generally smiled and saucily tossed her head, as one who should
say that she considered herself a person quite qualified to make an
impression without the help of any expectations.

"I sometimes wish the right man would come along, Lucelet," Mr. Money
said one day, throwing his arm round his pretty daughter's shoulder,
and drawing her to him.

"Papa! do you want to get rid of me so soon? I wonder at you. I know I
don't want to get rid of you."

"No, no, dear; it isn't that. Never mind. Where's your mamma? Just run
and ask her"--and Mr. Money started something else, and put an end to
the conversation.

Mr. Money's ideas with regard to the future of his daughters did not
fail to become known among his acquaintances in general, and would
doubtless have drawn young men in goodly numbers around his home, even
if Lucelet were far less pretty than she really was. But in any case
Mrs. Money loved to be friendly to young people, and her less formal
parties were largely attended, almost always, by the young. Miss
Theresa's future husband did not come there often. He had known the
family chiefly through Mr. Money and Parliament; and, coming once to
dine with Mr. Money, he fell fairly in love with the dove-like eyes and
saintly ways of Theresa. Theresa was therefore what her father would
have called "out of the swim." She looked tolerantly upon her mother's
little gatherings of poets _en herbe_, artists who were great to
their friends, patriots hunting for constituencies, orators who had not
yet caught the speaker's eye, and persons who had tried success in all
these various paths and failed. She looked on them tolerantly, but her
soul was not in them; it floated above them in a purer atmosphere. It
was now, indeed, floating among the spires of the church which her
lover was to build.

One peculiarity seemed common to the guests whom Mrs. Money gathered
around her. On any subject in which they felt the slightest interest
they never felt the slightest doubt. The air they breathed was that
of conviction; the language they talked was that of dogma. The men
and women they knew were the greatest, most gifted, and most
beautiful in the world; the men and women they did not know were
nothing--were beneath contempt. Every one had what Lowell calls an
"I-turn-the-crank-of-the-universe air." In that charmed circle every
one was either a genius destined yet to move the world, or a genius
too great for the dull, unworthy world to comprehend. It was a happy
circle, where success or failure came to just the same.

All in a flutter of delight was Mary Blanchet when preparing to enter
that magical circle. She was going at last to meet great men and
brilliant women. Perhaps, some day, she might even come to be known
among them--to shine among them. She could never be done embracing
Minola for having brought her to the gate of that heaven. She spent all
the day dressing herself and adjusting her hair; but as the hours went
on she became almost wretched from nervousness. When it was nearly time
for them to go she was quivering with agitation. They went in a
brougham hired specially for the occasion, because, although Mrs. Money
offered to send her carriage, and Mary would have liked it much, Minola
would hear of nothing of the kind. Mary was engaged all the way in the
brougham in the proper adjustment of her gloves. At last they came to
the place. Minola did the gentleman's part, and handed her agitated
companion out. Mary Blanchet saw a strip of carpet on the pavement, an
open door with servants in livery standing about, blazing lights,
brightly dressed women going in, a glimpse of a room with a crowd of
people, and then Minola and she found themselves somehow in a ladies'
dressing-room.

"Minola, darling, don't go in without me. I am quite nervous--I should
never venture to go in alone."

Minola did not intend to desert her palpitating little companion, who
now indeed clung to her skirts and would not let her go had she been
inclined. Miss Blanchet might have been a young beauty just about to
make her _début_ at a ball, so anxious was she about her appearance,
about her dress, about her complexion; and at the same time she was so
nervous that she could hardly compel her trembling fingers to give the
finishing touches which she believed herself to need. Minola looked on
wondering, puzzled, and half angry. The poetess was unmistakably a
little, withered, yellowing old maid. She had not even the remains of
good looks. No dressing or decoration possible to woman could make her
anything but what she was, or deceive any one about her, or induce any
one to feel interested in her. The handsome, stately girl who stood
smiling near her was about to enter the drawing-room quite unconcerned
as to her own appearance, and indeed not thinking about it; and the
homely little old maid was quite distressed lest the company generally
should not sufficiently admire her, or should find any fault with her
dress.

"Come along, you silly poetess," said Minola at last, breaking into a
laugh, and fairly drawing her companion away from the looking-glass.
"What do you think anybody will care about you or me? We'll steal in
unnoticed, and we'll be all right."

"It's the first time I ever was in London society, Minola, dear, and
I'm quite nervous."

"It's the first time I ever was in London society, and I'm not a bit
nervous. No one knows us, dear--and no one cares. So come along."

She fairly carried Mary Blanchet out of the dressing-room, along a
corridor lined with seats, on which people who had been in the
drawing-room and had come out, were chattering, and flirting, and
lounging--and at last over the threshold of the drawing-room, and into
the presence of the hostess. A few friendly words were got through, and
Minola dragged her companion along through the crowd into the recess
formed by a window where there were some unoccupied seats.

"Now, Mary, that's done. The plunge is made, dear! We are in society!
Let us sit down here--and look at it."

"This," said Mary faintly--"this, at last, is society."

"I suppose it is, dear. At least it will do very well for you and me.
We should never know any difference. Imagine all these people marquises
and countesses, and what more can we want to make us happy? They may be
marquises and countesses for all I know."

"I should think there must be some great poets, and authors, and
artists, Minola. I am sure there must be. Oh, there is my brother!"

In effect Mr. Herbert Blanchet had already fixed his dark eyes on
Minola, and was making his way up to her retreat, rather to Minola's
distress. He addressed Minola at once with that undefinable manner of
easy and kindly superiority which he always adopted toward women, and
which, it must be owned, impressed some women a great deal. To his
sister he held out, while hardly looking at her, an encouraging hand of
recognition.

"Have you seen Delavar's picture?" he asked Minola.

"No. Who is Delavar?"

"Delavar? He _was_ the greatest painter of our time--at least of his
school; for I don't admit that his school is the true one."

"Oh, is his picture here?"

"In the other room--yes. He painted it for Mr. Money--for Mrs. Money
rather I should say--and it has just been sent home. Come with me and I
will show it to you."

"And Mary?"

"We'll come back for Mary presently. The rooms are too full. We
couldn't all get through. If you'll take my arm, Miss Grey!"

Minola rose and took his arm, and they made their way slowly through
the room. They moved even more slowly than was necessary, for Herbert
Blanchet was particularly anxious to show off his companion and himself
to the fullest advantage. The moment Minola entered the room he saw
that she was the handsomest girl there, and that her dressing was
simple, graceful, and picturesque. He knew that before a quarter of an
hour had passed everybody would be asking who she was, and he resolved
to secure for himself the effect of being the first to parade her
through the rooms. He was a singularly handsome man--as has been said
before--almost oppressively handsome; and a certain wasted look about
his eyes and cheeks added a new and striking effect to his appearance.
He was dark, she was fair; he was a tall man, she was a rather tall
girl; and if his face had a worn look, hers had an expression of
something like habitual melancholy, which was not perhaps in keeping
with her natural temperament, and which lent by force of contrast an
additional charm to her eyes when they suddenly lit up at the opening
of any manner of animated conversation. No combination could be more
effective, Mr. Blanchet felt, than that of his appearance and hers; and
then she was a new figure. So he passed slowly on with her, and he knew
that most people looked at them as they passed. He took good care, too,
that they should be engaged in earnest talk.

"I am delighted to have you all to myself for a moment, Miss Grey--to
tell you that I know all about your goodness to Mary. That is why I
would not bring her with us now. No--you must let me speak--I am not
offering you my thanks. I know you would not care about that. But I
must tell you that I know what you have done. I have no doubt that you
are her sole support--poor Mary!"

"I am her friend, Mr. Blanchet--only that."

"Her only friend too. Her brother has not done much for her. To tell
you the truth, Miss Grey, it isn't in his power now. You don't know the
struggles of us, the unsuccessful men in literature, who yet have faith
in ourselves. I am very poor. My utmost effort goes in keeping a decent
dress-coat and buying a pair of gloves; I don't complain--I am not one
bit deterred, and I only trouble you with this confession, because
whatever I may have been in the past I had rather you knew me to be
what I am--a wretched, penniless struggler--than believe that I left my
sister to be a burden on your friendship."

"Mary is the only friend I have," said Minola. "It is not wonderful if
I wish to keep her with me. And you will make a great success some
time."

He shook his head.

"If one hadn't to grind at things for bare living, one might do
something. I am not bad enough, or good enough; and that's the truth of
it. I dare say if I were mean enough to hunt after some woman with
money, I might have succeeded as well as others--but I couldn't do
that."

"No, I am sure you could not."

"I am not mean enough for that. But I am not high-minded enough to
accept any path, and be content with it and proud of it. Now I shan't
bore you any more about myself. I wanted you to know this that you
might not think too harshly of me. I know you felt some objection to me
at first; you need not try politely to deny it."

"Oh, no; I don't want to deny it. I prefer truth to politeness, a great
deal. I did think you had neglected your sister; but really I was not
surprised. I believe other men do the same thing."

"But now you see that I have some excuse?"

"I am glad to hear it, Mr. Blanchet."

"Glad to hear that I am so wretchedly poor, Miss Grey?" he said with a
smile, and bending his eyes on her. "Glad to hear that your friend's
brother is such a failure?"

"I would rather a thousand times hear that you were poor than that you
were heartless. I don't call it a failure to be poor. I should call it
a failure to be selfish and mean."

She spoke in a low tone, but very earnestly and eagerly, and she
suddenly thought she was speaking too eagerly, and stopped.

"Well," he said, after a moment's pause, "here is the picture. We shall
get to it presently, when these people move away."

They had entered, through a curtained door, a small room which was
nearly filled with people standing before a picture, and admiringly
criticising it. Minola, with all her real or fancied delight in noting
the jealousies and weaknesses of men and women, could hear no words of
detraction or even dispraise.

"Is the painter here?" she asked of her companion in a whisper.

"No; I haven't seen him. Perhaps he'll come in later on."

"Would you think it cheap cynicism if I were to ask why they all praise
the picture--why they don't find any fault with it?"

"Oh, because they are all of the school, and they must support their
creed. Our art is a creed to us. I don't admit that I am of Delavar's
school any more; in fact, I look upon him as a heretic. He is going in
for mere popularity; success has spoilt him. But to most of these
people here he is still a divinity. They haven't found him out yet."

"Oh!"

This little exclamation broke from Minola as some people at length
struggled their way outward, and allowed her to see the whole of the
picture.

"What is it called?" she asked.

"Love stronger than death."

The scene was a graveyard, under a sickly yellow moon, rising in a
livid and greenish sky. A little to the left of the spectator was seen
a freshly-opened grave. In the foreground were two figures--one that of
a dead girl, whom her lover had just haled from her coffin, wrapped as
she was in her cerements of the tomb; the other that of the lover. He
had propped the body against the broken hillock of the grave, and he
was chanting a love-song to it which he accompanied on his lute. His
face suggested the last stage of a galloping consumption, further
enlivened by the fearsome light of insanity in his eyes. Some dreary
bats flopped and lollopped through the air, and a few sympathetic toads
came out to listen to the lay of the lover. The cypresses appeared as
if they swayed and moaned to the music; and the rank weeds and grasses
were mournfully tremulous around the sandalled feet of the forlorn
musician.

Minola at first could not keep from shuddering. Then there followed a
shocking inclination to laugh.

"What do you think of it?" Blanchet asked.

"Oh, I don't like it at all."

"No? It is trivial. Mere prettiness; just a striving after drawing-room
popularity. No depth of feeling; no care for the realistic power of the
scene. Pretty, pleasing--nothing more. Surface only; no depth."

"But it is hideous," Minola said.

"Hideous? Oh, no! Decay is loveliness; decay is the soul of really high
art when you come to understand it. But there is no real decay there.
That girl's face is pretty waxwork. There's no death there," and he
turned half away in contempt. "That is what comes of being popular and
a success. No; Delavar is done. I told him so."

"He is quite new to me," said Minola. "I never heard of him before."

"He's getting old now," Blanchet said. "He must be quite thirty. Let me
see--oh, yes; fully that. He had better join the pre-Raphaelites now;
or send to the Royal Academy; or hire a gallery and exhibit his
pictures at a shilling a head. I fancy they would be quite a success."

Some of this conversation took place as they were making their way
through the crowd with the intention of entering the drawing-room
again. Minola was greatly amused, and in a manner interested. The whole
thing was entirely new to her. As they passed into the corridor there
were one or two vacant seats.

"Will you rest for a moment?" Blanchet said, motioning toward a seat.

"Hadn't we better go back for Mary?"

"We'll go back presently. She is very happy; she loves above all things
observing a crowd."

Minola would have liked very much to observe the crowd herself and to
have people pointed out to her. Blanchet, however, though he saluted
several persons here and there, did not seem particularly interested in
any of them. Minola sat down for a while to please him, and to show
that she had no thought of giving herself airs merely because she was
enabled to be kind to his sister.

Blanchet threw himself sidelong across his chair and leaned toward
Minola's seat. He knew that people were looking at him and wondering
who his companion was, and he felt very happy.

"I wish I might read some of my poems to you, Miss Grey," he said. "I
should like to have your opinion, because I know it would be sincere."

"I should be delighted to hear them, but I don't think I should venture
to give an opinion; my opinion would not be worth anything."

"When may I come and read one or two to you and Mary? To-morrow
afternoon?"

"Oh, yes; we are staying here tonight, but we shall be at home in the
afternoon. Are these published poems? Pray, excuse me--I quite forgot;
you don't publish. You don't care for fame--the fame that sets other
people wild."

He smiled, and slightly shrugged his shoulders.

"We don't care for the plaudits of the stupid crowd," he said; "that is
quite true. We don't care for popularity, and to have our books lying
on drawing-room tables, and kept by the booksellers bound in morocco
ready to hand, to be given away as gift books to young ladies. But we
should like the admiration of a chosen few. The truth is, that I don't
publish my poems because I haven't the money. They would be a dead
loss, of course, to any one who printed them; I am proud to say that. I
would not have them printed at all if they couldn't be artistically and
fitly brought out; and I haven't the money, and there's an end. But if
I might read my poems to you, that would be something."

Minola began to be full of pity for the poor poet, between whom and
possible fame there stood so hard and prosaic a barrier. She was
touched by the proud humility of his confession of ambition and
poverty. Three sudden questions flashed through her mind. "I wonder how
much it would cost? and have I money enough? and would it be possible
to get him to take it?"

Her color was positively heightening, and her breath becoming checked
by the boldness of these thoughts, when suddenly there was a rushing
and rustling of silken skirts, and Lucy Money, disengaging herself from
a man's arm, swooped upon her.

"You darlingest, dear Nola, where have you been all the night? I have
been hunting for you everywhere! Oh--Mr. Blanchet! I haven't seen you
before either. Have you two been wandering about together all the
evening?"

Looking up, Minola saw that it was Mr. Victor Heron who had been with
Lucy Money, and that he was now waiting with a smile of genial
friendliness to be recognized by Miss Grey. It must be owned that
Minola felt a little embarrassed, and would rather--though she could
not possibly tell why--not have been found deep in confidential talk
with Herbert Blanchet.

She gave Mr. Heron her hand, and told him--which was now the
truth--that she was glad to see him.

"Hadn't we better go and find Mary?" Blanchet said, rising and glancing
slightly at Heron. "She will be expecting us."

"No, please don't take Miss Grey away just yet," Victor said,
addressing himself straightway, and with eyes of unutterable cordiality
and good-fellowship, to the poet. "I haven't spoken a word to her yet;
and I have to go away soon."

"I'll go with you to your sister, Mr. Blanchet," said Lucy, taking his
arm forthwith. "I haven't seen her all the evening, and I want to talk
to her very much."

So Lucy swept away on Mr. Blanchet's arm, looking very fair, and
_petite_, and pretty, as she held a bundle of her draperies in one
hand, and glanced back, smiling and nodding, out of sheer good-nature,
at Minola.

Victor Heron sat down by Minola, and at once plunged into earnest talk.




TRIED AND TRUE.


    Year after year we'll gather here,
    And pass the night in merry cheer.
    Through storm and war, o'er sea and land,
    We'll come each year to Neckar's strand:
    In war and storm, on land and sea,
    To this our pledge we'll faithful be,
    _And each to all be true_.

    So sang three students one March night--
      Without the storm wind blew,
    Within were wine and warmth and light
      And three hearts brave and true.

      "To-morrow morn we all go hence,"
      Said Wilhelm, speaking low.
      "For Emil fights for Fatherland,
      Franz o'er the sea doth go,

      "And I in Berlin, with my books,
      Will lead a scholar's life--
    In toil, and war, and foreign land,
      We thus begin the strife."

    Three glasses then with Rhineland wine
      Unto the brim were filled,
    And to the sacred parting pledge
      Each heart responsive thrilled.

    Three years went by, and so the friends
      Unto their faith were true,
    And spent the night in merry song
      And lived the past year through.

    When came the fourth reunion night
      Without the March wind blew,
    Within were wine, and warmth, and light,
      And one heart brave and true.

    For Emil died for Fatherland,
      And Franz went down at sea--
    In war and storm, in life and death,
      They said they'd faithful be:

    And so Wilhem three glasses filled.
      Of one he kissed the edge;
    Two shadow hands the others raised--
      The friends had kept their pledge!

SYLVESTER BAXTER.




ABOUT CIGARETTES.


Ten or fifteen years ago we rarely saw cigarettes in this country,
their use being confined to the few natives who had acquired the habit
during a residence abroad, and to foreigners, French, Italian, and
Cuban settlers, who followed the practices of their youth. So slight
was the general demand that, excepting in the large cities, cigarettes
were rarely found for sale. To-day there are probably few small towns
in the thickly settled portions of the country where cigarettes are not
readily obtained; while in the large cities the stores vie with each
other in giving us varied assortments of leading brands. Indeed, recent
statistics state that nearly thirty per cent. of the entire smoking
tobacco consumed in the United States is in this form. Cigarettes are
now imported from all portions of Europe, but principally from France.
Several factories have of late years been started in our own country,
but the cigarette _par excellence_ is made in Havana. Nowhere else do
we find capital so largely invested, labor so diversified, or such
attention to details. There certainly you can take your
choice--Honoradez, Havana, Astrea, Cherito, Henriquez, and dozens of
others of lesser note.

The tobacco used in the making of the Havana cigarettes is bought from
the cigar factors, but only from those who have the most assured
reputation. It consists of the leaves left from the making of cigars.
The necessity of securing the best grades of tobacco cannot be
overestimated. The judgment of the cigarette smoker is formed solely
from the sense of taste. He is totally unaffected by sight, which in
the cigar enables a clever workman to so roll bad tobacco that we are
predisposed in favor of an inferior article. While absolute inferiority
is intolerable in either, mediocrity, in Cuba at all events, is much
more readily tolerated in the cigar than in the cigarette.

The tobacco for the cigarette is not, as is generally supposed with us,
raised on the plantations of the various leading cigar factors.
"Bartegas," "Cobania," "Upman," or whatever be the name of our favorite
brand, does not depend for its success upon any one plantation. The
practice on the part of the leading houses is to send their purchasing
agents into the tobacco district as soon as the crop begins to ripen.
Sales are then and there arranged, immense sums sometimes being offered
in advance, by way of retainer, for a specially likely plantation. The
Vuelto Abago district is the favorite one, the planters there holding a
position not unlike that occupied by the proprietors of the "Sea
Island" plantations in days when "cotton was king." The ability to
control the market so as to bring to their own manufactories the
choicest tobacco is the main secret of the success of the larger
houses, not, as is frequently supposed, any particular superiority in
the workmen.

The principal cigarette factory is, as is well known, the factory of M.
Susini, "La Honoradez," "Honoradez" signifying in Spanish, honesty, the
motto of the house. It consists of a series of irregular buildings,
covering an area in space about equal to that occupied by the usual
Broadway block. On the upper floor of the principal building we find a
lot of tobacco, which has just arrived, and is being prepared for
inspection; the first requisite being to remove from it any leaves that
are either dead or in any way injured. The tobacco lays loosely
scattered over an immense wooden tray, which is kept continually
moving, by means of machinery, from one end of a table to the other.
Around this table are seated some twelve or fourteen Cuban workmen, all
good judges of tobacco. Each one throws aside such leaves as he deems
unfit for use, while the slow but yet continual motion given to the
tray brings each imperfection successively before the eyes of all. The
next step is to free the tobacco from any particles of sand or earth
that may adhere to it. This is done by moving the tray by machinery,
until it is over a large bin, into which the tobacco is allowed to
fall, being subjected in its passage to a powerful current of air
induced by means of an immense fan, likewise worked by machinery. One
step more, and a very simple one--that of drying--and the tobacco is
ready for a change of form. The tobacco is dried by simply exposing it
on the roof, for a few hours, to the heat of the sun. For cigarettes it
can scarcely be too dry, or for cigars too damp. A Cuban would not
think of smoking other than a damp cigar. In the factories one sees the
workmen smoking cigars they have just rolled, and no native could
understand why one should smoke dry cigars in which so much of the
natural flavor has been lost.

Thus far the process has been entirely one of cleansing or of freeing
from impurities. The next step is that of cutting the leaves into fine
particles in order to adapt the tobacco for cigarettes. The scattered
leaves are first collected and subjected to powerful hydraulic
pressure, from which they come out looking for all the world like a
pile of snuff-colored brick. The moulded tobacco next goes to the
cutting machine, falling from thence into a sieve, the meshes of which
pass only such pieces as have been reduced to the proper size. The
remainder is passed into a hopper, and thence goes for a second
cutting. One step more, and the tobacco will be issued to the
"rollers." Some half a dozen Chinese enter the room, each carrying with
him a small vessel containing an aromatic liquid, with which the loose
tobacco is carefully sprinkled. The preparation of this liquid is not
known. It is doubtless the desire to keep it secret that leads to the
preference of Chinese over native labor.

Before following the tobacco furher, let us look at the remaining
portion of the cigarette, the wrapper. The original envelope for the
tobacco was doubtless composed of leaves, the followers of Columbus
carrying back to Spain accounts of the strange custom existing among
the natives of San Salvador, the smoking of tobacco wrapped in the
leaves of the palm, which was doubtless the primitive cigarette. In
France to this day new straws are much used, but generally paper has
become the popular envelope. This paper must be specially manufactured.
Most of it comes from Barcelona, where the making of cigarette paper
constitutes an important industry. All of that used at the "Honoradez"
factory, after inspection, is carefully stamped with the name "Susini."
By unrolling any of this brand of cigarettes this mark can be readily
seen, and serves as the readiest means of detecting counterfeits. A
portion of the paper is sprinkled with various preparations to give to
it the flavor of tea, licorice, or such other taste as may suit certain
consumers. This explains the variation in the color of the wrapper,
which is sometimes straw-color, sometimes brown, but more usually
white, the latter color distinguishing the paper which has not been
artificially flavored. In the cutting machine the paper is rapidly
converted into the proper size for envelopes, while another machine
close at hand is turning out little bits of pasteboard for such of the
cigarettes as are to be made with a mouthpiece.

Both tobacco and paper are now ready to be given out to the "rollers."
Let us go down and watch them as they come pouring in. Both sexes and
all ages have representations here. Each one awaits his turn, and then
receives, after it has been carefully weighed, his or her allowance of
tobacco, some five thousand papers, and a large wooden hoop. The hoop
serves as a rude but very accurate gauge, its circumference being of
such a size as to properly encompass five thousand cigarettes of such
size as will contain the entire amount of tobacco issued. A slight
excess of both tobacco and paper, say sufficient to make forty or fifty
cigarettes, is usually given, intended for the personal consumption of
the employee. When their work is completed and returned to the factory,
they receive in exchange therefor a small copper check payable on
demand. So common are these checks in Havana that a few years
since--possibly it may be so still--they were constantly given to one
at the various stores, and were commonly received as current coin.

Physically the cigar and cigarette makers are a sorry lot. The
continual odor of tobacco, their constant labor, with bodies bent over
tables, calling into play no muscle, no exertion, indeed, whatever,
excepting the exercise of their fingers--this cannot fail to have its
effect. The cigarette makers are injured, too, by the inhalation of an
almost invisible dust arising from the small particles of tobacco. The
compensation received appears very small. Four or five cigarettes a
minute is accounted good work, and even at this rate two days' steady
labor is required to fill a hoop, for which they receive less than two
dollars.

The larger number of cigarettes manufactured at Havana are made by
machinery which is exceedingly ingenious, and has proved thoroughly
successful. The cigarettes made by machinery are not only more tightly
wrapped, but also manufactured at a much reduced cost. Each machine is
capable of making thirty cigarettes per minute, 1,800 per hour, or
43,200 per day, thus replacing the labor of fourteen men, presuming
them to be capable of working ten hours per day. For such persons as
prefer making their own cigarettes, pressed packages of tobacco, with
little paper books containing the envelopes, are sold. The tobacco is
so neatly put up that were it not for the accompanying book, one would
almost fancy it to be a package of the most delicate French chocolate.
As illustration of the consumption of cigarettes it may be of interest
to state that three million cigarettes are made in the Honoradez
factory each year, while it is estimated that in their manufacture over
six million dollars is annually expended in the city of Havana alone.
The Cuban, indeed, is much more of a cigarette than a cigar smoker; the
cigarette is his constant companion. Even after dinner the cigarette
seems to be preferred. I remember once, at a very charming dinner
party, being quite astonished--for it was shortly after my arrival in
Havana--to find myself and the host the only cigar smokers. The rest of
our number, some six or seven, all Cubans, took to their accustomed
cigarette with a unanimity which has always led me to believe that my
good host himself felt called upon by his sense of politeness to do
violence to his own preference.

In connection with the manufacture of cigarettes, nothing strikes one
with more astonishment than the many industries which form accessories
to a factory. The printing and lithographic work, a large quantity of
which is required for the paper bundles or tasteful pasteboard boxes in
which the various packages are put up, is all done by the employees,
and even a photograph gallery is at hand for such persons as may desire
their own likeness to accompany each package. So cleverly is all this
work executed, that until very recently the bank notes and lottery
tickets, both of which are largely circulated, were here printed.
Rather odd to our American ideas, it must be confessed, is the
spectacle of bank notes and lottery tickets being printed side by
side--that too in a cigarette factory.

Boxes of tin, of wood, of all shapes and sizes, as well as kegs for
exportation to distant points, are made within these same walls, where
moulders, machinists, blacksmiths, tinmen, printers, lithographers,
engravers, painters, and carpenters, are all furnished with work. Two
hundred out of the twenty-five hundred employees are Chinese, and for
them is provided a separate dormitory, kitchen, and even bathrooms.




THE HARD TIMES.

WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR CHEAP LABOR?


    "WANTED.--

    _Work for a thousand starving Immigrants!_"

Such is our advertisement. _Cheap labor!_ that is the boon our
"society" seeks. We wish to "develop our resources"; and as rapidly as
possible, for in that lies all blessedness--real "sweetness and light."

Has not this delightful gospel been preached to us from pulpit and
forum now full fifty good years, and does any one doubt its divine
origin? Yes; I fear there is now and then to be found one of those
antiquated infidels who scorns our "cheap cotton" and holds fast to
manhood; who sniffs at our great new factory and says, "Give me a
_man_!"

It is some two years ago that one of these benighted men told me--I
pity him--he told me he had been into our beautiful Berkshire county to
enjoy the delicious air and the delightful mountains. He went to North
Adams, which lies so calm and basks so peacefully in the embraces of
its sheltering hills. He said that when the noonday bell clanged out, a
living torrent of men and women, boys and girls, poured forth from one
of the gorgeous temples which have been there raised for the worship of
the new god. In that temple were created cheap shoes. He said these men
and women, boys and girls, were haggard, old, squalid, dirty; they
showed traces--so it seemed to his jaundiced eyes--of drink,
hopelessness, lechery, and vileness. He asked who they were. He was
told--and they said it with glee--

"_That is our cheap labor!_"

And where does it come from--from the homes of New England? Oh, no!
From Ireland, from Germany, from Portugal, from China, from
Canadian-Acadie, that pastoral spot of which poets sing!

"Vileness, filth, baseness!" he said. "My God, has Berkshire come to
this!"

It was a very foolish thing to say, and his calling upon his antiquated
God was not only foolish, but useless. His God is not the God now.

He took a ride through the winding roads and wooded hills of that
delightful land. His driver proposed to take him round by the
"Limestone brook" to show him the new factory.

"And what do they make there?"

"Why, didn't you know? They are grinding up the white limestone, and
they send away tons and tons on't every day."

"And what is it used for?"

"Used for? It's used for mixin'. They make three grades: the sody
grade, and the flour grade, and the sugar grade."

"The deuce they do!"--that was a foolish exclamation. "Do you mean that
they use this to mix with flour and sugar?"

The man laughed pityingly. "Of course they do. It makes 'em healthier.
Flour and sugar is healthier and goes further with a little of this
'ere limestone dust mixed in--you see. It's cheaper too. This stuff is
sold for fifty cents a hundred, and flour, you know, costs six dollars
a hundred. Don't you see?"

The benighted infidel did see, and he indulged in some internal
ejaculations; but he fled from the simple and sincere hills of
Berkshire, and sought a solace in the coarse vulgarity and vice of
Boston.

But I am neglecting to say what our _society_ proposes to do; and when
I have told you _of course_ we shall expect you to subscribe.

"The Cheap Labor Society" proposes to introduce from Africa and China,
in batches of one thousand each, as rapidly as possible, able-bodied
men who will work cheap.

"To _develop the resources_" of the country is the end and aim of
all honorable men. In other words, we want cheap men so that we may
make cheap shoes, cheap hats, cheap mutton, and--cheap women.

We who are now here--_we_ do not wish to work at all. Work is a
_curse_. The Bible has said so, and every noble-minded man has said so,
and the clergy has said so, and we know it is and must be so. But yet
there are people existing in the depths of Africa and China who it is
believed will work rather than starve; and these we propose to bring as
rapidly as our means will permit.

We head our appeal, as you see, "Work wanted for a thousand starving
men," because we know that we can get more work out of men who are just
on the edge of starvation than from any other, and in that way we shall
"develop our resources" most effectively and rapidly.

It is quite true that we already produce more cotton cloth and more
boots and shoes than we can possibly sell; but we know--for have we not
political economy to teach us?--that when we get them cheap enough, say
to one-half their present starvation prices--every man, and every
woman, and every child will wear two shirts, and two hats, and two
pairs of shoes; and thus we shall have in a superior way that
blessedness of which poets write--the making "two blades of grass grow
where one grew before." Now, I ask any liberal-minded man if "two pairs
of shoes in place of one" is not higher and nobler than two blades of
grass? That goes without talking.

If work be indeed the curse of curses, why, let the sons of Ham
(Africa) and the sons of Shem (Asia) do it; for it is well known they
are accursed, and have been since the days of "good old Noah"; besides
which, having colored skins, we know just how to mark the helots; can
import them as fast as needed; can put all labor upon them, and can
thus keep our own Japhetic skins and hands clean and white.

Deferring to a not wholly extinct public opinion, which is now and then
announced by some orator to some small schoolboys, in words like these,
_Labore est honore_, and in the vernacular, "_Labor is honorable_," I
am compelled to deny it clearly and distinctly. Almost all know it, but
it may be best to say to those who do not:

If labor is honorable, why does every man refuse to hoe in his garden,
to make his fire, to raise his food? Why does every woman refuse to
cook her food, to make her clothes, to take care of her children? Why
do every father and every mother take special pains to so bring up and
educate their children that they can do no sort of hand work? Why is it
that high schools, and academies, and colleges are held as the most
majestic of blessings, except that they are intended to wholly unfit
boys and girls for the _necessary work of life_?

Why is it that those who do no work are always called "upper classes,"
and those who do much work are called "the masses," unless it is so?
Being so, let us agree to import "the masses" as rapidly as we can.

Permit me to here lay down another corner-stone: As cheapness is a
boon, of course cheap labor is a boon; if labor, even at a dollar a
day, is a blessing, it follows that labor at half a dollar a day is a
greater blessing; and if we can only get it to a quarter of a dollar a
day, will not mankind be four times as happy as when it is at a dollar
a day? And then, oh blessed time! When we get it down to one cent a day
shall we not be standing just in the portals of Paradise?

Let all men take heart, for we approach that time. I learned last
summer, in the lovely State of Connecticut, that the Messrs. Sprague
were hiring able-bodied men to work eleven hours a day, sometimes in
water and mud, at rebuilding their great Baltic dam, for eighty-three
cents a day, and that thousands more were ready to rush in. I may
recall to mind the dark ages, when ignorance prevailed, and men boasted
of a land (if there was one) where

    All the men were brave and all the women virtuous.

_All_ of that kind! Then there could have been no cheap labor, and the
boon which we now know to be the greatest vouchsafed to man could not
be enjoyed. There have been times when strong, honest men and strong,
honest (and permit me to say clean) women were thought to be the
fruition of a perfect and Christian civilization--when cheap cotton was
not thought to be the "one thing needful."

The good King Henri of Navarre is said to have hoped for the day when
in France the poorest peasant might have a fowl in his pot.

Besotted king! he did not know that in the good time coming, when we
shall bring in our one to ten thousand cheap Chinese per week, the
white man will be happy indeed who can get a pound of rice or potatoes
in his pot. A fowl in his pot! Foolish king!

"Progress"--what a lovely word!--progress has shown all mankind what a
glorious thing cheap labor is and must be. How great and happy are the
people who preach and practise it! "Progress"--a beautiful word
certainly, if we do really understand it. But I remember me of a man--a
brewer--who rather late in life had fallen in love with the word
"docile." He thought it a beautiful word. One day his partner returned,
having failed to collect a doubtful debt. My friend essayed it, but
returned red in the face.

"Well," said his partner, "have you got it?"

"Got it! The fellow won't do a thing. He's as _docile_ as hell!"

_Progress!_ Its meaning once was,

"Intellectual or moral advancement; improvement in knowledge or in
virtue."

Now it means _cheap cotton and cheap men and women_. To the enlightened
and prosperous English nation belongs the credit of this radical
discovery.

To England too belongs the invention or creation of our new god. She--I
am happy to say it--she invented and created the god we now worship. We
call him

    TRADE!

The first, last, and only commandment of our new god is,

"_Buy cheap and sell dear._"

Whatever nation or man worships this god, and obeys this first and
great commandment, is sure of blessedness; for that man or that nation
will get more money than other men and other nations, as England has;
and will be happy, _as she is_!

Swiftly and surely the belief and worship of the new god and the new
gospel is spreading into all lands. Men _fancy_ they still worship "the
Trinity," "Confucius," "Zoroaster," "Mohammed," "Mumbo-jumbo." It is
wholly a fancy. Men still _say_, "I believe in God the Father," etc.
They still say, "Do to others as you would have them do to you," is the
first and great commandment. But what they _do_ do, and wish to do, and
mean to do, is,

"To buy cheap and sell dear."

We need no missionaries to drive this gospel into heathen minds. It has
the charming vitalizing power of going itself. The Chinese have
received it, and have immediately taken the whole tea business out of
the hands of Messrs. Russell & Co. and Jardine, Matheson & Co.; have
quite put an extinguisher upon _their_ money-making. Indeed, do we not
know that _almost_ every European, Chinese, and Indian merchant has
failed, and the heathen Chinee sits in their seats.

How England came to invent this new gospel is known to many, though not
to all. Let me briefly sketch the amazing creation:

A century ago the strength and power of England was based upon her
yeomanry. They possessed much land; and upon the lovely rolling fields
of that lovely country their stone farm-houses and their small farms
were the homes and habitations of millions. From this strong and hardy
yeomanry were drawn the bowmen and the pike-men who made the armies of
the Edwards and the Henrys invincible; from them came the "jolly tars"
who seized victory for Drake and Nelson.

Then Liverpool was not, and Manchester was not, and _creation_ did
not pay tribute to England's god.

But a century ago Watt, the keen, canny Scotsman, discovered that
_steam_ was a giant, and could he but capture him and harness him into
his machine, what work might he not do? He did capture him, and he did
harness him to his machine; and now he works on, on, up, down, here,
there, not ceasing by night and day, by summer and winter; he tires
not, he rests not; for ever and for ever he toils on. He saws, he
grinds, he spins, he weaves, he ploughs, he thrashes, he drags, he
lifts. Such a giant he is!

_One_ man with the steam machine now does the work which once was done
by _ten_, _twenty_, _fifty_! He files, he cuts, he sews, he polishes,
he brews, he bakes, he washes, he irons. Is all this nothing?

It is vast--it is a _revolution_! And no man yet sees the end.

Trade now was exaggerated beyond all former measure, and henceforth was
to be the god of England and of the world. "Let us produce, let us buy
cheap and sell dear, and so we shall be blessed." England had coal deep
down in her bowels. Let her send her sons by thousands into the slime
and darkness to dig it out. Let her make steam, and cheap cotton, and
infinite iron, and let her make all mankind buy of her. "Let us," she
cried, "demand free trade! for _we_ can make cheap and sell dear, and
none can rival us."

She did demand free trade. She demanded it in India by seizing a
kingdom. She demanded it in China at the cannon's mouth. She got it.

She said to all peoples, "You may make corn, and cotton, and wool for
us, and we will make everything you want cheaper than you can make it
for yourselves, and happy you will be. We will make all the ships, will
bring your corn, and cotton, and wool to us, and we will carry all our
lovely manufactures to you, to the uttermost ends of the earth--at
_your_ cost. We will take toll of you both ways; we will make fair
profit on _your_ cotton, and on _our_ manufactures, and that will be
just and even, and we shall both be happy."

And so it has gone on for a hundred years, and gold has poured into
England's stomach, a flowing stream, until her eyes stick out with
fatness; she has even sought Turkish bonds for investment, and has lent
much money to the good Khedive of Egypt--_which she can't get back_!

Let us look at England for a moment, as she is to-day. She has built
magnificent temples dedicated to her great god all over England: at
Birmingham and Manchester, at Glasgow and Paisley; at Birkenhead and
Liverpool, at Preston and Salford, at Leeds and Nottingham--and where
not? England has become a great workshop in which the god of trade is
ministered to.

Her land? Yes, it is beautiful, but her _yeoman have disappeared_--all
have been drawn into the maw of the manufacturing monster. Forty
millions of people now has England, and only some seven per cent. of
them raise the food they eat. And how do the rest get their food? It is
quite simple: by selling to other nations the things they make, and
bringing back the food which other nations make.

It has been the boast of England that she had a larger population to
the square mile--389 human bodies--than any other land except one, and
more great cities than any other land but the "far Cathay"--if even she
be an exception.

That "inspired idiot" Goldsmith once sang in his pretty, sentimental
way,

    Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
    Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
    Princes and lords may flourish or may fade;
    A breath can make them as a breath has made:
    But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
    When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

"Bold peasantry," "stalwart yeomen," "hard-handed farmers"--what
preposterous phrases these seem now when we have the immense advantages
of "cheap labor"!

And we here in America--we too? But of us, anon, anon.

Great factories, great halls, great shops, abound--abound and magnify
that English land, so that a glamour has come over mankind, and
moon-faced idiots in all lands have cried, "Behold the glory of
England. Let us do likewise." Those great cities have glorified
themselves and have glorified England, and who has cared to look deeper
down into the mire? Have we seen these men and women, childhood and
age, reeking in squalor and vile with filth in the purlieus of every
temple? Have we looked into the slums of Liverpool and Glasgow, of
Edinburgh and Newcastle, to see men and women, childhood and age, in
all their divinity--or their damnation? Is all lovely--is it indeed? Is
this "progress"? Is it civilization? Is it Christianity? Of course it
is, all three.

I have mentioned the word _revolution_--social revolution. What is it?
Is it at hand? It is quite clear that this amazing power of steam and
machinery is doing _something_. It is quite clear that every machine
does the work of twenty men, and nineteen of these have got to seek
other means of support--they and their wives and their little ones.

It is well known that every man out of work means four mouths bare of
food. Who fills them? The rates (taxes) of course, and in London, the
last winter I was there, some six years ago, 80,000 paupers and beggars
were receiving public aid. "The laws of trade" is to make things right.
I think that is the name of the modern redeemer of men. If work is not
there and food is not there, man will flow at his own sweet will, like
water seeking its level, until he finds his food and his work
somewhere. But if man's "sweet will" decides not to flow, but to lie
down and make his bed in your _pockets_, and feed on the contents in
the shape of taxes--what is to come then? Why, he must be depleted, or
he will deplete _you_. How to deplete him is a most interesting
question? He does not deplete himself, for it is manifest to men that
paupers in England and America get children as fast as they can; and
the clergy applaud and say, "Be fruitful and multiply." There is no
continence among them--none anywhere except in wicked France.

In the "good time coming" in England, the pauper will lie down with the
prince, and there will be peace while the pauper devours the prince; or
there will be pestilence, which is a sure depleter; or the idle army
may be used to deplete the mob. Who can say?

"But there is no danger! Of course not. Why croak?"

What has been will be, under the benign influence of cheap labor and
free trade--perhaps! Let me go on with my pleasant tale--do not
interrupt--I have the word--by and by you.

At this moment, to-day, this year of our Lord 1877, the merchant
princes of London, the manufacturing barons of Manchester are at their
wits' ends; for people refuse to buy the products of their mills.
Germany will not have them, and France will not, and America chooses to
make her own; and even India, ungrateful that she is, has gone to
spinning her own cotton. Mills are being closed in England, furnaces
are blown out, wages are reduced, and workmen are threatening to
_strike_, or have struck, and are settling down for a comfortable
winter upon the _rates_. All right! England has "developed her
resources," and trade is free. Let her sing hosannahs, and cry, "Glory
be to our god," for no such beautiful "progress" was ever seen on earth
before.

What is to happen to the 300,000 or half million land-owners of
England, if outside pig-headed peoples wilfully and maliciously refuse
to buy the mill products of England and so to feed the 37,200,000
people of England who have no land upon which to raise their own food?
What is to happen if some fine day the 37,200,000 take it into their
foolish heads to say:

"We do not like to starve. We are many, you are few. We will take the
land and raise our own food, and you can emigrate if you like, or you
can stand out in the cold as we have done. We don't like it."

It is not quite easy to shoot those people; and if they choose to stay
in England, it is not quite easy to _make_ them emigrate--not even if
the "laws of trade" tell them they really ought to go.

And besides, it is so easy for 100,000 paupers to emigrate--to take
their wives and their children, their flocks and their herds, their
camels and their asses, their beds and their tents, and go forth to
seek the promised land--the land flowing with milk and honey. It is so
simple, so pleasant, that one is lost in amazement that they do not
go--that they wickedly persist in staying where they are paupers, and
refuse to obey the law of "supply and demand."

Such conduct is quite unworthy of enlightened Britons who "never will
be slaves."

It is too bad--it really is--and political economy ought to be preached
at them severely. Why is it too that outside barbarians refuse to buy
the divine productions of England? Some think we may do well to take a
look at this part of the problem before _we_ go on with our plans for
introducing more cheap labor into our own happy land.

A century ago, as has been said, England discovered the wonderful way
of applying the _steam giant_ to the creation of manufactured goods,
and for three-quarters of the century she has had a practical monopoly;
has turned the golden streams of the whole world to enrich herself; has
preached free trade; has said, "Buy cheap and sell dear," and has set
her god on a high throne. But slowly and haltingly other and stupider
nations have caught the tricks of the new Cultus; have caught little
steam giants, and have set them to work to turn their mills and grind
their grists. Germany and the United States are two of these dull
nations who have done a stroke of work in this way. France has really
been too stupid to do much at it--has indeed gone back to a tariff
after having tasted of the new gospel, and now obstinately refuses to
live by it--_will_ pay her debts, and will _not_ enjoy unlimited
pauperism.

Germany has, however, done well. She now makes woollens, cottons,
linens, irons, steels, penknives, and Bibles quite as cheap as England,
and, as some say (one of her own Centennial Commission), "cheaper and
nastier." Now _her_ traders are ubiquitous; they go, with the wandering
Jew, the fascinating Englishman, the penetrating Yankee, into all
heathen lands, carrying everywhere the new gospel of trade, and
introducing to youthful minds the civilizing influences of lager beer
and free lunches. Aided by the persuasive tones of the patient and
soothing Yankee, they are doing wonders in teaching the value of time,
by founding establishments for "stand-up drinks" in every lazy and
luxurious land, by giving prizes to all who _smoke while they work_,
thus making labor cheerful if not respectable. So patient and
indefatigable has Germany been, that at Manchester in England, which
may perhaps be termed the Delos of the new faith, I was told some five
years ago that she had just taken the contract, had bought from Germany
the iron beams and rafters for a new city building, and had put them up
under the very noses of the worshippers who burn their sacred fires at
Birmingham and Wolverhampton. And so, in the whirligig of time, Trade
brings his pleasant revenges.

I was told also--the newspapers said it, and it must be true--that Mr.
Mundella, an enterprising M.P., and a devout worshipper of the new
god, who is a vast producer at Nottingham of stockings and hosiery of
every sort--had found it best--well, absolutely necessary--in order to
compete with the new disciples in Germany, to remove a part of his
machines and machinery to Germany, and make his stockings there, in
order that those ridiculous and cheap Germans should not quite put a
stop to his trade. It was whispered about that French-made tools were
being bought and brought into England for use there, and it was said
openly that American saws, vises, and axes were playing the very deuce;
and now, just after the triumphs of the "Centennial," Englishmen are
writing home that Yankee silks will also play another very deuce with
them if they don't get more and cheaper labor. I see too, by late
letters from England, that they propose to cheapen iron by putting
cheap Chinese labor into the iron works!

And yet in Germany they cry out that _they_ have a panic, and that
trade is dull, and people will persist in failing, and that other
people won't buy all they can make; they too are at their wits' ends.
There must be something wrong, the "doctrinaires" say, about the gases.
Trade is not free enough, or labor is not cheap enough, or they have
too much or too little paper money, or they don't try woman suffrage.
At any rate the new gospel is right--_must be right_, because if
you obey the laws of trade and buy cheap and sell dear, you are sure to
be happy.

And France--it is frightful to think of France. Steeped in stupidity
and enveloped in Cimmerean fog, she resists the new gospel. She will
not send her missionaries abroad over the world; she will not build
great factories and temples; she will not take her whole people from
their small farms, where they raise great surpluses of food, to put
them into the new temples; she does not even work her land with steam,
nor does she hanker for the cheap (and nasty) things which England and
Germany are so ready, willing, and anxious to pour into every
household; indeed, will not have them at all. Oh, the economic
condition of France makes the heart of the enlightened priest of the
new gospel weep. France has taken no steps to introduce the cheap labor
of Ireland or China, or even of Africa--right at her doors--into her
own wretched country, and there is no sign that she will. What feeling
but contempt can the sincere doctrinaire entertain for France?

It would be indeed strange--and yet it is not wholly impossible--that
England and Germany and the United States, all of whom have for
centuries been cursing work, and crying out against work, and doing all
manner of things to get rid of work, and educating their best and
wisest not to do it--it would be indeed strange if some day they should
be crying out, "Give us work, in God's name." Strange, but not wholly
impossible.

We come back now to our own country--to the

    Land of the free, and the home of the blest.

We are the child of England, and we revere, we love, we emulate her. We
adopt her methods, we worship her god. We follow in her footsteps, and
emulating her example, we send out missionaries to extend the gospel of
trade; we love to buy cheap and sell dear; we love to scheme; we
delight in speculation, for that is an intellectual operation. We have
been taught for centuries that the mind is divine, the body devilish.
We do well, therefore, to despise the devilish body and exalt the
godlike soul. We do well to depress and belittle the hand, and to
glorify and enlarge the head. We do well to say it, and to make men
believe it if we can, that the "pen is mightier than the sword" or the
plough. We do well to convert our boys and girls into exaggerated
heads, even if they are useless, because we thus exalt them toward
gods. We do well to leave out of view all just balance between head and
hand because that is common and vulgar. We do well to say that the man
who _says_ a good thing is greater than he who _does_ a good thing, for
the spiritual _is_ divine, and the earthly _is_ base!

Keeping in view the short time we have possessed this land, we may
fairly arrogate to ourselves what England has long claimed for herself,
great "progress." We have created more great cities, more luxurious
habits, more free whiskey, more useless railroads, more brokers'
boards, more wild-cat banks, more swindling mining companies, more
political jobs, more precocious boys and more fast girls, more bankrupt
men and more nervous women than any country known in history. Following
the "example of our illustrious predecessor"--England--we have done one
thing of which we are justly proud, and the full account of which,
illustrated with pictures, our "Government" (as we facetiously call it)
has published in some ten fine volumes. And what is the example we
followed? It is this: England, having possessed herself of the vast
kingdom of India, found a production there of opium very lucrative to
her and very desirable to many of the Chinese, who enjoyed the smoking
of the pleasing drug. England greatly desired to sell this drug to
China, for it was all in the interest of trade. One fine day some
Chinese emperor or mandarin took it into his meddling head to check or
forbid the freedom of this trade: and then the virtue, the religious
fervor of the devoted Briton was roused. Ninety-three thousand chests
of good merchantable opium, worth many taels, was not a dogma to be
trifled with, not even by the Emperor of the Flowery Kingdom. What!
Should trade be impeded by this yellow Mantchu, this devotee of
Confucius, this long-eyed heathen, because he had some sentimental
notions about his people's morals or manners? Good heavens! Could trade
stand that? By no means. Persuasion must bring him to his senses if he
had any. Persuasion was tried, and various iron arguments were used.
They battered down Canton, they assaulted and took the cities of Amoy,
Chusan, Ningpo, Woosung, Shanghai, Nanking; and thus the English
missionaries kept on persuading until at last the heathen Chinee
yielded: was persuaded to pay $12,000,000, to open the ports of Canton,
Amoy, Foochoo, Ningpo, Shanghai to trade; to welcome all future opium
with open arms; to make the good Queen Victoria a present of the port
of Hong Kong; and so on and on. Thus, under the persuasion of a
fraternal war, "trade, civilization, and Christianity" made themselves
safe in the high places of China; since which happiness has bourgeoned
there if not in England!

Could our youthful but pious nation do better than follow this
illustrious example? Certainly not. Something must be done. If China
could thus be persuaded to trade by the English, poor little Japan
might be persuaded to trade by the United States. We could but try. We
did, and Perry sailed away, with his ships and his cannons, to try. The
Japs were benighted, foolish, and weak. They declined, and said, "No,
we don't want any of your trade. We make _all we want_, and don't care
either for your religion, your opium, your whiskey, or your stovepipe
hats."

"But," said the gallant Perry, "that is a wicked sentiment. The
brotherhood of nations is the cornerstone of modern civilization. Trade
is divine, and stovepipe hats mark the intellectual races. We are your
brothers. God has made of one blood all the nations of the earth. If
you will not be our brothers, and trade, we shall be obliged to shoot.
Don't want to, but must. One--two--three. Bang!"

Well, the Japs also yielded to these arguments, and thenceforth have
been happy. Trade has prevailed. Rice has gone up, and a good many
Japs have gone to the ethereal spaces, overcome with hunger. Railways
have been built, national debts have been created; the Mikado and
Tycoon have fought, the Daimios have quarrelled, white men have been
assassinated, beggary has begun, taxes press upon the people; and
indeed all the signs which mark the high civilization of trade have
appeared. "Progress," we are assured, is now certain, and Japan is
"developing her resources." Bliss ensues. All of which is written down
and printed in many volumes for all men to read. And "Perry's
Expedition" can be read in beautiful volumes which cost you, we'll say,
$50 for the books and a million for the glorious expedition.

We make any sacrifices for the new religion, and are willing to waste
the filthy lucre of gold to extend a divine idea.

We did it!

We opened their ports!

We extended the blessing of trade!

We have made the Japs into Yankees!

They are learning the benefits of cheap and nasty!

Glory be to the new god!

Massachusetts! Massachusetts has held herself and has been held as the
heart and the brain of New England. She has had (so she has believed)
the heart to feel a moral principle and the head to accept a great
thought. She has had brave-hearted men and clear-eyed women. Once--let
us make a brief retrospect--she had "pilgrim fathers." She had what she
and the world too thought a religion, which she believed in. She had a
people of sound English stock, who in this clear New England air grew
to hate squalor, vice, beggary, debt, and damnation. Once, fifty years
ago, she had no great cities; her "Hub," Boston, in 1830 had but the
poor population of 61,392, nearly all born on her soil, few of them
dirty or beggared. Once, fifty years ago, all through Massachusetts
were clean, decent, white-housed towns, such as Worcester, and
Springfield, and Northampton, and Concord, and Salem, and Newburyport,
centres of small but most cultivated and earnest social life.

Then small farms were cultivated by families of New England birth, out
of whom came able men and handsome women. Children lived with parents,
and did not tyrannize them. Silk gowns were rare, and pianos unknown;
"art" and "culture" had not become household words, but butter was made
at home, and the mystery of bread was known to ladies. Few then had
been to Paris, and few therefore knew how vulgar they were. But "where
ignorance is bliss," etc. They got on, and did not know what poor
creatures they were.

Every child was expected to learn the three R's at the little red
school-house, and to _perfect_ his education by taking hold of material
nature with his hands, and learning what it was by mastering it. That
was education. The parson knew a little Latin, and he was all. They
thought this worked well. Lamentable indeed!

The man expected to marry a capable wife, and to bring up children; he
expected to work on his land or in his shop, to dress decently in
clothes which his wife had made, securing a reasonable support in this
world by his own labor, not by _hocus-pocus_; he provided for his
future salvation by imbibing the five points of Calvin through
fifty-four sermons a year, with now and then a Thursday lecture to fill
in the cracks. Thus he was sure of his food here and of salvation
hereafter--through the merciful providence of God, and not his own
righteousness. New England thus produced a breed of people unlike and
they fancied not inferior to any that history tells of.

But it would not do. There was no progress--it was a lamentable
condition of things. They had _not_ got a population of 211.78 to the
square mile, raked together from the four corners of creation, making
the State the sixth in density of all in the world, as she now boasts
she has, and thus she had totally failed to secure the higher and
better civilization.

They had not "developed their resources"; they had not built up
splendid great cities; they had little knowledge of the delights of
trade. Things could not get on so--that was not "progress." Here was
water power running to waste all over Massachusetts; there were keen
and able heads who believed they knew how to set these powers to work
to grind their grists; it was quite ridiculous that these tumbling
streams should not be turning millwheels and spinning cheap cotton. And
then too not a railroad ran through Massachusetts--no transportation
except in wagons. "Good God!" the pious people naturally exclaimed;
"what misery, what a slow set!" Money--money was then loaned at only
six per cent.! Things must be changed. They were changed. Mill after
mill was built, among them the "_Atlantic_." Railway after railway was
built, among them the "_Eastern_," and the stock was quickly paid up,
and all went merry as a marriage bell. But some people own those stocks
now, and do _not_ find themselves happy!

What is the cure for these shrivelled dividends? Clearly, is it not,
_to bring in cheap labor_? Let every man who has nothing and wants
much, take shares in

    "THE CHEAP LABOR SOCIETY."

Seeing what has been done for Massachusetts, it is easy to see what can
be done. And what has been done? In fifty years she has built up
Lowell, and Lawrence, and Worcester, and Holyoke, and many more great
towns. She has increased Boston to a population of 341,919 souls--or
bodies--in the year of grace 1875. She has "improved" things so, has
made such progress, that Boston now spends yearly $15,114,389.73
(auditor's report 1875-6), which means that out of every man, woman,
and child of Boston was taken in 1875, for public expenses, the sum of
_forty-four dollars_! The happiness resulting from this may be partly
understood when I relate that this tax is some four hundred per cent.
greater than the "effete aristocracies" of Europe have ever got out of
their down-trodden serfs, or have even dared to try to get. One other
charming effect of this style of self-government (?), as we please to
call it, is, that it has driven out of Boston a set of bloated money
getters, who fancy it is not pleasant to pay large taxes, so they go to
Nahant, and Barnstable, and Concord for a few months, and rid Boston of
themselves and--their taxes! Shrewd fellows those Boston Democrats!
They know how to _govern_ a city. So they do in New York. So they do in
Cambridge.

But let us look at another of the evidences of true progress. Every man
votes, you must know, whether he owns any property or not. Now, Mr.
Daniel L. Harris has discovered, in his researches at Springfield, that
of the voters there, _four_ pay taxes and _five_ do not; that is,
four-ninths of the voters pay the taxes and five-ninths who pay none
outvote the four who pay all. This is so generous on the part of the
four that we ought to try to see what it is the four really are about.
Applying the same ratio to Boston, we find that every tax-payer, every
man of the four-ninth party, really paid to the yearly expenditures of
the city of Boston, in the blessed year 1875-6, the neat little sum of
three hundred and ninety-nine dollars, money of this realm.[1]

      [1] Total polls of Boston, 85,243. Four-ninths of these will go
      into $15,114,389--total expenditure of the year 1875-6--$399
      times.

And yet the business men of Boston complain that they have made no
money for three years, and that they can't make any. How absurd that
is, when they can pay such taxes as these! And then think what they do
in Boston for the intellect (as it is called). While they stupidly
complain that they can't make any money, they spend on their common
schools every year--over two millions of good dollars (2,015,380)--and
they teach what--what don't they teach? I counted, I think, _thirty-six
branches_ as being taught in the Boston schools last year. "Art" and
"culture," you know! And in those brutal old times of fifty years ago,
they taught only the three R's. Unhappy and despicable! Did they not
deserve it?

And then the generosity of these Boston merchants who can't, as they
pretend, make anything. Look for a moment at that!

They paid in 1865 for the teaching of each one of those children those
thirty-six branches, so necessary to salvation, the sum of $21.16; in
1875 the sum of $35.23. That is, they voluntarily and gladly paid
somebody sixty-six per cent. more for their work in 1875 than in 1865,
and all the while those merchants pretend they are making no money. Do
they expect us to believe that?

If they want to make money, why not at once bring in more cheap labor?
The Chinese are ready to come, and the negroes, even if Ireland can
spare no more of her enlightened people. And then what a boon this
class of people would be to our aspiring statesman. For the sum of two
dollars they are entitled to vote, and then any man who feels a desire
to be a governor or an M.C. can, by paying this paltry pittance,
secure the votes of a grateful constituency. Is it not, therefore, our
supreme duty to bring in this class of voters as rapidly as possible?
We need _population_ and we need _voters_. England has a population of
389 to the square mile and we in Massachusetts have only 211! Should we
not hide our faces with shame while such an inferiority lasts?

There are people now who are getting up a scare about the wonderful
growth of the Holy Catholic Church, claiming that that church demands
of all its members (as it does) allegiance _first_ to the Church, and
then _second_ to the government where its subjects happen to be. I
do not think much of this now that Antonelli is dead; but there may be
something in it. I question whether Massachusetts can any longer put
forth pretensions to being a Puritan or a Unitarian or religious State
of any sort unless it be a Catholic one. Go with me to the U.S. census
report of 1870:

    The whole population of Massachusetts in 1870 was    1,457,351

    Of these were born in foreign lands         353,319

    Born of foreign parents in Massachusetts    626,211    979,530

Thus, it seems, the population of Massachusetts is already foreign-born
and of foreign parents, _over two-thirds_. What number of these foreign
people are Roman Catholics, any other person can guess as well as I
can. But it is quite certain that this blessing, such as it is, has
reached us incidentally through our cheap labor; that is, it is a sort
of superadded bliss, coming as an unexpected reward of unconscious
virtue. In the words of Shakespeare, "We are twice blessed." We have
got cheap labor and we have got the Catholic church crowning every hill
and blooming in every valley.

At any rate it is quite certain that few if any of this class of the
Massachusetts people are either Puritans, Unitarians, or Episcopalians;
and some of them I strongly suspect are like the good sailor, neither
Catholics nor Protestants, but "captains of the fore-top!" In
Massachusetts, as I have said, there was in 1870 of this kind of
population sixty-six per cent., and all have votes. In the whole United
States there was forty-five per cent. of this sort, all of whom have
votes. It is known also that New York, and Boston, and Lowell, and Fall
River are intrinsically foreign cities. It is known that the majority
of voters in those cities have no property which pays taxes; it is
known that this class of voters are now well organized, and can and do
vote and do elect such men as will _please them_--men who "will tickle
me if I'll tickle you"--that is the sort of statesman we now welcome
with effusion; indeed, we seek no other. We mean to deplete all
over-grown fortunes; we mean through the taxes to equalize things and
make Saturday afternoons pleasant. I have not at hand, just this
moment, the figures to tell what good was done in Boston last year to
the class called "the poor." But I have them for Cambridge, a small
city almost a part of Boston. In that small select and intellectual
city the expenditures in direct aid of "the poor," not counting work
which was _made_ for them, was in dollars, $80,000, and that does not
count a large sum besides given in private charity. This help was given
to some 5,400 persons; stating it simply, in the words of political
economy, one person in seven or eight of that cultivated and select
community was a pauper. Another feature of this new and peculiar social
state is this: that the voters who have no property and pay no taxes do
not enjoy the possibility of starving, nor do they look with favor upon
advice which tells them to "Go West." Why should they go West? They do
not know where to go--indeed, they have no money to go with--nor do
they know that there would be any work for them there. They _choose_ to
stay where they are, and they will vote for people who will help them
to stay; and they have five votes to the tax-payer's four, which
significant little fact should not be lost sight of!

In our laudable desire for "progress," in our vital wish "to develop
our resources," we have produced many results, some interesting ones,
quite unexpected. We have got cheap labor and we have got cheap cotton
cloth and cheap boots and shoes, and a good deal of all of them. The
smart little city of Lowell was begun by the most capable and
enterprising of Boston's "solid men"; it was begun upon a theory that
men and women in New England ought to be clean, decent, and virtuous.
In its beginning nearly all the operatives were of New England birth,
descendants of Puritans who were used to decency, cleanliness, and
virtue. Then they lived and lodged in houses belonging to the mills,
which were _regulated_--the men in their own boarding houses, the women
in theirs. All were expected to be in their houses by or before a
certain hour, say ten o'clock at night.

Then every young lady had a green silk parasol for Sunday's use, and
she wrote poetry for the "Lowell Offering," if she felt the divine
movement. At that early undeveloped time an English gentleman, one
Anthony Trollope, visited the nascent city. He lamented the
narrow-mindedness of the projectors, and predicted it would not work;
that the little Lowell could never compete with such highly developed
cities as Manchester and Preston, where they knew the magic of "cheap
labor." In other words, Lowell could not be a great success.

That Arcadian simplicity worked for a while, but inevitably the magic
of cheap labor made itself felt--it was potent--it came, it saw, it
conquered. And now the best information I have convinces me that the
squalor, filth, recklessness, and happiness are nearly or quite equal
to what they are in the noble cities of Manchester and Glasgow in
England. Should Mr. Trollope revisit those scenes of his youth, he
would be as much delighted as any Englishman could permit himself to be
with anything outside his "Merrie England" at the delectable advances
made there.

He would find labor cheap and cotton cheap--as cheap as they are in his
beloved Manchester. He would find, as in his beloved Manchester, that
they made more than they could sell; which is the secret of cheapness.
He would find that in that small elysium, in the year 1874, they made
135,000,000 yards of cotton cloth, which gospel of cotton they were
then spreading abroad over all the earth, sending some of it to his
beloved Manchester. He would learn also that there was invested there
some $20,000,000 of good money of the realm, a large proportion of
which paid no dividends; which also is an excellent method of securing
cheapness. He would find all "narrow-minded regulations" quite done
away with, and the full liberty of the subject enjoyed by all; that
people staid "out nights" according to their own sweet wills; that men
slept when they pleased and where they pleased, and with whom they
pleased--women too for that matter; and that life was as free and
pleasant as his good English heart could wish. He would find that the
old-fashioned, narrow-minded New England stock had disappeared--not
being cheap enough--and their places were fully supplied with a
delightful conglomeration of gentlemen and ladies who had fled from
poor Ireland, from the Azores, from Germany, from pastoral Acadie; and
here and there he would note the pigtail of the frugal Chinese, the
_avant courier of a better time coming_.

Thus he would find that Lowell, having rid herself of narrow-minded
notions, having followed reverently in the footsteps of his illustrious
Manchester, was _a success indeed_.

And _Lynn_ too. She discovered thirty years ago the surprising
swiftness of "teams," whereby six or eight men working in partnership,
each one doing only one thing, say one a welt, and another a bottom,
and another the eyelets, etc., could put a shoe through in one-eighth
the time of the old "one-man" way. Millions of shoes were made, and
shoes were cheap. Much money flowed in, and life was lovely at Lynn.
But Paradise pales if too long continued. The sewing-machines came, and
McKaye was a god--for the master. One man with his machine could do the
work of twenty or forty men in the teams. Shoes were now amazingly
cheap. The Crispins wept, the master laughed, and the making of shoes
went merrily on. And what became of the Crispins? They struck! and
then--they disappeared, vanished, went too "where the woodbine
twineth." They too were not wanted. Let them get themselves out of the
way! the Chinese are coming!

They got much consolation from a certain set of preachers, who assured
them it was all right--"Laws of trade, you know," "cheap shoes good for
the masses," "water will find its level," "the masses in Africa will
now be able to wear shoes," "the best government is _no_ government,"
"all one great brotherhood," "every man for himself and the devil take
the hindmost."

Paradise was just beyond their noses, and it lay just here: "When
things get very cheap every man will only work three hours a day. All
men can play the rest of the time, or they can cultivate their
_minds_!" "Beautiful! Beautiful! Hosannah to the highest!" was what
every disbanded Crispin ought to have said; but, foolish man as he was,
he kept saying, "My _body_ is hungry, and I have no work, and I will
steal some food--or become a broker! You had better look out."

But luckily the Southern war came, and it made places for a good many
men, and the "Government" (not us men and women)--the Government paid
_the bills_, and so we were tided over. And now we have got the bills,
and we have got cheap labor too! And we are as near to "no government"
as any people ever was except wild Indians; and that we know--for the
doctrinaires say so--is Paradise. If it is not that, what in Heaven's
name is it?

There was once a notion that the men who had knowledge, and experience,
and strength, should think for and act for those who had not; in short,
that those who were strong should protect and care for the weak. The
father in some countries--not all--yet does pursue this plan; he is
head and master of his household, and is expected to know how to act
and what to do better than his boys and girls.

We have exploded that idea. Under this "best government upon which the
sun ever shone," we have made discoveries. We find that children know
what _they_ want better than their fathers; that women are really
stronger than men, have larger brains, more sense, more heart, and more
purity; and that when women and children both vote (mistress Biddy too)
the world will go right--for they--the pure, the honest--_will_ "holler
out gee!"

This old paternal or family government was a _despotism_, tempered
with love, to be sure, but a despotism not to be tolerated in an
enlightened age. Shovel it out, shovel it out!

It is a sad fact that children now, while wiser and purer than their
fathers, are not physically quite so strong. But it is found that the
pistol puts the holders upon a _perfect equality_, and that is the
thing to be aimed at. The redress of the weak is therefore in the
pistol, which I expect to see in every child's pocket soon. The tyrant
man will then be degraded to his place. With women voting, and children
holding pistols, men and fathers will be pulled down from the pedestal
they have usurped so long.

We know that women have more virtue than men (?), and that children
have more purity, and therefore, knowing well the "good, the true, and
the beautiful," they must and shall govern the land. They shall be
tyrannized no longer.

And so, as New England has cut into old England, and has set her own
machinery and steam to work making many things cheaper than old England
can make them, and bids fair to starve out some of her garrisons of
workers, just in the same way have Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, and
Chicago taken it into their heads to set their machinery and steam to
work; and now torrents of hats, and shoes, and woollens, and cottons,
and clothing, and furniture, and stoves, and pots are pouring out of
those nests of industry, so that even they are beginning to cry out,
"Why don't you buy what we want to sell, and thus make _us_ rich?"

If, then, we in New England refuse to buy--refuse to buy at profitable
prices the productions of old England--what does England propose to do
with her millions of non-food-producing workmen? She demands free
trade; says we are fools for not opening our ports and accepting with
effusion the blessings of cheap goods she would so willingly send us?
She does not quite like to open _our_ ports, as she did those of China,
nor does she incline at present to carry into France the civilizing
influences of her cheap looms at the point of the bayonet. _She_ must
answer the question, not I.

And in New England--if that "West," with its fertile fields and its
surplus food, will go to making cheap shoes and cheap cotton, and will
not see how much happier she would be if she would only make corn and
pork and swap them with New England for shoes and cotton--what will New
England, what will Massachusetts do with her 507,034 workers who do not
produce their own food? This is rather a vital question to those men
and women who have no food. It is rather vital too to the capital
invested in mills and machines in Lowell and elsewhere.

I come back now to my first proposition for the cure of the ills of
life--_cheap labor_.

If trade be the true god, let us worship him; if to buy cheap and sell
dear be the true gospel, let us extend that; if to convert men and
women into tenders to machines be really the perfection of human
nature, let us import the wild African and the heathen Chinee rapidly,
largely, for nothing can be cheaper than they. Let us get ready our
ships; let us open the ports of Dahomey, and Congo, and Canton, and
Shanghai; let us exchange whiskey and tobacco for able-bodied men and
women; let us fill this land with the black men and the copper men; let
us perfect our civilization, for those men and those women can live
cheap and work cheap; and if _white_ men and _white_ women do go to the
wall--why should they not?

Gentle reader, you ask what is the _moral_?

I reply, Does not our civilization demand _cheap cotton_ and not great
_men and women_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand free _pauper immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand cheap _Chinese immigration_? Clearly it does.

Does it not demand free _pauper_ and free _Chinese voting_? Clearly it
does.

Does it not demand that "Trade" shall be god, and the _laws of supply
and demand_ shall rule? Clearly it does.

Does it not call this "progress"? Clearly it does.

And is not all this leading us directly to--_Heaven_ or to _Hell_?
Clearly they are.

And you, gentle reader, can decide which.

CHARLES WYLLY ELLIOTT.




THE TWO WORLDS.


    Two mighty silences, two worlds unseen
      Over against each other lie:
    For ever boundlessly apart have been,
          For ever nigh.

    In one is God Himself, and angels bright
      Do congregate, and spirits fair;
    And, lost in depths of mystic light,
          Our Dead dwell there.

    All things that cannot fade, nor fall, nor die,
      Voices beloved, and precious things foregone,
    Float up and up, and in that silence high,
          With God grow one.

    No barren silence, nay, but such as over
      Lips that we love its spell may fling,
    Where tender words like nested swallows hover,
          Ere they take wing.

    Sometimes from that far land there comes a breeze,
      Soft airs surprise us on our way,
    As dew-drops from above; then on our knees
          We fall and pray.

    And oft in some low crimson coast of cloud
      We deem we see its far-off strand:
    Our hearts, like shipwrecked sailors, cry aloud,
          "The Land! the Land!"

    And side by side that other world unknown,
      Drenched in unbroken silence lies,
    World of ourselves, where each one lives alone,
          And lonely dies.

    With our unuttered griefs, our joys untold,
      Our multitudinous thoughts swift throng,
    We dwell; one silence them and us doth fold
          All our life long.

    Out from those depths there comes a cry of pain.
      Ah, pitifully, Lord, it calls,
    "Behold the sorrows of our hearts!" and then--
          A silence falls.

    Nought but the narrow strip doth lie between
      Of sounding surf that men call life;
    Yet none can pass between those worlds unseen,
          And end the strife.

    Die down, die down, O thou tormented sea!
      Suffer my silent world to fill
    With voices from that land which cry to me,
          "We love thee still."

    In vain: I hear them not! but o'er my loss
      Comes an apocalyptic voice,
    "There shall be no more sea, and thou canst cross."
          Rejoice! rejoice!

ELICE HOPKINS.




SISTER ST. LUKE.


They found her over there. "This is more than I expected," said
Carrington as they landed--"seven pairs of Spanish eyes at once."

"Three pairs," answered Keith, fastening the statement to fact and the
boat to a rock in his calm way; "and one if not two of the pairs are
Minorcan."

The two friends crossed the broad white beach toward the little stone
house of the light-keeper, who sat in the doorway, having spent the
morning watching their sail cross over from Pelican reef, tacking
lazily east and west--an event of more than enough importance in his
isolated life to have kept him there, gazing and contented, all day.
Behind the broad shoulders of swarthy Pedro stood a little figure
clothed in black; and as the man lifted himself lazily at last and came
down to meet them, and his wife stepped briskly forward, they saw that
the third person was a nun--a large-eyed, fragile little creature,
promptly introduced by Melvyna, the keeper's wife, as "Sister St.
Luke." For the keeper's wife, in spite of her black eyes, was not a
Minorcan at all; not even a southerner. Melvyna Sawyer was born in
Vermont, and, by one of the strange chances of this vast, many-raced,
motley country of ours, she had travelled south as nurse, and a very
good, energetic nurse too, albeit somewhat sharp-voiced, to a delicate
young wife, who had died in the sunny land, as so many of them die; the
sun, with all his good will and with all his shining, not being able to
undo in three months the work of long years of the snows and the bleak
east winds of New England.

The lady dead, and her poor thin frame sent northward again to lie in
the hillside churchyard by the side of bleak Puritan ancestors, Melvyna
looked about her. She hated the lazy tropical land, and had packed her
calf-skin trunk to go, when Pedro Gonsalvez surprised her by proposing
matrimony. At least that is what she wrote to her Aunt Clemanthy, away
up in Vermont; and although Pedro may not have used the words, he at
least meant the fact, for they were married two weeks later by a
justice of the peace, whom Melvyna's sharp eyes had unearthed, she of
course deeming the padre of the little parish and one or two attendant
priests as so much dust to be trampled energetically under her shoes,
Protestant and number six and a half double-soled mediums. The justice
of the peace, a good natured old gentleman who had forgotten that he
held the office at all, since there was no demand for justice and the
peace was never broken in the small lazy village, married them as well
as he could in a surprised sort of a way, and instead of receiving a
fee gave one, which Melvyna, however, promptly rescued from the
bridegroom's willing hand, and returned with the remark that there was
no "call for alms" (pronounced as if it rhymed with hams), and that two
shilling, or mebbe three, she guessed, would be about right for the
job. This sum she deposited on the table, and then took leave, walking
off with a quick, enterprising step, followed by her acquiescent and
admiring bridegroom. He had remained acquiescent and admiring ever
since, and now, as light-house keeper on Pelican island, he admired and
acquiesced more than ever; while Melvyna kept the house in order,
cooked his dinners, and tended his light, which, although only third
class, shone and glittered under her daily care in the old square tower
which was founded by the Spaniards, heightened by the English, and now
finished and owned by the United States, whose light-house board said
to each other every now and then that really they must put a
first-class Fresnal on Pelican island and a good substantial tower
instead of that old-fashioned beacon. They did so a year or two later;
and a hideous barber's pole it remains to the present day. But when
Carrington and Keith landed there the square tower still stood in its
gray old age, at the very edge of the ocean, so that high tides swept
the step of the keeper's house. It was originally a lookout where the
Spanish soldier stood and fired his culverin when a vessel came in
sight outside the reef; then the British occupied the land, added a
story, and placed an iron grating on the top, where their
coastguardsman lighted a fire of pitch-pine knots that flared up
against the sky, with the tidings, "A sail! a sail!" Finally the United
States came into possession, ran up a third story, and put in a
revolving light, one flash for the land and two for the sea, a
proportion unnecessarily generous now to the land, since nothing came
in any more, and everything went by, the little harbor being of no
importance since the indigo culture had failed. But ships still sailed
by on their way to the Queen of the Antilles, and to the far Windward
and Leeward islands, and the old light went on revolving, presumably
for their benefit. The tower, gray and crumbling, and the keeper's
house, were surrounded by a high stone wall with angles and
loopholes--a small but regularly planned defensive fortification built
by the Spaniards; and odd enough it looked there on that peaceful
island, where there was nothing to defend. But it bore itself stoutly
nevertheless, this ancient little fortress, and kept a sharp lookout
still over the ocean for the damnable Huguenot sail of two centuries
before.

The sea had encroached greatly on Pelican island, and sooner or later
it must sweep the keeper's house away; but now it was a not unpleasant
sensation to hear the water wash against the step--to sit at the narrow
little windows and watch the sea roll up, roll up, nearer and nearer,
coming all the way landless in long surges from the distant African
coast only to never quite get at the foundations of that stubborn
little dwelling, which held its own against them, and then triumphantly
watched them roll back, roll back, departing inch by inch down the
beach, until, behold! there was a magnificent parade-ground, broad
enough for a thousand feet to tread--a floor more fresh and beautiful
than the marble pavements of palaces. There were not a thousand feet to
tread there, however; only six. For Melvyna had more than enough to do
within the house, and Pedro never walked save across the island to the
inlet once in two weeks or so, where he managed to row over to the
village, and return with supplies, by taking two entire days for it,
even Melvyna having given up the point, tacitly submitting to loitering
she could not prevent, but recompensing herself by a general cleaning
on those days of the entire premises, from the top of the lantern in
the tower to the last step in front of the house.

You could not argue with Pedro. He only smiled back upon you as sweetly
and as softly as molasses. Melvyna, endeavoring to urge him to energy,
found herself in the position of an active ant wading through the downy
recesses of a feather bed, which well represented his mind.

Pedro was six feet, two inches in height, and amiable as a dove. His
wife sensibly accepted him as he was, and he had his two days in
town--a very mild dissipation, however, since the Minorcans are too
indolent to do anything more than smoke, lie in the sun, and eat salads
heavily dressed in oil. They said, "The serene and august wife of our
friend is well, we trust?" And, "The island--does it not remain
lonely?" And then the salad was pressed upon him again. For they all
considered Pedro a man of strange and varied experiences. Had he not
married a woman of wonder--of an energy unfathomable? And he lived with
her alone in a light-house, on an island; alone, mind you, without a
friend or relation near!

The six feet that walked over the beautiful beach of the southern ocean
were those of Keith, Carrington, and Sister St. Luke.

"Now go, Miss Luke," Melvyna had said, waving her energetically away
with the skimmer as she stood irresolute at the kitchen door. "'Twill
do you a power of good, and they're nice, quiet gentlemen who will see
to you, and make things pleasant. Bless you, _I_ know what they are.
They ain't none of the miserable, good-for-nothing race about here!
Your convent is fifty miles off, ain't it? And besides, you were
brought over here half dead for me to cure up--now, warn't you?"

The Sister acknowledged that she was, a

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