The Holland age of letters may be said to have extended over the eighth decade of this century, and that it was an era of change and progress can be readily seen by a glance at the periodical literature of the seventies.
It is during this era, however, that we find indications of a deplorable tendency on the part of the good doctor to pander to the prejudices of the gas-fitter and the paper-hanger element, by the publication of stories and articles which were either spurious as literature or else absolutely mendacious as to the facts which they[Pg 48] recorded and the scenes which they described.
Of course I do not pretend that literary mendacity began under Dr. Holland, for the Ledger school was a highly imaginative one, at best; but the vein of untruth which is found cropping out from time to time during the eighth decade has proved infinitely more harmful to modern literature than were the lurid and confessedly improbable tales of bandits and haunted castles and splendid foreign noblemen which found so many eager readers a score of years ago. The aristocratic circles of English society which were enlivened by the nebulous presence of Lady Chetwynde’s spectre were so far removed from those in which the spellbound hay-maker, who read about them, had his being that it made very little difference to him—or to literary art either—whether they were truthfully portrayed or not; but the mendacious and meretricious[Pg 49] literature which we find in the Holland period is more pretentious in its imitation of truth, and therefore all the more dangerous.
It was within a year after the first number of Scribner’s had been issued that Dr. Holland began the publication of a series of papers, afterward printed in book form, which deserve special mention here because they are so thoroughly characteristic of the period in which they saw the light. They are known to the world as Back-log Studies, and the average reader of ordinary intelligence will tell you that Mr. Warner’s book is “delightful reading,” that he possesses a “dainty style,” and that his studies of the open fireplace are “fresh, original, and altogether charming.”
Now did you ever happen to read The Reveries of a Bachelor? If you did you will admit that there was very little left in an open fire when Ik Marvel got[Pg 50] through with it; and if you have also read Back-log Studies in the conscientious, critical way in which all books should be read, then you will agree with me in my opinion that Mr. Warner found very little to say about it that had not already been much better said by Marvel.
The book is neither fresh nor original nor charming, but it imitates those qualities so artistically and successfully that it has won for itself a unique place in the literature of a period in which the Ledger and the Holland schools of fiction may be said to have struggled for the supremacy.
I do not call Back-log Studies mendacious. They are merely imitative, and deserve mention here only because they were put together with so much cleverness that nearly the whole of the reading public has been deluded into believing them wholly original and of a high order of merit.
[Pg 51]In a previous chapter I have cited certain glaring examples of mendacity that occurred during the Holland period; but none of them deserves to rank, in point of barefaced and unscrupulous perversion of facts, with Abbott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, published in Harper’s Magazine years before Dr. Holland became the leading figure in American letters, which he was during the seventies. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that the present literary age has given birth to no end of stories and novels and descriptive articles which are disgracefully mendacious in color, fact, and sentiment.
But if you, my dear reader, would like to see a descriptive article which is absolutely matchless in point of mendacity and asinine incompetency, turn to the June Scribner’s of 1875—the very middle of the Holland age—and read what a certain Mr. Rhodes has to say about the Latin Quarter of Paris. I suppose the[Pg 52] whole world does not contain a corner that offers so much that is picturesque, fascinating, interesting—in short, so well worth writing about—as the Quartier Latin in the French capital.
At the time this article was printed there were dozens of clever young men—Bohemians, poets, and humorists of the class that used to gather in Pfaff’s of a Saturday night to make merry with the “tenner” received the day before for a Ledger poem entitled “Going Home to Mother” or “Be Prepared; Bow to the Will Divine.” I doubt if we have to-day young men better equipped for the task of describing the student life of Paris than were those who dwelt in our own Bohemia in 1875. But the conductors of Scribner’s Monthly passed them by and intrusted the work to this Albert Rhodes, concerning whom history is silent, but who seems to have been more incompetent and more unworthy of his great opportunity[Pg 53] than any human being on the face of the earth.
What shall we say of a man who quotes one of the best things in the Scènes de la Vie de Bohême and then blandly remarks that he does not see anything funny in it?
That is precisely what Mr. Rhodes does. He prints the program of the soirée given by Rodolphe and Marcel, and then observes, with the solemnity of a Central Park pelican: “There is nothing very humorous in this, as will be observed, and yet it may be regarded as one of the best specimens of Murger’s genre.”
Well, I can inform Mr. Rhodes, and also the simple-minded folk who believed in him because he wrote for the magazines, that if that chapter of the Vie de Bohême is not funny, there is nothing funny in the world. It begins with the “opening of the salons and entry and promenade of the witty authors of the[Pg 54] Mountain in Labor, a comedy rejected by the Odéon Théatre,” and closes with the significant warning that “persons attempting to read or recite poetry will be cast into outer darkness.”
The gifted Mr. Rhodes was probably in doubt as to the humor of this passage because it is not prefixed with “Our friend K—— sends the ‘Drawer’ the following good one,” and because its point is not indicated by italics after the fashion of humor of the Ayer’s Almanac school; but he can rest assured that that brief quotation from Murger is the funniest thing in his essay, always excepting his own bovine lack of perception. It is particularly funny to me because I have sometimes witnessed the “entry and promenade” through the salons of the witty authors of stories that have been accepted by magazines—a spectacle calculated to produce prolonged and hilarious merriment—and I have often wished[Pg 55] that the recitation clause in the Bohemian’s program could be enforced in every house in the town.
I have devoted a good deal of space to this long-forgotten article because it is a fair sample of the sort of stuff that is offered to us from time to time, prepared especially for us, like so much baby’s food, by men and women who are carefully selected by the magazine barons, and who generally rival Mr. Rhodes in point of simian incompetence and utter lack of all appreciative or perceptive qualities.
But let us turn from the awful spectacle of Mr. Rhodes standing like a lone penguin in the very midst of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and wailing mournfully about the poor girl who “sometimes compels the young man to marry her.” A far brighter picture is that presented by the distinguished English gentleman who, having won the highest distinction with his pencil, takes up his pen with the air[Pg 56] of one who is enjoying a holiday fairly earned by a lifetime of toil, and portrays the real Quartier Latin of the Second Empire with a humor that makes us think of Henri Murger, and with a delicacy of touch, a human sympathy, and a tendency to turn aside and moralize that place him very near to Thackeray.
If you wish to read a story which is at once human, truthful, and interesting, read George Du Maurier’s “Trilby,” and note the skill with which he has caught the very essence of the spirit of student life, preserved it for a third of a century, and then given it to us in all its freshness, and with the fire of an artistic youth blended with the philosophy and worldly knowledge that belong only to later life.
To read “Trilby” is to open a box in which some rare perfume has been kept for thirty odd years, and to drink in the fragrance that is as pervading and strong and exquisite as ever.
[Pg 57]And while we are enjoying this charming story, let us not forget to give thanks to the Harpers for the courage which they have shown in publishing it, for if there is anything calculated to injure them in the eyes of the gas-fitters and paper-hangers it is a novel in which the truth is told in the high-minded, cleanly, and straightforward fashion in which Mr. Du Maurier tells it here. Fancy the feelings of a Christian Endeavorer—the modern prototype of the Levite who passed by on the other side—on finding in a publication of the sort which he has always found as soothing to his prejudices and hypocrisy and pet meannesses as the purring of a cat on a warm hearthstone—fancy the feelings of such an one as he finds the mantle of charity thrown over the sins and weaknesses of the erring, suffering, exquisitely human Latin Quarter model.
One need not read more than a single[Pg 58] instalment of “Trilby” to realize that its author never learned the trade of letters in either the Ledger primary school or the Dr. Holland academy, for there is scarcely a chapter that does not fairly teem with matter that has long been forbidden in all well-regulated magazine offices, and I know that a great many experienced manufacturers of and dealers in serial fiction believe that it marks a new era in literature.
But to return to our sheep—and in the case of Mr. Rhodes the word is an apt one—why was that article about the Latin Quarter of Paris published?
Perhaps some of my readers think it was that the Scribner people did not know any better, or because Mr. Rhodes belonged to that “ring of favored contributors” of which one hears so much in certain artistic circles. In reply, let me say that the “ring of favored contributors” is a myth, or at least I have never[Pg 59] been able to find reasonable proof of its existence. Magazine editors buy exactly what they consider suitable for their readers, and they buy from whoever offers what they want. If they allowed themselves to be influenced by their small personal likes and dislikes the whole literary system which they have reared would go to pieces, and some dialect-writers that I wot of would be “back on the old farm,” like the slick chaps in eight of the “Two Brothers” poems.
As for the Scribner editors “not knowing any better,” let none be deceived. They have always known a great deal more than their rejected contributors gave them credit for, and there was a distinct and vital reason for every important step that they took in building up the magnificent property now known the world over as the Century Magazine. Personally I have the highest confidence in the wisdom of the magazine barons.[Pg 60] If a barbed-wire fence is stretched across a certain pasture it is with a purpose as definite and rational as that which led Mr. Bonner to reject Jack Moran’s “Stepmother’s Prayer” and pay $160 for the sixteen poems about the two brothers.
No; there was something in this article that made it valuable for magazine purposes. It was well calculated to please those who revel in that sniveling Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy and humbug about British virtue and the wickedness of the French people. Mr. Rhodes was employed by Dr. Holland because he was probably the only living creature who could stand on the spot from which has come so much that has made the world brighter and better and happier, and utter his silly platitudes about “young men draining the cup of pleasure to the dregs.” I say that the editor of Scribner’s had just as good a reason for publishing the Quartier[Pg 61] Latin essay as Mr. Bonner had for being “down on stepmothers” and refusing all poems that treated of them: Dr. Holland was down on grisettes.