Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 12, No. 33, December, 1873

The Evangelical Alliance has gone, and left behind it nothing but animosities. It was really a vast movement of the Presbyterian Church: Geneva and Calvin were the exclusive proprietors. Episcopalians, Unitarians and Baptists, Methodists and Universalists, were requested to stand aside. The communions were always at some Presbyterian church. Perhaps they thought the Episcopal Church exclusive, as some one said an Englishman carried his pride into his prayers, and said, "O Lord, I do most haughtily beseech thee," and that the Unitarians felt "that any man who had been born in Boston did not see the necessity of being born again."

Every one is extremely well dressed, in spite of the panic. The hair is worn plain and off the brow, let us thank the genius of Fashion, so that every woman has a purer, better look. Nothing destroys the expression of a good woman like breaking over that line which Nature has made about the forehead. Our women have made themselves into wicked Faustinas and vulgar Anonymas long enough with their frizzes and short curls and "banging," as the square-cut straight lock on the forehead is called. Let us see the Madonna brow once more. The high ruff, the sleeve to the elbow, the dress cut to show the figure, all bring-back the days of our great-grandmothers: the opera is filled with Copley's portraits. The bonnets, too, are delightfully large, with long feathers. Every new fashion brings out a new crop of beauties, but I could not see what beauties were brought out by those bold bonnets of last year, which were hung on at the back of the head.

We expect great fun from Dundreary rehearsing Hamlet for private theatricals. Mr. Sothern has been asked to write down Dundreary, that so great an eccentric conception may not be lost to the world. He answers that he has twelve volumes of Dundreary literature! That shows how much industry goes to even an "inconsiderate trifle." This fine actor and most accomplished and agreeable man has been playing in two of the poorest plays ever presented to a New York audience. Nothing but a capital "make up," resembling one of the most fashionable men in town, who is Sothern's particular friend, has given them point—even then only to New Yorkers. Sothern's fondness for practical joking has brought about so many false charges that he is getting very tired of being fathered with every stupid trick which any one chooses to play, and will probably drop that form of wit, so really unworthy of his great genius and true refinement, for the man who could invent Dundreary and who can play Garrick is a genius.

I assisted with four thousand others at the first representation of the Magic Flute at the Grand Opera House, where the late James Fisk's monogram is decently covered up by Gothic shields, hastily improvised after that distinguished actor met the reward of his crimes. I heard lima di Murska for the first time. She is an unpleasant miracle, compelling your reluctant astonishment. Such vocal gymnastics I never heard. The flute and the musical-box are left in the background, but her voice is nasal and disagreeable at first. Lucca's splendid, rich, full organ rang out gloriously by contrast, although her constitutional jealousy showed itself unpleasantly in some parts of the opera where Murska was so deliriously applauded. Lucca, little woman, conquered herself at last, and handed the flowers up to her rival with a pretty grace which was loudly applauded. It is strange that the tact of woman, usually so apprehensive, does not more often see the good effect of generosity.

One effect of the panic, it is to be hoped, will be to make the dinners less magnificently heavy. I am sure every lady in New York who was last winter constrained to sit from seven o'clock until eleven at those monstrously elaborate and expensive dinners which have become so much the fashion, will be glad to dine in a more simple manner, in a shorter time, with less display, and with fewer courses, and fewer excitements. One entertainer last winter introduced live swans and small canaries to enliven his dinner. The swans splashed rather disagreeably.

"Do you know why he had the swans?" said a lady to a gentleman.

"I suppose, he wanted the Ledas of society," said the gentleman.

"Well, yes," said the lady, "but I did not know, although he is as rich as a Jew, that he was a Jupiter."

The faces of the "panicstricken" seem to look brighter, although everybody talks of "shrinkage" and ruin. Meanwhile the beautiful weather keeps the carriages going and Fifth Avenue looking gay. "I shall fail, but my wife need not give up her horses," said a young broker the other day. The old days of commercial morality, when people reduced their style of living because they had failed, seem to have gone out of fashion.

A letter from New York, this Queen of Commerce, is almost necessarily mercantile, as is our conversation.

"How you all talk stocks and money!" said a gentleman just arrived from a ten years' sojourn in Europe. "When I went away you were talking of books, of art, of social ethics, of fine women, of good dinners, of whist and bezique: now you are all talking of longs and shorts, bulls and bears, a fraction of per cent., etc. etc.—all of you, men, women and children."

We have a beautiful collection at the Art Museum in Fourteenth street of jewelry, objets d'art, and a good ceramic display, all clustered round the Di Cesnola sculptures and pottery. This collection, founded on the idea of the South Kensington Museum, makes a most agreeable lounging-place in the Kruger mansion, and is, in the absence of most of the opulent owners of private picture-galleries and the closing of the National Academy, almost our only artistic amusement at present. But the first of December will throw open many hospitable doors, and the new pictures and statues which have been accumulated during the past summer will become in one sense the property of the gazing public.

MARGARET CLAYSON.

NOTES

Amongst the traditional scenes of the drama probably none plays a part more useful than the village festival. This merrymaking appears twice or thrice in an ordinary pantomime, regularly adorns the melodrama, is almost an essential of the opera, could not be dispensed with in the plays of the Fanchon type, and may even relieve the sombre tints of dire tragedy. We all know the charming spectacle: peasant youths and maidens, clad in all the wealth of the dramatic wardrobe, are skipping around a Maypole; presently Baptiste and Lisette are discovered kissing behind a pasteboard hedge, and are drawn out with universal laughing, in the midst of which enters the recruiting-sergeant with his squad and whisks off poor Baptiste to the wars. It is a pleasing scene—a trifle monotonous now with repetition; and for this latter reason it might be well to vary it by substituting the rural Feast of the Onion, which a 'correspondent of the Cambrai Gazette witnessed in the suburbs of Gouzeaucourt. Every year, between June 24th and July 2d, the inhabitants of the two neighboring villages of Gouzeaucourt and Gonnelieu perform the ceremony of "turning the onion"—that is to say, they dance in a circle, joining hands, on the village green of one or the other hamlet. Thanks to this ancient custom, the two French communes raise the finest onions in the department, this vegetable never failing, as carrots are apt to do in that locality: on the contrary, the onions are well-grown, finely rounded, and in short, magnificently "turned." On this festive occasion three or four hundred persons of every age and condition dance around a well in Sunday best, rigged out in ribbons and with smiling faces. The more they hop the bigger the crop of onions; and naturally they skip and sing till out of breath, always repeating the popular song, "Ah! qu'il est malaisé d'être amoureux et sage." Surely, all this would form a pleasant variety on the ordinary festal scene of the stage; and we hasten to remind the fastidious that though this ceremony is the Feast of Onions, yet it does not appear that that odorous esculent need actually be present; besides, even if it were, surely a garland of "well-turned" onions would add strength to the picturesque ropes of theatrical paper roses. The well, too, would replace with a certain grace the too familiar pole. And again, since all ages and conditions assist at this feast, it would utilize that extraordinary company of figurantes, varying from the longest and slimmest to the shortest and plumpest, which every manager thinks it incumbent to put upon the stage for the rural fête. Finally, to complete the tableau satisfactorily, it appears that this year at Gonnelieu, at the height of the dancing, half a dozen gendarmes rushed upon the scene, causing a general stampede among the disciples of the onion and a hasty adjournment of the festival. What law against irregular assemblages was infringed by these onion-worshipers is not clear, for one can hardly detect sedition lurking under the rustic ditty, and it is equally difficult to suspect an Orsini bomb conspiracy of being typified by the conjuring of prodigious prize onions.

It is a vast pity that so many excellent stories are "almost too good to be true." Such a tale seems to be the one which explains the origin of that prodigious collection of monkeys that forms so large a part of the population of the Jardin d'Acclimation in Paris; and yet, as this curious account has not been questioned, so far as we are aware, by those who ought to know the facts, it is hardly gracious in us to begin the relation of it by gratuitous skepticism. A Bordeaux ship-owner, who is noted for insisting on a strict obedience to instructions on the part of his captains, some time ago gave written orders to one of the latter to bring back from Brazil, whither he was going, one or two monkeys—"Rapportez-moi 1 ou 2 singes." The ou was so badly written that the captain read "1002 singes;" and the result was that the owner, three months after, found his ship returning, to his utter stupefaction, overrun with monkeys from keel to mast-head. However, inflexibly just even in his surprise, he recognized the fault to be that of his own hasty handwriting, and praised the scrupulous captain who had executed his apparent order even to the odd pair of monkeys over the thousand. For a week apes were a drug in the Bordeaux market, and, adds the story, the Jardin, hearing the news, took care not to lose so good an opportunity of laying in a large stock.

The traditional union of fidelity, obedience to orders, strict discipline and stupidity in the old-fashioned military servant is wittily illustrated in a story told by the Gazette de Paris at the expense of a captain of the Melun garrison. This officer, who had been invited to dine at a neighboring castle, sent his valet with a note of "regrets," adding, as the boy started, "Be sure and bring me my dinner, Auguste, when you have left the letter." The soldier took the letter to the castle and was told, of course, "It's all right." "Yes, but I want the dinner," said the lad: "the captain ordered me to bring it back, and I always obey orders." The baroness, being informed of the good fellow's blunder, carried out the joke by despatching a splendid repast. The officer, too amused to make any explanation to his servant, merely sent him back at once to buy a bouquet to carry with his compliments to the baroness. Successfully accomplishing this feat, the brilliant Auguste was handed a five-franc piece from the lady. "That won't do," says the honest fellow: "I paid thirty francs for the flowers." The difference was made up to him, and he returned to the fort, quite proud at having so ably discharged his duty. We think this incident will fairly match some of the experiences which our own officers are fond of narrating, regarding the way in which their servants have interpreted and executed their orders.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY

Sub-Tropical Rambles in the Land of the Aphanapteryx. By Nicholas Pike. New York: Harper & Brothers.

The story of a bright and educated traveler is always a capital one, and Mr. Pike has done wonders for Mauritius, which would seem in itself to be one of the most deplorably dull and fatiguing prominences on the face of the sea. An enthusiastic botanist and naturalist, as well as an interested ethnologist, this lively observer relieves the monotony of a seemingly easy consulate and repulsive population by watching all the secrets of animated nature around him. It is a very bloodthirsty island that his fates have guided him to: everything bites or stings or poisons. When wading out into the sea for shells, Mr. Pike is attacked by "a tazarre, a fish something like a fresh-water pike," which comes right at him repeatedly, "like a bulldog," and is only subdued by being speared in the head with a harpoon. Creatures elsewhere the most evasive and timid are here found fighting like gladiators: the eels bite everybody within their reach—one of these combative eels caught by our author measured twelve feet three inches; the fresh-water prawns "strike so sharply with their tails as to draw blood if not carefully handled." The exquisite polyps and anemones, whose painted beauty our author is never weary of relating, have mostly poisoned weapons concealed under their flounces, and treat the naturalist who would coquet with them to a swelled arm or a lamed hand. Centipedes, scorpions and virulently poisonous snakes animate the land, while the shoals, where the natives declare there are "more fish than water," teem with every sort of man-eating shark, and with the cuttle-fish watching for his prey from each interstice of the coral-reef. The latter, often of immense size, are caught and eaten, both fresh and salt, some fishermen collecting nothing else: they dexterously turn the ugly stomach inside out and thread it on a string slung round the neck. The horror of the lobster for these cuttle-fish is something curious; and it affords a gauge for the sensitiveness of crustaceae (and incidentally an argument against those who maintain the greater reasonableness of fishing than of hunting on account of the lower organization of the prey) to learn that the lobster must not be taken to market in company with the cuttle-fish, "or the flesh will be spoilt before he gets there, the creature being literally sick from fright." Meantime, in the ooze which forms a connecting link between sea and shore lurks the mud-laff, indescribably hideous in shape, leprous-looking, slimy, and darting a greenish poison through the spines on its back. Treading on one of these, the poor naked fisherman is apt to die of lockjaw; and Mr. Pike's kitten, having its paw touched with a single spine, perished of convulsions in an hour. Some of the sea-carnivora, however, are so beautiful that one is ready to forgive their more or less Clytemnestra-like tempers. Of some gymnobranchiata the writer observes: "I never saw any living animals with such gorgeous colors—the most vivid carmine and pure white, mixed with golden yellow in the bodies and mantles, and the gills of pale lemon-color and lilac. No painting could give an idea of the harmony of the shades as they blended into each other, or the undulating grace of the movements of the mantles. I have sat for an hour at a time watching them, lost in admiration, and frequently turning them over to see the expert way they would contract the elegant gill-branches, and reopen them as soon as they had righted themselves." Such are some of the animated charms of Paul and Virginia's island. Of Bernardin Saint Pierre's romance as an illustration of the spot, Mr. Pike dryly observes that writers when about to draw largely on their imaginations should be careful to conceal the actual whereabouts of their stories: we live in an age of exploration that is sure to "display their ridiculous side when reduced to fact." There was, however, a foundation in fact, quite enough for the purpose of a prose poem, in the loves and deaths of Paul and Virginia: it is doubtless the island scenes alone that Mr. Pike would satirize. The great shipwreck was in 1744, a year of famine, which the wise and prudent French governor, the most able man who ever adorned the colony, M. Mahé de Labourdonnais, was unable to avert. The ship St. Géran, sent with provisions from France, was ignorantly driven on the reef shortly before dawn, and all perished save nine souls. There were on board two lovers, a Mademoiselle Mallet and Monsieur de Peramon, who were to be united in marriage on arriving at the island, then called Isle de France. The young man made a raft, and implored his mistress to remove the heavier part of her garments and essay the passage. This the pure young creature refused to do, with that exaggerated modesty which has been called mawkishness in the story, but which in a real occurrence looks very like heroism. Their bodies were soon washed ashore together in the harbor, since called the Bay of Tombs. Two structures of whitewashed brick under some beautiful palms and feathery bamboos, in an inland garden called "Pamplemousses" (the Shaddocks), now cover the remains of the ill-starred lovers. Mr. Pike appears to have visited the site but once, when, as there had been heavy rains, he could not reach the tombs. He is evidently more in his element when wading after sea-urchins. His observations on such races as coolies, Chinese and Malabar-men are all, however, to the purpose. The island is peopled with these varieties, in addition to a mixed white population, the Indians having been brought from Hindostan for the cane-fields since the English occupation in 1810, and serving a good purpose. Their manners illustrate the lower horrors of the Hindoo mythology, they appearing to worship pretty exclusively a race of gods and goddesses invented for robber tribes, who are appeased only by blood-curdling rites: our author saw their young men running, with yells and contortions, over a bed of live coals twenty-five feet across to earn the favor of one such cruel goddess. The Chinese, though in worship they exhibit the milder sacrificial spirit of offering sheets of paper, yet in a more stolid way show an equal talent for self-sacrifice. A neighbor of Mr. Pike's, an excellent quiet fellow, having gambled with his own servant for his shop, stock and person, was seen one morning sweeping and serving customers, whilst the youngster sat leisurely smoking, the game having gone contrarily. "There was no appearance of triumph on the boy's face: master and servant reversed their places with the most perfect sang-froid." Of the Creoles, we learn that they believe the presence of pieces of coral in the house induces headache; of the women from Malabar, that they can only wear toe-rings after marriage; of the handsomest Indian tribe in the island, the Reddies, we are told that the boys marry at five or six, their bride living with the father-in-law or other husband's relative and rearing children to him: when the boy grows up, his wife being then aged, he "takes up with some boy's wife in a manner precisely similar to his own, and procreates children for the boy-husband." The remaining wonder of Mauritius appears to be the great Peter Both Mountain, so nearly inaccessible that a rage for climbing it has been developed. The first successful attempt was made by Claude Penthé, who planted the French flag on it in 1790, and English ascents were made in 1832, 1848, 1858, 1864 and 1869. We must not omit, however, the Aphanapteryx, though Mr. Pike does: it is a red bird which in Mauritius has survived its whilom companion the dodo, and which is to be described in a future volume. Mr. Pike has obliged us with a book of admirable temper, inexhaustible research and fine manly spirit: we could wish for our own sakes nothing better than that all our sub-tropical and tropical consulships were filled by his brothers, and that they would all make volumes out of their experiences.

Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. By William Ellery Ghanning. Boston: Roberts Bros.

Mr. Charming is a boon, and we would not have missed his lucubration on any account. Now we know how Margaret Fuller talked and in what dialect they wrote The Dial. It was with this sententiousness, this solemn attitude over the infinitely little, this care to compose paragraphs out of short sentences completely disconnected, that the old Concord philosophy was enunciated. Nobody outside the circle ever caught the exact accent except one of Dickens's characters—Mr. F.'s aunt—who would interrupt a dinner conversation to observe, "There's milestones on the Dover road." "Above our heads," says Mr. Channing, "the nighthawk rips;" "see the frog bellying the world in the warm pool;" "the rats scrabbling." This sententiousness is consistent, on Mr. Channing's part, with the most stupefying ignorance of words and things, as in the sentence, "forced to conceal the raveled sleeve of care by buttoning up his outer garments." It is particularly imposing in the judgments, nearly always severe, of individuals, and the reader lays down the present book sure that here, at last, he has found a truly superior person. Schoolcraft is simply "poor Schoolcraft," and of course subsides; Miss Martineau is "that Minerva mediocre;" Carlyle is "Thomas Carlyle with his bilious howls and bankrupt draughts on hope." Hawthorne, he learns, though we cannot tell from whence, "thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that any one should notice man's miseries, these being his staple product," and was "swallowed up in the wretchedness of life;" also, "the Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky character, with a soft rolling gait; a wit said he seemed like a boned pirate." From these more or less contemptuous views of mankind at large Mr. Channing turns with a kind of somersault to an intense admiration for Thoreau. Could he but write of him in his own style—supposing him to have a style—he would have been in danger of producing a sensible book, and nous autres would have lost one delight; but it is the perfection of comedy to see the apocalyptic trio—Emerson stepping off grandly and gladly into the clouds—Thoreau, his principal disciple, following with a good imitation of the gait, but with evident self-consciousness—and finally Mr. Channing—

to see him's rare sportStep in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short.

It would be unfair to judge Henry D. Thoreau by the indiscreet laudations of his friends. He was cut out more nearly in the pattern of a hermit than any man of modern time. His love of solitude was probably sincere, his surliness was his breeding, and he extracted from his painful, unsocial habitudes the peculiar poetry which suits with hardship. It was not for him to sing of summer and nectarines, nor to honestly appreciate or kindly judge those who did so; but he sang of winter, of crab-apples, of cranberries, of reptiles, of field-mice, with just the right accent and with a tingling vibration of life in his chords. The Bernard Palissy of literature, he modeled his frogs and water-snakes so true that they seemed better than birds of paradise.

Babolain. From the French of Gustave Droz. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

This is a tragical little romance which draws the reader along with it by every line in every page, yet its power is derived from the resources of caricature: it is rather the hollow side of a comic mask than a true expression of pathos. Scientific and stupid, Professor Babolain enters the world of Paris armed with his innocence, his uncle's legacy, his deep learning and his utter ignorance. A couple of adventuresses, mother and daughter, swoop down upon him as a lawful prey, and he is quickly a doting husband and a terrified son-in-law. The sole redeeming trait about the younger woman, who is a beauty and who paints, is that she never makes the least pretence of loving him: in his first moments of adoration she mystifies him heartlessly, crushing him with her wit and confounding him with her art: "Difficult? oh no! In the first place, you need rabbits' hair: that is indispensable. If you had no rabbits, or if you were in a country where rabbits had no hair, painting could not be thought of." She never melts, except when he presents her with a rivière of diamonds, and, after finding a leisure moment to give birth to a little girl, rushes off to Italy with Count Vaugirau, followed promptly by a certain Timoleon. This Timoleon, who loves her unsuccessfully, is the beneficiary of poor Babolain, borrowing his money at the same time that he tries to borrow his wife, and returning with outrageous reproaches to the hero impoverished and desolate. This precious friend is a specimen of all the rest. The very daughter, sole consolation of her parent's straitened existence, but ill fulfills the rapturous anticipations of early fatherhood. He is at first her nurse and teacher: "I saw the satin-like skin of her little neck, and behind her ear, fresh and pink like the petal of a flower, the soft curls upon the nape of her neck, half hair, half down, sucking in with their greedy roots the sweet juices of this living cream." He throws his hat into the river to teach her the laws of gravity. But she grows up ungrateful and estranged, and, having married an ambitious physician, allows her father to live as a neglected pensioner under a part of her roof. The details of Babolain's decline are exquisitely painful, but partake of that style of exaggeration and caricature which causes even the heartless beings who make up his world to seem more like grotesque puppets with bosoms of wood than responsible beings to be really execrated and condemned. As the abused victim, starving and ragged, treads the road of sacrifice to death, our sympathy is checked by the consciousness of his unmitigated and needless pliancy, until we withhold the tribute of sorrow due to the misfortunes of a Lear or a Père Goriot. The romance, however, though sketched out extravagantly between hyperbole and parable, fairly scintillates with brilliancies and good things: we could hardly indicate another imported novel of the length actually containing so much. Nothing can be more comical than the grand airs of the ladies, whether in their poor or rich estate, or than the perpetual suite of victimizations endured by the helpless Babolain: the muses of Comedy and Tragedy rush together over the stage to crush this fly with their buskins. The translator of Babolain reveals his quality by calling pantaloons, in several places, pants, and by adopting an ugly locative common enough in New York—"Perhaps I did not have that amount," for "perhaps I had not," etc. The work revels in that buff binding which has given to the Leisure Hour Series the popular sobriquet of the "Linen Duster Series," a livery now well known as the certain indication of honest entertainment and literary excellence.