The great books teach us to smile at life.

The old proverb that there is nothing new under the sun gives much latitude to dullards and plagiarists, who are altogether destitute of the fascination of a mood or manner. Egoism is the last virtue of modern literature.

It is not so much what a man says, but what he looks, with women. It is the fantasy of wickedness that flashes from eye to eye among dumb clods that keeps poetry perennially in the world.

If the sun shone only upon the righteous, he would not need to get up so early in the morning.

I have my livelihood to earn, and consequently I am an optimist.

There is something intellectually lacking in all converts to brand new dogmas and creeds. A deep sense of wickedness is but a phase of immaturity of mind.

A woman who is not at heart a tyrant in her dreams of love is a perversion of nature.

So far as can be learned at this distance, there is only one industry in the new South which is really in a flourishing condition, and that is the unlimited production of abominable trashy “literature.”

If some half baked people would consent to go to night school instead of covering endless reams with horrible aberrations, the progress of aesthetics would be more rapid in America. Some people cannot realize that mere mellifluous meanderings in verse or plain prose are simply indications of an affection of the gray matter, akin to a cold in the head, and are of no more significance to the outside world than the week’s washing.

The instability of all industrial and business life in America is one of the horrors of existence here, and it is one of the factors that make culture impossible here. A nation on the jump runs to “smartness” but not to intellect. There is only one class in our society that enjoys stability, and that is the Police. Whether we may expect any aesthetic appreciation from this quarter remains to be seen.

“To amuse respectable people,” said Moliere, “what a strange task.” And God was good enough to allow Moliere to live and write for the Court of Louis XIV. It is a great privilege for a writer to know precisely the follies and moods of his audience. Moliere himself showed how much appreciation of wit and sanity can be cultivated in a court of folly. But how can the most assiduous student of human nature gauge the vagaries of taste in a democracy? The amusing of respectable, and other people, is the wreck of imagination and authorship in this happy land of Educational Eclipse. Here, all are what is called “educated.” But how few care for or know anything of that self education which constitutes culture?

The poor alone trust in Providence. The rich own Providence.

To Amaryllis: As you did not enclose postage for the return of your manuscript, I address you through this medium. Your verses are good enough from one point of view; but unfortunately this is a Bibelot of Literature, and these are picture-book verses. They are in the right key, though, for we have tried them on the office cat with gratifying results. The cat was seized with a fit of melancholy, and has not been out for two nights. It will be a sin if you do not send these potent poems to the editor of the Century magazine.

The woman who has plenty of red blood corpuscles, a body that is a body and not a poetic wraith of the spirit, seems to be tumbling into fiction nowadays. As the new heroine she is rudely disturbing the reign of the pink and white saints, expressly made in Paris dollhouses for the heroines of English novels, who open and close their eyes and smile in every chapter.

Educate yourself to tell little lies easily and artistically, and the big ones will take care of themselves.

The trouble with the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois is they have no picturesqueness. They have an abundance of vices, but no redeeming ones.

The majority of men are Christians and pagans, Democrats and Republicans, princes and paupers, and what not, first of all, and themselves last of all—usually only in crises.

The salvation of stupidity in this world is that the instinct of self-preservation has given it an undisputed currency among the masses of men as common-sense.

Democracy is the damnation of ideals. Old John Calvin, if he were living and working out his logic in the midst of modern life, would have laid even greater distress upon total depravity and the eternal damnation of the majority. That is the only dream which can console us for the dominion of the vulgar in this life; and, unfortunately, there is no substantial logic or evidence to support it. If instead of having lived a quiet life in Geneva, in the sixteenth century, Calvin were living to-day in the heart of New York or Chicago, he would have made his theology more terrible. The kernel of his doctrines was evidently derived from the observation of human society, and a career amid the brutality of our modern cities would have left no room in his creed for any compromises. The perseverance of the saints is not in evidence in the cut-throat scramble of modern life.

This doctrine of damnation has always condoned for me many of the intolerable narrownesses in Calvinism. If it is probable that God himself cannot contemplate an invasion of the mob without trepidation, I cannot see what argument can be made in support of democracy in our social and intellectual life here below. I envy all those who hold this doctrine of damnation without any troublesome doubts. Calvin had evidently fathomed human nature, even if he did not enjoy any special revelation of the life hereafter.

About the only woman whose novels I am curious to read at this moment is Diana of the Crossways. And her “Princess Egeria” and the rest are out of reach forever.

Now here is a nice psychological point. A very clever woman, who knows men and women as only some wonderful women can, and who yet has never written a novel, came to me the other day, as to a Father Confessor of the smaller sophistries of conscience, upon which religion affords no certain light and assurance. The point she wished to know was whether she was a new woman or simply a harmless flirt of the old school. As I could not decide this momentous matter, I concluded to ventilate it in print, suppressing the name of my friend. The situation is this: She loves her husband with all her heart, but yet she sometimes lacks the moral courage to tell some men whom she meets casually that she is a married woman.

It does not seem to add to England’s glory to appoint Uriah Heep to the job of court clown. The old jesters made better sport.

I sometimes wonder what peculiar influence in their environment makes so many literary critics attached to the editorial staff of periodicals, whose chief staple is some denominational form of religious conviction, so offensively positive and dogmatic. They are seldom troubled with any judicial hesitations. They proclaim their ipse dixits with a solemnity and excess of asseveration and finality which is hideously funny to the lay mind, that takes its own peculiar predilections and distastes, with a shade of something approximating good-natured tolerance of the possible tastes of others. I think this critical attitude of the religious Pontifex is largely due to some profound mental and moral confusion. He is so accustomed to dealing out fire and brimstone and damnation with a callous and easy conscience to all who differ with him in the domain of religious belief, and especially to those who occupy the agnostic and rational attitude toward the eternal problems of life, that he finally gets into the trick of using the thunder of Jehovah for smaller offences and occasions.

Here is a case in point. A solemn and inspired lunatic writes, in the New York “Independent,” of George Meredith, the greatest living writer in the English speaking world, in this utterly mendacious and injudicious fashion. “The most elaborately feminine man in English literary life.” “The Amazing Marriage” is then described as “a crazy structure gorgeously decorated, in which dwell nympholepts, aged satyrs, erotic wives and foredoomed maidens, all moving on to rainbow-hued destruction or jaundiced delight.”

This in a religious paper that makes a great parade of its dignity, and is always finding fault with the honest opinions of others, because they are apt to be so irreverent, looks like that simple and vulgar bid for pre-eminence in heresy, which will always catch the greedy ears of the envious and mediocre mob, that is glad to see hateful superiority spattered with mud. I suppose this view of the modern man of letters who is inflexibly true to his aims and the dignity of his calling, and who is, moreover, the master of his craft, is to be attributed to the superintellectual quality of the inspiration that directs all organs of religious opinion.

It is a little hard to understand the criticism which hails the revival of the old familiar blood and thunder fiction of our boyhood days as the renaissance of genius in fiction. All this sort of literature, whether wrapt in mediÆval properties or not, is fatally melodramatic and unreal, and constitutes so much lumber and nothing else, if it should remain in the memory. But as all our picture periodicals and Sunday papers are filled with nothing but blood and thunder stuff from Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope and the rest, it is obviously the taste of the time. I am meditating a new magazine on these popular lines. It is to be called: “The Antique Renascence; a Magazine of Pistol Shots and Rape.”

One of the metropolitan Sunday papers advertises every week in triumphant and gigantic capitals how many square miles of spruce forest were converted into paper for the Sunday edition. The number of square miles of forest that is disappearing in this way is something appalling. It seems to a few reactionary wits, unintoxicated with the spectacle of this modern progress, that sacrificing half a spruce forest to make a Sunday paper is much worse than butchering a little chain-gang of Christians to make a Roman holiday.

It is a simple death notice in the Boston Evening Events, for February 2, 1896. It reads thus:

“Miss Priscilla Prim, of 29976 Beacon street, Boston, died suddenly of a severe mental shock yesterday evening. Miss Prim was well known as the possessor of a very large fortune, a philanthropist, and a patron of the arts and all sorts of moral reforms and missions, and her decease will be mourned by all lovers of liberal culture.”

She had just finished her supper, when a niece from Chicago, who was stopping in her house, to come out this season in the “smart set,” handed her a copy of the February Fly Leaf, fresh and virgin from the press that evening. It contained some opinions which are regarded as heterodox and impossible in “The Ladies’ Own Humbug and Treasury of Misinformation.” It appeared to lack reverence for the unsupported tradition of “culture” that lingers in modern materialistic, money-grubbing Boston, in every well-regulated household, quite independently of the fact that in thousands there is no evidence of civilization in the shape of books, ancient or modern. This flippancy is undoubtedly immoral, and its heinousness may be judged by its effect in this instance.

Miss Prim was mad, indignant, furious, and fumed at the mouth with the passion of her outraged moral feelings. She sprang to her feet to write a letter of protest to the editor of the Events, when she stumbled over the only work of literature in the establishment—it was Mrs. Parloa’s Appledore Cookbook, by the way—and falling face forward upon the floor, she expired immediately of a severe bump and excess of moral emotion.

It is time the old fierce Puritanical spirit was calmed in the blood of the hereditary Bostonians; but the old generation dies glum and hard, and will refuse Heaven if the Almighty is so captious as to demand a sense of humor.

Mr. Chauncey M. Depew is reported to have said that Fame depends entirely upon being civil to interviewers. English visitors should remember this—and a few, who want to feather their nests, are beginning to appreciate the wisdom of our worldly sage. Conan Doyle and Hall Caine have taken “the tip,” and have even been quite civil and polite about American institutions and social life since gaining their own shores. This little simple art of glossing is one the British should cultivate. They are at present the most hateful people on earth. The world is getting crowded now and they should endeavor to become less obnoxious. English celebrities can extend their fame with their courtesies.

A very pathetic and significant incident occurred in one of the leading hotels of Boston the other day. It is fraught with a warning for the injudicious, that needs no additional emphasis from me. But do not turn aside and skip the paragraph because it has a moral!

A well-known Temperance lecturer and social reformer from Shebogan Falls, Arizona, who was stopping at the house, was suddenly taken violently sick, and showed unmistakable signs of suffering from delirium tremens. The gentleman had then been in the hotel for twenty-four hours and he was known to have touched no liquor. A search of his room and grip revealed no intoxicants. The doctors called in were positive about the symptoms, and yet the man’s breath contained no hint of alcohol. The stomach pump afforded no more confirmation. But he was in the throes of delirium tremens, nevertheless, and the doctors were perplexed. All sorts of elaborate theories of hereditary influences were proposed and discussed, and the man’s history and ancestry were looked up. Suddenly he recovered, and an explanation was soon forthcoming.

A well thumbed and dismantled copy of the Arena magazine was discovered under his bed.

Those who are interested in the diffusion of good literature among all classes in America, should make themselves acquainted with the publications of Thomas B. Mosher, of Portland, Me. A good book in his list to put upon the shelf, to begin with, is the beautifully bound volume of the Bibelot for 1895. In making a collection of belles-lettres, the authors and books after all, who give most pleasure, one provides a sure refuge always at hand for any sudden invasion of the blues or ennui, and there is solace here for weightier sorrows, too. For the brave idealists condemned to struggle in this alien world, who can still unpack their minds of all sordid sorrows and bitterness and carry merry and piping hearts to Arcady, are surely not lacking in a profound philosophy—and the philosophy which includes the life of the philosopher is rare indeed.

It is for this reason that the poets and fantastists are closer to our moods through the changing years than all other writers. When the historians, philosophers and social prophets and the rest find us indifferent and content to let the world slide, when great names and ideals no longer stir or move us, when experience has disenchanted us with life and humanity, and so stript history and philosophy and religion of all significance, when all our enthusiasms are gone, love is an exchange of domestic services for the sake of economy, and friendship is a long laid ghost of youth—then we can recur again and again to the authors who turn our chimney corner into that wider dominion of freedom the human spirit can never quite relinquish in its dreams. Fine spun logic and all the metaphysics of the ages cannot bring us back to faith and hope and charity then; but these few blessed spirits who found their way to Arcady occasionally, give us a spell of oblivion, if not much philosophy, and often a pinch of fortitude for our return to the doom of disenchantment.

The republic of beauty is not an important territory or marked very clearly on the current maps of Democracy. But there are still some who cherish the ancient boon of poetry and beauty, and such will appreciate a volume like “The Bibelot,” filled with the literature that blows through our foetid life like God’s wind through a hospital. It is one of the few books that cannot fail to hit the taste of any real book lover. It contains selections from William Blake, James Thomson, Francois Villon, a discourse of Walter Pater’s on Marcus Aurelius, Fragments from Sappho, Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets, the Pathos of the Rose in Poetry, extracts from Rossetti’s “Hand and Soul,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Lodging for the Night: A Story of Villon,” and other masterpieces of literature. It is a priceless book for the poor student, for these selections have been culled from scarce editions and sources not generally accessible.

If our young readers will read the Bibelot, they may acquire the sense of beauty and power of discrimination, and the taste for the best in literature, old and new. They will then become callous to the tawdry domestic twaddle that has been circulated as “literature” in the respectable domestic periodicals, for the past two decades, in this country, and will learn to distinguish genuine literature from mere merchandise. Perhaps then it will be possible for sincere and earnest work to find currency in books in America, as it has not been since the popular picture periodicals took the place of books in our breakneck economy.

Anthony Hope is one of the few authors of the day honest enough to confess that he reads very little. He is too busy writing. This is one of the evils of the age. The writers outnumber the readers. Every man or woman who takes to writing is a reader lost, for writers almost invariably only read and reread their own works. But all authors are not as candid as Anthony Hope.

That volume of lectures on “The Art of Making a Newspaper,” which all “the bright young men” in American journalism have been studying, is marred with the omission of an important historical matter. This is the origin and career of Mr. Dana’s “office cat.” Charles A. Dana is the most picturesque personality in contemporary American public life. He is more definitely in the popular imagination of this generation than any man engaged in literature proper, and so every characteristic detail and whimsy of the “Sun’s” school of journalism should be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The “office cat” has played a great part in the “Sun’s” art and artifice, and its omission is a national catastrophe.

Habakkuk Higginbotham.