Ponkapog Papers Part 3

Strolling to-day through the streets of the older section of the town, I miss many a venerable landmark submerged in the rising tide of change, but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down a musty volume from its shelf at some melancholy old book-stall on Cornhill.

FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES

WHEN an English novelist does us the honor to introduce any of our countrymen into his fiction, he generally displays a commendable desire to present something typical in the way of names for his adopted characters--to give a dash of local color, as it were, with his nomenclature. His success is seldom commensurate to the desire. He falls into the error of appealing to his invention, instead of consulting some city directory, in which he would find more material than he could exhaust in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have secured in the pages of such a compendium a happier t.i.tle than Fullalove for his Yankee sea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if Anthony Trollope could have discovered anything better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the young woman from "the States" in his novel called "Is He Popenjoy?"

To christen a sprightly young female advocate of woman's rights Olivia Q. Fleabody was very happy indeed; to be candid, it was much better than was usual with Mr. Trollope, whose understanding of American life and manners was not enlarged by extensive travel in this country. An English tourist's preconceived idea of us is a thing he brings over with him on the steamer and carries home again intact; it is as much a part of his indispensable impedimenta as his hatbox. But Fleabody is excellent; it was probably suggested by Peabody, which may have struck Mr. Trollope as comical (just as Trollope strikes _us_ as comical), or, at least, as not serious. What a capital name Veronica Trollope would be for a hoydenish young woman in a society novel! I fancy that all foreign names are odd to the alien. I remember that the signs above shop-doors in England and on the Continent used to amuse me often enough, when I was over there.

It is a notable circ.u.mstance that extraordinary names never seem extraordinary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow-creature were branded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he would remain to the end of his days quite unconscious of anything out of the common.

I am aware that many of our American names are sufficiently queer; but English writers make merry over them, as if our most eccentric were not thrown into the shade by some of their own. No American, living or dead, can surpa.s.s the verbal infelicity of Knatchbull-Hugessen, for example--if the gentleman will forgive me for conscripting him. Quite as remarkable, in a grimly significant way, is the appellation of a British officer who was fighting the Boers in the Transvaal in the year of blessed memory 1899. This young soldier, who highly distinguished himself on the field, was known to his brothers-in-arms as Major Pine Coffin. I trust that the gallant major became a colonel later and is still alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to lose a man with a name like that.

Several years ago I read in the sober police reports of "The Pall Mall Gazette" an account of a young man named George F. Onions, who was arrested (it ought to have been by "a peeler") for purloining money from his employers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles & Son, stuff merchants, of Bradford--_des noms bien idylliques!_ What mortal could have a more ludicrous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles, or Pickled Onions?

And then for Onions to rob Pickles! Could there be a more incredible coincidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime. No story-writer would dare to present that fact or those names in his fiction; neither would be accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Fleabody is _ben trovato_.

A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"

THE night-scene on the battlefield of Wagram in "L'Aiglon"--an episode whose sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagination like the point of a rapier--bears a striking resemblance to a picturesque pa.s.sage in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." It is the one intense great moment in the play, and has been widely discussed, but so far as I am aware none of M. Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the resemblance mentioned. In the master's romance it is not the field of Wagram, but the field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled with contending armies of spooks, to use the grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the mind's eye. The pa.s.sage occurs at the end of the sixteenth chapter in the second part of "Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as follows:

Le champ de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui appartient a la terre, support impa.s.sible de l'homme, et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si quelque voyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute, s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de Philippes, l'hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit. L'effrayant 18 juin revit; la fausse colline-monument s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de bataille reprend sa realite; des lignes d'infanterie ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent l'horizon; le songeur effare voit l'eclair des sabres, l'etincelle des bayonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes, l'entre-crois.e.m.e.nt monstrueux des tonnerres; il entend, comme un rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur vague de la bataille-fantome; ces...o...b..es, ce sont les grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuira.s.siers; . . . tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore; et les ravins s'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et il y a de la furie jusque dans les nuees, et, dans les tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plancenoit, apparaissent confus.e.m.e.nt couronnees de tourbillons de spectres s'exterminant. (1)

Here is the whole battle scene in "L'Aiglon," with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against one another (seen only through the eyes of the poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled shapes lying motionless in various postures of death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like vague wailings of the wind--all this might be taken for an artful appropriation of Victor Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant page, read in early youth, still lingered on the retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were the case, it does not necessarily detract from the integrity of the conception or the playwright's presentment of it.

(1) The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which belongs to earth, the impa.s.sive support of man, and is like all other plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled, and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallucination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible June 18 relives; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself, the lion disappears, the field of battle a.s.sumes its reality; lines of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres, the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting sh.e.l.ls, the clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the m.u.f.fled clamor of the phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb; these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuira.s.siers . . . all this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one another.

The idea of repeopling old battlefields with the shades of vanished hosts is not novel. In such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark hand on the imagination, and prompts one to invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that haunts the place. One summer evening long ago, as I was standing alone by the ruined walls of Hougomont, with that sense of not being alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by solitude, I had a sudden vision of that desperate last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard.

Marshal Ney rose from the grave and again shouted those heroic words to Drouet d'Erlon: "Are you not going to get yourself killed?" For an instant a thousand sabres flashed in the air. The deathly silence that accompanied the ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the short-lived dream. A moment later I beheld a hunched little figure mounted on a white horse with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay slack in the rider's hand; his three-cornered hat was slouched over his brows, and his chin rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he slowly rode away through the twilight, and n.o.body cried, _Vive l'Empereur!_

The ground on which a famous battle has been fought casts a spell upon every man's mind; and the impression made upon two men of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond Rostand, might well be nearly identical.

This sufficiently explains the likeness between the fantastic silhouette in "Les Miserables" and the battle of the ghosts in "L'Aiglon." A muse so rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need not borrow a piece of supernaturalness from anybody.

PLOT AND CHARACTER

HENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony Trollope, says that if Trollope "had taken sides on the rather superficial opposition between novels of character and novels of plot, I can imagine him to have said (except that he never expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred the former cla.s.s, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no means character." So neat an ant.i.thesis would surely never have found itself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr. James had not cunningly lent it to him. Whatever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may have preached, his almost invariable practice was to have a plot. He always had a _story_ to tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, and end--in short, a framework of some description.

There have been delightful books filled wholly with character-drawing; but they have not been great novels. The great novel deals with human action as well as with mental portraiture and a.n.a.lysis. That "character in itself is plot" is true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motive with a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a novel or a romance as it is to a drama. A group of skillfully made-up men and women lounging in the green-room or at the wings is not the play. It is not enough to say that this is Romeo and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to inform us that certain pa.s.sions are supposed to be embodied in such and such persons: these persons should be placed in situations developing those pa.s.sions. A series of unrelated scenes and dialogues leading to nothing is inadequate.

Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me vulnerable at both ends--unlike Achilles. "Plot is by no means character." Strictly speaking, it is not. It appears to me, however, that plot approaches nearer to being character than character does to being plot. Plot necessitates action, and it is impossible to describe a man's actions' under whatever conditions, without revealing something of his character, his way of looking at things, his moral and mental pose. What a hero of fiction _does_ paints him better than what he _says_, and vastly better than anything his creator may say of him. Mr. James a.s.serts that "we care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are."

I think we care very little what people are (in fiction) when we do not know what happens to them.

THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE

IN the process of their experiments upon the bodies of living animals some anatomists do not, I fear, sufficiently realize that

The poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great As when a giant dies.

I am not for a moment challenging the necessity of vivisection, though distinguished surgeons have themselves challenged it; I merely contend that science is apt to be cold-hearted, and does not seem always to take into consideration the tortures she inflicts in her search for knowledge.

Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old number of the "London Lancet," I came upon the report of a lecture on experimental physiology delivered by Professor William Rutherford before a learned a.s.sociation in London. Though the type had become antiquated and the paper yellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of those pages was alive and palpitating.

The following pa.s.sages from the report will ill.u.s.trate not unfairly the point I am making. In the course of his remarks the lecturer exhibited certain interesting experiments on living frogs. Intellectually I go very strongly for Professor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess that the weight of my sympathy rests with the frogs.

Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regarding our manoeuvres with a somewhat lively air. Now and then it gives a jump. What the precise object of its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say; but probably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires to escape.

To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted that the frog had some slight reason for apprehension. The lecturer proceeded:

I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so struggle to get away when I pinch its toes? Doubtless, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal has now _spontaneously_ drawn up its legs and arms, and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away the offending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the motion still the result of the volition?

That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted at the circ.u.mstance, there seems to be no room to doubt, for Professor Rutherford related that having once decapitated a frog, the animal suddenly bounded from the table, a movement that presumably indicated a kind of consciousness. He then returned to the subject immediately under observation, pinched its foot again, the frog again "resenting the stimulation." He then thrust a needle down the spinal cord. "The limbs are now flaccid," observed the experimenter; "we may wait as long as we please, but a pinch of the toes will never again cause the limbs of this animal to move." Here is where congratulations can come in for _la grenouille_. That frog being concluded, the lecturer continued:

I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . . I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent legs without any difficulty. . . . I gently pinch the toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . . I pinch the same more severely.

. . . Both legs are thrown into motion.

Having thus satisfactorily proved that the wretched creature could still suffer acutely, the professor resumed:

The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sensitive to acids; so I put a drop of acetic acid on the outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most violent movements both of arms and legs, and notice particularly that the animal is using the toes of the leg on the same side for the purpose of rubbing the irritated spot. I dip the whole animal into water in order to wash away the acid, and now it is all at rest again. . . . I put a drop of acid on the skin over the lumbar region of the spine. . . . Both feet are instantly raised to the irritated spot. The animal is able to localize the seat of irritation.

. . . I wash the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the feet at the ankle. . . . I apply a drop of acid over the knee of the footless leg. . . . Again, the animal turns the leg towards the knee, as if to reach the irritated spot with the toes; these, however, are not now available. But watch the other foot. The _foot of the other leg_ is now being used to rub away the acid. The animal, finding that the object is not accomplished with the foot of the same side, uses the other one.

I think that at least one thing will be patent to every unprejudiced reader of these excerpts, namely--that any frog (with its head on or its head off) which happened to make the personal acquaintance of Professor Rutherford must have found him poor company. What benefit science may have derived from such a.s.sociation I am not qualified to p.r.o.nounce upon.

The lecturer showed conclusively that the frog is a peculiarly sensitive and intelligent little batrachian. I hope that the genial professor, in the years which followed, did not frequently consider it necessary to demonstrate the fact.

LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL

IT has recently become the fashion to speak disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to cla.s.s him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer to Coleridge, Sh.e.l.ley, and Keats. Truth to tell, Hunt was not a Keats nor a Sh.e.l.ley nor a Coleridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He was a delightful essayist--quite unsurpa.s.sed, indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way--and as a poet deserves to rank high among the lesser singers of his time. I should place him far above Barry Cornwall, who has not half the freshness, variety, and originality of his compeer.

I instance Barry Cornwall because there has seemed a disposition since his death to praise him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck me as extremely artificial, especially in his dramatic sketches. His verses in this line are mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of his own age and atmosphere for inspiration; but in order successfully to do so he must be a dramatist.

Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the role; he got no further than the composing of brief disconnected scenes and sc.r.a.ps of soliloquies, and a tragedy ent.i.tled Mirandola, for which the stage had no use. His chief claim to recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the dramatic studies, his att.i.tude is nearly always affected. He studiously strives to reproduce the form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Londoner, he naturally sings much of rural English life, but his England is the England of two or three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say about the "falcon," but the poor bird has the air of beating fatigued wings against the bookshelves of a well-furnished library! This well-furnished library was--if I may be pardoned a mixed image--the rock on which Barry Cornwall split. He did not look into his own heart, and write: he looked into his books.

A poet need not confine himself to his individual experiences; the world is all before him where to choose; but there are subjects which he had better not handle unless he have some personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of these. The man who sang,

The sea! the sea! the open sea!

The blue, the fresh, _the ever free!_

(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have penned), should never have permitted himself to sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I first read this singularly vapid poem years ago, in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had ever laid eyes on any piece of water wider than the Thames at Greenwich, and in looking over Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not so much surprised as amused to learn that he was never out of sight of land in the whole course of his existence. It is to be said of him more positively than the captain of the Pinafore said it of himself, that he was hardly ever sick at sea.

Imagine Byron or Sh.e.l.ley, who knew the ocean in all its protean moods, piping such thin feebleness as