Ponkapog Papers

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> Ponkapog Papers


I had few or no inklings of his life disconnected with the streets and
the book-stalls, chiefly those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is
possible I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a room somewhere at
the South End or in South Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his
coffee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I got from him one or
two fortuitous hints of quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared,
some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch of mince pies, twenty
or thirty at least. He once spoke to me of having laid in his winter
pie, just as another might speak of laying in his winter coal. The
only fireside companion Tom Folio ever alluded to in my presence was
a Maltese cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him from time to
time. I suspected those mince pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss
Mowcher.

If he had any immediate family ties beyond this I was unaware of
them, and not curious to be enlightened on the subject. He was more
picturesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so. Other figures
introduced into the background of the canvas would have spoiled the
artistic effect.

Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a recluse even when he allowed
himself to be jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream of
humanity sweeping in opposite directions through Washington Street and
its busy estuaries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I had so little
real knowledge of him that I was obliged to imagine his more intimate
environments. However wide of the mark my conjectures may have fallen,
they were as satisfying to me as facts would have been. His secluded
room I could picture to myself with a sense of certainty--the couch (a
sofa by day), the cupboard, the writing-table with its student lamp, the
litter of pamphlets and old quartos and octavos in tattered bindings,
among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, and
perhaps--nay, surely--an _editio princeps_ of the "Essays."

The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower or a more loving disciple
than Tom Folio. He moved and had much of his being in the early part
of the last century. To him the South-Sea House was the most important
edifice on the globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used to be,
in spite of all the changes that had befallen it. It was there Charles
Lamb passed the novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the East
India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a slender, boyish figure was still
seated, quill in hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon
Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That famous first paper in the
"Essays," describing the South-Sea House and the group of human oddities
which occupied desks within its gloomy chambers, had left an indelible
impression upon the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean annuitant"
was as familiar to Tom Folio as if he had written it himself. Stray
scraps, which had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were known
to him, and it was his to unearth amid a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten
magazines, a handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men. Trifles,
yes--but Charles Lamb's! "The king's chaff is as good as other people's
corn," says Tom Folio.

Often his talk was sweet and racy with old-fashioned phrases; the talk of
a man who loved books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere of
fine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at a convenable distance, Izaak
Walton was Tom Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope, though
he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of "Cato" contained some proper
good lines. Our friend was a wide reader in English classics, greatly
preferring the literature of the earlier periods to that of the
Victorian age. His smiling, tenderly expressed disapprobation of various
modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's verses were monstrous
pretty, but over-ornamented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct
with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry of Shelley might have been
composed in the moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning person. If you
wanted a sound mind in a sound metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's
"Essay on Man." There was something winsome and by-gone in the general
make-up of Tom Folio. No man living in the world ever seemed to me to
live so much out of it, or to live more comfortably.

At times I half suspected him of a convalescent amatory disappointment.
Perhaps long before I knew him he had taken a little sentimental
journey, the unsuccessful end of which had touched him with a gentle
sadness. It was something far off and softened by memory. If Tom Folio
had any love-affair on hand in my day, it must have been of an airy,
platonic sort--a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Woffington or
Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Waller's Saccharissa.

Although Tom Folio was not a collector--that means dividends and bank
balances--he had a passion for the Past and all its belongings, with
a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare
Nankin (he had caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china), or an
undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him delight in the handling,
though he might not aspire to ownership. I believe he would willingly
have drunk any horrible decoction from a silver teapot of Queen Anne's
time. These things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic sense;
in a spiritual sense he held possession of them in fee-simple. I learned
thus much of his tastes one day during an hour we spent together in the
rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities.

I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I am inclined to think that
I mis-stated it. He had hosts of friends who used to climb the rather
steep staircase leading to that modest third-story front room which
I have imagined for him--a room with Turkey-red curtains, I like to
believe, and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Hogarth's excellent
moral of "The Industrious and Idle Apprentices" pinned against the
chimney breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always the best of
company, dropped in at intervals. There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a special
chair reserved for him by the window, where he could catch a glimpse of
the pretty housemaid over the way, chatting with the policeman at the
area railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author of "The Deserted
Village" were frequent visitors, sometimes appearing together
arm-in-arm, with James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, following
obsequiously behind. Not that Tom Folio did not have callers vastly more
aristocratic, though he could have had none pleasanter or wholesomer.
Sir Philip Sidney (who must have given Folio that copy of the
"Arcadia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two or three others before
whom either of these might have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to
gather round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Defoe, Dick
Steele, Dean Swift--there was no end to them! On certain nights, when
all the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber, the narrow street
stretching beneath Tom Folio's windows must have been blocked with
invisible coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the visionary
glare of torches borne by shadowy linkboys hurrying hither and thither.
A man so sought after and companioned cannot be described as lonely.

My memory here recalls the fact that he had a few friends less
insubstantial--that quaint anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ,
to whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his apple; and the
brown-legged little Neapolitan who was always nearly certain of a copper
when this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums on a Saturday
afternoon--Saturday probably being the essayist's pay-day. The withered
woman of the peanut-stand on the corner over against Faneuil Hall Market
knew him for a friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant, whom
Tom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted across the stormy traffic of
Dock Square. _Noblesse oblige!_ He was no stranger in those purlieus.
Without designing to confuse small things with great, I may say that a
certain strip of pavement in North Street could be pointed out as Tom
Folio's Walk, just as Addison's Walk is pointed out on the banks of the
Cherwell at Oxford.

I used to observe that when Tom Folio was not in quest of a print or a
pamphlet or some such urgent thing, but was walking for mere recreation,
he instinctively avoided respectable latitudes. He liked best the
squalid, ill-kept thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tenement-houses
and teeming with unprosperous, noisy life. Perhaps he had, half
consciously, a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and cheerful
resignation of it all.

Returning home from abroad one October morning several years ago, I was
told that that simple spirit had passed on. His death had been little
heeded; but in him had passed away an intangible genuine bit of Old
Boston--as genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself--a
personality not to be restored or replaced. Tom Folio could never happen
again!

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 title 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 circumstance 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 surpass 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 passage 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 passage 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 impassible 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-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres; il entend, comme un
rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur vague de la bataille-fantome; ces
ombres, ce sont les grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers;
. . . 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 confusement 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 impassive 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 assumes 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 shells, the clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the
muffled clamor of the phantom conflict comes to him like
dying moans from the tomb; these shadows are grenadiers,
these lights are cuirassiers . . . 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 nobody 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
class, inasmuch as character in itself is plot, while plot is by no
means character." So neat an antithesis 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 analysis. 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 passions are supposed to be embodied in such and such
persons: these persons should be placed in situations developing those
passions. 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 asserts 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 association
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 passages from the report will illustrate 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 circumstance, 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.