Ponkapog Papers

T >> Thomas Bailey Aldrich >> Ponkapog Papers


Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of the period. That a
Christian can go about unabashed with a shiny black cylinder on his head
shows what civilization has done for us in the way of taste in personal
decoration. The scalplock of an Apache brave has more style. When an
Indian squaw comes into a frontier settlement the first "marked-down"
article she purchases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct as to
the eternal fitness of things tells her that its proper place is on the
skull of a barbarian.

It was while revolving these pleasing reflections in my mind, that our
friend Delorme walked across the stage in the fourth act, and though
there was nothing in the situation nor in the text of the play to
warrant it, I broke into tremendous applause, from which I desisted
only at the scowl of an usher--an object in a celluloid collar and
a claw-hammer coat. My solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an
involuntary and, I think, pardonable protest against the male costume of
our own time.




ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION

EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is the age of vain fantasy, there is
no accounting for the fact that young men and young women of poetical
temperament should so frequently assume to look upon an early demise
for themselves as the most desirable thing in the world. Though one may
incidentally be tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one cannot
help wondering. That persons who are exceptionally fortunate in their
environment, and in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should
openly announce their intention of retiring at once into the family
tomb, is a problem not easily solved. The public has so long listened
to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets thus impatient to
be gone were to go, their departure would perhaps be attended by that
resigned speeding which the proverb invokes on behalf of the parting
guest.

The existence of at least one magazine editor would, I know, have a
shadow lifted from it. At this writing, in a small mortuary basket under
his desk are seven or eight poems of so gloomy a nature that he would
not be able to remain in the same room with them if he did not suspect
the integrity of their pessimism. The ring of a false coin is not more
recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow.

The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled "Forsaken," in which she
addresses death as her only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes.
He sees, among other dissolving views, a little hoyden in magnificent
spirits, perhaps one of this season's social buds, with half a score of
lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem--a rose whose countless
petals are coupons. A caramel has disagreed with her, or she would not
have written in this despondent vein. The young man who seeks to inform
the world in eleven anaemic stanzas of _terze rime_ that the cup of
happiness has been forever dashed from his lip (he appears to have but
one) and darkly intimates that the end is "nigh" (rhyming affably with
"sigh"), will probably be engaged a quarter of a century from now in
making similar declarations. He is simply echoing some dysthymic poet of
the past--reaching out with some other man's hat for the stray nickel of
your sympathy.

This morbidness seldom accompanies genuine poetic gifts. The case of
David Gray, the young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an instance
to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly sad, and the failure of
health just as he was on the verge of achieving something like success
justified his profound melancholy; but that he tuned this melancholy and
played upon it, as if it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in
one of his sonnets.

In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) "Life and Letters of John Keats"
it is related that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood upon his
lips after coughing, said to his friend Charles Brown: "I know the color
of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That drop
is my death-warrant. I must die." Who that ever read the passage
could forget it? David Gray did not, for he versified the incident as
happening to himself and appropriated, as his own, Keats's comment:

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.

The incident was likely enough a personal experience, but the comment
should have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few stranger
things in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man's
pathos. Even Keats's epitaph--_Here lies one whose name_ _was writ in
water_--finds an echo in David Gray's _Below lies one whose name was
traced in sand_. Poor Gray was at least the better prophet.




WISHMAKERS' TOWN

A LIMITED edition of this little volume of verse, which seems to me
in many respects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long been out of
print. The reissue of the book is in response to the desire off certain
readers who have not forgotten the charm which William Young's poem
exercised upon them years ago, and, finding the charm still potent,
would have others share it.

The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem and not simply a series of
unrelated lyrics, is ingenious and original, and unfolds itself in
measures at once strong and delicate. The mood of the poet and the
method of the playwright are obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--a
little town situated in the no-man's-land of "The Tempest" and "A
Midsummer Night's Dream"--is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the
dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls the townfolk to their
various avocations, the toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness,
the miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque sequence the personages
of the Masque pass before us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers,
gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd the scene, and have in
turn their word of poignant speech. We mingle with the throng in the
streets; we hear the whir of looms and the din of foundries, the blare
of trumpets, the whisper of lovers, the scandals of the market-place,
and, in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy microcosm.
A contracted stage, indeed, yet large enough for the play of many
passions, as the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the sounding of the
curfew, the town is hushed to sleep again, and the curtain falls on this
mimic drama of life.

The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. Perhaps if one could
name it, the spell were broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs an
atmosphere too evasive for measurement--an atmosphere that stipulates an
imaginative mood on the part of the reader. The quality which pleases in
certain of the lyrical episodes is less intangible. One readily explains
one's liking for so gracious a lyric as The Flower-Seller, to select an
example at random. Next to the pleasure that lies in the writing of such
exquisite verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the stanzas partly
for my own gratification, and partly to win the reader to "Wishmakers'
Town," not knowing better how to do it.

Myrtle, and eglantine,
For the old love and the new!
And the columbine,
With its cap and bells, for folly!
And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth! and the rue,
For melancholy!
But of all the blossoms that blow,
Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may,
This gentle guest,
Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray,
Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low
Upon her breast.
For the orange flower
Ye may buy as ye will: but the violet of the wood
Is the love of maidenhood;
And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour,
He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream,
No, never again shall he meet with a dower that shall seem
So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years,
At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath,
The past shall arise,
And his eyes shall be dim with tears,
And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise
Though he stand in the Shambles of death.
In a different tone, but displaying the same sureness of execution, is
the cry of the lowly folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of life:

Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame,
Plot, and plunder, and disagree!
O but the game is a royal game!
O but your tourneys are fair to see!

None too hopeful we found our lives;
Sore was labor from day to day;
Still we strove for our babes and wives--
Now, to the trumpet, we march away!

"Why?"--For some one hath will'd it so!
Nothing we know of the why or the where--
To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow--
Nothing we know, and little we care.

Give us to kill!--since this is the end
Of love and labor in Nature's plan;
Give us to kill and ravish and rend,
Yea, since this is the end of man.

States shall perish, and states be born:
Leaders, out of the throng, shall press;
Some to honor, and some to scorn:
We, that are little, shall yet be less.

Over our lines shall the vultures soar;
Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry;
And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore;
And daily the living shall pray to die.

Nay, what matter!--When all is said,
Prince and Bishop will plunder still:
Lord and Lady must dance and wed.
Pity us, pray for us, ye that will!

It is only the fear of impinging on Mr. Young's copyright that prevents
me reprinting the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the prologue of The
Strollers, which reads like a page from the prelude to some Old-World
miracle play. The setting of these things is frequently antique, but the
thought is the thought of today. I think there is a new generation of
readers for such poetry as Mr. Young's. I venture the prophecy that
it will not lack for them later when the time comes for the inevitable
rearrangement of present poetic values.

The author of "Wishmakers' Town" is the child of his period, and has not
escaped the _maladie du siecle_. The doubt and pessimism that marked
the end of the nineteenth century find a voice in the bell-like strophes
with which the volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than the poet
who speaks here. The real message of the poet to mankind is ever one of
hope. Amid the problems that perplex and discourage, it is for him to
sing

Of what the world shall be
When the years have died away.





HISTORICAL NOVELS

IN default of such an admirable piece of work as Dr. Weir Mitchell's
"Hugh Wynne," I like best those fictions which deal with kingdoms and
principalities that exist only in the mind's eye. One's knowledge of
actual events and real personages runs no serious risk of receiving
shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything that happens in an imaginary
realm--in the realm of Ruritania, for illustration--has an air of
possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance. The atmosphere and local
color, having an authenticity of their own, are not to be challenged.
You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of the period in which his
narrative is laid, since the period is as vague as the geography.
He walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils that beset
the story-teller who ventures to stray beyond the bounds of the
make-believe. One peril he cannot escape--that of misrepresenting human
nature.

The anachronisms of the average historical novel, pretending to
reflect history, are among its minor defects. It is a thing altogether
wonderfully and fearfully made--the imbecile intrigue, the cast-iron
characters, the plumed and armored dialogue with its lance of gory
rhetoric forever at charge. The stage at its worst moments is not so
unreal. Here art has broken into smithereens the mirror which she is
supposed to hold up to nature.

In this romance-world somebody is always somebody's unsuspected father,
mother, or child, deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usually
the anonymous person is the hero, to whom it is mere recreation to hold
twenty swordsmen at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of them
before he escapes through a door that ever providentially opens directly
behind him. How tired one gets of that door! The "caitiff" in these
chronicles of when knighthood was in flower is invariably hanged from
"the highest battlement"--the second highest would not do at all; or
else he is thrown into "the deepest dungeon of the castle"--the second
deepest dungeon was never known to be used on these occasions. The hero
habitually "cleaves" his foeman "to the midriff," the "midriff"
being what the properly brought up hero always has in view. A certain
fictional historian of my acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim:
"My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff;" but that is an exceptionally
lofty flight of diction. My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in
the course of long interviews with her lover remains unrecognized--a
diaphanous literary invention that must have been old when the Pyramids
were young. The heroine's small brother, with playful archaicism called
"a springald," puts on her skirts and things and passes himself off for
his sister or anybody else he pleases. In brief, there is no puerility
that is not at home in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen--a
priest, a princess, and a young man in woman's clothes are on the scene:

\ The princess rose to her feet and
approached the priest.
\ "Father," she said swiftly, "this
is not the Lady Joan, my brother's
wife, but a youth marvelously like
her, who hath offered himself in
her place that she might escape. . . .
He is the Count von Loen, a lord
of Kernsburg. And I love him. We
want you to marry us now, dear
Father--now, without a moment's
delay; for if you do not they will
kill him, and I shall have to marry
Prince Wasp!"

This is from "Joan of the Sword Hand," and if ever I read a more silly
performance I have forgotten it.




POOR YORICK

THERE is extant in the city of New York an odd piece of bric-a-brac
which I am sometimes tempted to wish was in my own possession. On a
bracket in Edwin Booth's bedroom at The Players--the apartment remains
as he left it that solemn June day ten years ago--stands a sadly
dilapidated skull which the elder Booth, and afterward his son Edwin,
used to soliloquize over in the graveyard at Elsinore in the fifth act
of "Hamlet."

A skull is an object that always invokes interest more or less poignant;
it always has its pathetic story, whether told or untold; but this skull
is especially a skull "with a past."

In the early forties, while playing an engagement somewhere in the wild
West, Junius Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a particularly
undeserving fellow, the name of him unknown to us. The man, as it
seemed, was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer, and highwayman--in
brief, a miscellaneous desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort
of person likely to touch the sympathies of the half-mad player. In the
course of nature or the law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily
disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist even as a reminiscence in
the florid mind of his sometime benefactor.

As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast one morning in a hotel in
Louisville, Kentucky, a negro boy entered the room bearing a small osier
basket neatly covered with a snowy napkin. It had the general appearance
of a basket of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as such it
figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's conjecture. On lifting the cloth the
actor started from the chair with a genuine expression on his features
of that terror which he was used so marvelously to simulate as Richard
III. in the midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the ghost of Banquo
usurped his seat at table.

In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the head of Booth's old pensioner,
which head the old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form to the
tragedian, begging him henceforth to adopt it as one of the necessary
stage properties in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy of
"Hamlet." "Take it away, you black imp!" thundered the actor to the
equally aghast negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not prompted him
to investigate the dark nature of his burden.

Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's residuary legatee,
recovering from the first shock of his surprise, fell into the grim
humor of the situation, and proceeded to carry out to the letter the
testator's whimsical request. Thus it was that the skull came to secure
an engagement to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B. Booth's company
of strolling players, and to continue a while longer to glimmer behind
the footlights in the hands of his famous son.

Observing that the grave-digger in his too eager realism was damaging
the thing--the marks of his pick and spade are visible on the
cranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it with a papier-mache
counterfeit manufactured in the property-room of the theatre. During
his subsequent wanderings in Australia and California, he carefully
preserved the relic, which finally found repose on the bracket in
question.

How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in that front room on the fourth
floor of the clubhouse in Gramercy Park, watching the winter or summer
twilight gradually softening and blurring the sharp outline of the skull
until it vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin Booth had forgotten,
if ever he knew, the name of the man; but I had no need of it in order
to establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In this association I was
conscious of a deep tinge of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance
not without its queerness, considering how very distant the acquaintance
really was.

Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his day; he was sober
enough now, and in no way disposed to indulge in those flashes of
merriment "that were wont to set the table on a roar." But I did not
regret his evaporated hilarity; I liked his more befitting genial
silence, and had learned to look upon his rather open countenance with
the same friendliness as that with which I regarded the faces of
less phantasmal members of the club. He had become to me a dramatic
personality as distinct as that of any of the Thespians I met in the
grillroom or the library.

Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a subject upon which I frequently
speculated. There was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence in
those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden remembrance of some old
experience had illumined them. He had been a great traveler, and had
known strange vicissitudes in life; his stage career had brought him
into contact with a varied assortment of men and women, and extended
his horizon. His more peaceful profession of holding up mail-coaches on
lonely roads had surely not been without incident. It was inconceivable
that all this had left no impressions. He must have had at least a faint
recollection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth. That Yorick
had formed his estimate of me, and probably not a flattering one, is
something of which I am strongly convinced.

At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick passed out of my personal
cognizance, and now lingers an incongruous shadow amid the memories of
the precious things I lost then.

The suite of apartments formerly occupied by Edwin Booth at The Players
has been, as I have said, kept unchanged--a shrine to which from time to
time some loving heart makes silent pilgrimage. On a table in the
centre of his bedroom lies the book just where he laid it down, an ivory
paper-cutter marking the page his eyes last rested upon; and in this
chamber, with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments, the skull
finds its proper sanctuary. If at odd moments I wish that by chance poor
Yorick had fallen to my care, the wish is only halfhearted, though had
that happened, I would have given him welcome to the choicest corner
in my study and tenderly cherished him for the sake of one who comes no
more.




THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER

One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
--_King Lear._

THE material for this paper on the autograph hunter, his ways and his
manners, has been drawn chiefly from experiences not my own. My personal
relations with him have been comparatively restricted, a circumstance
to which I owe the privilege of treating the subject with a freedom that
might otherwise not seem becoming.

No author is insensible to the compliment involved in a request for his
autograph, assuming the request to come from some sincere lover of
books and bookmen. It is an affair of different complection when he is
importuned to give time and attention to the innumerable unknown who
"collect" autographs as they would collect postage stamps, with no
interest in the matter beyond the desire to accumulate as many as
possible. The average autograph hunter, with his purposeless insistence,
reminds one of the queen in Stockton's story whose fad was "the
buttonholes of all nations."

In our population of eighty millions and upward there are probably two
hundred thousand persons interested more or less in what is termed the
literary world. This estimate is absurdly low, but it serves to cast
a sufficient side-light upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two
hundred thousand is likely at any moment to indite a letter to some
favorite novelist, historian, poet, or what not. It will be seen, then,
that the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable person. He has made it
embarrassing work for the author fortunate or unfortunate enough to
be regarded as worth while. Every mail adds to his reproachful pile
of unanswered letters. If he have a conscience, and no amanuensis,
he quickly finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless and futile
correspondence. Through policy, good nature, or vanity he is apt to
become facile prey.

A certain literary collector once confessed in print that he always
studied the idiosyncrasies of his "subject" as carefully as another
sort of collector studies the plan of the house to which he meditates
a midnight visit. We were assured that with skillful preparation and
adroit approach an autograph could be extracted from anybody. According
to the revelations of the writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and
Mr. Gladstone had their respective point of easy access--their one
unfastened door or window, metaphorically speaking. The strongest man
has his weak side.

Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every one who wrote to him was
perhaps not a trait characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell, for
instance, was harder-hearted and rather difficult to reach. I recall one
day in the library at Elmwood. As I was taking down a volume from the
shelf a sealed letter escaped from the pages and fluttered to my feet. I
handed it to Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the superscription.
"Oh, yes," he said, smiling, "I know 'em by instinct." Relieved of its
envelope, the missive turned out to be eighteen months old, and began
with the usual amusing solecism: "As one of the most famous of American
authors I would like to possess your autograph."

Each recipient of such requests has of course his own way of responding.
Mr. Whittier used to be obliging; Mr. Longfellow politic; Mr. Emerson,
always philosophical, dreamily confiscated the postage stamps.

Time was when the collector contented himself with a signature on a
card; but that, I am told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter
addressed to him personally--"on any subject you please," as an immature
scribe lately suggested to an acquaintance of mine. The ingenuous
youth purposed to flourish a letter in the faces of his less fortunate
competitors, in order to show them that he was on familiar terms with
the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred motive is the spur to many
a collector. The stratagems he employs to compass his end are
inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note to inquire in what year you
first published your beautiful poem entitled "A Psalm of Life." If you
are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him that you are not the author
of that poem, which he must have confused with your "Rime of the
Ancient Mariner"--and there you are. Another expedient is to ask if your
father's middle name was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has probably
been dead many years, and as perhaps he was not a public man in his day,
you are naturally touched that any one should have interest in him after
this long flight of time. In the innocence of your heart you reply by
the next mail that your father's middle name was not Hierophilus, but
Epaminondas--and there you are again. It is humiliating to be caught
swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch of one's genealogical
tree.

Some morning you find beside your plate at breakfast an imposing
parchment with a great gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This
document--I am relating an actual occurrence--announces with a flourish
that you have unanimously been elected an honorary member of The
Kalamazoo International Literary Association. Possibly the honor does
not take away your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy to make
an acknowledgment, and you express your insincere thanks to the obliging
secretary of a literary organization which does not exist anywhere on
earth.