THE MAKER OF MANY BOOKS.
During the winter of 1879, when I was in London, it was my fortune to attend, a social meeting of literary men at the rooms of a certain eminent publisher. The rooms were full of tobacco-smoke and talk, amid which were discernible, on all sides, the figures and faces of men more or less renowned in the world of books. Most noticeable among these personages was a broad-shouldered, st.u.r.dy man, of middle height, with a ruddy countenance, and snow-white tempestuous beard and hair. He wore large, gold-rimmed spectacles, but his eyes were black and brilliant, and looked at his interlocutor with a certain genial fury of inspection. He seemed to be in a state of some excitement; he spoke volubly and almost boisterously, and his voice was full-toned and powerful, though pleasant to the ear. He turned himself, as he spoke, with a burly briskness, from one side to another, addressing himself first to this auditor and then to that, his words bursting forth from beneath his white moustache with such an impetus of hearty breath that it seemed as if all opposing arguments must be blown quite away.
Meanwhile he flourished in the air an ebony walking-stick, with much vigor of gesticulation, and narrowly missing, as it appeared, the pates of his listeners. He was clad in evening dress, though the rest of the company was, for the most part, in mufti; and he was an exceedingly fine-looking old gentleman. At the first glance, you would have taken him to be some civilized and modernized Squire Western, nourished with beef and ale, and roughly hewn out of the most robust and least refined variety of human clay. Looking at him more narrowly, however, you would have reconsidered this judgment. Though his general contour and aspect were ma.s.sive and st.u.r.dy, the lines of his features were delicately cut; his complexion was remarkably pure and fine, and his face was susceptible of very subtle and sensitive changes of expression. Here was a man of abundant physical strength and vigor, no doubt, but carrying within him a nature more than commonly alert and impressible.
His organization, though thoroughly healthy, was both complex and high-wrought; his character was simple and straightforward to a fault, but he was abnormally conscientious, and keenly alive to others"
opinion concerning him. It might be thought that he was overburdened with self-esteem, and unduly opinionated; but, in fact, he was but overanxious to secure the good-will and agreement of all with whom he came in contact. There was some peculiarity in him--some element or bias in his composition that made him different from other men; but, on the other hand, there was an ardent solicitude to annul or reconcile this difference, and to prove himself to be, in fact, of absolutely the same cut and quality as all the rest of the world. Hence he was in a demonstrative, expository, or argumentative mood; he could not sit quiet in the face of a divergence between himself and his a.s.sociates; he was incorrigibly strenuous to obliterate or harmonize the irreconcilable points between him and others; and since these points remained irreconcilable, he remained in a constant state of storm and stress on the subject.
It was impossible to help liking such a man at first sight; and I believe that no man in London society was more generally liked than Anthony Trollope. There was something pathetic in his att.i.tude as above indicated; and a fresh and boyish quality always invested him. His artlessness was boyish, and so were his acuteness and his transparent but somewhat belated good-sense. He was one of those rare persons who not only have no reserves, but who can afford to dispense with them.
After he had shown you all he had in him, you would have seen nothing that was not gentlemanly, honest, and clean. He was a quick-tempered man, and the ardor and hurry of his temperament made him seem more so than he really was; but he was never more angry than he was forgiving and generous. He was hurt by little things, and little things pleased him; he was suspicious and perverse, but in a manner that rather endeared him to you than otherwise. Altogether, to a casual acquaintance, who knew nothing of his personal history, he was something of a paradox--an entertaining contradiction. The publication of his autobiography explained many things in his character that were open to speculation; and, indeed, the book is not only the most interesting and amusing that its author has ever written, but it places its subject before the reader more completely and comprehensively than most autobiographies do. This, however, is due much less to any direct effort or intention on the writer"s part, than to the unconscious self-revelation which meets the reader on every page. No narrative could be simpler, less artificial; and yet, everywhere, we read between the lines, and, so to speak, discover Anthony Trollope in spite of his efforts to discover himself to us.
The truth appears to be that the youthful Trollope, like a more famous fellow-novelist, began the world with more kicks than half-pence. His boyhood, he affirms, was as unhappy as that of a young gentleman could well be, owing to a mixture of poverty and gentle standing on his father"s part, and, on his own, to "an utter lack of juvenile manhood"--whatever that may be. His father was a lawyer, who frightened away all his clients by his outrageous temper, and who encountered one mischance after another until he landed himself and his family in open bankruptcy; from which they were rescued, partly by death, which carried away four of them (including the old gentleman), and partly by Mrs. Trollope, who, at fifty years of age, brought out her famous book on America, and continued to make a fair income by literature (as she called it) until 1856, when, being seventy-six years old, and having produced one hundred and fourteen volumes, she permitted herself to retire. This extraordinary lady, in her youth, cherished what her son calls "an emotional dislike to tyrants"; but when her American experience had made her acquainted with some of the seamy aspects of democracy, and especially after the aristocracy of her own country had begun to patronize her, she confessed the error of her early way, "and thought that archd.u.c.h.esses were sweet." But she was certainly a valiant and indefatigable woman,--"of all the people I have ever known," says her son, "the most joyous, or, at any rate, the most capable of joy"; and he adds that her best novels were written in 1834-35, when her husband and four of her six children were dying upstairs of consumption, and she had to divide her time between nursing them and writing. a.s.suredly, no son of hers need apprehend the reproach--"_Tydides melior matre_"; though Anthony, and his brother Thomas Adolphus, must, together, have run her pretty hard. The former remarks, with that terrible complacency in an awful fact which is one of his most noticeable and astounding traits, that the three of them "wrote more books than were probably ever before produced by a single family." The existence of a few more such families could be consistent only with a generous enlargement of the British Museum.
The elder Trollope was a scholar, and to make scholars of his sons was one of his ruling ideas. Poor little Anthony endured no less than twelve mortal years of schooling--from the time he was seven until he was nineteen--and declares that, in all that time, he does not remember that he ever knew a lesson. "I have been flogged," he says, "oftener than any other human being." Nay, his troubles began before his school-days; for his father used to make him recite his infantile tasks to him while he was shaving, and obliged him to sit with his head inclined in such a manner "that he could pull my hair without stopping his razor or dropping his shaving-brush." This is a depressing picture; and there are plenty more like it. Dr. Butler, the master of Harrow, meeting the poor little draggletail urchin in the yard, desired to know, in awful accents, how so dirty a boy dared to show himself near the school! "He must have known me, had he seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps,"
adds his victim, "he did not recognize me by my face!" But it is comforting to learn, in another place, that justice overtook the oppressor. "Dr. Butler only lived to be Dean of Peterborough; but his successor (Dr. Longley) became Archbishop of Canterbury." There is a great deal of Trollopian morality in the fate of these two men, the latter of whom "could not have said anything ill-natured if he had tried."
Black care, however, continued to sit behind the horseman with harrowing persistence. A certain Dr. Drury (another schoolmaster) punished him on suspicion of "some nameless horror," of which the unfortunate youngster happened to be innocent. When, afterward, the latter fact began to be obvious, "he whispered to me half a word that perhaps he had been wrong. But, with a boy"s stupid slowness, I said nothing, and he had not the courage to carry reparation farther." The poverty of Anthony"s father deprived the boy of all the external advantages that might have enabled him to take rank with his fellows: and his native awkwardness and sensitiveness widened the breach. "I had no friend to whom I could pour out my sorrows. I was big, awkward and ugly, and, I have no doubt, skulked about in a most unattractive manner. Something of the disgrace of my school-days has clung to me all through life. When I have been claimed as school-fellow by some of those many hundreds who were with me either at Harrow or at Winchester, I have felt that I had no right to talk of things from most of which I was kept in estrangement. I was never a coward, but to make a stand against three hundred tyrants required a moral courage which I did not possess." Once, however, they pushed him too far, and he was driven to rebellion. "And then came a great fight--at the end of which my opponent had to be taken home to be cured." And then he utters the characteristic wish that some one, of the many who witnessed this combat, may still be left alive "who will be able to say that, in claiming this solitary glory of my school-days, I am making no false boast." The lonely, lugubrious little champion! One would almost have been willing to have received from him a black eye and a b.l.o.o.d.y nose, only to comfort his sad heart. It is delightful to imagine the terrific earnestness of that solitary victory: and I would like to know what boy it was (if any) who lent the unpopular warrior a knee and wiped his face.
After he got through his school-days, his family being then abroad, he had an offer of a commission in an Austrian cavalry regiment; and he might have been a major-general or field-marshal at this day had his schooling made him acquainted with the French and German languages.
Being, however, entirely ignorant of these, he was obliged to study them in order to his admission; and while he was thus employed, he received news of a vacant clerkship in the General Post-Office, with the dazzling salary of 90 a year. Needless to say that he jumped at such an opening, seeing before him a vision of a splendid civil and social career, at something over twenty pounds a quarter. But London, even fifty years ago, was a more expensive place than Anthony imagined.
Moreover, the boy was alone in the wilderness of the city, with no one to advise or guide him. The consequence was that these latter days of his youth were as bad or worse than the beginning. In reviewing his plight at this period, he observes: "I had pa.s.sed my life where I had seen gay things, but had never enjoyed them. There was no house in which I could habitually see a lady"s face or hear a lady"s voice. At the Post-Office I got credit for nothing, and was reckless. I hated my work, and, more than all, I hated my idleness. Borrowings of money, sometimes absolute want, and almost constant misery, followed as a matter of course. I Had a full conviction that my life was taking me down to the lowest pits--a feeling that I had been looked upon as an evil, an enc.u.mbrance, a useless thing, a creature of whom those connected with me had to be ashamed. Even my few friends were half-ashamed of me. I acknowledge the weakness of a great desire to be loved--a strong wish to be popular. No one had ever been less so."
Under these circ.u.mstances, he remarks that, although, no doubt, if the mind be strong enough, the temptation will not prevail, yet he is fain to admit that the temptation prevailed with him. He did not sit at home, after his return from the office, in the evening, to drink tea and read, but tramped out in the streets, and tried to see life and be jolly on 90 a year. He borrowed four pounds of a money-lender, to augment his resources, and found, after a few years, that he had paid him two hundred pounds for the accommodation. He met with every variety of absurd and disastrous adventure. The mother of a young woman with whom he had had an innocent flirtation in the country appeared one day at his desk in the office, and called out before all the clerks, "Anthony Trollope, when are you going to marry my daughter?" On another occasion a sum of money was missing from the table of the director.
Anthony was summoned. The director informed him of the loss--"and, by G--!" he continued, thundering his fist down on the table, "no one has been in the room but you and I." "Then, by G--!" cried Anthony, thundering _his_ fist down upon something, "you have taken it!" This was very well; but the thing which Anthony had thumped happened to be, not a table, but a movable desk with an inkstand on it, and the ink flew up and deluged the face and shirt-front of the enraged director.
Still another adventure was that of the Queen of Saxony and the Half-Crown; but the reader must investigate these matters for himself.
So far there has been nothing looking toward the novel-writer. But now we learn that from the age of fifteen to twenty-six Anthony kept a journal, which, he says, "convicted me of folly, ignorance, indiscretion, idleness, and conceit, but habituated me to the rapid use of pen and ink, and taught me how to express myself with facility." In addition to this, and more to the purpose, he had formed an odd habit.
Living, as he was forced to do, so much to himself, if not by himself, he had to play, not with other boys, but with himself; and his favorite play was to conceive a tale, or series of fict.i.tious events, and to carry it on, day after day, for months together, in his mind. "Nothing impossible was ever introduced, or violently improbable. I was my own hero, but I never became a king or a duke, still less an Antinous, or six feet high. But I was a very clever person, and beautiful young women used to be very fond of me. I learned in this way to live in a world outside the world of my own material life." This is pointedly, even touchingly, characteristic. Never, to the day of his death, did Mr. Trollope either see or imagine anything impossible, or violently improbable, in the world. This mortal plane of things never dissolved before his gaze and revealed the mysteries of absolute Being; his heavens were never rolled up as a scroll, and his earth had no bubbles as the water hath. He took things as he found them; and he never found them out. But if the light that never was on sea or land does not illuminate the writings of Mr. Trollope, there is generally plenty of that other kind of light with which, after all, the average reader is more familiar, and which not a few, perhaps, prefer to the transcendental l.u.s.tre. There is no modern novelist who has more clearly than Trollope defined to his own apprehension his own literary capabilities and limitations. He is thoroughly acquainted with both his fortes and his foibles; and so sound is his good sense, that he is seldom beguiled into toiling with futile ambition after effects that are beyond him. His proper domain is a sufficiently wide one; he is inimitably at home here; and when he invites us there to visit him, we may be sure of getting good and wholesome entertainment. The writer"s familiarity with his characters communicates itself imperceptibly to the reader; there are no difficult or awkward introductions; the toning of the picture (to use the painter"s phrase) is unexceptionable; and if it be rather tinted than colored, the tints are handled in a workmanlike manner. Again, few English novelists seem to possess so sane a comprehension of the modes of life and thought of the British aristocracy as Trollope. He has not only made a study of them from the observer"s point of view, but he has reasoned them out intellectually.
The figures are not vividly defined; the realism is applied to events rather than to personages: we have the scene described for us but we do not look upon it. We should not recognize his characters if we saw them; but if we were told who they were, we should know, from their author"s testimony, what were their characteristic traits and how they would act under given circ.u.mstances. The logical sequence of events is carefully maintained; nothing happens, either for good or for evil, other than might befall under the dispensations of a Providence no more unjust, and no more far-sighted, than Trollope himself. There is a good deal of the _a priori_ principle in his method; he has made up his mind as to certain fundamental data, and thence develops or explains whatever complication comes up for settlement. But to range about unhampered by any theories, concerned only to examine all phenomena, and to report thereupon, careless of any considerations save those of artistic propriety, would have been vanity and striving after wind to Trollope, and derivatively so, doubtless, to his readers.
Considered in the abstract, it is a curious question what makes his novels interesting. The reader knows, in a sense, just what is in store for him,--or, rather, what is not. There will be no astonishment, no curdling horror, no consuming suspense. There may be, perhaps, as many murders, forgeries, foundlings, abductions, and missing wills, in Trollope"s novels as in any others; but they are not told about in a manner to alarm us; we accept them philosophically; there are paragraphs in our morning paper that excite us more. And yet they are narrated with art, and with dramatic effect. They are interesting, but not uncourteously--not exasperatingly so; and the strangest part of it is that the introductory and intermediate pa.s.sages are no less interesting, under Trollope"s treatment, than are the murders and forgeries. Not only does he never offend the modesty of nature,--he encourages her to be prudish, and trains her to such evenness and severity of demeanor that we never know when we have had enough of her.
His touch is eminently civilizing; everything, from the episodes to the sentences, moves without hitch or creak: we never have to read a paragraph twice, and we are seldom sorry to have read it once.
Amusingly characteristic of Trollope is his treatment of his villains.
His att.i.tude toward them betrays no personal uncharitableness or animosity, but the villain has a bad time of it just the same. Trollope places upon him a large, benevolent, but unyielding forefinger, and says to us: "Remark, if you please, how this inferior reptile squirms when pressure is applied to him. I will now augment the pressure. You observe that the squirmings increase in energy and complexity. Now, if you please, I will bear down yet a little harder. Do not be alarmed, madam; the reptile undoubtedly suffers, but the spectacle may do us some good, and you may trust me not to let him do you any harm.
There!--Yes, evisceration by means of pressure is beyond question painful; but every one must have observed the benevolence of my forefinger during the operation; and I fancy even the subject of the experiment (were he in a condition to express his sentiments) would have admitted as much. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again very shortly. John, another reptile, please!" Upon the whole, it is much to Trollope"s credit that he wrote somewhere about fifty long novels; and to the credit of the English people that they paid him three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for these novels--and read them!
But his success as a man of letters was still many years in the future.
After seven years in the London office, he went to Ireland as a.s.sistant surveyor, and thenceforward he began to enjoy his business, and to get on in it. He was paid sixpence a mile, and he would ride forty miles a day. He rode to hounds, incidentally, whenever he got a chance, and he kept up the practice, with enthusiasm, to within a few years of his death. "It will, I think, be accorded to me," he says, "that I have ridden hard. I know very little about hunting; I am blind, very heavy, and I am now old; but I ride with a boy"s energy, hating the roads, and despising young men who ride them; and I feel that life cannot give me anything better than when I have gone through a long run to the finish, keeping a place, not of glory, but of credit, among my juniors."
Riding, working, having a jolly time, and gradually increasing his income, he lived until 1842, when he became engaged; and he was married on June 11, 1844. "I ought to name that happy day," he declares, "as the commencement of my better life." It was at about this date, also, that he began and finished, not without delay and procrastination, his first novel. Curiously enough, he affirms that he did not doubt his own intellectual sufficiency to write a readable novel: "What I did doubt was my own industry, and the chances of a market." Never, surely, was self-distrust more unfounded. As for the first novel, he sent it to his mother, to dispose of as best she could; and it never brought him anything, except a perception that it was considered by his friends to be "an unfortunate aggravation of the family disease." During the ensuing ten years, this view seemed to be not unreasonable, for, in all that time, though he worked hard, he earned by literature no more than 55. But, between 1857 and 1860, he received for various novels, from 100 to 1000 each; and thereafter, 3000 or more was his regular price for a story in three volumes. As he maintained his connection with the post-office until 1867, he was in receipt of an income of 4500, "of which I spent two-thirds and put by one." We should be doing an injustice to Mr. Trollope to omit these details, which he gives so frankly; for, as he early informs us, "my first object in taking to literature was to make an income on which I and those belonging to me might live in comfort." Nor will he let us forget that novel-writing, to him, was not so much an art, or even a profession, as a trade, in which all that can be asked of a man is that he shall be honest and punctual, turning out good average work, and the more the better. "The great secret consists in"--in what?--why, "in acknowledging myself to be bound to rules of labor similar to those which an artisan or mechanic is forced to obey." There may be, however, other incidental considerations. "I have ever thought of myself as a preacher of sermons, and my pulpit as one I could make both salutary and agreeable to my audience"; and he tells us that he has used some of his novels for the expression of his political and social convictions. Again--"The novelist must please, and he must teach; a good novel should be both realistic and sensational in the highest degree." He says that he sees no reason why two or three good novels should not be written at the same time; and that, for his own part, he was accustomed to write two hundred and fifty words every fifteen minutes, by the watch, during his working hours. Nor does he mind letting us know that when he sits down to write a novel, he neither knows nor cares how it is to end. And finally, one is a little startled to hear him say, epigrammatically, that a writer should not have to tell a story, but should have a story to tell. Beyond a doubt, Anthony Trollope is something of a paradox.
The world has long ago pa.s.sed its judgment on his stories, but it is interesting, all the same, to note his own opinion of them; and though never arrogant, he is generally tolerant, if not genial. "A novel should be a picture of common life, enlivened by humor and sweetened by pathos. I have never fancied myself to be a man of genius," he says; but again, with strange imperviousness, "A small daily task, if it be daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules." Beat them, how?
Why, in quant.i.ty. But how about quality? Is the travail of a work of art the same thing as the making of a pair of shoes? Emerson tells us that--
"Ever the words of the G.o.ds resound, But the porches of man"s ear Seldom, in this low life"s round, Are unsealed, that he may hear."
No one disputes, however, that you may hear the tapping of the cobbler"s hammer at any time.
To the view of the present writer, how much good soever Mr. Trollope may have done as a preacher and moralist, he has done great harm to English fict.i.tious literature by his novels; and it need only be added, in this connection, that his methods and results in novel-writing seem best to be explained by that peculiar mixture of separateness and commonplaceness which we began by remarking in him. The separateness has given him the standpoint whence he has been able to observe and describe the commonplaceness with which (in spite of his separateness) he is in vital sympathy.
But Trollope the man is the abundant and consoling compensation for Trollope the novelist; and one wishes that his books might have died, and he lived on indefinitely. It is charming to read of his life in London after his success in the _Cornhill Magazine_. "Up to that time I had lived very little among men. It was a festival to me to dine at the "Garrick." I think I became popular among those with whom I a.s.sociated.
I have ever wished to be liked by those around me--a wish that during the first half of my life was never gratified." And, again, in summing up his life, he says: "I have betrayed no woman. Wine has brought to me no sorrow. It has been the companionship, rather than the habit of smoking that I loved. I have never desired to win money, and I have lost none. To enjoy the excitement of pleasure, but to be free from its vices and ill-effects--to have the sweet, and to leave the bitter untasted--that has been my study. I will not say that I have never scorched a finger; but I carry no ugly wounds."
A man who, at the end of his career, could make such a profession as this--who felt the need of no further self-vindication than this--such a man, whatever may have been his accountability to the muse of Fiction, is a credit to England and to human nature, and deserves to be numbered among the darlings of mankind. It was an honor to be called his friend; and what his idea of friendship was, may be learned from the pa.s.sage in which he speaks of his friend Millais--with the quotation of which this paper may fitly be concluded:--
"To see him has always been a pleasure; his voice has always been a sweet sound in my ears. Behind his back I have never heard him praised without joining the eulogist; I have never heard a word spoken against him without opposing the censurer. These words, should he ever see them, will come to him from the grave, and will tell him of my regard--as one living man never tells another."
CHAPTER VII.
MR. MALLOCK"S MISSING SCIENCE.
Before criticising Mr. Mallock"s little essay, let us summarize its contents. The author begins with an a.n.a.lysis of the aims, the principles, and the "pseudo-science" of modern Democracy. Having established the evil and destructive character of these things, he sets himself to show by logical argument that the present state of social inequality, which Democrats wish to disturb, is a natural and wholesome state; that the continuance of civilization is dependent upon it; and that it could only be overturned by effecting a radical change--not in human inst.i.tutions, but in human character. The desire for inequality is inherent in the human character; and in order to prove this statement, Mr. Mallock proceeds to affirm that there is such a thing as a science of human character; that of this science he is the discoverer; and that the application of this science to the question at issue will demonstrate the integrity of Mr. Mallock"s views, and the infirmity of all others. In the ensuing chapters the application is made, and at the end the truth of the proposition is declared established.
This is the outline; but let us note some of the details. Mr. Mallock a.s.serts (Chap. I.) that the aim of modern Democracy is to overturn "all that has. .h.i.therto been connected with high-breeding or with personal culture"; and that "to call the Democrats a set of thieves and confiscators is merely to apply names to them which they have no wish to repudiate." He maintains (Chap. II.) that the first and foremost of the Democratic principles is "that the perfection of society involves social equality"; and that "the luxury of one man means the deprivation of another." He credits the Democrats with arguing that "the means of producing equality are a series of changes in existing inst.i.tutions"; that "by changing the inst.i.tutions of a society we are able to change its structure"; that "the cause of the distribution of wealth" is "laws and forms of government"; and that "the wealthy cla.s.ses, as such, are connected with wealth in no other way but as the accidental appropriators of it." In his third chapter he tells us that "the entire theory of modern Democracy ... depends on the doctrine that the cause of wealth is labor"; that Democrats believe we "may count on a man to labor, just as surely as we may count on a man to eat"; that "the man who does not labor is supported by the man who does"; and that the pseudo-science of modern Democracy "starts with the conception of man as containing in himself a natural tendency to labor." And here Mr.
Mallock"s statement of his opponent"s position ends.
In the fourth chapter we are brought within sight of "The Missing Subst.i.tute." "A man"s character," we are told, "divides into his desires on the one hand, and his capacities on the other"; and it is observed that "various as are men"s desires and capacities, yet if talent and ambition commanded no more than idleness and stupidity, all men practically would be idle and stupid." "Men"s capacities," we are reminded, "are practically unequal, because they develop their own potential inequalities; they do this because they desire to place themselves in unequal external circ.u.mstances,--which result the condition of society renders possible."
Coming now to the Science of Human Character itself, we find that it "a.s.serts a permanent relationship to exist between human character and social inequality"; and the author then proceeds at some length to show how near Herbert Spencer, Buckle, and other social and economic philosophers, came to stumbling over his missing science, and yet avoided doing so. Nevertheless, argues Mr. Mallock, "if there be such a thing as a social science, or a science of history, there must be also a science of biography"; and this science, though it "cannot show us how any special man will act in the future," yet, if "any special action be given us, it can show us that it was produced by a special motive; and conversely, that if the special motive be wanting, the special action is sure to be wanting also." As an example how to distinguish between those traits of human character which are available for scientific purposes, and those which are not, Mr. Mallock instances a mob, which temporarily acts together for some given purpose: the individual differences of character then "cancel out," and only points of agreement are left. Proceeding to the sixth chapter, he applies himself to setting to rest the scruples of those who find something cynical in the idea that the desire for Inequality is compatible with a respectable form of human character. It is true, he says, that man does not live by bread alone; but he denies that he means to say "that all human activity is motived by the desire for inequality"; he would a.s.sert that only "of all productive labor, except the lowest." The only actions independent of the desire for inequality, however, are those performed in the name of art, science, philanthropy, and religion; and even in these cases, so far as the actions are not motived by a desire for inequality, they are not of productive use; and _vice versa_. In the remaining chapters, which we must dismiss briefly, we meet with such statements as "labor has been produced by an artificial creation of want of food, and by then supplying the want on certain conditions"; that "civilization has always been begun by an oppressive minority"; that "progress depends on certain gifted individuals," and therefore social equality would destroy progress; that inequality influences production by existing as an object of desire and as a means of pressure; that the evils of poverty are caused by want, not by inequality; and that, finally, equality is not the goal of progress, but of retrogression; that inequality is not an accidental evil of civilization, but the cause of its development; the distance of the poor from the rich is not the cause of the former"s poverty as distinct from riches, but of their civilized competence as distinct from barbarism; and that the apparent changes in the direction of equality recorded in history, have been, in reality, none other than "a more efficient arrangement of inequalities."
Now, let us inquire what all this ingenious prattle about Inequality and the Science of Human Character amounts to. What does Mr. Mallock expect? His book has been out six months, and still Democracy exists.
But does any such Democracy as he combats exist, or could it conceivably exist? Have his investigations of the human character failed to inform him that one of the strongest natural instincts of man"s nature is immovably opposed to anything like an equal distribution of existing wealth?--because whoever owns anything, if it be only a coat, wishes to keep it; and that wish makes him aware that his fellow-man will wish to keep, and will keep at all hazards, whatever things belong to him. What Democrats really desire is to enable all men to have an equal chance to obtain wealth, instead of being, as is largely the case now, hampered and kept down by all manner of legal and arbitrary restrictions. As for the "desire for Inequality," it seems to exist chiefly in Mr. Mallock"s imagination.
Who does desire it? Does the man who "strikes" for higher wages desire it? Let us see. A strike, to be successful, must be not an individual act, but the act of a large body of men, all demanding the same thing--an increase in wages. If they gain their end, no difference has taken place in their mutual position; and their position in regard to their employers is altered only in that an approach has been made toward greater equality with the latter. And so in other departments of human effort: the aim, which the man who wishes to better his position sets before himself, is not to rise head and shoulders above his equals, but to equal his superiors. And as to the Socialist schemes for the reorganization of society, they imply, at most, a wish to see all men start fair in the race of life, the only advantages allowed being not those of rank or station, but solely of innate capacity. And the reason the Socialist desires this is, because he believes, rightly or wrongly, that many inefficient men are, at present, only artificially protected from betraying their inefficiency; and that many efficient men are only artificially prevented from showing their efficiency; and that the fair start he proposes would not result in keeping all men on a dead level, but would simply put those in command who had a genuine right to be there.
But this is taxing Mr. Mallock too seriously: he has not written in earnest. But, as his uncle, Mr. Froude, said, when reading "The New Republic,"--"The rogue is clever!" He has read a good deal, he has an active mind, a smooth redundancy of expression, a talent for caricature, a fondness for epigram and paradox, a useful shallowness, and an amusing impudence. He has no practical knowledge of mankind, no experience of life, no commanding point of view, and no depth of insight. He has no conception of the meaning and quality of the problems with whose exterior aspects he so prettily trifles. He has constructed a Science of Human Character without for one moment being aware that, for instance, human character and human nature are two distinct things; and that, furthermore, the one is everything that the other is not. As little is he conscious of the significance of the words "society" and "civilization"; nor can he explain whether, or why, either of them is desirable or undesirable, good or bad. He has never done, and (judging from his published works) we do not believe him capable of doing, any a.n.a.lytical or constructive thinking; at most, as in the present volume, he turns a few familiar objects upside down, and airily invites his audience to believe that he has thereby earned the name of Discoverer, if not of Creator.
CHAPTER VIII.
THEODORE WINTHROP"S WRITINGS.
On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four volumes whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse of twenty years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are stoutly bound in purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design apparently, on the centre of each cover. They are stained and worn, and the backs have faded to a brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and a leaf in one of the volumes has been torn across; but the paper and the sewing and the clear bold type are still as serviceable as ever.
The books seem to have been made to last,--to stand a great deal of reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically designed covers one sees nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably ugly, and the least popular novelist of our time would protest against having his lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire.
Nevertheless, on turning to the t.i.tle-pages, you may see imprinted, on the first, "Fourteenth Edition"; on the second, "Twelfth Edition"; and on the others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still evidence of very exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of the first years of our civil war; and the first published of them is prefaced by a biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend George William Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the _Atlantic Monthly_, two or three months after the death of its subject, Theodore Winthrop.
For these books,--three novels, and one volume of records of travel,--came from his hand, though they did not see the light until after he had pa.s.sed beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At that time, the country was in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men who went to fight its battles were regarded with a personal affection by no means restricted to their personal acquaintances. Their names were on all lips, and those of them who fell were mourned by mult.i.tudes instead of by individuals. Winthrop"s historic name, and the influential position of some of his nearest friends, would have sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief career and his fate as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and character been less honorable and winning than they were. But he was a type of a young American such as America is proud to own. He was high-minded, refined, gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published soon after his death,--a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an eloquent, sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face, with grave eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every one felt a desire to read them.
Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during 1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, ent.i.tled "Love on Skates," appeared in the "Atlantic." It was a brilliant and graphic celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as full of romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it was, as I recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry atmosphere, with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, pa.s.sages of sentiment, half tender, half playful. It was something new in our literature, and gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer was not destined to fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp of his regiment, he wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches, touching upon the characteristic points of the campaigning life which had just begun; but, before the last of these had become familiar to the "Atlantic"s" readers, it was known that it would be the last.
Theodore Winthrop had been killed.