Part 15
"There is a thing that I do want-- With you these beauteous walks to haunt; We would be happy if you would Try to come over if you could. Then I would all quite happy be _Now and for all eternity_. My mother is so very sweet, _And checks my appetite to eat_; My father shows us what to do; But O I'm sure that I want you. I have no more of poetry; O Isa do remember me, And try to love your Marjory."
In a letter from "Isa" to
"Miss Muff Maidie Marjory Fleming, favored by Rare Rear-Admiral Fleming,"
she says:--"I long much to see you, and talk over all our old stories together, and to hear you read and repeat. I am pining for my old friend Cesario, and poor Lear, and wicked Richard. How is the dear Multiplication table going on? are you still as much attached to 9 times 9 as you used to be?"
But this dainty, bright thing is about to flee,--to come "quick to confusion." The measles she writes of seized her, and she died on the 19th of December, 1811. The day before her death, Sunday, she sat up in bed, worn and thin, her eye gleaming as with the light of a coming world, and with a tremulous, old voice repeated the lines by Burns,--heavy with the shadow of death, and lit with the fantasy of the judgment-seat,--the publican's prayer in paraphrase:--
Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene
It is more affecting than we care to say to read her mother's and Isabella Keith's letters, written immediately after her death. Old and withered, tattered and pale, they are now: but when you read them, how quick, how throbbing with life and love! how rich in that language of affection which only women and Shakespeare and Luther can use,--that power of detaining the soul over the beloved object and its loss....
In her first letter to Miss Keith, Mrs. Fleming says of her dead Maidie:--"Never did I behold so beautiful an object. It resembled the finest wax-work. There was in the countenance an expression of sweetness and serenity which seemed to indicate that the pure spirit had anticipated the joys of heaven ere it quitted the mortal frame. To tell you what your Maidie said of you would fill volumes; for you were the constant theme of her discourse, the subject of her thoughts, and ruler of her actions. The last time she mentioned you was a few hours before all sense save that of suffering was suspended, when she said to Dr. Johnstone, 'If you will let me out at the New Year, I will be quite contented.' I asked what made her so anxious to get out then. 'I want to purchase a New Year's gift for Isa Keith with the sixpence you gave me for being patient in the measles; and I would like to choose it myself.' I do not remember her speaking afterwards, except to complain of her head, till just before she expired, when she articulated, 'O mother! mother!'"
Do we make too much of this little child, who has been in her grave in Abbotshall. Kirkyard these fifty and more years? We may of her cleverness,--not of her affectionateness, her nature. What a picture the _animosa infans_ gives us of herself, her vivacity, her passionateness, her precocious love-making, her passion for nature, for swine, for all living things, her reading, her turn for expression, her satire, her frankness, her little sins and rages, her great repentances. We don't wonder Walter Scott carried her off in the neuk of his plaid, and played himself with her for hours....
We are indebted for the following--and our readers will be not unwilling to share our obligations--to her sister:--"Her birth was 15th January, 1803; her death 19th December, 1811. I take this from her Bibles. I believe she was a child of robust health, of much vigor of body, and beautifully formed arms, and until her last illness, never was an hour in bed. She was niece to Mrs. Keith, residing in No. 1 North Charlotte Street, who was _not_ Mrs. Murray Keith, although very intimately acquainted with that old lady....
"As to my aunt and Scott, they were on a very intimate footing. He asked my aunt to be godmother to his eldest daughter Sophia Charlotte. I had a copy of Miss Edgeworth's 'Rosamond' and 'Harry and Lucy' for long, which was 'a gift to Marjorie from Walter Scott,' probably the first edition of that attractive series, for it wanted 'Frank,' which is always now published as part of the series under the title of 'Early Lessons.' I regret to say these little volumes have disappeared."
Sir Walter was no relation of Marjorie's, but of the Keiths, through the Swintons; and like Marjorie, he stayed much at Ravelstone in his early days, with his grand-aunt Mrs. Keith....
We cannot better end than in words from this same pen:--"I have to ask you to forgive my anxiety in gathering up the fragments of Marjorie's last days, but I have an almost sacred feeling to all that pertains to her. You are quite correct in stating that measles were the cause of her death. My mother was struck by the patient quietness manifested by Marjorie during this illness, unlike her ardent, impulsive nature; but love and poetic feeling were unquenched. When lying very still, her mother asked her if there was anything she wished: 'Oh yes! if you would just leave the room door open a wee bit, and play 'The Land o' the Leal,' and I will lie and _think_, and enjoy myself' (this is just as stated to me by her mother and mine). Well, the happy day came, alike to parents and child, when Marjorie was allowed to come forth from the nursery to the parlor. It was Sabbath evening, and after tea. My father, who idolized this child, and never afterwards in my hearing mentioned her name, took her in his arms; and while walking up and down the room, she said, 'Father, I will repeat something to you; what would you like?' He said, 'Just choose yourself, Maidie.' She hesitated for a moment between the paraphrase 'Few are thy days, and full of woe,' and the lines of Burns already quoted, but decided on the latter, a remarkable choice for a child. The repeating these lines seemed to stir up the depths of feeling in her soul. She asked to be allowed to write a poem; there was a doubt whether it would be right to allow her, in case of hurting her eyes. She pleaded earnestly, 'Just this once;' the point was yielded, her slate was given her, and with great rapidity she wrote an address of fourteen lines, 'To her loved cousin on the author's recovery,' her last work on earth:--
'Oh! Isa, pain did visit me, I was at the last extremity; How often did I think of you, I wished your graceful form to view, To clasp you in my weak embrace, Indeed I thought I'd run my race: Good care, I'm sure, was of me taken, But still indeed I was much shaken. At last I daily strength did gain, And oh! at last, away went pain; At length the doctor thought I might Stay in the parlor all the night; I now continue so to do; Farewell to Nancy and to you.'
She went to bed apparently well, awoke in the middle of the night with the old cry of woe to a mother's heart, 'My head, my head!' Three days of the dire malady 'water in the head' followed, and the end came."
"Soft, silken primrose, fading timelessly!"
It is needless, it is impossible to add anything to this; the fervor, the sweetness, the flush of poetic ecstasy, the lovely and glowing eye, the perfect nature of that bright and warm intelligence, that darling child; Lady Nairne's words, and the old tune, stealing up from the depths of the human heart, deep calling unto deep, gentle and strong like the waves of the great sea hushing themselves to sleep in the dark; the words of Burns touching the kindred chord; her last numbers, "wildly sweet," traced with thin and eager fingers, already touched by the last enemy and friend,--_moriens canit_,--and that love which is so soon to be her everlasting light, is her song's burden to the end.
"She set as sets the morning star, which goes Not down behind the darkened west, nor hides Obscured among the tempests of the sky, But melts away into the light of heaven."
THE DEATH OF THACKERAY
From 'Spare Hours'
We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in December, when he was walking with two friends along the Dean road, to the west of Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city. It was a lovely evening,--such a sunset as one never forgets: a rich dark bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills, lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color, lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this pure radiance, and there a wooden crane, used in the quarry below, was so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was, unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at it silently. As they gazed, he gave utterance in a tremulous, gentle, and rapid voice, to what all were feeling, in the word "CALVARY!" The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he seldom did, of divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of salvation; expressing his simple faith in God and in his Savior.
There is a passage at the close of the 'Roundabout Paper' No. 23, 'De Finibus,' in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the passage, as if bidding it and all else good-night. He will be in bed, his candle out, and in darkness, in five minutes, and his shoes found next morning at his door, the little potentate all the while in his final sleep. The whole paper is worth the most careful study; it reveals not a little of his real nature, and unfolds very curiously the secret of his work, the vitality and abiding power of his own creations; how he "invented a certain Costigan, out of scraps, heel-taps, odds and ends of characters," and met the original the other day, without surprise, in a tavern parlor. The following is beautiful: "Years ago I had a quarrel with a certain well-known person (I believed a statement regarding him which his friends imparted to me, and which turned out to be quite incorrect). To his dying day that quarrel was never quite made up. I said to his brother, 'Why is your brother's soul still dark against me? _It is I who ought to be angry and unforgiving, for I was in the wrong_.'" _Odisse quem læseris_ was never better contravened. But what we chiefly refer to now is the profound pensiveness of the following strain, as if written with a presentiment of what was not then very far off:--"Another Finis written; another milestone on this journey from birth to the next world. Sure it is a subject for solemn cogitation. Shall we continue this story-telling business, and be voluble to the end of our age?" "Will it not be presently time, O prattler, to hold your tongue?" And thus he ends:--
"Oh, the sad old pages, the dull old pages; oh, the cares, the _ennui_, the squabbles, the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again! But now and again a kind thought is recalled, and now and again a dear memory. Yet a few chapters more, and then the last; after which, behold Finis itself comes to an end, and the Infinite begins."
* * * * *
He had been suffering on Sunday from an old and cruel enemy. He fixed with his friend and surgeon to come again on Tuesday, but with that dread of anticipated pain which is a common condition of sensibility and genius, he put him off with a note from "yours unfaithfully, W.M.T." He went out on Wednesday for a little, and came home at ten. He went to his room, suffering much, but declining his man's offer to sit with him. He hated to make others suffer. He was heard moving, as if in pain, about twelve, on the eve of--
"That happy morn Wherein the Son of Heaven's eternal King, Of wedded maid and virgin-mother born, Our great redemption from above did bring."
Then all was quiet, and then he must have died--in a moment. Next morning his man went in, and opening the windows found his master dead, his arms behind his head, as if he had tried to take one more breath. We think of him as of our Chalmers, found dead in like manner: the same childlike, unspoiled, open face; the same gentle mouth; the same spaciousness and softness of nature; the same look of power. What a thing to think of,--his lying there alone in the dark, in the midst of his own mighty London; his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his goodness. God help them, and us all! What would become of us, stumbling along this our path of life, if we could not, at our utmost need, stay ourselves on Him?
Long years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time. It was found after death how little life he had to live. He looked always fresh, with that abounding silvery hair, and his young, almost infantine face, but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty years. With him it is the end of Ends; finite is over and, infinite begun. What we all felt and feel can never be so well expressed as in his own words of sorrow for the early death of Charles Buller:--
"Who knows the inscrutable design? Blest He who took and He who gave! Why should your mother, Charles, not mine, Be weeping at her darling's grave? We bow to heaven that willed it so, That darkly rules the fate of all, That sends the respite or the blow, That's free to give or to recall."
CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE (ARTEMUS WARD)
(1834-1867)
BY CHARLES F. JOHNSON
Charles Farrar Brown, better known to the public of thirty years ago under his pen-name of Artemus Ward, was born in the little village of Waterford, Maine, on the 26th day of April, 1834. Waterford is a quiet village of about seven hundred inhabitants, lying among the foot-hills of the White Mountains. When Browne was a child it was a station on the western stage-route, and an important depot for lumbermen's supplies. Since the extension of railroads northerly and westerly from the seaboard, it has however shared the fate of many New England villages in being left on one side of the main currents of commercial activity, and gradually assuming a character of repose and leisure, in many regards more attractive than the life and bustle of earlier days. Many persons are still living there who remember the humorist as a quaint and tricksy boy, alternating between laughter and preternatural gravity, and of a surprising ingenuity in devising odd practical jokes in which good nature so far prevailed that even the victims were too much amused to be very angry.
[Illustration: Charles F. Browne]
On both sides, he came from original New England stock; and although he was proud of his descent from a very ancient English family, in deference to whom he wrote his name with the final "e," he felt greater pride in his American ancestors, and always said that they were genuine and primitive Yankees,--people of intelligence, activity, and integrity in business, but entirely unaffected by new-fangled ideas. It is interesting to notice that Browne's humor was hereditary on the paternal side, his father especially being noted for his quaint sayings and harmless eccentricities. His cousin Daniel many years later bore a strong resemblance to what Charles had been, and he too possessed a kindred humorous faculty and told a story in much the same solemn manner, bringing out the point as if it were something entirely irrelevant and unimportant and casually remembered. The subject of this sketch, however, was the only member of the family in whom a love for the droll and incongruous was a controlling disposition. As is frequently the case, a family trait was intensified in one individual to the point where talent passes over into genius.
On his mother's side, too, Browne was a thorough-bred New-Englander. His maternal grandfather, Mr. Calvin Farrar, was a man of influence in town and State, and was able to send two of his sons to Bowdoin College. I have mentioned Browne's parentage because his humor is so essentially American. Whether this consists in a peculiar gravity in the humorous attitude towards the subject, rather than playfulness, or in a tendency to exaggerated statement, or in a broad humanitarian standpoint, or in a certain flavor given by a blending of all these, it is very difficult to decide. Probably the peculiar standpoint is the distinguishing note, and American humor is a product of democracy.
Humor is as difficult of definition as is poetry. It is an intimate quality of the mind, which predisposes a man to look for remote and unreal analogies and to present them gravely as if they were valid. It sees that many of the objects valued by men are illusions, and it expresses this conviction by assuming that other manifest trifles are important. It is the deadly enemy of sentimentality and affectation, for its vision is clear. Although it turns everything topsy-turvy in sport, its world is not a chaos nor a child's play-ground, for humor is based on keen perception of truth. There is no method--except the highest poetic treatment--which reveals so distinctly the falsehoods and hypocrisies of the social and economic order as the _reductio ad absurdum_ of humor; for all human institutions have their ridiculous sides, which astonish and amuse us when pointed out, but from viewing which we suddenly become aware of relative values before misunderstood. But just as poetry may degenerate into a musical collection of words and painting into a decorative association of colors, so humor may degenerate into the merely comic or amusing. The laugh which true humor arouses is not far removed from tears. Humor indeed is not always associated with kindliness, for we have the sardonic humor of Carlyle and the savage humor of Swift; but it is naturally dissociated from egotism, and is never more attractive than when, as in the case of Charles Lamb and Oliver Goldsmith, it is based on a loving and generous interest in humanity.
Humor, must rest on a broad human foundation, and cannot be narrowed to the notions of a certain class. But in most English humor,--as indeed in all English literature except the very highest,--the social class to which the writer does not belong is regarded _ab extra_. In Punch, for instance, not only are servants always given a conventional set of features, but they are given conventional minds, and the jokes are based on a hypothetical conception of personality. Dickens was a great humorist, and understood the nature of the poor because he had been one of them; but his gentlemen and ladies are lay figures. Thackeray's studies of the flunky are capital; but he studies him _qua flunky_, as a naturalist might study an animal, and hardly ranks him _sub specie humanitatis_. But to the American humorist all men are primarily men. The waiter and the prince are equally ridiculous to him, because in each he finds similar incongruities between the man and his surroundings; but in England there is a deep impassable gulf between the man at the table and the man behind his chair. This democratic independence of external and adventitious circumstance sometimes gives a tone of irreverence to American persiflage, and the temporary character of class distinctions in America undoubtedly diminishes the amount of literary material "in sight" but when, as in the case of Browne and Clemens, there is in the humorist's mind a basis of reverence for things and persons that are really reverend, it gives a breadth and freedom to the humorous conception that is distinctively American.
We put Clemens and Browne in the same line, because in reading a page of either we feel at once the American touch. Browne of course is not to be compared to Clemens in affluence or in range in depicting humorous character-types; but it must be remembered that Clemens has lived thirty
## active years longer than his predecessor did. Neither has written a line
that he would wish to blot for its foul suggestion, or because it ridiculed things that were lovely and of good report. Both were educated in journalism, and came into direct contact with the strenuous and realistic life of labor. And to repeat, though one was born and bred west of the Mississippi and the other far "down east," both are distinctly American. Had either been born and passed his childhood outside our magic line, this resemblance would not have existed. And yet we cannot say precisely wherein this likeness lies, nor what caused it; so deep, so subtle, so pervading is the influence of nationality. But their original expressions of the American humorous tone are worth ten thousand literary echoes of Sterne or Lamb or Dickens or Thackeray.
The education of young Browne was limited to the strictly preparatory years. At the age of thirteen he was forced by the death of his father to try to earn his living. When about fourteen, he was apprenticed to a Mr. Rex, who published a paper at Lancaster, New Hampshire. He remained there about a year, then worked on various country papers, and finally passed three years in the printing-house of Snow and Wilder, Boston. He then went to Ohio, and after working for some months on the Tiffin Advertiser, went to Toledo, where he remained till the fall of 1857. Thence he went to Cleveland, Ohio, as local editor of the Plain Dealer. Here appeared the humorous letters signed "Artemus Ward" and written in the character of an itinerant showman. In 1860 he went to New York as editor of the comic journal Vanity Fair.