We scarcely know when we have been more amused, than in reading lately a satirical sketch, entitled ‘The House of Mourning: a Farce.’ Squire Hamper and his lady, personages rather of the rustic order, who have come up to London from the family seat in the country, in the progress of shopping in a street at the west end of the metropolis, stop at a dry-goods undertakers, with a hatchment, and ‘Maison de Deuil,’ or House of Mourning, by way of a sign over the door. ‘Mason de Dool!’ exclaims the Squire, responding to his wife’s translation; ‘some foreign haberdasher’s, I ’spose.’ The lady, however, coaxes him to go in; for although she has lost no friends, she longs to see the ‘improvements in mourning,’ which she can do by ‘cheapening a few articles, and buying a penny-worth of black pins.’ The worthy pair enter, take an ebony chair at the counter, while a clerk in a suit of sables addresses the lady, and in sepulchral tones inquires if he ‘can have the melancholy pleasure of serving her.’ ‘How deep would you choose to go, Ma’am? Do you wish to be very poignant? We have a very extensive assortment of family and complimentary mourning. Here is one, Ma’am, just imported; a widow’s silk, watered, as you perceive, to match the sentiment. It is called the ‘Inconsolable,’ and is very much in vogue in Paris for matrimonial bereavements.’ ‘Looks rather flimsy, though,’ interposes the Squire; ‘not likely to last long, eh, Sir?’ ‘A little slight, praps,’ replies the shopman; ‘rather a delicate texture; but mourning ought not to last forever, Sir.’ ‘No,’ grumbles the Squire; ‘it seldom does, ’specially the violent sorts.’ ‘As to mourning, Ma’am,’ continues the shopman, addressing the lady, ‘there has been a great deal, a very great deal indeed, this season; and several new fabrics have been introduced, to meet the demand for fashionable tribulation, and all in the French style; they of France excel in the funèbre. Here for instance is an article for the deeply-afflicted; a black crape, expressly adapted to the profound style of mourning; makes up very sombre and interesting. Or, if you prefer to mourn in velvet, here’s a very rich one; real Genoa, and a splendid black; we call it the ‘Luxury of Woe.’ It’s only eighteen shillings a yard, and a superb quality; fit, in short, for the handsomest style of domestic calamity.’ Here the Squire wants to know ‘whether sorrow gets more superfine as it goes upward in life.’ ‘Certainly—yes, Sir—by all means,’ responds the clerk; ‘at least, a finer texture. The mourning of poor people is very coarse, very; quite different from that of persons of quality. Canvass to crape, Sir.’ The lady next asks if he has a variety of half-mourning; to which he replies: ‘O, infinite—the largest stock in town; full, and half, and quarter, and half-quarter mourning, shaded off from a grief prononcé to the slightest nuance of regret.’ The lady is directed to another counter, and introduced to ‘the gent. who superintends the Intermediate Sorrow Department;’ who inquires: ‘You wish to inspect some half-mourning, Madam? the second stage of distress? As such Ma’am, allow me to recommend this satin—intended for grief when it has subsided; alleviated, you see, Ma’am, from a dead black to a dull lead color. It’s a Parisian novelty, Ma’am, called ‘Settled Grief,’ and is very much worn by ladies of a certain age, who do not intend to embrace Hymen a second time.’ (‘Old women, mayhap, about seventy,’ mutters the Squire.) ‘Exactly so, Sir; or thereabout. Not but what some ladies, Ma’am, set in for sorrow much earlier; indeed, in the prime of life; and for such cases it is a very durable wear; but praps it’s too lugubre: now here’s another—not exactly black, but shot with a warmish tint, to suit a woe moderated by time. The French call it a ‘Gleam of Comfort.’ We’ve sold several pieces of it; it’s very attractive; we consider it the happiest pattern of the season.’ ‘Yes,’ once more interposes the Squire; ‘some people are very happy in it no doubt.’ ‘No doubt, Sir. There’s a charm in melancholy, Sir. I’m fond of the pensive myself. Praps, Madam, you would prefer something still more in the transition state, as we call it, from grave to gay. In that case, I would recommend this lavender Ducape, with only just a souvenir of sorrow in it; the slightest tinge of mourning, to distinguish it from the garb of pleasure. But possibly you desire to see an appropriate style of costume for the juvenile branches, when sorrow their young days has shaded? Of course, a milder degree of mourning than for adults. Black would be precocious. This, Ma’am, for instance—a dark pattern on gray; an interesting dress, Ma’am, for a little girl, just initiated in the vale of tears; only eighteen-pence a yard Ma’am, and warranted to wash.’ The ‘Intermediate Sorrow Department,’ however, derives no patronage from the ‘hard customer;’ and we next find her in the ‘Coiffure Department,’ looking at caps, and interrogating a show-woman in deep mourning, who is in attendance, and enlarging upon the beauty of her fabrics: ‘This is the newest style, Ma’am. Affliction is very much modernized, and admits of more gout than formerly. Some ladies indeed for their morning grief wear rather a plainer cap; but for evening sorrow, this is not at all too ornée. French taste has introduced very considerable alleviations.’ Failing however, in ‘setting her caps’ for the new customer, the show-woman ‘tries the handkerchief’ enticement; exhibiting one with a fringe of artificial tears worked on the border—the ‘Larmoyante,’ a sweet-pretty idea.’ The Squire intimates that as a handkerchief to be used, it would most likely be found ‘rather scrubby for the eyes.’ But the show-woman removes this objection: ‘O dear, no, Sir—if you mean wiping. The wet style of grief is quite gone out—quite! The dry cry is decidedly the genteel thing.’ No wonder that the Squire, as he left the establishment with his ‘better half,’ was fain to exclaim: ‘Humph! And so that’s a Mason de Dool! Well! if it’s all the same to you, Ma’am, I’d rather die in the country, and be universally lamented after the old fashion; for, as to London, what with the new French modes of mourning, and the ‘Try Warren’ style of blacking the premises, it do seem to me that before long all sorrow will be sham Abram, and the House of Mourning a regular Farce!’

I have an old friend who lives just around the corner from one of the main lines of travel in New England, and whenever I am passing near by and the railroads let me, I drop in on him awhile and quarrel about art. It’s a good old-fashioned comfortable, disorderly conversation we have generally, the kind people used to have more than they do now–sketchy and not too wise–the kind that makes one think of things one wishes one had said, afterward.

We always drift a little at first, as if of course we could talk about other things if we wanted to, but we both know, and know every time, that in a few minutes we shall be deep in a discussion of the Things That Are Beautiful and the Things That Are Not.

Brim thinks that I have picked out more things to be beautiful than I have a right to, or than any man has, and he is trying to put a stop to it. He thinks that there are enough beautiful things in this world that have been beautiful a long while, without having people–well, people like me, for instance, poking blindly around among all these modern brand-new things hoping that in spite of appearances there is something one can do with them that will make them beautiful enough to go with the rest. I’m afraid Brim gets a little personal in talking with me at times and I might as well say that, while disagreeing in a conversation with Brim does not lead to calling names it does seem to lead logically to one’s going away, and trying to find afterwards, some thing that is the matter with him.

“The trouble with you, my dear Brim, is,” I say (on paper, afterwards, as the train speeds away), “that you have a false-classic or Stucco-Greek mind. The Greeks, the real Greeks, would have liked all these things–trolley cars, cables, locomotives,–seen the beautiful in them, if they had to do their living with them every day, the way we do. You would say you were more Greek than I am, but when one thinks of it, you are just going around liking the things the Greeks liked 3000 years ago, and I am around liking the things a Greek would like now, that is, as well as I can. I don’t flatter myself I begin to enjoy the wireless telegraph to-day the way Plato would if he had the chance, and Alcibiades in an automobile would get a great deal more out of it, I suspect, than anyone I have seen in one, so far; and I suspect that if Socrates could take Bliss Carman and, say, William Watson around with him on a tour of the General Electric Works in Schenectady they wouldn’t either of them write sonnets about anything else for the rest of their natural lives.”

I can only speak for one and I do not begin to see the poetry in the machines that a Greek would see, as yet.

But I have seen enough.

I have seen engineers go by, pounding on this planet, making it small enough, welding the nations together before my eyes.

I have seen inventors, still men by lamps at midnight with a whirl of visions, with a whirl of thoughts, putting in new drivewheels on the world.

I have seen (in Schenectady,) all those men–the five thousand of them–the grime on their faces and the great caldrons of melted railroad swinging above their heads. I have stood and watched them there with lightning and with flame hammering out the wills of cities, putting in the underpinnings of nations, and it seemed to me me that Bliss Carman and William Watson would not be ashamed of them … brother-artists every one … in the glory … in the dark … Vulcan-Tennysons, blacksmiths to a planet, with dredges, skyscrapers, steam shovels and wireless telegraphs, hewing away on the heavens and the earth.

H. C. Dodge, reported in Buchanan’s Journal of Man, October 1887

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1. I have unintentionally omitted to name Falconer, who deserves the highest honors among nautical writers.[back]

The “Editor’s Table” in The Knickerbocker is full of well, this and that. Lots of editorializing, some jokes, correspondence (including from contributors), reviews of other magazines… and it is so densely printed it is really hard to read. When you go read a Knickerbocker (like this one, perhaps?), be sure to enlarge your font. Your eyes will thank you.¹

One of the other magazines they read (and report on) frequently is Punch, or the London Charivari, usually to laugh at its jokes. For instance, from the February 1844 “Editor’s Table”:

Punch’s ‘Literary Intelligence’ is very full. From it we gather that the author of the ‘Mothers,’ ‘Wives,’ ‘Maids,’ and ‘Daughters’ of England has another work in press, entitled ‘The Grandmothers of England.’ ‘No grandmother’s education will be complete till she has read and re-read ‘The Grandmothers of England.’ The book is the very best guide to oval suction extant.’

I’m wondering, though, why do grandmothers know how to suck eggs? Do you have to be a grandmother to do it?

1. Too bad for the original readers — they didn’t have the same opportunity to spare their sight and had to read the tiny (Agate?) print by candlelight.[back]

(1813)

I have in my possession a curious volume of Latin verses, which I believe to be unique. It is entitled Alexandri Fultoni Scoti Epigrammatorum libri quinque. It purports to be printed at Perth, and bears date 1679. By the appellation which the author gives himself in the preface, hypodidasculus, I suppose him to have been usher at some school. It is no uncommon thing now a days for persons concerned in academies to affect a literary reputation in the way of their trade. The “master of a seminary for a limited number of pupils at Islington,” lately put forth an edition of that scarce tract, the Elegy in a Country Churchyard (to use his own words), with notes and head-lines!–But to our author. These epigrams of Alexander Fulton, Scotchman, have little remarkable in them besides extreme dulness and insipidity; but there is one, which, by its being marshalled in the front of the volume, seems to have been the darling of its parent, and for its exquisite flatness, and the surprising stroke of anachronism with which it is pointed, deserves to be rescued from oblivion. It is addressed, like many of the others, to a fair one:–

Which, in humble imitation of mine author’s peculiar poverty of stile, I have ventured thus to render into English:–

The happy idea of an American war undertaken in the cause of beauty ought certainly to recommend the author’s memory to the countrymen of Madison and Jefferson; and the bold anticipation of the discovery of that Continent in the time of the Trojan War is a flight beyond the Sibyll’s books.

(more from Charles Lamb, from “Table-Talk from The Examiner“)

How far the very custom of hearing any thing spouted, withers and blows upon a fine passage, may be seen in those speeches from Henry the Fifth, &c. which are current in the mouths of school-boys from their being to be found in Enfield Speakers, and such kind of books. I confess myself utterly unable to appreciate that celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet, beginning “To be or not to be,” or to tell whether it be good, bad, or indifferent, it has been so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys and men, and torn so inhumanly from its living place and principle of continuity in the play, till it is become to me a perfect dead member.

(From “On the Tragedies of Shakspeare, Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation” (1811, text of 1818), in The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 1, Miscellaneous Prose.)

Dr. Aldrich, of convivial memory, said there were five reasons for drinking:–

“Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest you should be by and by,
Or any other reason why.”