corroding passion and shamed it with the purity of Mary Magdelen; that
dragged from the despair of old Job the uttermost poison-drop of doubt
and answered it with the noble problem of organized existence; that
teems with murder and mistake and glows with all goodness and honest
aspiration–that is the Book of Books. There hasn’t been one written
since that has crossed the boundary of its scope. What would that
book be after some goody-goody had expurgated it of evil and left it
sterilized in butter and sugar? Let no ignorant paternal Czar, ruling
over cottage or mansion, presume to keep from the mind and heart of
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youth the vigorous knowledge and observation of evil and good, crime and
virtue together. No chaff, no wheat; no dross, no gold; no human faults
and weaknesses, no heavenly hope. And if any gentleman does not like
the sentiment, he can find me at my usual place of residence, unless he
intends violence–and be hanged, also, to him!
A novel is a novel, and there are no bad ones in the world, except those
you do not happen to like. Suppose a boy started with Robinson Crusoe
and was scientifically and criminally steered by the hand of misguided
”culture” to Scott and Dickens and Cooper and Hawthorne–all the
classics, in fact, so that he would escape the vulgar thousands? Answer
a straight question, ye old rooters between a thousand miles of muslin
lids–would you have been willing to miss ”The Gunmaker of Moscow” back
yonder in the green days of say forty years ago? What do you think of
Prof. William Henry Peck’s ”Cryptogram?” Were not Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.,
and Emerson Bennett authors of renown–honor to their dust, wherever it
lies! Didn’t you read Mrs. Southworth’s ”Capitola” or the ”Hidden Hand”
long before ”Vashti” was dreamed of ? Don’t you remember that No. 52
of Beadle’s Dime Library (light yellowish red paper covers) was
”Silverheels, the Delaware,” and that No. 77 was ”Schinderhannes,
the Outlaw of the Black Forest?” I yield to no man in affection and
reverence for M. Dumas, Mr. Thackeray and others of the higher circles,
but what’s the matter with Ned Buntline, honest, breezy, vigorous,
swinging old Ned? Put the ”Three Guardsmen” where you will, but there is
also room for ”Buffalo Bill, the Scout.” When I first saw Col. Cody, an
ornament to the theatre and a painful trial to the drama, and realized
that he was Buffalo Bill in the flesh–why, I was glad I had also read
”Buffalo Bill’s Last Shot”–(may he never shoot it). The day has passed
forever, probably, when Buffalo Bill shall shout to his other scouts,
”You set fire to the girl while I take care of the house!” or vice
versa, and so saying, bear the fainting heroine triumphantly off from
the treacherous redskins. But the story has lived.
It was a happy and honored custom in the old days for subscribers to the
New York Ledger and the New York Weekly to unite in requests for the
serial republication of favorite stories in those great fireside
luminaries. They were the old-fashioned, broadside sheets and, of
course, there were insuperable difficulties against preserving the
numbers. After a year or two, therefore, there would awaken a general
hunger among the loyal hosts to ”read the story over,” and when the
demand was sufficiently strong the publishers would repeat it, cuts,
divisions, and all, just as at first. How many times the ”Gunmaker
of Moscow” was repeated in the Ledger, heaven knows. I remember I
petitioned repeatedly for ”Buffalo Bill” in the Weekly, and we got
it, too, and waded through it again. By wading, I don’t mean pushing
laboriously and tediously through, but, by George! half immersion in the
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joy. It was a week between numbers, and a studious and appreciative boy
made no bones of reading the current weekly chapters half a dozen times
over while waiting for the next.
It must have been ten years later that I felt a thrill at the coming of
Buffalo Bill himself in his first play. I had risen to the dignity of
dramatic critic upon a journal of limited civilization and boundless
politics, and was privileged to go behind the scenes at the theatre and
actually speak to the actors. (I interviewed Mary Anderson during her
first season, in the parlor of the local hotel, where honest George
Bristow–who kept the cigar stand and could not keep a healthy
appetite–always gave a Thanksgiving order for ”two-whole-roast turkeys
and a piece of breast,” and they were served, too, the whole ones going
to some near-by hospital, and the piece of breast to George’s honest
stomach–good, kind soul that he was. And Miss Anderson chewed gum
during the whole period of the interview to the intense amusement of
my elder and brother dramatic critic, who has since become the honored
governor of his adopted state, and toward whom I beg to look with
affectionate memory of those days.) Now, when a man has known novels
intimately, has been dramatic critic, and has traveled with a circus, it
seems to me in all reason he can not fairly have any other earthly
joys to desire. At fifteen I was walking on tip-toe about the house
on Sundays, and going off to the end of the garden to softly whistle
”weekday” tunes, and at twenty I stood off the wings L. U. E., and had
twenty ”Black Crook” coryphees in silk tights and tarletan squeeze
past in line, and nod and say, ”Is it going all right in front?”
They–knew–I–was–the–Critic! When you can do that you can laugh at
Byron, roosting around upon inaccessible mountain crags and formulating
solitude and indigestion into poetry!
I waited for Buffalo Bill’s coming with feelings that can not be
described. It was impossible to expect to meet Sir William Wallace
in the flesh, or Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe, or Capt. D’Artagnan, or
Umslopogaas, or any one of a thousand great fighting heroes; but here
was Buffalo Bill, just as great and glorious and dashing and handsome
as any of them, and my right hand tingled to be grasped in that of the
Bayard of the Prairies. And that hand’s desire was attained. In his
dressing-room between acts I sat nervously on a chair while the splendid
Apollo of frontiersmen, in buckskin and beads, sat on his trunk, with
his long, shapely legs sprawled gracefully out, his head thrown back so
that the mane of brown hair should hang behind. It was glistening with
oil and redolent of barber’s perfume. And we talked there as one man
to another, each apparently without fear. I was certainly nervous and
timid, but he did not notice it, and I am frank to say he did not appear
to feel the slightest personal fear of me. Thus, face to face, I saw the
man with whom I had trod Ned Buntline’s boundless plains and had seen
and encountered a thousand perils and redskins. When the act call came,
and I rose to go, a man stopped at the door and said to him:
”What shall it be to-night, Colonel?”
30
”A big beef-steak and a bottle of Bass!” answered Buffalo Bill heartily,
”and tell ’ern to have it hot and ready at 11:15.”
The beef-steak and Bass’ ale were the watchwords of true heroism. The
real hero requires substantial filling. He must have a head and a
heart–but no less a good, healthy and impatient stomach.
In the daily paper the morning I write this I see the announcement of
Buffalo Bill’s ”Wild West Show” coming two week’s hence. Good luck to
him! He can’t charge prices too steep for me, and there are six seats
necessary–the best in the amphitheater. And I wish I could be sure the
vigorous spirit of Ned Buntline would be looking down from the blue sky
overhead to see his hero charge the hill of San Juan at the head of the
Rough Riders.
This digression may be wide of the sub ject of novel reading, but the
real novel reader is at home anywhere. He has thoughts, dreams,
reveries, fancies. All the world is his novel and all actions are
stories and all the actors are characters. When Lucile Western, the
excellent American actress, was at the height of her powers, not long
before her last appearances, she had as her leading man a big, slouchy
and careless person, who was advertised as ”the talented young English
actor, William Whally.” In the intimacies of private association he was
known as Bill Whally, and his descent was straight down from ”Mount
Sinai’s awful height.” He was a Hebrew and no better or more uneven and
reckless actor ever played melodramatic ”heavies.” He had a love for
Shakespeare, but could not play him; he had a love of drink and could
gratify it. His vigorous talents purchased for him much forbearance.
I’ve seen Mr. Whally play the fastidious and elegant ”Sir Archibald
Levison” in shiny black doe-skin trousers and old-fashioned cloth
gaiters, because his condition rendered the problem of dressing somewhat
doubtful, though it could not obscure his acting. He was the only
walking embodiment of ”Bill Sykes” I ever saw, and I contracted the
habit of going to see him kill Miss Western as ”Nancy” because he
butchered that young woman with a broken chair more satisfactorily than
anybody else I ever saw. There was a murderer for you–Bill Sykes! Bad
as he was in most things, let us not forget that–he–killed–Nancy–
and–killed–her–well and–thoroughly. If that young woman didn’t
snivel herself under a just sentence of death, I’m no fit householder to
serve on a jury. Every time Miss Western came around it was my custom to
read up fresh on ”Oliver Twist” and hurry around and enjoy Bill Whally’s
happy application of retribution with the aid of the old property chair.
There were six other persons whom I succeeded in persuading to applaud
the scene with me every time it was acted.
But there’s a separate chapter for villains.
31
Let us return to the old novels. What curious pranks time plays with
tastes and vogues. Forty years ago N. P. Willis was just faded. Yet he
was long a great comet of literary glitter and obscured many men of much
greater ability. Everybody read him; the annuals hung upon his name; the
ladies regarded him as a finer and more dashing Byron than Byron.
The place he filled was much like that of Congreve, before whom
Shakespeare’s great nose was out of joint for a long time; Congreve, who
was the margarita aluminata ma jor of English poesy and drama and public
life, and is now found in junk stores and in the back line on book
shelves and whom nobody reads now. Willis had his languid affectations,
his superficial cynicism and added to them ostentatious sentimentality.
Does anybody read William Gilmore Simm’s elaborate rhetoric disguised as
novels? He must have written two dozen of them, the Richardson of the
United States. Lovers of delicious wit and intellectual humor still
read Dr. Holmes’ essays, but it would probably take a physician’s
prescription to make them swallow the novels. In what dark corners of
the library are Bayard Taylor’s novels and travels hidden? Will you come
into the garden, Maud, and read Chancellor Walworth’s mighty tragedies
and Miss Mulock’s Swiss-toy historical novels, or will you beg off, like
the honest girl you are, and take a nap? Your sleepiness, dear Miss
Maud, does you credit. By the way, what the deuce is the name of anyone
of these novels? I can recall ”Elsie Vernier,” by Dr. Holmes and then
there is a blank.
But what classics they were–then! In the thick of them had appeared a
newspaper story that struggled through and was printed in book form. Old
friends have told me how they waited at the country post-offices to
get a copy, delayed for weeks. It was a scandal to read it in some
localities. It was fiercely attacked as an outrageous exaggeration
produced by temporary excitement and hostile feeling, or praised as a
new gospel. It has been translated into every tongue having a printing
press, and has sold by millions of copies. It was ”Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
It was not a classic, but what a vigorous immortal mongrel of human
sentiment it was! What a row was kicked up over Miss Braddon’s
”Octoroon,” and what an impossible yellowback it was! The toughest piece
of fiction I met with as a boy was ”Sanford and Merton,” and I’ve been
aching to say so for four pages. If this world were full of Sanfords
and Mertons, then give me Jupiter or some other comfortable planet at a
secure sanitary distance removed.
I can’t even remember the writers who were grammatically and
rhetorically perfect forty years ago, and also very dull with it all.
Is there a bookshelf that holds ”Leni Leoti, or The Flower of the
Prairies?” There are ”Jane Eyre,” ”Lady Audley’s Secret,” and ”John
Halifax, Gentleman,” which will go with many and are all well worth the
reading, too. Are Mrs. Eliza A. Dupuy, Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth,
Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz and Augusta J. Evans dead? Their novels still
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live–look at the book stores. ”Linda, or the Young Pilot of the Belle
Creole,” ”India, the Pearl of Pearl River,” ”The Planter’s Northern
Bride,” ”St. Elmo”–they were fiction for you! A boy old enough to have
a first sweetheart could swallow them by the mile.
You remember, when we were boys, the circus acrobats always–always,
remember–rubbed young children with snake-oil and walloped them with a
rawhide to educate them in tumbling and contortion? Well, if I could get
the snake-oil for the joints and a curly young wig, I’d like to get back
at five hundred of those books and devour them again–”as of yore!”
VI
RASCALS
BEING A DISCOURSE UPON GOOD, HONEST SCOUNDRELISM AND
VILLAINS.