University of Virginia Library

17. CHAPTER XVII.
I AM INTRODUCED INTO SOCIETY.

BOLTON and I were sitting, up to our ears in new
books which had been accumulating for notice for
days past, and which I was turning over and dipping
into here and there with the jaded, half-disgusted air of
a child worn out by the profusion of a Thanksgiving dinner.

“I feel perfectly savage,” I said. “What a never-ending
harvest of trash! Two, or at the most, three tolerable
ideas, turned and twisted in some novel device, got up in
large print, with wide margins—and, behold, a modern
book! I would like to be a black frost and nip them all
in a night!”

“Your dinner didn't agree with you, apparently,” said
Bolton, as he looked up from a new scientific work he was
patiently analyzing, making careful notes along the margin;
“however, turn those books over to Jim, who understands
the hop, skip, and jump style of criticism. Jim has about a
dozen or two of blank forms that only need the name of
the book and publisher inserted, and the work is done.”

“What a perfect farce,” said I.

“The notices are as good as the books,” said Bolton
“Something has to be said to satisfy the publishers and do
the handsome thing by them; and the usual string of commendatory
phrases and trite criticism, which mean nothing
in particular, I presume imposes upon nobody. It is merely
a form of announcing that such and such wares are in the
market. I fancy they have very little influence on public
opinion.”

“But do you think,” said I, “that there is any hope of a
just school of book criticism—something that should be a
real guide to buyers and readers, and a real instruction to
writers?”

“That is a large question,” said Bolton, “and a matter
beset with serious difficulties. While books are a matter of
commerce and trade; while magazines which criticise books
are the property of booksellers, and newspapers depend on
them for advertising patronage, it is too much to expect of
human nature, that we should always get wholly honest,
unbiassed opinions. Then, again, there is the haste, and
rush, and hurry of our times, the amount of literary drift-wood
that is all the while accumulating! Editors and critics
are but mortal men, and men kept, as a general thing, in the
last agonies of weariness and boredom. There is not, for
the most part, sensibility enough left to enable them to read
through or enter into the purport of one book in a hundred;
yet, for all this, you do observe here and there in the columns
of our best papers carefully studied and seriously written
critiques on books; these are hopeful signs. They show a
conscientious effort on the part of the writers to enter into
the spirit of the work, and to give their readers a fair
account of it; and, if I mistake not, the number of such is
on the increase.”

“Well,” said I, “do you suppose there is any prospect or
possibility of a constructive school of criticism—honest, yet
kindly and sympathetic, that shall lead young authors into
right methods of perfecting themselves?”

“We have a long while to wait before that comes,” said
Bolton. “Who is appreciative and many-sided enough to
guide the first efforts of genius just coming to consciousness?
How many could profitably have advised Hawthorne
when his peculiar Rembrandt style was just forming? As
a race, we Anglo Saxons are so self-sphered that we lack
the power to enter into the individuality of another mind,
and give profitable advice for its direction.

“English criticism has generally been unappreciative and
brutal; it has dissected butterflies and humming-birds with
mallet and cleaver—witness the review that murdered
Keats, and witness in the letters of Charlotte Bronté the
perplexity into which sensitive, conscientious genius was

thrown by obstreperous, conflicting criticism. The most
helpful, because most appreciative reviews, she says, came
to her from France.”

“I suppose,” said I, “that it is the dramatic element in
the French character that fits them to be good literary critics.
They can enter into another individuality. One would
think it a matter of mere common sense, that in order to
criticise justly you must put yourself for the time being as
nearly as possible at the author's point of sight; form a
sympathetic estimate of what he is striving to do, and then
you can tell how nearly he attains his purpose. Of this
delicate constructive criticism, we have as yet, it seems to
me, almost no specimens in the English language. St.
Beuve has left models in French, in this respect, which we
should do well to imitate. We Americans are a good-natured
set, and our criticism inclines to comity and good-fellowship
far more than to the rude bluntness of our English
neighbors; and if we could make this discriminating,
as well as urbane, we should get about the right thing.”

Our conversation was interrupted here by Jim Fellows,
who came thundering up-stairs, singing at the top of his
lungs—

“Gracious, Jim! what a noise!” said I, as he entered the
room with a perfect war-whoop on the chorus.

“Bless my soul, man, why arn't you dressing? Arn't
you going up to the garden of Eden with me to night, to
see the woman, and the serpent, and all that?” he said, collaring
me without ceremony. “Come away to your bower,
and curl your nut-brown hair; for

And thus singing, Jim whirled me down the stairs, and tumbled
me into my room, and went into his, where I heard him
accompanying his toilet operations with very loud selections
from the last comic opera, beating time with his hair-brush
in a bewildering manner.

Jim was certainly a natural curiosity in respect to the
eternal, unceasing vivacity of his animal spirits, which
were in a state of effervesence from morning to night, frothing
out in some odd freak of drollery or buffoonery. There
was not the smallest use in trying remonstrance or putting
on a sober face: his persistence, and the endless variety of
his queer conceits, would have overcome the gravity of the
saddest hermit that ever wore sackcloth and ashes.

Bolton had become accustomed to see him bursting
into his room at all hours, with a breeze which fluttered all
his papers; and generally sat back resignedly in his chair,
and laughed in helpless good-nature, no matter how untimely
the interruption. “Oh, it's Jim!” he would say,
in tones of comic resignation. “It's no use; he must have
his fling!”

“Time's up,” said Jim, drumming on my door with his
hair-brush when his toilet was completed. “Come on,
my boy, `Let us haste to Kelvyn Grove.”'

I opened my door, and Jim took a paternal survey of me
from neck-cloth to boot-toe, turning me round and inspecting
me on all sides, as if I had been a Sunday-school boy,
dressed for an exhibition.

“Those girls have such confounded sharp eyes,” he remarked,
“a fellow needs to be well got up. Yes, you'll
do; and you're not bad looking, Hal, either, all things considered,”
he added, encouragingly. “Come along. I've got
lots of things to make a sensation with among the girls tonight.'

“What, for example?”

“Oh, I've been investigating round, and know sundry
little interesting particulars as to the new engagement just
declared. I know when the engagement ring was got, and

what it cost, and where the bride's jewels are making up,
and what they are to be—all secrets, you understand, of the
very deadest door-nail kind. But Jim knows them! Oh,
yes!—you'll see the flutter I'll make in the roost to-night!
I say, if you want to cultivate your acquaintance with
Miss Eva there, I'll draw all the rest off, and keep 'em
so wide awake round me that they'll never think what
becomes of you.”

I must confess to feeling not a little nervous in the prospect
of my initiation into society, and regarding with a
secret envy the dashing, easy assurance of Jim. I called
him in my heart something of a coxcomb, but it was with a
half-amused tolerance that I allowed him to patronize me.

The experience of a young man who feels that he has his
own way in life to make, and all whose surroundings must
necessarily be of the most rigid economy, when he enters
the modern sphere of young ladyhood, is like a sudden
change from Nova Zembla to the tropics. His is a world
of patient toil, of hard effort, of dry drudgery, of severe
economies; while our young American princesses, his social
equals, whose society fascinates him, to whose acquaintance
he aspires, live like the fowls of the air or the lilies of the
field, without a thought of labor, or a care, or serious responsibility
of any kind. They are “gay creatures of the
element,” living to enjoy and to amuse themselves, to be
fostered, sheltered, dressed, petted, and made to have “good
times” generally. In England, there are men born to just
this life and position,—hereditary possessors of wealth,
ease, and leisure, and therefore able to be hereditary idlers
and triflers—to live simply to spend and to enjoy. But in
America, where there are no laws to keep fortunes in certain
families, fortunes, as a general rule, must be made by their
possessors, and young men must make them. The young,
unmarried women, therefore, remain the only aristocracy
privileged to live in idleness, and wait for their duties to
come to them.

The house to which I was introduced that night was one

of those New York palaces that are furnished with eclectic
taste, after a survey of all that Europe has to give. The
suites of rooms opened into each other in charming vista,
and the walls were hung with the choicest paintings. It
was evident that cultured skill and appreciation had presided
over the collection of the endless objects of artistic
elegance and vertu which adorned every apartment: it was
no vulgar display of wealth, but a selection which must
have been the result of study and care.

Jim, acting the part of master of ceremonies, duly presented
me to Mr. and Mrs. Van Arsdel, and the bevy of
young ladies, whose eyes twinkled with dangerous merriment
as I made my bow to them.

Mr. Van Arsdel was what one so often sees in these palaces,
a simple, quiet, silent man, not knowing or caring a
bodle about any of the wonders of art and luxury with
which his womankind have surrounded him, and not pretending
in the least to comprehend them; but quietly indulgent
to the tastes and whims of wife and daughters, of whose
superior culture he is secretly not a little proud.

In Wall street Mr. Van Arsdel held up his head, and found
much to say; his air was Napoleonic; in short, there his
foot was on his native heath. But in his own house, among
Cuyps, and Frères, and Rembrandts, and Fra Angelicos,
with a set of polyglot daughters who spake with tongues,
he walked softly, and expressed himself with humility, like
a sensible man.

Mrs. Van Arsdel had been a beauty from her youth;
had come of a family renowned for belles, and was still a
very handsome woman, and, of course, versed in all those
gentle diplomacies, and ineffable arts and crafts, by which
the sons of Adam are immediately swayed and governed.

Never was stately swan sailing at the head of a brood of
fair young cygnets more competent to leadership than she
to marshal her troop of bright, handsome daughters through
the straits of girlhood to the high places of matrimony.
She read, and classified, and ticketed, at a glance, every

young man presented to her, yet there was not a shade of
the scrutiny dimming the bland cordiality of her reception.
She was winning, warming, and charming; fully alive to
the éclat of a train of admirers, and to the desirableness
of keeping up a brilliant court.

“Mr. Henderson,” she said, with a rich mellow laugh, “I
tell Eva there is some advantage, first or last, in almost
everything. One of her scatter-brained tricks has brought
us the pleasure of your acquaintance.”

“Mamma has such a shocking way of generalizing about
us girls,” said Eva; “If we once are caught doing a thing
she talks as if we made a regular habit of it. Now, I have
come over from Brooklyn hundreds of times, and never
failed to have the proper change in my purse till this once.”

“I am to regard it, then, as a special piece of good fortune,
sent to me?” said I, drawing somewhat nearer, as
Mrs. Van Arsdel turned to receive some new arrivals.

I had occasion this evening to admire the facility with
which Jim fulfilled his promise of absorbing to himself the
attention of the young hostesses, and leaving me the advantage
of a tête-à-tête with my new acquaintance. I could
see him at this moment, seated by Miss Alice, a splendid,
brilliant brunette, while the two pretty younger sisters,
not yet supposed to be out, were seated on ottomans, and
all in various stages of intense excitement. I could hear:

“Oh, Mr. Fellows, now, you must tell us! indeed I am
quite wild to know! how could you find it out?” in various,
eager tones. Jim, of course, was as fully aware of the
importance of a dramatic mystery as a modern novel-writer,
and pursued a course of most obdurate provocation, letting
out only such glimpses and sparkles of the desired
intelligence as served to inflame curiosity, and hold the
attention of the circle concentrated upon himself.

“I think you are perfectly dreadful! Oh, Mr. Fellows,
it really is a shame that you don't tell us, really now I shall
break friendship with you,”—the tones here became threatening.
Then Jim struck a tragic attitude, and laid his hand

on his heart, and declared that he was a martyr, and
there was more laughing and such a chatter, and confusion
of tongues, that nothing definited could be made out.

The length of time that young people, from eighteen
to twenty, and even upward, can keep themselves in ecstacies
of excitement with such small stock of real things of
any sort to say, is something that invariably astonishes
old and sober people, who have forgotten that they once
were in this happy age, when everything made them laugh.
There was soon noise enough, and absorption enough,
in the little circle,—widened by the coming in of one or two
other young men—to leave me quite unnoticed, and in the
background. This was not to be regretted, as Miss Eva
assumed with a charming ease and self-possession that rôle
of hospitality and entertainment, for which I fancy our
young American princess has an especial talent.

“Do you know, Mr. Henderson,” she said, “we scarcely
expected you, as we hear you never go out.”

“Indeed!” said I.

“Oh, yes! your friend, Mr. Fellows there, has presented
you to us in most formidable aspects—such a Diogenes! so
devoted to your tub! no getting you out on any terms!”

“I'm sure,” I answered, laughing, “I wasn't aware that
I had ever had the honor of being discussed in your circle
at all.”

“Oh, indeed, Mr. Henderson, you gentlemen who make
confidants of the public are often known much better than
you know. I have felt acquainted with many of your
thoughts for a long while.”

What writer is insensible to such flattery as this? especially
from the prettiest of lips. I confess I took to this sort of
thing kindly, and was ready if possible for a little more of
it. I began to say to myself how charming it was to find
beauty and fashion united with correct literary taste.

“Now,” she said, as the rooms were rapidly filling, “let
me show you if I have not been able to read aright some of
your tastes. Come into what I call my 'Italy.'” She lifted

a portiére and we stepped into a charming little boudoir,
furnished in blue satin, whose walls were finished in compartments,
in each of which hung a copy of one of Fra
Angelico's Angels. Over the white marble mantel was a superb
copy of “The Paradise.” “There,” she said, turning
to me, with a frank smile, “am I not right?”

“You are, indeed, Miss Van Arsdel. What beautiful
copies! They take me back to Florence.”

“See here,” she added, opening a velvet case, “here is
something that I know you noticed, for I read what you
thought of it.”

It was an exquisite copy of that rarest little gem of Fra
Angelico's painting, “The Death-Bed of the Virgin Mary,”
—in time past the theme of some of my verses, which Miss
Van Arsdel thus graciously recalled.

“Do you know,” she said, “the only drawback when one
reads poems that exactly express what one would like to
say, is that it makes us envious; one thinks, why couldn't I
have said it thus?”

“Miss Van Arsdel,” said I, “do you remember the lines of
Longfellow: `I shot an arrow through the air?”'

“What are they?' she said.

I repeated:

“Do you know,” I said, “that this expresses exactly what
a poet wants? It is not admiration, it is sympathy. Poems

on his heart, and declared that he was a martyr, and
there was more laughing and such a chatter, and confusion
of tongues, that nothing definite could be made out.

The length of time that young people, from eighteen
to twenty, and even upward, can keep themselves in ecstacies
of excitement with such small stock of real things of
any sort to say, is something that invariably astonishes
old and sober people, who have forgotten that they once
were in this happy age, when everything made them laugh.
There was soon noise enough, and absorption enough,
in the little circle,—widened by the coming in of one or two
other young men—to leave me quite unnoticed, and in the
background. This was not to be regretted, as Miss Eva
assumed with a charming ease and self-possession that rôle
of hospitality and entertainment, for which I fancy our
young American princess has an especial talent.

“Do you know, Mr. Henderson,” she said, “we scarcely
expected you, as we hear you never go out.”

“Indeed!” said I.

“Oh, yes! your friend, Mr. Fellows there, has presented
you to us in most formidable aspects—such a Diogenes! so
devoted to your tub! no getting you out on any terms!”

“I'm sure,” I answered, laughing, “I wasn't aware that
I had ever had the honor of being discussed in your circle
at all.”

“Oh, indeed, Mr. Henderson, you gentlemen who make
confidants of the public are often known much better than
you know. I have felt acquainted with many of your
thoughts for a long while.”

What writer is insensible to such flattery as this? especially
from the prettiest of lips. I confess I took to this sort of
thing kindly, and was ready if possible for a little more of
it. I began to say to myself how charming it was to find
beauty and fashion united with correct literary taste.

“Now,” she said, as the rooms were rapidly filling, “let
me show you if I have not been able to read aright some of
your tastes. Come into what I call my `Italy.”' She lifted

“I should be only too much flattered,” said I, as I followed
my guide across a hall, and into a little plainly furnished
study, whose air of rigid simplicity contrasted with the
luxury of all the other parts of the house.