University of Virginia Library

EPILOGUE.

“What a mournful glory falls upon the October
woods! It seems as if a broken rain-bow were
strained through a sieve of gray clouds, and sprinkled
over the crisp leaves. Ochre, vermillion, dappled
russet, and all rare tintings! And then the wind
that rushes so gloriously through the woodlands,
bearing with it a rich, earthy smell, and scattering
the purple wealth, the hoarded gold of the autumnal
days! Pleasant Forest, with your oaken harps!
Pleasant little Town, lying quietly in sunshine and
moonlight—how sad I was to leave ye! Pleasant
River, that stealest up from the sea, past the fort

and into the old weather-beaten seaport town—
crawling lazily among the rotting piers of deserted
wharves, then gliding off through the shaky bridge,
squirming and curveting into a world of greenery,
like a great serpent with an emerald back! And
the girls! Village belles, rustic flirts—eyes, lips,
shady curls, white hands, little feet, enchanting
pouts—ah, me!

This rhapsodical soliloquy was interrupted one
fine October morning, two days after my return
from the sea-side, by a voice there was no mistaking.
It was Barescythe, who startled Mrs. Muggins with
the following pertinent inquiry:

“Prolific producer of sea-prodigies, is Ralph at
home?”

I could not see Mrs. Muggins' face, for that good
soul was standing at the foot of the stairs; but I
knew her feelings were injured, and I hastened out
of my room to prevent any verbal combat that might
ensue.

Mrs. Muggins, (after a long silence, and with
some asperity)—“What, sir?”

Barescythe, (petulantly)—“Is Ralph in, Sycorax?”

What reply the “relick” of Joshua Muggins might

have made to this interrogation, is only to be
imagined; for I immediately “discovered” myself, to
use a theatrical phrase, and led my solemn friend
from hostile ground.

“My dear Barry,” said I, after greeting him cordially,
“you shouldn't—”

“Shouldn't what?”

“Call Mrs. Muggins names.”

“Sycorax? She deserved it. Women are Cleopatras
until they are thirty, then they are old
witches with broomstick propensities! Don't interrupt
me. Don't speak to me.”

I chocked down a panegyric on Woman, for I
knew that Barry was thinking of a cold, heartless
piece of femininity that, years and years ago, forgot
her troth to an honest man, and ran away with a
moustache and twenty-four gilt buttons. I could
never see why he regretted it, for Mrs. Captain
Mary O'Donehugh never stopped growing till she
could turn down a two hundred weight; and she
looks anything but interesting, with her long file of
little O'Donehughs—nascent captains and middies
in the bud!

I knew that Barescythe was not in a mood to
be critically just, yet, for the sake of turning his
thoughts into different channels, I glanced significantly
at the MS. under his arm.

“My Novel,” I ventured.

“Like the man in the play,” said Barescythe,
“the world should ask somebody to write it down
an ass!”

With which, he threw the manuscript on the
table before me.

His remark was uttered with such an air of logic,
that I nodded assent, for I never disagree with logicians.

“The world is wide-mouthed, long-eared, and
stupid—it will probably like that affair of yours,
though I doubt if the book sells.”

And Barry pointed to the curied up novel on the
table.

I bowed with, “I hope it will.”

“The world,” he continued, “that gave Milton
£10 for Paradise Lost, ought surely to be in
ecstacies over Daisy's Necklace.”

“Barry,” said I, somewhat nettled, “is it my good
nature, or your lack of it, that seduces you into
saying such disagreeable things?”

“Neither, Ralph, for I no more lack good nature
than you possess it. But we wont quarrel. I am
sore because the day of great books has gone by!
Once we could boast of giant minds: we have only
pigmies now.”

“But let them speak, Barry. There may be some

among us that are not for a day. Who foresaw in
the strolling player, in the wild, thoughtless Will
Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the Dramatist
of all time? Your pet Homer was a mendicant.
Legions of our best poets were not acknowledged,
until the brain that thought, was worn out, the hand
that toiled, cold, and the lips that murmured, patient
forever!
What if my poor story is stale and flat beside the
chef-d'œuvre of Sir Walter Scott's genius? Barry,
there is a little bird in our New-England woods
known only by its pleasant chirp; yet who would
break its amber bill because the nightingales in
eastern lands warble so deliciously?”

Barry laughed.

“There you come, Ralph, with your bird-conceits!
You flap the wings of some thread-bare metaphor
in my face, and I cannot see for the feathers! You
are not a man to argue with. Poetical men never
are: they make up in sentiment what they lack in
sense; and very often it happens that a bit of poetry
is more than a match for a piece of logic. `No
more of that, Hal, an' thou lovest me.' Your book

is a miserable one. All your voluble ingenuity cannot
controvert that.”

Barry's better nature had slipped out of him for
a moment into the sunshine, like a turtle's head;
but it slipped back again, and the speech that commenced
with a laugh ended with a snarl.

“It shows,” he said, rumpling the manuscript
with a careless hand, “a want of Art. The construction
of the tale is crude: the characters are
all old friends with new names—broken down stage-horses
with new harnesses—and the prose throughout
is uneven. How can it be otherwise, since it
is only an intolerable echo of Hood, Dickens, and
Charles Reade? Your want of artistic genius is
shown in taking three chapters to elaborate “little
Bell,” who has no kind of influence in working out
the plot, and who dies conveniently at Chapter III.
Your imitative proclivities are prominent in the
chapter headed `A Few Specimens of Humanity.'
Was ever anything more like the author of `The
Old Curiosity Shop?' Your short, jerky sentences
are modeled after Reade's `Peg Woffington,' and
`Christie Johnstone,' or any of Dumas' thefts. As
to the plot, that is altogether too improbable and
silly for serious criticism. And then the title,
`Daisy's Necklace'—`Betsy's Garter!”'

“Ah, Barry, this is only Fadladeen and Feramorz

over again! Do you remember that after all the
strictures of the eastern savant, Feramorz turned
out to be not only a Poet but a Prince? I could
take you to be `Blackwood' slashing an American
book, rather than a Yankee editor looking over a
friend's virgin novel. You are like all critics,
Barry. They ignore what might please them greatly
if they had not their critical behavior on, and grow
savage over that part of an author which they should
speedily forget—like a dog on a country highway,
that turns up his cold nose at the delicate hedge-blossoms,
and growls over a decayed bone! So you
find nothing to admire in my sixteen chapters?”

“Not much.”

“Then say a good word for that little.”

“There are some lines, Ralph, some whole paragraphs,
may be, that would be very fine in a poem;
but in an every-day novel they are strikingly out
of place. Your jewels, (heart-jewels I suppose you
call 'em,) seem to me like diamonds on the bosom
of a calicoed and untidy chambermaid. That sentimental
chapter with `The Dead Hope' caption,
is quite as good as your blank verse, and I would
wager a copy of Grisworld's `Poets of America,'
against a doubtful three-cent piece, that you wrote
it in rhyme—it's not very difficult, you know, to
turn your poetry into prose. You needn't stare.

In a word, your book is as tame as a sick kitten—
I hate kittens: there's something diabolical in a
yellow cat!”

I nipped a smile in the bud, and said, quietly:

“I intended to write a tame, simple domestic
story. The facts are garnered from my own experience,
and—”

“Garnered from your maternal grandparent, Ralph!
Very much I believe it. Very much anybody will.
It's a wonder to me that you didn't call the book
`Heart-life by an Anatomy'!”

“I will acknowledge, Barescythe, that I have not
done my best in this affair. `Yet consider,' as Fabricio
says in the play, `'twas done at a sitting: a
single sitting, by all the saints! I will do better
when I have those pistoles, and may use time.'
Local tales of this school have been popular. I
wrote mine to sell.”

“But it wont.”

“Why?”

“Let's see. How many `sunsets' have you in
the book?”

“Not many, I think.”

“That was an oversight. There should be one
at the end of each chapter—twenty `sunsets' at
least. Then you have no seduction.”

“A seduction?” horrified.

“Of course. What modern novel is complete
without one? It gives a spicy flavor to the story.
People of propriety like it. Prim ladies of an uncertain
age always `dote' on the gallant, gay Lothario,
and wish that he wasn't so very wicked!”

And Barry raised his eye-brows, and broke out
in such a clear, bell-like, canorous laugh—so contagious
in its merriment, that I joined him; and I
fancied I heard Mrs. Muggins beating a hasty retreat
down the front stairs. It seems improbable to
me that Mrs. Muggins had been listening at the
key-hole of my door—respectable Mrs. Muggins.

“Then, sir,” said Barry, re-assuming his mock-serious
air, “there should be a dreadful duel, in
which the hero is shot in his hyacinthine curls,
falls mortally wounded, dripping all over with gory
blood, and is borne to his ladye-love on a shutter!
You have none of these fine points. Then the
names of your characters are absurdly commonplace.
Mortimer Walters should be Montaldo St.
Clare: Daisy Snarle, (how plebeian!) should be Gertrude
Flemming: John Flint, Clarence Lester, and
so on to the end of the text. How Mrs. Mac Elegant
will turn up her celestial nose at a book written
all about common people!”

“Mrs. Mac Elegant be shot!” I exclaimed. I
used to be sweet on Mrs. Mac Elegant, and Barescythe

has a disagreeable way of referring to that
delicate fact. “It was not for such as she I wrote.
I sought to touch that finer pulse of humanity which
throbs the wide world over. The sequel will prove
whether or not I have failed.”

Barry laughed at my ill-concealed chagrin.

“Barry,” said I, carelessly, meditating a bit of
revenge, and unfolding at the same time a copy of
the `Morning Glory,' “did you write the book criticisms
in to-day's paper?”

“Yes,” returned Barry, coloring slightly.

“They are very fine.”

Barry's blood went up to his forehead.

“So consistent,” I continued, “with what you
have been saying. I have neither read `The Scavenger's
Daughter,' nor `The Life of Obadiah Zecariah
Jinkings;' but, judging from the opinion here expressed,
I take them to be immortal works. I could
never be led to think so by reading the extracts you
have made from the volumes, for the prose is badly
constructed. Indeed, Barry, here's a sentence which
lacks a personal pronoun and a verb.”

“I see what you are aiming at,” replied Bare
scythe, sharply. “You twit me with praising these
books so extravagantly. I grant you that worse
trash was never in type, (Daisy is not printed yet,

you know,) but will you allow me to ask you a
question?”

“Si usted gusta, my dear fellow.”

“Do you think that Gabriel Ravel, at Niblo's,
turns spasmodic summersets on a chalked rope for
the sake of any peculiar pleasure derived therefrom?”

“Why, Barry, I can scarcely imagine anything
more unpleasant than to be turned upside down,
fifteen feet from maternal earth, with an undeniable
chance of breaking one's neck, on a four-inch rope.
But why do you ask?”

“M. Ravel distorts himself for a salary, and no
questions asked. I do the same. I throw literary
summersets for a golden consideration. It is a very
simple arrangement”—here Barescythe drew a diagram
on the palm of his hand—“Messrs. Printem
& Sellem (my thumb) give us, `The Morning Glory,'
(my forefinger) costly advertisements, and I, Barescythe,
(the little finger) am expected to laud all
the books they publish.”

Out of respect to Barescythe, I restrained my
laughter.

He went on, with a ruthful face:

“Here is `The Life of Jinkings'—the life of a
puppy!—an individual of whom nobody ever heard
till now, a very clever, harmless, good man in his
way, no doubt,—the big gun of a little village, but

no more worthy of a biography than a printer's
devil!”

With which words, Barescythe hit an imaginary
Mr. Jinkings in the stomach with evident satisfaction.

“Yet I am called upon to tell the world that this
individual, this what do you call him?—Jinkings—
is one of the luminaries of the age, a mental Hercules,
a new Prometheus—the clown! Why on
earth did his friends want to resurrectionize the insipid
incidents of this man's milk-and-water existence!
If he made a speech on the introduction of a
`Town-pump,' or delivered an essay at the `Bell
Tavern'—it was very kind of him, to be sure: but
why not bury his bad English with him in the
country church-yard? I wish they had, for I am
expected to say that ten thousand copies of the
`work' have been sold, when I know that only five
hundred were printed; or else Messrs. Printem &
Sellem withdraw their advertisements, in which
case my occupation's gone! And this `Scavenger's
Daughter'—a book written by a sentimental school-girl,
and smelling of bread-and-butter—see how I
have plastered it all over with panegyric!”

“And so, Barry,” I said, with some malice, “you
wantingly abuse my book, because I cannot injure
you pecuniarily.”

“Perhaps I do,” growled Barescythe. “It is a
relief to say an honest thing now and then; but
wait, Ralph, till I start The Weekly Critique, then
look out for honest, slashing criticism. No longer
hedged in by the interests and timidity of `the
proprietors,' I shall handle books for themselves,
and not their advertisements—

“What a comment is this on American criticism!
O, Barry, it is such men as you, with fine taste and
fine talent, who bring literature into disrepute. Your
genius gives you responsible places in the world of
letters, and how you wrong the trust!”

“Thank you,” returned Barescythe, coldly, “you
blend flattery and insult so ingeniously, that I hesitate
whether to give you the assurance of my distinguished
consideration, or knock you down.”

“Either you please, Barry. I have spoken quite as
honestly, if not so bluntly as you; and I regret that
I have so little to say in favor of your inconsistent
criticism. I am sorry you dislike my novel, but—”

I looked toward the chair in which Barescythe
had been sitting.

He was gone.

I was not surprised, for Barry does few things

“after the manner of men,” and a ceremonious departure
is something he never dreams of. I sat
and thought of what had been said. I wondered
if we were the dregs of time, the worthless leaves
of trees that had borne their fruit—if there were
none among us,
And lastly, I wondered if any of our city papers
had such a critical appendage as T. J. Barescythe.

It is pleasant to have your friend Mr. Smith
pat you patronisingly on the back, and say, “My
dear fellow, when is your book coming out?”

Of course, you send Mrs. Smith a copy after
that—and all Mrs. Smith's relations.

“Daisy's Necklace” is nearly ready. The following
advertisement, which I cut from “The Evening
Looking Glass” of last Thursday, illustrates the
manner in which “my publishers,” Messrs.
Printem & Sellem, make their literary announcements:

“We have in Press, and shall publish in the
course of a few days, a New Work of
rare merit, entitled—

DAISY'S NEGKLACE,
And what came of it.

A THRILLING NOVEL, SURPASing,
in pathos and quiet satire,
the most felicitous efforts of Dickens!!

Printem & Sellem,

Publishers.”

That was rather modest and pleasant; but it is
pleasanter than all to have an early copy of your
book placed on the breakfast-table, unexpectedly,
some sunshiny morning — to behold, for the first
time, the darling of your meditation in a suit of
embossed muslin. How your heart turns over—if
you are not used to the thing. How you make
pauses between your coffee and muffins, to admire
the clear typography, the luxurious paper, the gold
letters on the back!

Messrs. Printem & Sellem sent me two out-of-town
papers, containing notices of “Daisy.” These
notices were solicited by advance copies of the work,
for the purpose of being used in the publication
advertisement. It is curious to remark how great
minds will differ.

I should take the editor of the “Blundertown
Journal” to be a man of cultured taste, appreciative
and discriminating. The second review was
not quite so “favorable,” and can scarcely be called
“a first-rate notice.”

Not a line quoted to prove the justice of the unstrained
censure! I could not account for the malignant
personality of this critique, until Barry informed
me that my publishers never advertised their books
in the columns of the “Frogpond Gazette.” This, of
course, explained it. I only wish I had the stubborn
editor of the “Frogpond” at arm's length, I
would try the consistency of his ears.

I was somewhat astonished, the next day, to find
how ingeniously Messrs. Printem & Sellem made
the adverse criticism subservient to their interests.

My lucubration was out.

The “Post” said so; the “Morning Rabid” said it;
the “Evening Looking-Glass” said it; and a host of
small fry echoed the important fact. I unfolded
“The Rabid,” and beheld the following advertisement:

“Four thousand agents!” quoth Barry, looking
over my shoulder; “I rather think it would take
forty thousand to sell an edition of `Daisy!' ”

I laughed at my irate friend, and, igniting a fresh
regalia, crossed my feet on the mantelpiece, and remarked,
composedly,

“Now for the Critics!”