FLUNKYANA.-Drawn by GEORGE DU MAURIER. (A visit to the portrait gallery of Brabazon Towers.) "Pardon me! but you have passed over that picture in the corner; an old Dutch master, I think!" "Oh, that! The Burgermaster, it's called-by Rembrank, I b'lieve! It ain't nothing much-only a work of hart-not one of the family, you know!" Editor's N the very prime of the year appears Easy Chair. is no longer observed. It was a pretty I the decay. custom, recalling the social circle a some happy June lawn, or strolling in some wood whose branches "high overarch and embower," while still the roses are blowing and the dog-days are far away, one little yellow leaf forecasts autumn, frost, and winter. Shall we say because of the startling hue, as of that bright spirit, "far off his coming shone," or as in Lochiel's warning, "and coming events cast their shadows before"? This will depend upon the mood of the mind. If it be a pensive or minor mood anticipating decay or sorrow, the coming event will cast a shadow. If, on the contrary, it be a major mood, a feeling of cheerful anticipation, then far off the coming event will shine. Coleridge speaks of a melancholy both in the spring and in the autumn. But he discriminates between them. One is soft, buoyant, evanescent, the mist of the morning. The other is a gathering shroud of storm. Every pleasant anniversary is anticipated with pleasure until, as time passes, it comes to record inexorably the lapse of time, and the heart begins to ask itself, "How many more shall I behold?" One of Hawthorne's grewsome tales is the · Christmas Banquet," whose company is never to be enlarged. With the inexorable years the guests dwindle and dwindle, until only one remains, and the happiest of festivals becomes a ghastly feast. The reader is ready to chide the story-teller who can find it in his heart to cast a shadow upon that day of happiness, and turns to Irving and Dickens and Thackeray for the Christmas of good cheer and general joy. 66 Yet the question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas, which already shines far off, is this, whether, while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy, we take care to keep it so. In point of fact, now, some months before the holidays, as the day of days in all the year rises in anticipation, does its coming shine, or is it an event which casts its shadow before? The Easy Chair asks betimes, and it is not the first who asks, have we not done much to spoil the happy sea small community, when everybody knew everybody, and the neighborhood gave a day to visiting. But when the little town became a great city the devotee of old traditions began after breakfast, and until a late dinner was breathlessly running in and out of a hundred houses, and vagabonds, presuming upon the general hurry and confusion, pushed into houses in which they had no acquaintance. The significance and interest of the day were lost, and will never be revived. Christmas has a deeper hold and a humaner significance than the old Dutch New-Year. But how much of its charm as we feel it in English literature and tradition, how much of the sweet and hallowed association with which it is invested, are we retaining, and what are we substituting for it? Irving's "Christmas," we are told, is his most delightful paper. There is a peacefulness, a freshness, a simplicity, a domesticity in his treatment which breathe the very spirit of the day. It is very Christmas that he describes, whether in the Sketch-book or in Bracebridge Hall. It is a soft, idyllic picture, blended of the spirit of Christmas and of England. But what is the substance of the picture? Is it vast and ostentatious expense, a lavish display, a toilsome and exhausting endeavor to give something to all your acquaintance, a wearisome anticipation, and a painful suspicion that somebody has been omitted? Thackeray describes a little dinner at Timmins's. A modest couple make themselves miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner to people for whom they do not care and who do not care for them. It is a series of mortifications, and the young pair make themselves needlessly miserable and at a most damaging cost. They know it. Their good sense accuses them of it. But other people do so, and they cannot do otherwise. What would Mrs. Grundy say? Awful thought! She might tell the truth, and say that they could not afford it. They cannot afford it. Timmins and his wife cannot live as the Duke of Westminster lives, nor even as son? The old custom of New-Year's calling the water-tax collector. But instead of VOL. LXXXV.-No. 510.-95 living pleasantly as they can live, they must needs pretend to do as their richer neighbors do, and ludicrously fail in the pretence. Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they must spend lavishly to buy gifts like their richer neighbors. They thank God with warmth that Christmas comes but once a year. It is becoming a vulgar day, a day not of domestic pleasure, but of ruinous rivalry in extravagance, a day to be deprecated rather than welcomed. Are not the Timminses legion? Is there not reason in their dread of Christmas because of the sordid and mercenary standards by which it is measured? The same good sense that sees the folly of Timmins's little dinner and avoids it can stay the abuse and regenerate Christmas. It is essentially a day of human good-will. It commemorates the spirit of the brotherhood of men. You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little. If the extravagance of funerals is such that a great society is organized to withstand it, should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance? Enge William Cartis In Memoriam GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS THE last communication to his readers from our dear old Easy Chair is a plea for Christmas; and with the timely warning against the wasting blight menacing the gracious holiday there is another note of presage, as if in those June days the writer already felt the approach of life's decay. The one little yellow leaf" has now become the full autumn of sad mists and shining glories. But he was taken before the autumn came, and another Christmas he will not see. 66 A month ago we cherished the hope that the end might be still afar off; it seemed impossible that the sweet, strong music grown so familiar to our ears could come thus suddenly to its close, broken thus abruptly in the full summer of its melody. How gladly would we hear its rich though sad autumn requiem and the wise prophecy of its winter psalm! But no chill was to fall upon the fragrant air where for him swung the ample censers of the July and August days and nights, while, during all those days and nights, in the library of his Staten Island home, he sat in the easy-chair where so often he had written for this Magazine, where alone he could find even partial respite from pain, and where at last the peace of heaven fell upon him. All of summer's incense flowed about him as he drew near the new world he was about to discover.... "My voice quivers when I come to the point in which it is related that sweet odors of the land mingled with the sea-air as the Admiral's fleet approached the shores; that tropical birds flew out and fluttered around the ships, glittering in the sun, the gorgeous promises of the new country; that boughs, perhaps with blossoms not all decayed, floated to welcome the strange wood from which the craft were hollowed. Then I cannot restrain myself. I think of the gorgeous visions I have seen before I have even undertaken the journey to the West, and I cry aloud to Prue: "What sun-bright birds, and gorgeous blossoms, and celestial colors will float out to us, my Prue, as we approach our Western possessions!" .... We have just returned from the simple, unceremonious burial of our beloved friend. A little group of those who had known him intimately; a few earnest, loving words from the Rev. J. W. Chadwick, heartfully impressive and appreciative; a tender farewell utterance at the grave from his long-time comrade and summer neighbor, Professor Charles Eliet Norton, and then, in sight of the beautiful New York Bay, and under the cloudless sky of a September day-reminding us of the lines of Herbert, which he often quoted, "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky" all that was mortal of George William Curtis passed from human view. We leave to others the fit eulogy of Mr. Curtis as publicist, orator, and lecturer, as the antagonist of slavery, and spoke for freedom or for the quickening of the public conscience, or at the annual Academy dinner in the interest of living and ennobling art, there was that singular personal quality--the magic of an enchantment beyond the spoken word and less formal play of his fancy in the Easy Chair. Of his essays in this department Mr. Edwin P. Whipple said, sixteen years ago: as protagonist in the hard struggle-but to him never seeming a hopeless one-for purer politics and an unpartisan civil service. Whoever shall worthily say for him such words as he was called to say and so nobly said for others-for Bryant, Longfellow, Sumner, Phillips, and Low-informing it-which flowed through the ell-must needs traverse the whole field of our political history during the last forty years, and, to complete the portrait, he will give no merely passing glance at the changes which during that period have passed upon the surface of our society, and at the influences which have been at work in the development of our art and literature. Nor can he wholly ignore the quiet but important educational activities proceeding from the University of the State of New York during the Regency and Chancellorship of Mr. Curtis. "In these he has developed every faculty of his mind and every felicity of his disposition; the large variety of the topics he has treated would alone be sufficient to prove the generous breadth of his culture; but it is in the treatment of his topics that his peculiarly attractive genius is displayed in all its abunreason, and sentiment. His tone is not only dant resources of sense, knowledge, wit, fancy, manly, but gentlemanly; his persuasiveness is an important element of his influence, and no reformer has equalled him in the art of insinuating sound principles into prejudiced intellects by putting them in the guise of pleasantries. He can on occasion send forth sentences of ringing invective, but in the Easy Chair he generally prefers the attitude of urbanity, which the title of his department suggests. His style, in addition to its other merits, is rhythmical; so that his thoughts slide, as it were, into the reader's mind in a strain of music. Not the least remarkable of his characteristics is the undiminished vigor and elasticity of his intelligence, in spite of the incessant drafts he has for years been making upon it." But here we are only saying a loving good-by to our friend-saying it for his publishers, who not only miss a great moral and literary force, which they have valued at its highest, and a wise counsel lor in whom they have always had unreserved confidence, but feel as a deep personal grief the loss of him, the sympathetic companion, the partner of their aspirations, of their joys and their sorrows; for his editorial associates, who will forever cherish the memory of his genial kindly presence and loyal affection, to whom his every word was an inspiration and his smile a benediction; for all who were brought in contact with him in the special field of his work here, who felt his simple worth, the unaffected dignity of his speech and bearing, the affability of a sincere and generous nature; and last of all, but not the least, for the readers of this Magazine, since in bidding him good-by we are also saying a final goodby to the Easy Chair itself, wherein his readers have been admitted to the most familiar and frank expression of his per- Around the corner at every turn of his sonality-an intimacy next to that of the wit was the swift way to the heart. And home circle. For them, therefore, there if the occasion of the merrymaking was is a deeper and more lasting regret than one that deeply moved him, then when may be expressed in the general voice la- the unwearying round of mirth and good menting a public loss-it is a private feeling came to an end, he would lead in grief, less easily definable, and foreverAuld Lang Syne," sung with locked finding some new fountain from which hands around the table. it springs afresh. In the eloquent oration on the poet Burns, in the exquisite lecture on Sir Philip Sidney, and, indeed, in every public utterance of Mr. Curtis, whether he We have always felt in the Easy Chair a summer presence, such as Mr. Curtis himself was in every gathering of friends, a blithe spirit, prodigal of cheer as are the pines of balm, tireless in its play as are the tropical sea and sky. The feast where he presided never lacked its roses, or the charm of "Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not." So in that vast round of the festival of Easy Chairs, where grandsire, sire, and son have listened to strains of music that in their ideal harmony seem to blend with the strains that are never heard by any outward ear, has this tireless and deathless spirit found its way to millions of human hearts that will ever love him and cherish his memory. As he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound. "If the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" There were some shining days which are especially commemorated by the Easy Chair, made luminous by enthusiasms whose rapture is communicated to his readers with charming frankness. Such was the day when he met the Brownings in Florence. "Oh, happy day!" How characteristic of him is the unreserved delight with which he so often reverts to the singing of Jenny Lind— "an unwasting music which has murmured and echoed through a life"; and how pleasant to us is his pleasure to remember that when she came forward to sing her farewell to America she bore in her hand the flowers he had sent her-a bouquet of white rose-buds, with a Maltese cross of deep carnations in the centre! The happiness of one we loved is so dear to us that we would gladly linger over all the felicities of a life that was not without its shadows and chastening sorrows: the years of youthful travel in the East, and of leisurely sojourn in Italy with Ken There is a conflict in the music-as in what music is there not?--always the two centres of its elliptic orbit, the storm centre and the centre of repose. He who in his youth "breathed the Orient and lay drunk with balm" encountered the fiercest blasts of hatred that blew in his time, even as in the valley of the Nile "the wind and cold hovered, awful, upon the edges of dreaming." His love of goodness and beauty was a passion. He would fain have seen that all was fair and good, and he strove to find it so; finding it otherwise, he strove to make it so. Thus, with no heart for satire, yet the discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods, and through his whole career as a writer he was often compelled to don the habit he was most loth to wear. Not thus unwillingly did he take up arms against the dragon wrongs which assailed the nation's heart-for he was the best knight of our time, a genuine crusader. Unwaveringly he met the bitter scoff of the discomfited foe whose disguises he had penetrated and the jeers of the censorious partisan. There was no uncertain sound in the clarion notes of his challenge to battle. But he was a lover of peace, and the re-sett and Hicks, in Switzerland and Gertirement of his library and of his Ashfield home was dearer to him than the applause of the Senate Chamber or the triumphs of diplomacy as minister to the most stately of European courts. And yet he sacrificed the ease of many years to meet an obligation which to many honest men would have seemed to rest upon a too fastidious sense of honor. But the old dream days of his golden youth-"the lotus-eating days of faith in the poets as the only practical people, because all the world is poetry "-were kept alive in the pages of the Easy Chair, and, like the sunshine of a Syrian summer, glowed through all his musings. They brought no delirious fever; no desire for startling effectivism ever disturbed the calm serenity of his style. They did not shut out the "riddle of the painful earth"; he never failed to impart the noblest of lessons-"how to help the helpless, how to console the suffering, how to teach poverty to hope and to labor for its own relief." many and England; the earlier companionship of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dana, Ripley, and Margaret Fuller at Brook Farm; and the later friendships of his growing manhood, including the best and greatest of his contemporaries; the heroic moments of his country's triumphs, in which he was so great a part; and the unmarred pleasures of his home. Such grace of fortune crowned his summer, which was so bountiful of grace to us. But, as he sang many years ago in the closing lines of his poem "The Reaper," "Though every summer green the plain, Dear Easy Chair, beloved friend, once more with locked hands, the festival being now over at which you have sat so long as master, we sing the old song of "Auld Lang Syne," and with hearts full of sorrow that cannot be uttered even in lour tears, we bid you good-by! |