Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 22, November, 1878

While early familiarity with the best of these songs would have a good effect in refining the popular sense of melody, the appreciation of what came last and is highest in music—of harmonic progressions—could best be taught by a similar familiarity with the German four-part chorals. They are the very embodiment of vigorous, soul-stirring harmony, the basis of sacred, as the Volkslied is of secular, music. "Each of our churches," says Thibaut, the author of the celebrated little book on Purity in Musical Art, "had a period of the highest enthusiasm, which will never return, and each of them has at this very period of the most ardent religious zeal done its utmost for the development of its song." The German choral is the result of the intense devotional feelings which existed among the early Protestant congregations, and it is evident that a wholesome religious spirit could with it be introduced in our schools in a manner which could be objectionable to no denomination. In course of time these chorals might then be transferred to our churches, where they might well take the place of the easier but very eccentric melodies and incorrect harmonies now too often heard there.

    Henry T. Finck.

OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP

A SUCCESSFUL ENTERPRISE

IN one of the side streets of a city which fronts on Long Island Sound is to be found a curiosity-shop whose show-window challenges the attention of all lovers of the quaint and queer by its jumble of cracked and ancient porcelain, old-fashioned brasses and small articles of more or less valuable bric-à-brac. Inside, the three small rooms are crowded with sets of delft and willow china, old candlesticks, clocks, andirons, fenders, high-backed chairs and the like. The whole aspect of the place is shabby and dingy, and the antique furniture has no chance of showing either its worth or its dignity amid such surroundings; yet the traffic which goes on in this "curiosity-shop" has already brought a respectable fortune to the owner, and promises, if the rage for revivals of ancient fashions continues, to make him a capitalist. Knapp, as we will call this dealer in second-hand furniture and bric-à-brac, began his trade some five or six years ago. He was originally a tin-peddler, travelling up and down the country with his wagon, offering tin and glass ware in return for rags, feathers and old metals. Knapp probably had, to start with, a touch of that original genius which transmutes the most ordinary conditions of life into means of personal aggrandizement. He laid the stepping-stone to his fortune when it one day occurred to him to accept a piece of old-fashioned Wedgwood ware in return for half a dozen shining tins. It was an inspiration which he considered half a weakness, but he yielded to it, and afterward had cause to congratulate himself when he found an opportunity for disposing of the cup at a remunerative rate. This gave him an impulse of curiosity toward any heirlooms in the way of china and pottery to be found among the farmers' wives in the section of New England he traversed; and his activities soon had their reward. At that date the passion for ceramics was but just beginning to invade our cities, and not a suspicion of it stirred the minds of the good women who artlessly opened their cupboards and displayed their treasures of Worcester china and willow-ware to the ingratiating Knapp. No man in the world was ever better calculated to drive good bargains for himself, yet leave an impression on his victim's mind that the peddler's interest in a "sort of china which matched a set his grandmother used to have" was running away with his better judgment.

Knapp became shortly a most interesting personage to people who were making collections, and he attained, besides ingenuity, genuine taste and skill in detecting marks and discerning values. In a year he had as nice a knowledge of china and pottery as any one in the country, and if the farmers' wives were so much the poorer by the loss of what had been in the family for generations, they did not recognize their loss.

However, it was by old clocks and brass andirons and fenders that Knapp made his fortune. A gentleman asked him to procure him some old-fashioned articles of this sort, and the peddler at once went into the matter on speculation, and bought up all the old brasses he could find within a radius of fifty miles. These fenders and andirons were gladly parted with, growing rusty as they had been for years, and almost forgotten in garrets and cellars. New England farmers remember too distinctly the shiverings and burnings of their youth not to feel an insurmountable prejudice against open fires. So Knapp, whose wider knowledge made him master of the fact that this present generation, sickened of stoves and dreary black holes in the wall and burnt dead heat, and longing for some cheerful household centre, were restoring the old fireplaces and open fires, where the flames could leap and roar, and the logs burn and glow and smoulder,—Knapp, I say, humored this fancy by opening his shop and offering his old-fashioned fenders and andirons to the public. He had bought them at a mere song, and sold them again at a price so reasonable that any purchaser might be suited, yet still at a profit of five hundred to a thousand per cent.

Once started as a regular dealer, he went steadily on: his activity was incessant, and always productive. His energies seemed to have been shaped by an unerring and divining instinct. He found old sideboards, chests, wardrobes, brought from England two centuries ago, dropping to pieces in barns and cellars. He found an "almost priceless Elizabethan cabinet" serving as a hen-house in a farmer's barnyard, and another in a little better condition used as a receptacle for pies in his cellar. He bought them both for five dollars, had them "restored," and sold one for eight hundred and the other for five hundred dollars. It is true that this process of "restoration" was an expensive one, and in his next venture of the sort he demanded higher prices without offering articles so valuable or so unique. At present he is engaged in refurnishing a North River mansion of colonial times with suitable furniture and decorations, and will be handsomely rewarded for his pains. But he is too well known now to find rare and curious articles as freely parted with as they were a few years ago. Still, the hard times help him. Then, too, in New England old families are constantly passing away, and leaving what small possessions belonged to the last surviving maiden of the race to far-away relations. These possessions, consisting of good solid old furniture, are certain to become Knapp's if he finds anything desirable among them. He has been known to go to a house within twelve hours of the death of the last surviving member of the family, and offer to negotiate with a servant or friend of the deceased for a chair, table, clock or sideboard he coveted. I doubt if an auction of old furniture has occurred for four years within one hundred miles of him where he has not been the first and the most privileged buyer.

    L.W.

SMALL-WAISTED WOMEN

If the truth be fairly stated, women have many excuses for their infatuation regarding small waists. It is Mrs. Haweis who says, "The reason why a small waist is a beauty is because, when it is natural, it goes together with the peculiar litheness and activity of a slenderly-built figure. All the bones are small, the shoulders and arms petite, and the general look is dainty and youthful." In other words, a small waist is only a beauty when it is in proportion to the rest of the figure. The common mistake lies in considering it a beauty in a large woman of massive proportions. A few centuries ago women did not take a scientific view of things, and fell into delusions which in this age are a disgrace to the sex. They knew nothing of anatomy, of the law of proportion or of the curve of beauty, and they misunderstood the language of admiration. The latter I suspect to be at the root of the whole matter. Poets were, as we shall presently see, everlastingly praising small waists, and women fell into the error of supposing that a small waist was, in the abstract, a beauty and an attraction. When or where the mistake originated I cannot tell, but here are the words of praise of probably a fourteenth-century lover: "Middel heo hath menskful smal," or, "She hath a graceful small waist." At a later day Master Wither included in the attractions of her who had left him,

Her wast exceeding small,
The fives did fit her shoo;
But now, alasse! sh'as left me.

This suits exactly the modern view of a small waist and a No. 5 shoe.

In the well-known Scotch ballad "Edom o' Gordon" the Lady Rodes is represented as being shut up by Gordon in her burning castle. The smoke was suffocating when,

Oh than bespaik her dochter dear:
She was baith jimp and sma', etc.

Here it might be said that the evident youth of the girl, who was dropped over the wall and fell on the point of the cruel Gordon's spear, accounts for her being "jimp and sma'." The explanation will not apply to "The Cruel Sister," as given by Sir Walter Scott:

She took her by the middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!

So fascinated was the rhymer by that special feature of her beauty that he returns to it after recounting how the elder sister drowned the younger:

You could not see her middle sma',
Binnorie, O Binnorie!
Her gouden girdle was so bra,
By the bonny milldams of Binnorie.

Another instance is in the opening verse of Sir Walter Scott's version of "The Lass of Lochroyan:"

Oh wha will shoe my bonny foot?
And wha will glove my hand?
And wha will lace my middle jimp
Wi' a lang, lang linen band?

The last line appears to indicate the use of a linen band, as the Roman ladies used the strophium, a broad ribbon tied round the breast as a support. From this it may be inferred that the "Lass of Lochroyan" did not owe her "middle jimp" to any very deadly artificial means of compression.

One of the most remarkable instances that can be adduced is in the original version of "Annie Laurie," by William Douglas, a Scottish poet of the seventeenth century. It has been so completely displaced by a later version that few are probably acquainted with the song as written by Douglas:

She's backit like a peacock,
She's breisted like a swan,
She's jimp about the middle,
Her waist ye weel micht span;
Her waist ye weel micht span,
And she has a rolling ee, etc.

In view of all these passages is there any wonder that it is hard to persuade women that men do not admire "wasp" waists? How are they to know that the "jimp middle" of the ballads was in its jimpness in proportion to the shoulders? The trouble is, that the early rhymesters have used up the only side of the question capable of poetical treatment. One cannot sing of the reverse: no poet could seriously lift up his voice in praise of her "ample waist" or "graceful portliness." In order to reach woman's ear, modern writers must adopt a different course, and it is curious to contrast their utterances with those of the ballad-makers. Place Charles Reade by the side of Douglas, and then what becomes of the "waist ye weel micht span"? After showing how the liver, lungs, heart, stomach and spleen are packed by Nature, the novelist asks: "Is it a small thing for the creature (who uses a corset) to say to her Creator, 'I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,' and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close by a powerful, a very powerful, and ingenious machine?"

Every lady should read A Simpleton, and learn something of the monstrous wrong she inflicts upon herself by trying to compass an artificially-produced "middle sae jimp." It will prepare her for Mrs. Haweis's lessons upon The Art of Beauty. One or two passages will give a hint of their flavor: "Nothing is so ugly as a pinched waist: it puts the hips and shoulders invariably out of proportion in width.... In deforming the waist almost all the vital organs are affected by the pressure, and the ribs are pushed out of their proper place." "Tight-lacing is ugly, because it distorts the natural lines of the figure, and gives an appearance of uncertainty and unsafeness.... Men seldom take to wife a girl who has too small a waist, whether natural or artificial." "In architecture, a pillar or support of any kind is called debased and bad in art if what is supported be too heavy for the thing supporting, and if a base be abnormally heavy and large for what it upholds. The laws of proportion and balance must be understood. In a waist of fifteen inches both are destroyed, and the corresponding effect is unpleasant to the eye. The curve of the waist is coarse and immoderate, utterly opposed to what Ruskin has shown to be beauty in a curve. Real or artificial, such a waist is always ugly: if real, it is a deformity that should be disguised; if artificial, it is culpable, and nasty to boot."

No rhyming can withstand such reasoning. If the ballads really had any effect in fostering an admiration of abnormally small waists, both science and a truer conception of beauty should by this time have counteracted their influence. Women cannot much longer, with decency, plead ignorance of the results of a practice which would be ridiculous were it less pernicious.

    J.J.

VICTOR HUGO AT HOME

On the steep heights of the Rue de Clichy, at the corner of a street, we find the number 21. How many heads crowned either with a laurel or a diadem have passed beneath the arch of this doorway since Victor Hugo left the Rue Pigalle to take up his abode here! The apartment inhabited by the poet can hardly be considered either spacious or elegant. Its dining-room is of cramped dimensions, and the famous red drawing-room, though handsomely furnished, lacks the air of individuality that one would naturally expect to find in it. Probably this arises from the wandering life that Victor Hugo has led for so many years. After the coup d'état the furniture of his house in the Rue de la Tour d'Auvergne was sold at auction. Contrary to custom, and probably through the interference of some member of the imperial party, no police were at hand to protect or watch over the articles exposed for sale. Consequently, the depredations were frightful. Small objects were carried off bodily, tapestries were cut to pieces and the furniture and statues were mercilessly mutilated. One well-dressed man walked off with Columbus's compass—that which the insurrectionists had a few months before examined so respectfully, their leader remarking, "That compass discovered America." Many of the poet's household treasures remain at Hauteville House, in the island of Guernsey.

But the curiosity of the abode is the study. From floor to ceiling it is one mass of books, letters, newspapers and manuscripts: the chairs, the mantelpiece, the table have disappeared beneath their burdens. A narrow path, shaped in the midst of these accumulations, permits the poet to pass from the door to the window, Victor Hugo's correspondence is enormous, and is continually increasing. He receives letters from all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects—letters of homage and letters of abuse, requests for autographs and demands for money, verses sent by youthful poets with prayers for his advice, and the wails of the oppressed who look to him as their sworn champion. Very seldom does Victor Hugo refuse to answer, though his responses are necessarily brief. Among these accumulated papers must be cited the vast mass of Victor Hugo's unpublished works. He never fails to devote a certain portion of the day to literary work, his brain being as clear, his imagination as fertile, his pen as ready, as they were twenty-five years ago. "Nulla dies sine linea" is the motto of his daily life. Yet with all his industry he has been heard to lament that he will not live long enough to transfer to paper all the conceptions that crowd his busy brain. In January, 1876, he remarked to a friend, "Were I to begin giving to the world my unpublished and completed works, I could issue a new volume monthly for a year." Among these treasures for posterity are to be found the tragedies of Torquemada and the Twins (the Iron Mask); the comedies of the Grandmother, The Sword, and perchance The Brother of Gavroche; a fairy piece wherein the flowers and trees play speaking parts; volumes of poems entitled The Four Winds of the Mind, All the Lyre, Just Indignation, The Sinister Years (a connecting link between Les Châtiments and a Terrible Year); and even a scientific work on the effects of the sphere. He once said, "I have more to do than I have yet done. It seems to me that as I advance in years my horizon grows larger, so I shall depart and leave my work unfinished. It would take several more lifetimes to write down all that fills my brain. I shall never complete my task, but I am resigned: I see in my future more than I behold in my past."

He was once speaking of the dénouement of Marion Delorme, and remarked that he had written two last scenes for that tragedy, the first sombre and terrible, the second tender and touching, and that he had preferred the former, but had yielded to the counsels of his friends and the actors in the piece, and had suffered it to be produced with the more gentle dénouement. On being asked if he had destroyed the rejected scene, he made answer that he preserved everything he had ever written. "Posterity can destroy what it pleases, and keep what it pleases," he added with a smile.

Victor Hugo's receptions are delightfully simple and informal. He is at home one evening in the week, when his friends and admirers gather round him. No change of toilette is needed: the ladies appear in walking costume, the gentlemen in frock-coats. "The Master," as his intimate friends and disciples love to call him, avoids all airs and posing with the quiet simplicity of true genius. He does not plant himself in the midst of his company, neither does he assume the consequential manners of a dictator. Seated in an arm-chair or on a sofa beside some favored guest, he converses—he does not discourse. At an early hour, in view of the age and the simple habits of the host, the company separate, the most enthusiastic raising the hand of the Master to their lips as they take leave. One of the greatest charms about Victor Hugo's manner is that he never shrinks from or repels any manifestation of genuine admiration or homage. Unlike celebrities of far less note, who profess to be indignant or disgusted at any such manifestations, he lends himself to what must often be wearisome to him with a kindly graciousness that often changes the enthusiasm of his admirers into a passionate personal attachment.

Few men have ever enjoyed so wide-spread and enduring a popularity as does Victor Hugo among the people of Paris. When, during the dark days of 1870, he returned from his long exile, he was greeted at the railway-station by a vast crowd, which escorted his carriage to his first resting-place, the home of M. Paul Meurice, and he was twice compelled to address a few words to them in order to appease their eagerness to hear his voice. When he appears in public on great and solemn occasions, such as the funeral of M. Thiers, he is invariably made the object of a popular ovation of the most touching character. People climb up the sides of his carriage to touch his hand, mothers lift up their children to the windows imploring his blessing, and the cry of "Vive Victor Hugo!" goes up from the very hearts of the throng. On the day of the funeral of Madame Paul Meurice, as the cortége was going along the exterior boulevards, it passed near a menagerie. Just as the carriage of Victor Hugo came opposite the door the lions within set up a tremendous roar. "They know that the other one is passing by," said an old workingman beside the carriage ("Ils sentent que l'autre passe"). The fondness of Victor Hugo for riding about Paris on the top of an omnibus is well known. It has sometimes happened that on tendering his fare the conductor has put the coin aside with the remark, "I shall keep that as a relic." One day, on returning from a session of the senate at Versailles, he arrived late at the station. It was a snowy day, the train was full, and he was obliged to climb into a fourth-class place, a seat on the top of the cars. The benches were covered with snow. A workingman who recognized the poet would not let him sit down till with his blouse he had wiped the seat clean and dry. Victor Hugo thanked him and offered him his hand, and with a naïve delight the good fellow cried, "Ah, monsieur, ah, citizen, how proud I am to have seen you and touched you!" More than once the cabman employed to take the poet to his house has refused to accept his fare, declaring that the honor of having driven Victor Hugo was recompense enough. On the day of the funeral of M. Thiers so dense a crowd surrounded the carriage of the poet that it remained for a long time motionless and imprisoned, and the shouts that greeted him were so wildly enthusiastic that the coachman who was driving his carriage fairly shed tears, remarking, however, in a shame-faced manner, "A crying coachman! what a silly sight!"

Naturally, beside this passionate love stands a hate as passionate. The vindictive fury of the Bonapartists against Victor Hugo can easily be understood. No writer more than he has contributed to render a restoration of the Empire impossible. Hence insults of all kinds, from the calumny openly printed in an imperialist newspaper to the anonymous letter overflowing with menaces. One of these, received in September, 1877, threatened the poet in no doubtful terms. "Do not imagine, scoundrel, that we will let you escape us a second time:" so ran one of its paragraphs. Under the Second Empire all letters written to or by Victor Hugo were compelled to pass through the ordeal of the Black Cabinet. Many of his Parisian correspondents evaded this surveillance by sending their letters under cover to acquaintances in Germany or by confiding them to travellers who were going to England. But the letters of the poet to his friends in France were invariably opened and read, and many of them were confiscated. In a sarcastic mood Victor Hugo caused a quantity of envelopes to be prepared for his use, in one corner of which was printed an extract from the law forbidding any agent of the government to open or to tamper with any letter that passes through the post-office. On one occasion he wrote across the address of a letter, "Family matters—useless to open it."

It is said that the empress Eugénie, after perusing Les Châtiments, threw the volume aside with this exclamation: "I do not see what harm we have ever done to this M. Hugo." This remark was afterward repeated to the poet. "Tell her that the harm was the second of December," was his reply.

The bottle that contained the ink used in writing Napoleon le Petit had a curious history. That splendid and fiery piece of invective, so amply justified by after events, was commenced on the 12th of June, 1852, and finished on the 14th of July, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastile. With the few drops of ink that remained in the bottle Victor Hugo wrote upon its label—

Out of this bottle
Came Napoleon the Little,

and affixed his signature. The bottle was given by Victor Hugo to Madame Drouet, who afterward presented it to a young physician who had attended her through a dangerous illness. This young physician, Dr. Yvan, owed to the intercession of Prince Jerome Napoleon permission to return to France to visit his dying father. Having invited the prince to dinner after his return, he showed him as a curiosity the famous bottle. No sooner had the prince read the inscription than he insisted upon taking possession of it, and in spite of the remonstrances of Dr. Yvan he carried it off in triumph.

Victor Hugo is very hospitable, and delights in having three or four friends to dine with him, but his appetite, though healthful, is neither very great nor very dainty: he prefers plain food and drinks only light claret habitually. He is a very early riser, and on fine spring or summer mornings he may often be met at six o'clock taking a stroll in the Champs Élysées. Of his fondness for riding on the tops of omnibuses I have already spoken. These long rides, when he traverses Paris from one end to the other, are his periods of composition. He sits plunged in a profound reverie, with vague eyes gazing unseeing into space. So well are his moods understood by the conductors and habitual travellers on those lines that he is always left undisturbed. Sometimes the greater part of the day will be passed in these excursions, nor does any severity of the weather ever daunt the aged poet. Yet with all the quiet simplicity of his habits his daily life has not escaped the shafts of calumny. The Bonapartist press declared that he was a drunkard who used often to be picked up insensible from the floor of his own dining-room. He has been called an assassin because of his sympathy with the proscribed Communists, a madman because of his enthusiastic and impassioned utterances, and he has been said to be a hunchback whose deformity was dissimulated by the skill of his tailor.

Any sketch of the poet's home-life would be incomplete did I not touch on his passionate fondness for his grand-children, the two little beings whose prattle and caresses lend a charm of peculiar sweetness to the waning hours of that illustrious career. For them the world-renowned genius is but the most loving and tender of grandfathers. Their games, their studies, their baby caprices, sway the actions of that grand personality as the zephyrs ruffle the surface of the summer ocean. The creator of Marion Delorme excels in manœuvring a puppet-show and in getting up plays on a dolls' theatre. The author of Les Miserables often lulls these little ones to sleep with improvised tales of wonderful fascination. For their sakes he becomes a sculptor and moulds in bread-crumb most marvellous pigs with four matches for legs. They it is who know best the almost feminine tenderness, the wellnigh maternal love, of which that powerful nature is capable.

I write in the present tense, yet as I write these things exist no longer. The red drawing-room is closed, the dwelling on the Rue de Clichy is deserted. Victor Hugo is in Guernsey, and from that far retreat come sinister rumors respecting his failing health. These are denied by his friends, but are stoutly supported by his enemies. Which of them speak the truth? That is hard to tell. It may be that this grand career, long and lustrous as a summer day, has reached its evening hour at last. Perchance we shall see no more the massive head framed in its snow-white locks and beard, the piercing eyes, the stalwart frame that bore so lightly the burden of wellnigh fourscore years. It may be so, and yet we hope, we pray, for the return of him who lights our century with the lustre of the great creative genius of the world.