And yet, why not? Not to speak it profanely, does anybody suppose that Mr. Munsey's favorite reading is the Mansey Storiettes? Does "the sound of the swashbuckler swashing on his buckler" seem less humorous to the editors who encourage it than it does to Mr. Howells, who has laid aside his editorial armor and can smile at the weaknesses of his former fellow warriors? Do the peaceful editors of The Outlook really thrill with those stern praises of fighting men and fighting machines which adorn its secularized pages? Or does the talented conductor of The Ladies' Home Journal really . . . No, he cannot. As the Toastmaster makes these too daring interrogations, it seems to him that he perceives a faint odor of violets, -not the shy flower of the woodside, but the brazen-faced, tightly laced boutonnière of the pavement, —in a word, the violet of commerce.

That single glimpse of M. Doucette in his shirt-sleeves and in his despondency ought not to obliterate the memory of a hundred nights when, clothed in proper evening attire, he reigned gloriously over his long table-full of guests,

all is going well, catering has its innocent delights and its honest satisfactions. To invent a new dish, or to serve an old one with recognized skill, is to share at once the artist's joy and the bourgeois's complacency. Yet having once beheld the confidential shirt-sleeves, one is thenceforward subtly aware of them, hidden though they be for another hundred nights by the dress coat. They are there, those shirt-sleeves of the Caterer, and his workaday responsibilities are inescapable. In vain does Sir Leslie Stephen, in one of those papers which have lately charmed the Atlantic's readers, blithely assert that an editor "only vouches for the readability of the article, not for the correctness of the opinions expressed." It is a millennial dream. It asks too much of human nature. Shall the Toastmaster, except in a New Year's confidence, dare to say, "My dear guests, I am no mycologist. This dish may be toadstool or mushroom for all I know, but I assure you that the odor is appetizing"?

Alas, it is true that he is no mycologist; he prints every month a dozen articles on topics concerning which he knows nothing, as well as a half dozen more whose views of politics and society and criticism are the very opposite of his own. He vouches for their readability, that is all; and sometimes this is quite enough to take upon his conscience. But the public is shrewdly suspicious of this happy impartiality of ignorance. It keeps reminding the Toastmaster that he is Caterer too; that he has the responsibility of buying the provisions in the open market as well as merely arranging them upon the table and announcing the bill of fare.

In one sense, the public is quite right. Some one must take the responsibility of decision. But the public sometimes forgets how the Caterer must make up in faith what he lacks in special knowledge. He depends upon the honesty of the mar

ketmen, the producers. This confidence is rarely betrayed. M. Doucette would have died of shame, no doubt, if he had really served toadstools to his trusting company. Yet it never happened. His mushrooms were always mushrooms. It is the contributors to a magazine like the Atlantic who maintain, after all, the fine traditions of the institution. For purposes of convenience, it is assumed that the editor knows what he is purchasing. In reality, he is only exercising faith in writers who know what they are writing and whose views-strange as it may seem! may be worth consideration even if they do not harmonize with his own. The monthly table of contents is neither more nor less than such a confession of faith. It cannot be made without a certain hardihood. In camp, when it is your week to cook, you can always enjoy the luxury of finding fault with the man who laid in the supplies: he should have bought more bacon or a different brand of coffee, and why did he forget the onions? Even the suave conductor of the dining-car, who presents you with a menu which requests explicit criticism of meals and service, can shrug his shoulders and explain that he did not buy that steak himself. But here in the magazine world there is no shuffling. Month by month what is in the larder comes on to the table, and if it is mouldy or tough or raw the Toastmaster cannot blame the Caterer, for he is both in one: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the red slayer and the slain.

Who is there that can tell, after all, precisely how to please even the most indulgent of publics? The editors of the Atlantic have always been drafted from the ranks of its contributors; mere contributors, who once inclosed stamps for the return of manuscript and waited and wondered if it would prove "magazinable." How can such a one, drawn in a moment, like Browning's conscript, "From the safe glad rear to the dreadful van " pretend that he has been invested with

infallibility? "I am fain to think it vivacious," wrote Lowell of a certain Contributor's Club which he was submitting to the editor in 1890, nearly thirty years after his own editorship closed, "but if your judgment verify my fears, don't scruple to return it. I can easily make other disposition of it, or at worst there is always the waste-basket." His Club was accepted, in spite of Lowell's fears, and, as it happened, it was his last contribution to the magazine. But whenever an author's manuscript carries the bunker of the editor's judgment, there remains a far more formidable hazard still, namely, the unknown taste of the public.

Who really understands it? Did not Emerson, that most unmercenary of editors, accept for The Dial, pro honoris causa and with a sinking heart, that article of Theodore Parker's on the Reverend John Pierpont, which nevertheless, to Emerson's astonishment, sold out the entire edition? Did not Coleridge, an equally unworldly member of the guild, lose five hundred subscribers to the illstarred Watchman on the publication of the very second number, by "a censurable application of a text from Isaiah as its motto"?

Of one thing only may the editor be sure. No matter what dish be served, some one at the table will be positive that it either ought not to have been brought on at all, or that it should have been cooked differently. If the Atlantic has dispatched a representative to Borrioboola Gha to report upon the condition of blankets-and-top-boots in that unhappy country, some correspondent will turn up, as soon as the article is printed, to prove that he himself was the sole originator of the blankets-and-top-boots idea, and that the Atlantic has misrepresented the blessed work now going forward there. May he not have ample space in the next number to reply? Well, very likely he ought to have it. But the unlucky editor, puzzling at that moment

over the problem of finding space in the issue three months hence, thinks with a sigh of M. Doucette's pension. For at those long table-d'hôte dinners no one was expected to care for every course; if you allowed a dish to pass or left it barely tasted, you must for that very reason talk the more agreeably with your neighbor; and if individual clamor over some unfortunate concoction reached the quick ear of M. Doucette, with what infinite ease and wit did he offer the critic the honor of planning and preparing the next meal in person, invitation which was somehow never accepted. Besides, as M. Doucette used sometimes to hint, when flushed with his success, if one did not like the pension des violettes, there were plenty of other pensions across the way, eager for patron

age.

T

an

Is all this too intimate a survey of the editorial pantry and kitchen? Pray consider it nothing more than the shirtsleeved conversation of that garrulous M. Doucette, provoked into real confidence by an unusual hour. The New Year's greetings come but once a twelvemonth, after all. And the Caterer's sorrows are very few in comparison with the pleasure of spreading the Atlantic's table and seeing the still increasing guests appear. May every one find in the courses now presented something to his taste! Not to like Colonel Higginson's new essays will indeed be to betray a fantastic appetite. If articles upon Advertising and the Ethics of Business savor too much of the very shop which

you take up the Atlantic to forget, turn back to the sixteenth century, and follow Mr. Andrew D. White's account of the singular career of Father Paul. If you love that cheerful sound of the swashbuckler in fiction, you must wait a little longer, for Mr. Herrick's The Common Lot is only about Chicago, and concerns itself with men and women who are uncommonly like ourselves. There will be some contributions from writers who long since laid down their pens: from Emerson, whose Journals begin in a few months; from Timrod, and the elder Henry James; and from Walt Whitman, who appeared in these pages twice or thrice in his early manhood, and now comes back as a lusty ghost. But many of the contributors are young; provokingly young, indeed, to know so much and to write so well. There will be variety enough, at least, with some dishes of the fine old substantial sort, and wine that needs no praise, and coffee and cigars for those who like them, or gossip about men and women and books, if that be more to your after-dinner fancy. And perhaps there will be a few violets, purchased with secret anxiety of heart, but laid by each plate with such grace as Park Street may afford.

At any rate, here is a clean cloth for 1904 and an unfeigned welcome. Forget, if you will, the unskilled service, and remember that market-place and kitchen are as yet imperfect places in an imperfect, although improvable and improving world. And here is a boy's appetite to every guest, and a Happy New Year!

B. P.

It was

Ir happened to me once to be summoned on short notice to the house of a most agreeable neighbor, then Dean of the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge, to assist in entertaining two English guests unexpectedly arrived. These guests were a husband and wife, both authors, and visiting this country for the first time. They proved to belong to that class of British travelers who, as the genial Longfellow used to say, come hither, not so much to obtain information about America, as to communicate it. We were scarcely seated at table when the little lady for they were both very small in person-looked up at me confidingly and said, "Don't you think it rather a pity that all the really interesting Americans seem to be dead?" difficult for a living man to maintain any resistance against a conclusion so decisive, and all I remember is that our talk became a series of obituaries. To those might now be added, were it needful, similar memorials of my fair questioner, of her husband, and of our gracious host himself, since these also have passed away. And why should such remembrances be sad, one may well ask, if they are brought together in a sunny spirit, and have for their motto, not the mournfulness of old-time epitaphs, but rather the fine outburst of Whitman's brief song of parting, "Joy, Shipmate, Joy." Even the gloomy Carlyle had to admit that "there is no life of a man faithfully recorded, but is a heroic poem of its sort, rhymed or unrhymed."

Those who followed the chorus of affectionate praise which surrounded the

celebration of Emerson's hundredth birthday must have felt very keenly its unlikeness to the ever renewing tumult of discussion around the grave of Carlyle. The difference was in great measure the penalty of temperament, or in Emerson's case, its reward. No one recognized this more fully than Carlyle himself when he said sadly to me, "Ah! the dear Emerson ! He thinks that everybody in the world is as good as himself ;" just as he had said to Longfellow, years before, that Emerson's first visit to him was "like the visit of an angel." It is clear that the whole atmosphere of Emerson's memory is that of sunshine, but it gradually appears, in tracing it farther, that much of this traditional atmosphere extends at least for those who lived through it and perhaps for their children also over the whole intellectual period of which Emerson was the best representative. This period is now usually and doubtless vaguely known in America as the period of Transcendentalism. Unsatisfying as the word, when thus applied, must be, it may yet be employed for want of a better, without entering too profoundly into its source or its services. Originally a philosophic term, it can be used for the present to indicate a period.

The word "Transcendentalism" was apparently first employed by the leader among modern German philosophers, Immanuel Kant, to designate the intuitive method of reaching truth, as apart from the experimental or sensational method of Locke, which had held its own so stoutly. Kant died in 1804, but the word was handed on, so modified and, we might perhaps say, battered by

later German thinkers, that it would now be useless to attempt to employ it further than as a landmark or guidepost, as it will be used here. If we wish to ix the birth-time of the American period bearing that name, we may place it somewhere near the publication of Emerson's Nature (1836), or the appearance of the first number of The Dial (July, 1840), or the formation of the "Brook Farm Institute" or "Community" as it was oftenest called, near Boston (1841). The special interest of this household for the world was not so much because it gave a new roof-tree for a little domestic experiment, the Moravians and Shakers had long before done that, but rather because it offered also an atmosphere of freedom.

It visibly relaxed restraint, suggested a substitute for the strict Puritan tradition, brought together the most open and hopeful minds of the community, sometimes uniting with them the fanatics, still oftener the do-nothings; giving conservatives and radicals alike something to talk about. Those whose names are now oftenest associated with the Brook Farm enterprise, as Emerson, Alcott, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and William Henry Channing, never actually be longed to it; while its most noted members, as Hawthorne and George William Curtis, were there only during the first year. The only narrator who has written his personal remembrances of it was but a second-year member; and its more systematic historian, Mr. Lindsay Swift, says justly of it, "There was a distinct beginning, a fairly coherent progress,' but a vague termination." He also touches the keynote of the whole history when he says in his preface, " It is more than fifty years since the last dweller in that pleasant domain turned his reluctant steps away from its noble illusions, and toward the stress of realities; but from no one of this gracious company has ever come the admission that Brook Farm was a failure." Surely this is much to say.

66

In going still farther back for the historic origins of American transcendentalism, we must recognize the earlier influence of Burns, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, as laying the foundations for all this new atmosphere of thought and living. This is a fact of much interest as compared with the first reception of all these poets in their own country. The London Monthly Review the leading critical magazine in England before the Edinburgh Review appeared-pronounced Burns's first volume to be "disgusting," and "written in an unknown tongue," the editor adding his own partial version of The Cotter's Saturday Night translated into the English language! The same editor pronounced Coleridge's Ancient Mariner "the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper . . a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence, of which we do not perceive the drift," while Christabel was described by him as "rude, unfeatured stuff."

...

Even of Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey the same critic complains that it is "tinctured with gloomy, narrow, and unsociable ideas of seclusion from the commerce of the world; " and yet on turning the pages of Dennie's Portfolio published in Philadelphia simultaneously with the English periodical just quoted (1786), we find these very poets and, indeed, these identical poems hailed as the opening of a new intellectual era. Such, indeed, it was, but an era heralded in America with an eagerness, cordiality, and, above all, a cheerfulness such as might well belong to a fresher and more youthful life.

Then followed Carlyle's great influence through his Sartor Resartus, whose American editor, Charles Stearns Wheeler, I can well remember to have watched with timid reverence at the Boston Athenæum Library as he transcribed that exciting work from the pages of Fraser's Magazine, for its first reprinting in book form. Still more must be recalled the influence of Kant and Fichte, Hegel and Schleiermacher, with the more transient