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THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

ON NAMES

IT is interesting to remember the fascination that names had for Balzac; to him the name not only preceded the story, but even evoked it. Resounding imaginary titles, each with its family history and characteristics, marched musically through the corridors of his mind, so that, ere he put pen to paper, the people who were to bear those names possessed a full identity. The sign of one Z. Marcas upon a streetcorner became at once the kernel of a tale. The names of his characters were not so much created as discovered, and that is the ideal method.

Floating in the limbo of the creative imagination, there is a vague coagulation of habits, ideas, idiosyncrasies; it is given a name — and thereupon at once it takes form, has existence, history, destiny. Such is the effect upon us poor mortals of our immortal faith in identity.

After all, was Balzac wrong? When the creature is named is not his fate foreshadowed? There must be a key to his cypher, and many of us make use of it without realizing just what we are about. Mr. Lang calls attention to a character of Meredith's, 'whose name sounded like the close of a rich hexameter Clare Doria Forey.' But for my part I never could believe in Miss Forey, nor summon any interest in her fate; her name is too unreal; it is created, not discovered, by the novelist who evoked her. Every time I go to the play and stare at the curtain, I protest inwardly against any one's bearing the name Lee Lash, and wonder why parents as well as novelists try

to create instead of to discover the names of their progeny.

There are cases in which the name seems to have been the really evil gift of the mischievous fairy. Either it inspires confidence where confidence were misplaced, or else it tends to arouse distrust without the slightest warrant. A certain eminent cardinal must be constantly struggling against the refractory influence exerted upon his career by such a name as Merry Del Val. There is a perverse jocosity in the sound. And think of the weapon placed by inscrutable Providence in the hand of a person bearing a name so frank and trustworthy as Thérèse Humbert! No wonder there was but a collar-button in the safe. Contrariwise, if you have the wrong name, how useless even to attempt to defraud the public. Who, I ask in all sincerity, would ever trust any one called Ann Aurelia Diss Debar?

I heard of a colored butler once named Geoffrey Conquest. I know nothing about him; he must have been an admirable person. I would myself have handed him the key of the platechest without a reference, his name was enough.

If, after reading the above passages of incontrovertible logic, anybody needs to be further convinced that his destiny is not recorded on the lines of his palm, nor on the bumps of his head, I will recall to his mind a supreme instance in real life of the psychological significance of names. He to whom the key was given, must from the very beginning have seen clearly through all the tortuosities of L'Affaire. The good and evil power of names strove

for supremacy in that contest. For instance, had Dreyfus borne the name of Lévy, the first accusation would have been impossible. But his name, with its ugly German twang, was bound to exert its malign influence upon its unfortunate possessor. This being so, doubtless the Gods of Nomenclature began to take sides in the struggle, like the gods in Homer. What name destined to die the death but Henry? What one to pique the public but Picquart? What more clouded with suspicion than Esterhazy? And what more plainly marked with villainy than that of De Paty du Clam? Could a virtuous man live, think you, called De Paty du Clam? Nor did the obscure contention end here. What trumpetcall of a name halted this infamy? - Zolà! Who was to labor in that tangle but Labori; or to listen with dignity and clemency but-Clémenceau! The riddle was almost too plain.

Your great novelist invariably discovers rather than invents the names of his people. We have often marveled at the accuracy of Dickens's Quilp and Pickwick; where he goes astray into artificialities it is because he is in too great a hurry to discover, so must invent. Thackeray is often quoted and praised for his felicity in this regard, and his mere caricatures of naming, like the Southdowns and Bareacres, or the receptions in Vanity Fair attended by chickens and cheeses, seem even less remarkable than the serious genius of names like Clive Newcome and Becky Sharp. Could Richardson's first heroine have been named other than Pamela? The gods christened her. And in the name Clarissa Harlowe, tragedy vies with distinction. Had she been called Argemone Lavington, or Emma Woodhouse, surely the same stars would not have shone upon her fate.

It is a pity that this gift of the novelist should be so conspicuously lacking

to the scholar. Our antiquaries love to create, they have not the patience or the insight to discover the names buried in the sand or scrawled upon the potsherd. Men were humbler in the past: such names as Rameses and Nebuchadnezzar held shape and color, and sound and idea. But to-day these are being taken from us, the crystal shattered into meaningless syllables, the plant torn up and dried in an herbal. To the mind of Thackeray, the name of an Egyptian queen suggested a pleasant phrase. When he says, 'as dead as Queen Tiah,' we understand just the mummified condition he implies. But to-day the lady has become - the Gods of cacophony alone know wherefore- Queen Thi-iy! A strong protest should be registered against such an absurdity. No one cares how her majesty was pronounced in her antediluvian existence; the rendering of hieratics into English letters must needs be approximate at best. For heaven's sake, then, let us retain those names to which we have attached both associations and ideas!

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There is a Dutch savant, I never read his works, but that they are erudite I know, and that they are distinguished I am convinced. For once I heard his name, spoken as it should be spoken, 'trippingly on the tongue,' and knew all that he must be, to which his name destined him. Fortunate, thrice fortunate, M. Chantepie de la Saussaye!

SWASHBUCKLING DAYS IN VER

MONT

THERE was lately tried, in Bennington County Court, a very interesting case, involving the alleged embezzlement, by one citizeness, of 'a six-quart pail of blueberries' harvested by another. The case attracted spectators, and excited comment in the press of

southern Vermont. And well it might do so. Though unlikely to be carried to the Supreme Court, the Blueberry Case may very well go down in history down in history as the triumph of a principle, and the end of an era in Vermont.

Time was when the courts would have had no jurisdiction over such a matter, in any section of the Green Mountains. When the 'Beech Seal' was affixed, not to the deeds, but to the backs, of interlopers on the farms granted by New Hampshire; when Ethan Allen took Ticonderoga 'in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress,' though 'holding,' as one historian very justly remarks, 'no commission from either'; when, in short, Vermont was still

The outlaw state that held her own
In single-handed fight
Against the British on the left,

The Yorkers on the right;

then, indeed, the mountain where these blueberries were picked would have been the scene of their last reckoning; and neither of the stalwart housewives would have troubled judge or jury in

the matter.

She should take who had the power.

Turbulent, indeed, were the Green Mountains of the early days! Ethan Allen was, I think, the only great swashbuckler of the Revolution. His swaggering feats are commemorated by at least three monuments in his native state; whereas the finer genius of Seth Warner is unmemorialized, save by that graceful shaft in the mountain township of Peru. Vermont sent to Congress, in her adopted son, the Irishman Matthew Lyon, a swashbuckling legislator if ever there was one. His resort to the arbitration of fists with his colleague Griswold is not, to be sure, unparalleled in Congressional history; but there was a unique element of swagger in his solitary session in the House,

when every other member of House and Senate marched away in state to pay their customary devoirs to the President. Lyon justly represented, on that occasion, his almost Jacobin constitu

ency.

Vermont used then to cast her tiny vote with herculean energy for Thomas Jefferson. Which of our forbears in these rocky valleys could have foreseen what a phalanx we were later to present on the Conservative and Whiggish side? Republican Vermont to-day seems to require 'breaking up' more urgently than the most solid regions of the South!

Our early Democracy is departed, along with our Wild West airs of a century ago; but there survives in Vermont a very sturdy democracy of the uncapitalized description. We may, I think, be fairly called 'democratic Republicans.' Who ever heard of sumptuary laws in Vermont? The very names of our villages are a lesson in democracy. Pumpkin Hollow alternates with the proud names of Danby, Shaftesbury, and Arlington. Our southwestern counties abound in the names of famous English noblemen of the seventeenth century; a certain page of Green's History is like a roll-call of townships in Bennington, Rutland, and Windham counties. Yet intermixed with these sounding and splendid titles, on the leveling map of Vermont, are Bald Mountain, Owl's Head, Mother Merrick, Chiselville, and Bear Town.

The anecdote is still told in our valley of the reply which Mrs. Chittenden, the Governor's wife, made to some squeamish guests who objected to meeting the farmhands at dinner. 'We usually all dine together,' said the first lady of Vermont, but I really think there should be two tables set: the first for the farmhands, because they have been working very hard, and must be

very hungry; and the second for the rest of us, who can very well wait.'

A certain importance once attached to Vermont as the eldest daughter of the Revolution. She took a slight precedence in statehood over Kentucky. The two were, however, in sisterly agreement in their dispositions. There was a great deal of 'uppishness' in the conduct of both. Congress thought it very bad taste in any of her frontier children to demand or threaten her dignified and deliberate procedure; but Vermont and Kentucky set an example of anything but meekness and patience to the swarming young brood of would-be states.

In the old curiosity shop of history several interesting parallels can be traced between Vermont and Kentucky. Before the former entered on her half-century of prohibition, strong waters were fully as popular in the Green Mountains as in the Blue Grass. Account-books are extant of an old shop-of-all-goods in our village, where incredible quarts, nay gallons, of rum were sold to many a deacon and elder. A singular circumstance it seems that Stephen A. Douglas came from Vermont, while Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. (And of Sion it shall be reported, that he was born there.') The Little Giant, when he left Vermont, was but one of the crowding, ever-increasing army of emigration from that sapphire of a state.' Chicago in its early days was rich in Vermonters. They built up the West, and left their native valleys, as the biographer of Bishop Hopkins indignantly remarks, 'feeble and fainting' behind them. From 1850 to 1860 the railroad and the stock combined brought fewer than a hundred persons a year to Vermont.

The mountaineers swarmed, and are still swarming, away from the sugarbush and marble-quarries of home.

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Ireland, however, has paid a high, a prohibitive price for her poetry. Better for Vermont that she has not been a distressful country, such as produces a Mangan or a Ferguson. And yet Company E, of the Fifth Vermont, might, I always thought, have been accorded a poem. They were recruited and drilled in my own village, and marched away to Virginia to be annihilated in an obscure skirmish, the very name of which is hardly to be found outside the files of our village paper. Into the mouths of those young men, on the eve of that dreadful little battle, might well have been put the fine lines of Miss Lawless (with a slight change in geography, and a shade less bitterness):

The wind is wild to-night, and there 's tempest in the air;

The wind is from the North, and it seems to blow from Clare;

The whole night long we dream of home, and waking think we're there; Vain dream, and foolish waking! we never shall see Clare.

THEM YELLOW-BACKS

THE love of poetry and music is dying, or dead, in America. This fact is admitted, deplored, and explained by various erudite theories. What no one has yet suggested is a way to replant the seed, to revive the love of rhythm which once found expression in folkballad and plantation-song. Music is recognized as a means of culture, but it is a luxury, for grand opera and Paderewski 'come high.'

How many people do you know who read poetry for delight, and sing while they saw wood or wash dishes? Even music-loving foreigners fail to hand down their folk-poetry to their child

ren.

The sounds to be heard in America are chiefly discords: in the cities there are the roar and shriek of the cars; in the country the 'chug-chug' of the corn-shredder, or the monotonous 'click, click, click' that announces the approach, not of Peter Pan's crocodile, but of the manure-spreader. No milkmaid 'singeth blithe.' The barefoot boy, we fear, has lockjaw, at least now he never opens his mouth to sing. Even the roustabouts on the Mississippi River steamboats no longer 'tote' freight to a musical cadence. Their chorus has given place to a high-collared darkey who pounds a tin piano or scares the peaceful cows on the riverbanks with the raucous echoes of the calliope.

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This musical famine in the land is lamentable, and if you are inclined to hope for better times, look over the poetry in the current periodicals, or read the latest volume of verse. Nor may we expect help from the schools. Invaluable though they may be as a means of culture, sight-singing in the grades, and the study of Shakespeare and the Ancient Mariner, come too late in life to instill in our children a love for rhythm and harmony; such qualities must be cultivated from infancy. When the cradle was banished from nursery and kitchen, with it went lullaby and slumber-song. Is it possible that herein lies the true explanation of the present condition, and that a well-planned course of slumber-songs for infants would tend to remedy the evil?

A recent experience has suggested this unsuspected cause for the atrophy of the musical sense. Whether the in

duction be logical or fanciful, the incident is in itself worth relating.

Charlie, the chore-boy on the farm, is quick, willing, a good worker, but illiterate to the last degree. Born in Illinois of American parents, at fourteen he can barely sign his name, multiply seven by nine, and spell out the baseball news in the paper. His vocabulary is so limited that he sometimes fails to obey orders because he does n't understand ordinary words. For a future president he is shockingly ignorant; Roosevelt he has heard of, but Taft and Bryan are empty names. His father and older brother he 'guesses' are Republicans, but he does n't rightly know. In American history he has 'never got beyont Washington's administration,' because he always has to stop school in March to plant corn. The study he likes best at school is 'etymology,' which, he explained in answer to questions, 'tells you all about your body.'

Realizing his deficiencies, Charlie accepts help most gratefully, and last summer we spent many a sultry evening working examples in the greatest common divisor, or reading about the Constitution, of which he said he had never heard. One night when I told him he had better go to bed, he rose with evident relief, mopping his hot little face with his shirt-sleeve. At the door, however, he balanced a moment on one foot and hesitatingly asked,

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