A Literary Courtship/Chapter 1
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JOHN BRUNT was a lucky fellow—is still for the matter of that. Everybody knows his books; that capital volume of Travels at the South Pole, the two series of essays on The Modern Wherewithal, and his Reign of Louis XI, which all the historical bigwigs have sanctioned. From the outset, Brunt was blessed with that happiest of combinations, a moderate income and a taste for literature. Now literature, as has been often observed, is a first-rate thing, if you have an income to back it up with, but for a poor devil out at elbows pecuniarily, like some of us, writing books is about as practical an occupation as keeping a yacht.
John was a great fellow for a discussion, and was never satisfied till he had proved his point. It is my opinion that if he had hazarded the statement that a fairly good pedestrian could walk from Maine to Oregon in so and so many weeks, he would have been ready to perform the feat for the sake of the argument. Luckily, that particular question never came up, for we should have missed John badly at the Pow-wow. Pretty good name for a debating club, by the way. Harry Flint christened it. Flint is a capital fellow, only he insists upon making puns, and his are so much better than anything anybody else can do in that line, that we find them rather a bore.
One night, at the Pow-wow, Hanley had read a paper on Civil-Service Reform, and a very able paper it was too. But the discussion which was in order was inclined to flag, owing to our all being of pretty much the same opinion. Ellis tried to recall some heresy of Daniel Webster's on the subject, which he thought might stir us up a little, but there wasn't any real "go" to the talk, and we drifted off onto side issues. Ballotreform, which is Manning's hobby, led to English methods of election, old and new, and then somebody struck Felix Holt, which naturally brought the talk round to George Eliot. One of the fellows remarked that it was odd that so many women had chosen a man's name for a nom-de-plume, but Percy Kent said it was natural enough, since a book got a better hearing if it was supposed to be written by a man.
"Nonsense!" exclaimed Brunt. "A book's a book, and stands for itself! If it's a woman that's written a good book, all the better for the book!"
"If that is so," Kent answered, "it is mighty queer that so many of the best heads among the women should have chosen to take a man's name."
"A man's name is a more effectual concealment," Blunt maintained.
"Then why don't men sometimes do the same thing for the sake of concealment? Why didn't Dickens call himself Ruth instead of Boz? Why didn't Samuel Clemens pass himself off as Mary Twain? Why were not the "Sonnets of Proteus" called the sonnets of Io or Persephone or some other classic girl, just as changeable, I warrant you, as Proteus ever was?"
"Because the author was not as muddled in his mythology as you are, Kent!"
"Poh! My mythology is miles ahead of your logic, Brunt. There's a reason in things, and Currer Bell, and George Sand, and George Eliot knew what they were about—you may depend upon it!'"
Singularly enough, we found this a much more fruitful theme than civil-service reform, and there were lots of good things said before we got through with it. I don't repeat them, for two reasons. In the first place, I have noticed that what we fellows say at the Pow-wow never sounds as clever by half when you try to repeat it. In the second place, it all happened some time ago and I have forgotten the best points. But I remember that everybody had something to say on the subject. Brunt got much wrought up, because he could not lay his hand on any proof of his assertion, that it was rather an advantage to a book than otherwise, to have been written by a woman. If it had not been for a look in Brunt's eye that I knew better than anyone else—for Brunt and I are old college chums, and I know him like a book, though he wouldn't thank me for saying so—if it hadn't been for that look in his eye I might have forgotten all about that particular Pow-wow.