The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866

More than twenty manuals of croquet have been published in England, it is said, and some five or six in America. Of the four authorities named above, each has some representative value for American players. Mayne Reid was the pioneer, Routledge is the most compact and seductive, Fellow the most popular and the poorest, and "Newport" the newest and by far the best. And among them all it is possible to find authority for and against almost every possible procedure.

The first point of grave divergence is one that occurs at the very outset of the game. "Do you play with or without the roquet-croquet?" has now come to be the first point of mutual solicitude in a mixed party. It may not seem a momentous affair whether the privilege of striking one's own ball and the adversary's without holding the former beneath the foot, should be extended to all players or limited to the "rover"; but it makes an immense difference in both the duration and the difficulty of the game. By skilfully using this right, every player may change the position of every ball, during each tour of play. It is a formidable privilege, and accordingly Reid and "Newport" both forbid it to all but the "rover," and Routledge denies it even to him; while Fellow alone pleads for universal indulgence. It seems a pity to side with one poor authority against three good ones, but there is no doubt that the present tendency of the best players is to cultivate the roquet-croquet more and more; and after employing it, one is as unwilling to give it up, as a good billiard-player would be to revert from the cue to the mace. The very fact, however, that this privilege multiplies so enormously the advantages of skill is perhaps a good reason for avoiding it in a mixed party of novices and experts, where the object is rather to equalize abilities. It should also be avoided where the croquet-ground is small, as is apt to be the case in our community,—because in such narrow quarters a good player can often hit every other ball during each tour of play, even without this added advantage. If we played habitually on large, smooth lawns like those of England, the reasons for the general use of the roquet-croquet would be far stronger.

Another inconvenient discrepancy of the books relates to the different penalties imposed on "flinching," or allowing one's ball to slip from under one's foot, during the process of croquet. Here Routledge gives no general rule; Reid and "Newport" decree that, if a ball "flinches," its tour terminates, but its effects remain; while, according to Fellow, the ball which has suffered croquet is restored, but the tour continues,—the penalties being thus reversed. Here the sober judgment must side with the majority of authorities; for this reason, if for no other, that the first-named punishment is more readily enforced, and avoids the confusion and altercation which are often produced by taking up and replacing a ball.

Again, if a ball be accidentally stopped in its motion by a careless player or spectator, what shall be done? Fellow permits the striker either to leave the ball where the interruption left it, or to place it where he thinks it would have stopped, if unmolested. This again is a rule far less simple, and liable to produce far more wrangling, than the principle of the other authorities, which is that the ball should either be left where it lies, or be carried to the end of the arena.

These points are all among the commonest that can be raised, and it is very unfortunate that there should be no uniformity of rule, to meet contingencies so inevitable. When more difficult points come up for adjudication, the difficulty has thus far been less in the conflict of authorities than in their absence. Until the new American commentator appeared, there was no really scientific treatise on croquet to be had in our bookstores.

The so-called manual of the "Newport Croquet Club" is understood to proceed from a young gentleman whose mathematical attainments have won him honor both at Cambridge and at New Haven, and who now beguiles his banishment as Assistant Professor in the Naval Academy by writing on croquet in the spirit of Peirce. What President Hill has done for elementary geometry, "Newport" aims to do for croquet, making it severely simple, and, perhaps we might add, simply severe. And yet, admirable to relate, this is the smallest of all the manuals, and the cheapest, and the only one in which there is not so much as an allusion to ladies' ankles. All the others have a few pages of rules and a very immoderate quantity of slang; they are all liable to the charge of being silly; whereas the only possible charge to be brought against "Newport" is that he is too sensible. But for those who hold, with ourselves, that whatever is worth doing is worth doing sensibly, there is really no other manual. That is, this is the only one which really grapples with a difficult case, and deals with it as if heaven and earth depended on the adjudication.

It is possible that this scientific method sometimes makes its author too bold a lawgiver. The error of most of the books is in attempting too little and in doing that little ill. They are all written for beginners only. The error of "Newport" lies in too absolute an adherence to principles. His "theory of double points" is excellent, but his theory of "the right of declining" is an innovation all the more daring because it is so methodically put. The principle has long been familiar, though never perhaps quite settled, that where two distinct points were made by any stroke,—as, for instance, a bridge and a roquet,—the one or the other could be waived. The croquet, too, could always be waived. But to assert boldly that "a player may decline any point made by himself, and play precisely as if the point had not been made," is a thought radical enough to send a shudder along Pennsylvania Avenue. Under this ruling, a single player in a game of eight might spend a half-hour in running and rerunning a single bridge, with dog-in-the-mangerish pertinacity, waiting his opportunity to claim the most mischievous run as the valid one. It would produce endless misunderstandings and errors of memory. The only vexed case which it would help to decide is that in which a ball, in running the very last bridge, strikes another ball, and is yet forbidden to croquet, because it must continue its play from the starting-point. But even this would be better settled in almost any other way; and indeed this whole rule as to a return to the "spot" seems a rather arbitrary and meaningless thing.

The same adherence to theory takes the author quite beyond our depth, if not beyond his own, in another place. He says that a ball may hit another ball twice or more, during the same tour, between two steps on the round, and move it each time by concussion,—"but only one (not necessarily the first) contact is a valid roquet." (p. 34.) But how can a player obtain the right to make a second contact, under such circumstances, unless indeed the first was part of a ricochet, and was waived as such? And if the case intended was merely that of ricochet, it should have been more distinctly stated, for the right to waive ricochet was long since recognized by Reid (p. 40), though Routledge prohibits, and Fellow limits it.

Thus even the errors of "Newport" are of grave and weighty nature, such as statesmen and mathematicians may, without loss of dignity, commit. Is it that it is possible to go too deep into all sciences, even croquet? But how delightful to have at last a treatise which errs on that side, when its predecessors, like popular commentators on the Bible, have carefully avoided all the hard points, and only cleared up the easy ones!

Poetry, Lyrical, Narrative, and Satirical, of the Civil War. Selected and Edited by Richard Grant White. New York: The American News Company.

We confess that our heart had at times misgiven us concerning the written and printed poetry of our recent war; but until Mr. White gave us the present volume, we did not know how strong a case could be made against it. The effect is perhaps not altogether intended, but it shows how bad his material was, and how little inspiration of any sort attended him in his work, when a literary gentleman of habits of research and of generally supposed critical taste makes a book so careless and slovenly as this.

We can well afford the space which the editor devotes to Mr. Lowell's noble poem, but we must admit that we can regard "The Present Crisis" as part of the poetry of the war only in the large sense in which we should also accept the Prophecies of Ezekiel and the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Many pious men beheld the war (after it came) foreshadowed in the poetry of the awful and exalted prophecies, and we wonder that Mr. White did not give us a few passages from those books. It is scarcely possible that he did not know "The Present Crisis" to have been written nearly a score of years ago; though he seems to have been altogether ignorant of "The Washers of the Shroud," a poem by the same author actually written after the war began, and uttering all that dread, suspense, and deep determination which the threatened Republic felt after the defeats in the autumn of 1861. As Mr. White advances with his poetical chronology of the war, he is likewise unconscious of "The Commemoration Ode," which indeed is so far above all other elegiac poems of the war, as perhaps to be out of his somewhat earth-bound range. Yet we cannot help blaming him a little for not looking higher: his book must for some time represent the feeling of the nation in war time, and we would fain have had his readers know how deep and exalted this sentiment really was, and how it could reach, if only once and in only one, an expression which we may challenge any literature to surpass. Of "The Biglow Papers," in which there is so much of the national hard-headed shrewdness, humor, and earnestness, we have but one, and that not the best.

As some compensation, however, Mr. White presents us with two humorous lyrics of his own, and makes us feel like men who, in the first moments of our financial disorder, parted with a good dollar, and received change in car-tickets and envelopes covering an ideal value in postage-stamps. It seems hard to complain of an editor who puts only two of his poems in a collection when he was master to put in twenty if he chose, and when in both cases he does his best to explain and relieve their intolerable brilliancy by foot-notes; yet, seeing that one of these productions is in literature what the "Yankee Notions" and the "Nick-Nax" caricatures of John Bull are in art, and seeing that the other is not in the least a parody of the Emersonian poetry it is supposed to burlesque, and is otherwise nothing at all, we cannot help crying out against them.

The foot-notes to Mr. White's verses are comical, however, we must acknowledge; and so are all the foot-notes in the book. If the Model of Deportment had taken to letters with a humorous aim, we could conceive of his writing them. "If burlesque," says Mr. White of his "Union" verses, "were all their purpose, they would not be here preserved"; adding, with a noble tenderness for his victim, "Mr. Emerson could well afford to forgive them, even if they did not come from one of his warmest admirers,"—in which we agree with Mr. White, whose consideration for the great transcendentalist is equalled only by his consideration for the reader's ignorance in regard to most things not connected with the poetry of the war. "Bully," he tells us, was used as "an expression of encouragement and approval" by the Elizabethan dramatists, as well as by our own cherished rowdies; which may be readily proven from the plays of Shakespeare. But what the author of the poem in which this word occurs means by "hefty" Mr. White does not know, and frankly makes a note for the purpose of saying so. Concerning the expression "hurried up his cakes," he is, however, perfectly au fait, and surprises us with the promptness of his learning. "As long as the importance of hurrying buckwheat pancakes from the griddle to the table," says he, with a fine air of annotation, "is impressed upon the American mind, this vile slang will need no explanation. But the fame,"—mark this dry light of philosophy, and the delicacy of the humor through which it plays,—"but the fame of the Rebel march into Pennsylvania, and of the victory of Gettysburg, will probably outlive even the taste for these alluring compounds." This is Mr. White's good humor; his bad humor is displayed in his note to a poem by Fitz James O'Brien on the "Seventh Regiment," which he says was "written by a young Irishman, one of its members." The young Irishman's name is probably as familiar to most readers of the magazines as Mr. White's, and we cannot help wondering how he knew a writer of singularly brilliant powers and wide repute only as "a young Irishman."

But there are many things which Mr. White seems not to know, and he has but a poor memory for names, and in his despair he writes anonymous against the title of every third poem. We might have expected a gentleman interested in the poetry of the war to attend the lectures of Dr. Holmes, who has been reading in New York and elsewhere "The Old Sergeant," as the production of Mr. Forcythe Willson of Kentucky. By turning to the index of that volume of the Atlantic from which the verses were taken, Mr. White could have learned that "Spring at the Capital" was written by Mrs. Akers; and with quite as little trouble could have informed himself of the authorship of a half-score of other poems we might name. We have already noted the defectiveness of the collection, in which we are told "no conspicuous poem elicited by the war is omitted"; and we note it again in Mr. White's failure to print Mr. Bryant's pathetic and beautiful poem, "My Autumn Walk," and in his choosing from Mr. Aldrich not one of the fine sonnets he has written on the war, but a jeu d'esprit which in no wise represents him. Indeed, Mr. White's book seems to have been compiled after the editor had collected a certain number of clippings from the magazines and newspapers: if by the blessing of Heaven these had the names of their authors attached, and happened to be the best things the poets had done, it was a fortunate circumstance; but if the reverse was the fact, Mr. White seems to have felt no responsibility in the matter. We are disposed to hold him to stricter account, and to blame him for temporarily blocking, with a book and a reputation, the way to a work of real industry, taste, and accuracy on the poetry of the war. It was our right that a man whose scholarly fame would carry his volume beyond our own shores should do his best for our heroic Muse, robing her in all possible splendor; and it is our wrong that he has chosen instead to present the poor soul in attire so very indifferently selected from her limited wardrobe.

The Story of Kennett. By Bayard Taylor. New York: G. P. Putnam; Hurd and Houghton.

In this novel Mr. Taylor has so far surpassed his former efforts in extended fiction, as to approach the excellence attained in his briefer stories. He has of course some obvious advantages in recounting "The Story of Kennett" which were denied him in "Hannah Thurston" and "John Godfrey's Fortunes." He here deals with the persons, scenes, and actions of a hundred years ago, and thus gains that distance so valuable to the novelist; and he neither burdens himself with an element utterly and hopelessly unpicturesque, like modern reformerism, nor assumes the difficult office of interesting us in the scarcely more attractive details of literary adventure. But we think, after all, that we owe the superiority of "The Story of Kennett" less to the felicity of his subject than to Mr. Taylor's maturing powers as a novelist, of which his choice of a happy theme is but one of the evidences. He seems to have told his story because he liked it; and without the least consciousness (which we fear haunted him in former efforts) that he was doing something to supply the great want of an American novel. Indeed, but for the prologue dedicating the work in a somewhat patronizing strain to his old friends and neighbors of Kennett, the author forgets himself entirely in the book, and leaves us to remember him, therefore, with all the greater pleasure.

The hero of the tale is Gilbert Potter, a young farmer of Kennett, on whose birth there is, in the belief of his neighbors, the stain of illegitimacy, though his mother, with whom he lives somewhat solitarily and apart from the others, denies the guilt imputed to her, while some mystery forbids her to reveal her husband's name. Gilbert is in love with Martha, the daughter of Dr. Deane, a rich, smooth, proud old Quaker, who is naturally no friend to the young man's suit, but is rather bent upon his daughter's marriage with Alfred Barton, a bachelor of advanced years, and apparent heir of one of the hardest, wealthiest, and most obstinately long-lived old gentlemen in the neighborhood. Obediently to the laws of fiction, Martha rejects Alfred Barton, who, indeed, is but a cool and timid wooer, and a weak, selfish, spiritless man, of few good impulses, with a dull fear and dislike of his own father, and a covert tenderness for Gilbert. The last, being openly accepted by Martha, and forbidden, with much contumely, to see her, by her father, applies himself with all diligence to paying off the mortgage on his farm, in order that he may wed the Doctor's daughter, in spite of his science, his pride, and his riches; but when he has earned the requisite sum, he is met on his way to Philadelphia and robbed of the money by Sandy Flash, a highwayman who infested that region, and who, Mr. Taylor tells us, is an historical personage. He appears first in the first chapter of "The Story of Kennett," when, having spent the day in a fox-hunt with Alfred Barton, and the evening at the tavern in the same company, he beguiles his comrade into a lonely place, reveals himself, and, with the usual ceremonies, robs Barton of his money and watch. Thereafter, he is seen again, when he rides through the midst of the volunteers of Kennett, drinks at the bar of the village tavern, and retires unharmed by the men assembled to hunt him down and take him. After all, however, he is a real brigand, and no hero; and Mr. Taylor manages his character so well as to leave us no pity for the fate of a man, who, with some noble traits, is in the main fierce and cruel. He is at last given up to justice by the poor, half-wild creature with whom he lives, and whom, in a furious moment, he strikes because she implores him to return Gilbert his money.

As for Gilbert, through all the joy of winning Martha, and the sickening disappointment of losing his money, the shame and anguish of the mystery that hangs over his origin oppress him; and, having once experienced the horror of suspecting that Martha's father might also be his, he suffers hardly less torture when the highwayman, on the day of his conviction, sends to ask an interview with him. But Sandy Flash merely wishes to ease his conscience by revealing the burial-place of Gilbert's money; and when the young man, urged to the demand by an irresistible anxiety, implores, "You are not my father?" the good highwayman, in great and honest amazement, declares that he certainly is not. The mystery remains, and it is not until the death of the old man Barton that it is solved. Then it is dissipated, when Gilbert's mother, in presence of kindred and neighbors, assembled at the funeral, claims Alfred Barton as her husband; and after this nothing remains but the distribution of justice, and the explanation that, long ago, before Gilbert's birth, his parents had been secretly married. Alfred Barton, however, had sworn his wife not to reveal the marriage before his father's death, at that time daily expected, and had cruelly held her to her vow after the birth of their son, and through all the succeeding years of agony and contumely,—loving her and her boy in his weak, selfish, cowardly way, but dreading too deeply his father's anger ever to do them justice. The reader entirely sympathizes with Gilbert's shame in such a father, and his half-regret that it had not been a brave, bad man like Sandy Flash instead. Barton's punishment is finely worked out. The fact of the marriage had been brought to the old man's knowledge before his death, and he had so changed his will as to leave the money intended for his son to his son's deeply wronged wife; and, after the public assertion of their rights at the funeral, Gilbert and his mother coldly withdraw from the wretched man, and leave him, humiliated before the world he dreaded, to seek the late reconciliation which is not accomplished in this book. It is impossible to feel pity for his sufferings; but one cannot repress the hope that Mary and her son will complete the beauty of their own characters by forgiving him at last.

It seems to us that this scene of Mary Potter's triumph at the funeral is the most effective in the whole book. Considering her character and history, it is natural that she should seek to make her justification as signal and public as possible. The long and pitiless years of shame following the error of her youthful love and ambition, during which the sin of attempting to found her happiness on a deceit was so heavily punished, have disciplined her to the perfect acting of her part, and all her past is elevated and dignified by the calm power with which she rights herself. She is the chief person of the drama, which is so pure and simple as not to approach melodrama; and the other characters are merely passive agents; while the reader, to whom the facts are known, cannot help sharing their sense of mystery and surprise. We confess to a deeper respect for Mr. Taylor's power than we have felt before, when we observe with what masterly skill he contrives by a single incident to give sudden and important development to a character, which, however insignificant it had previously seemed, we must finally allow to have been perfectly prepared for such an effect.

The hero of the book, we find a good deal like other heroes,—a little more natural than most, perhaps, but still portentously noble and perfect. He does not interest us much; but we greatly admire the heroine, Martha Deane, whom he loves and marries. In the study of her character and that of her father, Mr. Taylor is perfectly at home, and extremely felicitous. There is no one else who treats Quaker life so well as the author of the beautiful story of "Friend Eli's Daughter"; and in the opposite characters of Doctor Deane and Martha we have the best portraiture of the contrasts which Quakerism produces in human nature. In the sweet and unselfish spirit of Martha, the theories of individual action under special inspiration have created self-reliance, and calm, fearless humility, sustaining her in her struggle against the will of her father, and even against the sect to whose teachings she owes them. Dr. Deane had made a marriage of which the Society disapproved, but after his wife's death he had professed contrition for his youthful error, and had been again taken into the quiet brotherhood. Martha, however, had always refused to unite with the Society, and had thereby been "a great cross" to her father,—a man by no means broken under his affliction, but a hard-headed, self-satisfied, smooth, narrow egotist. Mr. Taylor contrives to present his person as clearly as his character, and we smell hypocrisy in the sweet scent of marjoram that hangs about him, see selfishness in his heavy face and craft in the quiet gloss of his drab broadcloth, and hear obstinacy in his studied step. He is the most odious character in the book, what is bad in him being separated by such fine differences from what is very good in others. We have even more regard for Alfred Barton, who, though a coward, has heart enough to be truly ashamed at last, while Dr. Deane retains a mean self-respect after the folly and the wickedness of his purposes are shown to him.

His daughter, for all her firmness in resisting her father's commands to marry Barton, and to dismiss Gilbert, is true woman, and submissive to her lover. The wooing of these, and of the other lovers, Mark Deane and Sally Fairthorn, is described with pleasant touches of contrast, and a strict fidelity to place and character. Indeed, nothing can be better than the faithful spirit in which Mr. Taylor seems to have adhered to all the facts of the life he portrays. There is such shyness among American novelists (if we may so classify the writers of our meagre fiction) in regard to dates, names, and localities, that we are glad to have a book in which there is great courage in this respect. Honesty of this kind is vastly more acceptable to us than the aerial romance which cannot alight in any place known to the gazetteer; though we must confess that we attach infinitely less importance than the author does to the fact that Miss Betsy Lavender, Deb. Smith, Sandy Flash, and the two Fairthorn boys are drawn from the characters of persons who once actually lived. Indeed, we could dispense very well with the low comedy of Sally's brothers, and, in spite of Miss Betsy Lavender's foundation in fact, we could consent to lose her much sooner than any other leading character of the book: she seems to us made-up and mechanical. On the contrary, we find Sally Fairthorn, with her rustic beauty and fresh-heartedness, her impulses and blunders, altogether delightful. She is a part of the thoroughly country flavor of the book,—the rides through the woods, the huskings, the raising of the barn,—(how admirably and poetically all that scene of the barn-raising is depicted!)—just as Martha somehow belongs to the loveliness and goodness of nature,—the blossom and the harvest which appear and reappear in the story.