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Modern Essays
MODERN ESSAYS
SELECTED BY
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT. 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the
labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland
sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a
collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be
the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the
mind.
Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are
burdensome. There are so many considerations to be tenderly weighed;
personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan;
for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned
and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the
authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be enjoyable
(for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered
over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally
sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times--twenty at least--I
have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ to reconsider whether his ten pages on Dickens, or his
glorious summing-up of Decadents and Æsthetes, were not absolutely
essential. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in
_The Education of Henry Adams_ and in Mr. Wells's _Outline of History_,
which, I assured myself, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly
excerpted.
But I usually concluded that would not be quite fair. I have not been
overscrupulous in this matter, for the essay is a mood rather than a
form; the frontier between the essay and the short story is as
imperceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and Dixon line.
Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country between the two empires lie (to
my way of thinking) some of the most fertile fields of prose--fiction
that expresses feeling and character and setting rather than action and
plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the
essayist's mood. This is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get
into the movies. I think of short stories such as George Gissing's, in
that too little known volume _The House of Cobwebs_, which I read again
and again at midnight with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget;
and again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They have no
brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no worked-up 'situations'
which have to be taken at high speed to pass without breakdown over
their brittle bridgework of credibility. They have only the modest and
faintly melancholy savor of life itself.
Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay does not have easily
recognizable manners. It may be severely planned, or it may ramble in
ungirdled mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it from the
short story proper, or the merely personal memoir. That distinction,
easily felt by the sensitive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps
the true meaning of the word _essay_--an attempt--gives a clue. No
matter how personal or trifling the topic may be, there is always a
tendency to generalize, to walk round the subject or the experience, and
view it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short story)
cutting a carefully landscaped path through a chosen tract of human
complication. So an essay can never be more than an attempt, for it is
an excursion into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that in
the composition of a short story many entertaining and valuable
elaborations may rise in the mind of the author which must be strictly
rejected because they do not forward the essential motive. But in the
essay (of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot, but relevance
to mood. That is why there are so many essays that are mere marking
time. The familiar essay is easier to write than the short story, but it
imposes equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in fiction the
writer is controlled and limited and swept along by his material; but in
the essay, the writer rides his pen. A good story, once clearly
conceived, almost writes itself; but essays are written.
There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay--the temptation to
become too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word
which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine flavor and
genius of the essay--as in Bacon and Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt,
Thackeray, Thoreau; perhaps even in Stevenson--is the rich bouquet of
personality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. One might put
it thus: that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious
revelation of self done inadvertently.
The art of the anthologist is the art of the host: his tact is exerted
in choosing a congenial group; making them feel comfortable and at ease;
keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly
alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general
cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the
background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and
seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one into some
characteristic and felicitous vein. I think I can offer you, in this
parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the most genuine sort; and
having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more.
But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do,
just why this particular company has been called together. My intention
is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that
too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating
those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to
be frank, a secret ambition that a book of this sort may even be used as
a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to
the student that as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in
the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces
reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is
foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos,
politics, and the picturesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a
work of art. And I would call the reader's attention to this: that the
greater number of these essays were written not by retired æsthetes, but
by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press.
The names of some of the most widely bruited essayists of our day are
absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include
material less generally known.
I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal tone of the
introductory notes on each author. But I conceived the reader in the
rôle of a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.
Pulling out one's favorites and talking about them, now and then reading
a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some time after midnight) by
choosing some special volume for the guest to take to bed with him--in
the same spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the editorial
comments have too much the manner of dressing gown and slippers; but
what a pleasant book this will be to read in bed!
And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a small contribution to
Anglo-American friendliness. Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-,
but that is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are much
better acquainted with what their professional colleagues are doing in
Britain, than they with our concerns. But surely there should be a
congenial fraternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue in
print. There are some of us who even imagine a day when there may be
regular international exchanges of journalists, as there have been of
scholars and students. The contributions to this book are rather evenly
divided between British and American hands; and perhaps it is not
insignificant that two of the most pleasing items come from Canada,
where they often combine the virtues of both sides.
It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and publishers who have
assented to the reprinting of these pieces. To the authors themselves,
and to the following publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the
use of material copyrighted by them:--Doubleday Page and Company for the
extracts from books by John Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall
Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's _Niagara Falls_; the
New York _Sun_ for Don Marquis's _Almost Perfect State_; the George H.
Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday;
Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to _A
Personal Record_; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M.
Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osler for the essay
by the late Sir William Osler; Henry Holt and Company for Thomas Burke's
_The Russian Quarter_; E. P. Dutton and Company for _A Word for Autumn_,
by A. A. Milne; the New York _Evening Post_ for the essays by Stuart P.
Sherman and Harry Esty Dounce; Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's _A
Woodland Valentine_; Dodd, Mead and Company for Simeon Strunsky's
_Nocturne_, from his volume _Post-Impressions_; the Macmillan Company
for _Beer and Cider_, from Professor Saintsbury's _Notes on a Cellar
Book_; Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's _A Free Man's
Worship_, from _Mysticism and Logic_; Robert M. McBride and Company for
the selection from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and Company for
the essay by Heywood Broun; _The Weekly Review_ for the essays by O. W.
Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The present
ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I have
been unable to discover. It was published in _Patrins_ (Copeland and
Day, 1897), which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity of my
motives I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce Miss
Guiney's exquisite work to the younger generation that knows her hardly
at all.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
OCTOBER, 1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface iii
AMERICAN LITERATURE _John Macy_ 3
MARY WHITE _William Allen White_ 22
NIAGARA FALLS _Rupert Brooke_ 30
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE _Don Marquis_ 39
"THE MAN O' WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND" _David W. Bone_ 49
THE MARKET _William McFee_ 60
HOLY IRELAND _Joyce Kilmer_ 67
A FAMILIAR PREFACE _Joseph Conrad_ 81
ON DRAWING _A. P. Herbert_ 94
O. HENRY _O. W. Firkins_ 100
THE MOWING OF A FIELD _Hilaire Belloc_ 113
THE STUDENT LIFE _William Osler_ 128
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA _Stephen Leacock_ 145
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION _Harry Morgan Ayres_ 153
THE RUSSIAN QUARTER _Thomas Burke_ 160
A WORD FOR AUTUMN _A. A. Milne_ 173
"A CLERGYMAN" _Max Beerbohm_ 177
SAMUEL BUTLER _Stuart P. Sherman_ 187
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS _H. M. Tomlinson_ 210
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE _Louise Imogen Guiney_ 219
ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT _Stewart Edward White_ 229
A WOODLAND VALENTINE _Marian Storm_ 236
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY _George Santayana_ 241
NOCTURNE _Simeon Strunsky_ 246
BEER AND CIDER _George Saintsbury_ 253
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP _Bertrand Russell_ 263
SOME HISTORIANS _Philip Guedalla_ 278
WINTER MIST _Robert Palfrey Utter_ 291
TRIVIA _Logan Pearsall Smith_ 297
BEYOND LIFE _James Branch Cabell_ 304
THE FISH REPORTER _Robert Cortes Holliday_ 316
SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG _Harry Esty Dounce_ 331
THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON _Heywood Broun_ 338
MODERN ESSAYS
AMERICAN LITERATURE
_By_ JOHN MACY
This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter of
John Macy's admirable volume _The Spirit of American Literature_,
published in 1913--a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, which has
unfortunately never reached one-tenth of the many readers who would
find it permanently delightful and profitable. Mr. Macy has no
skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to himself: no shafts
of limelight have followed him across the stage. But those who have
an eye for criticism that is vivacious without bombast, austere
without bitterness, keen without malice, know him as one of the
truly competent and liberal-minded observers of the literary scene.
Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877; graduated from Harvard in 1899;
did editorial service on the _Youth's Companion_ and the _Boston
Herald_; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Village, writing
a good deal for _The Freeman_ and _The Literary Review_. Perhaps,
if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, you
might see him treading thoughtfully along, with a wide sombrero
hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray forelock that droops over
his brow. You would know, as soon as you saw him, that he is a man
greatly lovable. I like to think of him as I first saw him, some
years ago, in front of the bright hearth of the charming St.
Botolph Club in Boston, where he was usually the center of an
animated group of nocturnal philosophers.
The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawakening of
American creative work that began in the 'teens of this century.
The reader will find it interesting to consider how far Mr. Macy's
remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.
_The Spirit of American Literature_ has been reissued in an
inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well worth
owning.
AMERICAN literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are
English books written in Scotland or South Africa. Our literature lies
almost entirely in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of
the western world were freely interchanged among the nations and became
accessible to an increasing number of readers. In literature nationality
is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. M.
Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to French
literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is already an English
classic. Geography, much less important in the nineteenth century than
before, was never, among modern European nations, so important as we
sometimes are asked to believe. Of the ancestors of English literature
"Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than
our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the true progenitors
of English literature are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and French.
American literature and English literature of the nineteenth century are
parallel derivatives from preceding centuries of English literature.
Literature is a succession of books from books. Artistic expression
springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a
river which is swollen throughout its course by new tributaries and by
the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows,
taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, but its power and
volume descend from distant headwaters and affluents far up stream. Or
it may be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or
impoverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or damage, but
which flows on through us, strangely impersonal and beyond our power to
kill or create.
It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will draw my
inspiration from life!" For we have too many books that are simply
better books diluted by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not
born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage,
and students find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism
reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled
at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers are often prolific of
anæmic offspring. The stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and
returns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. But of the main
fact of descent there is no doubt.
American literature is English literature made in this country. Its
nineteenth-century characteristics are evident and can be analyzed and
discussed with some degree of certainty. Its "American"
characteristics--no critic that I know has ever given a good account of
them. You can define certain peculiarities of American politics,
American agriculture, American public schools, even American religion.
But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is just as
American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as American as Whittier. The
American spirit in literature is a myth, like American valor in war,
which is precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The
American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which he calls America,
can say that the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American
home life. An Irish Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely
idealized image of America, surprised that a face does not fit his
image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in that galley?" There is no answer.
You never can tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and
lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Professor van Dyke
says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do
not understand what that means. Facts are uncomfortable consorts of
prejudices and emotional generalities; they spoil domestic peace, and
when there is a separation they sit solid at home while the other party
goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious
care, said: "It has been a matter of marvel, to European readers, that a
man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable
English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a marvel that Blake
and Keats flowered in the brutal city of London a hundred years ago.
The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is influenced and
mastered, by the accumulated riches of literature. In the last century
the strongest thinkers in our language were Englishmen, and not only the
traditional but the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists
were British. This may account for one negative characteristic of
American literature--its lack of American quality. True, our records
must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of nightingales and Persian
gardens, have not altogether forgotten the mocking-bird and the woods of
Maine. Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and
Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those
mighty commonwealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men
about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits
and scenery of that county. But wherever an English-speaking man of
imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is
subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot
escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave
of him. He is assigned to the department of the service for which his
gifts qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by
drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far from his
birthplace.
Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who writes of
California, and Bret Harte influences Kipling, who writes of India. Each
is intensely local in subject matter. The affinity between them is a
matter of temperament, manifested, for example, in the swagger and
exaggeration characteristic of all three. California did not "produce"
Bret Harte; the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras
and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that never existed,
and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling
invented an army and an empire unknown to geographers and war-offices.
The ideas at work among these English men of letters are
world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is
on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows
west across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe
influenced Rossetti; Whitman influenced Henley. For a century Cooper has
been in command of the British literary marine. Literature is
reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, as individual
citizens, afflicted with local prides and hostilities. It takes only a
dramatic interest in the guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly
uttered by Gaston Paris in the Collège de France in 1870, when the city
was beleaguered by the German armies: "Common studies, pursued in the
same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions
of diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country which no
war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where souls find that refuge and
unity which in former times was offered them by the city of God." The
catholicity of English language and literature transcends the temporal
boundaries of states.
What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American province of the
empire of British literature? Is it an observable general
characteristic, and is it a virtue or a vice? There is a sense in which
American literature is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all
literature is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing outside of Greece and
needed to know nothing. The Old Testament is tribal in its
provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and
sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. If this racial
localism is not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is
inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our
cosmopolitan age and there are few traces of it in American books. No
American poet has sung of his neighborhood with naïve passion, as if it
were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously American, but his
sympathies are universal, his vision is cosmic; when he seems to be
standing in a city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his
spirit is racing with the winds.
The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an admirable kind
of provincialism; it shows us defective in local security of judgment.
Some of us have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of European
culture that we could not see a poet in our own back yard until European
poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to
a disposition found in some Americans to disregard world standards and
proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of
San Francisco. The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about "The
American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the
mouth of that sort of gaping village reverence.
Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce
so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our
poets desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Elizabethan dramas
and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on
the banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they croon
the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his noble steed. This is
not a very grave offence, for poets live among the stars, and it makes
no difference from what point of the earth's surface they set forth on
their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully
about nightingales, and a New England Unitarian may write beautifully
about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.
The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been few of them; they
have not been adequate in numbers or in genius to the task of describing
the sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits from New
Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small band as they are, with great
domestic opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes
to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and to Italy,
where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense American literature
is too globe-trotting, it has too little savor of the soil.
Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, like other men
of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice
sometimes imputed to them by provincial critics who view literature from
the office of a London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of
American colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example,
Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in outlook, but
cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their provinciality by a
self-conscious internationalism. Probably English and French writers may
be similarly classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's
collection of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and
exquisite specimen of _provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification
of men." It is nothing like that. It is an example of what happens when
a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected into a volume
because he turns out to be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not
more remarkable for the number of nonentities it includes than "The
Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was hack for a
bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets that the taste of the time
encouraged the bookseller to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit; his
prejudices were personal and highly original, usually against the
prejudices of his _moment and milieu._ Hawthorne is less provincial, in
the derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, as will
become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American notes on England,
written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. James's British
notes on America ("The American Scene"), written in our happy days of
spacious vision.
Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like the sky above
a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew more about American life and
about what other people ought to do than any other British writer
earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly complains that Emerson is not
sufficiently local and concrete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's
Life, American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson loves and
wonders at, well _Emersonised._" Longfellow would not stay at home and
write more about the excellent village blacksmith; he made poetical
tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from several languages
for the delight of the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so
heartily cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of
Anglomania--which proves their provincialism but acquits him. Mr.
Howells has written a better book about Venice than about Ohio. Mark
Twain lived in every part of America, from Connecticut to California, he
wrote about every country under the sun (and about some countries beyond
the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of men in the
English-speaking world, and he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is
difficult to come to any conclusion about provincialism as a
characteristic of American literature.
American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely
finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the
_Youth's Companion._ The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men of
genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American
literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not
lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom come
to grips with the problems of life, especially the books cast in
artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, and preachers attack life
vigorously and wrestle with the meaning of it. The poets are thin,
moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and
dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to exceptions,
are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen volumes of the _Atlantic
Monthly_, which are a treasure-house of the richest period of American
literary expression. In those volumes one finds a surprising number of
vigorous, distinguished papers on politics, philosophy, science, even on
literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose names are not
well remembered, are clustered there about the half dozen salient men of
genius; and the collection gives one a sense that the New England mind
(aided by the outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an
abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, except
for some verses by the few standard poets. And the fiction is naïve.
Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is almost the only
story there that one comes on with a thrill either of recognition or of
discovery.
It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and
passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American
life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty
things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the
absence of international copyright threw our market open too
unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an
unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without
paying royalty and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does
not explain. For there were many American novelists, published, read,
and probably paid for their work. The trouble is that they lacked
genius; they dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not
take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no doubt
they were in another sense serious enough about their poor productions.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions to
the prevailing weakness and superficiality of American novels.
Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its intensities,
its significance? The American Civil War was the most tremendous
upheaval in the world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative
reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses,
Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which came before the war but
is part of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second
series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man Without a Country"--and
what else? The novels laid in war-time are either sanguine melodrama or
absurd idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front--a tragic theme if
tragically and not sentimentally conceived. Perhaps the bullet that
killed Theodore Winthrop deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil
War, for he was on the right road. In a general speculation such a
might-have-been is not altogether futile; if Milton had died of whooping
cough there would not have been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this
is that some geniuses whose works ought inevitably to have been produced
by this or that national development may have died too soon. This
suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is that the
American literary imagination after the Civil War was almost sterile. If
no books had been written, the failure of that conflict to get itself
embodied in some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands
of books were written by people who knew the war at first hand and who
had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these books none
rises to distinction.
An example of what seems to be the American habit of writing about
everything except American life, is the work of General Lew Wallace.
Wallace was one of the important secondary generals in the Civil War,
distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote
"Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and
it shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, so
dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war experiences.
"Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergyman with a pretty literary gift,
is a ridiculous inanity to come from a man who has seen the things that
Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of experience may not
write at all, and, on the other hand, that the man of secluded life may
have the imagination to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with
experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering the ability and the
ambition to write--for him to make spurious oriental romances which
achieve an enormous popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical,
yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The American
literary artist has written about everything under the skies except what
matters most in his own life. General Grant's plain autobiography, not
art and of course not attempting to be, is better literature than most
of our books in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity
and the profound importance of the subject-matter.
Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, but their faces
have been averted from the mightier issues of life. They have been
high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to the
real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years
from Irving's first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel,
most of our books are eminent for just those virtues which America is
supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are fanciful, dainty,
reserved; they are literose, sophisticated in craftsmanship, but
innocently unaware of the profound agitations of American life, of life
everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of reality, Whitman,
Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell
and Emerson at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beautiful
and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious of
contemporaneous realities, too seldom vibrate with a tremendous sense of
life.
The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed his life in
a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous seas is a
connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss
Marie Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. He who is
figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the desert with the
steam locomotive, sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little
garden. The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most
tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love stories that
would have made Jane Austen smile.
Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac had seen
Pittsburgh, he would have cried: "Give me a pen!" The truth is, the
whole country is crying out for those who will record it, satirize it,
chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient as life and
fresh as a wilderness. American literature is one occupation which is
not over-crowded, in which, indeed, there is all too little competition
for the new-comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest young
writers are discovering the fertility of a soil that has scarcely been
scratched.
American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are not
assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong is crude. The
stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are
admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, not of large
vitality. On the other hand, some of the stronger American fictions fail
in workmanship; for example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid
and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded; the novels of
Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, who attempted to
put national economics into something like an epic of daily bread; and
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A
few American novelists have felt the meaning of the life they knew and
have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various reasons failed
to make first-rate novels; for example, Edward Eggleston, whose stories
of early Indiana have the breath of actuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe,
author of "The Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great
ability, whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he died;
George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who
gives a genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its people;
and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of
Courage" and "Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short stories
America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Annie Trumbull
Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward
Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are
some of those whose short stories are perfect in their several kinds.
But the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains an
inferior production.
On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and drama in the English
language are the works of ten British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G.
Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr.
Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Sinclair, Mr. William De
Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes,
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but two Americans, Mrs.
Edith Wharton and Mr. Theodore Dreiser. There may be others, for one
cannot pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet for
every American that should be added, I would agree to add four to the
British list. However, a contemporary literature that includes Mrs.
Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt" both
published last year, is not to be despaired of.
In the course of a century a few Americans have said in memorable words
what life meant to them. Their performance, put together, is
considerable, if not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one
feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion between a limited
expression and the multifarious immensity of the country. Our
literature, judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, is
insufficient to the opportunity and the need. The American Spirit may be
figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and
eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.
MARY WHITE
By WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Mary White--one seems to know her after reading this sketch written
by her father on the day she was buried--would surely have laughed
unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together
with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the
pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave.
This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy
comment. It was written for the Emporia _Gazette,_ which William
Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best-known,
most public-spirited and most truly loved of American journalists.
He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two
characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that
vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that
seems to be a Kansas birthright.
Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.
THE Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death
declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she
would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life.
Horses have fallen on her and with her--"I'm always trying to hold 'em
in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one
was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death
resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured
her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the
parking.
The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home
from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on
the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She
climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was
doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the
country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode
through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passers-by. She
knew everyone in town. For a decade the little figure with the long
pig-tail and the red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of
Emporia, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her.
She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of the Normal Library,
and waved at them; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on,
and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North
Merchant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a
lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still
moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A _Gazette_ carrier passed--a
High School boy friend--and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand;
the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging
limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came.
But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,
staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite recovered consciousness.
But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year
or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and
she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and
to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a
physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back
of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the
streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong,
muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first
years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released
a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she
was happy because she was enlarging her horizon. She came to know all
sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one
of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom
O'Connor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police
judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her special friends, and all
the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in
Pepville and Stringtown, were among her acquaintances. And she brought
home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage
was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a continual bubble of
joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous
without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary
White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five
minutes in her life.
With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her
table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy,
"Creative Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark
Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was ten--all of their writings.
Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted her. She was
entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assistant editor of the
High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship
of the Annual next year. She was a member of the executive committee of
the High School Y. W. C. A.
Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to
draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her school books,
funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and took a course--rather
casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong
purposes--and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having
her pictures accepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of
delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do
the cartooning for that book this spring, was too beautiful for words.
She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were
accepted, and her pride--always repressed by a lively sense of the
ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting--was a really gorgeous
thing to see. No successful artist ever drank a deeper draught of
satisfaction than she took from the little fame her work was getting
among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse--but
never her car.
For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never
had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but
she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to
fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White--white and
black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing
better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an
occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went
to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy
proposition" didn't interest her--yet. But young people--great
spring-breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads
of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun
she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that
got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home;
scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a
wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own
Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it
all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While
there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing
but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags
enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to
make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And
the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored
girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet,
because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those
who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with
her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness;
and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the
Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly
for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
would have hooted at a "testimony." But even as a little child she felt
the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance,
and she wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes
meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but
eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but
a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly
seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by
with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above
every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a
child. The tom-boy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put
away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.
Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have
wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from
her Brother Bill's Harvard classmen--Heavens, how proud that would have
made her! and the red roses from the _Gazette_ force--in vases at her
head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on "Love" from the
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her
democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor and police
judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down
for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow,
poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which she loved,
and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first
movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in
certain moods on the phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends
in the High School.
That was all.
For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen; her Latin teacher--W.
L. Holtz; her High School principal, Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank
Foncannon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the _Gazette_ office,
Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to
know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been
transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to
direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.
A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her
coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But
the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was
flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.
NIAGARA FALLS
_By_ RUPERT BROOKE
The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not
merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle
suggestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of
description was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters sent
to the _Westminster Gazette_ describing his trip in the United
States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume _Letters
from America_ to which Henry James contributed so affectionate and
desperately unintelligible a preface--one of the last things James
wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth reading: they are
full of delightful and lively comments, though sometimes much (oh,
very much!) too condescending. The last paragraph in this essay is
interesting in view of subsequent history.
Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; was at
King's College, Cambridge; died of blood-poisoning in the Ægean,
April 23, 1915.
Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveler
could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling
himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake
of their too-human comments. It is his fault if a peasant's _naïveté_
has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen
are more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at
observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from
trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the
wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara means
nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything.
It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for
Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian
character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water
falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human
race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to
surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity.
Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends,
stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-place for all
the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous,
greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly,
take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle;
professionals, amateurs, and _dilettanti_, male and female; touts who
would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked
background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into
cars, char-à-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a
carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards,
moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and
touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just
purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to
tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls.
He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but
they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the
Canadian and the American.
Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water of the
great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion. It descends
with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into
a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. Sometimes it is
divided by islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see nothing but a
waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even
seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously
forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and
you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and
foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water.
Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this
weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of
the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile
or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of
almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But
it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. Here
and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that
faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really
stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance,
the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their
fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience.
They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are
preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the
sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot on
towards the verge.
But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and
blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend
and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of disaster
the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in
ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder
and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of
violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they
fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps
up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The
spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that
fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air,
graining it, and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and
houses, and so vanishes.
The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks of the river
above the Falls told me that the center of the riverbed at the Canadian
Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill this
up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the power-houses.
And this, he said, would supply the need for more power, which will
certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary
sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real secret of
the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the
feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the
plunge of that vast body of water. If that were taken away, there would
be little visible change, but the heart would be gone.
The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the
Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water
does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is
almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily level, one long
curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is
on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark
against them. With both Falls the color of the water is the
ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into
one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun.
Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow
from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white
intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there
are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a
great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top
to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the cliff
opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accompanies
you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and
awakens again as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler
who attempts the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare open
his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in
span, leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling beside
him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that place was
a complete circle, such as I have never seen before, and so near that I
could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind
the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the
water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of
falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So,
if you are close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recognize
liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware
that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front
of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar
and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible
plane of air.
Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor of
marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum that was foam.
It slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly
exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries more swiftly,
smooth and ominous. As the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs,
and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more
terrifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its bands
of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as
if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly
convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up
into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible
speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along the shining
curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually
suggests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids moves one
with a different sense of awe and terror from that of the Falls. Here
the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost resolute;
masculine vigor compared with the passive gigantic power, female,
helpless and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every
hour, and especially by night, when the cloud of spray becomes an
immense visible ghost, straining and wavering high above the river,
white and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close below
the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy
thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind;
for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind
the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were
like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of
life--caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct
or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise
in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single
current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a
community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream;
a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In
such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet
comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to
their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to
it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And
as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs
over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying.... With some such
thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder
of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can
never give.
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE
_By_ DON MARQUIS
Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym; it is pronounced
_Markwiss_, not _Markee_. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's
amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have
appeared in the column (_The Sun Dial_) conducted by him for ten
years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional motto of
sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers only the serene
hours; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight of his Muse is
shining, it casts darker and even more precious shadows of satire
and mysticism. His many readers know by this time the depth and
reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis is a true philosopher and wit,
his humor adorns a rich and mellow gravity. When strongly moved he
sometimes utters an epigram that rings like steel leaving the
scabbard.
There are many things to be said against American newspapers, but
much of the indictment is quashed when one considers that every now
and then they develop a writer like Don Marquis. The violent haste,
pressure and instancy of newspaper routine, purgatorial to some
temperaments, is a genuine stimulus to others--particularly if they
are able, as in the case of the columnist, to fall back upon
outside contributors in their intervals of pessimism or sloth.
Mr. Marquis's _The Old Soak_, a post-prohibition portrait of a
genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American humor
since _Mr. Dooley_--some say since Mark Twain. His _Prefaces_ and
his poems will also be considered by the judicious. He was born in
Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in Philadelphia and
Atlanta before coming to the _Sun_ in 1912.
I
No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not
nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can,
somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a
few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not
attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is
a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals
as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they
die.
Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all
the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is
untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly
untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing
that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing
and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against
them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is certainly far from a
uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time
of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow
into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that
a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in
spite of his troubles.
It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And
most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and
racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of
all.
In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years
before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living ... things will be so
arranged economically that this will be possible for each individual.
Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence
and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years
old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and
accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten
years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.
During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that
we have been forced by circumstances to forego. We have always been
compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be
prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful
of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but
we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our
observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the
argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as
associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the
radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the
idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the
sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know
any of them, far less become intimate with them.
Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall
be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to
be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not
walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic
beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a
bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and
write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our
chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the
lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we
want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window
and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have
been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall
... but we don't wish to make any one envious of the good time that is
coming to us ... we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored
and disorderly old age.
(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you can't have us pinched
and deported for our yearnings.)
We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old
age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not
want the kind we want ... some of you may prefer prunes and morality to
the bitter end. Some of you may be dissolute now and may look forward to
becoming like one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem. But for
our part we have always been a hypocrite and we shall have to continue
being a hypocrite for a good many years yet, and we yearn to come out in
our true colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you want to
be, during those last ten years, that you may be, in the Almost Perfect
State.
Any system of government under which the individual does all the
sacrificing for the sake of the general good, for the sake of the
community, the State, gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things
that cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all the time.
The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you
have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth
doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and
get some joy out of it.
Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too
continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much
you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching
you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
BUT ... overstrain yourself _now and then_. For this reason: The things
you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and
joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when
you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new
self--if you get what we mean. And if you should ask us suddenly just
what this has to do with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair
we should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed to sort o' run into
it, somehow.
II
Interplanetary communication is one of the persistent dreams of the
inhabitants of this oblate spheroid on which we move, breathe and suffer
for lack of beer. There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if
we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we might learn from
them something to our advantage. There is a disposition to concede the
superiority of the fellows Out There ... just as some Americans
capitulate without a struggle to poets from England, rugs from
Constantinople, song and sausage from Germany, religious enthusiasts
from Hindustan and cheese from Switzerland, although they have not
tested the goods offered and really lack the discrimination to determine
their quality. Almost the only foreign importations that were ever
sneezed at in this country were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.
But are the Martians ... if Martians there be ... any more capable than
the persons dwelling between the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn,
between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.?
Perhaps the Martians yearn toward earth, romantically, poetically, the
Romeos swearing by its light to the Juliets; the idealists and
philosophers fabling that already there exists upon it an ALMOST PERFECT
STATE--and now and then a wan prophet lifting his heart to its gleams,
as a cup to be filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and courage.
For this earth, it is also a star.
We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in the far stars, the
philosophers, poets, the prophets ... or _are_ they wrong?
They are both right and wrong, as we are probably both right and wrong
about them. If we tumbled into Mars or Arcturus or Sirius this evening
we should find the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the
inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers, no doubt ...
and they would be equally disappointed by the way we flitter, frivol,
flutter and flivver.
And yet, that other thing would be there too ... that thing that made
them look at our star as a symbol of grace and beauty.
Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it
in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE.
We used sometimes to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, that song in stone
and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist, at dusk, when the
tides of shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a surf of glory
and mystery and illusion against the tall towers of Manhattan. Seen from
the middle arch of the bridge at twilight, New York with its girdle of
shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its quick pulsations
of unstable light is a miracle of splendor and beauty that lights up the
heart like the laughter of a god.
But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with the details. The dirty
old shed from which the "L" trains and trolleys put out with their
jammed and mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the unknown
bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same dirty old shed; on a hot,
damp night the pasty streets stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you
are trodden and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their
hopping victims; you are encompassed round about by the ugly and the
sordid, and the objectionable is exuded upon you from a myriad candid
pores; your elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snowflakes
that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery brow, and you say:
"Beauty? Aw, h--l! What's the use?"
And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was created by these
people and people like these.... You have seen the tall towers of
Manhattan, wonderful under the stars. How did it come about that such
growths came from such soil--that a breed lawless and sordid and prosaic
has written such a mighty hieroglyphic against the sky? This glamor out
of a pigsty ... how come? How is it that this hideous, half-brute city
is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?
It comes about because the wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy
to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored;
no conscious thought; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of
commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of
them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the
broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one
labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and
trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul; the
aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were
the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one
of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the
silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the
unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation,
the inchoate art, the submerged spirit--these groped and found each
other and gathered themselves together and worked themselves into the
tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow
of the sunrise and the sea winds.
Humanity triumphs over its details.
The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and
expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being
of the race.
The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it
first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots. Coming
closer, you will be profoundly discouraged at the number of low spots,
not to say two-spots. Coming still closer, you will become discouraged
once more by the reflection that the same stuff that is in the high
spots is also in the two-spots.
"THE MAN-O'-WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND"
_By_ DAVID W. BONE
Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his ship
will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone describes the
loss of the _Cameronia_, his command, torpedoed in the
Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive us for
pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title pays
tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the
sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not
less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture of a
sea tragedy is taken from _Merchantmen-at-Arms_, a history of the
British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of enthralling
power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother, Muirhead
Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers.
David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow) in 1873; his
father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his great-grandfather
was a boyhood companion of Robert Burns. Bone went to sea as an
apprentice in the _City of Florence_, an old-time square-rigger, at
the age of fifteen; he has been at sea ever since. He is now master
of S.S. _Columbia_ of the Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New
York Harbor, as she has carried passengers between the Clyde and
the Hudson for more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea
tale, The _Brass-bounder_, published in 1910, has become a classic
of the square-sail era; his _Broken Stowage_ (1915) is a collection
of shorter sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have
reflected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone
will take a permanent and honorable place.
A sense of security is difficult of definition. Largely, it is founded
upon habit and association. It is induced and maintained by familiar
surroundings. On board ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be
contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be sailing beyond the
influences of the land and of other ships. The sea is the same we have
known for so long. Every item of our ship fitment--the trim arrangement
of the decks, the set and rake of mast and funnel, even the furnishings
of our cabins--has the power of impressing a stable feeling of custom,
normal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought to recall
that in their homely presence we are endangered. Relating his
experiences after having been mined and his ship sunk, a master confided
that the point that impressed him most deeply was when he went to his
room for the confidential papers and saw the cabin exactly in everyday
aspect--his longshore clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella
standing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard.
Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assurance. Unlike us, they
cannot carry their home with them to the battlefields. All their scenes
and surroundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance and comfort
from the familiar presence of their comrades. At sea in a ship there is
a yet greater incitement to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless
sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. The atmosphere that
is so familiar and comforting to us, is to many of them an environment
of dread possibilities.
It is with some small measure of this sense of security--tempered by our
knowledge of enemy activity in these waters--we pace the bridge. Anxiety
is not wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flotsam that may
have come from the decks of a French mail steamer, torpedoed three days
ago. The passing of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the
steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly presence of
familiar surroundings has effect in allaying immediate fears. The rounds
of the bridge go on--the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass,
the small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. Two days out
from Marseilles--and all well! In another two days we should be
approaching the Canal, and then--to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a
term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accompany us for the present,
but the filmy glare of the sun, now low, and a backward movement of the
glass foretells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed to make
the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each bow, our two escorting
destroyers conform to the angles of our zigzag--spurring out and
swerving with the peculiar "thrown-around" movement of their class.
Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch of the ship's crew,
military signalers are posted; the boats swung outboard have each a
party of troops on guard.
An alarmed cry from aloft--a half-uttered order to the steersman--an
explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in
her stride!
The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, a huge
column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent
on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and
hangs--watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water--the
steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on
his forehead.... Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the
thrust of the engines marking the heartbeats of the stricken ship.
Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days
on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of
our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow
comes, the explosion killing many outright. We had counted on a
proportion of the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to
balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw in emergency.
Hurrying from the mess-decks as enjoined, the quick movement gathers way
and intensity: the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gangways and
passages are blocked in the struggle. There is the making of a
panic--tuned by their outcry, _"God! O God! O Christ!"_ The swelling
murmur is neither excited nor agonized--rather the dull, hopeless
expression of despair.
The officer commanding troops has come on the bridge at the first
alarm. His juniors have opportunity to take their stations before the
struggling mass reaches to the boats. The impossibility of getting among
the men on the lower decks makes the military officers' efforts to
restore confidence difficult. They are aided from an unexpected quarter.
The bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. "Hey! Steady up
you men doon therr," he shouts. "Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels
croodin' th' ledders!"
We could not have done it as well. The lad is plainly in sight to the
crowd on the decks. A small boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr!" The
effect is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is arrested.
The engines are stopped--we are now beyond range of a second
torpedo--and steam thunders in exhaust, making our efforts to control
movements by voice impossible. At the moment of the impact the
destroyers have swung round and are casting here and there like hounds
on the scent: the dull explosion of a depth-charge--then another, rouses
a fierce hope that we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has
broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial still holds and,
when a measure of order on the boatdeck allows, we send a message of our
peril broadcast. There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our
bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. We have
nearly three thousand on board. There are boats for sixteen
hundred--then rafts. Boats--rafts--and the glass is falling at a rate
that shows bad weather over the western horizon!
Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with only
half-complements in them, will not serve. We pass orders to lower away
in any condition, however overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it
is with some apprehension we watch the packed boats that drop away from
the davit heads. The shrill ring of the block-sheaves indicates a
tension that is not far from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats
reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the
tackles--far beyond their working load--is too great for all to stand to
it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently
to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A
third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at
parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights,
disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We
can make no attempt to reach the men in the water. Their life-belts are
sufficient to keep them afloat: the ship is going down rapidly by the
head, and there remains the second line of boats to be hoisted and swung
over. The chief officer, pausing in his quick work, looks to the bridge
inquiringly, as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two hands
suffice to mark our estimate.
The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch of the bows. Pumps are
utterly inadequate to make impression on the swift inflow. The chief
engineer comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only a
question of time. How long? Already the water is lapping at a level of
the foredeck. Troops massed there and on the forecastle-head are
apprehensive: it is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them
for so long. The commanding officer sets example by a cool nonchalance
that we envy. Posted with us on the bridge, his quick eyes note the
flood surging in the pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have
removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the sea.
Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving _Nemesis_ to steam fast
circles round the sinking ship, _Rifleman_ swings in and brings up
alongside at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety and distress,
we cannot but admire the precision of the destroyer captain's
manœuver--the skilful avoidance of our crowded life-boats and the men
in the water--the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant that brings
her to a standstill at the lip of our brimming decks. The troops who
have stood so well to orders have their reward in an easy leap to
safety. Quickly the foredeck is cleared. _Rifleman_ spurts ahead in a
rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to eddy in her wash. She takes
up the circling high-speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in
and embark a number of our men.
It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the
gallant service of the destroyers. There remain the rafts, but many of
these have been launched over to aid the struggling men in the water.
Half an hour has passed since we were struck--thirty minutes of frantic
endeavor to debark our men--yet still the decks are thronged by a packed
mass that seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers alters
the outlook. _Rifleman's_ action has taken over six hundred. A sensible
clearance! _Nemesis_ swings in with the precision of an express, and the
thud and clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a continuous
drumming note of deliverance. Alert and confident, the naval men accept
the great risks of their position. The ship's bows are entered to the
water at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weighing, casting
her stern high in the air. The bulkheads are by now taking place of keel
and bearing the huge weight of her on the water. At any moment she may
go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of the destroyer and
bear her down. For all the circling watch of her sister ship, the
submarine--if still he lives--may get in a shot at the standing target.
It is with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. Her decks
are jammed to the limit. She can carry no more. _Nemesis_ lists heavily
under her burdened decks as she goes ahead and clears.
Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheelhouse goes on ringing the
angles of time and course as though we were yet under helm and speed.
For a short term we have noted that the ship appears to have reached a
point of arrest in her foundering droop. She remains upright as she has
been since righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like the
lady she always was, she has added no fearsome list to the sum of our
distress. The familiar bridge, on which so many of our safe sea-days
have been spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold uneasy. She
cannot remain for long afloat. The end will come swiftly, without
warning--a sudden rupture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight.
We are not now many left on board. Striving and wrenching to man-handle
the only remaining boat--rendered idle for want of the tackles that have
parted on service of its twin--we succeed in pointing her outboard, and
await a further deepening of the bows ere launching her. Of the
military, the officer commanding, some few of his juniors, a group of
other ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a muster of
seamen, a few stewards, are banded with us at the last. We expect no
further service of the destroyers. The position of the ship is
over-menacing to any approach. They have all they can carry. Steaming at
a short distance they have the appearance of being heavily overloaded;
each has a staggering list and lies low in the water under their deck
encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick out-throw of the
remaining boat and the chances of a grip on floating wreckage to count
upon.
On a sudden swift sheer, _Rifleman_ takes the risk. Unheeding our
warning hail, she steams across the bows and backs at a high speed: her
rounded stern jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch on
a projection and give with the ring of buckling steel--she turns on the
throw of the propellers and closes aboard with a resounding impact that
sets her living deck-load to stagger.
We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, our small company
endeavors to get foothold on her decks. The destroyer widens off at the
rebound, but by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged aboard. One
fails to reach safety. A soldier loses grip and goes to the water. The
chief officer follows him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the
devoted labors of the last half-hour, he is in no condition to effect a
rescue. A sudden deep rumble from within the sinking ship warns the
destroyer captain to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our
shipmates: the propellers tear the water in a furious race that sweeps
them away, and we draw off swiftly from the side of the ship.
We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last
buoyant breath of _Cameronia_ is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to
the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly,
steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she
goes down.
THE MARKET
_By_ WILLIAM MCFEE
William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his writing
he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a background than
as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen this brief
and colorful little sketch to represent his talent because it is
different from the work with which most of his readers are
familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic of
him--an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings of
commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been for
some years an engineer in the sea service of the United Fruit
Company, with a Mediterranean interim--reflected in much of his
recent writing--during the War.
The publication of McFee's _Casuals of the Sea_ in 1916 was
something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to the
reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and subtlety.
His earlier books, _An Ocean Tramp_ and _Aliens_ (both republished
since), had gone almost unnoticed--which, it is safe to say, will
not happen again to anything he cares to publish. His later books
are _Captain Macedoine's Daughter_, _Harbours of Memory_, and _An
Engineer's Notebook_. He was born at sea in 1881, the son of a
sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb of London, served his
apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, and has been in ships
most of the time since 1905.
There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door; a rap having within
its insistent urgency a shadow of delicate diffidence, as though the
person responsible were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe
to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four-forty. One of the
dubious by-products of continuous service as a senior assistant at sea
is the habit of waking automatically about 4 A. M. This gives one
several hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one's sins, frailties, and
(more rarely) triumphs and virtues. For a man who gets up at say
four-thirty is regarded with aversion ashore. His family express
themselves with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and meditate, or
suffer the ignominy of being asked when he is going away again.
But this morning, in these old Chambers in an ancient Inn buried in the
heart of London City, I have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for
this momentous departure from a life of temporary but deliberate
indolence is a lady. "Cherchez la femme," as the French say with the dry
animosity of a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being on the
outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as already hinted, with a sharp
insistent delicacy. To this romantic summons I reply with an articulate
growl of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve the anxiety
of any reader who imagines an impending elopement it may be stated in
succinct truthfulness that we are bound on no such desperate venture. We
are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand, to Covent Garden
Market, to see the arrival of the metropolitan supply of produce.
Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as primitive as that favored
by gentlemen aroused to go on watch, and placating an occasional
repetition of the tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I
take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts of my door,
discover a young woman standing by the window looking out upon the
quadrangle of the old Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is
continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for articles in the
press. That is her profession, or one of her professions--writing
articles for the press. The other profession is selling manuscripts,
which constitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual agent's
commission she is selling one of my manuscripts. Being an unattached
and, as it were, unprotected male, she plans little excursions about
London to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is attired in the
flamboyant finery of a London flowergirl. She is about to get the
necessary copy for a special article in a morning paper. With the
exception of a certain expectant flash of her bright black Irish eyes,
she is entirely businesslike. Commenting on the beauty of an early
summer morning in town, we descend, and passing out under the ponderous
ancient archway, we make our leisurely progress westward down the
Strand.
London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that
extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about
her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness
which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are shining in the
sunlight as though paved with "patines of bright gold." Early 'buses
rumble by from neighboring barns where they have spent the night. And,
as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward into the great
rivers of traffic soon to pour round its base like some bold Byzantine
promontory, we see Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high.
From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross the great wains
are arriving from Paddington Terminal, from the market-garden section of
Middlesex and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts laden with
vegetables from Brentwood and Coggeshall, and neat vans packed with
crates of watercress which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and
Cambridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four-horse vehicles
from the docks, vehicles with peaches from South Africa, potatoes from
the Canary Islands, onions from France, apples from California, oranges
from the West Indies, pineapples from Central America, grapes from Spain
and bananas from Colombia.
We turn in under an archway behind a theatre and adjacent to the
stage-door of the Opera House. The booths are rapidly filling with
produce. Gentlemen in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable marbled
note-books walk about with an important air. A mountain range of
pumpkins rises behind a hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being
suspended from rails. The heads of barrels are being knocked in,
disclosing purple grapes buried in corkdust. Pears and figs, grown under
glass for wealthy patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken
crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in a splash of ruddy
gold on the plank runway. A wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets,
and the broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the air is
heavy with the acrid sweetness.
We pick our way among the booths and stalls until we find the flowers.
Here is a crowd of ladies, young, so-so and some quite matronly, and all
dressed in this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken. They are
grouped about an almost overpowering mass of blooms. Roses just now
predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a
glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without
ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge
aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one
imagines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round baskets,
eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to the majestic blazonry of
the roses and the dew-spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by.
"And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a
moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs
piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and
displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs
and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh,
penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the
flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps
Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see the
timber pier and the long line of rackety open-slatted cars jangling into
the dark shed, pushed by a noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys
lying asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats covering their
faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise the blue mountains; behind is
the motionless blue sea. I hear the whine of the elevators, the
monotonous click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible and
argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the tropic day, and see the
gleam of the white waves breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I
recall the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a solitude
alive, if one is equipped with knowledge, with a ceaseless warfare of
winged and crawling hosts. And while my companion is busily engaged in
getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out
of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his
two-wheeled barrow is the last link in the immense chain of
transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the
cockney pedestrian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a banana for
a couple of pennies.
HOLY IRELAND
_By_ JOYCE KILMER
This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kilmer
ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and insight that
lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub Street. In him,
as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become legendary, it was
part of his religion and his dream-life, and he treated it with
real affection and humor. You will find it cropping out many times
in his verses. The Irish problem as it is reflected in this country
is not always clearly understood. Ireland, in the minds of our
poets, is a mystical land of green hills, saints and leprechauns,
and its political problems are easy.
Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at Rutgers
College and Columbia University; taught school; worked on the staff
of the Standard Dictionary; passed through phases of socialism and
Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and joined the Sunday
staff of the New York _Times_ in 1913. He was killed fighting in
France in 1918. This sketch is taken from the second of the three
volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday, his friend and executor,
has collected Joyce Kilmer's work.
We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day--the third of a
four days' journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles
were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen
stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a
little house in a side street.
"Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and
dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a
spotless stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three
children--a girl of eight years, a boy of five, a boy of three. They
stared with round frightened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first
they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at once climbed
to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night. First we
lifted the packs from one another's aching shoulders: then, without
spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.
For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an occasional groan, an
oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a
forest. Then a voice came from the corner:
"Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily searched. There was no
Sergeant Reilly to be found.
"I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint," said the voice. And
with the curiosity of the American and the enthusiasm of the Irish we
lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.
He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were off and his
bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to
expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the
little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years of
soldiering and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic
sweetness, he was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More." We
listened respectfully.
"They cheer the King and then salute him," said Sergeant Reilly.
"A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we all joined in the chorus,
"Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More."
"Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to
talk at the top of their voices. What they said Heaven knows, but the
tones were friendly, even admiring.
"Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, "the lady who
runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take
off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don't
crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs."
Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true bourgeoise, with all
the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the
authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the
attic of her house to sleep in--nothing more; no light, no heat. Also,
wood is very expensive in France--for reasons that are engraven in
letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless--
"Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And she brought nearer to
the fire all the chairs the establishment possessed and some chests and
boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was
Solange, went out into the snow and came back with heaping armfuls of
small logs. The fire blazed merrily--more merrily than it had blazed
since August, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was
thick with steam from our drying socks.
Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had generously admitted all eleven of
us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in
spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French
was "du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon jour." Those of us who knew a
little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for the
others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We learned
that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle just one
month before our arrival in her home. She showed us with simple pride
and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she showed us those
of her two brothers--one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner
of war--of her mother and father, of herself dressed for First
Communion.
This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we
would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if
Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Communion, then
Madame's face cleared.
"Mais oui!" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous êtes Catholiques,
n'est-ce pas?"
At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this
question affirmatively. Tattered prayer-books and somewhat dingy
scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered their
surprise and delight to each other, and every exhibit called for a new
outburst.
"Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voilà, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le
Sacré Cœur!" (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent
as it looks in print).
Now other treasures, too, were shown--treasures chiefly photographic.
There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame
and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They admired
and sympathized; they exclaimed appropriately at the beauty of every
girl's face, the tenderness of every pictured mother. We had become the
intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and we her into
ours.
Soldiers--American soldiers of Irish descent--have souls and hearts.
These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But our
stomachs remained--and that they yearned was evident to us. We had made
our hike on a meal of hardtack and "corned willy." Mess call would sound
soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through the snowy
streets to the temporary mess-shack? We knew our supply wagons had not
succeeded in climbing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread
and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great depression settled
upon us.
But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.
"Boys," he said, "this here lady has got a good fire going, and I'll bet
she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?"
The proposal was received joyously at first. Then some one said:
"But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I--not a damn sou!" said
another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.
Again Sergeant Reilly spoke:
"I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he said. "But let's have
a show-down. I guess we've got enough to buy somethin' to eat."
It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of the
search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made up for
the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins on the
table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a Chinese
piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money
came in all to eight francs.
It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry soldiers these days
in France. But there was no harm in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an
ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly in
explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that we
were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and that
we wanted her to cook us something to eat.
Now Madame was what they call in New England a "capable" woman. In a
jiffy she had the money in Solange's hand and had that admirable child
cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what
she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for
supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the fire,
the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed.
Nothing in the way of a food cupboard could be seen. And the only other
room of the house was the bare attic.
When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself these
articles: (1) two loaves of war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3)
three cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat; (6) a bag of
coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated, exactly
the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.
Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then with a veritable French
trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange
had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a chain
over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed, Madame
standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret that I do
not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping the
potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their part
to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.
We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The only
absentees were the two little boys, Michael and Paul. And they were
really absent only from our board--they were in the room, in the great
built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange. Their
little bodies were covered by the three-foot thick mattress-like red
silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us
unblinkingly all the evening.
But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of
dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame
stopped her chattering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped her
chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather searchingly
at us. We didn't know what was the matter, but we felt rather
embarrassed.
Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make
foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was
surprised to see that American Catholics did not say grace before
eating like French Catholics.
We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved
the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an
ex-seminarian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if a
bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after we had
blessed ourselves: "Benedicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat
Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen."
Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we
sat down again to eat.
It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation--except on the
part of Madame and Solange--but there was plenty of good cheer. Also
there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of
us--half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who
drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an
apple pie without stopping to take breath, was satisfied. There were
toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly--toasts to Madame, and to
the children, and to France, and to the United States, and to the Old
Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent only
to illuminati of Sergeant Reilly's circle).
The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly said, we sat
before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and
full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by
Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the
evening's expenditures--totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.
Now when soldiers are unhappy--during a long, hard hike, for
instance--they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy,
as on the evening now under consideration, they sing to express their
satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." We shook the
kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We
informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact, the whole village,
that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana
home. We grew sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant Reilly
obliged with a reel--in his socks--to an accomplishment of whistling and
handclapping.
Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She
responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and
finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking
down some paper-covered books.
There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of
pages. Then, after some preliminary coughing and humming, the music
began--the woman's rich alto blending with the child's shrill but sweet
notes. And what they sang was "Tantum ergo Sacramentum."
Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this
company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why we
found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem
appropriate to all of us--to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive
a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on
Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fitting. Not
one of us then or later expressed any surprise that this hymn, familiar
to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down
the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to
us in this strange land and in these strange circumstances.
Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the season
was appropriate, one of us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item
on the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our ex-seminarian knew
all the words and the rest of us came in strong with "Venite, adoremus
Dominum."
Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies
obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune" and other simple ballads of old
France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and
there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening's
entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections. We
sang--as best we could--the "Star-Spangled Banner," Solange and her
mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we
attempted "La Marseillaise." Of course, we did not know the words.
Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the
song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got to work in
earnest. Madame sang with us, and Solange. But during the final stanza
Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and
looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from under the red
comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred
hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about
that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's widow--we all felt it.
And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.
There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchanging, that hang over the
green slopes of some mountains I know. I have seen them on the Irish
hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they are
made of the tears of good brave women.
Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant
Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw.
Blankets, shelter-halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep.
Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The
final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a corner of his mouth.
"That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said. "We sure were in luck
when we struck this billet."
He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes. Then
he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the floor,
where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.
"You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is right. What do you know
about that lady, anyway?"
"Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty white."
"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how much trouble that woman
took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a
damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give
her. And she's out about six francs for firewood, too--I wish to God I
had the money to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and
hungry, too.
"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an
occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she
cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit
down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and
the little Sallie there sung for us.
"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing
them church hymns to me that way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn
sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I
sort of realize what we're fighting for now, and I never did before.
It's for women like that and their kids.
"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing them hymns. I
remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there's many
women like that in France now--telling their beads and singing the old
hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she's just after treating
us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I
think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.'"
A FAMILIAR PREFACE
_By_ JOSEPH CONRAD
This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in whatever
form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It is from
the preface to _A Personal Record_, that fascinating
autobiographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of
a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in English. As
a companion piece, those who have the honor of the writer's craft
at heart should read Conrad's preface to _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_.
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to wonder
what some newspaper owners--say Mr. Hearst--would reply to that?
Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here. If by
any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be to his
soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.
As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
ourselves; yet this little book[A] is the result of a friendly
suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself
with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice
insisted, "You know, you really must."
It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must!...
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of
sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this
by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable
than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a
whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the other hand, you
cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek.
Shouted with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction, these two by
their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's "virtue" for
you if you like!... Of course, the accent must be attended to. The right
accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering or the
tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was
an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics
commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the
right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
What a dream for a writer! Because written words have their accent, too.
Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out
aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It
may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's
no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a
pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and
fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world
unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and
something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Among other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
embroil one with one's friends.
"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine among
either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the
mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in
his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among
imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains,
to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a
seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.
In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help
thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic
author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons
esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the
opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of
fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print
till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of
his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
they recommend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its
men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
am incorrigible.
Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
sea life, I have a special piety toward that form of my past; for its
impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me,
and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then,
that in my two exclusively sea books--"The Nigger of the Narcissus," and
"The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth"
and "Typhoon")--I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
hands and the objects of their care.
One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to
write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of
what the French would call _sécheresse du cœur_. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I
feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can
only express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom
an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of
either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the
reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or
contempt. No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which
only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a
task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the
world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the
regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the
dignity of one's work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as
the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.
Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for
love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound
to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea
training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one
thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of
losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which
is the first condition of good service. And I have earned my notion of
good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never
sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of
pure esthetes.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable
or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general
principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough, perhaps, and of
necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles.
These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his
thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit
of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much
the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to
believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for
other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work?
To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is
not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he
may be, since his aim is to reach the wry fount of laughter and tears.
The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy
of respect, too. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one
of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will
is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, "_Il y a toujours la manière_." Very true.
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as
old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of
Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way
or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty
convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards
ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace
of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at
these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All
claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from
which a philosophical mind should be free.
ON DRAWING
_By_ A. P. HERBERT
A. P. Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger English
writers, and has done remarkable work in fields apparently
incompatible: light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beautifully
written tragic novel, _The Secret Battle_. This last was
unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War, but
its sale was tragically small. _The House by the River_, a later
book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale, apparently
cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery story," but
really a study of selfishness and cowardice done with startling
irony and intensity.
Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College, Oxford,
where he took his degree in 1914. He saw military service at the
Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the staff of _Punch_.
There is no young writer in England from whom one may more
confidently expect a continuance of fine work. This airy and
delicious little absurdity is a perfect example of what a genuine
humorist can do.
If there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the
oldfashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let
him examine Mr. Herbert's _The Secret Battle_. This book often
sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek--e.g.,
Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet,
informal and swift. If these are not the cardinal prose virtues,
what are?
It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is
true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I
have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have
to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such
functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can
satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing
during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an
expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know
Drawing as well as it can be known.
The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and
by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials.
An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give
you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and
very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is
essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much
artistic pleasure--except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose
between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and
making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.
Much the best committees from the point of view of material are
committees about business which meet at business premises--shipping
offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white
blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the
directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two
pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.
When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away,
the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the
chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but
just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for
their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when
they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they
had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.
As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. 1).
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most
difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where the eye goes.
If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man
spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye
(Fig. 2).
[Illustration: FIG. 2]
Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a
gamble. Personally, I go in for _strong heads_ (Fig. 3).
[Illustration: FIG. 3]
I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is
not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads; they make it so
difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck.
The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this
the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4).
[Illustration: FIG. 4]
I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the
southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you
can't go back; not unless you are on a _very_ good committee which
provides india-rubber as well as pencils.
Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy or black, or lightish
and thin. It depends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For
myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up better
(Fig. 5).
[Illustration: FIG. 5]
Until one draws hair one never realizes what large heads people have.
Doing the hair takes the whole of a speech, usually, even one of the
chairman's speeches.
This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place.
And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he
would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at
the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.
I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing.
Sometimes I draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is
always a dud.
There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a
low forehead and beetling brows--a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a
powerful face. The one on the left was meant to be another Bolshevik,
arguing with him. But he has turned out to be a lady, so I have had to
give her a "bun." She is a lady solicitor; but I don't know how she came
to be talking to the Bolshevik.
[Illustration: FIG. 6]
When you have learned how to do men, the only other things in Drawing
are Perspective and Landscape.
PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road
with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).
I have put in a fence as well.
LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most
amusing, especially fluffy trees.
Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).
Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would
have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.
[Illustration: FIG. 7]
[Illustration: FIG. 8]
But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like
this through.
There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a
man front-face. It can't be done.
O. HENRY
_By_ O. W. FIRKINS
Several years ago I turned to _Who's Who in America_ in hope of
finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilliant
reviews--chiefly of poetry--were appearing in _The Nation_. I found
no entry, but every few months I would again rummage that stout red
volume with the same intention, forgetting that I had done so
before without success. It seemed hardly credible that a critic so
brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious compilers of that
work, which includes hundreds of hacks and fourflushers. When
gathering the contents of this book I tried _Who's Who_ again,
still without result I wrote to Mr. Firkins pleading for
biographical details; modestly, but firmly, he denied me.
So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind one
of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. One
sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destination by
the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and paradoxes. That
is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, an author who has
often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not say overpraised) by
people incompetent to appreciate his true greatness. Mr. Robert
Cortes Holliday, in an essay called "The Amazing Failure of O.
Henry," said that O. Henry created no memorable characters. Mr.
Firkins suggests the obvious but satisfying answer--New York itself
is his triumph. The New York of O. Henry, already almost erased
physically, remains a personality and an identity.
Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of Minnesota,
and a contributing editor of _The Weekly Review_, in which this
essay first appeared in September, 1919. The footnotes are, of
course, his own.
There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle class views him
as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy; part of the higher
criticism sees in him little but sensation and persiflage. Between these
views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens are _ipso
facto_ the demons of Christianity. Unmixed assertions, however, are
commonly mixtures of truth and falsehood; there is room to-day for an
estimate which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither.
There is one literary trait in which I am unable to name any writer of
tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry.[B] It is not primary or
even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value _per se_ than
the condition or foundation of values. But its utility is manifest, and
it is rare among men: Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of
its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence
would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories--not to
the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer
phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed,
but to the disposition of masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a
half-educated American provincial should have been original in a field
in which original men have been copyists is enough of itself to make his
personality observable.
Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely superfluous. I supply
two instances. Two lads, parting in New York, agree to meet "After
Twenty Years" at a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful;
but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual silence and
ignorance have turned the one into a dashing criminal, the other into a
sober officer of the law. Behind the picturesque and captivating
rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral problem of
arresting gravity. This is dealt with in six pages of the "Four
Million." The "Furnished Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve
pages. Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower West Side a man
trails a woman. Chance leads him to the very room in which the woman
ended her life the week before. Between him and the truth the avarice of
a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of a lie. In the bed in which
the girl slept and died, the man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of
the deadly fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mournful
coincidence forever from the knowledge of mankind. O. Henry gave these
tales neither extension nor prominence; so far as I know, they were
received without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body of work in
which such specimens are undistinguished hardly requires comment.
A few types among these stories may be specified. There are the Sydney
Cartonisms, defined in the name; love-stories in which divided hearts,
or simply divided persons, are brought together by the strategy of
chance; hoax stories--deft pictures of smiling roguery; "prince and
pauper" stories, in which wealth and poverty face each other, sometimes
enact each other; disguise stories, in which the wrong clothes often
draw the wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim sacrifices
his beloved watch to buy combs for Della, who, meanwhile, has sacrificed
her beloved hair to buy a chain for Jim.
This imperfect list is eloquent in its way; it smooths our path to the
assertion that O. Henry's specialty is the enlistment of original method
in the service of traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty
years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane to the old homestead.[C]
Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives and antitheses in
which his own faculty delighted. In mechanical invention he is almost
the leader of his race. In a related quality--a defect--his leadership
is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the probable, or, more
precisely, of the available in the improbable, ever became equally
weakened or deadened in a man who made his living by its exercise. The
improbable, even the impossible, has its place in art, though that place
is relatively low; and it is curious that works such as the "Arabian
Nights" and Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the incredible,
are the works which give almost no trouble on the score of
verisimilitude. The truth is that we reject not what it is impossible to
prove, or even what it is possible to disprove, but what it is
impossible to imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimaginable--that
is his crime.
The right and wrong improbabilities may be illustrated from two burglar
stories. "Sixes and Sevens" contains an excellent tale of a burglar and
a citizen who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the score of
their common sufferings from rheumatism. This feeling in practice would
not triumph over fear and greed; but the feeling is natural, and
everybody with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. Nature
_tends_ towards that impossibility, and art, lifting, so to speak, the
lid which fact drops upon nature, reveals nature in belying fact. In
another story, in "Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in
which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette of their mutual
relation by formulas derived from short stories with which both are
amazingly conversant. This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an
imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the maturity of small
boys will have naught to do with this insanity.
But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inventions in his tales the
very utterance of which--not the mere substance but the utterance--on
the part of a man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses the
reader as incredible. In a "Comedy in Rubber," two persons become so
used to spectatorship at transactions in the street that they drift into
the part of spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. Can
human daring or human folly go further? O. Henry is on the spot to prove
that they can. In the "Romance of a Busy Broker," a busy and forgetful
man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his hand to the
stenographer _whom he had married the night before_.
The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I came upon the
following sentence: "Never will the imagination approach the
improbabilities and the antitheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated
February 21, 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was not born
till September of the same year.
Passing on to style, we are still in the land of antithesis. The style
is gross--and fine. Of the plenitude of its stimulus, there can be no
question. In "Sixes and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental
morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and blows. O. Henry's
public seems imaged in that young man. But I draw a sharp distinction
between the _tone_ of the style and its _pattern_. The tone is brazen,
or, better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incorrigible; it
reeks with that air of _performance_ which is opposed to real
efficiency. But the pattern is another matter. The South rounds its
periods like its vowels; O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in
his boyhood. His sentences are _built_--a rare thing in the best writers
of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, he was strong, though it
must be confessed that the tale-teller was now and then hustled from the
rostrum by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce a felicity
with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the
sovereigns of English. "In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs.
McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat
went into Mrs. McCaskey."
I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet even for these
levities with which his pages are so liberally besprinkled or bedaubed,
some half-apology may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is
consummate. A horseman who should dismount to pick up a bauble would be
childish; O. Henry picks it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is
most pardonable in the man with whom its use is least exclusive and
least necessary. There are men who, going for a walk, take their dogs
with them; there are other men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute
slang for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to the second
will exactly illustrate the superiority of O. Henry to the abject
traffickers in slang.
In the "Pendulum" Katy has a new patch in her crazy quilt which the ice
man cut from the end of his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate,"
threading the mazes of a banana grove is compared to "paging the palm
room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith." O. Henry's is the type
of mind to which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room are
presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging continuity. There was
hardly an object in the merry-go-round of civilized life that had not
offered at least an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming eyes.
Nothing escapes from the besom of his allusiveness, and the style is
streaked and pied, almost to monotony, by the accumulation of lively
details.
If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but it is part of the
grimness of the bargain that destiny drives with us that the mixture of
the crude and the rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites
and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the kingdom of style O.
Henry's estates were princely, but, to pay his debts, he must have sold
them all.
Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have been offset by
extraordinary defects. To lift our author out of the class of brilliant
and skilful entertainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I should
answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowledge of setting, which is clear
and first-hand, but subsidiary, above the order of events, which is,
generally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which are sound and
warm, but almost purely derivative, there is a rather small, but
impressive body of first-hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his
endurance may hinge.
I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York. With the
exception of his New Orleans, I care little for his South and West,
which are a boyish South and West, and as little, or even less, for his
Spanish-American communities. My objection to his opera-bouffe republics
is, not that they are inadequate as republics (for that we were entirely
prepared), but that they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his
show from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even among
pretenses, and a faith must be induced before its removal can enliven
us. But his New York has quality. It is of the family of Dickens's
London and Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the family. Mr.
Howells, in his profound and valuable study of the metropolis in a
"Hazard of New Fortunes," is penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand,
is _penetrated_. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is caught in
the mesh of the imagination.
O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human destiny and human
nature. In these pictures he is not formally accurate; he could never or
seldom set his truth before us in that moderation and proportion which
truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality. He was apt to present
his insight in a sort of parable or allegory, to upraise it before the
eyes of mankind on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggeration.
Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a lie, and tales which are
dramatized epigrams are subject to a like constraint. The force,
however, is real. I could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful
exposition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial story in the
volume which appropriates its title. It wanted only the skilled romantic
touch of a Gautier or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the
masterpieces of its kind in contemporary letters.
Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly perceptible; we draw
close to the bare fact. O. Henry, fortunate in plots, is peculiarly
fortunate in his renunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it
is also costly. There is an admirable little story called the "Pendulum"
(in the "Trimmed Lamp"), the simplicity of whose fable would have
satisfied Coppée or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom, has
come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture. She departs for a few
hours, and, by the break in usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to
womanhood. She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That is all. O.
Henry could not have given us less--or more. Farcical, clownish, if you
will, the story resembles those clowns who carry daggers under their
motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious hat, the reader
smiles, and quails. I will mention a few other examples of insights with
the proviso that they are not specially commended to the man whose quest
in the short story is the electrifying or the calorific. They include
the "Social Triangle," the "Making of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign
Policy of Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief Début of
Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Complete Life of John Hopkins" in
the "Voice of the City." I cannot close this summary of good points
without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive portrayal of humane
and cheerful scoundrels in the "Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false
to species, is faithful to genus.
O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side, both in merits and
defects, reminds us of those park benches so characteristic of his tales
which are occupied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at the
other. But, to complete the image, we must add as a casual visitor to
that bench a seer or a student, who, sitting down between the previous
comers and suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should gaze
with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison upon the passing crowd.
In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian tradition meet. His
mind, quick to don the guise of modernity, was impervious to its spirit.
The specifically modern movements, the scientific awakening, the
religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, the
enfranchisement of women--these never interfered with his artless and
joyous pursuit of the old romantic motives of love, hate, wealth,
poverty, gentility, disguise, and crime. On two points a moral record
which, in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, rises
almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excitement had become
available and permissible, this worshiper of stimulus never touched with
so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The
second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. His passionate
concern for this wrong derives a peculiar emphasis from the general
refusal of his books to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in
its collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he is asked: "Are
you one of the bunch?" (meaning one of the bunch of grasping and
grinding employers), the response, through all its slang, is
soul-stirring. "'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the fellow
that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind man for his
pennies.'" The author of that retort may have some difficulty with the
sentries that watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none with
the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem.
THE MOWING OF A FIELD
_By_ HILAIRE BELLOC
We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of the
scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious fellow:
if you read him much you will find yourself trying to imitate him;
there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught the trick from
Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the essay I wrote about
him in a book called _Shandygaff_. You can refer to it there, which
will be good business all round. I know it is a worthy essay, for
much of it was cribbed from an article by Mr. Thomas Seccombe,
which an American paper lifted from the English journal which,
presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for it. I wrote it for the Boston
_Transcript_, where I knew the theft would be undetected; and in
shoveling together some stuff for a book (that was in 1917, the
cost of living was rising at an angle of forty-five degrees, as so
many graphs have shown) I put it in, forgetting (until too late)
that some of it was absolute plunder.
Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake to
think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish it to
become _their_ property, so that they may more perfectly respect
it."
And by the way, Max Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in _A Christmas
Garland_, is something not to be missed. It is one of the best
proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm does not
waste his time mimicking the small fry.
Hilaire Belloc--son of a French father and an English mother; his
happy junction of both English and French genius in prose is
hereditary--was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex as a
child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol
College, Oxford, 1893-95, and sat four years (1906-10) in the House
of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gatherings of
essays) _On Nothing_, _On Everything_, _On Something_, _Hills and
the Sea_, _First and Last_; then you can read _The Path to Rome_,
and _The Four Men_, and _Caliban's Guide to Letters_ and _The
Pyrenees_ and _Marie Antoinette_. If you desire the bouillon (or
bullion) of his charm, there is _A Picked Company_, a selection (by
Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work. It is published
by Methuen and Company, 36 Essex Street W. C., London.
Having done so, come again: we will go off in a corner and talk
about Mr. Belloc.
There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear,
where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the
scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to
that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they
choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone
leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable: now green
where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the
homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they
reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot
attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the
floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by
lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great
rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that
other. But the plains above which they have traveled and the Weald to
which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall.
The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the
salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was
nourished here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and
all the life that all things draw from the air.
In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches
that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a
glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and
glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw the sea. To this place
very lately I returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not
less charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much
more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not
intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy
ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more
beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me
as I approached--a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a
small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a
low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things
fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the
place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its
better reality. "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say
is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined
save in a moment when at last it is attained."
When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house
I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I
saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for
the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do--of those
things at least which are very old--there is an exact moment when they
are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it
works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not
given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with
delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn
of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in
the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is
thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has
already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for
delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it
comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between
the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are
over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had
come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind;
and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which
always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the
very end of that rain--but not later--that grass should be cut for hay.
True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than
the grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the
latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower
and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a
harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before
maturity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our
hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and
Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes
always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass
too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to
these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.
June was in full advance; it was the beginning of that season when the
night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it,
never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.
Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the
mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window,
all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald,
where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the
hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the
rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had
awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to
where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I
remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe,
just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were
many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and
the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.
When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there
were already many colors in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen
my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry.
Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to
get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an
advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait
till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours of
work (and those the coolest), and next--which is more important--you
lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. So
I at once began to sharpen my scythe.
There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe, and it is worth
describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will
see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then
also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good
thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's
mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from
you, and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping
it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade-edge and
then down the other, beginning near the handle and going on to the point
and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps,
cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen
to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and
stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp
enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite
silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much
for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily
recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower.
Mowing well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing at all--are separated
by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle,
and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing.
For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower
Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all
these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the
point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the
handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with
his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it
clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the
ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his
stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the
meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be
done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of
these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just
barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of
his mowing are always the same.
So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much
is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with
which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on
good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed
wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you
treat it honorably and in a manner that makes it recognize its service.
The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that
swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength
into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work.
The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force
the scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as
nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up
every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every
stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing
a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive
mood: be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious
only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound. In
this mowing should be like one's prayers--all of a sort and always the
same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them, as it
were, with half your mind: that happier half, the half that does not
bother.
In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went
forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and
bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until
the air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I sharpened my
scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down
again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell rang
in the chapel above me--that is, long before six o'clock, which is the
time for the Angelus--I had many swathes already lying in order parallel
like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great contrast
with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of
Val-ès-Dunes, where--
The tall son of the Seven Winds
Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made
a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)
was like a scythe
In Arcus when the grass is high
And all the swathes in order lie,
And there's the bailiff standing by
A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and
from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be
seen.
I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the
village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in
older times, before I had left the Valley.
He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but
which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or
Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and
makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the
Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it active
and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors
turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that
our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and
ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I believe, an
older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the
strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and
camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the
upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road
from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and
mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and
were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed. They remain;
and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin
and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.
To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said
to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in
duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand;
and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good
custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous
pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was
his labor at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were
free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the
dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the
Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and
observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not
begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom
with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own
steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say
that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder,
according to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking critically
at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains.
There is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their
exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig
you have there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine
pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in
one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I
say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the
pig, and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved
by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming
half the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in
silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly,
till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will
also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the
pig--and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly
accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a
spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you
what I _will_ do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value,
the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in
the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or lime, always with
elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and
more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the
mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred
and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a
motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two
thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might
take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising
the land.
Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get
his scythe. But I went into this house and brought out a gallon jar of
small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small
ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs
called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because
he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the
other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun
rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there
was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of
linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
lying around them when the battle is over and done.
Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man
and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the
musical sharpening of a scythe.
The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley;
for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading;
and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the
field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes
between the dead and yellow swathes.
These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our
return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could,
for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to
spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling
blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the
carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little
over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and
deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the
rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the
trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I
paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should
meet in the same place before sunrise.
He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do,
making their walking a part of the easy but continual labor of their
lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north
and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind
the woods of No Man's Land.
THE STUDENT LIFE
By WILLIAM OSLER
Sir William Osler, one of the best-loved and most influential
teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began his
education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, where he
served as professor of medicine, 1874-84. Wherever he worked his
gifted and unique personality was a center of inspiration--at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns Hopkins, 1889-1904.
In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Professor of Medicine; he died
in England in 1919.
Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great
doctor's place in their own world; but one would like to see his
honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. His
generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully
expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can
afford to overlook _Æquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Alabama
Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Immortality and
Counsels and Ideals_, this last an anthology collected from his
professional papers by one of his pupils. He stands in the
honorable line of those great masters who have found their highest
usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. His lucid and
exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quotation from
the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness,
put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. One could get a
liberal education in literature merely by following up all his
quotations and references. He was more deeply versed in the
classics than many professors of Greek and Latin; the whole music
of English poetry seemed to be current in his blood. His essay on
Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful story _Via Wireless_, tells
the student more about that poet than many a volume of biography.
When was biography more delightfully written than in his volume _An
Alabama Student?_
Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osler attended him years ago, "Osler
believes in the gospel of encouragement--of putting the best
construction on things--the best foot forward. He's a fine fellow
and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel of
encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight reader.
Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his books
are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young
student. As one who has found them an unfailing delight, I venture
to hope that our medical confrères may not be the only readers to
enjoy their vivacity and charm.
EXCEPT it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study
than a student. Shakespeare might have made him a fourth in his immortal
group. The lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine frenzy,
the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the student aflame with the
desire for knowledge are of "imagination all compact." To an absorbing
passion, a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring energy, if
the student is to become a devotee of the gray-eyed goddess to whose law
his services are bound. Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of
Minerva is not for all. For the one, the pure life; for the other, what
Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." Here again the student
often resembles the poet--he is born, not made. While the resultant of
two molding forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the hidden
germinal energies, which produce in each one of us national, family, and
individual traits, the true student possesses in some measure a divine
spark which sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies
definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by which you may
recognize the genuine article from a Boojum--an absorbing desire to know
the truth, an unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open,
honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.
At the outset do not be worried about this big question--Truth. It is a
very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as
much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be
content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the
thirst--a thirst that from the soul must rise!--the fervent longing, are
the be-all and the end-all. What is the student but a lover courting a
fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is
brought out his second great characteristic--steadfastness of purpose.
Unless from the start the limitations incident to our frail human
faculties are frankly accepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you.
The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that
the best men accept--with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining
at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger
portion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive does the student
escape perdition. It is not, as Charles Lamb remarks, that some people
do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, but the
tragic fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condition of
mind-blindness in which the truth is not recognized, though it stares
you in the face. This can never happen to a man who has followed step by
step the growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases of its
evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of life that every truth has
to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey
knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years
demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to publish the
facts on which the truth was based.[D]
Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift
his position to meet the new conditions in which new truths are born, or
old ones modified beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense
of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say
advisedly an honest heart--the honest head is prone to be cold and
stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain
that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put
the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It
will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by
the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of
a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a
lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.
You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since
that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude
of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be
in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most
delightful way, signifying a bond of intellectual filiation. A fraternal
attitude is not easy to cultivate--the chasm between the chair and the
bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a
cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a
height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The
new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps
unconsciously by his very manner antagonizing minds to whose level he
cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his
juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no
appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught--both are in the
same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated,
the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor,
whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first
consideration.
The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the
education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a
medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years
under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will falter and fail in
the race or whether you will be faithful to the end depends on the
training before the start, and on your staying powers, points upon which
I need not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few may become
great students, and now and again one of you will be found who does
easily and well what others cannot do at all, or very badly, which is
John Ferriar's excellent definition of a genius.
In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which is the life of this
continent, it is not easy to train first-class students. Under present
conditions it is hard to get the needful seclusion, on which account it
is that our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I have
always been much impressed by the advice of St. Chrysostom: "Depart from
the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is
hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep her fruit till it be
ripe." The dilettante is abroad in the land, the man who is always
venturing on tasks for which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind
fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curriculum: and while
many things are studied, few are studied thoroughly. Men will not take
time to get to the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the
price the modern student pays for success. Thoroughness is the most
difficult habit to acquire, but it is the pearl of great price, worth
all the worry and trouble of the search. The dilettante lives an easy,
butterfly life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which the
treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or wrung by patient
research in the laboratories. Take, for example, the early history of
this country--how easy for the student of the one type to get a
smattering, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of the
French and Spanish settlements. Put an original document before him, and
it might as well be Arabic. What we need is the other type, the man who
knows the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in what may be
called the embryology of history, has yet a powerful vision for the
minutiæ of life. It is these kitchen and backstair men who are to be
encouraged, the men who know the subject in hand in all possible
relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is possible to become
so absorbed in the problem of the "enclitic de," or the
structure of the flagella of the Trichomonas, or of the toes of the
prehistoric horse, that the student loses the sense of proportion in his
work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which are valueless
because not in touch with current knowledge. You remember poor Casaubon,
in "Middlemarch," whose painful scholarship was lost on this account.
The best preventive to this is to get denationalized early. The true
student is a citizen of the world, the allegiance of whose soul, at any
rate, is too precious to be restricted to a single country. The great
minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language,
and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company
of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the
cosmopolitan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the
full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands
other than his own--French, English, German, American, Japanese,
Russian, Italian--there must be no discrimination by the loyal student
who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind
and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what
stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the
rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be
effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How
often has it happened that years of precious time have been given to a
problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, because of the
ignorance of what had been done elsewhere. And it is not only book
knowledge and journal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not
only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises,
but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate
better the failings or successes in his own line of work, perhaps to
look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose
limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own.
Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concentration must then
be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a
knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the
slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he
may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but
which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think
that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt--men who
took the whole field of knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from
a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can
tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle,
as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of
the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will
look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal
to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-continental railway. He
is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to
order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when or
where he may arise. The conditions seem to be present even under the
most unlikely externals. Some of the greatest students this country has
produced have come from small villages and country places. It is
impossible to predict from a study of the environment, which a "strong
propensity of nature," to quote Milton's phrase again, will easily bend
or break.
The student must be allowed full freedom in his work, undisturbed by the
utilitarian spirit of the Philistine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts
pure science. The present remarkable position in applied science and in
industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible by men who did
pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, in biology, and in physiology,
without a thought in their researches of any practical application. The
members of this higher group of productive students are rarely
understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as little their
unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect of the practical side of
the problems.
Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as an honored member of
the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of
some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack and
wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swearings and starings,
pribbles and prabbles"; but all that has changed with the curriculum,
and the "Meds" now roar you as gently as the "Theologs." On account of
the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your studies, what I
have said upon the general life and mental attitude of the student
applies with tenfold force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily
anomalies and diseases--the machine in order, the machine in disorder,
and the business yours to put it to rights. Through all the phases of
its career this most complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will
be the subject of our study and of your care--the naked, new-born
infant, the artless child, the lad and the lassie just aware of the tree
of knowledge overhead, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman
with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the aged, peaceful in
the contemplation of the past. Almost everything has been renewed in the
science and in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries
there has been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential
features of the life which is our contemplation and our care. The sick
love-child of Israel's sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the
great Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and
"Tully's daughter mourned so tenderly," are not of any age or any
race--they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, and
the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is
laid, and this eternal note of sadness would be insupportable if the
daily tragedies were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and
devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain you more potently
than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may
be thought, the true poetry of life--the poetry of the commonplace, of
the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with their loves and
their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. The comedy, too, of life
will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor
at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his
patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned
towards him as the tragic. Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your
stars if they have given you the proper sense to enable you to
appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which we catch our
fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one of the free gifts of the gods,
unevenly distributed, not bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions.
In undue measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the doctor
it is better appreciated by the eye than expressed on the tongue.
Hilarity and good humor, a breezy cheerfulness, a nature "sloping toward
the southern side," as Lowell has it, help enormously both in the study
and in the practice of medicine. To many of a somber and sour
disposition it is hard to maintain good spirits amid the trials and
tribulations of the day, and yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go
about among patients with a long face.
Divide your attentions equally between books and men. The strength of
the student of books is to sit still--two or three hours at a
stretch--eating the heart out of a subject with pencil and notebook in
hand, determined to master the details and intricacies, focussing all
your energies on its difficulties. Get accustomed to test all sorts of
book problems and statements for yourself, and take as little as
possible on trust. The Hunterian "Do not think, but try" attitude of
mind is the important one to cultivate. The question came up one day,
when discussing the grooves left on the nails after fever, how long it
took for the nail to grow out, from root to edge. A majority of the
class had no further interest; a few looked it up in books; two men
marked their nails at the root with nitrate of silver, and a few months
later had positive knowledge on the subject. They showed the proper
spirit. The little points that come up in your reading try to test for
yourselves. With one fundamental difficulty many of you will have to
contend from the outset--a lack of proper preparation for really hard
study. No one can have watched successive groups of young men pass
through the special schools without profoundly regretting the haphazard,
fragmentary character of their preliminary education. It does seem too
bad that we cannot have a student in his eighteenth year sufficiently
grounded in the humanities and in the sciences preliminary to
medicine--but this is an educational problem upon which only a Milton or
a Locke could discourse with profit. With pertinacity you can overcome
the preliminary defects and once thoroughly interested, the work in
books becomes a pastime. A serious drawback in the student life is the
self-consciousness, bred of too close devotion to books. A man gets shy,
"dysopic," as old Timothy Bright calls it, and shuns the looks of men,
and blushes like a girl.
The strength of a student of men is to travel--to study men, their
habits, character, mode of life, their behavior under varied conditions,
their vices, virtues, and peculiarities. Begin with a careful
observation of your fellow students and of your teachers; then, every
patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he
suffers. Mix as much as you possibly can with the outside world, and
learn its ways. Cultivated systematically, the student societies, the
students' union, the gymnasium, and the outside social circle will
enable you to conquer the diffidence so apt to go with bookishness and
which may prove a very serious drawback in after-life. I cannot too
strongly impress upon the earnest and attentive men among you the
necessity of overcoming this unfortunate failing in your student days.
It is not easy for every one to reach a happy medium, and the
distinction between a proper self-confidence and "cheek," particularly
in junior students, is not always to be made. The latter is met with
chiefly among the student pilgrims who, in traveling down the Delectable
Mountains, have gone astray and have passed to the left hand, where
lieth the country of Conceit, the country in which you remember the
brisk lad Ignorance met Christian.
I wish we could encourage on this continent among our best students the
habit of wandering. I do not know that we are quite prepared for it, as
there is still great diversity in the curricula, even among the leading
schools, but it is undoubtedly a great advantage to study under
different teachers, as the mental horizon is widened and the sympathies
enlarged. The practice would do much to lessen that narrow "I am of Paul
and I am of Apollos" spirit which is hostile to the best interests of
the profession.
There is much that I would like to say on the question of work, but I
can spare only a few moments for a word or two. Who will venture to
settle upon so simple a matter as the best time for work? One will tell
us there is no best time; all are equally good; and truly, all times are
the same to a man whose soul is absorbed in some great problem. The
other day I asked Edward Martin, the well-known story-writer, what time
he found best for work. "Not in the evening, and never between meals!"
was his answer, which may appeal to some of my hearers. One works best
at night; another, in the morning; a majority of the students of the
past favor the latter. Erasmus, the great exemplar, says, "Never work at
night; it dulls the brain and hurts the health." One day, going with
George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage, at that time the physician in
charge, remarked upon two great groups of patients--those who were
depressed in the morning and those who were cheerful, and he suggested
that the spirits rose and fell with the bodily temperature--those with
very low morning temperatures were depressed, and vice versa. This, I
believe, expresses a truth which may explain the extraordinary
difference in the habits of students in this matter of the time at which
the best work can be done. Outside of the asylum there are also the two
great types, the student-lark who loves to see the sun rise, who comes
to breakfast with a cheerful morning face, never so "fit" as at 6 A. M.
We all know the type. What a contrast to the student-owl with his
saturnine morning face, thoroughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched
breakfast bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep, no appetite,
and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to his vis-à-vis, whose
morning garrulity and good humor are equally offensive. Only gradually,
as the day wears on and his temperature rises, does he become endurable
to himself and to others. But see him really awake at 10 P. M. while our
blithe lark is in hopeless coma over his books, from which it is hard to
rouse him sufficiently to get his boots off for bed, our lean
owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the ascendant, with bright eyes and
cheery face, is ready for four hours of anything you wish--deep study,
or
Heart affluence in discoursive talk,
and by 2 A. M. he will undertake to unsphere the spirit of Plato. In
neither a virtue, in neither a fault we must recognize these two types
of students, differently constituted, owing possibly--though I have but
little evidence for the belief--to thermal peculiarities.
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA
_By_ STEPHEN LEACOCK
Nineteen hundred and ten was an important year. Halley's comet came
along, and some predicted the End of the World. And Stephen
Leacock's first _humorous_ book--_Literary Lapses_--was published.
First humorous book, I said, for Mr. Leacock--who is professor of
political economy at McGill University, Montreal--had published his
_Elements of Political Science_ in 1906.
It seems to me that I have heard that _Literary Lapses_ was
obscurely or privately published in Canada before 1910; that Mr.
John Lane, the famous London publisher, was given a copy by some
one as he got on a steamer to go home to England; that he read it
on the voyage and cabled an offer for it as soon as he landed. This
is very vague in my mind, but it sounds probable. At any rate,
since that time Professor Leacock's humorous volumes have appeared
with gratifying regularity--_Nonsense Novels, Behind the Beyond_,
etc.; and some more serious books too, such as Essays and _Literary
Studies_ and The _Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice_. One of the
unsolved riddles of social injustice is, why should Professor
Leacock be so much more amusing than most people?
We usually think of him as a Canadian, but he was born in England
in 1869.
Coming up home the other night in my car (the Guy Street car), I heard a
man who was hanging onto a strap say: "The drama is just turning into a
bunch of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it did,
because I am being paid by this paper to think once a week, and it is
wearing. Some days I never think from morning till night.
This decline of the drama is a thing on which I feel deeply and
bitterly; for I am, or I have been, something of an actor myself. I
have only been in amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some
mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare as a citizen, I
have been a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and I was once one end
(choice of ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other parts too,
such as "A Voice Speaks From Within," or "A Noise Is Heard Without," or
a "Bell Rings From Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as A
Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses where people were being
turned away from the door; and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a
Tumult, and once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper."
So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the Drama, I speak of what
I know.
Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very often into quite
intimate personal contact, with some of the greatest actors of the day.
I don't say it in any way of boasting, but merely because to those of us
who love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. I remember,
for example, that when Wilson Barrett played "The Bat" and had to wear
the queer suit with the scales, it was I who put the glue on him.
And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving one night when he said
to me, "Fetch me a glass of water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it
is not only a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee
of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. I will go
further--" "Do," he said. Henry was like that, quick, sympathetic, what
we call in French "vibrant."
Forbes Robertson I shall never forget: he owes me 50 cents. And as for
Martin Harvey--I simply cannot call him Sir John, we are such dear old
friends--he never comes to this town without at once calling in my
services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt everybody knows that
splendid play in which he appears, called "The Breed of the Treshams."
There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing. Harvey, as the
hero, has to be tortured, not on the stage itself, but off the stage in
a little room at the side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured.
Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used to working together
that Harvey didn't want to let anybody do it but me.
So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the Drama: and I hate to
think of it going all to pieces.
The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass of conversation
and reflection: nothing happens in it; the action is all going out of it
and there is nothing left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is
time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Now in my day--I mean when I was at the apogee of my reputation (I think
that is the word--it may be apologee--I forget)--things were very
different. What we wanted was action--striking, climatic, catastrophic
action, in which things not only happened, but happened suddenly and all
in a lump.
And we always took care that the action happened in some place that was
worth while, not simply in an ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the
way it is in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse (top
story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a power house, or a dog
house, or a bath house, in short, in some place with a distinct local
color and atmosphere.
I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote (I write plays,
too) the manager to whom I submitted it asked me at once, the moment he
glanced at it, "Where is the action of this laid?" "It is laid," I
answered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good, good," he said;
"keep it there."
In the case of another play the manager said to me, "What are you doing
for atmosphere?" "The opening act," I said, "is in a steam laundry."
"Very good," he answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you
brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had not. "That's rather
unfortunate," he said, "because we are especially anxious to bring in a
condemned cell. Three of the big theaters have got them this season, and
I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?" "Yes," I said, "I can,
if it's wanted. I'll look through the cast, and no doubt I can find one
at least of them that ought to be put to death." "Yes, yes," said the
manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can."
But I think of all the settings that we used, the lighthouse plays were
the best. There is something about a lighthouse that you don't get in a
modern drawing room. What it is, I don't know; but there's a difference.
I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never have enjoyed acting so
much, have never thrown myself into acting so deeply, as in a play of
that sort.
There is something about a lighthouse--the way you see it in the earlier
scenes--with the lantern shining out over the black waters that suggests
security, fidelity, faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally
to be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you could see the
huddled figures of the fishermen and their wives on the foreshore
pointing out to the sea (the back of the stage).
"See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is lightning in yon sky."
(I was the lightning and that my cue for it): "God help all the poor
souls at sea to-night!" Then a woman cried, "Look! Look! a boat upon the
reef!" And as she said it I had to rush round and work the boat to make
it go up and down properly. Then there was more lightning, and some one
screamed out, "Look! See! there's a woman in the boat!"
There wasn't really; it was me; but in the darkness it was all the same,
and of course the heroine herself couldn't be there yet because she had
to be downstairs getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried out,
"Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen ran up and down making
a noise.
Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully excited; and what with
the excitement and the darkness and the bright beams of the lighthouse
falling on the wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the
reef--ah! me, those were plays! That was acting! And to think that there
isn't a single streak of lightning in any play on the boards this year!
And then the kind of climax that a play like this used to have! The
scene shifted right at the moment of the excitement, and lo! we are in
the tower, the top story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still
and quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors flooding the
little room, and the roar of the storm heard like muffled thunder
outside.
The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm and quiet and rugged he
looks. The snows of sixty winters are on his head, but his eye is clear
and his grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens the door and
steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty feet above the water, and
peers out upon the storm.
"God pity all the poor souls at sea!" he says. (They all say that. If
you get used to it, and get to like it, you want to hear it said, no
matter how often they say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it
at him, really, but the effect was wonderful.)
And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax
breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet,
breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama
they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea.
"A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it."
And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only daughter--the only
one that he has--who is being cast to death upon the reef. Then comes
the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it through
the surf but him. You know that because the other man says so himself.
But if he goes in the boat then the great light will go out. Untended it
cannot live in the storm. And if it goes out--ah! if it goes out--ask of
the angry waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's long toll of
death must be without the light!
I wish you could have seen it--you who only see the drawing-room plays
of to-day--the scene when the lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and
resolute, and says: "My place is here. God's will be done." And you know
that as he says it and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is
drifting, at that very moment, to the rocks.
"How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can ask that question you
little understand the drama as it was. Save her? No, of course they
didn't save her. What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and force,
no matter how wild and tragic it might be. They did not save her. They
found her the next day, in the concluding scene--all that was left of
her when she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. Her bottom
boards had been smashed in, her gunwale was gone--in short, she was a
wreck.
The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl. That kind of thing was
always taken care of. You see just as the lighthouse man said "God's
will be done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging there.
Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not ashamed to use Providence
in the Old Drama. So he made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony
and hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it every night.
A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been. But, somehow, those of
us who were brought up on that sort of thing, still sigh for it.
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION
_By_ HARRY MORGAN AYRES
This admirable summary of Anglo-American history first appeared
(February, 1920) as an editorial in the _Weekly Review_. It seemed
to me then, and still does, as a model in that form of writing,
perfect in lucidity, temperance and good sense. Mr. Ayres is a
member of the faculty of Columbia University (Department of
English) and also one of the editors of the _Weekly Review_.
Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Seneca seem to be his favorite
hobbies.
To sum up the gist of Anglo-American relations in half a dozen
pages, as Mr. Ayres does here, is surely a remarkable achievement.
The recently established chair in the history, literature, and
institutions of the United States which is to be shared among the
several universities of Great Britain, is quite different from the
exchange professorships of sometimes unhappy memory. It is not at all
the idea to carry over one of our professors each year and indoctrinate
him with the true culture at its source. The occupant of the chair will
be, if the announced intention is carried out, quite as often British as
American, and quite as likely a public man as a professor. The chief
object is to bring to England a better knowledge of the United States,
and a purpose more laudable can scarcely be imagined. Peace and
prosperity will endure in the world in some very precise relation to
the extent to which England succeeds in understanding us.
It is not an illusion to suppose that our understanding of the British
is on the whole better than theirs of us. The British Empire is a large
and comparatively simple fact, now conspicuously before the world for a
long time. The United States was, in British eyes, until recently, a
comparatively insignificant fact, yet vastly more complicated than they
imagined. Each, of course, perfectly knew the faults of the other,
assessed with an unerring cousinly eye. The American bragged in a nasal
whine, the Briton patronized in a throaty burble. Whoever among the
struggling nations of the world might win, England saw to it that she
never lost; your Yankee was content with the more ignoble triumphs of
merchandising, willing to cheapen life if he could only add to his
dollars. But the excellence of English political institutions and
methods, the charm of English life, the tremendous power of the Empire
for promoting freedom and civilization in the world, these are things
which Americans have long recognized and in a way understood. Anything
like an equivalent British appreciation of America in the large seems
confined to a very few honorable exceptions among them. Admiration for
Niagara, which is half British anyway, or enthusiasm for the "Wild
West"--your better-class Englishman always thrills to the frontier--is
no step at all toward rightly appreciating America.
To no inconsiderable extent this is America's own fault. She does not
present to the world a record that is easily read. It is obvious, for
instance--and so obvious that it is not often enough stated--that
America has and will continue to have a fundamentally English
civilization. English law is the basis of her law. English speech is her
speech, and if with a difference, it is a difference that the
philologist, all things considered, finds amazingly small. English
literature is her literature--Chaucer and Shakespeare hers because her
blood then coursed indistinguishably through the English heart they knew
so well; Milton, Dryden, and the Queen Anne men hers, because she was
still a part of England; the later men hers by virtue of affectionate
acquaintanceship and a generous and not inconsiderable rivalry. English
history, in short, is her history. The struggles of the thirteenth
century through which law and parliament came into being, the struggles
of the seventeenth century through which law and parliament came to
rule, are America's struggles upon which she can look back with the
satisfaction that some things that have been done in the world need
never be undone or done over again, whatever the room for improvement
may still be. Americans, no less than British, recognize that
independence was largely an accidental result of a war which sprang out
of a false theory of economics, but whose conclusion carried with it a
lesson in the management of empire which subsequent history shows the
British to have learned thoroughly and for the benefit of all concerned.
American independence, however, once established, pointed a way to
democratic freedom which England hastened to follow. This we know. And
yet--
And yet we allow these obvious and fundamental considerations to become
marvelously obscured. We allow England's failure to solve an insoluble
Irish problem to arouse in us an attitude of mind possibly excusable in
some Irishmen, but wholly inexcusable in any American. We allow a
sentimental regard for some immigrant from Eastern Europe, who comes to
us with a philosophy born of conditions that in English-speaking lands
ceased to be centuries ago, to make us pretend to see in him the true
expression of America's traditional ideals. We allow ourselves to be far
too easy with the phrase, "He is not pro-German, he is merely
anti-British." Why are they anti-British? Why should they be permitted
to make it falsely appear that recognition of the English basis of
America involves approval of everything that England in her history may
or may not have done? Why should they be allowed to pretend that
disapproval of some particular act of England justifies repudiation of
most of the things by virtue of which we are what we are? America from
the first has been part of the great English experiment--great because
it is capable of learning from experience.
The world has put a big investment in blood and treasure, and all that
they imply, into the education of England. It is satisfied--the world's
response to Germany's insolent challenge is the proof of it--that its
pains have been well bestowed. England is more nearly fit than any other
nation to wield the power that is hers. That is not to deny the peculiar
virtues of other nations; indeed, these virtues have largely contributed
to the result. Italy has educated her; France has educated her; we have
done something; and Germany. In result, she is not perfect--the English
would perhaps least of all assert that--but she has learned a great deal
and held herself steady while she learned it. It is a bigger job than
the world cares to undertake to teach any other nation so much. Nor
would it be at all likely to succeed so well. For what England has to
offer the world in return is not simply her institutions; it is not
merely a formula for the effective discharge of police duty throughout
the world; it is the English freeman, whether he hail from Canada,
Australia, Africa, or the uttermost isles of the sea.
A most adaptable fellow, this freeman, doing all sorts of work
everywhere, and with tremendous powers of assimilation. Consider him in
his origins. He began by assimilating fully his own weight in Danes,
while remaining an English freeman. He then perforce accepted a Norman
king, as he had accepted a Danish one, hoping, as always, that the king
would not trouble him too much. But when Norman William, who was very
ill-informed about the breed, killed off most of his natural leaders and
harried the rest into villeiny, how did he manage in a small matter of
two hundred years or so to make an English gentleman not only of himself
but of all the rag-tag of adventurers who had come over with William and
since? How did he contrive, out of a band of exiles fleeing from an
Egypt of ecclesiastical tyranny, broken younger sons, artisans out of a
job, speculators, bondmen, Swedes, Dutchmen, and what not, to make
America? Is he one likely to lose his bearings when in his America the
age-old problem again heaves in view? This is a job he has been working
at pretty successfully for more than a thousand years. Grant him a
moment to realize himself afresh in the face of it. Don't expect him to
stop and give a coherent explanation of what he is doing. He wouldn't
be the true son of the English tradition that he is if he could do that.
Perhaps the occupants of the new chair can do something of the sort for
him.
THE RUSSIAN QUARTER
_By_ THOMAS BURKE
Thomas Burke, a young newspaper man in London, came into quick
recognition with his first book, _Nights in Town_ (published in
America as _Nights in London_) in 1915. His first really popular
success, however, was _Limehouse Nights_, less satisfactory to
those who had read the first book, as it was largely a repetition
of the same material in fiction form. (In fact, Mr. Burke holds
what must be almost a record among authors by having worked over
nearly the identical substance in four different versions--as
essays and sketches, in _Nights in Town_; as short stories, in
_Limehouse Nights_; as a novel, in _Twinkletoes_; as poetry, in
_The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse_.)
Mr. Burke has specialized on London, and with great ability. In the
Limehouse series his colorings seem just a little too consciously
vivid, his roguishness a little too studied, to be quite
satisfying. _The Outer Circle_, a volume of rambles in the London
suburbs, is to me more truly a work of art.
I had known the quarter for many years before it interested me. It was
not until I was prowling around on a Fleet Street assignment that I
learned to hate it. A murder had been committed over a café in Lupin
Street; a popular murder, fruity, cleverly done, and with a sex
interest. Of course every newspaper and agency developed a virtuous
anxiety to track the culprit, and all resources were directed to that
end. Journalism is perhaps the only profession in which so fine a public
spirit may be found. So it was that the North Country paper of which I
was a hanger-on flung every available man into the fighting line, and
the editor told me that I might, in place of the casual paragraphs for
the London Letter, do something good on the Vassiloff murder.
It was a night of cold rain, and the pavements were dashed with smears
of light from the shop windows. Through the streaming streets my hansom
leaped; and as I looked from the window, and noted the despondent
biliousness of Bethnal Green, I realized that the grass withereth, the
flower fadeth.
I dismissed the cab at Brick Lane, and, continuing the tradition which
had been instilled into me by my predecessor on the London Letter, I
turned into one of the hostelries and had a vodka to keep the cold out.
Little Russia was shutting up. The old shawled women, who sit at every
corner with huge baskets of black bread and sweet cakes, were departing
beneath umbrellas. The stalls of Osborn Street, usually dressed with
foreign-looking confectionery, were also retiring. Indeed, everybody
seemed to be slinking away, and as I sipped my vodka, and felt it burn
me with raw fire, I cursed news editors and all publics which desired to
read about murders. I was perfectly sure that I shouldn't do the least
good; so I had another, and gazed through the kaleidoscopic window,
rushing with rain, at the cheerful world that held me.
Oh, so sad it is, this quarter! By day the streets are a depression,
with their frowzy doss-houses and their vapor-baths. Gray and sickly is
the light. Gray and sickly, too, are the leering shops, and gray and
sickly are the people and the children. Everything has followed the
grass and the flowers. Childhood has no place; so above the roofs you
may see the surly points of a Council School. Such games as happen are
played but listlessly, and each little face is smirched. The gaunt
warehouses hardly support their lopping heads, and the low, beetling,
gabled houses of the alleys seem for ever to brood on nights of bitter
adventure. Fit objects for contempt by day they may be, but when night
creeps upon London, the hideous darkness that can almost be touched,
then their faces become very powers of terror, and the cautious soul,
wandered from the comfort of the main streets, walks and walks in a
frenzy, seeking outlet and finding none. Sometimes a hoarse laugh will
break sharp on his ear. Then he runs.
Well, I finished my second, and then sauntered out. As I was passing a
cruel-looking passage, a girl stepped forward. She looked at me. I
looked at her. She had the haunting melancholy of Russia in her face,
but her voice was as the voice of Cockaigne. For she spoke and said:--
"Funny-looking little guy, ain't you?"
I suppose I was. So I smiled and said: "We are as God made us, old
girl."
She giggled....
I said I felt sure I should do no good on the Vassiloff murder. I
didn't. For just then two of her friends came out of the court, each
with a boy. It was apparent that she had no boy. I had no idea what the
occasion might be, but the other four marched ahead, crying, "Come on!"
And, surprised, yet knowing of no good reason for being surprised, I
felt the girl's arm slip into mine, and we joined the main column....
That is one of London's greatest charms: it is always ready to toss you
little encounters of this sort, if you are out for them.
Across the road we went, through mire and puddle, and down a long,
winding court. At about midway our friends disappeared, and, suddenly
drawn to the right, I was pushed from behind up a steep, fusty stair.
Then I knew where we were going. We were going to the tenements where
most of the Russians meet of an evening. The atmosphere in these places
is a little more cheerful than that of the cafés--if you can imagine a
Russian ever rising to cheerfulness. Most of the girls lodge over the
milliners' shops, and thither their friends resort. Every establishment
here has a piano, for music, with them, is a somber passion rather than
a diversion. You will not hear comic opera, but if you want to climb the
lost heights of melody, stand in Bell Yard, and listen to a piano, lost
in the high glooms, wailing the heart of Chopin, or Rubinstein or
Glazounoff through the fingers of pale, moist girls, while the ghost of
Peter the Painter parades the naphtha'd highways.
At the top of the stair I was pushed into a dark, fusty room, and guided
to a low, fusty sofa or bed. Then some one struck a match, and a lamp
was lit and set on the mantelshelf. It flung a soft, caressing radiance
on its shabby home, and on its mistress, and on the other girls and
boys. The boys were tough youngsters of the district, evidently very
much at home, smoking Russian cigarettes and settling themselves on the
bed in a manner that seemed curiously continental in Cockney toughs. I
doubt if you would have loved the girls at that moment; and yet ... you
know ... their black or brassy hair, their untidiness, and the cotton
blouses half-dropped from their tumultuous breasts....
The girl who had collared me disappeared for a moment, and then brought
a tray of Russian tea. "Help 'selves, boys!" We did so, and, watching
the others, I discovered that it was the correct thing to lemon the
ladies' tea for them and stir it well and light their cigarettes. I did
so for Katarina--that was her name--while she watched me with little
truant locks of hair running everywhere, and a slow, alluring smile
that seemed to hold all the agony and mystery of the steppes.
The room, on which the wallpaper hung in dank strips, contained a
full-sized bed and a chair bedstead, a washstand, a samovar, a potpourri
of a carpet, and certain mysteries of feminine toilet. A rickety
three-legged table stood by the window, and Katarina's robes hung in a
dainty riot of frill and color behind the door, which only shut when you
thrust a peg of wood through a wired catch.
One of the boys sprawled himself, in clumsy luxury, on the bed, and his
girl arranged herself at his side, and when she was settled her hair
tumbled in a shower of hairpins, and everybody laughed like children.
The other girl went to the piano, and her boy squatted on the floor at
her feet.
She began to play.... You would not understand, I suppose, the
intellectual emotion of the situation. It is more than curious to sit in
these rooms, in the filthiest spot in London, and listen to Moszkowsky,
Tchaikowsky, and Sibelius, played by a factory girl. It is ... something
indefinable. I had visited similar places in Stepney before, but then I
had not had a couple of vodkas, and I had not been taken in tow by an
unknown girl. They play and play, while tea and cigarettes, and
sometimes vodka or whisky, go round; and as the room gets warmer, so
does one's sense of smell get sharper; so do the pale faces get
moister; and so does one long more and more for a breath of cold air
from the Ural Mountains. The best you can do is to ascend to the flat
roof, and take a deep breath of Spitalfields ozone. Then back to the
room for more tea and more music.
Sanya played.... Despite the unventilated room, the greasy appointments,
and other details that would have turned the stomach of Kensington, that
girl at the piano, her dress cunningly disarranged, playing, as no one
would have dreamed she could play, the finer intensities of Wieniawski
and Moussorgsky, shook all sense of responsibility from me. The burdens
of life vanished. News editors and their assignments be damned. Enjoy
yourself, was what the cold, insidious music said. Take your moments
when the fates send them; that was life's best lesson. Snatch the joy of
the fleeting moment. Why ponder on time and tears?
Devilish little fingers they were, Sanya's. Her technique was not
perhaps all that it might have been; she might not have won the Gold
Medal of our white-shirted academies, but she had enough temperament to
make half a dozen Bechstein Hall virtuosi. From valse to nocturne, from
sonata to prelude, her fancy ran. With crashing chords she dropped from
"L'Automne Bacchanale" to the Nocturne in E flat; scarcely murmured of
that, then tripped elvishly into Moszkowsky's Waltz, and from that she
dropped to a song of Tchaikowsky, almost heartbreaking in its childish
beauty, and then to the lecherous music of the second act of "Tristan."
Mazurka, polonaise, and nocturne wailed in the stuffy chamber; her
little hands lit up the enchanted gloom of the place with bright
thrills, until the bed and the dingy surroundings faded into phantoms
and left only two stark souls in colloquy: Katarina's and mine.
Katarina had settled, I forget how, on the sofa, and was reclining very
comfortably with her head on my shoulder and both arms about me. We did
not talk. No questions passed as to why we had picked one another up.
There we were, warmed with vodka and tea, at eleven o'clock at night,
five stories above the clamorous world, while her friend shook the silly
souls out of us. With the shy boldness of my native country, I stretched
a hand and inclosed her fingers. She smiled; a curious smile that no
other girl in London could have given; not a flushed smile, or a
startled smile, or a satisfied smile, or a coy smile; but a smile of
companionship, which seemed to have realized the tragedy of our living.
So it was that she had, by slow stages, reached her comfortable
position, for as my hand wandered from finger to wrist, from wrist to
soft, rounded arm, and so inclosed her neck, she slipped and buried me
in an avalanche of flaming, scented tresses.
Sanya at the piano shot a glance over her shoulder, a very sad-gay
glance; she laughed, curiously, I almost said foreignly. I felt somehow
as though I had been taken complete possession of by these people. I
hardly belonged to myself. Fleet Street was but a street of dream. I
seemed now to be awake and in an adorable captivity.
With a final volley of chords, the pianist slid from the chair, and sat
by her boy on the carpet, smoothing his face with tobacco-stained
fingers, and languishing, while her thick, over-ripe lips took his
kisses as a baby bird takes food from its mother.
We talked--all of us--in jerks and snatches. Then the oil in the lamp
began to give out, and the room grew dim. Some one said: "Play
something!" And some one said: "Too tired!" The girl reclining on the
bed grew snappy. She did not lean for caresses. She seemed morose,
preoccupied, almost impatient. Twice she snapped up her boy on a casual
remark. I believe I talked vodka'd nonsense....
But suddenly there came a whisper of soft feet on the landing, and a
secret tap at the door. Some one opened it, and slipped out. One heard
the lazy hum of voices in busy conversation. Then silence; and some one
entered the room and shut the door. One of the boys asked, casually,
"What's up?" His question was not answered, but the girl who had gone to
the door snapped something in a sharp tone which might have been either
Russian or Yiddish. Katarina loosened herself from me, and sat up. The
girl on the bed sat up. The three of them spat angry phrases about, I
called over to one of the boys: "What's the joke? Anything wrong?" and
received a reply: "Owshdiknow? I ain't a ruddy Russian, am I?"
Katarina suddenly drew back her flaming face. "Here," she said, "you
better go."
"Go?"
"Yes--fathead! Go's what I said."
"But--" I began, looking and feeling like a flabbergasted cat.
"Don't I speak plain? Go!"
I suppose a man never feels a finer idiot than when a woman tells him
she doesn't want him. If he ever does, it is when a woman tells him that
she loves him. Katarina had given me the bullet, and, of course, I felt
a fool; but I derived some consolation from the fact that the other boys
were being told off. Clearly, big things were in the air, about to
happen. Something, evidently, had already happened. I wondered.... Then
I sat down on the sofa, and flatly told Katarina that I was not going
unless I had a reason.
"Oh," she said, blithely, "ain't you? This is my room, ain't it? I
brought you here, and you stay here just as long as I choose, and no
longer. Who d'you think you are, saying you won't go? This is my room. I
let you come here for a drink, and you just got to go when I say. See?"
I was about to make a second stand, when again there came a stealthy tap
at the door, and the whispering of slippered feet. Sanya glided to the
door, opened it, and disappeared. In a moment she came back, and called,
"'Rina!" Katarina slipped from my embrace, went to the door, and
disappeared too. One girl and three boys remained--in silence.
Next moment Katarina reappeared, and said something to Sanya. Sanya
pulled her boy by the arm, and went out. The other girl pushed her boy
at the neck and literally threw him out. Katarina came over to me, and
said: "Go, little fool!"
I said: "Shan't unless I know what the game is."
She stood over me; glared; searched for words to meet the occasion;
found none. She gestured. I sat as rigid as an immobile comedian.
Finally, she flung her arms, and swept away. At the door she turned;
"Blasted little fool! He'll do us both in if y'ain't careful. You don't
know him. Both of us he'll have. Serveyeh right."
She disappeared. I was alone. I heard the _sup-sup_ of her slippered
feet down the stair.
I got up, and moved to the door. I heard nothing. I stood by the window,
my thoughts dancing a ragtime. I wondered what to do, and how, and
whether. I wondered what was up exactly. I wondered ... well, I just
wondered. My thoughts got into a tangle, sank, and swam, and sank again.
Then there was a sudden struggle and spurt from the lamp, and it went
black out. From a room across the landing a clock ticked menacingly. I
saw, by the thin light from the window, the smoke of a discarded
cigarette curling up and up to the ceiling like a snake.
I went again to the door, peered down the steep stair and over the crazy
balustrade. Nobody was about; no voices. I slipped swiftly down the five
flights, met nobody. I stood in the slobbered vestibule. From afar I
heard the sluck of the waters against the staples of the wharves, and
the wicked hoot of the tugs.
It was then that a sudden nameless fear seized me; it was that simple
terror that comes from nothing but ourselves. I am not usually afraid of
any man or thing. I am normally nervous, and there are three or four
things that have power to terrify me. But I am not, I think, afraid. At
that moment, however, I was afraid of everything: of the room I had
left, of the house, of the people, of the inviting lights of the
warehouses and the threatening shoals of the alleys.
I stood a moment longer. Then I raced into Brick Lane, and out into the
brilliance of Commercial Street.
A WORD FOR AUTUMN
_By_ A. A. MILNE
This is the sort of urbane pleasantry in which British essayists
are prolific and graceful. Alan Alexander Milne was born in 1882,
went to Trinity College, Cambridge; was editor of _The Granta_ (the
leading undergraduate publication at Cambridge at that time); and
plunged into the great whirlpool of London journalism. He was on
the staff of _Punch_, 1906-14. He has now collected several volumes
of charming essays, and has had considerable success as a
playwright: his comedy, _Mr. Pim Passes By_, recently played a
prosperous run in New York. "A Word for Autumn" is from his volume
_Not That It Matters_.
Last night the waiter put the celery on with the cheese, and I knew that
summer was indeed dead. Other signs of autumn there may be--the
reddening leaf, the chill in the early-morning air, the misty
evenings--but none of these comes home to me so truly. There may be cool
mornings in July; in a year of drought the leaves may change before
their time; it is only with the first celery that summer is over.
I knew all along that it would not last. Even in April I was saying that
winter would soon be here. Yet somehow it had begun to seem possible
lately that a miracle might happen, that summer might drift on and on
through the months--a final upheaval to crown a wonderful year. The
celery settled that. Last night with the celery autumn came into its
own.
There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It
is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat. It crackles
pleasantly in the mouth. Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the
complexion. One is always hearing of things which are good for the
complexion, but there is no doubt that celery stands high on the list.
After the burns and freckles of summer one is in need of something. How
good that celery should be there at one's elbow.
A week ago--("A little more cheese, waiter")--a week ago I grieved for
the dying summer. I wondered how I could possibly bear the waiting--the
eight long months till May. In vain to comfort myself with the thought
that I could get through more work in the winter undistracted by
thoughts of cricket grounds and country houses. In vain, equally, to
tell myself that I could stay in bed later in the mornings. Even the
thought of after-breakfast pipes in front of the fire left me cold. But
now, suddenly, I am reconciled to autumn. I see quite clearly that all
good things must come to an end. The summer has been splendid, but it
has lasted long enough. This morning I welcomed the chill in the air;
this morning I viewed the falling leaves with cheerfulness; and this
morning I said to myself, "Why, of course, I'll have celery for lunch."
("More bread, waiter.")
"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said Keats, not actually
picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the
general blessings of the autumn. Yet what an opportunity he missed by
not concentrating on that precious root. Apples, grapes, nuts, and
vegetable marrows he mentions specially--and how poor a selection! For
apples and grapes are not typical of any month, so ubiquitous are they,
vegetable marrows are vegetables _pour rire_ and have no place in any
serious consideration of the seasons, while as for nuts, have we not a
national song which asserts distinctly, "Here we go gathering nuts in
May"? Season of mists and mellow celery, then let it be. A pat of butter
underneath the bough, a wedge of cheese, a loaf of bread and--Thou.
How delicate are the tender shoots unfolded layer by layer. Of what a
whiteness is the last baby one of all, of what a sweetness his flavor.
It is well that this should be the last rite of the meal--_finis coronat
opus_--so that we may go straight on to the business of the pipe. Celery
demands a pipe rather than a cigar, and it can be eaten better in an inn
or a London tavern than in the home. Yes, and it should be eaten alone,
for it is the only food which one really wants to hear oneself eat.
Besides, in company one may have to consider the wants of others. Celery
is not a thing to share with any man. Alone in your country inn you may
call for the celery; but if you are wise you will see that no other
traveler wanders into the room. Take warning from one who has learnt a
lesson. One day I lunched alone at an inn, finishing with cheese and
celery. Another traveler came in and lunched too. We did not speak--I
was busy with my celery. From the other end of the table he reached
across for the cheese. That was all right! it was the public cheese. But
he also reached across for the celery--my private celery for which I
owed. Foolishly--you know how one does--I had left the sweetest and
crispest shoots till the last, tantalizing myself pleasantly with the
thought of them. Horror! to see them snatched from me by a stranger. He
realized later what he had done and apologized, but of what good is an
apology in such circumstances? Yet at least the tragedy was not without
its value. Now one remembers to lock the door.
Yes, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it
was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet,
dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other
things--crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires.
Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end
of the summer is not the end of the world. Here's to October--and,
waiter, some more celery.
"A CLERGYMAN"
_By_ MAX BEERBOHM
Max Beerbohm, I dare say (and I believe it has been said before),
is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles Lamb. It
is not surprising that he has (now for many years) been referred to
as "the incomparable Max," for what other contemporary has never
once missed fire, never failed to achieve perfection in the field
of his choice? Whether in caricature, short story, fable, parody,
or essay, he has always been consummate in grace, tact, insouciant
airy precision. I hope you will not miss "No. 2 The Pines" (in _And
Even Now_, from which this selection also comes), a reminiscence of
his first visit to Swinburne in 1899. That beautiful (there is no
other word) essay shows an even ampler range of Mr. Beerbohm's
powers: a tenderness and lovely grace that remind one, almost
against belief, that the gay youth of the '90's now mellows
deliciously with the end of the fifth decade. He was so enormously
old in 1896, when he published his first book and called it his
_Works_; he seems much younger now: he is having his first
childhood.
This portrait of the unfortunate cleric annihilated by Dr. Johnson
is a triumphant example of the skill with which a perfect artist
can manœuver a trifle, carved like an ivory trinket; in such
hands, subtlety never becomes mere tenuity.
Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Charterhouse
School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a brilliant figure in
the _Savoy_ and _Yellow Book_ circles by the time he was
twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its purest
distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through the
lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of
observing personality.
I have often wondered how it came about (though the matter is
wholly nonpertinent) that Mr. Beerbohm married an American
lady--quite a habit with English essayists, by the way: Hilaire
Belloc and Bertrand Russell did likewise. _Who's Who_ says she was
from Memphis, which adds lustre to that admirable city.
He now lives in Italy.
Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the
rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my
weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he
asked a question, and received an answer.
This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that day,
had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It seems that
Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson "what were the best
English sermons for style." In the interval before dinner, accordingly,
Boswell reeled off the names of several divines whose prose might or
might not win commendation. "Atterbury?" he suggested. "JOHNSON: Yes,
Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson? JOHNSON: Why, not now. I
should not advise any one to imitate Tillotson's style; though I don't
know; I should be cautious of censuring anything that has been applauded
by so many suffrages.--South is one of the best, if you except his
peculiarities, and his violence, and sometimes coarseness of
language.--Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological.
Jortin's sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is very
elegant, though he has not made it his principal study.--And you may add
Smalridge. BOSWELL: I like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both
for neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like
to read all that Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is,
what sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence.
JOHNSON: We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for
anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name I
do not recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions?
JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may."
The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
burrow was no more.
I know not which is the more startling--the début of the unfortunate
clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told
us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful
and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman
was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.
Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or
later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in
our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around Johnson
he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his
self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it startles
us. In Johnson's massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.
Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This
unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he
lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however, does
not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's
strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the Cloth.
To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grace and
charming deference. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good humor. He
was at the Thrales', where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine
dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to
be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the
question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was
one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been
agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the
blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in
which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.
Say the words aloud: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the
passions?" They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic
sense, _cannot_ be said except in a high, thin voice.
You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
you must pipe them.
Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well,
the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very
loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when
at length he suddenly mustered courage to 'cut in,' let his high, thin
voice soar _too_ high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no
other hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson
turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we may be sure, mean to be cruel.
The old lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw
and claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the
strength of Johnson's voice; and the very cadence of those words, "They
were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may," convinces me
that the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does
not record that there was any further conversation before the
announcement of dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily
deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the
poor dear clergyman exclusively.
I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I
omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any
one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even
the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that question.
He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the
neighboring church? I think so. It would account for his having been
invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's
pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a
chair in the background. He has colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a
face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-colored. His hands
are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This
constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak. He has
no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something
whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for
thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is most justly observed" or "Sir, this has
never occurred to me. I thank you"--thereby fixing the observer forever
high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents
itself. "We have," shouts Johnson, "no sermons addressed to the
passions, that are good for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver
with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can't bear it, I
shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill,
followed by something thunderous.
Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.
Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established
Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?
And, by the way, who _were_ they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought
that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palæo-Georgians
conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a
big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath
him. But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all
very elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled
full calf, and no palæo-Georgian gentleman's library will be complete
without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but,
bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels
are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a
very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years
hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and
sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly
as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir,"
some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is
one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his
concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of
problems, but is not very creational.--Caine's books are very edifying.
I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is
very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know,"
says the disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as specially
enthralling." The pundit answers: "We have no novels addressed to the
passions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of
enthralment." And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will
not remember) inquires: "Are not Mrs. Glyn's novels addressed to the
passions?" and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will
come when readers of this passage in our pundit's Life will take more
interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those
great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate
between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above
Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must
remember that things are not always what they seem.
Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past
favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by
so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a
correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human,
but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson
and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.
They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.
Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not
elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us
keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than
merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the
Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well
became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But
at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.
And that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust man might
have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in
infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had
they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you
are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest,
the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. "A
Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled again after the brief
encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.
Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was no more.
I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.
SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE VICTORIANS
_By_ STUART P. SHERMAN
Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult,
caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be more
than a cooling bandage--in fact, a wet blanket. In the general
rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent years, Mr.
Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swinging blows in favor
of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard--which was often
square but rarely hollow.
Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from Williams
in 1903, has been since 1911 professor of English at the University
of Illinois. His own account of his adventures, written without
intended publication, is worth consideration. He says:
"My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,' nor as simply
'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example: I lived in
Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and then went on a seven
months' adventure in gold mining in the Black Cañon of Arizona,
where I had some experience with drouth in the desert, etc. That is
not 'literary.'
"Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little paper about
some college friends at Williams. I was in college with Harry James
Smith (author of _Mrs. Bumpstead Lee_), Max Eastman, and
'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey. As editor of the _Williams Monthly_ I have
accepted and rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have
reminiscences of their literary youth.
"Then I spent a summer in the _Post_ and _Nation_ in 1908, which is
a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer teaching at
Columbia; this past summer teaching at the University of
California. My favorite recreations are climbing little mountains,
chopping wood, and canoeing on Lake Michigan.
"This summer I have been picking out a place to die in--or rather
looking over the sites offered in California. I lean towards the
high Sierras, up above the Yosemite Valley.
"My ambition in life is to retire--perhaps at the age of
seventy--and write only for amusement. When I can abandon the task
of improving my contemporaries, I hope to become a popular
author."
Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact contemporary
of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords in more than one
spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to give as good as he
takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. It is high time that
his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning were better known in
the market-place.
UNTIL I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in
our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one
should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last
match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said;
but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious
spirit is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum of
universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary
sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians:
Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment
and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures
forever. Destroy a man's faith in God and he will worship humanity;
destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his
faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in
himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.
What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of course, that Butler,
poor dear, as the English say, was the least worshipful of men. He was
not even--till his posthumous disciples made him so--a person of any
particular importance. One writing a private memorandum of his death
might have produced something like this: Samuel Butler was an
unsociable, burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante in
art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty cynic of inquisitive
temper and, comprehensively speaking, the unregarded Diogenes of the
Victorians. Son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835,
educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordination. But, as we
are told, because of scruples regarding infant baptism he abandoned the
prospect of holy orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with
capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-farming for five
years. In 1864, returning to England with £8,000, he established himself
for life at Clifford's Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting,
adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional trips to Sicily and
Italy, and wrote a dozen books, which generally fell dead from the
press, on religion, literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon,"
however, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 1899 sold between
three and four thousand copies. Butler made few friends and apparently
never married. He died in 1902. His last words were: "Have you brought
the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was cremated and the ashes were
buried in a garden by his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing
to mark the spot.
Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly part betokens no
contempt for fame. Denied contemporary renown, he had firmly set his
heart on immortality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for
it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suffrage of his
countrymen, he would go down by the shrewd use of his cheque book; he
would buy his way in. He bought the publication of most of the books
produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared manuscripts for
posthumous publication and accumulated and arranged great masses of
materials for a biographer. He insured an interest in his literary
remains by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his literary
executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an interest in a biographer by
persuading Henry Festing Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian
proclivities, to abandon the law and become his musical and literary
companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones received between 1887
and 1900 an allowance of £200 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of
£500, the musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and
privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation of Butler's
fame, together with their own, in the next generation.
These good and faithful servants performed their duties with exemplary
zeal and astuteness. In 1903, the year following the Master's death,
Streatfeild published "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with
satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was capable of walking
off on its own legs and exciting general curiosity about its
author--curiosity intensified by the announcement that the novel had
been written between 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation there
began the systematic annual relaunching of old works, with fresh
introductions and memoirs and a piecemeal feeding out of other literary
remains, culminating in 1917 with the publication of "The Note-Books," a
skilful collection and condensation of the whole of Butler's
intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Erewhon dinner had been
instituted. In spite of mild deprecation, this feast, with its two
toasts to his Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed from
the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of believers. Among these
was conspicuous on the second occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not
quite certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to receive honor,
whether he was himself to be regarded as the beloved disciple or rather
as the one for whom Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had
prepared the way with "free and future-piercing suggestions."
By 1914 Streatfeild was able to declare that no fragment of Butler's was
too insignificant to publish. In 1915 and 1916 appeared extensive
critical studies by Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 1919 at last
arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative memoir in two
enormous volumes with portraits, documents, sumptuous index, elaborate
bibliography and a pious accounting to the public for the original
manuscripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at St. John's
College, the Bodleian, the British Museum, the Library of Congress and
at various shrines in Italy and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh
consideration of the man in relation to his work.
The unconverted will say that such a monument to such a man is absurdly
disproportionate. But Butler is now more than a man. He is a spiritual
ancestor, leader of a movement, moulder of young minds, founder of a
faith. His monument is designed not merely to preserve his memory but to
mark as well the present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir
appears to have been written primarily for them. The faithful will no
doubt find it delicious; and I, though an outsider, got through it
without fatigue and with a kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.
It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies its puzzling and
complex subject. Mr. Jones is not of the biographers who look into the
heart of a man, reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accordance
with it. He works from the outside, inward, and gradually achieves life
and reality by an immense accumulation of objective detail, without
ever plucking out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. What
was the man's "master passion" and his master faculty? Butler himself
did not know; consequently he could not always distinguish his wisdom
from his folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and an
egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his wounds in
self-assertion and his hesitancies in an external aggressiveness. Mr.
Jones pierces the shell here and there, but never removes it.
Considering his opportunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his
subject based on his own direct observation; and, with all his
ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating indiscretions, he is
frequently silent as a tomb where he must certainly possess information
for which every reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do
not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the happy
reincarnation of moderation, common sense and fearless honesty.
The whole case of the Georgians against the Victorians might be fought
out over his life and works; and indeed there has already been many a
skirmish in that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor Mr.
Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. Ultimately Butler's
vogue is due to the fact that he is a friend of the Georgian revolution
against idealism in the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary
acclaim with which he is now received is his reward for having long ago
prepared to betray the Victorians into the hands of a ruthless
posterity. He was a traitor to his own times, and therefore it follows
that he was a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which we may
all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor whom we have received
within our lines is whether he will make us a good citizen. We should
like to know pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his
countrymen--whether through defects in his own temper and character or
through a clear-eyed and righteous indignation with the incorrigible
viciousness of their manners and institutions. We should like to know
what vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hitherto the
Georgians have been more eloquent in their disillusions than in their
visions, and have inclined to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent
without much inspecting his solution.
The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering attack on family life,
notably in "The Way of All Flesh"; and many a studious literary man with
a talkative wife and eight romping children would, of course, admit an
occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bachelor apartments. Mr.
Jones tells us that Theobald and Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness
Butler uncovers, were drawn without exaggeration from his own father and
mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of pitiless satire. Butler
appears to have hated his father, despised his mother and loathed his
sisters in all truth and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and
contemptuous feelings towards them all through his life; he studied
these feelings, made notes on them, jested out of them, lived in them,
reduced them to a philosophy of domestic antipathy.
He was far more learned than any other English author in the psychology
of impiety. When he heard some one say, "Two are better than one," he
exclaimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know my sisters."
When he was forty-eight years old he wrote to a friend that his father
was in poor health and not likely to recover; "but may hang on for
months or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to have later
on." In the same letter he writes that he is going to strike out forty
weak pages in "Erewhon" and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial
of a middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a suitable
age.'" His father's one unpardonable offense was not dying early and so
enlarging his son's income. If this had been a jest, it would have been
a little coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears to think it
very amusing, proves clearly enough that it was not a jest, but an
obsession, and a horrid obsession it was. Now a man who attacks the
family because his father does not die as promptly as could be desired
is not likely to propose a happy substitute: his mood is not
reconstructive, funny though it may be in two old boys of fifty, like
Butler and Jones, living along like spoiled children on allowances,
Butler from his father, Jones from his mother.
The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant attack on "romantic"
relations between the sexes. Before the advent of Shaw he poured poison
on the roots of that imaginative love in which all normal men and
maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy cloud shot through
with golden lights.
His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, capable of passion, a
face distinctly virile, rather harshly bearded, with broad masculine
eyebrows. Was he ever in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary
questions which his biographer after a thousand pages leaves unanswered.
Mr. Jones asserts that both Overton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh"
are in the main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes much
evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence in this fact, that
Butler, unlike his hero, was never in prison. Did Butler, like his hero,
have children and farm them out? The point is of some interest in the
case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conventional family.
Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with such women as the
late Queen Victoria would not have approved, relations which J. B.
Yeats has, however, publicly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cynical
enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes pains to tell us that
his own grandfather was never married. He does not hesitate to
acknowledge abundance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access
of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking is the order of
the day and the special pride of contemporary Erewhonians? Why did a
young man of Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in New
Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute biographer perhaps find a
more "realistic" explanation than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr.
Shaw told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." In some
respects he was also a sly old bird.
Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be
sure that the author of "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge
Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now
trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty,
sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a
club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his
manuscripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines
and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his
knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay
in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his
most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find
any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on
his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation
of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than
pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of Alethea
Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage,
he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness
which I used to associate with ladies who had been at school with my
mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored
him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her
cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that
you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was
alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself
construed the words as an overture to which he was indisposed to
respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it
is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings
than "pride and delight."
This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the chivalry which used
to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand
old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss
Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made
notes on his correspondence reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of
her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in
two sonnets from which I extract some lines:
She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain,
For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
Forty and overkind.
'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man
Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
A man will yield for pity if he can,
But if the flesh rebel what can he do?
I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
In these Butlerian times one who should speak of "good taste" would
incur the risk of being called a prig. Good taste is no longer "in." Yet
even now, in the face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven
preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butlerian Adonis of fifty!
The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be thankful that their
fathers had no intimate relations with Butler. There is a familiar story
of Whistler, that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal to
Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in Velasquez?" Butler,
with similar aversion for rivals, but without Whistler's extempore wit,
slowly excogitated his killing sallies and entered them in his
note-books or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserving a copy
for the delectation of the next age: "I do not see how I can well call
Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff of Science, though this is exactly what he is;
but I think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age and then, a
little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the Bacon of the Victorian Era." To
this he adds another note reminding himself to call "Tennyson the Darwin
of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I can recall but one
work of a contemporary mentioned favorably in the biography; perhaps
there are two. The staple of his comment runs about as follows:
"Middlemarch" is a "longwinded piece of studied brag"; of "John
Inglesant," "I seldom was more displeased with any book"; of "Aurora
Leigh," "I dislike it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs.
Browning, or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his
manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends"; of George
Meredith, "No wonder if his work repels me that mine should repel him";
"all I remember is that I disliked and distrusted Morley"; of Gladstone,
"Who was it said that he was 'a good man in the very worst sense of the
words'?" The homicidal spirit here exhibited may be fairly related to
his anxiety for the death of his father.
It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-thinkers to attack
Christianity with reverence and discrimination in an attempt to preserve
its substance while removing obstacles to the acceptance of its
substance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not attack mischievously
like a gamin, he attacked vindictively like an Italian laborer whose
sweetheart has been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a
broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones produces a letter from
a clergyman testifying to his "saintliness." But this must be some of
Mr. Jones's fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zealand, Butler
imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a calm and philosophic spirit of
impartial and critical investigation." In 1862 he writes: "For the
present I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people must have
something to believe in. I can only say that I have not found my
digestion impeded since I left off believing in what does not appear to
be supported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he printed his
"Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," the manner of his
attack was impish; and so was the gleeful exchange of notes between him
and Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the bait. In his
notebook he wrote: "Mead is the lowest of the intoxicants, just as
Church is the lowest of the dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest
of the condiments." He went to church once in 1883 to please a friend
and was asked whether it had not bored him as inconsistent with his
principles. "I said that, having given up Christianity, I was not going
to be hampered by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity,
and not its accessories of external worship, that I had objected to ...
so I went to church out of pure cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889:
"There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social
arrangements--I mean we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of
suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been
laid; and the best way to lay it is to be a moderate churchman."
Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the "Cotter's Saturday
Night"; Renan was a free-thinker, but he buried his God in purple;
Matthew Arnold was a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious
poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in mathematical physics,
but he wrote of Mont St. Michel and Chartres with chivalrous and almost
Catholic tenderness for the Virgin: for in all these diverse men there
was reverence for what men have adored as their highest. There was
respect for a tomb, even for the tomb of a God. Butler, having
transferred his faith to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a
street Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church windows. He
established manners for the contemporary Butlerian who, coming down to
breakfast on Christmas morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, "Well,
this is the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene!"
Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and middle-aged
persons: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making
ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done." His ethics is
founded realistically on physiology and economics; for "goodness is
naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency of means."
Pleasure, dressed like a quiet man of the world, is the best teacher:
"The devil, when he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be
detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt
this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at
all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but
more respectable and on the whole more trustworthy guide." There we have
something of the tone of our genial Franklin; but Butler is a Franklin
without a single impulse of Franklin's wide benevolence and practical
beneficence, a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely,
his immensely intelligent social consciousness.
Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and otherwise, and having
reduced the morality of "enlightened selfishness" to its lowest terms,
Butler turned in the same spirit to the destruction of orthodox
Victorian science. We are less concerned for the moment with his
substance than with his character and manner as scientific
controversialist. "If I cannot," he wrote, "and I know I cannot, get the
literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know
I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such professional
training as he had was for the church and for painting, he seems never
to have doubted that his mother wit was sufficient equipment,
supplemented by reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of men
like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boyhood had given their lives
to collecting, studying and experimenting with scientific data. "I am
quite ready to admit," he records, "that I am in a conspiracy of one
against men of science in general." Having felt himself covertly
slighted in a book for which Darwin was responsible, he vindictively
assailed, not merely the work, but also the character of Darwin and his
friends, who, naturally inferring that he was an unscrupulous "bounder"
seeking notoriety, generally ignored him.
His first "contribution" to evolutionary theory had been a humorous
skit, written in New Zealand, on the evolution of machines, suggested by
"The Origin of Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To support
this whimsy he found it useful to revive the abandoned "argument from
design"; and mother wit, still working whimsically, leaped to the
conception that the organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he
commenced serious scientific speculator, and produced "Life and Habit,"
1878; "Evolution Old and New," 1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and
"Luck or Cunning," 1886. The germ of all his speculations, contained in
his first volume, is the notion of "the oneness of personality existing
between parents and offspring up to the time that the offspring leaves
the parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the offspring
"unconsciously" remembers what happened to the parents; and thence his
theory that a vitalistic purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian
chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His theory has something
in common with current philosophical speculation, and it is in part, as
I understand, a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess, at the present
attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to half a dozen
footnotes in a centenary volume on Darwin; but it hardly justifies his
transference of Darwin's laurels to Button, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and
himself; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that Darwin was
a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a liar. He swelled the ephemeral
body of scientific speculation; but his contribution to the verified
body of science was negligible, and the injuries that he inflicted upon
the scientific spirit were considerable.
For their symptomatic value, we must glance at Butler's sallies into
some other fields. He held as an educational principle that it is hardly
worth while to study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in
his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the first time the
study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett having inquired what subject Butler
and Jones would take up when they had finished "Narcissus," Butler said
that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred subject"; and when
Garnett asked whether they had anything in particular in mind, he
replied that they were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery." In the
same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade professorship of art at
Cambridge; and he took credit for the rediscovery of a lost school of
sculpture.
At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek, which he "had not
wholly forgotten," and read the "Odyssey" for the purposes of his
oratorio, "Ulysses." When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him
that he was reading the work of a young woman! Thereupon he produced his
book, "The Authoress of the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress,
Nausicaa, identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased the
Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she wrote her poem. It was
the most startling literary discovery since Delia Bacon burst into the
silent sea on which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the latest
navigator. That the classical scholars laughed at or ignored him did not
shake his belief that the work was as important as anything he had done.
"Perhaps it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had written
it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert Bridges, "and, except Homer
and Shakespeare"--he should have added Nausicaa--"I have read absolutely
nothing of English poetry and _very little_ of English prose." His
inacquaintance with English poetry, however, did not embarrass him,
when, two years after bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up
the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it prevent his
dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a discussion at an A. B.
C. shop, as a poor old incompetent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex,
speaking for her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take it
all round, it has come pretty easily." The poor old doctor, like the
Greek scholars and the professional men of science, had blunted his wits
by too much research.
Butler maintained that every man's work is a portrait of himself, and
in his own case the features stand out ruggedly enough. Why should any
one see in this infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the
pagan wisdom? In his small personal affairs he shows a certain
old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an experienced old bachelor,
who manages his little pleasures without scandal. But in his
intellectual life what vestige do we find of the Greek or even of the
Roman sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler was
conservative: he respected the established political and economic order.
But he respected it only because it enabled him, without bestirring
himself about his bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at
Clifford's Inn and invent attacks on every other form of orthodoxy. With
a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed by his desire to be original
he worked out the central Butlerian principle; videlicet: The fact that
all the best qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable
establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is valueless and false.
With his feet firmly planted on this grand radical maxim he employed his
lively wit with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case against family
life, of which he was incapable; against imaginative love, of which he
was ignorant; against chivalry, otherwise the conventions of gentlemen,
which he had but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of letters,
whom, by his own account, he had never read; against altruistic
morality and the substance of Christianity, which were repugnant to his
selfishness and other vices; against Victorian men of science, whose
researches he had never imitated; and against Elizabethan and classical
scholarship, which he took up in an odd moment as one plays a game of
solitaire before going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath
his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for originality, his manners
and his assurance, which has been gathering compound interest ever
since. In the original manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned
"Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two displaced later by
Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and
_another_, to limbo as the Seven Humbugs of Christiandom." Who was the
unnamed seventh?
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS
_By_ H. M. TOMLINSON
I shall not forget with what a thrill of delight I came upon H. M.
Tomlinson's _Old Junk_, the volume of essays from which this is
borrowed. One feels, in stumbling upon such a book, much as some
happy and astounded readers must have felt in 1878 when _An Inland
Voyage_ came out. It makes one wonder, submitting one's self to the
moving music and magic of that prose, so simple and yet so subtle
in its flavor, whether poetry is not, after all, an inferior and
more mechanic form. "The cool element of prose," that perfect
phrase of Milton's, comes back to mind. How direct and satisfying a
passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build
and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate
loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand
of the dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as
intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the
pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world,
something for which we have no catchword, the illumination of a
spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and humane.
Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that exquisite,
considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem transparent;
we come close to a man's mind.
In Mr. Tomlinson's three books--_The Sea and the Jungle_ (1912),
_Old Junk_ (1920) and _London River_ (1921) is revealed one of the
most sincere and perfect workmen in contemporary prose.
H. M. Tomlinson was born in 1873; among his early memories he
records: "I was an office boy and a clerk among London's ships, in
the last days of the clippers. And I am forced to recall some of
the things--such as bookkeeping in a jam factory and stoking on a
tramp steamer." He joined the staff of the London _Morning Leader_
in 1904; which was later merged with the _Daily News_, and to this
journal he was attached for several years. During the War he was a
correspondent in France; at the danger of incurring his anger
(should he see this) I quote Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe on this phase of
his work:--"One who was the friend of all, a sweet and fine spirit
moving untouched amid the ruin and terror, expressing itself
everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times with a shattering
candor."
In 1917 he became associate editor of the London _Nation_, where,
if you are interested, you may find his initials almost weekly.
The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There
was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
shadows. Black specters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air,
but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little
friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the
solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It
cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all our
verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to know
of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle for
me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
beside the only worshiper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living
heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding
the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous specters
stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the
world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly
and founder us in original gloom.
The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
golden lily on a silver stem!
"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I nearly
replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife; but that
is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea was that
the bed-book is soporific, and for that reason she even advocated the
reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly
you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You would enter into
sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not only unshriven,
but in the act of guilt.
What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named
are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess at times
they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours,
their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my part,
they are too big for bed-fellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
feeble and restricted glim, following (in pajamas) the statuesque figure
of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere pity,
the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after midnight! Let
those go who like it.
As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colors are prismatic
spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on
fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once the
pillow is nicely set.
For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain
attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to
swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for
a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when
one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works
which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have
not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
literature as there is about theology.
There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
anyhow, is the level of mediocrity to-day; we are all too infernally
clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
the heavens where duty, honor, witty arguments, controversial logic on
great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
certainly smiles at cleverness.
For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white and
lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare of
illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and starlike, as a clear and
lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and
sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate
on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of the evil
they have created.
That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select intimacy
of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not
at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible nature of
this genius who thought that much of us, but how it is that after such a
wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we insist on doing, and our
reasons for doing them, and what happens after we have done them, men do
not change. It does seem impossible that society could remain unaltered,
after the surprise its appearance should have caused it as it saw its
face in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact that Swift
lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not a matter for surprise.
Such books, and France's "Isle of Penguins," are not disturbing as
bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
hand in the book-shelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
"Tristram Shandy" is sure to be found in the sun.
But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
every night for months with Doughty in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a
craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
shins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned from
a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the Red Sea
coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the world you
used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of no other
test.
Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his boys
nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that habit
of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no reason that
he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about. He thought
of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the past. The
familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its wonderful
well-remembered stories of things long past--like that of Esther, one of
the best in English--the eloquent anger of the prophets for the people
then who looked as though they were alive, but were really dead at
heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of it, it is our
home and solace that we want in a bed-book.
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE
_By_ LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), one of the rarest poets and most
delicately poised essayists this country has reared, has been
hitherto scantily appreciated by the omnipotent General Reader. Her
dainty spoor is perhaps too lightly trodden upon earth to be
followed by the throng. And yet one has faith in the
imperishability of such a star-dust track. This lovely and profound
"Precept of Peace" is peculiarly characteristic of her, and reminds
one of the humorous tranquillity with which she faced the complete
failure (financially speaking) of almost all her books. There was a
certain sadness in learning, when the news of her death came, that
many of our present-day critical Sanhedrim had never even become
aware of her name.
There is no space, in this brief note, to do justice to her. The
student will refer to the newly published memoir by her friend,
Alice Brown.
She was born in Boston in 1861, daughter of General Patrick Guiney
who fought in the Civil War. From 1894-97 she was postmistress in
Auburndale, Mass. Her later years were spent in England, mostly at
Oxford: the Bodleian Library was a candle and she the ecstatic
moth.
A certain sort of voluntary abstraction is the oldest and choicest of
social attitudes. In France, where all esthetic discoveries are made, it
was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and
le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind,
brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to
appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it;
full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never
sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly"
among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave,
but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even
Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the
essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our
wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand,
and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the
shorter stick of celery, or
"The friends to whom we had no natural right,
The homes that were not destined to be ours,"
it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we
buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of
Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can
live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into
luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as
full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets
with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an
immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I
want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the
novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian
interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly
extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of
Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously
increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of
concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much
concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be
a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will
disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the
bric-a-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit,
is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake
the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to
cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early
Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need
never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted
sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking
a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life,"
says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act
with too jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap
only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded
eye-corners.
Now nothing is farther from le saint indifférent than cheap
indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is
to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not
he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness,
like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious
elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to
others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all
times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the
absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus
pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will
that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen
outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through
volition, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a
specific act: he has no habits. Le saint indifférent is a dramatic
wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little
haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his
own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being
sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful
propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of
easy good-nature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim
the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the
secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who
wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one
whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which
his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with
some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent
partizan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros
Tyriusque. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in
talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat
less communicative than
"The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height."
Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he
condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In
short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are
spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove
inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw,
and stretches his legs; then heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelopes
him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of
poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."
"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed Hamlet of this mortal
outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its
sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him
vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but
comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear,
where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The
unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of
perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes,
which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order
of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him
first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our
indifférent, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never
tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero
of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his
profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic
pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little
to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who
push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at
competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a
life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine
Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him,
even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the
guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often
from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is
away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted
(though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in
locality, it follows that he is the best of travelers, tangential
merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes
wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a
prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps,
all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives
at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is
really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury
himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he
gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of
commercial ambition.
The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has
hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of indifférents.
From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to
have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with
foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential
to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile--and
no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the
universe--wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely
on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which
his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well
with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation
and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for
an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise
make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war."
And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he
lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions,
and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young
never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newburg field. The imminent deed he made
a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor.
Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take
the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if
he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like
the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The indifférent is a good
thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old
Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is
content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the
Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals
not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The
material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so
sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his
consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out
of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with
perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as
successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel
Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis
Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to
win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the
Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an indifférent, however.
The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three
hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end
of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be
shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of
Gonzaga how he, on his part, should employ the precious interval. "I
should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic
youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to
step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand
is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation
wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian
spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the
counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of
perfection, but also of polity. A very little nonadhesion to common
affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice,
provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The
indifférent believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him.
But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented
by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped
dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:
"Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
For we be come into a quiet rode."
No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the contrary, the
cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said
of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to
another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His
universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental
carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same
delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the
other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such
innermost asylum the right sort of dare-devil sits smiling, while men
rage or weep.
ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT
_By_ STEWART EDWARD WHITE
This is from _The Forest_--one of Stewart Edward White's many
delightful volumes. A very large public has enjoyed Mr. White's
writings--many of his readers, perhaps, without accurately
realizing how extraordinarily good they are.
Mr. White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1873; studied at the
University of Michigan; has hunted big game in Africa; served as
major of field artillery, 1917-18; and is a Fellow of the Royal
Geographical Society. His first book, _The Westerners_, was
published in 1901, since when they have followed regularly.
_"Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cry?"_
About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is so
I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no
predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of too
much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or stimulating
conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of rather a good
night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the forest grow
larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse; your thoughts
drift idly back and forth between reality and dream; when--_snap!_--you
are broad awake!
Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a
little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus
that you enter the temple of her larger mysteries.
For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes they
stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
themselves in the mist of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose-leaves.
In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the voices
of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft
and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even
the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over
the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms swimming across the
field of vision, which disappear so quickly when you concentrate your
sight to look at them, and which reappear so magically when again your
gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness they
speak; when you bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only
the tumults and the tinklings remain.
But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as
often an odor will wake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the
force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a multitude
_en fête_, so that subtly you feel the gray old town, with its walls,
the crowded market-place, the decent peasant crowd, the booths, the
mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted sun. Or, in
the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters, sound faint
and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant notes of
laughter, as though many canoes were working against the current--only
the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices louder. The
_voyageurs_ call these mist people the Huntsmen; and look frightened. To
each is his vision, according to his experience. The nations of the
earth whisper to their exiled sons through the voices of the rapids.
Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest always peaceful scenes--a
harvest-field, a street fair, a Sunday morning in a cathedral town,
careless travelers--never the turmoils and struggles. Perhaps this is
the great Mother's compensation in a harsh mode of life.
Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more
concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water.
And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring
louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside
the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a
whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some
night creature--at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff away--you
are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through the
texture of your tent.
The voices of the rapids have dropped into the background, as have the
dashing noises of the stream. Through the forest is a great silence, but
no stillness at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short curve
of his regular song; over and over an owl says his rapid _whoo, whoo,
whoo_. These, with the ceaseless dash of the rapids, are the web on
which the night traces her more delicate embroideries of the unexpected.
Distant crashes, single and impressive; stealthy footsteps near at hand;
the subdued scratching of claws; a faint _sniff! sniff! sniff!_ of
inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn _ko-ko-ko-óh_ of the little owl; the
mournful, long-drawn-out cry of the loon, instinct with the spirit of
loneliness; the ethereal call-note of the birds of passage high in the
air; a _patter, patter, patter_, among the dead leaves, immediately
stilled; and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the
beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow--the nightingale
of the North--trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a
shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred
figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent--these things
combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they are a part
overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.
No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look about
you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm blanket
the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual, bathes you
from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last vibrations. You
hear the littler night prowlers; you glimpse the greater. A faint,
searching woods perfume of dampness greets your nostrils. And somehow,
mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood, the forces of the world
seem in suspense, as though a touch might crystallize infinite
possibilities into infinite power and motion. But the touch lacks. The
forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the little noises. In all
humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the Silent Places.
At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put fourteen
inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near McGregor's Bay I discovered in
the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping the herbage
like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn that every
night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of his head,
probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had in all
likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the tent
opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always gone by
earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon.
But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and the woods
shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world forces is
a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You cannot know the
night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by coming into her
presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her face to face in her
intimate mood.
The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds,
chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few
moments you roll yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.
And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going through the day
unrefreshed. You may feel like turning in at eight instead of nine, and
you may fall asleep with unusual promptitude, but your journey will
begin clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much in reserve.
No languor, no dull headache, no exhaustion, follows your experience.
For this once your two hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.
A WOODLAND VALENTINE
_By_ MARIAN STORM
Marian Storm was born in Stormville, N. Y., and educated at Penn
Hall, Chambersburg, Pa., and at Smith College. She did editorial
and free-lance work in New York after graduation, and later went to
Washington to become private secretary to the Argentine Ambassador.
Since 1918 she has been connected with the New York _Evening Post_.
This essay comes from _Minstrel Weather_, a series of open-air
vignettes which circle the zodiac with the attentive eye of a
naturalist and the enchanted ardor of a poet.
Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of
frost. Bulbs try the door. February's stillness is charged with a faint
anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth's center
and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds,
who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must
whisper over and over, "Not yet, not yet!" Better to stay behind the
frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of
cold are still aprowl. Wisely the snow places a white hand over eager
life unseen, but perceived in February's woods as a swimmer feels the
changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick stars,
closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert and
serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent to lonely
peoples--herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers--who are abroad in
the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It is in the
long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers.
February knows the beat of twilight wings. Drifting north again come
birds who only pretended to forsake us--adventurers, not so fond of
safety but that they dare risk finding how snow bunting and pine finch
have plundered the cones of the evergreens, while chickadees, sparrows,
and crows are supervising from established stations all the more
domestic supplies available, a sparrow often making it possible to annoy
even a duck out of her share of cracked corn. Ranged along a
brown-draped oak branch in the waxing light, crows show a lordly
glistening of feathers. (Sun on a sweeping wing in flight has the
quality of sun on a ripple.) Where hemlocks gather, deep in somber
woods, the great horned owl has thus soon, perhaps working amid snows at
her task, built a nest wherein March will find sturdy balls of fluff.
The thunderous love song of her mate sounds through the timber. By the
time the wren has nested these winter babies will be solemn with the
wisdom of their famous race.
There is no season like the end of February for cleaning out brooks.
Hastening yellow waters toss a dreary wreckage of torn or ashen leaves,
twigs, acorn cups, stranded rafts of bark, and buttonballs from the
sycamore, never to come to seed. Standing on one bank or both, according
to the sundering flood's ambition, the knight with staff and bold
forefinger sets the water princess free. She goes then curtsying and
dimpling over the shining gravel, sliding from beneath the ice that
roofs her on the uplands down to the softer valleys, where her quickened
step will be heard by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish,
recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she brings.
Down from the frozen mountains, in summer, birds and winds must bear the
seed of alpine flowers--lilies that lean against unmelting snows,
poppies, bright-colored herbs, and the palely gleaming, fringed beauties
that change names with countries. How just and reasonable it would seem
to be that flowers which edge the ice in July should consent to bloom in
lowlands no colder in February! The pageant of blue, magenta, and
scarlet on the austere upper slopes of the Rockies, where nights are
bitter to the summer wanderer--why should it not flourish to leeward of
a valley barn in months when icicles hang from the eaves in this tamer
setting? But no. Mountain tempests are endurable to the silken-petaled.
The treacherous lowland winter, with its coaxing suns followed by
roaring desolation, is for blooms bred in a different tradition.
The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no means the mighty
vintage of April. February has no intoxication; the vague eagerness that
gives the air a pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret
stirring of imprisoned life. Spring and sunrise are forever miracles,
but the early hour of the wonder hardly hints the exuberance of its
fulfilment. Even the forest dwellers move gravely, thankful for any
promise of kindness from the lord of day as he hangs above a sea-gray
landscape, but knowing well that their long duress is not yet to end.
Deer pathetically haunt the outskirts of farms, gazing upon cattle
feeding in winter pasture from the stack, and often, after dark,
clearing the fences and robbing the same disheveled storehouse. Not a
chipmunk winks from the top rail. The woodchuck, after his single
expeditionary effort on Candlemas, which he is obliged to make for
mankind's enlightenment, has retired without being seen, in sunshine or
shadow, and has not the slightest intention of disturbing himself just
yet. Though snowdrops may feel uneasy, he knows too much about the Ides
of March! Quietest of all Northern woods creatures, the otter slides
from one ice-hung waterfall to the next. The solitary scamperer left is
the cottontail, appealing because he is the most pursued and politest of
the furry; faithfully trying to give no offense, except when starvation
points to winter cabbage, he is none the less fey. So is the mink,
though he moves like a phantom.
Mosses, whereon March in coming treads first, show one hue brighter in
the swamps. Pussy willows have made a gray dawn in viny caverns where
the day's own dawn looks in but faintly, and the flushing of the red
willow betrays reveries of a not impossible cowslip upon the bank
beneath. The blue jay has mentioned it in the course of his voluble
recollections. He is unwilling to prophesy arbutus, but he will just
hint that when the leaves in the wood lot show through snow as early as
this.... Once he found a hepatica bud the last day of February....
Speaking with his old friend, the muskrat, last week.... And when you
can see red pebbles in the creek at five o'clock in the afternoon....
But it is no use to expect yellow orchids on the west knoll this spring,
for some people found them there last year, and after that you might as
well.... Of course cowslips beside red willows are remarkably pretty,
just as blue jays in a cedar with blue berries.... He is interminable,
but then he has seen a great deal of life. And February needs her blue
jays' unwearied and conquering faith.
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY
_By_ GEORGE SANTAYANA
George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863, of Spanish parentage.
He graduated from Harvard in 1886, and taught philosophy there,
1889-1911. He lives now, I think, in England. I must be frank:
except his poems, I only know his work in that enthralling volume,
_Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana_, edited
by L. Pearsall Smith. Much of it is too esoteric for my grasp, but
Mr. Smith's redaction brings the fascination of Santayana's
philosophy within the compass of what Tennyson called "a
second-rate sensitive mind"; and, if mine is a criterion, such will
find it of the highest stimulus. This discourse on poetry seems to
me one of the most pregnant utterances on the subject. It is not
perfectly appreciated by merely one reading; but even if you have
to become a poet to enjoy it fully, that will do yourself least
harm.
If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history,
because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from
unmeaning circumstances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry
is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate
experience. Poetry breaks up the trite conceptions designated by current
words into the sensuous qualities out of which those conceptions were
originally put together. We name what we conceive and believe in, not
what we see; things, not images; souls, not voices and silhouettes. This
naming, with the whole education of the senses which it accompanies,
subserves the uses of life; in order to thread our way through the
labyrinth of objects which assault us, we must make a great selection in
our sensuous experience; half of what we see and hear we must pass over
as insignificant, while we piece out the other half with such an ideal
complement as is necessary to turn it into a fixed and well-ordered
conception of the world. This labor of perception and understanding,
this spelling of the material meaning of experience, is enshrined in our
workaday language and ideas; ideas which are literally poetic in the
sense that they are "made" (for every conception in an adult mind is a
fiction), but which are at the same time prosaic because they are made
economically, by abstraction, and for use.
When the child of poetic genius, who has learned this intellectual and
utilitarian language in the cradle, goes afield and gathers for himself
the aspects of nature, he begins to encumber his mind with the many
living impressions which the intellect rejected, and which the language
of the intellect can hardly convey; he labors with his nameless burden
of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and
reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his
inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and
the discipline of expression.
The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye, or recovers it
easily; he disintegrates the fictions of common perception into their
sensuous elements, gathers these together again into chance groups as
the accidents of his environment or the affinities of his temperament
may conjoin them; and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of
fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart,
presently bubble over into some kind of utterance.
The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions bring them nearer to our
actual perceptions than common discourse could come; yet they may easily
seem remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to think
entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted in the algebraic
rapidity of their thinking by a moment's pause and examination of heart,
nor ever to plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and
imagery over which the bridge of prosaic associations habitually carries
us safe and dry to some conventional act. How slight that bridge
commonly is, how much an affair of trestles and wire, we can hardly
conceive until we have trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness of
introspection. But psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally
will confess, that we hurry by the procession of our mental images as we
do by the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly forgetting
the noise and movement of the scene, and looking only for the corner we
would turn or the door we would enter. Yet in our alertest moment the
depths of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands drawn in
bare outline against a background of chaos and unrest. Our logical
thoughts dominate experience only as the parallels and meridians make a
checkerboard of the sea. They guide our voyage without controlling the
waves, which toss forever in spite of our ability to ride over them to
our chosen ends. Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a
dream controlled.
Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet fetches his wares. He
dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world and
brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and
reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things unnecessary,
he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in again into the landscape the
tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from it. If he seems
sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring an
experience. The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its
ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and
this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the
image, because he stops to enjoy. He wanders into the bypaths of
association because the bypaths are delightful. The love of beauty which
made him give measure and cadence to his words, the love of harmony
which made him rhyme them, reappear in his imagination and make him
select there also the material that is itself beautiful, or capable of
assuming beautiful forms. The link that binds together the ideas,
sometimes so wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often the
link of emotion; they have in common some element of beauty or of
horror.
NOCTURNE
_By_ SIMEON STRUNSKY
Simeon Strunsky is one of the most brilliant and certainly the most
modest of American journalists. I regret that I cannot praise him,
for at present we both work in the same office, and kind words
uttered in public would cause him to avoid me forever. All that is
necessary is for my readers to examine his books and they will say
for themselves what I am restrained from hinting. There is a
spontaneous play of chaff in Mr. Strunsky's lighter vein which is
unsurpassed by any American humorist; his more inward musing is
well exemplified by this selection (from _Post-Impressions_, 1914).
If you read _Post-Impressions_, _The Patient Observer_, _Belshazzar
Court_, _Professor Latimer's Progress_ and _Sinbad and His
Friends_, you will have made a fair start.
Strunsky was born in Russia in 1879; studied at the Horace Mann
High School (New York) and graduated from Columbia University in
1900. He worked on the staff of the New International Encyclopædia
in 1900-06, and since then has been on the staff of the New York
_Evening Post_, of which he is now editor.
Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the
Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock
and midnight, when the traffic of the court is at its heaviest, and it
would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her
turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners'
bench and confront the magistrate.
Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A
policeman in citizen's clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath
with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the
frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and
testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of
the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While
he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called
upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while
the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay
the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.
She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.
* * * * *
The Night Court is no longer a center of general interest. During the
first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it
was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a
rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its
appeal to visitors from out-of-town. It stirred even the languid pulses
of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way
of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches
and took notes.
To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the
Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango
has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have
not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the
pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of
the court is without its little group of social investigators, among
whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women,
exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before
the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing
that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration
and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing,
the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress,
which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could
show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of
remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop
windows.
Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the
spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the
Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would
venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her
own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who
called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.
She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualize him
either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident
of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look
behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power
to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate,
and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind
through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.
To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process
came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in
citizen's clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of
a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The
professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of
this process to the tax-payer, and they took notes on the proportion of
first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in
civilization. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay
a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.
Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would
be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the
witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies
which constituted her usual defense. This would give her the
opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the
courtroom with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The
pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least
interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they
wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read
very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were
the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were
printed frequently on the first page.
She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court.
Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional
glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or
in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But
her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable
shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the
dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just
appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk
of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of
concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was
different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing
out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the esthetic
contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she
could catch mere fugitive aspects.
Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and
hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor
really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand
times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with
better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in
person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of
thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest
reporters, analyzed by the statisticians, defended by the social
revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter,
to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can
there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits
of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for
themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court,
anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them?
Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the
Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the
case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however
imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.
That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential
schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our
subsidized dancing-schools for shopgirls, they encourage the
get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the
other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage
is an audience and a stage.
That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night
Court. She saw life there.
BEER AND CIDER
_By_ GEORGE SAINTSBURY
How pleasant it is to find the famous Professor Saintsbury--known
to students as the author of histories of the English and French
literatures, the _History of Criticism_ and _History of English
Prosody_--spending the evening so hospitably in his cellar. I print
this--from his downright delightful _Notes on a Cellar Book_--as a
kind of tantalizing penance. It is a charming example of how
pleasantly a great scholar can unbend on occasion.
George Saintsbury, born in 1845, studied at Merton College, Oxford,
taught school 1868-76, was a journalist in London 1876-95, and held
the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh University, 1895-1915.
If you read _Notes on a Cellar Book_, as you should, you will agree
that it is a charmingly light-hearted _causerie_ for a gentleman to
publish at the age of seventy-five. More than ever one feels that
sound liquor, in moderation, is a preservative of both body and
wit.
There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than Beer;
but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or
an establishment numerous enough to justify the accommodation. In the
good days when servants expected beer, but did not expect to be treated
otherwise than as servants, a cask or two was necessary; and persons who
were "quite" generally took care that the small beer they drank should
be the same as that which they gave to their domestics, though they
might have other sorts as well. For these better sorts at least the good
old rule was, when you began on one cask always to have in another.
Even Cobbett, whose belief in beer was the noblest feature in his
character, allowed that it required some keeping. The curious "white
ale," or lober agol--which, within the memory of man, used to exist in
Devonshire and Cornwall, but which, even half a century ago, I have
vainly sought there--was, I believe, drunk quite new; but then it was
not pure malt and not hopped at all, but had eggs ("pullet-sperm in the
brewage") and other foreign bodies in it.
I did once drink, at St David's, ale so new that it frothed from the
cask as creamily as if it had been bottled: and I wondered whether the
famous beer of Bala, which Borrow found so good at his first visit and
so bad at his second, had been like it.[E]
On the other hand, the very best Bass I ever drank had had an exactly
contrary experience. In the year 1875, when I was resident at Elgin, I
and a friend now dead, the Procurator-Fiscal of the district, devoted
the May "Sacrament holidays," which were then still kept in those remote
parts, to a walking tour up the Findhorn and across to Loch Ness and
Glen Urquhart. At the Freeburn Inn on the first-named river we found
some beer of singular excellence: and, asking the damsel who waited on
us about it, were informed that a cask of Bass had been put in during
the previous October, but, owing to a sudden break in the weather and
the departure of all visitors, had never been tapped till our arrival.
Beer of ordinary strength left too long in the cask gets "hard" of
course; but no one who deserves to drink it would drink it from anything
but the cask if he could help it. Jars are makeshifts, though useful
makeshifts: and small beer will not keep in them for much more than a
week. Nor are the very small barrels, known by various affectionate
diminutives ("pin," etc.) in the country districts, much to be
recommended. "We'll drink it in the firkin, my boy!" is the lowest
admission in point of volume that should be allowed. Of one such firkin
I have a pleasant memory and memorial, though it never reposed in my
home cellar. It was just before the present century opened, and some
years before we Professors in Scotland had, of our own motion and
against considerable opposition, given up half of the old six months'
holiday without asking for or receiving a penny more salary. (I have
since chuckled at the horror and wrath with which Mr. Smillie and Mr.
Thomas would hear of such profligate conduct.) One could therefore move
about with fairly long halts: and I had taken from a friend a house at
Abingdon for some time. So, though I could not even then drink quite as
much beer as I could thirty years earlier a little higher up the Thames,
it became necessary to procure a cask. It came--one of Bass's minor
mildnesses--affectionately labeled "Mr. George Saintsbury. Full to the
bung." I detached the card, and I believe I have it to this day as my
choicest (because quite unsolicited) testimonial.
Very strong beer permits itself, of course, to be bottled and kept in
bottles: but I rather doubt whether it also is not best from the wood;
though it is equally of course, much easier to cellar it and keep it
bottled. Its kinds are various and curious. "Scotch ale" is famous, and
at its best (I never drank better than Younger's) excellent: but its
tendency, I think, is to be too sweet. I once invested in some--not
Younger's--which I kept for nearly sixteen years, and which was still
treacle at the end. Bass's No. 1 requires no praises. Once when living
in the Cambridgeshire village mentioned earlier I had some, bottled in
Cambridge itself, of great age and excellence. Indeed, two guests,
though both of them were Cambridge men, and should have had what Mr.
Lang once called the "robust" habits of that University, fell into one
ditch after partaking of it. (I own that the lanes thereabouts are very
dark.) In former days, though probably not at present, you could often
find rather choice specimens of strong beer produced at small breweries
in the country. I remember such even in the Channel Islands. And I
suspect the Universities themselves have been subject to "declensions
and fallings off." I know that in my undergraduate days at Merton we
always had proper beer-glasses, like the old "flute" champagnes, served
regularly at cheese-time with a most noble beer called "Archdeacon,"
which was then actually brewed in the sacristy of the College chapel. I
have since--a slight sorrow to season the joy of reinstatement
there--been told that it is now obtained from outside.[F] And All Souls
is the only other college in which, from actual recent experience, I can
imagine the possibility of the exorcism,
Strongbeerum! discede a lay-fratre Petro,
if lay-brother Peter were so silly as to abuse, or play tricks with, the
good gift.
I have never had many experiences of real "home-brewed," but two which I
had were pleasing. There was much home-brewing in East Anglia at the
time I lived there, and I once got the village carpenter to give me some
of his own manufacture. It was as good light ale as I ever wish to drink
(many times better than the wretched stuff that Dora has foisted on us),
and he told me that, counting in every expense for material, cost and
wear of plant, etc., it came to about a penny[G] a quart. The other was
very different. The late Lord de Tabley--better or at least longer known
as Mr. Leicester Warren--once gave a dinner at the Athenæum at which I
was present, and had up from his Cheshire cellars some of the old ale
for which that county is said to be famous, to make flip after dinner.
It was shunned by most of the pusillanimous guests, but not by me, and
it was excellent. But I should like to have tried it unflipped.[H]
I never drank mum, which all know from The Antiquary, some from "The
Ryme of Sir Lancelot Bogle," and some again from the notice which Mr.
Gladstone's love of Scott (may it plead for him!) gave it once in some
Budget debate, I think. It is said to be brewed of wheat, which is not
in its favor (wheat was meant to be eaten, not drunk) and very bitter,
which is. Nearly all bitter drinks are good. The only time I ever drank
"spruce" beer I did not like it. The comeliest of black malts is, of
course, that noble liquor called of Guinness. Here at least I think
England cannot match Ireland, for our stouts are, as a rule, too sweet
and "clammy." But there used to be in the country districts a sort of
light porter which was one of the most refreshing liquids conceivable
for hot weather. I have drunk it in Yorkshire at the foot of Roseberry
Topping, out of big stone bottles like champagne magnums. But that was
nearly sixty years ago. Genuine lager beer is no more to be boycotted
than genuine hock, though, by the way, the best that I ever drank (it
was at the good town of King's Lynn) was Low not High Dutch in origin.
It was so good that I wrote to the shippers at Rotterdam to see if I
could get some sent to Leith, but the usual difficulties in establishing
connection between wholesale dealers and individual buyers prevented
this. It was, however, something of a consolation to read the delightful
name, "our top-and-bottom-fermentation beer," in which the
manufacturer's letter, in very sound English for the most part, spoke of
it. English lager I must say I have never liked; perhaps I have been
unlucky in my specimens. And good as Scotch strong beer is, I cannot say
that the lighter and medium kinds are very good in Scotland. In fact, in
Edinburgh I used to import beer of this kind from Lincolnshire,[I] where
there is no mistake about it. My own private opinion is that John
Barleycorn, north of Tweed, says: "I am for whisky, and not for ale."
* * * * *
"Cider and perry," says Burton, "are windy drinks"; yet he observes that
the inhabitants of certain shires in England (he does not, I am sorry to
say, mention Devon) of Normandy in France, and of Guipuzcoa in Spain,
"are no whit offended by them." I have never liked perry on the few
occasions on which I have tasted it; perhaps because its taste has
always reminded me of the smell of some stuff that my nurse used to put
on my hair when I was small. But I certainly have been no whit offended
by cider, either in divers English shires, including very specially
those which Burton does not include, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, or in
Normandy. The Guipuzcoan variety I have, unfortunately, had no
opportunity of tasting. Besides, perry seems to me to be an abuse of
that excellent creature the pear, whereas cider-apples furnish one of
the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of
alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else
whatever, and they are excellent good for that. I think I like the weak
ciders, such as those of the west and the Normandy, better than the
stronger ones,[J] and draught cider much better than bottled. That of
Norfolk, which has been much commended of late, I have never tasted; but
I have had both Western and West-Midland cider in my cellar, often in
bottle and once or twice in cask. It is a pity that the
liquor--extremely agreeable to the taste, one of the most
thirst-quenching to be anywhere found, of no overpowering alcoholic
strength as a rule, and almost sovereign for gout--is not to be drunk
without caution, and sometimes has to be given up altogether from other
medical aspects. Qualified with brandy--a mixture which was first
imparted to me at a roadside inn by a very amiable Dorsetshire farmer
whom I met while walking from Sherborne to Blandford in my first Oxford
"long"--it is capital: and cider-cup who knoweth not? If there be any
such, let him not wait longer than to-morrow before establishing
knowledge. As for the pure juice of the apple, four gallons a day per
man used to be the harvest allowance in Somerset when I was a boy. It is
refreshing only to think of it now.
Of mead or metheglin, the third indigenous liquor of Southern Britain, I
know little. Indeed, I should have known nothing at all of it had it not
been that the parish-clerk and sexton of the Cambridgeshire village
where I lived, and the caretaker of a vinery which I rented, was a
bee-keeper and mead-maker. He gave me some once. I did not care much for
it. It was like a sweet weak beer, with, of course, the special honey
flavor. But I should imagine that it was susceptible of a great many
different modes of preparation, and it is obvious, considering what it
is made of, that it could be brewed of almost any strength. Old literary
notices generally speak of it as strong.
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP
_By_ BERTRAND RUSSELL
"A Free Man's Worship" was written in 1902; it was republished by
Mr. Russell in 1918 in his volume _Mysticism and Logic_. It is
interesting to note carefully Mr. Russell's views in this fine
essay in connection with the fact that he was imprisoned by the
British Government as a pacifist during the War.
Much of Mr. Russell's writing, in mathematical and philosophical
fields, is above the head of the desultory reader; but so
stimulating a paper as this one should not be neglected by the
moderately inquisitive amateur.
Bertrand Russell was born in 1872, studied at Trinity College,
Cambridge, and is widely known as a thinker of uncompromising
liberalism.
To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
Creation, saying:
"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow
wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not
given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
undeserved praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled
inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the
planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid
crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean,
and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees,
huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding,
fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the
play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the
knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man
saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is
struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before
Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose,
could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence
something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of
reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God
intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he
followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his
ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive
him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he
invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased.
And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the
future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that
enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled;
and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and
worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's
sun; and all returned again to nebula.
"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed
again.'"
Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;
that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his
beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve
an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages,
all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably
be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things,
if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no
philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the
scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as
Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that
Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a
child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge
of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his
unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental
control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to
criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the
world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this
lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward
life.
The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before
the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects
more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods,
without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and
very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation
and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods:
surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has
been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will
not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be
generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave,
who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master
deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet
acknowledged, Power may be freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited
respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to
gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they
feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still
urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude
inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power
and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint.
Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their
morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors
are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so
repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have
become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in
some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the
world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the
mystic unity of what is and what should be.
But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
non-human Power. When we have realized that Power is largely bad, that
man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us:
Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God
exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own
conscience?
The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche
and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure
to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a
prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If
strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength
of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to
recognize that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we
know there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the
ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of
matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal
of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of
these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If
Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In
this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God
created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must
submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty
planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let
us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
before us.
When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a
spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to
the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile
universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to
refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the
duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is
still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil
world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs
there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to
overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our
desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the
submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission
of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of
our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the
vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant
world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered
contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and
thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall
yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations
of Time.
Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of
evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding
that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are
yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form
part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced
is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for
proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our
hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods,
when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every
man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there
is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a
passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by
death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn,
each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however
beautiful may be the things we crave for, Fate may nevertheless forbid
them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without
repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right:
it is the very gate of wisdom.
But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom; for not by
renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own
ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of
imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines
and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of
change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of
fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will
shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a
cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered.
The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the
gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can
the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the
Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose
radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to
gladden the pilgrim's heart.
When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both
to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that
the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at
last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to
transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining
gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the
world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the
events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the
insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which
its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery
over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with
which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is
its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden
treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to
swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the
proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the
very center of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest
mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his
columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life
continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the
servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless
city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy
the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honor to those brave warriors
who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious
invaders the home of the unsubdued.
But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more
or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the
spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the
irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an
overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.
In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little
trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of
day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the
flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid
hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must
struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole
weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.
Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into
the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter
of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are
born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost
shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to
be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the
powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity
to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of
its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late
autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still
glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or
strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was
eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the
things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a
soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison
with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate
and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself,
and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great
as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless
splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no
longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb
it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private
happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with
passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free
man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of
Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be
purged by the purifying fire of Time.
United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a
common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always,
shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a
long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by
weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where
none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief
is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or
misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten
their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the
difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark
of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
glowed.
Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow,
sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through
the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the
coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his
own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a
mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly
defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding
Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the
trampling march of unconscious power.
SOME HISTORIANS
By PHILIP GUEDALLA
Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the
present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House of
Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies, and a
textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most conspicuous
achievement so far is the brilliant volume _Supers and Supermen_,
from which my selection is taken.
_Supers and Supermen_ is a collection of historical and political
portraits and skits. It is mercilessly and gloriously humorous.
Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla knows
how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find the book a
prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for the absurd; his
paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of proving excellent truth.
(Truth is sometimes like the furniture in Through the Looking
Glass, which could only be reached by resolutely walking away from
it.)
Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continuously and
insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of that day. The
charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not lessened since his
fellow-undergraduates strove to convince themselves that no man
could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be. When Mr. Guedalla
"holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or "gives thanks that Britons
never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes Henry James into three
reigns: "James I, James II, and the Old Pretender;" or when he
speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir James Barrie's cans as he
went round with the milk of human kindness," there will be some who
will sigh; but there will also (I hope) be many who will forgive
the bravado for the quicksilver wit.
It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, "History repeats
itself: historians repeat each other." The saying is full of the mellow
wisdom of either writer, and stamped with the peculiar veracity of the
Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might have added, if the
aphorist had stayed for an answer, that history is rather interesting
when it repeats itself: historians are not. In France, which is an
enlightened country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a public
examination in rhetoric, historians are expected to write in a single
and classical style of French. The result is sometimes a rather
irritating uniformity; it is one long Taine that has no turning, and any
quotation may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because _la nuit tous
les chats sont gris_. But in England, which is a free country, the
restrictions natural to ignorant (and immoral) foreigners are put off by
the rough island race, and history is written in a dialect which is not
curable by education, and cannot (it would seem) be prevented by
injunction.
Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease. The
thing is probably scheduled in the Workmen's Compensation Act, and the
publisher may be required upon notice of the attack to make a suitable
payment to the writer's dependants. The workers in this dangerous trade
are required to adopt (like Mahomet's coffin) a detached
standpoint--that is, to write as if they took no interest in the
subject. Since it is not considered good form for a graduate of less
than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that is either
familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily acquired, and the
resulting narrations present the dreary impartiality of the Recording
Angel without that completeness which is the sole attraction of his
style. Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote at the top of
his voice; but a modern historian, when he is really detached, writes
like some one talking in the next room, and few writers have equaled the
legal precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed the
Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and committed other grave
violations of international law."
Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest in the subject, the
young historian should adopt a moral code of more than Malthusian
severity, which may be learned from any American writer of the last
century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of Spain. This manner,
which is especially necessary in passages dealing with character, will
lend to his work the grave dignity that is requisite for translation
into Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style. It will be
his misfortune to meet upon the byways of history the oddest and most
abnormal persons, and he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit
his Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he may indicate at once
the enormity of the subject and the disapproval of the writer. The
writings of Lord Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessary
facility in lightning characterization. It was the practice of Cicero to
label his contemporaries without distinction as "heavy men," and the
characters of history are easily divisible into "far-seeing statesmen"
and "reckless libertines." It may be objected that although it is
sufficient for the purposes of contemporary caricature to represent Mr.
Gladstone as a collar or Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an
inadequate record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy man to
write history without formulæ, and after all sheep are sheep and goats
are goats. Lord Macaulay once wrote of some one, "In private life he was
stern, morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutchman. It is a
passage which has served as a lasting model for the historian's
treatment of character. I had always imagined that Cliché was a suburb
of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus, if the
working historian is faced with a period of "deplorable excesses," he
handles it like a man, and writes always as if he was illustrated with
steel engravings:
The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards a crisis. Surrounded
by a Court in which the inanity of the day was rivaled only by the
debauchery of the night, he became incapable towards the year 1472
of distinguishing good from evil, a fact which contributed
considerably to the effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was
hardly calculated to conform with the monastic traditions of his
House. Long nights of drink and dicing weakened a constitution that
was already undermined, and the council-table, where once Campo
Santa had presided, was disfigured with the despicable apparatus of
Bagatelle. The burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild
laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it was reported in
London that Ladislas had played at Halma the Court of St. James's
received his envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning.
That is precisely how it is done. The passage exhibits the benign and
contemporary influences of Lord Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it
contains all the necessary ingredients, except perhaps a "venal
Chancellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of especial
interest to historians, who are in most cases residents in small county
towns; and there is unbounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer
on the Renaissance, who said _à propos_ of a Pope: "The disgusting
details of his vices smack somewhat of the morbid historian's lamp." The
note itself is a fine example of that concrete visualization of the
subject which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of Frederick's
invasion of Silesia "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red
men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America."
A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the reproduction of
contemporary sayings and speeches. Thus, an obituary should always close
on a note of regretful quotation:
He lived in affluence and died in great pain. "Thus," it was said
by the most eloquent of his contemporaries, "thus terminated a
career as varied as it was eventful, as strange as it was unique."
But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence greater art is
required. It is no longer usual, as in Thucydides' day, to compose
completely new speeches, but it is permissible for the historian to
heighten the colors and even to insert those rhetorical questions and
complexes of personal pronouns which will render the translation of the
passage into Latin prose a work of consuming interest and lasting
profit:
The Duke assembled his companions for the forlorn hope, and
addressed them briefly in _oratio obliqua_. "His father," he said,
"had always cherished in his heart the idea that he would one day
return to his own people. Had he fallen in vain? Was it for nothing
that they had dyed with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred
battlefields? The past was dead, the future was yet to come. Let
them remember that great sacrifices were necessary for the
attainment of great ends, let them think of their homes and
families, and if they had any pity for an exile, an outcast, and an
orphan, let them die fighting."
That is the kind of passage that used to send the blood of Dr. Bradley
coursing more quickly through his veins. The march of its eloquence, the
solemnity of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns unite
to make it a model for all historians: it can be adapted for any period.
It is not possible in a short review to include the special branches of
the subject. Such are those efficient modern text-books, in which events
are referred to either as "factors" (as if they were a sum) or as
"phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also the solemn business
of writing economic history, in which the historian may lapse at will
into algebra, and anything not otherwise describable may be called
"social tissue." A special subject is constituted by the early conquests
of Southern and Central America; in these there is a uniform opening for
all passages running:
It was now the middle of October, and the season was drawing to an
end. Soon the mountains would be whitened with the snows of winter
and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent. Cortez, whose
determination only increased with misfortune, decided to delay his
march until the inclemency of the season abated.... It was now the
middle of November, and the season was drawing to an end....
There is, finally, the method of military history. This may be
patriotic, technical, or in the manner prophetically indicated by Virgil
as _Belloc_, _horrida Belloc_. The finest exponent of the patriotic
style is undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished colonial
clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic wars. His night-attacks are
more nocturnal, and his scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous
than those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the most moving in
my limited circle of drummer-boys. One gathers that the Peninsular War
was full of pleasing incidents of this type:
THE NIGHT ATTACK
It was midnight when Staff-Surgeon Pettigrew showed the flare from
the summit of Sombrero. At once the whole plain was alive with the
hum of the great assault. The four columns speedily got into
position with flares and bugles at the head of each. One made
straight for the Watergate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third
for the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly Smeathe) for
the Tube station. Let us follow the second column on its secret
mission through the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the
huzzas of a thousand English throats. "---- the ----s," cried
Cocker in a voice hoarse with patriotism; at that moment a red-hot
shot hurtled over the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the
frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the ground. Captain
Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up with the dry coughing howl of the
British infantryman. "---- them," he roared, "---- them to ----";
and for the last fifty yards it was neck and neck with the ladders.
Our gallant drummer-boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang
out from the silent ramparts. The 94th Léger were awake. _We were
discovered!_
The war of 1870 requires more special treatment. Its histories show no
particular characteristic, but its appearance in fiction deserves
special attention. There is a standard pattern.
HOW THE PRUSSIANS CAME TO GUITRY-LE-SEC
It was a late afternoon in early September, or an early afternoon
in late September--I forget these things--when I missed the boat
express from Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by the
time-table to spend three hours at the forgotten hamlet of
Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of Dauphiné. It contained besides a
quantity of underfed poultry one white church, one white mairie,
and nine white houses. An old man with a white beard came towards
me up the long white road. "It was on just such an afternoon as
this forty years ago," he began, "that...."
"Stop!" I said sharply. "I have met you in a previous existence.
You are going to say that a solitary Uhlan appeared sharply
outlined against the sky behind M. Jules' farm." He nodded feebly.
"The red trousers had left the village half an hour before to look
for the hated Prussian in the cafés of the neighboring town. You
were alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You can hear their
shrieking fifes to this day." He wept quietly.
I went on. "There was an officer with them, a proud, ugly man with
a butter-colored mustache. He saw the little Mimi and drove his
coarse Suabian hand upward through his Mecklenburger mustache. You
dropped on one knee...." But he had fled.
In the first of the three cafés I saw a second old man. "Come in,
Monsieur," he said. I waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such
an afternoon...." I went on. At the other two cafés two further old
men attempted me with the story; I told the last that he was
rescued by Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to read
about Vichy Célestins until the train came in from the south.
The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject and derives its
particular flavor from the airy grace with which Sir Ian Hamilton has
described it. Like this:
WAO-WAO, _Jan._ 31.--The _rafale_ was purring like a _mistral_ as I
shaved this morning. I wonder where it is; must ask ----. ---- is a
charming fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a voice like
a circular saw.
11:40--It was eleven-forty when I looked at my watch. The
shrapnel-bursts look like a plantation of powder-puffs suspended in
the sky. Victor says there is a battle going on: capital chap
Victor.
2 P. M.--Lunched with an American lady-doctor. How feminine the
Americans can be.
7 P. M.--A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over again. Substitute the
Tenth Army for the Traffordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks
Spruit into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into the frowning
scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. The Staff were obviously
gratified when I told them about Donkelsdorp.
The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed
battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I
knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese
service to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), but his men
bit the trails and dragged them up by their teeth. Slowly the
Muscovites peeled off the steaming mountain and took the funicular
down the other side.
I wonder what my friend Smuts would make of the Yen-tai coal mine?
Well, well.--_"Something accomplished, something done."_
The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition for the beginner,
since it involves a knowledge of at least two European languages. It is
(a) cardinal rule that all places should be described as _points
d'appui_, the simple process of scouting looks far better as
_Verschleierung_, and the adjective "strategical" may be used without
any meaning in front of any noun.
But the military manner was revolutionized by the war. Mr. Belloc
created a new Land and a new Water. We know now why the Persian
commanders demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a Greek
town; it was the weekly demand of the Great General Staff, as it called
for its favorite paper. Mr. Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into
a new style: it is the last cry of historians' English, because one was
invented by a German and the other by a Greek.
WINTER MIST
_By_ ROBERT PALFREY UTTER
Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Washington. He
graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so many Harvard men in
this book: I didn't know they were Harvard men until too late) in
1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 1906. After a varied experience,
including editorial work on the _Youth's Companion_, reporting on
the New York _Evening Post_, ranching in Mexico and graduate study
at Harvard, he went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of
English. He was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at
Beaune, France, 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of
English at the University of California.
Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has
published _Guide to Good English_ (1914), _Every-Day Words and
Their Uses_ (1916), and _Every-Day Pronunciation_ (1918).
Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the lasting
stimulus his teaching has given them: that he can beautifully
practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.
From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I learned very recently that
for pond skating the proper costume is brown homespun with a fur collar
on the jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray herringbone
suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, barren years that I have been a
skater, and no one told me of this! And here's another thing. I was
patiently trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze of a
hockey player who had no better business till the others arrived than to
watch my efforts. "What I don't see about that game," he said at last,
"is who wins?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked bored, and
I remembered that the pictures in the magazine showed the wearers of the
careful costumes for rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes
that looked illimitably bored. I have hopes of the "rocker" and the
"mohawk"; I might acquire a proper costume for skating on a small river
if I could learn what it is; but a bored look--why, even hockey does not
bore me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder that those who play
it look bored. Even Alexander, who played a more imaginative game than
hockey, was bored--poor fellow, he should have taken up fancy skating in
his youth; I never heard of a human being who pretended to a complete
conquest of it.
I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow among the hills will
always have a bit of mist about it, let the sky be clear as it may. The
moonlight, which seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all
pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The shore that was like
iron under your heel as you came down to the ice is vague, when you look
back at it from the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream. The
motion is like flying in a dream; you float free and the world floats
under you; your velocity is without effort and without accomplishment,
for, speed as you may, you leave nothing behind and approach nothing.
You look upward. The mist is overhead now; you see the moon in a
"hollow halo" at the bottom of an "icy crystal cup," and you yourself
are in just such another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her
out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the center of a
circle of vague limit and vaguer content, where passes a swift,
ceaseless stream of impression through a faintly luminous halo of
consciousness.
If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions like faint, bewitching
music, in sunlight it is scarcely less. More often than not when I go
for my skating to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the
mill-dam to the railroad trestle, the hills are clothed in silver mist
which frames them in vignettes with blurred edges. The tone is that of
Japanese paintings on white silk, their color showing soft and dull
through the frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill-dam
the hockey players furiously rage together, but I heed them not, and in
a moment am beyond the first bend, where their clamor comes softened on
the air like that of a distant convention of politic crows. The silver
powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to cover earlier tracings and
leave me a fresh plate to etch with grapevines and arabesques. The
stream winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across with soft-edged
shadows of violet, indigo, and lavender. On one side it is bordered with
leaning birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of hemlocks
under which the very air seems tinged with green. On the other, rounded
masses of scrub oak and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like
clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns, then spreads into
a swamp, where I weave my curves round the straw-colored tussocks. Here,
new as the snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow has
traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints with long dashes
where he trailed his middle toe as he lifted his foot and his spur as he
brought it down. Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its
seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird feet in
irregular curves woven into a circular pattern. A silent glide towards
the bank, where among bare twigs little forms flit and swing with low
conversational notes, brings me in company with a working crew of pine
siskins, methodically rifling seed cones of birch and alder, chattering
sotto voce the while. Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow
tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch, hopped
aimlessly about for a few yards, then went up the bank. Farther on,
where the river narrows again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top
speed has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous indirection as if
it had been defined by all the ponderosities of mathematics. There is no
pursuing track; was it his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of hawk?
The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leaving the upper ridges
almost imperceptibly veiled and the rounded tops faintly softened. The
snowy slopes are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that they
remind me of Dürer's engravings, the fur of Saint Jerome's lion, the
cock's feathers in the coat of arms with the skull. From behind the veil
of the southernmost hill comes a faint note as
From undiscoverable lips that blow
An immaterial horn.
It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I pause and watch
long for the next sign. At last I hear its throbbing, which ceases as it
pauses at the flag station under the hill. There the invisible
locomotive shoots a column of silver vapor above the surface of the
mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the top, looking like nothing so
much as the photograph of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic
outburst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized water standing
like a frosted elm tree. Then quick puffs of dusky smoke, the volley of
which does not reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out
of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner. High on its
narrow trestle it leaps across my little river and disappears between
the sandbanks. Far behind it the mist is again spreading into its even
layers. Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical creaking of four
starlings in an apple tree as they eviscerate a few rotten apples on the
upper branches. I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the river
without delaying for embroideries or arabesques. At the mill-dam the
hockey game still rages; the players take no heed of the noon train.
Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
Or Hatim call to supper....
Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of hard rubber. I
begin to think I have misjudged them when I consider what effort of
imagination must be involved in the concentration of the faculties on
such an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure of beauty.
Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great syllable Om" whereby he
attains Nirvana? I cannot attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey
players win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss.
TRIVIA
_By_ LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's _Trivia_,
the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays are
extracted, is well known: it is too daintily, fragile and absurd
and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has a
cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publication
in 1917 it has become a sort of password in a secret brotherhood or
intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly, for Mr. Smith's
irony is glitteringly edged. Its incision is so keen that the
reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned against himself
until he perceives the wound to be fatal.
Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties. But
he had Repressions--(an excellent thing to have, brothers. Most of
the great literature is founded on judicious repressions). He came
of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family down in the
Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember rightly) was one of
Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the Camden days. But when the
strong wine of the Nineties was foaming in the vats and noggins,
Mr. Smith (so we imagine it, at least) was still too close to that
"guarded education in morals and manners" that he had had at
Haverford College, Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with
docility at Harvard and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward
gush of hilarious satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in
that wellspring of champagne and mercury until many many years
later. When it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his
_Trivia_, privately; the book was published by Doubleday in 1917)
it sparkled all the more tenderly for its long cellarage.
But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at
Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and
Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of that
mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin peaks) and was
three years at Haverford in the class of '85. He went to Harvard
for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his
degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he has lived in England.
STONEHENGE
They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge
circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the Uncles and
Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but
when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates
them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, old,
contemptuous Faces.
THE STARS
Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a
sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of
a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the
Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.
I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night
with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus
followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses,
and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western Sky. Moving along the
road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the
Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me
also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no
account.
THE SPIDER
What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a
waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full
of floating froth and refuse?
No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on
leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops
and dead flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Problem of
Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
L'OISEAU BLEU
What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that I am
looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I
were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it floats
about from one place to another.
When I find myself, however, among persons of middle age and settled
principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps them
going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College, and I
know that many serious people believe it--which maintains that all men,
in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleasure.
This theory certainly brings portly, respected persons very near to me.
Indeed, with a sense of low complicity, I have sometimes watched a
Bishop. Was he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his
Bird?
I SEE THE WORLD
"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now and then
invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really much more
pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of my own of seeing
the World. And of summer evenings, when motors hurry through the late
twilight, and the great houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation,
I go owling out through the dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my
way in unknown streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens
and a bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan, or some
half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and
strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid
people on this flat earth; and at dances, standing in the street with
the crowd, and stirred by the music, the lights, the rushing sound of
voices, I think the Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes
of light past our rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords
in novels; and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by
me, they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on hot
nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner Parties, as I
peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at the silver, the women's
shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine attitudes of
their heads as they lean and listen, I imagine extraordinary intrigues
and unheard-of wines and passions.
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday afternoon, in
the Palladian interior of the London Church, and listened to the
unexpressive voices chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable
assurance that we were in no danger of being betrayed into any unseemly
manifestations of religious fervor. We had not gathered together at that
performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and
sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican
First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscientious--whom,
without loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise.
CONSOLATION
The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer myself by
thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there wasn't one of them
for which I seemed to care a button--not Wine, nor Friendship, nor
Eating, nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth
while then going up in a lift into a world that had nothing less trite
to offer?
Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of reading.
This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished
vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.
THE KALEIDOSCOPE
I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious
collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining and fading for no
reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable--the corner of a
road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are many charming
pictures too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down
on harvest fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the
leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts,
with the rain beating for ever on the fields. Then Winter's upward
glare of snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in
Summer's golden heats.
And as I walk about, certain places haunt me; a cathedral rises above a
dark blue foreign town, the color of ivory in the sunset light; now I
find myself in a French garden, full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in
sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and washing outside its walls;
now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected
light of Oxford lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the
familiar Oxford hours.
THE POPLAR
There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage floats high
in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the
late, decorative sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the
nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those branches sometimes,
like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-colored Moon. In the glare of
August, when all the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze
in those cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
its lightly-hung leaves.
But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
BEYOND LIFE
_By_ JAMES BRANCH CABELL
To my taste, _Beyond Life_, an all-night soliloquy put into the
mouth of the author's _alter ego_ Charteris, is the most satisfying
of Mr. Cabell's books. Its point of view is deftly sharpened, its
manner is urbane and charming, without posture or allegorical
pseudo-romantics. From this book I have taken the two closing
sections, which form a beautiful and significant whole.
James Branch Cabell, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879, graduated
from William and Mary College in 1898. He had some newspaper
experience in Richmond and on the New York _Herald_, and began
publishing in 1904. Not until 1915, until Mr. McBride, the New York
publisher, and his untiring literary assistant, Mr. Guy Holt (to
whom much of Cabell's appreciation is due), began their work, did
critics begin to take him at all seriously. Since that time Mr.
Cabell's reputation has been enormously enhanced by the idiotic
suppression of his novel _Jurgen_. The Cabell cult has been almost
too active in zeal, but there can be no doubt of his very real and
refreshing imaginative talent.
I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in
my own life. I appeal for charity, and implore that literature afford me
what I cannot come by in myself....
For I want distinction for that existence which ought to be peculiarly
mine, among my innumerable fellows who swarm about earth like ants. Yet
which one of us is noticeably, or can be appreciably different, in this
throng of human ephemeræ and all their millions and inestimable millions
of millions of predecessors and oncoming progeny? And even though one
mote may transiently appear exceptional, the distinction of those who
in their heydays are "great" personages--much as the Emperor of Lilliput
overtopped his subjects by the breadth of Captain Gulliver's nail--must
suffer loss with time, and must dwindle continuously, until at most the
man's recorded name remains here and there in sundry pedants' libraries.
There were how many dynasties of Pharaohs, each one of whom was absolute
lord of the known world, and is to-day forgotten? Among the countless
popes who one by one were adored as the regent of Heaven upon earth, how
many persons can to-day distinguish? and does not time breed emperors
and czars and presidents as plentiful as blackberries, and as little
thought of when their season is out? For there is no perpetuity in human
endeavor: we strut upon a quicksand: and all that any man may do for
good or ill is presently forgotten, because it does not matter. I wail
to a familiar tune, of course, in this lament for the evanescence of
human grandeur and the perishable renown of kings. And indeed to the
statement that imperial Cæsar is turned to clay and Mizraim now cures
wounds, and that in short Queen Anne is dead, we may agree lightly
enough; for it is, after all, a matter of no personal concern: but how
hard it is to concede that the banker and the rector and the
traffic-officer, to whom we more immediately defer, and we ourselves,
and the little gold heads of our children, may be of no importance,
either!... In art it may so happen that the thing which a man makes
endures to be misunderstood and gabbled over: yet it is not the man
himself. We retain the _Iliad_, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep
that many question if he ever existed at all.... So we pass as a cloud
of gnats, where I want to live and be thought of, if only by myself, as
a distinguishable entity. And such distinction is impossible in the long
progress of suns, whereby in thought to separate the personality of any
one man from all others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger
Omniscience....
I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry
or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is
not asking very much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible to
me! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose this universe was
intended, to what end it was set a-going, or why I am here, or even what
I had preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I am
expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what it is I have no
notion.... And indeed, what have I done hitherto, in the years behind
me? There are some books to show as increment, as something which was
not anywhere before I made it, and which even in bulk will replace my
buried body, so that my life will be to mankind no loss materially. But
the course of my life, when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of
water that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice and
grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done nothing with
pre-meditation, but rather, to have had things done to me. And for all
the rest of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave every morning
in order to be ready for no more than this!... I have attempted to make
the best of my material circumstances always; nor do I see to-day how
any widely varying course could have been wiser or even feasible: but
material things have nothing to do with that life which moves in me.
Why, then, should they direct and heighten and provoke and curb every
action of life? It is against the tyranny of matter I would
rebel--against life's absolute need of food, and books, and fire, and
clothing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life perish.... No,
all that which I do here or refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I
detect any symmetry anywhere, such as living would assuredly display, I
think, if my progress were directed by any particular motive.... It is
all a muddling through, somehow, without any recognizable goal in view,
and there is no explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere
procurable. It merely seems that to go on living has become with me a
habit....
And I want beauty in my life. I have seen beauty in a sunset and in the
spring woods and in the eyes of divers women, but now these happy
accidents of light and color no longer thrill me. And I want beauty in
my life itself, rather than in such chances as befall it. It seems to me
that many actions of my life were beautiful, very long ago, when I was
young in an evanished world of friendly girls, who were all more lovely
than any girl is nowadays. For women now are merely more or less
good-looking, and as I know, their looks when at their best have been
painstakingly enhanced and edited.... But I would like this life which
moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeliness,
though but in transitory performance. The life of a butterfly, for
example, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in that its loveliness is
complete and perfectly rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker
through existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is
punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and contribute to
deserving charities: and the program does not seem, somehow, quite
adequate. There are my books, I know; and there is beauty "embalmed and
treasured up" in many pages of my books, and in the books of other
persons, too, which I may read at will: but this desire inborn in me is
not to be satiated by making marks upon paper, nor by deciphering
them.... In short, I am enamored of that flawless beauty of which all
poets have perturbedly divined the existence somewhere, and which life
as men know it simply does not afford nor anywhere foresee....
And tenderness, too--but does that appear a mawkish thing to desiderate
in life? Well, to my finding human beings do not like one another.
Indeed, why should they, being rational creatures? All babies have a
temporary lien on tenderness, of course: and therefrom children too
receive a dwindling income, although on looking back, you will recollect
that your childhood was upon the whole a lonesome and much put-upon
period. But all grown persons ineffably distrust one another.... In
courtship, I grant you, there is a passing aberration which often mimics
tenderness, sometimes as the result of honest delusion, but more
frequently as an ambuscade in the endless struggle between man and
woman. Married people are not ever tender with each other, you will
notice: if they are mutually civil it is much: and physical contacts
apart, their relation is that of a very moderate intimacy. My own wife,
at all events, I find an unfailing mystery, a Sphinx whose secrets I
assume to be not worth knowing: and, as I am mildly thankful to narrate,
she knows very little about me, and evinces as to my affairs no morbid
interest. That is not to assert that if I were ill she would not nurse
me through any imaginable contagion, nor that if she were drowning I
would not plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies at swimming:
what I mean is that, pending such high crises, we tolerate each other
amicably, and never think of doing more.... And from our blood-kin we
grow apart inevitably. Their lives and their interests are no longer the
same as ours, and when we meet it is with conscious reservations and
much manufactured talk. Besides, they know things about us which we
resent.... And with the rest of my fellows, I find that convention
orders all our dealings, even with children, and we do and say what
seems more or less expected. And I know that we distrust one another all
the while, and instinctively conceal or misrepresent our actual thoughts
and emotions when there is no very apparent need.... Personally, I do
not like human beings because I am not aware, upon the whole, of any
generally distributed qualities which entitle them as a race to
admiration and affection. But toward people in books--such as Mrs.
Millamant, and Helen of Troy, and Bella Wilfer, and Mélusine, and
Beatrix Esmond--I may intelligently overflow with tenderness and
caressing words, in part because they deserve it, and in part because I
know they will not suspect me of being "queer" or of having ulterior
motives....
And I very often wish that I could know the truth about just any one
circumstance connected with my life.... Is the phantasmagoria of sound
and noise and color really passing or is it all an illusion here in my
brain? How do you know that you are not dreaming me, for instance? In
your conceded dreams, I am sure, you must invent and see and listen to
persons who for the while seem quite as real to you as I do now. As I
do, you observe, I say! and what thing is it to which I so glibly refer
as I? If you will try to form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a
something that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control your
flesh and blood body, you will encounter a walking bundle of
superfluities: and when you mentally have put aside the extraneous
things--your garments and your members and your body, and your acquired
habits and your appetites and your inherited traits and your prejudices,
and all other appurtenances which considered separately you recognize to
be no integral part of you,--there seems to remain in those
pearl-colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little
save a faculty for receiving sensations, of which you know the larger
portion to be illusory. And surely, to be just a very gullible
consciousness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is
not an enviable plight. And yet this life--to which I cling
tenaciously--comes to no more. Meanwhile I hear men talk about "the
truth"; and they even wager handsome sums upon their knowledge of it:
but I align myself with "jesting Pilate," and echo the forlorn query
that recorded time has left unanswered....
Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I believe this is the rarest
quality in the world. Indeed, it probably does not exist anywhere. A
really urbane person--a mortal open-minded and affable to conviction of
his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in anything by irrational
blind prejudices--could not but in a world of men and women be regarded
as a monster. We are all of us, as if by instinct, intolerant of that
which is unfamiliar: we resent its impudence: and very much the same
principle which prompts small boys to jeer at a straw-hat out of season
induces their elders to send missionaries to the heathen. The history of
the progress of the human race is but the picaresque romance of
intolerance, a narrative of how--what is it Milton says?--"truth never
came into the world but, like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that
brought her forth, till time hath washed and salted the infant, declared
her legitimate, and churched the father of his young Minerva." And I,
who prattle to you, very candidly confess that I have no patience with
other people's ideas unless they coincide with mine: for if the fellow
be demonstrably wrong I am fretted by his stupidity, and if his notion
seem more nearly right than mine I am infuriated.... Yet I wish I could
acquire urbanity, very much as I would like to have wings. For in
default of it, I cannot even manage to be civil to that piteous thing
called human nature, or to view its parasites, whether they be
politicians or clergymen of popular authors, with one-half the
commiseration which the shifts they are put to, quite certainly, would
rouse in the urbane....
So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you guessed,
precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly
feel the lack in my own life. And it is that which romance affords her
postulants. The philtres of romance are brewed to free us from this
unsatisfying life that is calendared by fiscal years, and to contrive a
less disastrous elusion of our own personalities than many seek
dispersedly in drink and drugs and lust and fanaticism, and sometimes in
death. For, beset by his own rationality, the normal man is goaded to
evade the strictures of his normal life, upon the incontestable ground
that it is a stupid and unlovely routine; and to escape likewise from
his own personality, which bores him quite as much as it does his
associates. So he hurtles into these very various roads from reality,
precisely as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what lies ahead....
And romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that
man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is
undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and
aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his
existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators),
and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens,
willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The
things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is
solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the
cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the
whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee: so that, however
extravagant may seem these flattering whispers to-day, they were
immeasurably more remote from veracity when men first began to listen to
their sugared susurrus, and steadily the discrepancy lessens. To-day
these things seem quite as preposterous to calm consideration as did
flying yesterday: and so, to the Gradgrindians, romance appears to
discourse foolishly, and incurs the common fate of prophets: for it is
about to-morrow and about the day after to-morrow, that romance is
talking, by means of parables. And all the while man plays the ape to
fairer and yet fairer dreams, and practice strengthens him at
mimickry....
To what does the whole business tend?--why, how in heaven's name should
I know? We can but be content to note that all goes forward, toward
something.... It may be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by
rumors of a dawn which comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we
and our children have no part whatever. It may be that when our
arboreal propositus descended from his palm-tree and began to walk
upright about the earth, his progeny were forthwith committed to a
journey in which to-day is only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it
that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but as
seething atoms which ferment toward its making, if merely because man as
he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one
could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite
unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we
are sustained by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into
something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as
surely as we know that we will to have it thus.
And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and
the affairs of earth, not as they are, but "as they ought to be," which
we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we
perceive that we are talking about God.
THE FISH REPORTER
_By_ ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
This informal commentary on the picturesque humors of trade
journalism is typical of Mr. Holliday's great skill in capturing
the actual vibration of urban life. He has something of George
Gissing's taste for the actuality of city scenes and characters,
with rather more pungent idiosyncrasy in his manner of
self-expression. Careful observers of the art of writing will see
how much shrewd skill there is in the apparently unstudied manner.
One of Mr. Holliday's favorite discussions on the art of writing is
a phrase of Booth Tarkington's--"How to get the ink out of it." In
other words, how to strip away mere literary and conscious
adornment, and to get down to a translucent portraiture of life
itself in its actual contour and profile.
We are told that Mr. Holliday, in his native Indianapolis (where he
was born in 1880), was a champion bicycle rider at the age of
sixteen. That triumph, however, was not permanently satisfying, for
he came to New York in 1899 to study art; lived for a while,
precariously, as an illustrator; worked for several years as a
bookseller in Charles Scribner's retail store, and passed through
all sorts of curious jobs on Grub Street, among others book
reviewer on the _Tribune_ and _Times_. He was editor of _The
Bookman_ after that magazine was taken over by the George H. Doran
Company, and retired to the genteel dignity of "contributing
editor" in 1920, to obtain leisure for more writing of his own.
Mr. Holliday has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mellow,
fluent, and pleasantly eccentric. His _Walking-Stick Papers_,
Broome Street Straws, Turns about Town and _Peeps at People_ have
that charming rambling humor that descends to him from his masters
in this art, Hazlitt and Thackeray. When Mr. Holliday was racking
his wits for a title for _Men and Books and Cities_ (that odd
Borrovian chronicle of his mind, body and digestion on tour across
the continent) I suggested _The Odyssey of an Oddity_. He
deprecated this; but I still think it would have been a good title,
because strictly true.
Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then,
mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen,
and what not. And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of
yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavor to stir and
to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a thousand pities that no man of
genius has ever been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great
literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the
sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colors of story as that
presented by the commerce in fish.
Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of
paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in whale
oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house in
America, down by Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of old Long
John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old place. And
many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim Hawkins come
running out. Take Labrador cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or
to Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings brought to this port from
Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from
the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan;
fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and from France; caviar
from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia,
or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia River.
Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his prime, it is said, there was
not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters to
schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all
their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner
_Tillie B._, whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported
to have been sold to a moving-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean
Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only with the
sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be
rather unrecognizable." Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff
as stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store how little do
you reck of the glamor of what you are doing!
However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish
reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry
of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read:
"Wanted--Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many called, but I was
chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.
The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines
in bright colors. It would seem almost as if there were a different
magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the
statistics put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very
vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in
general, know nothing whatever. There is, for one, that fine, old,
standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the
interests of the coopering industry; there is too, _The Dried Fruit
Packer and Western Canner_, as alert a magazine as one could wish--in
its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes _The
New England Tradesman and Grocer_. And so on. At the place alone where
we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week,
from one for butchers to one for bankers.
_The Fish Industries Gazette_--Ah, yes! For some reason not clear
(though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the
great word among the titles of trade journals. There are _The Jewellers'
Gazette_ and _The Women's Wear Gazette_ and _The Poulterers' Gazette_
(of London), and _The Maritime Gazette_ (of Halifax), and other gazettes
quite without number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too,
curiously enough, to those who christen country papers; and trade
journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers. The "trade"
in each case is a kind of neighborly community, separated in its parts
by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Personals" are a vital
feature of trade papers. "Walter Conner, who for some time has conducted
a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N. Y., has removed to Fort Edward,
leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of business."
_The Fish Industries Gazette_, as I say, was one of several in its
field, in friendly rivalry with _The Oyster Trade and Fisherman_ and
_The Pacific Fisheries_. It comprised two departments: the fresh fish
and oyster department, and myself. I was, as an editorial announcement
said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a "reorganization of our
salt, smoked, and pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow
spirit of the country paper, so removed from the crash and whirr of
metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, that upon the _Gazette_ I
did practically everything on the paper except the linotyping. Reporter,
editorial writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader,
correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.
As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the English language in
eager search of fish news. And while you are about the matter, just find
me a finer bit of literary style evoking the romance of the vast wastes
of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, anywhere you please, than such a
news item as this: "Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark _Elnora_, of Salem,
Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longitude that,
September 8. She proved to be the whaler _Wanderer_, and her captain
said that she had been nine months at sea, that all on board were well,
and that he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil."
As exchange editor was it my business to peruse reports from Eastport,
Maine, to the effect that one of the worst storms in recent years had
destroyed large numbers of the sardine weirs there. To seek fish
recipes, of such savory sound as those for "broiled redsnapper,"
"shrimps bordelaise," and "baked fish croquettes." To follow fishing
conditions in the North Sea occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down
jokes of piscatory humor. "The man who drinks like a fish does not take
kindly to water.--Exchange." To find other "fillers" in the consular
reports and elsewhere: "Fish culture in India," "1800 Miles in a Dory,"
"Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as Fish Eaters." And, to
use a favorite term of trade papers, "etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the
winnowed fruits of this beguiling research.
As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the commission recently
sent by congress to the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, to report on the
condition of our national herd of fur seals; to discuss the official
interpretation here of the Government ruling on what constitutes
"boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in Canada to promote there
a more popular consumption of fish, and to brightly remark _à propos_
of this that "a fish a day keeps the doctor away"; to review the current
issue of _The Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan_, containing
leading articles on "Are Fishing Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our
Country" and "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well Known"; to combat
the prejudice against dogfish as food, a prejudice like that against
eels, in some quarters eyed askance as "calling cousins with the great
sea-serpent," as Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom of one of
the most picturesque monuments in the story of fish, the passing of the
pleasant and celebrated old Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near London,
scene of the famous Ministerial white-bait dinners of the days of Pitt;
to make a jest on an exciting idea suggested by some medical man that
some of the features of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be
introduced into the fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep
an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisheries; to hymn a praise to
the monumental new Fish Pier at Boston; to glance at conditions at the
premier fish market of the world, Billingsgate; to herald the fish
display at the Canadian National Exhibition at Toronto, and, indeed,
etc., and again etc.
As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a "leader," a
translation, say, from _In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitung_, or _Economic
Circular No. 10_, "Mussels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the
last biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of Wisconsin, or
a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in Captivity" reprinted by
permission of _Zoologica_, of the New York Zoölogical Society. To find
each week for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feeling of
the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads" would do, or John Masefield
singing of "the whale's way," or "Down to the white dipping sails"; or
Rupert Brooke: "And in that heaven of all their wish, There shall be no
more land, say fish"; or a "weather rhyme" about "mackerel skies," when
"you're sure to get a fishing day"; or something from the New York Sun
about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford, in the Century,
"To a Goldfish"; or, best of all, an old song of fishing ways of other
days.
And to compile from the New York _Journal of Commerce_ better poetry
than any of this, tables, beautiful tables of "imports into New York":
"Oct. 15.--From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen, 173 pkgs.
fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus hides, 2,000 bags salt;
La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7
pkgs. seaweed, 9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines; Bocas
Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes corals; Tampico, 2 pkgs.
sponges; Halifax, 1 cs. seal skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs.
lobsters, 490 bbls. codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted herrings,"
and much more. Beautiful tables of "exports from New York." "To
Australia" (cleared Sep. 1); "to Argentina";--Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala,
Scotland, Salvador, Santo Domingo, England, and to places many more. And
many other gorgeous tables, too. "Fishing vessels at New York," for one,
listing the "trips" brought into this port by the _Stranger_, the _Sarah
O'Neal_, the _Nourmahal_, a farrago of charming sounds, and a valuable
tale of facts.
As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper that the "markets,"
Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be together; that
"Nova Scotia Notes"--"Weather conditions for curing have been more
favorable since October set in"--would follow "Halifax Fish
Market"--"Last week's arrivals were: Oct. 13, schr. _Hattie Loring_, 960
quintals," etc.--that "Pacific Coast Notes"--"The tug _Tatoosh_ will
perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers of towing a vessel
from Seattle to this port via the Panama Canal"--would follow "Canned
Salmon"; that shellfish matter would be in one place; reports of
saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of the canned fish
trade politically embraced the canned fish advertising; and so on and so
on.
Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes. There
the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has
not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy
character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a
lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see. Up
lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and
narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" overhead. He
threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of
barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout many great
fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging upon the
sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and much of the
time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too
congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there.
You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then you would delight in
Greenwich Street. You could feast your highly creditable appetite for
these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs of
"wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them. The letter press,
as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble pæan to the
earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these
princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of
sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda,
and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried
fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish products."
Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is to-day's
translation of the Garden of Eden.
Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar
for barter here. Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at all,
mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most of us,
by the war. The fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, that
there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until fall, "when the
spoonbill start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish house,
where many men in salt-stained garments are running about, their arms
laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble
dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge fish; and
numerous others of "the same" are trundling round wheelbarrow-like
trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these hides stand on their
tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes are,
containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick, cream-colored
slabs, which is fish. And where still other men, in overalls stained
like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and
dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection.
Here it is said by the head of the house, by the stove (it is chill
weather) in his office like a shipmaster's cabin: "Strong market on
foreign mackerel. Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad report
that German resources continue to purchase all available supplies from
the Norwegian fishermen. No Irish of any account. Recent shipment sold
on the deck at high prices. Fair demand from the Middle West."
So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore Street, looking down a
narrow lane between two long bristling rows of wagons pointed out from
the curbs, to the façades of the North River docks at the bottom, with
the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and Whistleranean
silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond. Hereabout are more importers,
exporters, and "producers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the
celebrities of popular publicity. And he that has official entrée may
learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half-ladder and half-stair, and by
passing through low-ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to
the sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign herring way,
and get the current market quotations, at present sky-high, and hear
that the American shore mackerel catch is very fine stock.
Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of homely Washington
Street, and a turn through Franklin Street, where is the man decorated
by the Imperial Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should
care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in the development of
commerce in the marine products of Japan, back to Hudson Street. An
authentic railroad is one of the spectacular features of Hudson Street.
Here down the middle of the way are endless trains, stopping, starting,
crashing, laden to their ears with freight, doubtless all to eat.
Tourists should come from very far to view Hudson Street. Here is a
spectacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary as any in
the world. From dawn until darkness falls, hour after hour, along Hudson
Street slowly, steadily moves a mighty procession of great trucks. One
would not suppose there were so many trucks on the face of the earth. It
is a glorious sight, and any man whose soul is not dead should jump with
joy to see it. And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over the
stones is like the music of the spheres.
There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building where the fish
reporter goes, which should be enjoyed in this way: Up in the lift you
go to the top, and then you walk down, smacking your lips. For all the
doors in that building are brimming with poetry. And the tune of it goes
like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.," "Seaboard Rice," "Chili Products,"
"Red Bloom Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore
Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Importers of Fruit Pulps,
Pimentos," "Sole Agents U. S. A. Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers,"
"Log Cabin Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and Cocoa
Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.," "Bernese Alps and Holland
Condensed Milk Co.," "Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific Coast
Salmon," "California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on.
The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of the Sardine
Trust, who has just thrown the market into excitement by a heavy cut in
prices of last year's pack. Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the
way at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle Wines--Bordeaux
Clarets and Sauternes," over to Broadway to interview the most august
persons of all, dealers in fertilizer, "fish scrap." These mighty
gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of offices
constructed of marble and fine woods and laid with rich rugs. The
reporter is relayed into the innermost sanctum by a succession of richly
clothed attendants. And he learns, it may be, that fishing in Chesapeake
Bay is so poor that some of the "fish factories" may decide to shut
down. Acid phosphate, it is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore.
And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of his rounds.
Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to
come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad,
heir to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to
be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front Street. A white ship lies at
the foot of it. Cranes rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob
beyond. All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with
steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a
crescent-shaped hole in each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other
things dealt in hereabout are these: chronometers, "nautical
instruments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool
and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin. Queer old taverns,
public houses, are here, too. Why do not their windows rattle with a
"Yo, ho, ho"?
There is an old, old house whose business has been fish oil within the
memory of men. And here is another. Next, through Water Street, one
comes in search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is filled
with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice,
spices, bags and bagging here have their home. And there are haughty
bonded warehouses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin at the
top of a venerable structure comes the dean of the saltfish business.
"Export trade fair," he says; "good demand from South America."
SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG
_By_ HARRY ESTY DOUNCE
Harry Esty Dounce was born in Syracuse in 1889 and graduated from
Hamilton College in 1910. His first job was as a cub reporter on
the journal that newspapermen affectionately call "the old _Sun_";
the adjective is pronounced as though it were in italics. He was on
the staff of the Syracuse _Herald_, 1912-14; spent a year in New
Orleans writing short stories, and returned in 1916 to the magazine
staff of the Sun. He was editor of the Sun's book review section,
1919-20; in 1920 he joined the staff of the New York _Evening
Post_.
"My hand will miss the insinuated nose--"
_Sir William Watson_.
But the dog that was written of must have been a big dog. Nibbie was
just a comfortable lapful, once he had duly turned around and curled up
with his nose in his tail.
This is for people who know about dogs, in particular little mongrels
without pedigree or market value. Other people, no doubt, will find it
disgustingly maudlin. I would have found it so before Nibbie came.
The day he came was a beautiful bright, cool one in an August. A touring
car brought him. They put him down on our corner, meaning to lose him,
but he crawled under the car, and they had to prod him out and throw
stones before they could drive on. So that when I came home I found,
with his mistress-elect, a sort of potbellied bundle of tarry oakum,
caked with mud, panting convulsively still from fright, and showing the
whites of uncommonly liquid brown eyes and a pink tongue. There was
tennis that evening and he went along--I carried him over the railroad
tracks; he gave us no trouble about the balls, but lay huddled under the
bench where she sat, and shivered if a man came near him.
That night he got chop bones and she got a sensible homily on the
unwisdom of feeding strays, and he was left outdoors. He slept on the
mat. The second morning we thought he had gone. The third, he was back,
wagging approval of us and intent to stay, which seemed to leave no
choice but to take him in. We had fun over names. "Jellywaggles,"
suggested from next door, was undeniably descriptive. "Rags" fitted, or
"Toby" or "Nig"--but they had a colored maid next door; finally we
called him "Nibs," and soon his tail would answer to it.
Cleaned up--scrubbed, the insoluble matted locks clipped from his coat,
his trampish collar replaced with a new one bearing a license tag--he
was far from being unpresentable. A vet. once opined that for a mongrel
he was a good dog, that a black cocker mother had thrown her cap over
Scottish mills, so to speak. This analysis accounted for him perfectly.
Always, depending on the moment's mood, he was either terrier or
spaniel, the snap and scrap and perk of the one alternating with the
gentle snuggling indolence of the other.
As terrier he would dig furiously by the hour after a field mouse; as
spaniel he would "read" the breeze with the best nose among the dog folk
of our neighborhood, or follow a trail quite well. I know there was
retrieving blood. A year ago May he caught and brought me, not doing the
least injury, an oriole that probably had flown against a wire and was
struggling disabled in the grass.
Nibbie was shabby-genteel black, sunburnt as to the mustache, grizzled
as to the raggy fringe on his haunches. He had a white stock and
shirt-frill and a white fore paw. The brown eyes full of heart were the
best point. His body coat was rough Scottish worsted, the little black
pate was cotton-soft like shoddy, and the big black ears were genuine
spaniel silk. As a terrier he held them up smartly and carried a plumy
fishhook of a tail; as a spaniel the ears drooped and the tail swung
meekly as if in apology for never having been clipped. The other day
when we had to say good-by to him each of us cut one silky tuft from an
ear, very much as we had so often when he'd been among the burdocks in
the field where the garden is.
Burrs were by no means Nibbie's only failing. In flea time it seemed
hardly possible that a dog of his size could sustain his population. We
finally found a true flea bane, but, deserted one day, he was populous
again the next. They don't relish every human; me they did; I used to
storm at him for it, and he used, between spasms of scratching, to
listen admiringly and wag. We think he supposed his tormentors were
winged insects, for he sought refuge in dark clothes-closets where a
flying imp wouldn't logically come.
He was wilful, insisted on landing in laps when their makers wanted to
read. He _would_ make advances to visitors who were polite about him. He
_would_ get up on the living-room table, why and how, heaven knows,
finding his opportunity when we were out of the house, and taking care
to be upstairs on a bed--white, grimeable coverlets preferred--by the
time we had the front door open; I used to slip up to the porch and
catch through a window the diving flourish of his sinful tail.
One of his faults must have been a neurosis really. He led a hard life
before we took him in, as witnessed the game hind leg that made him sit
up side-saddle fashion, and two such scars on his back as boiling hot
grease might have made. And something especially cruel had been done to
him when asleep, for if you bent over him napping or in his bed he would
half rouse and growl, and sometimes snap blindly. (We dreaded exuberant
visiting children.) Two or three experiments I hate to remember now
convinced me that it couldn't be whipped out of him, and once wide
awake he was sure to be perplexedly apologetic.
He was spoiled. That was our doing. We babied him abominably--he was,
for two years, the only subject we had for such malpractice. He had more
foolish names than Wogg, that dog of Mrs. Stevenson's, and heard more
Little Language than Stella ever did, reciprocating by kissing proffered
ears in his doggy way. Once he had brightened up after his arrival, he
showed himself ready to take an ell whenever we gave an inch, and he was
always taking them, and never paying penalties. He had conscience enough
to be sly. I remember the summer evening we stepped outside for just an
instant, and came back to find a curious groove across the butter, on
the dining table, and an ever-so-innocent Nibbie in a chair in the next
room.
While we were at the table he was generally around it, bulldozing for
tid-bits--I fear he had reason to know that this would work. One
fortnight when his Missie was away he slept on his Old Man's bed (we had
dropped titles of dignity with him by then) and he rang the welkin
hourly, answering far-away dog friends, and occasionally came north to
lollop my face with tender solicitude, just like the fool nurse in the
story, waking the patient up to ask if he was sleeping well.
More recently, when a beruffled basket was waiting, he developed an
alarming trick of stealing in there to try it, so I fitted that door
with a hook, insuring a crack impervious to dogs. And the other night I
had to take the hook, now useless, off; we couldn't stand hearing it
jingle. He adopted the junior member on first sight and sniff of him, by
the way; would look on beaming as proudly as if he'd hatched him.
The last of his iniquities arose from a valor that lacked its better
part, an absurd mixture of Falstaff and bantam rooster. At the critical
point he'd back out of a fuss with a dog of his own size. But let a
police dog, an Airedale, a St. Bernard, or a big ugly cur appear and
Nibbie was all around him, blackguarding him unendurably. It was lucky
that the big dogs in our neighborhood were patient. And he never would
learn about automobiles. Usually tried to tackle them head on, often
stopped cars with merciful drivers. When the car wouldn't stop, luck
would save him by a fraction of an inch. I couldn't spank that out of
him either. We had really been expecting what finally happened for two
years.
That's about all. Too much, I am afraid. A decent fate made it quick the
other night, and clean and close at hand, in fact, on the same street
corner where once a car had left the small scapegrace for us. We tell
ourselves how glad we are it happened as it did, instead of an agonal
ending such as many of his people come to. We tell ourselves we
couldn't have had him for ever in any event; that some day, for the
junior member's sake, we shall get another dog. We keep telling
ourselves these things, and talking with animation on other topics. The
muzzle, the leash, the drinking dish are hidden, the last muddy paw
track swept up, the nose smudges washed off the favorite front window
pane.
But the house is full of a little snoofing, wagging, loving ghost. I
know how the boy Thoreau felt about a hereafter with dogs barred. I want
to think that somewhere, some time, I will be coming home again, and
that when the door opens Nibbie will be on hand to caper welcome.
THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON
_By_ HEYWOOD BROUN
Heywood Broun, who has risen rapidly through the ranks of newspaper
honor from sporting reporter and war correspondent to one of the
most highly regarded dramatic and literary critics in the country,
is another of these Harvard men, but, as far as this book is
concerned, the last of them. Broun graduated from Harvard in 1910;
was several years on the New York _Tribune_, and is now on the
_World_.
There is no more substantially gifted newspaper man in his field;
his beautifully spontaneous humor and drollery are counterbalanced
by a fine imaginative sensitiveness and a remarkable power in the
fable or allegorical essay, such as the one here reprinted. His
book, _Seeing Things at Night_, is only the first-fruit of truly
splendid possibilities. If I may be allowed to prophesy, thus
hazarding all, I will say that Heywood Broun is likely, in the next
ten or fifteen years, to do as fine work, both imaginative and
critical, as any living American of his era.
Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le Cœur-Hardy was
among the least promising. He was tall and sturdy, but his instructors
soon discovered that he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when
the jousting class was called, although his companions and members of
the faculty sought to appeal to his better nature by shouting to him to
come out and break his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the
lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies and the field
unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine refused to grow enthusiastic.
The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing
the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Professor could see no
remedy but expulsion.
"No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at the purple hills which
ringed the school, "I think I'll train him to slay dragons."
"He might be killed," objected the Assistant Professor.
"So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but he added, more
soberly, "we must consider the greater good. We are responsible for the
formation of this lad's character."
"Are the dragons particularly bad this year?" interrupted the Assistant
Professor. This was characteristic. He always seemed restive when the
head of the school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the
institution.
"I've never known them worse," replied the Headmaster. "Up in the hills
to the south last week they killed a number of peasants, two cows and a
prize pig. And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they may
start a forest fire simply by breathing around indiscriminately."
"Would any refund on the tuition fee be necessary in case of an accident
to young Cœur-Hardy?"
"No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all covered in the
contract. But as a matter of fact he won't be killed. Before I send him
up in the hills I'm going to give him a magic word."
"That's a good idea," said the Professor. "Sometimes they work wonders."
From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons. His course included
both theory and practice. In the morning there were long lectures on the
history, anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine did not
distinguish himself in these studies. He had a marvelously versatile
gift for forgetting things. In the afternoon he showed to better
advantage, for then he would go down to the South Meadow and practise
with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impressive, for he had
enormous strength as well as speed and grace. He even developed a
deceptive display of ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling
sight to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the dummy paper
dragon which had been set up for his practice. As he ran he would
brandish his ax and shout "A murrain on thee!" or some other vivid bit
of campus slang. It never took him more than one stroke to behead the
dummy dragon.
Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper gave way to
papier-mâché and finally to wood, but even the toughest of these dummy
dragons had no terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did the
business. There were those who said that when the practice was
protracted until dusk and the dragons threw long, fantastic shadows
across the meadow Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so
loudly. It is possible there was malice in this charge. At any rate, the
Headmaster decided by the end of June that it was time for the test.
Only the night before a dragon had come close to the school grounds and
had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden. The faculty decided that
Gawaine was ready. They gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and the
Headmaster summoned him to a private conference.
"Sit down," said the Headmaster. "Have a cigarette."
Gawaine hesitated.
"Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Headmaster. "But after
all, you have received your preliminary degree. You are no longer a boy.
You are a man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the great world
of achievement."
Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered him a match, but he
produced one of his own and began to puff away with a dexterity which
quite amazed the principal.
"Here you have learned the theories of life," continued the Headmaster,
resuming the thread of his discourse, "but after all, life is not a
matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and
the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and
sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for example, is to slay dragons."
"They say that those dragons down in the south wood are five hundred
feet long," ventured Gawaine, timorously.
"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Headmaster. "The curate saw one last week
from the top of Arthur's Hill. The dragon was sunning himself down in
the valley. The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him very
long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back to make a report to
me. He said the monster, or shall I say, the big lizard?--wasn't an inch
over two hundred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it.
You'll find the big ones even easier than the little ones. They're far
slower on their feet and less aggressive, I'm told. Besides, before you
go I'm going to equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear of
all the dragons in the world."
"I'd like an enchanted cap," said Gawaine.
"What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily.
"A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine.
The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't believe all those old
wives' stories," he said. "There isn't any such thing. A cap to make you
disappear, indeed! What would you do with it? You haven't even appeared
yet. Why, my boy, you could walk from here to London, and nobody would
so much as look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more invisible
than that."
Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into his old habit of
whimpering. The Headmaster reassured him: "Don't worry; I'll give you
something much better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you a
magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this magic charm once and no
dragon can possibly harm a hair of your head. You can cut off his head
at your leisure."
He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk and began to run
through it. "Sometimes," he said, "the charm is a whole phrase or even a
sentence. I might, for instance, give you 'To make the'--No, that might
not do. I think a single word would be best for dragons."
"A short word," suggested Gawaine.
"It can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent. There isn't so much
hurry as all that. Here's a splendid magic word: 'Rumplesnitz.' Do you
think you can learn that?"
Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to have the word well in
hand. Again and again he interrupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I
say 'Rumplesnitz' the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And always the
Headmaster replied, "If you only say 'Rumplesnitz,' you are perfectly
safe."
Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his career. At daybreak the
Headmaster saw him to the edge of the forest and pointed him to the
direction in which he should proceed. About a mile away to the southwest
a cloud of steam hovered over an open meadow in the woods and the
Headmaster assured Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon.
Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether it would be best to
approach the dragon on the run as he did in his practice in the South
Meadow or to walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all the way.
The problem was decided for him. No sooner had he come to the fringe of
the meadow than the dragon spied him and began to charge. It was a large
dragon and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of the
Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the dragon charged it
released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was
almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so
fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time to say "Rumplesnitz"
only once. As he said it, he swung his battle-ax and off popped the head
of the dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier to kill a
real dragon than a wooden one if only you said "Rumplesnitz."
Gawaine brought the ears home and a small section of the tail. His
school mates and the faculty made much of him, but the Headmaster wisely
kept him from being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work.
Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out to kill dragons. The
Headmaster kept him at home when it rained, because he said the woods
were damp and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want the boy to
run needless risks. Few good days passed in which Gawaine failed to get
a dragon. On one particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband
and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he developed a technique.
Pupils who sometimes watched him from the hill-tops a long way off said
that he often allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before he
said "Rumplesnitz." He came to say it with a mocking sneer. Occasionally
he did stunts. Once when an excursion party from London was watching him
he went into action with his right hand tied behind his back. The
dragon's head came off just as easily.
As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the Headmaster found it
impossible to keep him completely in hand. He fell into the habit of
stealing out at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the village
tavern. It was after such a debauch that he rose a little before dawn
one fine August morning and started out after his fiftieth dragon. His
head was heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other respects as
well, for he had adopted the somewhat vulgar practice of wearing his
medals, ribbons and all, when he went out dragon hunting. The
decorations began on his chest and ran all the way down to his abdomen.
They must have weighed at least eight pounds.
Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where he had killed the first
one. It was a fair-sized dragon, but evidently an old one. Its face was
wrinkled and Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a countenance.
Much to the lad's disgust, the monster refused to charge and Gawaine was
obliged to walk toward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon regarded
him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had heard of Gawaine. Even
when the lad raised his battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that
there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the head, for it had
been informed that this hunter was protected by an enchantment. It
merely waited, hoping something would turn up. Gawaine raised the
battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had grown very pale and he
trembled violently. The dragon suspected a trick. "What's the matter?"
it asked, with false solicitude.
"I've forgotten the magic word," stammered Gawaine.
"What a pity," said the dragon. "So that was the secret. It doesn't
seem quite sporting to me, all this magic stuff, you know. Not cricket,
as we used to say when I was a little dragon; but after all, that's a
matter of opinion."
Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the dragon's confidence rose
immeasurably and it could not resist the temptation to show off a bit.
"Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked. "What's the first
letter of the magic word?"
"It begins with an 'r,'" said Gawaine weakly.
"Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What
sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"
Gawaine could do no more than nod.
"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican."
Gawaine shook his head.
"Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down to business. Will
you surrender?"
With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage
to speak.
"What will you do if I surrender?" he asked.
"Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon.
"And if I don't surrender?"
"I'll eat you just the same."
"Then it doesn't mean any difference, does it?" moaned Gawaine.
"It does to me," said the dragon with a smile. "I'd rather you didn't
surrender. You'd taste much better if you didn't."
The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to ask "Why?" but the boy
was too frightened to speak. At last the dragon had to give the
explanation without his cue line. "You see," he said, "if you don't
surrender you'll taste better because you'll die game."
This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's. By means of some such
quip he was accustomed to paralyze his victims with laughter and then to
destroy them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was, but laughter
had no part in his helplessness. With the last word of the joke the
dragon drew back his head and struck. In that second there flashed into
the mind of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there was no time
to say it. There was time only to strike and, without a word, Gawaine
met the onrush of the dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and
shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head of the dragon
flew away almost a hundred yards and landed in a thicket.
Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after the death of the
dragon. His mood was one of wonder. He was enormously puzzled. He cut
off the ears of the monster almost in a trance. Again and again he
thought to himself, "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz'!" He was sure of that
and yet there was no question that he had killed the dragon. In fact, he
had never killed one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head for
anything like the same distance. Twenty-five yards was perhaps his best
previous record. All the way back to the knight school he kept rumbling
about in his mind seeking an explanation for what had occurred. He went
to the Headmaster immediately and after closing the door told him what
had happened. "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz,'" he explained with great
earnestness.
The Headmaster laughed. "I'm glad you've found out," he said. "It makes
you ever so much more of a hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that
it was you who killed all these dragons and not that foolish little word
'Rumplesnitz.'"
Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word after all?" he asked.
"Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought to be too old for such
foolishness. There isn't any such thing as a magic word."
"But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine. "You said it was
magic and now you say it isn't."
"It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the Headmaster, "but it
was much more wonderful than that. The word gave you confidence. It took
away your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have been killed
the very first time. It was your battle-ax did the trick."
Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude. He was obviously
distressed by the explanation. He interrupted a long philosophic and
ethical discourse by the Headmaster with, "If I hadn't of hit 'em all
mighty hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me like a, like
a--" He fumbled for a word.
"Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster.
"Like a egg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it many times. All
through the evening meal people who sat near him heard him muttering,
"Like a egg shell, like a egg shell."
The next day was clear, but Gawaine did not get up at dawn. Indeed, it
was almost noon when the Headmaster found him cowering in bed, with the
clothes pulled over his head. The principal called the Assistant
Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged the boy toward the
forest.
"He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more dragons under his
belt," explained the Headmaster.
The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It would be a shame to
stop such a fine run," he said. "Why, counting that one yesterday, he's
killed fifty dragons."
They pushed the boy into a thicket above which hung a meager cloud of
steam. It was obviously quite a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come
back that night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some weeks
afterward brave spirits from the school explored the thicket, but they
could find nothing to remind them of Gawaine except the metal parts of
his medals. Even the ribbons had been devoured.
The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed that it
would be just as well not to tell the school how Gawaine had achieved
his record and still less how he came to die. They held that it might
have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly, Gawaine has lived in
the memory of the school as its greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in
leaving the building to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs on
the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons' ears are mounted
upon the shield and underneath in gilt letters is "Gawaine le
Cœur-Hardy," followed by the simple inscription, "He killed fifty
dragons." The record has never been equaled.
* * * * *
The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext
transcriber:
wtihout malice=>without malice
smooth and omnious=>smooth and ominous
kinds words uttered=>kind words uttered
It is cardinal rule=>It is (a) cardinal rule
* * * * *
FOOTNOTES:
[A] _A Personal Record._
[B] William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney Porter,
physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in Greensboro, North
Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; in Texas he was amateur
ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and bank teller. Convicted of
misuse of bank funds on insufficient evidence (which he supplemented by
the insanity of flight), he passed three years and three months in the
Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus. Release was the prelude to life in
New York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, his
stories, published in New York journals and in book form, were consumed
by the public with an avidity which his premature death, in 1910,
scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, is almost certainly borrowed
from a French chemist Etienne-Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell
upon in his pharmacal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry
Biography" by C. Alphonso Smith.
[C] O Henry's stories have been known to coincide with earlier work in a
fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without clouding the
originality of the author. I thought the brilliant "Harlem Tragedy" (in
the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through sheer audacity, but the other day I
found its motive repeated with singular exactness in Montesquieu's
"Lettres Persanes" (Letter LI).
[D] "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less; some chid
and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to
depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anatomists."--De Motu
Cordis, chap. i.
[E] This visit (in the early eighties) had another relish. The inn
coffee-room had a copy of Mr. Freeman's book on the adjoining Cathedral,
and this was copiously annotated in a beautiful and scholarly hand, but
in a most virulent spirit. "Why can't you call things by their plain
names?" (in reference to the historian's Macaulayesque periphrases) etc.
I have often wondered who the annotator was.
[F] When I went up this March to help man the last ditch for Greek, I
happened to mention "Archdeacon": and my interlocutor told me that he
believed no college now brewed within its walls. After the defeat, I
thought of the stages of the Decline and Fall of Things: and how a sad
but noble ode might be written (by the right man) on the Fates of Greek
and Beer at Oxford. He would probably refer in the first strophe to the
close of the Eumenides; in its antistrophe to Mr. Swinburne's great
adaptation thereof in regard to Carlyle and Newman; while the epode and
any reduplication of the parts would be occupied by showing how the
departing entities were of no equivocal magnificence like the Eumenides
themselves; of no flawed perfection (at least as it seemed to their
poet) like the two great English writers, but wholly admirable and
beneficent--too good for the generation who would banish them, and whom
they banished.
[G] This was one of the best illustrations of the old phrase, "a good
pennyworth," that I ever knew for certain. I add the two last words
because of a mysterious incident of my youth. I and one of my sisters
were sitting at a window in a certain seaside place when we heard, both
of us distinctly and repeatedly, this mystic street cry: "A bible and a
pillow-case for a penny!" I rushed downstairs to secure this bargain,
but the crier was now far off, and it was too late.
[H] By the way, are they still as good for flip at New College, Oxford,
as they were in the days when it numbered hardly any undergraduates
except scholars, and one scholar of my acquaintance had to himself a set
of three rooms and a garden? And is "The Island" at Kennington still
famous for the same excellent compound?
[I] It came from Alford, the chef-lieu, if it cannot be called the
capital, of the Tennyson country. I have pleasant associations with the
place, quite independent of the beery ones. And it made me, partially at
least, alter one of the ideas of my early criticism--that time spent on
a poet's local habitations was rather wasted. I have always thought "The
Dying Swan" one of its author's greatest things, and one of the champion
examples of pure poetry in English literature. But I never fully heard
the "eddying song" that "flooded"
the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
And the willow branches hoar and dank,
And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.
And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
The desolate creeks and pools among--
till I saw them.
[J] Herefordshire and Worcestershire cider can be very strong and the
perry, they say, still stronger.
