Atlantic Classics

by Unknown

III

There are those whose ardor for humanity finds a congenial vent in the denouncement of all they see about them,—all the institutions of their country, all the laborious processes of civilization. Sociologists of this type speak and write of an ordinary American city in terms which Dante might have envied. Nobody, it would seem, is ever cured in its hospitals; they only lie on 'cots of pain.' Nobody is ever reformed in its reformatories. Nobody is reared to decency in its asylums. Nobody is—apparently—educated in its schools. Its industries are ravenous beasts, sucking the blood of workers; its poor are 'shackled slaves'; its humble homes are 'dens.' I have heard a philanthropic lecturer talk to the poor upon the housing of the poor. She threw on a screen enlarged photographs of narrow streets and tenement rooms which looked to me unspeakably dreary, but which the working-women around me gazed at in mild perplexity, seeing nothing amiss, and wondering that their residences should be held up to this unseemly scorn. They did not do as did the angry Italians of a New Jersey town,—smash the invidious pictures which shamed their homes; they sat in stolid silence and discomfiture, dimly conscious of an unresented insult.

It is hard to grasp a point of view immeasurably remote from our own; but what can we understand of other lives unless we do this difficult thing? Old women in the out-wards of an almshouse (of all earthly abodes the saddest) have boasted to me that their floors were scrubbed every other day, and their sheets changed once a week; and this braggart humor stunned my senses until I called to mind the floor and the bed of one of them (an extraordinarily dirty old woman) whom I had known in other years. Last winter the workers in a settlement house were called upon at midnight to succor a woman who had been kicked and beaten into unconsciousness by a drunken husband. The poor creature was all one bleeding bruise. When she was revived, her dim eyes traveled over the horrified faces about her. 'It's pretty bad,' she gasped, 'it's mighty bad'; and then, with another look at the group of protecting, pitying spinsters, 'but it must be something fierce to be an old maid.'

The city is a good friend to the poor. It gives them day nurseries for their babies, kindergartens for their little children, schools for their boys and girls, playgrounds, swimming-pools, recreation piers, reading-rooms, libraries, churches, clubs, hospitals, cheap amusements, open-air concerts, employment agencies, the companionship of their kind, and the chance of a friend at need. In return, the poor love the city, and cling to it with reasonable but somewhat stifling affection. They know that the hardest thing in life is to be isolated,—'unrelated,' to use Carlyle's apt word; and they escape this fate by eschewing the much-lauded fields and farms. They know also that in the country they must stand or fall by their own unaided efforts, they must learn the hard lesson of self-reliance. Many of them propose to live, as did the astute author of Piers Plowman, 'in the town, and on the town as well.' Moreover, pleasure means as much to them as it does to the rest of us. We hardly needed Mr. Chesterton to tell us that a visit to a corner saloon may be just as exciting an event to a tenement-house dweller, as a dinner at a gold-and-marble hotel is to the average middle-class citizen; and that the tenement-house dweller may be just as moderate in his potations:—

Merrily taking twopenny rum, and cheese with a pocket knife.

Poverty, we are assured, is an 'error,' like ill-health and crime. It is an anachronism in civilization, a stain upon a wisely governed land. But into our country which, after a human fashion, is both wise and foolish, pours the poverty of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants with but a few dollars between them and want; with scant equipment, physical or mental, for the struggle of life; with an inheritance of feebleness from ill-nourished generations before them,—this is the problem which the United States faces courageously, and solves as best she can. What she cannot do is miraculously to convert poverty into plenty,—certainly not before the next year doubles, and the third year trebles the miracle-seeking multitude. She cannot properly house or profitably employ a million of immigrants before the next million is clamoring at her doors. Nor is she even given a fair chance to accomplish her giant task. The demagogues who are employed in the congenial sport of railroad baiting, and who are enjoying beyond measure the fun of chivying business interests into dusty corners, are the ones to lift up their voices in shrill appeal for the army of the unemployed. They refuse to connect one phenomenon with the other. The notion that crippling industries will benefit the industrious is not so new as it seems. Æsop must have had a clear insight into its workings when he wrote the fable of the goose that laid the golden egg.

The City of New York expends, according to a recent report of the Hospital Investigating Committee, more than a million of dollars a year for the care of sick, defective, and otherwise helpless aliens. It expended in 1913 nearly four hundred thousand dollars for the care of aliens who had been in this country less than five years. This is the record of our greatest city, the one in which the astute immigrant takes up his abode. The education she gives her little foreign-born children comprises for the most part manual and vocational training, clinics for the defective, schools for the incorrigible, free or cost-price lunches, doctoring, dentistry, the care of trained nurses, and a score of similar attentions unknown to an earlier generation, undreamed of in the countries whence these children come. In return for such fostering care, New York is held up to execration because she has the money to pay the taxes which are expended in this fashion, because she lays the golden egg which benefits the poor of twenty nations. Her unemployed (reinforced hugely from less favored communities) riot in her streets and churches, and agitators curse her for a thing of evil, a city of palaces and slums, corroded with the

Shame of lives that lie

Couched in ease, while down the streets

Pain and want go by.

The only people who take short views of life are the poor, the poor whose daily wage is spent on their daily needs. Clerks and bookkeepers and small tradesmen (toilers upon whose struggle for decency and independence nobody ever wastes a word of sympathy) may fret over the uncertainty of their future, the narrow margin which lies between them and want. But the workman and his family have a courage of their own, the courage of the soldier who does not spend the night before battle calculating his chances of a gun-shot wound, or of a legless future. It is exasperating to hear a teamster's wife cheerfully announce the coming of her tenth baby; but the calmness with which she faces the situation has in it something human and elemental. It is exasperating to see the teamster risk illness and loss of work (he might at least pull off his wet clothes when he gets home); but he tells you he has not gone to his grave with a cold yet, and this careless confidence saves him as much as it costs. I read recently an economist's sorrowful complaint that families, in need of the necessities of life, go to moving-picture shows; that women, with their husbands' scanty earnings in their hands, take their children to these blithesome entertainments instead of buying the Sunday dinner. It sounds like the citizens who buy motor cars instead of paying off the mortgages on their homes, and it is an error of judgment which the working man is little likely to condone; but that the pleasure-seeking impulse—which social workers assign exclusively to the spirit of youth—should mutiny in a matron's bones suggests survivals of cheerfulness, high lights amid the gloom.

The deprecation of earthly anxiety taught by the Gospels, the precedence given to the poor by the New Testament, the value placed upon voluntary poverty by the Christian Church,—these things have for nineteen hundred years helped in the moulding of men. There still remain some leaven of courage, some savor of philosophy, some echoes of ancient wisdom (heard oftenest from uneducated men), some laughter loud and careless as the laughter of the Middle Ages, some slow sense of justice, not easy to pervert. These qualities are perhaps as helpful as the 'divine discontent' fostered by enthusiasts for sorrow, the cowardice bred by insistence upon trouble and anxiety, the rancor engendered by invectives against earth and heaven. No lot is bettered by having its hardships emphasized. No man is helped by the drowning of his courage, the destruction of his good-will, the paralyzing grip of

Envy with squinting eyes,

Sick of a strange disease, his neighbor's health.

Entertaining the Candidate
By Katharine Baker

BAG in hand, brother stops in for fifteen minutes, from campaigning, to get some clean shirts. He says the candidate will be in town day after to-morrow. Do we want him to come here, or shall he go to a hotel?

We want him, of course. But we deprecate the brevity of this notice. Also the cook and chambermaid are new, and remarkably inexpert. Brother, however, declines to feel any concern. His confidence in our power to cope with emergencies is flattering if exasperating.

There is nothing in the markets at this time of year. Guests have a malignant facility in choosing such times. We scour the country for forty miles in search of green vegetables. We confide in the fishmonger, who grieves sympathetically over the 'phone, because all crabs are now cold-storage, and he'd be deceiving us if he said otherwise.

Still we are determined to have luncheon prepared in the house. Last time the august judge dined with us we summoned a caterer from a hundred miles away, and though the caterer's food was good, it was late. We love promptness, and we are going to have it. Ladies knew all about efficiency long before Mr. Frederick Taylor. Only they couldn't teach it to servants, and he would find he couldn't either. But every mistress of a house knows how to make short cuts, and is expert at 'record production' in emergencies.

The casual brother says there will be one or two dozen people at luncheon. He will telephone us fifteen minutes before they arrive. Yes, really, that's the best he can do.

So we prepare for one or two dozen people, and they must sit down to luncheon because men hate a buffet meal. We struggle with the problem, how many chickens are required for twelve or twenty-four people? The answer, however, is really obvious. Enough for twenty-four will be enough for twelve.

Day after to-morrow arrives. The gardener comes in to lay hearth-fires and carry tables. We get out china and silver. We make salad and rolls, fruit-cup and cake. We guide the cook's faltering steps over the critical moments of soup and chicken. We do the oysters in our own particular way, which we fancy inimitable. We arrange bushels of flowers in bowls, vases, and baskets, and set them on mantels, tables, book-cases, everywhere that a flower can find a footing. The chauffeur comes in proudly with the flower-holder from the limousine, and we fill it in honor of the distinguished guest.

Then we go outside to see that the approach to the house is satisfactory. The bland old gardener points to the ivy-covered wall, and says with innocent joy, '—— it, ain't that ivory the prettiest thing you ever saw in your life?' And we can't deny that the lawn looks well, with ivy, and cosmos, and innumerable chrysanthemums.

The cook and chambermaid will have to help wait on the table. The chambermaid, who is what the butler contemptuously calls 'an educated nigger,' and so knows nothing useful, announces that she has no white uniform. All she has is a cold in her head. We give her a blouse and skirt, wondering why Providence doesn't eliminate the unfit.

We run upstairs to put on our costliest shoes and stockings, and our most perishable gown. The leisurely brother gets us on the wire to say that there will be twenty guests in ten minutes.

Descending, we reset the tables to seat twenty guests, light the wood-fires, toss together twenty mint-juleps, and a few over for luck, repeat our clear instructions to the goggling chambermaid, desperately implore the butler to see that she keeps on the job, drop a last touch of flavoring in the soup, and are sitting by the fire with an air of childish gayety and carelessness when the train of motor-cars draws up to the door.

Here is the judge, courteous and authoritative. Here is his assiduous suite. The room fills with faces well known in every country that an illustrated newspaper can penetrate. From the Golden Gate and the Rio Grande, from New York and Alabama, these men have come together, intent on wresting to themselves the control of the Western Hemisphere. Now they are a sort of highly respectable guerillas. To-morrow, very likely, they will be awe-inspiring magnates.

Theoretically we are impressed. Actually they have mannerisms, and some of them wear spectacles. We reflect that the triumvirs very likely had mannerisms, too, and Antony himself might have been glad to own spectacles. We try to feel reverence for the high calling of these men. We hope they'll like our luncheon.

The butler brings in the juleps and we maintain a detached look, as though those juleps were just a happy thought of the butler himself, and we were as much surprised as anybody. The judge won't have one, but most everybody else will. The newspaper men look love and gratitude at the butler.

That earnest youth is the judge's secretary. The huge, iron-gray man expects to be a governor after November fifth, if dreams come true. The amiable old gentleman who never leaves the judge's side, has come two thousand miles out of pure political enthusiasm, to protect the candidate from assassins. He can do it, too, we conclude, when we look past his smiling mouth into his steely eyes.

Here is the campaign manager, business man and man-of-the-world.

This pretty little newspaper-woman from Utah implores us to get an utterance on suffrage from the judge. Just a word. It will save him thousands of votes. Well, she's a dear little thing, but we can't take advantage of our guest.

Luncheon is announced. Brother, slightly apologetic, murmurs that there are twenty-three. Entirely unforeseen. He babbles incoherently.

But it's all right. We women won't come to the table. Voting and eating and things like that are better left to the men anyway. Why should women want to do either, when they have fathers and brothers to do it for them? We can sit in the gallery and watch. It's very nice for us. And exclusive. Nothing promiscuous. Yes, go on. We'll wait.

Whoever is listening to our conversation professes heartbreak at our decision, and edges toward the rapidly filling dining-room.

We sit down to play lady of leisure, in various affected attitudes. We are not going near the kitchen again. The luncheon is simple. Everything is perfectly arranged. The servants can do it all. It's mere machine work.

From afar we observe the soup vanishing. Then one by one we stammer,—'The mayonnaise—'—'I wonder if the rolls are hot—'—'Cook's coffee is impossible,'—fade silently up the front stair, and scurry down the kitchen-way.

We cover the perishable gown with a huge white apron, we send up a fervent prayer for the costly shoes, and go where we are needed most.

We save the day for good coffee. With the precision of a juggler we rescue plates from the chambermaid, who is overcome by this introduction to the great world and dawdles contemplatively through the pantry door. Charmed with our proficiency, she stands by our side, and watches us clear a shelf of china in the twinkling of an eye. If she could find a stool, she would sit at our feet, making motion studies. But she couldn't find it if it were already there. She couldn't find anything. We order her back to the dining-room, where she takes up a strategic position by the window, from which she can idly survey the mob outside, and the hungry men within.

The last coffee-cup has passed through the doorway. Cigars and matches are circulating in the butler's capable hands. No more need for us.

We shed the enveloping aprons, disappear from the kitchen, and materialize again, elegantly useless, in the drawing-room. Nobody can say that luncheon wasn't hot and promptly served.

Chairs begin to clatter. They are rising from the table. A brass band outside bursts into being.

Brother had foretold that band to us, and we had expressed vivid doubts. He said it would cost eighty dollars. Now eighty dollars in itself is a respectable sum, a sum capable even of exerting some mild fascination, but eighty dollars viewed in relation to a band becomes merely ludicrous.

We said an eighty-dollar band was a thing innately impossible, like free-trade, or a dachshund. Brother attested that the next best grade of band would demand eight hundred. We justly caviled at eight hundred. We inquired, Why any band? Brother claimed that it would make a cheerful noise, and we yielded.

So at this moment the band begins to make a noise. We perceive at once that the price was accurately gauged. It is unquestionably an eighty-dollar band. We begin to believe in dachshunds.

To these supposedly cheerful strains the gentlemen stream into the drawing-room. They beam repletely. They tell us what a fine luncheon it was. They are eloquent about it. All the conditions of their entertainment were ideal, they would have us believe. They imply that we are mighty lucky, in that our men can provide us with such a luxurious existence. They smile with majestic benignity at these fair, but frivolous pensioners on masculine bounty. American women are petted, helpless dolls, anyway. Foreigners have said so. They clasp our useless hands in fervent farewells. They proceed in state to the waiting cars. They hope we will follow them to the meeting. Oh, yes, we will come, though incapable of apprehending the high problems of government.

Led by the honest band, surrounded by flags, followed by cheers, they disappear in magnificent procession. Now we may straggle to the dining-room and eat cold though matchless oysters, tepid chicken, and in general whatever there is any left of.

The chambermaid has broken a lovely old Minton plate. We are glad we didn't use the coffee-cups that were made in France for Dolly Madison. She would have enjoyed wrecking those.

We hurry, because we don't want to miss the meeting altogether. We think enviously of the men. In our secret souls, we'd like to campaign. We love to talk better than anything else in the world, and we could make nice speeches, too. But we must do the oysters and the odd jobs, and keep the hearth-fires going, like responsible vestal virgins. It's woman's sphere. Man gave it to her because he didn't want it himself.

The Street
By Simeon Strunsky

IT is two short blocks from my office near Park Row to the Subway station where I take the express for Belshazzar Court. Eight months in the year it is my endeavor to traverse this distance as quickly as I can. This is done by cutting diagonally across the street traffic. By virtue of the law governing right-angled triangles I thus save as much as fifty feet and one fifth of a minute of time. In the course of a year this saving amounts to sixty minutes, which may be profitably spent over a two-reel presentation of 'The Moonshiner's Bride,' supplemented by an intimate picture of Lumbering in Saskatchewan. But with the coming of warm weather my habits change. It grows more difficult to plunge into the murk of the Subway.

A foretaste of the languor of June is in the air. The turnstile storm-doors in our office building, which have been put aside for brief periods during the first deceptive approaches of spring, only to come back triumphant from Elba, have been definitively removed. The steel-workers pace their girders twenty floors high almost in mid-season form, and their pneumatic hammers scold and chatter through the sultry hours. The soda-fountains are bright with new compounds whose names ingeniously reflect the world's progress from day to day in politics, science, and the arts. From my window I can see the long black steamships pushing down to the sea, and they raise vague speculations in my mind about the cost of living in the vicinity of Sorrento and Fontainebleau. On such a day I am reminded of my physician's orders, issued last December, to walk a mile every afternoon on leaving my office. So I stroll up Broadway with the intention of taking my train farther up-town, at Fourteenth Street.

The doctor did not say stroll. He said a brisk walk with head erect, chest thrown out, diaphragm well contracted, and a general aspect of money in the bank. But here enters human perversity. The only place where I am in the mood to walk after the prescribed military fashion is in the open country. Just where by all accounts I ought to be sauntering without heed to time, studying the lovely texts which Nature has set down in the modest type-forms selected from her inexhaustible fonts,—in the minion of ripening berries, in the nonpareil of crawling insect life, the agate of tendril and filament, and the 12-point diamond of the dust,—there I stride along and see little.

And in the city, where I should swing along briskly, I lounge. What is there on Broadway to linger over? On Broadway, Nature has used her biggest, fattest type-forms. Tall, flat, building fronts, brazen with many windows and ribbed with commercial gilt lettering six feet high; shrieking proclamations of auction sales written in letters of fire on vast canvasses; railway posters in scarlet and blue and green; rotatory barber-poles striving at the national colors and producing vertigo; banners, escutcheons, crests, in all the primary colors—surely none of these things needs poring over. And I know them with my eyes closed. I know the windows where lithe youths in gymnasium dress demonstrate the virtue of home exercises; the windows where other young men do nothing but put on and take off patent reversible near-linen collars; where young women deftly roll cigarettes; where other young women whittle at sticks with miraculously stropped razors. I know these things by heart, yet I linger over them in flagrantly unhygienic attitudes, my shoulders bent forward and my chest and diaphragm in a position precisely the reverse of that prescribed by the doctor.

Perhaps the thing that makes me linger before these familiar sights is the odd circumstance that in Broadway's shop-windows Nature is almost never herself, but is either supernatural or artificial. Nature, for instance, never intended that razors should cut wood and remain sharp; that linen collars should keep on getting cleaner the longer they are worn; that glass should not break; that ink should not stain; that gauze should not tear; that an object worth five dollars should sell for $1.39; but all these things happen in Broadway windows. Williams, whom I meet now and then, who sometimes turns and walks up with me to Fourteenth Street, pointed out to me the other day how strange a thing it was that the one street which has become a synonym for 'real life' to all good suburban Americans is not real at all, but is crowded either with miracles or with imitations.

The windows on Broadway glow with wax fruits and with flowers of muslin and taffeta drawn by bounteous Nature from her storehouses in Parisian garret workshops. Broadway's ostrich feathers have been plucked in East Side tenements. The huge cigars in the tobacconist's windows are of wood. The enormous bottles of champagne in the saloons are of cardboard, and empty. The tall scaffoldings of proprietary medicine bottles in the drug shops are of paper. 'Why,' said Williams, 'even the jewelry sold in the Japanese auction stores is not genuine, and the sellers are not Japanese.'

This bustling mart of commerce, as the generation after the Civil War used to say, is only a world of illusion. Artificial flowers, artificial fruits, artificial limbs, tobacco, rubber, silks, woolens, straws, gold, silver. The young men and women who manipulate razors and elastic cords are real, but not always. Williams and I once stood for a long while and gazed at a young woman posing in a drug-shop window, and argued whether she was alive. Ultimately she winked and Williams gloated over me. But how do I know her wink was real? At any rate the great mass of human life in the windows is artificial. The ladies who smile out of charming morning costumes are obviously of lining and plaster. Their smug Herculean husbands in pajamas preserve their equanimity in the severest winter weather only because of their wire-and-plaster constitution. The baby reposing in its beribboned crib is china and excelsior. Illusion everywhere.

But the Broadway crowd is real. You only have to buffet it for five minutes to feel, in eyes and arms and shoulders, how real it is. When I was a boy and was taken to the circus it was always an amazing thing to me that there should be so many people in the street moving in a direction away from the circus. Something of this sensation still besets me whenever we go down in the Subway from Belshazzar Court to hear Caruso. The presence of all the other people on our train is simple enough. They are all on their way to hear Caruso. But what of the crowds in the trains that flash by in the opposite direction? It is not a question of feeling sorry for them. I try to understand and I fail. But on Broadway on a late summer afternoon the obverse is true. The natural thing is that the living tide as it presses south shall beat me back, halt me, eddy around me. I know that there are people moving north with me, but I am not acutely aware of them. This onrush of faces converges on me alone. It is I against half the world.

And then suddenly out of the surge of faces one leaps out at me. It is Williams, whose doctor has told him that the surest way of fighting down the lust for tobacco is to walk down from his office to the ferry every afternoon. Williams and I salute each other after the fashion of Broadway, which is to exchange greetings backward over the shoulder. This is the first step in an elaborate minuet. Because we have passed each other before recognition came, our hands fly out backward. Now we whirl half around, so that I who have been moving north face the west, while Williams, who has been traveling south, now looks east. Our clasped hands strain at each other as we stand there poised for flight after the first greeting. A quarter of a minute perhaps, and we have said good-bye.

But if the critical quarter of a minute passes, there ensues a change of geographical position which corresponds to a change of soul within us. I suddenly say to myself that there are plenty of trains to be had at Fourteenth Street. Williams recalls that another boat will leave Battery Place shortly after the one he is bound for. So the tension of our outstretched arms relaxes. I, who have been facing west, complete the half circle and swing south. Williams veers due north, and we two men stand face to face. The beat and clamor of the crowd fall away from us like a well-trained stage mob. We are in Broadway, but not of it.

'Well, what's the good word?' says Williams.

When two men meet on Broadway the spirit of optimism strikes fire. We begin by asking each other what the good word is. We take it for granted that neither of us has anything but a chronicle of victory and courage to relate. What other word but the good word is tolerable in the lexicon of living, upstanding men? Failure is only for the dead. Surrender is for the man with yellow in his nature. So Williams and I pay our acknowledgments to this best of possible worlds. I give Williams the good word. I make no allusion to the fact that I have spent a miserable night in communion with neuralgia; how can that possibly concern him? Another manuscript came back this morning from an editor who regretted that his is the most unintelligent body of readers in the country. The third cook in three weeks left us last night after making vigorous reflections on my wife's good nature and my own appearance. Only an hour ago, as I was watching the long, black steamers bound for Sorrento and Fontainebleau, the monotony of one's treadmill work, the flat unprofitableness of scribbling endlessly on sheets of paper, had become almost a nausea. But Williams will know nothing of this from me. Why should he? He may have been sitting up all night with a sick child. At this very moment the thought of the little parched lips, the moan, the unseeing eyes, may be tearing at his entrails; but he in turn gives me the good word, and many others after that, and we pass on.

But sometimes I doubt. This splendid optimism of people on Broadway, in the Subway and in the shops and offices—is it really a sign of high spiritual courage, or is it just lack of sensibility? Do we find it easy to keep a stiff upper lip, to buck up, to never say die, because we are brave men, or simply because we lack the sensitiveness and the imagination to react to pain? It may be even worse than that. It may be part of our commercial gift for window-dressing, for putting up a good front.

Sometimes I feel that Williams has no right to be walking down Broadway on business when there is a stricken child at home. The world cannot possibly need him at that moment as much as his own flesh and blood does. It is not courage; it is brutish indifference. At such times I am tempted to dismiss as mythical all this fine talk about feelings that run deep beneath the surface, and bruised hearts that ache under the smile. If a man really suffers he will show it. If a man cultivates the habit of not showing emotion he will end by having none to show. How much of Broadway's optimism is—But here I am paraphrasing William James's Principles of Psychology, which the reader can just as well consult for himself in the latest revised edition of 1907.

Also, I am exaggerating. Most likely Williams's children are all in perfect health, and my envelope from the editor has brought a check instead of a rejection slip. It is on such occasions that Williams and I, after shaking hands the way a locomotive takes on water on the run, wheel around, halt, and proceed to buy something at the rate of two for a quarter. If any one is ever inclined to doubt the spirit of American fraternity, it is only necessary to recall the number of commodities for men that sell two for twenty-five cents. In theory, the two cigars which Williams and I buy for twenty-five cents are worth fifteen cents apiece. As a matter of fact they are probably ten-cent cigars. But the shopkeeper is welcome to his extra nickel. It is a small price to pay for the seal of comradeship that stamps his pair of cigars selling for a single quarter. Two men who have concluded a business deal in which each has commendably tried to get the better of the other may call for twenty-five cent perfectos or for half-dollar Dreadnoughts. I understand there are such. But friends sitting down together will always demand cigars that go for a round sum, two for a quarter or three for fifty (if the editor's check is what it ought to be).

When people speak of the want of real comradeship among women, I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons may not be that the prices which women are accustomed to pay are individualistic instead of fraternal. The soda fountains and the street cars do not dispense goods at the rate of two items for a single coin. It is infinitely worse in the department stores. Treating a friend to something that costs $2.79 is inconceivable. But I have really wandered from my point.

'Well, be good,' says Williams, and rushes off to catch his boat.

The point I wish to make is that on Broadway people pay tribute to the principle of goodness that rules this world, both in the way they greet and in the way they part. We salute by asking each other what the good word is. When we say good-bye we enjoin each other to be good. The humorous assumption is that gay devils like Williams and me need to be constantly warned against straying off into the primrose paths that run out of Broadway.

Simple, humorous, average American man! You have left your suburban couch in time to walk half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for the city. You have read your morning paper; discussed the weather, the tariff, and the prospects for lettuce with your neighbor; and made the office only a minute late. You have been fastened to your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamorous, overheated restaurant while you watched your hat and coat. At odd moments during the day the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills, has insisted on receiving attention. At the end of the day, laden with parcels from the market, from the hardware store, from the seedman, you are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word, sends you on your way with the injunction to be good—not to play roulette, not to open wine, not to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average suburban American!

I take back that word suburban. The Sunday Supplement has given it a meaning which is not mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper brought forth and named Common People, who begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent-Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, though one hates to do it, I must say 'clean-cut.' The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp-faced, almost insolent young men. There are not very many old men in the crowd, though I see any number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do you detect the traditional signs of age, the sagging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal contour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, the old-young, but rarely quite the old.

I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A very ordinary mind may be working behind that clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have known the shock of young men who look like kings of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that athletic carriage which is helped out by our triumphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages and all stations into a uniformity of padded shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant shoddy where the European chooses honest, clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with externals, and in outward appearances a Broadway crowd beats the world. Æsthetically we simply are in a class by ourselves when compared with the Englishman and the Teuton in their skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and German ambassadors at Washington do their worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain it against the world. The truth must out. Ruat cœlum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste.

Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer thing is a woman than a man of her class! To see this for yourself you have only to walk up Broadway until the southward-bearing stream breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to east. You have passed out of the commercial district into the region of factories. It is well on toward dark, and the barracks that go by the unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp of a host. It is an army of women, with here and there a flying detachment of the male.

On the faces of the men the day's toil has written its record even as on the women, but in a much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the soul of these men into brutish indifference, but in the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listlessness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vulgarity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap material. The spirit of grace which is the birthright of her sex cannot be killed—not even by the presence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America has accentuated her title. This America which drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which takes from her cheeks the color she has brought from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes restitution by remoulding her in more delicate, more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege of charm—and neurosis.

Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets itself be swallowed up with meek good-nature. Our amazing good-nature! Political philosophers have deplored the fact. They have urged us to be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the editor. I agree that only in that way can we be rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of ticket-speculators, of taxi-cab extortioners, of insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent congestion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with the social philosophers. But then I am not typical of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects itself into the small of my back, I twist around and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the innocent mechanical result of a whole series of elbows and backs extending the length of the car, to where the first cause operates in the form of a station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cattle into their stalls. In the faces about me there is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, instead of raising barricades in the Subway and hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to the lurching of the train, and young voices call out cheerfully, 'Plenty of room ahead.'

Horribly good-natured! We have taken a phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously predestined to subjection, one might understand. But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I have called them, that they should submit is a puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself—that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy; admiration rather, provided he has not shouldered and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good-nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I see signs of the approaching change. People do not call out, 'Plenty of room ahead,' so frequently as they used to.

Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. For the most part he sits there with folded arms, thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that there are other things in life besides baseball. No, it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoonists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 'local pride,' with their exaggerated gloatings over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a losing team, who are responsible. It is these demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of loving only a winner—but if I keep on I shall be in politics before I know it.

If you see in the homeward crowd in the Subway a face over which the pall of depression has settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall seeing any one smile over these long serials of humorous adventure which run from day to day and from year to year. I have seen readers turn mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips unconsciously spelling out the long legends which issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive husbands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects,—an entire zoölogy. If any stimulus rises from these pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible. I imagine that by dint of repetition through the years these grotesque creations have become a reality to millions of readers. It is no longer a question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise I cannot see why readers of the funny page should appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid.

This by way of anticipation. What the doctor has said of exercise being a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway. The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the professions and trades which centre about Madison Square—business women of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed table d'hôte prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New York.

The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval between the last of the matinée and shopping crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent waters, patent razors.

O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!

Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired. The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.

Fashions in Men
By Katharine Fullerton Gerould

NEVER, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature—Don Quixote and Tom Jones are equally 'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.

My first novel was Jane Eyre; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love—had time and chance permitted—with 'V. V.' or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the assault.

People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.

It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants—and gets—the Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order 'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.

I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop—'muscular Christianity' has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman—gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.

What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock's tail, as much as the anthropoid ape's, is destined to elimination. We women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock's tail. We are mortally afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle—the everlasting miracle of Nature—is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do?

So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day, Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax Rochester, and 'Stunning' Warrington are as different as possible; but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies' choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has previously been convicted of pride.

Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not proud—who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one of the hallmarks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her imagination on. Think of the Byronic males—Conrad, Lara, and the rest! If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and Heathcote and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!

Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their foes. Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to spurn anyone—least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born; and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr. Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is 'its only reward.' Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict,'Daniel Smith,' 'V. V.', or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in the lot of them do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes of love?

The 'Satanic charm.' The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to the last degree. 'Conventional,' that is, in the stricter sense; by which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large extent, predicable. They were jealous of their honor, and believed it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion, they were not democratic pour deux sous. The barmaid was not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of Paradise Lost, as we all remember, was a splendid snob.)

Moreover, they were sophisticated—and not merely out of books. The Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been abandoned—and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not so long ago there was still something more repellent to the female imagination about the man who chose not to know than about the man who chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random—we might be looking for a Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero, we expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to give a man points—and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith railed against the 'veiled virginal doll' as heroine. Well: our heroines now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes are. Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that there is a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal doll somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the sterner sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone, while women make the grand tour.

Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to that knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to have behind them:—

And saw the cities, and the counsels knew

. . . . . .

Of many men, and many a time at sea

Within his heart he bore calamity.

They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals were the less likely to be upset by a conventional assault upon them. Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his 'damnation' by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would have taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned heroes do something that he did not wish to. They knew something of society, and ergo of women; they had experienced, directly or vicariously, human romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know little or nothing—to begin with—of society, women, or romance, except what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and they pride themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal stresses and selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes nowadays must be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith in the superiority of the lower classes—the swing of the pendulum, no doubt, from the other extreme of thinking the lower classes morally and æsthetically negligible. 'Privilege' is as detestable now in matters of intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The man with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room. If your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he must at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon as he comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but (except in the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not yet learned that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.

Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or æsthetic, is now the deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for Ellis Island. And there goes another of the hallmarks of the gentleman as he was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have condescended to the glittering assemblies of fashion, but there was never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might have been hard up, but his necktie would not have been 'a black sea holding for life a school of fat white fish.' He might have been lonely or gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never, never, never have 'blinked' at the heroine. 'My godlike friend had carelessly put his hair-brush into the butter' says Asticot, at the outset, of the Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were always meeting people who did that sort of thing; but they were not gentlemen. Whereas, the Beloved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite his ten years' abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him. She does not marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to feel that there was something lacking in her because Paragot's manners at tea did not please her.

The hero of old had what used to be called 'a sense of fitness,' and a saving sense of humor, which combined to prevent his entering a ballroom as John the Baptist. The same lucky combination would have prevented him—in literature, at least—from wooing the millionaire's child with dusty commonplaces of the Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires' children to-day take that sort of thing for manners. To the argument that a performance of the kind takes courage, one can only reply that, judging from the enthusiasm with which the preaching hero is received by the heroine, it apparently does not. And in any case, the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what socially constitutes courage to deserve any credit for it.

Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy's men, he perceives, with some inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be welcomed; and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to accept a wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody. For the chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform his own class out of all recognition.

Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were men; and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured at in a way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had lived. Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia Jane married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.

I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are some adventures which, in themselves, add no lustre to a man's name. It is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity—though our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him to save Pendennis's chastity. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis, would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to seduce Fanny Bolton.

It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good. One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel The Way of All Flesh) when Ernest asks him,—

'"Don't you like poor people very much yourself?"

'Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said quietly, but slowly and decidedly, "No, no, no," and escaped.

'Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.'

It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though publication was delayed until some time after the author's death, the bulk of The Way of All Flesh was written in the '70's. The Way of All Flesh is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of Richard Feverel.

Only in one way is The Way of All Flesh quite contemporary. The hero thinks so well of the prostitute that he marries her. On the other hand, to be sure, he bitterly regrets it, which is not contemporary. I do not mean that the hero's marrying her is especially in the literary fashion, but his thinking well of her is. You will notice that in our moral fever we do not leave the prostitute out of our novels—no, indeed: she must be there to give spice, as of old. Only now, instead of being entangled with her, the young gentleman preaches to her; and she loves him for it. Perhaps this is what happens nowadays in real life. I do not pretend to know; but I suspect it is true, for I fancy the only kind of person who could invent the contemporary plot is the kind who would live it. The wildest imaginings of the people who are made differently would hardly stretch to it. And not only does the hero find himself immensely touched by the tragedy of the disreputable woman,—which is, after all, in certain cases plausible enough,—he burns to introduce his fiancée to her. Now that, again, may be life,—Mr. Winston Churchill, for example, should know better than I,—but it is certainly a world with the sense of values gone wrong. And when we have lost our sense of values, we shall presently lose the values as well. The girl herself is often to blame: did not the fiancée of Simon de Gex go of her own initiative to see the animal-tamer, and come away to renounce him, convinced that the animal-tamer was the nobler woman? Which, emphatically, she was not. But then, as we know from long experience of Mr. Locke, he cannot keep his head with circus-people about; and sawdust is incense to him. Let Mr. Locke have his little foibles by all means; but even Mr. Locke should not have made the spoiled darling of society marry the animal-tamer (one side of her face having been nearly clawed off) and then go with her into city missionary work. Yet I do not believe it is really Mr. Locke's fault. The public at present loves as a sister the woman with a past; and loves city missionary work, if possible, more.

The fact is that with all our imitation of Meredith—and every one who is not imitating Tolstoï is imitating Meredith—he has failed to save us. We have taken all his prescriptions blindly—except one. We have emancipated our women and emasculated our men; we have cast down the mighty from their seats and exalted them of low degree; we have learned all the Radical shibboleths and say them for our morning prayers; and we have faced the fact of sex so squarely that we can hardly see anything else. But we have not learned his saving hatred of the sentimentalist. Miss May Sinclair has admirably pointed out in her study of the Three Brontës that Charlotte Brontë was exceedingly modern in her detestation of sentimentality. Modern she may have been—with Meredith; but not modern with the present novelists, for they are almost too sentimental to be endured. And there is the whole trouble. We think Thackeray an old fool for being sentimental over Amelia Sedley; but how does it better the case to be sentimental, instead, over the heroine of The Promised Land? Amelia Sedley was all in all a much nicer person, if not half so clever. She may have sniveled a good deal, but she was capable of loving some one else better than herself.

Of course, I have cited only a few instances—those that happened to come most easily to mind. But let any reader of fiction run over mentally a group of contemporary heroes, and see if the substitutions I have named have not pretty generally taken place. Has not pride given way to humility, reticence to glibness, class-consciousness to a wild democracy, the code of manners to an uncouth unworldliness, and honor in the old sense to a burning passion for reform—'any old' reform? Do not these men lead us into the heterogeneous company of the unclassed of both sexes—and ask us to look upon them as saints in motley? Has not the world of fiction changed in the last twenty years? The hero in old days sometimes fell foul of the law by getting into debt. But we were not supposed, therefore, to be on his side against the law. Now, the hero does not, perhaps, get into legal difficulties himself, but he is always passionately on the side of the people whom laws were devised to protect the respectable from. The scientific tendency to consider that aristocracy consists merely in freedom from certain physical taints has permeated fiction. 'Is not one man as good as another?' asked the demagogue. 'Of course he is, and a great deal better!' replied the excited Irishman in the crowd. We are in the thick of a popular mania for thinking all the undesirables 'a good deal better.' The modern hero is, to my mind, in intention, if not in execution, an admirable figure; and though one rather expects him any day to give his whole fortune for a gross of green spectacles, one will not, for that, find him any less likable. Some day he will rediscover the Dantesque hierarchy of souls implicit in humanity. And then, perhaps, he will get back his charm.

Some one is probably bursting to observe that we have a school of realists at hand; and that no one can accuse Mr. Wells and Mr. Bennett of sentimentality—also that we have Mr. Shaw and Mr. Granville Barker and Mr. Masefield as mounted auxiliaries in the field. I grant Mr. Bennett; I am not so sure about Mr. Wells. But certainly Mr. Wells is not sentimental as Mr. William de Morgan, Mr. Winston Churchill, Mr. Meredith Nicholson, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. H. S. Harrison, and Miss Ellen Glasgow are sentimental. If he is sentimental at all, it is rather over ideas than people. (Mr. Masefield, I am inclined to think, is simply catering to the special audience that Thomas Hardy, by his silence, has left gaping and empty.) Let us look into the matter a little. 'Sentimental' is one of the most difficult catchwords in the world to define; and you can get a roomful of intelligent people quarreling over it any time. Perhaps, for our purposes, it will serve merely to say that the sentimentalist is always, in one way or another, disloyal to facts. He cannot be trusted to give a straight account, because his own sense of things is more valuable to him than the truth. He has come in on the top of the pragmatic wave, and the sands of Anglo-Saxondom are strewn thick with him. He serves, in Kipling's phrase, the God of Things as They Ought to Be (according to his private feeling). His own perversion may be æsthetic, or intellectual, or moral, or sociological, but he is always recognizable by his tampering with truth.

Now, Mr. Wells does tamper with truth. He did it, for example, in the case of Ann Veronica. He wanted Ann Veronica to be a nice girl under twenty, and he wanted her, even more, to be unduly awakened to certain physical aspects of sex. It was sentimentality that made him draw her as he did: determination to prove that the girl who loved as he wanted her to love was just as conventional as any one else. You cannot have your cake and eat it too; but the sentimentalist blindly refuses to accept that. Accordingly, we get the unconvincing creature that Mr. Wells wanted to believe existed. Mr. Wells's heroes may not seem to bear out my argument so well as Mr. Galsworthy's. To be sure, Mr. Wells is not so sentimental as Mr. Galsworthy, and he has not, like the author of The Man of Property, and Fraternity, and Justice, one—just one—fixed idea. Mr. Galsworthy always deals with a man who is in love with some other man's wife; and his world is thereby narrowed. Mr. Wells is interested in a good many things, and his politics are not purely philanthropic as most of our novelists' politics are. But Mr. Wells's heroes, even when they are fairly fortunate, are preoccupied with their own notions of sociological duty, even more than they are preoccupied with passion, though their passion is 'special' enough when it comes. Would any one except a Wells hero take a trip to India and come away having seen nothing but the sweat-shops of Bombay? Always the author's sympathy is with the under dog; whether it is Kipps or Mr. Polly living out his long foredoomed existence, or George Ponderevo analyzing Bladesover with diabolic keenness and aching contempt. 'I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses,' says Ponderevo in a burst of frankness. There you have the Wells hero to the life. And Mr. Bennett's people are only spiritual guttersnipes who are not in love with unimaginable goddesses.

The point is that the guttersnipe is having his turn in fiction: if our American heroes are not guttersnipes themselves, it is their sign of grace to be supremely interested in guttersnipes. In one way or the other, the guttersnipe must have his proper prominence. Of course, there are differences and degrees: a few heroes get no nearer the lower classes than a passionate desire for reform tickets and municipal sanitation. But ordinarily they must go through Ernest Pontifex's state of believing that poor people are not only more important, but in every way nicer than rich people; and few of them go back utterly on that belief, as Ernest did. Perhaps that, more than anything else, marks the change of fashion in men. For gentlemen were always, in their way, benevolent; but formerly they had not achieved the paradox that the object of benevolence is ex officio more interesting than the bestower.

Books have been written before now in the interest of reform. They tell us that Justice set the Home Secretary to thinking. Well: Marcus Clarke actually caused the reform of the Australian penal settlements by his now forgotten novel, For the Term of His Natural Life. The hero of Marcus Clarke's book was innocent and unjustly condemned; the hero of Justice is guilty. Wanton cruelty is wicked whether the victim be a bad man or a good one; but the difference between these two heroes is not so purely accidental as, at first blush, it may seem. The author of His Natural Life starting out to capture sympathy, showed the brutal system wreaking itself on an innocent man, of good family, condemned for another's guilt. Mr. Galsworthy, equally eager to capture sympathy, makes his protagonist guilty of the theft, having tried in vain to incriminate an innocent person. Each writer depended, doubtless, on public sentiment for his effect. In Marcus Clarke's time, public sentiment—however unfortunate the fact may be—simply could not have been aroused to such a pitch by the sufferings of a liar and a thief as by the sufferings of an innocent man who is consciously paying another person's penalty. The Humanitarian Hero had not come into fashion—nor yet the guttersnipe. But Marcus Clarke's book did its work—proof that even in the '50's we were not so callous as we seemed.

I said earlier that in life, as well as in literature, men had changed. One's instances, obviously, must be from books, and not from one's acquaintance; but I spoke truth. Philanthropy is the latest social ladder, but it would not be so if the people on the top rung were not interested in philanthropy. There has been, for whatever reason, a tremendous spurt of interest in sociological questions. Our hard-headed young men, of high ideals, find themselves fighting, of necessity, on a different battlefield from any that strategists would have chosen thirty years ago. Moreover, philanthropy being woman's way into politics, women have been giving their calm, or hysterical, attention to problems which, thirty years since, did not, as problems, exist for them. I said that the change of taste in women would probably account for much of the change of fashion in men. A schoolmate of mine, writing me some years since of her engagement, said (in nearly these words), 'He is tremendously interested in city missionary work; it wouldn't have been quite perfect if we hadn't had that in common.' Both were spoiled darlings of fortune, but the statement was quite sincere. Undoubtedly, without that, it would not have been 'quite perfect' in the eyes of either.

The mere conversation of the marriageable young has changed past belief. 'Social service' has usurped so many subjects! Have many people stopped to realize, I wonder, how completely the psychological novel and the 'problem' play (in the old sense) have gone out of date? The psychology of hero and heroine, their emotional attitudes to each other, are largely worked out now in terms of their attitudes to impersonal questions, their religious or their sociological 'principles.' The individual personal reaction counts less and less. If they agree on the same panacea for the social evils, the author can usually patch up a passion sufficient for them to marry on. Gone, for the most part, are the pages of intimate analysis. No intimate analysis is needed any longer. As for the 'problem play,' we have it still with us, but in another form. The Doll's House and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray are both antiquated: we do not call a drama a problem play now unless it preaches a new kind of legislation. And as for sex,—in its finer aspects it no longer interests us.

There was a great deal more sex, in its subtler manifestations, in the old novels and plays, than in the new ones. Not so long ago, a novel was a love story; and it was of supreme importance to a hero whether or not he could make the heroine care for him. It was also of supreme importance to the heroine. The romance was all founded on sex; and yet sex was hardly mentioned. Our heroes and heroines still marry; but when they consider sex at all, they are apt to consider it biologically, not romantically. We, as a public, are more frankly interested in sex than ever; but we think of it objectively, and a little brutally, in terms of demand and supply. And so we get often the pathetic spectacle of the hero and heroine having no time to make love to each other in the good old-fashioned way, because they are so busy suppressing the red-light district and compiling statistics of disease. Much of the frankness, doubtless, is a good thing; but beyond a doubt, it has cheapened passion. For passion among civilized people is a subtle thing: it is wrapped about with dreams and imaginings; and can bring human beings to salvation as well as to perdition. But when it is shown to us as the mere province of courtesans, small wonder that we turn from it to the hero who will have difficulty in feeling or inspiring it. Especially since we are told, at the same time, that even the courtesan plies her trade only from direst necessity.

After all, the only safe person to fall in love with nowadays is a reformer: socially, financially, and sentimentally. And most women, at least, could (if they would) say with the Princesse Mathilde, 'Je n'aime que les romans dont je voudrais être l'héroïne.' Certainly, unless for some special reason, no novel of which one would not like to be the heroine—in love with the hero—will reach the hundred thousand mark. If there are any of us left who regret the gentlemen of old—who still prefer our Darcy or even our Plantagenet Palliser—we must write our own novels, and divine our own heroes under the protective coloring of their conventional breeding. For they are not being 'featured,' at present, either in life or in literature.

A Confession in Prose
By Walter Prichard Eaton

UNLIKE M. Jourdain, who had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, I have been writing it nearly all of mine, quite consciously, and earning my living thereby since I was twenty-one years old. I am now thirty-four. I have been a professional writer of prose, then, for thirteen years—or shall I say a writer of professional prose? Much of this writing has been done for various American magazines; still more has been done to fill the ravenous columns of American newspapers; some, even, has been immured between covers. I have tried never to write sloppily, though I have of necessity often written hastily. I can honestly say, too, that I have tried at times to write beautifully, by which I mean rhythmically, with a conscious adjustment of sound and melody to the sense, with the charm of word-chiming further to heighten heightened thought. But I can also as honestly say that in this latter effort I have never been encouraged by a newspaper editor, and I have been not infrequently discouraged by magazine editors. Not all magazines compel you to chop up your prose into a maximum paragraph length of ten lines, as does a certain one of large circulation. Not all newspapers compel you to be 'smart,' as did one for which I worked compel us all. But the impression among editors is prevalent, none the less, that a conversational downrightness and sentence and paragraph brevity are the be-all and end-all of prose style, or at least of so much of prose style as can be grasped by the populace who read their publications; and that beautiful writing must be 'fine writing,' and therefore never too much to be avoided. So I started out from the classroom of Professor Lewis E. Gates, one of the keenest and most inspiring analysts of prose beauties this country has produced, to be a professional writer of prose, and dreamed, as youth will, of wrapping my singing robes about me and ravishing the world. I was soon enough told to doff my singing robes for the overalls of journalism, and I have become a writer of professional prose instead.

These remarks have been inspired by a long and wistful evening just spent in perusing Professor Saintsbury's new book, called The History of English Prose Rhythm. I shall hold no brief for the good professor's method of scansion. It matters little to me, indeed, how he chooses to scan prose. What does matter to me is that he has chosen to scan it at all, that he has brought forward the finest examples in the stately procession of English literature, and demonstrated with all the weight of his learning, his authority, his fine enthusiasm, that this prose is no less consciously wrought to pleasing numbers than is verse. We who studied under Professor Gates knew much of this before, if not in so detailed and would-be methodical a fashion. Charles Lamb knew it when he wrote, 'Even ourself, in these our humbler lucubrations, tune our best measured cadences (prose has her cadences) not unfrequently to the charm of the drowsier watchman, "blessing the doors"; or the wild sweep of winds at midnight.' Sir Thomas Browne was not exactly unaware of it as he prepared his Urn Burial for the printer; nor the authors of the King James Version of the Bible when they translated—or if you prefer, paraphrased—the rhapsodic chapters of Isaiah. But it is pleasant, and not unimportant, to be once more reminded, in a generation when written speech has sunk to the conversational level of the man in the street, that 'prose has her cadences'; and to me, at least, it is melancholy, also. For I would strive to write such prose, in my stumbling fashion, were I permitted.

Writing about a fine art, as I am so often called upon to do, I would endeavor with what might lay in me to write about it finely. Suppose that art chances to be the drama. Why, when some compact, weighty, and worthily performed example comes to our stage, should I be expected to toss off a description of it in a style less compact and weighty and worthily conducted? On the rare occasions when a new play chances to be poetic, am I not justified in writing of it in poetic prose? How else, indeed, can I truly render back to my readers the subtler aspects of its charm? But for such writing there is little room in our hurrying and 'conversational' press, though now and then a despised dramatic editor is found who understands. Even the drama itself strives to be 'conversational' at all costs, under the banner of 'realism,' and profanity flourishes on our stage in what we must infer to be a most life-like manner, while we have almost forgotten that the spoken word can be melodious or imaginative. Criticism cries at its heels, and helps with flippant jest and broken syntax and cacophonous combinations of our poorest vernacular, in the general debasement. Do not tell me that men do not exist who could write differently of the stage, as men exist who can, and do, write differently for it. Every worthy dramatist can be paralleled by at least one worthy critic, and more probably by three or four, since the true creative instinct in drama is perhaps the rarest of human attributes, save only charity. But the editors appear to have determined that the public does not want such critics—and perhaps the editors are right. At least, the public does not often get them.

We are speaking now of prose, not of opinions, and we may safely introduce the name of a living critic, William Winter. For nearly half a century Mr. Winter has written prose about the theatre, and although that prose was produced for a morning newspaper it was carefully and consistently balanced and welded, and, when the subject demanded it, rose, according to its creator's ideas of beauty, into the heightened eloquence of sentence rhythm and syllabic harmony. Leisure may improve, but haste cannot prevent the rhythm of prose, provided the instinct for it resides in the writer, and the opportunity exists for practice and expression. Two examples of Mr. Winter's use of rhythm come to my memory, and I quote only phrases, not whole sentences, merely because I am sure of no more. Writing one morning of a new and very 'modern' play, presented the previous evening by a well-known actress, he said: 'Sarah Bernhardt at least made her sexual monsters interesting, wielding the lethal hatpin or the deadly hatchet with Gallic grace and sweet celerity.' Again, in reviewing Pinero's Iris, he took up two of Henry Arthur Jones's phrases, recently made current in a lecture, and played with them, ending with mellifluous scorn, 'Such are "the great realities of modern life," flowers of disease and blight that fringe the charnel house of the "serious drama."'

These are certainly examples of rhythmic, or cadenced prose, and they are examples taken from journalistic reviews. They admirably express the writer's point of view toward his subject matter, but they also reveal his care for the manner of expression, they satisfy the ear; and therefore to one at all sensitive to literature they are doubly satisfying. The arrow of irony is ever more delightful when it sings on its flight. The trick, then, can be done. Mr. Winter, too often perhaps for modern ears, performed it by recourse to the Johnsonian balance of period and almost uniform, swelling roll. But that is neither here nor there. The point is that he performed it—and that it is no longer performed by the new generation, either in newspaper columns, or, we will add at once, anywhere else. Rhythmic prose, prose cadenced to charm the ear and by its melodies and harmonies properly adjusted to heighten, as with an under-song, the emotional appeal of the ideas expressed, is no longer written. It appears to be no longer wanted. We are fallen upon harsh and colloquial times.

No one with any ear at all would deny Emerson a style, even if his rhythms are often broken into the cross-chop of Carlyle. No one would deny Irving a style, or Poe,—certainly Poe at his best,—or, indeed, to hark far back, Cotton Mather in many passages of the Magnalia, where to a quaint iambic simplicity he added a Biblical fervor which redeems and melodizes the monotony. Mather suggests Milton, Irving suggests Addison, Emerson suggests Carlyle, Poe, shall we say, is often the too conscious workman typified by De Quincey. But thereafter, in this country, we descend rapidly into second-hand imitations, into rhythm become, in truth, mere 'fine writing,' until its death within recent memory. Yet we do not find even to-day the true cadenced prose either uninteresting or out of date. Emerson is as modern as the morning paper. Newman's description of the ideal site for a university, in the clear air of Attica beside the blue Ægean, charms us still with its perfect blend of sound and sense, its clear intellectual idea borne on a cadenced undersong, as of distant surf upon the shore; and the exquisite epilogue to the Apologia, with its chime of proper names, still brings a moisture to our eyes. The triumphant tramp of Gibbon, the headlong imagery and Biblical fervor of Ruskin, the languid music of Walter Pater, each holds its separate charm, and the charm is not archaic.

Is such prose impossible any more? Certainly it is not. The heritage of the language is still ours, the birthright of our noble English tongue. Simply, we do not dare to let ourselves go. We seem tortured with the modern blight of self-consciousness; and while the cheaper magazines are almost blatant in their unblushing self-puffery, they are none the less cravenly submissive to what they deem popular demand, and turn their backs on literature, on style, as something abhorrent to a race which has been fed on the English Bible for three hundred years. Their ideal of a prose style now seems to consist of a series of staccato yips. It really cannot be described in any other way. The 'triumphantly intricate' sentence celebrated by Walter Pater would give many a modern editor a shiver of terror. He would visualize it as mowing down the circulation of the magazine like a machine gun. Rhythm and beauty of style can hardly be achieved by staccato yips. The modern magazine writer, trying to be rhetorically effective, trying to rise to the demands of heightened thought or emotional appeal, reminds one of that enthusiastic German tympanist who wrote an entire symphonic poem for kettle-drums.

I read one of the autumn crop of new novels the other day. Curiously enough, it was written by a music critic who, in his reviews of music, is constantly insisting on the primal importance of melody and harmony, who is an arch foe of the modern programme school and the whole-tone scale of Debussy. But the prose of his novel was utterly devoid of these prized elements, melody and harmony. A heavy, or sometimes turgid, journalistic commonplaceness sat upon it. I will not be unfair and tear an illustration from some passage of rightly simple narration. I will take the closing sentences from one of the climactic chapters, when the mood had supposedly risen to intensity, and, if ever, the prose would have been justified in rising to reinforce the emotion.

The house was aroused to extravagant demonstrations. Across the footlights it looked like a brilliantly realistic piece of acting, and the audience was astonished at the vigor of the hitherto cold Americano.

'But Nagy was not deceived. Crushed, dishevelled, breathless, she knew that her dominion over him was gone forever. She had tried to show him his soul and he had begun to see the light.'

Now, an ear attuned to the melodies of English prose must surely find this commonplace, and the closing sentence of all actually as harsh as the tonalities of Strauss or Debussy seem to the writer. Let us, even if a little unfairly, set it beside a passage from Henry Esmond, again a climactic passage, but one where the style is climactic, also, rising to the mood.

'"You will please, sir, to remember," he continued, "that our family hath ruined itself by fidelity to yours: that my grandfather spent his estate, and gave his blood and his son to die for your service; that my dear lord's grandfather (for lord you are now, Frank, by right and title too) died for the same cause; that my poor kinswoman, my father's second wife, after giving away her honor to your wicked perjured race, sent all her wealth to the King; and got in return that precious title that lies in ashes, and this inestimable yard of blue ribbon. I lay this at your feet and stamp upon it; I draw this sword, and break it and deny you; and had you completed the wrong you designed us, by Heaven I would have driven it through your heart, and no more pardoned you than your father pardoned Monmouth. Frank will do the same, won't you, cousin?"'

This justly famous passage, be it noted, is dialogue. To-day we especially do not dare to rise above a conversational level in dialogue. We should be accused of being 'unnatural.' Does no one speak beautifully any more, then, even in real life? Are the nerve-centres so shattered in the modern anatomy that no connection is established between emotions and the musical sense? Does an exquisite mood no longer reflect itself in our voice, in our vocabulary? Does no lover rise to eloquence in the presence of his Adored? If that is the case, surely we now speak unnaturally, and it should be the duty of literature to restore our health! Nor need such speech in fiction float clear away from solid ground. Notice how Thackeray in his closing sentence—'Frank will do the same, won't you, cousin?'—anchors his rhetoric to the earth.

We are, let it be said again, in the grasp of realism, and realism but imperfectly understood. Just as our drama aims to reproduce exactly a 'solid' room upon the stage, and to set actors to talking therein the exact speech of every day, so our oratory, so-called, is the reproduction of a one-sided conversation, and our novels (when they are worthy of consideration) are reproductions of patiently accumulated details, set forth in impatiently assembled sentences. But all this does not of necessity constitute realism, because its effect is not of necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language, if we do not re-live its story as we read? Surely, the answer is plain, and therefore any literary devices which heighten the mood for us are perfectly justifiable weapons of the realist, even as they are of the romanticist. One of these devices is consciously wrought prose. For the present we plead for its employment on no higher ground than this of practical expediency.

But how, you may ask,—no, not you, dear reader, who understand, but some other chap, a poor dog of an author, perhaps,—can consciously wrought prose aid in the creation of illusion? How can it be more than pretty?

Let us turn for answer to Sir Thomas Browne, to 'The Garden of Cyrus,' to the closing numbers:—

'Besides, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dulness of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.'

That is archaic, perhaps, and not without a certain taint of quaintness to modern ears. But how drowsy it is, how minor its harmonies, how subtly soothing its languid melody! It tells, surely, in what manner consciously wrought prose may aid in the creation of illusion. The mood of sleep was here to be evoked, and lo! it comes from the very music of the sentences, from the drowsy lullaby of selected syllables.

We might choose a quite different example, from a seemingly most unlikely source, from the plays of George Bernard Shaw. One hardly thinks of Mr. Shaw with a style, but rather with a stiletto. His prefaces have been too disputative, his plays too epigrammatic, for the cultivation of prose rhythms. Yet his prose is almost never without a certain crisp accuracy of conversational cadence; his ear almost never betrays him into sloppiness; and when the occasion demands, his style can rise to meet it. The truth is, Mr. Shaw is seldom emotional, so that his crisp accuracy of speech is most often the fitting garment for his thought. But in John Bull's Other Island his emotions are stirred, and when Larry Doyle breaks out into an impassioned description of Ireland the effect on the imagination of the heightened prose, when a good actor speaks it, is almost startling.

'No, no; the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can be dull too, and no great harm done. (Going off into a passionate dream.) But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! (Savagely.) No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him so that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and (bitterly, at Broadbent) be "agreeable to strangers," like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.'

This, to be sure, is prose to be spoken, not prose to be read. Different laws prevail, for different effects are sought. But the principle of cadence calculated to fit the mood, and by its melodic, or, as here, its percussive character to heighten the emotional appeal, remains the same.

But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion, employed in the proper places,—that is, where intensity of imagery or feeling can benefit by it,—is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? I am pleading for no Newman of the news story, nor am I seeking to arm our muck-rakers with the pen of Sir Thomas Browne. I would not send Walter Pater to report a football game (though Stevenson could doubtless improve on most of the 'sporting editors'), nor ask that Emerson write our editorials. But there is a poor way, and there is a fine way, to write everything, and inevitably the man who has an ear for the rhythms of prose, who has been trained and encouraged to write his very best, will fit his style appropriately to his subject. He will not seek to cadence his sentences in bald narration or in exposition, but he will, nevertheless, keep them capable of natural and pleasant phrasing, he will avoid monotony, jarring syllables, false stress, and ugly or tripping terminations which throw the voice as one's feet are thrown by an unseen obstacle in the path. His paragraphs, too, will group naturally, as falls his thought. But when the subject he has in hand rises to invective, to exhortation, to the dignity of any passion or the sweep of any vision, then if his ear be tuned and his courage does not fail him he must inevitably write in cadenced periods, the effectiveness of his work depending on the adjustment of these cadences to the mood of the moment, on his skill as an artist in prose.

And just now the courage of our young men fails. The unrestrained abandonment of all art to realism, of every sort of printed page to bald colloquialism, has dulled the natural ear in all of us for comely prose, and made us deaf to more stately measures. The complete democratizing of literature has put the fear of plebeian ridicule in our hearts, and the wider a magazine's circulation, it would seem, the more harm it does to English prose, because in direct ratio to its sale are its pages given over to the Philistines, and the dignity and refinement of thought which could stimulate dignity and refinement of expression are unknown to its contributors, or kept carefully undisclosed.

I have often fancied, in penitential moments, a day of judgment for us who write, when we shall stand in flushed array before the Ultimate Critic and answer the awful question, 'What have you done with your language?' There shall be searchings of soul that morning, and searchings of forgotten pages of magazines and 'best sellers' and books of every sort, for the cadence that may bring salvation. But many shall seek and few shall find, and the goats shall be sorted out in droves, condemned to an eternity of torture, none other than the everlasting task of listening to their own prose read aloud.

'What have you done with your language?' It is a solemn question for all of us, for you who speak as well as for us who write. Our language is a priceless heritage. It has been the ladder of life up which we climbed; with it we have bridged the sundering flood that forever rolls between man and man; through its aid have come to us the treasures of the past, the world's store of experience; by means of it our poets have wrought their measures, our philosophers their dreams. Bit by bit, precious mosaic after precious mosaic, the great body of English literature has been built up, in verse and prose, the crown of that division of language we call our own. Consciously finding itself three centuries ago, our English prose blossomed at once into the solemn splendors of the King James Bible and then into the long-drawn, ornate magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne, never again till our day to lose consciousness of its power, to forget its high and holy task, the task of maintaining our language at full tide and ministering to style and beauty. There were fluxes in the fashions, naturally; little of Browne's music being found in the almost conversational fluency (but not laxness) of Addison, even as the suave Mr. Addison himself has vanished in the tempestuous torrents of Carlyle. But there always was an Addison, a Carlyle, a Newman, a Walter Pater, whose work loomed large in popular regard, whose influence was mighty in shaping a taste for prose style. Who now, we may ask, looking around us in America, looms large in popular regard as a writer of ample vision, amply and beautifully clothed in speech, and whose influence is mighty in shaping a taste for prose style? It is not enough to have the worthies of the past upon our shelves. Each age must have its own inspiration. Again we hear the solemn question, 'What have you done with your language?' Only Ireland may answer, 'We have our George Moore, and we had our Synge not long ago—but we stoned his plays.'

We have stifled our language, we have debased it, we have been afraid of it. But some day it will reassert itself, for it is stronger than we, alike our overlord and avatar. Deep in the soul of man dwells the lyric impulse, and when his song cannot be the song of the poet it will shape itself in rhythmic prose, that it may still be cadenced and modulated to change with the changing thought and sound an obligato to the moods of the author's spirit. How wonderful has been our prose,—grave and chastely rich when Hooker wrote it, striding triumphant over the pages of Gibbon on tireless feet, ringing like a trumpet from Emerson's white house in Concord, modulated like soft organ-music heard afar in Newman's lyric moods, clanging and clamorous in Carlyle, in Walter Pater but as the soft fall of water in a marble fountain while exquisite odors flood the Roman twilight and late bees are murmurous, a little of all, perhaps, in Stevenson! We, too, we little fellows of to-day, could write as they wrote, consciously, rhythmically, if we only cared, if we only dared. We ask for the opportunity, the encouragement. Alas! that also means a more liberal choice of graver subjects, and a more extensive employment of the essay form. Milton could hardly have been Miltonic on a lesser theme than the Fall of the Angels, and Walter Pater wrote of the Mona Lisa, not Lizzie Smith of Davenport, Iowa. It is doubtless of interest to learn about Lizzie, but she hardly inspires us to rhythmic prose.

In the Chair
By Ralph Bergengren

ABOUT once in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-assessor: an irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a canteloupe, with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends and acquaintances have advised him. His identity vanishes.

As a rule the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he has given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases with it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother, that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also because the weakest woman under such circumstances has strong convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him to see the haircut, cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man in a thousand—nay, in ten thousand—would dare express himself as dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man, returning home with a new haircut, who was compelled to turn round again and take what his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened to that man but once.

The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors. Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,' a euphemism indicating a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the barber's, and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must grow steadily—count on it for that!—until for a brief period it is 'just right,' æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long again.

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.' But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. When he goes, he goes suddenly.

There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal. Probably it converses on subjects remote from our bodily consciousness with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep them from attaining it, a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a weakness. The back of the head had to be shaven, and the fashion doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of sitting up straight.

Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think, and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I remember a barber—he was the only one available in a small town—who cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was a pretty little cut, he said—filling it with alum—and reminded him of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!' said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again in just the same place!'

A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum. Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation, although, as I have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here therefore a man can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the other—that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once made an apparatus—a kind of helmet with multitudinous little scissors inside it—which he hopefully believed would solve the problem; but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps he committed suicide, for one can easily imagine that a man who thought he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't would be thrown into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility that he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put away,' where nobody could see him but the hardened attendants, by his sensitive family. The important fact is that the invention never got on the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put on the bib—

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to be deeply interested in the Illustrated London News. The patrons of the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear—I cannot see the place, but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since grown again—had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed awkwardly to hold the Police Gazette. And this opportunity to hold the Police Gazette without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier—until my ear was cut—to forget my position in the examination of this journal than in the examination of the Illustrated London News. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise you may get to looking in the mirror.

Do not do that.

For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it all off!

'Oh, barber, spare that hair!

Leave some upon my brow!

For months it's sheltered me!

And I'll protect it now!

'Oh, please! P-l-e-a-s-e!—' These exclamations annoy a barber, rouse a demon of fury in him. He reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell him how to cut hair, will you! A little more and he'll shave your head—and not only half-way either, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even if you are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your hands and perhaps dropping or tearing the Illustrated London News, the mirror gives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face, but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dotted mountain with two hands holding the Illustrated London News. You are afraid momentarily that the barber will lift it off and go away with it. Then is the time to read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K. Chesterton. But your mind reverts to a story you have been reading about how the Tulululu Islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve the heads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwise quite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber to discover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry. And what is he going to get now? A krees? No, a paint-brush. Is he going to paint you? And if so—what color? The question of color becomes strangely important, as if it made any real difference. Green? Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your forehead, tickling your ears, tickling your nose, tickling you under the chin and down the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, a barber must have some relaxation.

There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of business economy.

He takes off your bib.

From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to give his head to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours—already as remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible—horrible—horrible!

The Passing of Indoors
By Zephine Humphrey

INDOORS is going. We may just as well make up our minds on this revolutionary point, and accept it with such degree of hardy rejoicing or shivering regret as our natures prompt in us.

The movement has been long under way, gradually working the perfect ejection which seems now at hand. We might have recognized the dislodging process long ago, had we been far-sighted enough. It began—who shall say when it did begin? Surely not in the shaggy breasts of those rude ancestors of ours whom we hold in such veneration, and to whose ways we seem to ourselves to be so wisely returning. They dragged their venison into the depths of a cave darker and closer than any house, and devoured it in great seclusion. Perhaps it began in the San Marco Piazza at Venice, with the little open-air tables under the colonnades. "So delightful! So charming!" Thus the tourists, as they sipped their coffee and dallied with their ices. They were right; it was delightful and charming, and so it is to this day, but it was perhaps the thin edge of the wedge which is turning us all out now.

Supper was the first regular meal to follow the open-air suggestion, country supper on the piazza in the warm summer evening. That also was delightful, of course, and not at all alarming. All nations and ages have practiced the sport of occasional festive repasts out of doors when the weather has permitted. But breakfast was not long in following suit; and when dinner, that most conservative, conventional of meals, succumbed to the outward pressure and spread its congealing gravies in the chilly air, we were in for the thing in good earnest, the new custom was on. No longer a matter of times and seasons, the weather had nothing to do with it now; and in really zealous families the regular summer dining-room was out of doors. Summer dining-room—that sounds well; since summer and warmth go together traditionally. But not always actually in New England, where bleak rains overtake the world now and then, and clearing north-west winds come racing keenly. It was soon essential to introduce a new fashion in dinner garments: overcoats, sweaters, and heavy shawls, felt hats and mufflers.

'Excuse me while I run upstairs to get a pair of mittens?'

'Finish your soup first, dear; it will be quite cold if you leave it.'

The adherents of the new doctrine are very conscientious and faithful, as was only to be expected. We are a valiant race in the matter of our enthusiasms and can be trusted to follow them sturdily, buckling on armor or overcoats or whatever other special equipment the occasion demands. Conscientiousness is a good trait, but there is perhaps more of the joy of life in some other qualities.

Sleeping outdoors was the next great phase in the open-air movement. That also began casually enough and altogether charmingly. One lingered in the hammock, watching the stars, musing in the still summer night, until, lo! there was the dawn beginning behind the eastern hills. A wonderful experience. Not much sleeping about it truly,—there is commonly not much sleeping about great experiences,—but so beautiful that the heart said, 'Go to! why not have this always? Why not sleep outdoors every night?' Which is of course exactly the way in which human nature works; very reasonable, very sane and convincing, but unfortunately never quite so successful as it should be. That which has blessed us once must be secured in perpetuity for our souls to feast on continually; revelation must fold its wings and abide with us. So we soberly go to work and strip all the poetry of divine chance, all the delight of the unexpected, from our great occasions by laying plans for their systematic recurrence.

He who bends to himself a joy,

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses a joy as it flies,

Lives in eternity's sunrise.

It is a pity that William Blake could not teach us that once for all. As a matter of fact, of course, great occasions care nothing at all for our urging; and a plan is an institution which they cordially abhor. The stars and the dawn do not condescend to such paraphernalia for waylaying them as sleeping-bags, rubber blankets, air-pillows, and mosquito netting, with a stout club close at hand in case of tramps or a skunk.

One experience of my own recurs to my memory poignantly here, and I think I cannot do better than set it forth. I had passed an unforgettable night all alone in a meadow, detained by the evening almost insensibly into 'solemn midnight's tingling silences,' and thence into the austere dawn. It was an episode such as should have sealed my lips forever; but I profanely spoke of it, and at once the contagion of interest spread through the little village.

'What fun! Did you have your rubbers on? Did you sit in a chair? I should think you would have sat in a chair—so much more comfortable! Well, I tell you what, let's do it together,—a lot of us, so we won't be afraid,—and let's climb a mountain. The sunset and dawn will be beautiful from a mountain.'

We did it; I blush to confess that some twenty-five of us did it. It was an excursion planned and discussed for a matter of two weeks (a full moon being part of the programme), and there was no accident unforeseen, no event unprovided for. The procession that wended its way, toiling and puffing, up the ascent of Haystack,—the favored mountain selected for the high pedestal of our rapture,—on the auspicious night, was about as sad, and withal as funny, an affront as the secrecy of beauty ever received. Blankets, steamer-rugs, pillows, shawls, hammocks, whiskey-flasks—how we groaned beneath the burden of all these things. We lost the way, of course, and had to beat the woods in every direction; we were tired and hot and—cross? Perhaps. But we knew what our rôle was, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we all of us stood very solemnly in a row and said, 'How beautiful!'

It was beautiful; that was just the fineness of the night's triumph over us—over me at least; I cannot speak for the other twenty-four. To this day, be it said in parentheses, whenever we mention that night on Haystack we lift our eyes in ecstasy, and no one of us has ever confessed any sense of lack. But honestly, honestly at the last (dear stalwart relief of honesty!), that experiment was a failure—so beautiful that the spirit should have been lifted out of the body, and would have been, had it stood alone, had it not already exhausted itself in plans and expectations. Beneath us, a far-spreading sea of misty, rolling hills, all vague and blended in the light of the soaring moon; above us, such a sweep of sky as only mountain-tops command; around us, silence, silence. Yet the unstrenuous orchard at home, with its tranquil acceptance of such degree of sunset light as was granted to it, and of the moon's presence when she rose above the apple trees, would have conveyed the night's message a thousand times more clearly.

It is seldom worth while to describe any failure of the spirit very minutely, and tragedy is not the tone this paper would assume; but one slight episode of the dawn following that fatal night must be related. We were gathered on the eastern edge of our mountain top, a tousled, gray, disheveled lot, heavy-eyed and weary. Does the reader understand the significance of the term 'to prevent the dawn'? He does if he has stood and waited for the sun to rise—or the moon or any of the constellations, for that matter. All heavenly bodies retard their progress through the influence of being waited for. 'Surely now!' a dozen times we warned one another there, with our faces toward the quickening east; yet no glittering, lambent rim slid up to greet our eyes.

At last a decent comely cloud came to the rescue of the sun, halting and embarrassed, and settled snugly all about the mountain of the day-spring. Into this the sun was born, so obscurely that it rode high above the mountain's edge, shorn and dull, a rubber ball, before we discovered it. 'Why—why—' some one began, stammering; and then there was a dramatic pause. Brave and determined though we were in our pursuit of ecstasy, we could not burst forth into song like Memnon statues at the sight of that belated orange, 'Lo, the Lord Sun!' Not at all. It was the merest varlet. In this dilemma of our hearts, a funny little wailing cry came from the cliff's edge: 'I want my money back! I want my money back!' It was a perfect commentary on the whole situation, as fine and humorous and true an utterance as could be asked on the foiled occasion. We laughed at it, and all the air was straightway clearer for us. Then down the mountain-side we trooped, and went home to bed.

Of course I am not unaware of the impatience of some readers, if they have taken pains to scan so far this earnest exposition. The outdoor movement is not one primarily of sentiment, but of health and happiness; and the story just related is aside from the point. That may be true. I certainly stand in respect of the great claims of the physical side of the subject, and would not deal with them. By all means, let all people be as well as possible. But it is still the other side, the side of sentiment and rapture, which is most pleadingly often brought home to me.

It is pitiful how helpless we are against the invasions of a new enthusiasm like this—we sober, conservative folk. I still sleep in my bed, in my room, but the satisfaction I used to take in the innocent practice is broken of late by haunting fears that I may not be able to keep it up. My friends will not let me alone.

'Of all things! why don't you sleep out here, on this little upper piazza? Precisely the place! I can't understand how you can ignore such an opportunity.'

'Well, you see,'—my answer was glib at first,—'the piazza overhangs the road, and the milk-wagons go by very early. I don't want to get up at four o'clock every morning.'

'They couldn't see much of you, I should think,'—with a thoughtful measuring glance,—'not more than your toes and the tip of your nose.'

'Oh, thank you, that's quite enough!'

'Well, you might saw off the legs of a cot, to bring it below the railing. Or just a mattress spread on the floor would do very well.'

Just a mattress spread on the floor! That closes the argument. I have no spirit left to prefer any other objections to these dauntless souls, such as the rain (the piazza has no roof). But what would a cold bath be if not distinctly so much to the good in view of the toilet operations of the following morning? There is no course left me but that final one,—which should in honesty have come first,—of damning myself by the hopeless assertion, 'I don't want to sleep out of doors.' This locks the argument, and the barrier stands complete, shutting me off in a world by myself, interrupting the genial flow of sympathetic friendship. But I love my friends. Therefore it follows that I tremble for my further repose in my bed. I fear I shall yet utter midnight sighs on that piazza floor.

Indoors, dear indoors! I would I might plead its cause a little here. Does no one ever pause to reflect that there was never any outdoors at all until indoors was created? The two had a simultaneous birth, but it was an appurtenance of the latter that marked the distinction and gave the names. A little humiliating that might have seemed to any creatures less generous than woods and mountains—to have been here really from the beginning, ages and ages in glorious life, and then to take their first generic name, find their first classification, all of them in a lump together (what a lump!) as the other side of a fragile barrier to a mushroom construction. One wonders that those who exalt the outdoors as everything nowadays, do not find some better title for it than its dooryard term. But those who love the indoors too, though they may smile at the calm presumption of its dubbing the universe, accept the conclusion without any question. Man is after all the creature of creatures, and his life is of first importance. We do not hear that the woodchuck speaks of out-hole, or the bird of out-tree.

Such life of man is an inner thing, intensely inner; its essence lies in its inwardness. It can hardly know itself 'all abroad'; it must needs have devised for itself a shelter as soon as it came to self-consciousness, a refuge, not only from storm and cold but from the distracting variety of the extensive world. Indoors is really an august symbol, a very grave and reverend thing, if we apprehend it rightly. It stands for the separate life of man, apart from (though still a part of, too) the rest of the universe. Take any one room inhabited daily by a person of strong individuality,—how alive it is! How brisk and alert in the very attitudes of the chairs and the pictures on the walls! Or, more happily, how serene and reposeful! Or how matter-of-fact! Morbid and passionate, flippant, austere, boisterous, decorous,—anything, everything a room may be which a human creature may be; and that range, as most of us know, is almost unlimited.

It is hard to understand how any person can fail to respond to the warm appeal of his own abode. Say one has been abroad all day (another term that assumes the house as a starting-point), climbing the mountains, exploring the woods, ravishing eyes and heart with the beauty of the excellent world. Night comes at last, and weariness droops upon the flesh. Enough! Even the spirit's cry finds a pause. Enough, enough! The wide world suddenly spreads so vast that it overwhelms and frightens; there is something pitiless in the reach of the unbounded sky. Then, as fast as they can, the lagging feet make for a point on the hillside where the eyes can command the valley, and swiftly, eagerly flies the glance to one dear accustomed goal. A white house nestled among the trees,—that is all, yet it thrills the heart with a potent summons which mountain-peaks and sunsets do not know. Home! Ah, hurry, then!

Down the hill, across the pasture, in at the white gate, and up the two marble steps. The front door stands open unconcernedly. The house makes no stir at receiving its inmate back,—its inmate whose life it has held and brooded during his absence, waiting to reinvest him with it when he wants it again,—but there is a quiet sense of welcome, a content of returning, which is among the sweetest and most establishing of human experiences. The clock ticks steadily in the hall, its hands approaching the genial hour of supper-time. Within the open library door, the books dream on the shelves. Little sounds of a tranquil preparation come from the dining-room; the tea-kettle sings, the black kitten purrs. Blessed indoors! It draws a veil gently over the tired head, bewildered with much marveling, lays a cool hand over the eyes, says, 'Now rest, rest.' Indoors is like the Guardian Angel in Browning's poem.

After supper, one sits by the lamp and reads peacefully. Aunt Susan reads, too, on the other side of the big table, and Cousin Jane sews. The books and the pictures look on benignly, and even the furniture is instinct with a mute eloquence of companionship. The song of the night insects throbs without, and millers hurl themselves with soft thuds against the windows; an owl mutters to himself in the maple tree. But not for anything would one go out, not for anything would one leave this glowing, brooding, protecting indoors which one has regained. After a while, one goes upstairs and lays one's self in the safe white bed in one's own room. The windows are open to the night, but solid walls are all round about; and, before the sleepily closing eyes, gleam one's own peculiar cherished belongings in the creeping moonlight. Into the very heart of one's life one has returned at the close of the day, and there one goes to sleep. 'In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.'

And we will not? Is the discouraged clause, promptly succeeding to that most beautiful verse of Isaiah, true, then, of us? Are we going to despoil ourselves of all the poetry, the intimate meaning of our indoor life?

'A place in which to dress and undress—that is all I want of a house,' an energetic young woman said.

A bath-house would suit her perfectly. Perhaps that is what we are coming to—rows of bath-houses, with sleeping-bags stored up in them against the night. Alas for the pictures! Alas for the music! Alas for the books!

The books! There is a happy suggestion. I believe the books will save us. There is certainty nothing that objects with greater decision and emphasis to sleeping out of doors than a book—yes, even a volume of Walt Whitman. Books are obstinate in their way; they know their own minds, and there are some things which they will not do. The effect of leaving one in the orchard inadvertently over night has a final melancholy about it which most book-lovers understand poignantly. Could books be printed on india rubber and bound in water-proof cloth? Perhaps; but the method does not sound attractive enough to be feasible even in these practical days. No, I believe the books will save us. They are a great army and they have power; a steady conservative hold is theirs on their restless owners. Other threatening situations, they have saved and are constantly saving.

'I sometimes think I'd give up housekeeping, and not have a home any more,' one woman said, 'if it weren't for my books. But I can't part with them, nor yet can I get them all into one room; so here I stay.'

'Buy books?' exclaimed a New York man. 'No; it hurts them too much to move them.'

Which innocent implication has caused me many a thoughtful smile.

Essentially human,—with the humanity of the ages, not of a few decades,—books understand what man really wants, and what he must have, better than he does himself. In the serene and gracious indoors, they took up their places long ago, and there they remain, and there they will always make shift to abide. Perhaps, if we sit down close at their feet, we, too, may abide.

The Contented Heart
By Lucy Elliot Keeler

CŒUR Content, grand Talent, runs the motto of one of my friends; which early led me to dub her, Contented Heart. Is it not human nature, such easy assumption of an interesting aspiration as a fact to be posted? As logical as to expect Mr. Short to check his stature at five feet two; as humanly contrary as for the Blacks to name their girls Lily, Blanche, and Pearl. They usually do. I remember a Bermudian rector, leaning down to inquire the name of the black baby to be christened, suddenly quickened into audibility by the mother's reply: 'Keren-Happuck, sir, yes, sir, one of the Miss Jobs, sir.' Now Job's daughters were fairest among the daughters of men.

Contented Heart has obsessed my mind of late. I like to take the other side: everybody does. Does like to and does; and because the air to-day is redolent of unrest and discontent, I put in the assertion that, nevertheless, the great majority of my acquaintances possess that great talent,—translate it knack, or translate it acquirement,—a contented heart. I seldom talk intimately with anybody but I hear something like this:—

'I have been visiting at the X's. What a superb place! but I do not envy them. Think of the care and expense and the servant question. Simple as my cot is, I honestly prefer it.' Or, 'What a fortune the H's appear to have. It would be comfortable to get what one wants and go where one wishes; not to worry at tax-paying time and new-suit time. Still I doubt if they get half the enjoyment from their acquisitions that we do who have to save and plan for ours.' Or, 'You do not use eye-glasses? How fortunate! they are such a nuisance. But hush—such a boon. I should be helpless without them. I am not sure but it is even a good thing to be born with them on, so to speak. My contemporaries who are beginning to use them are most unhappy, while glasses are just a part of my face.' Or, 'It is a great affliction to be deaf in even one ear. The person on that one side of you thinks you prefer the conversation of the person on the other side. Yet, as my brother said when he saw me struggling to make out a dull speaker's words, "Why abuse your natural advantage?"

How do people with two good ears sleep? They cannot bury them both in the pillow. Suppose our ears were so sensitive that we noticed every footstep on the street! Being deaf is merely to enjoy some of the advantages that the society to prevent unnecessary noises seeks to confer on a normal public. We admire a beautiful face and then add, 'But how she must hate to grow old; a tragedy of the mirror that we homely souls are spared.' All my life I envied persons with straight noses till I began to observe that with age the straight nose droops into a beak, whereas the youthful tip-tilt and concavity kind straightens its end to a fair classicism. Thus others than the Vicar of Wakefield draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune.

Of course content is dilemma enough to have its two horns: the double peaks of taking life too easily, and of taking it too hard. In his statue of Christ, Thorvaldsen expressed his conviction that he had reached his culminating point,—since he had never been so satisfied with any work before,—and was 'alarmed that I am satisfied.' That 'the people ask nothing better' is the slogan of the grafter. No reform comes without its preceding period of discontent; dissatisfaction is the price to be paid for better things; a revolutionary attitude must be maintained. Stevenson knew a Welsh blacksmith who at twenty-five could neither read nor write, at which time he heard a chapter of Robinson Crusoe read aloud in a farm kitchen. Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled in his ignorance; but he left the kitchen another man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, divine day-dreams, written and printed and bound, and to be bought for money and enjoyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor could he find another copy, only one in English. Down he sat once more, learned English, and at length with entire delight read Robinson.

As there is a noble way of being discontented, so there is an ignoble content. The Contented Heart is not a phrase to soothe us, but a power to work results. It must constantly emerge upon a higher plane, or it will fall. Few of us would be willing to retain just the personal habits that we have now. Sir Gilbert Elliot drove his sister out of her literary inertia when he bet gloves to ribbons that she could not write a modern ballad on the Flowers of the Forest. The result is one of the most popular songs of Scotland. There is also a sham content whose practitioners often get their 'cumuppances' as effectively as did Thomas Raikes. The Duchess of York led him about her garden, where was a menagerie crowded with eagles and some favorite macaws. A herd of kangaroos and ostriches appeared and a troop of monkeys. Next morning a kangaroo and a macaw strolled into Raikes's bedroom. He was too much of a courtier to tell his terror. At breakfast he said, 'If I like one creature more than another it is a kangaroo, while there is nothing so good for a bedroom sentinel as a strong-legged macaw.' The good Duchess smiled pleasantly and put Raikes down in her will for two macaws.

A certain kind of content enlivens us with the bliss of others' ignorance. Tacitus was one of the first historians in our modern sense, yet he described a motionless frozen sea in the north from which a hiss is heard as the sun plunges down into it at night; and Pliny noted that the reflection of mirrors is due to the percussion of the air thrown back upon the eyes. Kipling laughed slyly at the traveler in India who spent his time gazing at the names of the railway stations in Baedeker. When the train rushed through a station he would draw a line through the name and say, 'I've done that.' Satisfaction with our learning is confined to no age or nation. Two Frenchmen in a restaurant showing off their English opined, 'It deed rain to-morrow.' 'Yes, it was.' Satisfaction with virtue was rebuked by Francis de Sales when he told the nuns, who asked to go barefoot, to keep their shoes and change their brains. Satisfaction with our importance recalls Harlequin, who when asked what he was doing on his paper throne replied that he was reigning. Satisfaction with our future is the satisfaction of the eighth square of the chessboard where we shall all be queens together, and it's all feasting and fun.

I would not, as advocate of the Contented Heart, go so far as Walt Whitman when he said that whoever was without his volume of poems should be assassinated; but his remark suggests that extreme measures are frequently curative. Stanislaus of Poland did not hesitate to recall to his daughter the bad days they had undergone. 'See, Marie, how Providence cares for good people: you had not even a chemise in 1725, and now you are Queen of France.' To take up Dante and read about devils boiled in pitch must by comparison cheer morbid humans. The spectacle of tragedy in the lives of kings and favorites of the gods such as the Greek stage presented was believed to be wholesome because beholders thereby faced a scale of misfortune so much exceeding anything in their own lives that their mishaps appeared of slight importance in comparison. I know that after seeing Œdipus Rex given by the three Salvinis and others in the old amphitheatre in Fiesole, I went off murmuring, 'What does it matter if my trunk is lost!' a state of mind to which no slighter argument had sufficed to bring me. Surely life is too interesting to spend it all knocking off its pretty scallops by aimless exaggeration of small troubles, or hanging out our large ones to flap the passer-by. Besides which, we get no more sympathy from the passer-by than did Giant Despair who sometimes, in sunshiny weather, fell into fits.

Captivating as a 'born,' a fortuitous, untrained content may be, trained content is of a finer type. One is quantity content, the other quality content. Not to smash things up and make them over just as we want them, which we should like to do but cannot; not to waste our time fighting against conditions, but to take up those conditions, that environment, and out of them forge the œs triplex of a contented heart—that, I take it, is to be an adept in the fine art of living, and I for one am votary.

That the most restless heart can train itself to find content in simple, commonplace things, like work, nature, health, books, meditation, and friends,—illustrations are bewilderingly abundant. Burne-Jones said he would like to stay right in his own house for numberless years, the hope of getting on with his painting was happiness enough. Macaulay would 'rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading'; and King James said that if he were not a king he would be a university man, and if it were so that he must be a prisoner he would desire no other durance than to be chained in the Bodleian Library with so many noble authors. Carlyle's chief luxury was 'to think and smoke tobacco, with a new clay pipe every day, put on the doorstep at night for any poor brother-smoker or souvenir-hunter to carry away.'

All Diogenes wanted was that Alexander and his men should stand from between him and the sun. Goethe found content in Nature and earnest activity; and the happy Turk told Candide that he had twenty acres of land which he cultivated with his children, work which put them far from great evils: ennui, vice, and need,—'Il faut cultiver notre jardin.' Diocletian, one of the cleverest of the Roman emperors, reigned twenty-two years and then retired to private life in Dalmatia, building, planting, and gardening. Solicited by Maximian to resume the imperial purple, he replied that if he could show Maximian the cabbages which he had planted with his own hands he would no longer be urged to relinquish his enjoyment of happiness for the pursuit of power. Fanny Kemble lived all summer in the Alps, the guides describing her exquisitely as the lady who goes singing over the mountains. Pedaretus, being left out of the election of the three hundred, went home merry, saying that it did him good to find there were three hundred better than himself in the city. St. Augustine on his thirty-third birthday gave his friends a moderate feast followed by a three days' discussion of the Happy Life. Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress not to please his neighbors, but his own self to satisfy; in prison, too.

Catherine of Siena, whatever her sufferings, was always jocund, 'ever laughing in the Lord.' The blind Madame du Deffand rejoiced that her affliction was not rheumatism; Spurgeon's receipt for contentment was never to chew pills, but to swallow the disagreeable and have done with it; Darwin's comfort was that he had never consciously done anything to gain applause; and Jefferson never ceased affirming his belief in the satisfying power of common daylight, common pleasures, and all the common relations of life. Essipoff, when commiserated on the smallness of her hands, insisted that longer ones would be cumbersome. Robert Schauffler's specific for a blue Monday is to whistle all the Brahms tunes he can remember. Dr. Cuyler, when very ill, replied to a relative's suggestion of the glorious company waiting him above, 'I've got all eternity to visit with those old fellows; I am in no hurry to go'; and old Aunt Mandy, when asked why she was so constantly cheerful, replied, 'Lor', chile, I jes' wear this world like a loose garment.'

Acts, all these, the flinging out of hand or tongue against adverse fortune. The brain can do it, too. One of the most remarkable statements I ever heard is Mary Antin's that she never had a dull hour in her life. Now, outside things, doings, could not so have thrilled her days. Her spirit kept dullness distant. On the rafters of Montaigne's tower-room was written in Greek, 'It is not so much things that torment man as the opinion that he has of things.' Our opinions then make the contented or the discontented heart. Coleridge affirmed the shaping power of imagination to be so vitally human that the joy of life consists in it. Haydon's chief pleasure was 'feeding on his own thoughts.' 'Make for yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts,' Ruskin urged. 'Whether God gave the Venetians St. Mark's bones does not matter,' he says elsewhere, 'but he gave them real joy and peace in their imagined treasure, more than we have in our real ones.' Lord Rosebery urges people to garden in winter in the imagination. Stevenson writes of the ease and pleasure of travels in the calendar and a voyage in the atlas; and Keats thought that a man might pass a very pleasant life by reading certain pages of poetry and wandering with them and musing and dreaming upon them.

It is the mood that makes the contented heart, just as the eye makes the horizon, and we ourselves make the light that we see things by. Clothes warm us only by keeping our own heat in. 'Everyone is well or ill at ease,' says Epictetus, 'according as he finds himself; not he whom the world believes but himself believes to be so is content.' To be concrete, take riches. 'Greedy fools,' sings the modern poet,

'Measure themselves by poor men never;

Their standard being still richer men

Makes them poor ever.'

The rich man is merely one who has something to spare; and the really poor one he who has nothing over. If you can give anything you are rich. Try it. An old man tells me how Mark Hopkins used to examine the boys in the Westminster Catechism: 'What is the chief end of man?' 'To glorify God and enjoy him forever.' 'Well,' he burst forth, 'why don't you do it then?' It is not conceit, but hygiene of the soul, to 'enjoy one's self,' taking the conventional phrase literally. The trick of happiness, says Walt Whitman, is to tone down your wants and tastes low enough; and Stevenson puts in his say that the true measure of success is appreciation: 'I stand more in need of a deeper sense of contentment with life than of knowledge of the Bulgarian tongue.' What would the possession of a thousand a year avail, asks Thackeray, to one who was allowed to enjoy it only with the condition of wearing a shoe with a couple of nails in it?

Take knowledge, not to be confounded with wisdom,—'I have none,' sang Keats's thrush, 'and yet the evening listens.' It did not hurt Horace

if others be

More rich or better read than me,

Each has his place.

Montaigne would rather be more content and less knowing; and there is Lessing's great confession of faith: that if God in his right hand held all truth, and in his left the striving for truth, 'if he should say to me, "Choose," I would say, "Father, give me this striving, pure truth is for thee alone."'

Take work. Do you complain of it? Try doing more, of a productive sort. An engine-builder received complaint that his engine burned too much coal. 'How many cars on the train?' was the telegraphed query, with the reply, 'Four.' 'Try twelve,' went the prescription, and the train drew twelve with economy of fuel. 'Your brain tired?' William James echoed a student. 'Never mind, work straight on and your brain will get its second wind.' I myself do not know of any anodyne surer and quicker than that found in the garden. When all the world is askew, dibbling in seedlings in straight rows is a wonderful solace. Why do so many women treat domesticity as drudgery? Its infinite variety, so unlike the monotonous tasks of men, often wearies the mind, but like Chesterton I do not see how it can narrow it. And socialism, with its cry of armchairs for workingmen! Armchairs, as Creighton nobly says, will bring no lasting happiness; but to quicken a human being, even one's self, into a sense of the meaning of his life and destiny, that is a real happiness.

Take sorrow. Is it not infinitely better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Are there not many good moments in life which outweigh its greatest sorrows?

Take overpressure. Luther advised Melanchthon to stop managing the universe and let the Almighty do it; and Dr. Trumbull preached 'the duty of refusing to do good.'

Take the grief caused by others. One of the bravest women I know used in times of anxiety to gather her little children about her and say gayly, 'Now I will make some graham gems, and open some marmalade, and we will take a little comfort.' Solomon or Aristotle could have done no more.

Take, for a smile's sake, the weather. It may be bad, but as we cannot change it, the thing is our attitude toward it; and as dark enshrouds us, 'The sun is set,' said Mr. Inglesant, cheerfully; 'but it will rise again. Let us go home.'

In such ways as these the right-minded person will meet his discontents face to face, and one by one eliminate them. He will also take stock of his assets. St. Teresa said that by thinking of heaven for a quarter of an hour every day one might hope to deserve it. Why do we not deliberately devote some minutes each day to saying to ourselves, 'I am tolerably well; I have food and shelter; everybody so far as I know respects me, and a few persons love me truly. I have books and a garden, the stars and the sea. I enjoy this and that, and before long the other. The thing so long dreaded has never come to pass. I will embark at any rate for the land of the Contented Heart.' Would not such a conscious recapitulation be an actual force building up this thing of which we talk?

Can content be conveyed? Can it be passed from one who has it to one who has it not—as one lamp lights another nor grows less? I wonder what would be the effect of a group of young women, lately conning over in college class—

With what I most enjoy contented least—

if they should resolve to stop all that, and, undeterred by others' estimate of values, be trustees of their own content, not suffering it to be contingent upon the manners and conduct of others? I believe that it would act like the magnet, which not only attracts the needle but infuses it with the power of drawing others. Great-heart so inspired the travelers that Christiana seized her viol and Mercy her lute, and, as they made sweet music, Ready-to-Halt took Despondency's daughter, Mrs. Much-Afraid, by the hand and together they went dancing down the road.

Which is apropos of my contention that the Contented Heart is not so rare!

THE END

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE. MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.

---