OTHER ESSAYS
I
AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY
In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now dead.
That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices, and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country. Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward winter.
There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d'hôte express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry.
BROADWAY AT NIGHT
But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of revenants, which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid sort of revenants if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables d'hôte; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.
But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval.
But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it.
Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot, will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the actresses.
At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be, if it is not positively raining, you "do not know or need to know." Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night, which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York's present at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang, "Forget it, forget it." There remains only the future from which she can derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derived from immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists.
ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS
Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months. It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the Election Night you feel New York as you do in no other hour. The sense extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his sins and is no longer sorry for them.
After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers come in late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows? New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we must wait another year before we can put it to the test again; wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet, and the wind comes up and blows them bare, and yet another summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the revenants have once more returned to town.
II
PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES
A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon
"Across the walnuts and the wine."
"How," this puzzled spirit has asked, "shall I address a friend of mine who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to the respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our letters to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy, of letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities? Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?"
Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, not "Mr. Smythe Johnes" if you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with any man who knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply "Smythe Johnes," with his street and number, for he feels himself classed by your "Mr. Smythe Johnes" with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our revolt in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are now conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or below it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they will address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence.
The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than they think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was the proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so commonly called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older form of Armiger they forgot that inter arma silent leges, and that Esquire was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago, yielded to the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately addressed all his contributors as "Mr." One of them, the most liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a year, and then he protested. After that the young editor (he was then almost as young as any one now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately addressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abiding sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Friend and an abhorrer of war, he could not be hailed Armiger without something like insult.
With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but it is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly addressing doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In England, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you cannot call a surgeon "doctor" without offence; he is Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven knows.
It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall superscribe him.
A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their letters simply Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or affix. They kept up this good custom till in process of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted their manners, so that when they came home they began addressing each other as Esq., and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and doubtless if mankind could be brought to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes which these friends once disused the race would be none the worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes on one's visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial who is not to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is the United States post-office which delivers the letters of Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service which conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely the explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other William H. Taft.
Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were wanting in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well as hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The signory of the proudest republic in the world held that their family names were of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own day a lady of the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that the title of count existed in it or need exist: "Ognuno può essere conte: Peruzzi, no." ("Any one may be a count; but not a Peruzzi.") In like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and Washington and Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher regard with the help of these titles; and Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not have had greater glory from the survival of parchments so directed to them.
The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to be saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when used orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become "Doc," and Captain, "Cap," until one might rather have no title at all. Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses, can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success, though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the bell-strap, "Step lively, lady," but you cannot say, "Step lively, gentleman," and the fine old vocative "Sir" is quite obsolete. We ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted each other with "Sir!" and "Sir!" when they met; and "Step lively, sir," might convey the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor as "Step lively, lady." Sir might look very well on the back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly enough, it would be less archaic.
Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to say to the sovereign, "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," as the use is, instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," unless you are in that station of life to which you would be very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the difference of years is great enough.
The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant reader's difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to simplify themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We fancy not; besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best Comrade looks affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as Friend Smythe Johnes.
It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on without the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the roll of parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Cæsar was simply C. Julius Cæsar to his correspondents, and Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of his fellow-citizens. These historical personages may have had the number of their houses inscribed on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus added to his name for purposes of identification; but apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, without anything equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of
"The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,"
name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add Cæsar to the last name, though Cæsar seems to have finally served the turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style for imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the Roman state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine.
However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be styled on the backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not Miss Mary but Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr. before his name? In the case of a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it and D.D. after it? These are important questions, or, if they are not important, they are at least interesting. Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably knows no better than the sender how it should be addressed; but in the rarer case in which he does know, his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it is misaddressed. It is something like having your name misspelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it.
The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by legislation, as it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be. The first French Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of address, which could be used without offence to the self-love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and Citoyenne for all women was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified; but some things, though they are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. The same imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal chronology, and a new era, very handy and very clear; but the old week of seven days came back and replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur and Madame returned victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the reform of weights and measures, when once established, continued, and spread from France to most other countries—to nearly all, indeed, less stupid than Great Britain and the United States—so that the whole civilized world now counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine difference? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an opportunity to prove himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly be, or else the Society of Friends could not have so absolutely substituted First Day and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and could not have successfully refused all name-honor whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals.
But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic, one and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board, something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety. The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's given names could be added.
III
DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER
Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes, and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand, whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as "supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not even certain just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority; what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque. It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter. But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service, nowise appears.
What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of one's inn, as a place where one shall take one's ease, has perished in the evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One may take one's ease in one's hotel only if one is dressed to the mind of the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is more important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate, tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice, would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like, with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London.
Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and which now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is a question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and it will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom of the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do people from every part of their country who have got bored out with their happy homes and want a few days' or a few weeks' change. One may not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade, or at least more distinguished than one's own; with the best will in the world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four: a tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up, dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of a set in some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches aplenty, and aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true, intelligent, and heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle class, offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the effect of champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer, was to be noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the effect of something more than champagne in the face loomed in the perspective through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely far, the greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming promenade were simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, of a varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity. They were the stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it his imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.
The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted with his kind for half a century of æsthetic consciousness, and now had he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No," he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock foundations."
Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his fancy—never imagination—began to play forward with the vivacity of that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five. If all this were true—and its truth shone the more distinctly from a ground of potential dissent—was not there the stuff in the actual conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now that the first glow of his prime was past, might fashion an image of our decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had been easy—how easy it had been!—to catch the likeness of those formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of classic fable or mediæval romance. But there remained the days of the years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang.
The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature; which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted, hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has never yet taken the eyes of wonder.
We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any genre result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving emotion of an immense hotel dining-room, all in décolletée and frac paré, the old, simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be led out between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and delivered over to the police to be conducted in ignominy to the nearest Italian table d'hôte. The national character, on the broad level of equality which fiction once delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have no fear but some genius will arrive and impart the effect of the society which has arrived.
IV
THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH
As Eugenio—we will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal name—grew older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating the case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were young enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had only the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact, however, will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were young writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to know one thing: namely, how he did it.
What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for making the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint their phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one's modesty, one likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's pleasure in their flatteries was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how to return them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out to those generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in their teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with the fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing to show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods; he said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left them out of the question.
In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.
Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible. If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway; that there were only byways; private paths over other people's grounds; easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery to the latest-comer.
His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it themselves from his having practised.
The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had gone out of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled the stock criticism of the connoisseur in The Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains; but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: "Courage is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely, because the end with them absorbs the means."
Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end could no more justify bad means in æsthetics than in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result. If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop.
Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There were times when it changed to some other end or took a different significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel turning out other than he had forecast it.
In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds, and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.
As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art, and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like Hamlet, say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch, forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and walk the world forever.
Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done? The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the earnestness of his nature, to write their Hamlets from the beginning forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective Hamlets; they must slowly make their Hamlets' acquaintance by living with them.
If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate triumph.
"But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a style?"
"By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is the one thing you must not try for. If you try for style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante?"
Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?
One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our choice of two things—stop working; stop going, cease to move, to exist—or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which we have not dropped, drops us.
Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could sell or give or lend it.
Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that, whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men, and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?
If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art was a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider, deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it, partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done and call him master.
But how could Eugenio make such things—so true and yet so self-contradictory, so mutually repellent—clear to these simple-hearted young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more he resolved to do nothing about it.
V
THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM
It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues, but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course, the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.
Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt, that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly been cropped the season before.
The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would notice the coincidence.
He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them, if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but obliged to say that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the author in question has endeared to generations of readers; or one of those tedious prudes for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many psychological romances, the author has stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his work; or if the contrary is the case, he has to read of himself as doing something habitual and entirely characteristic of him. In vain, so far as that acute young critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if he has with much compunction consciously turned his furrows in a field tilled before, he stands a fair chance of being hailed at the outset of a new career.
He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help being what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the veteran author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any rate, bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer brings. What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive book of his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had liked him from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work. Such a critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground, and that he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he seemed to be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields. Such a critic would be alert to detect those fine differences of situation which distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He would note with unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which constitute Florindo an essentially novel character when presented under the name of Lindoro, or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even when he could not deny that these persons were in themselves one and the same, he would be able to make the reader observe that the new light thrown upon them by the author's ever-renascent art revealed in familiar creations traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined before. He would insist that, if not new, they were newer, because being more fully ascertained they were truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in Eugenio's former books whom they reminded one of, and, studying them in contrast, would convince the reader that the increasing purpose of the author in the treatment of the well-known types had been to reveal the infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human type.
Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits of a veteran author.
In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic, coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer, because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor, as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might be the means of destroying himself as a great author.
After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise. There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right, then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen?
Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the article of criticism, but somehow it is not.
Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The author would not mind if the critic's report were physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its theories and methods with gratitude.
As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of criticism.
In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty, bring himself to call "creative," though he did not mind others calling it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the recognition.
Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed, should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book? Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition.
In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author. What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad, the grateful care of such elders?
VI
THE FICKLENESS OF AGE
All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that
"From some odd corner of the mind
Beats time to nothing in the brain."
But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and listener are the twin spheres that form one star.
A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his soul with a newly realized purport in the words,
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and "sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age, and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or, if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to our friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood, and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.
He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them. He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain, when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.
These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his repose.
His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which is superannuated, while its "muddy vesture of decay" is in very tolerable repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged, with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he once predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like this with me!" he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of his conditional.
But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of the Lapland song,
"The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,"
erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of
"The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow."
He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless; it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there is.
Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as much in one respect as in the other, but our friend contends only for greater justice to it in the last. In the light that he has come into, he holds that where such unions are unhappy, though they may have been formed with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior partner who is to blame if blame may ever be attached to involuntary change. It is the senior partner who has wearied first of the companionship and wished for release with the impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of the annoyances which seem inherent in every union of the kind, and impatient of those differences of temperament which tell far more than any disparities of age, and which exist even where there are no such disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic of the husband where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer instances of her seniority. In the unions where two old people join their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically, doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything else of marriages in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in their youth, attempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are, for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against them.
Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with the value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can appeal for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we could imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain regret, an acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed for no apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the constitution of things, and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time of life. Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned upon grounds where age could more justly base its defence. It may be more reckless than age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly hobbles or hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate, for it has plenty of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little but eternity before it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life's trolley while it is still in motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps impatiently before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see physical proof of this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who would willingly wait years for them?
The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age. Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant occupation in the æons before it, or that its emotions or volitions shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems it in.
Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast, because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth—the star of trust and hope which
"Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines, and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the Addisonian Cato:
"But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds."
VII
THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION
There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated purveyor of intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty.
Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its increase of incident; the moral and social and æsthetical world is open on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye.
A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them. Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: "I feel that I have got my technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a subject." It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case. They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it; and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him.
Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them, he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it.
He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives, situations, catastrophes and dénouements, and characters eagerly fitting themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects.
After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was concerning his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself capable of in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed sometimes weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that others would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work of producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.
Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America, or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not be so dull as it promises.
One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end. Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him (like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The writers in the Spectator, the Guardian, the Tatler, the Rambler, and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic, because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point, to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking about everything else in the world but the business they started with. But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter with any sort of talker.
When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is, though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the early Victorian period.
But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's concern was with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome.
The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score, he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth, with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least one is as right as the other.
When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while man is working—plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?
It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them, his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays, will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity; only in the practice of the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon, it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.
VIII
THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA
At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain interest.
Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as encyclopædic.
The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies.
After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family wash, sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl with her as maid. In the first days of September, when the most enterprising of the fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the table, and the mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in the cellar and rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting used to the peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little teethers back to town with her; and when she found her husband in the comfortable dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and tender steak, and rich cream (such as never comes on "pure milk"), and hot and cold baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he had been very selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it.
In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the seaside, but if it had been better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as it was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better; and there was the beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an effect of superior fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every three of the three hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing at the yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out to lie on the sand and dry their hair.
At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap, but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him, as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends; he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company, they would be cutting off a frightful drain.
It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week, when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places where you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city after a long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this. Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed.
Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, sick and tired; and, as far as she could see, all those mountain-places were the same places. She could get no good of the air if she bored herself; the nice people did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the children were dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, who had long ceased to teethe but needed a summer outing as much as ever. A series of seasons followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in. Then, at least, she could look a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the club that he had fairly forgotten he had a wife and children. The trouble was all with Florindo, anyway; he cared more for his business than his family, much; if he did not, he could have managed somehow to spend the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran down once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then came back.
Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one morning with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a revelation. She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only solution. Once in Europe, you need not worry about where to go, for you could go anywhere. Europe was everywhere, and you had your choice of the Swiss mountains, where every breath made another person of you, or the Italian lakes with their glorious scenery, or the English lakes with their literary associations, or Scheveningen and all Holland, or Étretât, or Ostend, or any of those thousands of German baths where you could get over whatever you had, and the children could pick up languages with tutors, and the life was so amusing. Going to Europe was excuse enough in itself for Florindo to leave his business, and, if he could not be gone more than one summer, he could place her and the children out there till their health and education were completed, and they could all return home when it was time for the girls to think of coming out and the boys of going to college.
Florindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word to say against a scheme that must commend itself to any reasonable man. In fact, he scarcely opposed it. He said he had begun to feel a little run down, and he had just been going to propose Europe himself as the true solution. She gladly gave him credit for the idea, and said he had the most inventive mind she ever heard of. She agreed without a murmur to the particular German baths which the doctor said would be best for him, because she just knew that the waters would be good for all of them; and when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure with him, and they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in the early autumn, and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were comfortably settled in Paris for the winter.
As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After three years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and the family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there, and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding. They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent, however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking.
She was now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and, if not ideal to those within, it is nevertheless the best way of spending the hot season known to competitive civilization. What is most interesting to the student of that civilization is the surprisingly short time in which it has been evolved. Half a century ago it was known only to some of the richest people. A few very old and opulent families in New York had country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the same class had summer houses at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy planters of the South came North to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the vast majority of the fashionable Northern people also resorted. In the West it was the custom to leave home for a summer trip up the lakes or down the St. Lawrence. But this was the custom only for the very sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not summer outside of their winter homes to at all the same extent as in the East.
The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in that of innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the primitive joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels, as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish in their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic.
The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have typically come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the typical experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow domestic things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be astonished to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively poor, have summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps as much below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of Newport are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those who have them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, progressing toward those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and gradually arriving at picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with all the modern conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more of one's income than one has a quiet conscience in.
It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been known, after keeping a private hotel in their cottages for a series of summers, to shut them or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed rest, leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days of their youth, or even allowing them to live in their own houses with their cooks.
Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we want it to be; we ourselves are not all that we could wish; and, whatever shape our summering takes, the crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose. The only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under them are those who have no repose, but stay striving on amid the heat of the city while the prey of the crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills or by the sea. Those home-keeping Sybarites, composing seven-eighths of our urban populations, immune from the anguish of the rose-leaf, form themselves the pang of its victims in certain extreme cases; the thought of them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleepless rest-seeker in the resorts where there are no mosquitoes. There are Florindos, there are Lindoras, so sensitively conscienced that, in the most picturesque, the most prettily appointed and thoroughly convenienced cottages, they cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the summer hotels, in the boarding-houses by sea or shore, in the farms where they have small fruits, fresh vegetables, and abundance of milk and eggs; yes, they even remember those distant relations who toil and swelter in the offices, the shops, the streets, the sewers; and they are not without an unavailing shame for their own good-fortune.
But is it really their good-fortune? They would not exchange it for the better fortune of the home-keepers, and yet it seems worse than that of people less voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left for Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the summer on a yacht, which they see many other Florindos and Lindoras doing. Even these gay voyagers, or gay anchorers (for they seem most of the time to be moored in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their lot, or to be so constantly contented with it but that they are always coming off in boats to dine at the neighboring hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a crumpled rose-leaf under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the houseboat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere.
Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of that in her own case, for she has never been unreasonably exacting of circumstance. She has always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual endeavor for the amelioration of circumstance that civilization springs. The fault may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot see, but it is certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora's experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her practical guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable sphinx for which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor cottaging is the true answer.
Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the summer, and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo, as far as she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business to provide the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it impossible, he is not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her that their trouble is that they have always endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly borne might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make her believe that some of the best times he has had in summer have been when he was too busy to think about it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from morning till night, without finding the least relief from the summer ordeal or forgetting it a single moment.
The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and told her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was properly disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once, she did not care where it was.
"Well, I don't know," he answered. "There would have to be two opinions, I believe."
"Why?" she demanded, sharply. "Where is it?"
"In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me about it. In one of the celestial heavens—there seem to be seven of them—it appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This sole season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual springtime. How would you like that?"
Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry. He, too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and he would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora's impatience with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of his greatest amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that law of the universal life by which no human creature is permitted to escape a due share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common lot, or realized that to seek escape from them is a species of immorality which is unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and from itself.
IX
TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING
As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and money to waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for squandering both, find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true diner must be well on in middle life, for though the young may eat and drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray head difficultly bowed over the successive courses, and the full form of third youth straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it, that the vision presents itself when one thinks of dinners and diners.
After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large that one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than attach itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger or smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet a step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part elderly men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need not be counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to throng the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit, looking down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of bald heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and showing like dim, décolleté angels to the bleared vision raised to them from the floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and speaking have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds of tobacco and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether they abuse the chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height, where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear them softly gasping, gently coughing.
It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner has recorded her bird's-eye impression of it at the interesting moment when their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and the speakers sit must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in bed.
What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and looking down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration? Does it seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization? To their "finer female sense," what is the appeal of that evanescing spectacle, as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the clapping of hands rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal intelligences as the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we may have still the hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them the splendid and graceful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of the next day's papers.
The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the mellowed tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those courses of meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the morning following, he wakes "high sorrowful and cloyed," and has not yet read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes "the burning forehead and the parching tongue" like a gush of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker goes a great way, almost the whole way; and, especially if he is a comic speaker, he might rise up and sit down without a word and yet leave his hearers the sense of having been richly amused. If he does more, if he really says something droll, no matter how much below the average of the give and take of common talk, the listener's gratitude is frantic. It is so eager, it so outruns utterance, that it is not strange the after-dinner speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist, who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and prospers on to a celebrity for brilliancy which there is little danger of his ever forfeiting so long as he keeps there.
The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising. They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in their torpidity.
The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America. Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences, leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be pitied from the bottom of one's soul. But the man whose words come actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests to him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not feared the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still, who thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly, but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to say something before he stops, and so cannot stop.
The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, "We have with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless explosives." Or if it is the Discovery of America they are commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle it.
At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a while at least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the honored guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods, poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on the honored guest and talk of other things; and when sometimes he does so it seems rude.
The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped open for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter from every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous ladle in his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the honored guest's character or career and drenches it with drawn butter.
To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place, proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation, some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared, preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and shouting, "Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk eggs grew before."
Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter, till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.
Of course, the reader—especially if he has never been asked to a personal dinner of this sort—will be saying that the fault is not with the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the supper given to Æschylus on the hundredth performance of the Œdipus of Sophocles.
The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in the opening toast, "The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved, in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly obliterated under the régime of the Thirty Tyrants.
At the supper to Æschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke of inspiration to have on the speaker's left, where Sophocles would have sat if he had been present at a supper given to Æschylus, the sitting figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No allusion was made to Æschylus during the evening, after his health had been proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and exquisite surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches that followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all ostensibly devoted to the examination of the Œdipus and the other dramas of Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt with. But the unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly to take the character of appreciation of the Æschylus tragedies, whose good points were all turned to the light without open mention of them. This afforded the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending his younger confrère, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as some one said, from head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could not put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman gentleman present remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for sincere deprecation, since Cæsar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and the effect was that intended throughout—the supreme honor of Æschylus in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic proverb, "Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then lay down again amid shrieks of merriment from the whole company.
There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be questioned whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair; they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating memory of the other.
There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on, each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his soul.
They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not against a permanent folie des grandeurs that we need seek to guard the victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the speeches to follow.
X
A DAY AT BRONX PARK
In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.
By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street. This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life: the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind, which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.
When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinità de' Monti at Rome.
It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely, so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning to paint themselves palely green.
At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.
He had the very horse he ought to have had—old, weary, infirm, decently hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts—the collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground—so short is our patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press.
ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK
While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down; when he turned away as if that cask were done for, there it was bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would renew the struggle presently.
There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above all, so many small mammals?
Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman, who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right; but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him.
It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality, instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.
Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man. These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven, rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.
But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving presences by the water's brink.
The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.
They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts, from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.
The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.
Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the end of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward the shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked better, through that mystical law of population by which poverty is richer than prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and screaming at their games, though they could not hear them, and they yelled and screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes which in the east of these States is such a crying evil.
Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which made the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental operations are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She was a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face full of a petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too much for her weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out of the window and looking both ways at once, and she fought away the feebly restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks, so that the companions expected every moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death, and suffered many things from their fear. When it seemed as if nothing could save them, the guard came in and told the weak, meek mother that the child must not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the force of all constituted authority among us, the child sat down quietly in her mother's lap, and for the rest of the journey remained an example to angels, so that the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness as in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of their happy day, a day so happy that now in the faint air of August it is hard to believe it even of May.
THE END