To
My Sisters, Ella and Ann:
with whom
This Philosophy was Proven
THE ROMANCE OF
THE COMMONPLACE
Contents
[Introduction]
[April Essays]
[Getting Acquainted]
[Dining Out]
[The Uncharted Sea]
[The Art of Playing]
[The Use of Fools]
[Absolute Age]
[The Manual Blessing]
[The Deserted Island]
[The Sense of Humour]
[The Game of Correspondence]
[The Caste of the Articulate]
[The Tyranny of the Lares]
[Costume and Custom]
[Old Friends and New]
[A Defense of Slang]
[The Charms of Imperfection]
["The Play's the Thing"]
[Living Alone]
[Cartomania]
[The Science of Flattery]
[Romance *en Route*]
[At the Edge of the World]
[The Diary Habit]
[The Perfect Go-between]
[Growing Up]
[A Pauper's Monologue]
[A Young Man's Fancy]
[Where is Bohemia?]
[The Bachelor's Advantage]
[The Confessions of an Ignoramus]
[A Music-Box Recital]
[A Plea for the Precious]
[Sub Rosa]
Introduction
To let this book go from my hands without some one more personal note than the didactic paragraphs of these essays contained, has been, I must confess, a temptation too strong for me to resist. The observing reader will note that I have so re-written my theses that none of them begins with an "I" in big type, and though this preliminary chapter conforms to the rule also, it is for typographic rather than for any more modest reasons. Frankly, this page is by way of a flourish to my signature, and is the very impertinence of vanity.
But this little course of philosophy lays my character and temperament, not to speak of my intellect, so bare that, finished and summed up for the printer, I am all of a shiver with shame. My nonsense gave, I conceit myself, no clue by which my real self might be discovered. My fiction I have been held somewhat responsible for, but escape for the story-teller is always easy. Even in poetry a man may so cloak himself in metaphor that he may hope to be well enough disguised. But the essay is the most compromising form of literature possible, and even such filmy confidences and trivial gaieties as these write me down for what I am. Were they even critical in character, I would have that best of excuses, a difference of taste, but here I have had the audacity to attempt a discussion of life itself, upon which every reader will believe himself to be a competent critic.
By a queer sequence of circumstances, the essays, begun in the Lark, were continued in the Queen, and, if you have read these two papers, you will know that one magazine is as remote in character from the other as San Francisco is from London. But each has happened to fare far afield in search of readers, and between them I may have converted some few to my optimistic view of every-day incident. To educate the British Matron and Young Person was, perhaps, no more difficult an undertaking than to open the eyes of the California Native Son. The fogs that fall over the Thames are not very different to the mists that drive in through the Golden Gate, after all!
Still, I would not have you think that these lessons were written with my tongue in my cheek. I have made believe so long that now I am quite sincere in my conviction that we can see pretty much whatever we look for; which should prove the desirability of searching for amusement and profit rather than for boredom and disillusion.
We are in the day of homespun philosophy and hand-made dogma. A kind of mental atavism has made science preposterous; modern astrologers and palmists put old wine into new bottles, and the discussion of Psychomachy bids fair to revolutionize the Eternal Feminine. And so I, too, strike my attitude and apostrophize the Universe. As being, in part, a wholesome reaction from the prevailing cult, I might call my doctrine Pagan Science, for the type of my proselyte is the Bornese war chief peripatetic on Broadway--the amused wonderer. But I shall not begin all my nouns with capitals, for it is my aim to write of romance with a small "r." Also my philosophy must not be thought a mere laissez faire; it is an active, not a passive creed. We are here not to be entertained, but to entertain ourselves.