IV
In this same connection I suggest to you that in the domain of literary art an Englishman—a colonist, it is true, and so a little nearer allied to us in democratic sentiment—has more clearly and forcibly than anyone else expressed the spirit of the best Americanism—of the best world-temper of to-day. I refer to Rudyard Kipling. Human society has been fascinated by the virility and uncompromising force of his writings, but it has found an equal fascination in the deep, simple, sham-detesting sympathy with common humanity which permeates them. He has been the first to adopt and exalt the idea of the brotherhood of man without either condescension or depressing materialistic realism. He has interpreted the poetry of "the trivial round and common task" without suggesting impending soup, blankets, and coals on earth and reward in heaven on the one hand, or without emphasizing the dirtiness of the workman's blouse on the other. His imagery, his symbols and his point of view are essentially alien to those of social convention and caste. Yet his heroes of the engine-room, the telegraph-station, the Newfoundland Banks, and the dreary ends of the earth, democratic though they are to the core, appeal to the imagination by their stimulating human qualities no less than the bearers of titles and the aristocratic monopolists of culture and aspiration who have been the leading figures in the poetry and fiction of the past. Strength, courage, truth, simplicity and loving-kindness are still their salient qualities—the qualities of noble manhood—he expounds them to us by the force of his sympathy, which clothes them with no impossible virtues, yet shows them, in the white light of performance, men no less entitled to our admiration than the Knights of King Arthur or any of the other superhuman figures of traditional æsthetic culture. He recognizes the artistic value of the workaday life in law courts and hospitals and libraries and mines and factories and camps and lighthouses and ocean steamers and railroad trains, as a stimulus to and rectifier of poetic imagination, negativing the theory that men and women are to seek inspiration solely from what is dainty, exclusive, elegantly romantic, or rhapsodically star-gazing in human conditions and thought. This is of the essence of the American idea, which has been, however, slow to subdue imagination, which is the very electric current of art, to its use by reason chiefly of the seeming discord between it and common life, and partly from the reluctance of the world to renounce its diet of highly colored court, heaven and fairy-land imagery; partly, too, because so many of the best poets and writers of America have adopted traditional symbols. The school of great New England writers which has just passed away were, however, the exponents of the simple life, of high religious and intellectual thought amid common circumstance. They stood for noble ideals as the privilege of all. Yet their mental attitude, though scornful of pomp and materialism, was almost aristocratic; at least it was exclusive in that it was not wholly human, savoring rather of the ascetic star-gazer than the full-blooded appreciator of the boon of life. Their passion was pure as snow, but it was thin. Yet the central tenet of their philosophy, independent naturalness of soul, is the necessary complement to the broad human sympathy which is of the essence of modern art. The difficulty which imagination finds in expressing itself in the new terms is natural enough, for the poet and painter and musician are seemingly deprived of color, the color which we associate with mystic elegance and aristocratic prestige. Yet only seemingly. Externals may have lost the dignity and lustre of prerogative; but the essentials for color remain—the human soul in all its fervor—the striving world in all its joy and suffering. There is no fear that the tide of existence will be less intense or that the mind of man will degenerate in æsthetic appreciation, but it must be on new lines which only a master imbued with the value and the pathos of the highest life in the common life as a source for heroism can fitly indicate. There lies the future field for the poet, the novelist, and the painter—the idealization of the real world as it is in its highest terms of love and passion, struggle, joy, and sorrow, free from the condescension of superior castes and the mystification of the star-reaching introspective culture which seeks only personal exaltation, and excludes sympathy with the every-day beings and things of earth from its so-called spiritual outlook.
ANNE
By Fanny V. de G. Stevenson
Anne was walking down the slope of a hill at the time of the first stirring of dawn on a spring morning. She was an old woman, now, her youth lying years behind her; but she had not been one to fall easily into the sere and yellow leaf. Though frail in health, she had kept her manifold interests sharp and lively; pictures gave her pleasure keen as of yore, and there was no critic of literature more quick than she to detect a lapse in taste or art, nor with a readier appreciation of style, originality, or even intention. She was, at last, however, forced to believe that she was growing old. She was old, and the days were flying past her with an incredible rapidity. She rebelled with passionate fierceness against the inevitable, approaching end. As bitterly as for herself (she was sixty and past), she resented the fact that John, her husband, stood even nearer the final catastrophe than she; John, whom, though ten years her senior, she had petted and spoiled like a child. Hers had always been the dominant mind. John, older and aging more rapidly than she, had now become absolutely dependent on her, almost for his thoughts. Their marriage was blessed with no children, wherefore all the motherly instincts of the wife had been lavished on the husband. "My very love has made him helpless," thought Anne; "pray God he be called before me."
She walked more quickly, in time with her thoughts, which now wandered along devious pathways through the past. The scenes she recalled were nothing in themselves, no more than most elderly people keep stored in their memories; but to her, who had played the principal parts, they were of the liveliest interest. The day she and John took possession of the house that had been their own ever since was as vivid as yesterday. Nay, more vivid, for she was not at all sure concerning yesterday; she had had a headache, and was stupid, and had slept a good deal; and John dozed in his chair; there was nothing to remember in yesterday.
But that first day in the new house, both so proud, so fond, so full of plans; and it was all over. The plans matured or failed, and they were only two old people, conscious of ever-failing strength, careful of draughts, easily tired—well, no, not so very easily tired after all, at least not Anne, or at least not to-day. It must be the early morning, or the spring weather. She had heard of old people who recovered their faculties in a sort of Indian summer, possibly her Indian summer was about to burst into a mature blossoming. She felt so light on her feet, so uplifted as with a wholesome, altogether delightful intoxication. The sensation carried her far back to her childhood, to a first day in the garden after a winter's illness. How she skipped, and ran, and laughed. She was conscious to-day of the same pure joy in living. It was like being a child again. And those sad, querulous days, yesterday, and the days and years before—that was the child's illness; such a long illness, ever-increasing, with but one terrible cure.
But not even that fancy could depress Anne to-day, glorious to-day, this day of ten thousand! She laughed aloud, pretending, as children pretend, that she had, unknowing, drunk of the golden elixir; her eyes should be unclouded, her cheeks flower-fresh, her scant, white locks changed to rings of softest brown; a tall, slim slip of a girl, as John first met her. At the foot of the meadow where she kept tryst with John there used to be a still pool where she preened her feathers while waiting for her gallant. She looked about for a pool, smiling at this vanity in an old woman; but suppose—suppose—?
Of course she was always properly dressed and coifed as became one of her station and fortune, with a certain well-bred deference to the prevailing modes, and she owned to a nice taste in lace and jewels. Jane, her maid, had been very much remiss when she laid out the gown her mistress wore this morning. It must be a new one, by the way, or an old one remodelled; it was not in her usual style, but of a singular cut, stiff, plain, and ungraceful in its prim folds. However, it was white, and white was still Anne's color. And what matters a gown when one is in so high a humor?
The valley below was everywhere covered with a white rime which ran in sparkles as the sun touched it. It should be sharply cold, Anne thought, but she felt no chill. Frost generally passed over the high ground, while it nipped the lower. She hoped it had spared the tender plants in her garden, and the budding peaches. Already the crocuses were in bloom, and the lilacs showed a few timid, scented leaves. Anne was very fond of her garden, and it was one of her grievances against time that she could no longer tend it in person.