Atlantic Classics
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Title: Atlantic Classics
Editor: Ellery Sedgwick
Contributor: Katharine Baker
Ralph Bergengren
Cornelia A. P. Comer
Walter Prichard Eaton
Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Zephine Humphrey
Lucy Elliot Keeler
Edward Sandford Martin
Margaret Prescott Montague
Meredith Nicholson
Agnes Repplier
Robert Haven Schauffler
Dallas Lore Sharp
Margaret Pollock Sherwood
Simeon Strunsky
Owen Wister
Release date: October 14, 2011 [eBook #37758]
Most recently updated: December 10, 2011
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/37758
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC CLASSICS ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
ATLANTIC
CLASSICS
The Atlantic Monthly Company
Boston
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
TO
The Pleasantest of Companions,
Most Constant of Friends,
Who Seeks not Flattery but Counsel,
Provoked on Occasion only
And never Vexing beyond Endurance,
Wise with Ancient Wisdom,
And Fresh from the Fountain of Youth--
THE
ATLANTIC CONTRIBUTOR
Preface
This volume, composed of essays which on their appearance in the
_Atlantic_ have met with especial favor and which from their character
seem to deserve a longer life than the paper covers of a magazine
permit, is published out of deference to a multitude of requests. Many
readers have asked that this essay or that be preserved in permanent
form, while many teachers both in college and high school have written
us that the usefulness of the _Atlantic_ in the classroom would be
enhanced by the appearance of an edition which, selecting from the
selection already made from month to month, should constitute a kind of
_Atlantic Anthology_, preserving the magazine's flavor and character and
offering, as it were, a sample of what it aims to be.
To give to this collection that variety which is the spice of a
magazine's life, the editor has selected a single contribution from each
of sixteen characteristic _Atlantic_ authors, making his choice from
material not greatly affected by the interests of the moment. In two or
three instances appears an essay which has already been published in
some collection of an author's work, and the _Atlantic_ wishes to
acknowledge with thanks permission from Houghton Mifflin Company to
print once again Professor Sharp's delightful "Turtle Eggs for Agassiz,"
which has been included in his volume "The Face of the Fields," and Mr.
Nicholson's agreeable delineation of the "Provincial American"; while it
gratefully adds its acknowledgment to Henry Holt and Company for the
reappearance of Mr. Strunsky's "The Street," already published in his
inimitable little volume, "Belshazzar Court."
Our chief thanks, now and always, are due to the _Atlantic's_
contributors, to whom we owe all we have or hope for. Were not our
design limited, we should gladly enrich this collection with much
material from our file, which is quite as worthy to represent the
magazine, but which, for one reason or another, we judge less suitable
for the purposes of the present volume.
THE EDITOR.
Contents
FIDDLERS ERRANT _Robert Haven Schauffler_ 1
TURTLE EGGS FOR AGASSIZ _Dallas Lore Sharp_ 23
A FATHER TO HIS FRESHMAN SON _Edward Sanford Martin_ 45
INTENSIVE LIVING _Cornelia A. P. Comer_ 59
REMINISCENCE WITH POSTSCRIPT _Owen Wister_ 87
THE OTHER SIDE _Margaret Sherwood_ 110
ON AUTHORS _Margaret Preston Montague_ 124
THE PROVINCIAL AMERICAN _Meredith Nicholson_ 130
OUR LADY POVERTY _Agnes Repplier_ 153
ENTERTAINING THE CANDIDATE _Katharine Baker_ 173
THE STREET _Simeon Strunsky_ 181
FASHIONS IN MEN _Katharine Fullerton Gerould_ 201
A CONFESSION IN PROSE _Walter Prichard Eaton_ 225
IN THE CHAIR _Ralph Bergengren_ 243
THE PASSING OF INDOORS _Zephine Humphrey_ 252
THE CONTENTED HEART _Lucy Elliot Keeler_ 265
Fiddlers Errant
By Robert Haven Schauffler
I
MUSICAL adventures largely depend on your instrument. Go traveling with
a bassoon or clarionet packed in your trunk, and romance will pass you
by. But far otherwise will events shape themselves if you set forth with
a fiddle.
The moment I turned my back upon the humdrum flute and embraced the
'cello, that instrument of romance, things began happening thick and
fast in a hitherto uneventful life. I found that to sally forth with
your 'cello couchant under your arm, like a lance of the days of
chivalry, was to invite adventure. You tempted Providence to make things
interesting for you, up to the moment when you returned home and stood
your fat, melodious friend in the corner on his one leg--like the stork,
that other purveyor of joyful surprises.
One reason why the 'cellist is particularly liable to meet with musical
adventures is because the nature of his talent is so plainly visible.
The parcel under his arm labels him FIDDLER in larger scare-caps than
Mr. Hearst ever invented for headlines. It is seen of all men. There is
no concealment possible. For it would, indeed, be less practicable to
hide your 'cello under a bushel than to hide a bushel under your 'cello.
The non-reducible obesity of this instrument is apt to bring you
adventures of all sorts: wrathful sometimes, when urchins recognize it
as a heaven-sent target for snowballs; or when adults audibly quote Dean
Swift's asinine remark, 'He was a fiddler and therefore a rogue.'
Absurd, sometimes, as when the ticket-chopper in the subway bars your
path under the misapprehension that you are carrying a double-bass; and
when the small boys at the exit offer you a _Saturday Evening Post_ in
return for 'a tune on that there banjo.' But more often the episodes are
pleasant, as when your bulky trademark enables some kindred spirit to
recognize you as his predestined companion on impromptu adventures in
music.
I was at first almost painfully aware of my 'cello's conspicuousness
because I had abandoned for it an instrument so retiring by nature that
you might carry it till death in your side pocket, yet never have it
contribute an unusual episode to your career. But from the moment when I
discovered the exaggerated old fiddle in the attic, slumbering in its
black coffin, and wondered what it was all about, and brought it
resurrection and life,--events began. I have never known exactly what
was the magic inherent in the dull, guttural, discouraged protests of
the strings which I experimentally plucked that day. But their
songs-without-words-or-music seemed to me pregnant with promises of
beauty and romance far beyond the ken of the forthright flute. So then
and there I decided to embark upon the delicate and dangerous enterprise
of learning another instrument.
It was indeed delicate and dangerous because it had to be prosecuted as
secretly as sketching hostile fortifications. Father must not suspect. I
feared that if he heard the demonic groans of a G string in pain, or the
ghoulish whimperings of a manhandled A, he would mount to the attic,
throw back his head, look down upon me through those lower crescents of
his spectacles which always made him look a trifle unsympathetic, and
pronounce that baleful formula: 'My son, come into my study!' For I knew
he labored under the delusion that I already 'blew in' too much time on
the flute, away from the companionship of All Gaul, _enteuthen
exelaunei_, and Q.E.D. As for any additional instrument, I feared that
he would reduce it to a pulp at sight, and me too.
My first secret step was to secure a long strip of paper to be pasted on
the finger-board under the strings. It was all pockmarked with black
dots and letters, so that if the music told you to play the note G, all
you had to do was to contort your neck properly and remove your left
hand from the path of vision, then gaze cross-eyed and upside down at
the finger-board until you discovered the particular dot labeled G. The
next move was to clap your fingertip upon that dot and straighten out
your neck and eyes and apply the bow. Then out would come a triumphant
G,--that is, provided your fingers had not already rubbed G's
characteristically undershot lip so much as to erase away the letter's
individuality. In that case, to be sure, all your striving for G might
result only in C after all.
It was fascinating work, though. And every afternoon as the hour of
four, and father's 'constitutional,' approached, I would 'get set' like
a sprinter on my mark in the upper hall. The moment the front door
closed definitely behind my parent I would dash for the attic and
commence my cervical and ocular contortions. It was dangerous, too. For
it was so hard to stop betimes that one evening father made my blood run
cold by inquiring, 'What were you moaning about upstairs before dinner?'
I fear that I attributed these sounds to travail in Latin scholarship,
and an alleged sympathy for the struggles of the dying Gaul.
The paper finger-board was so efficacious that in a week I felt ready to
taste the first fruits of toil. So I insinuated a pair of musical
friends into the house one afternoon, to try an easy trio. They were a
brother and sister who played violin and piano. Things went so
brilliantly that we resolved on a public performance within a few days,
at the South High School. Alas, if I had only taken the supposed
rapidity of my progress with a grain of attic salt! But my only
solicitude was over the problem how to smuggle the too conspicuous
instrument to school, on the morning of the concert, without the
knowledge of a vigilant father. We decided at last that any such attempt
would be suicidal rashness. So I borrowed another boy's father's 'cello,
and, in default of the printed strip, I penciled under the strings notes
of the whereabouts of G, C, and so forth, making G shoot out the lip
with extra decision.
Our public performance was a _succès fou_,--that is, it was a _succès_
up to a certain point, and _fou_ beyond it, when one disaster followed
another. My fingers played so hard as to rub out G's lower lip. They
quite obliterated A, turned E into F, and B into a fair imitation of D.
These involuntary revisions led me to introduce the very boldest modern
harmonies into one of the most naïvely traditional strains of Cornelius
Gurlitt. Now, in the practice of the art of music one never with
impunity pours new harmonic wine into old bottles. The thing is simply
not done.
Perhaps, though, we might have muddled through somehow, had not my
violinist friend, during a rest, poked me cruelly in the ribs with his
bow and remarked in a coarse stage whisper, 'Look who's there!'
I looked, and gave a gasp. It might have passed for an excellent
rehearsal of my last gasp. In the very front row sat--father! He
appeared sardonic and businesslike. The fatal formula seemed already to
be trembling upon his lips. The remnants of B, C, D, and so forth
suddenly blurred before my crossed eyes. With the most dismal report our
old bottle of chamber music blew up, and I fled from the scene.
'My son, come into my study.'
In an ague I had waited half the evening for those hated words; and with
laggard step and miserable forebodings I followed across the hall. But
the day was destined to end in still another surprise. When father
finally faced me in that awful sanctum, he was actually smiling in the
jolliest manner, and I divined that the rod was going to be spared.
'What's all this?' he inquired. 'Thought you'd surprise your old dad,
eh? Come, tell me about it.'
So I told him about it; and he was so sympathetic that I found courage
for the great request.
'Pa,' I stammered, 'sometimes I think p'raps I don't hold the bow just
right. It scratches so. Please might I take just four lessons from a
regular teacher so I could learn all about how to play the 'cello?'
Father choked a little. But he looked jollier than ever as he replied,
'Yes, my son, on condition that you promise to lay the flute entirely
aside until you have learned _all_ about how to play the 'cello.'
I promised.
I have faithfully kept that promise.
II
Fiddlers errant are apt to rush in and occupy the centre of the stage
where angels in good and regular practice fear even to tune up. One of
the errant's pet vagaries is to volunteer his services in orchestras too
good for him. Not long after discovering that I would need more than
four lessons to learn quite all there was to know about the 'cello,--in
fact, just nine months after discovering the coffin in the attic,--I
'rushed in.' Hearing that _The Messiah_ was to be given at Christmas, I
approached the conductor and magniloquently informed him that I was a
'cellist and that, seeing he was he, I would contribute my services
without money and without price to the coming performance.
With a rather dubious air my terms were accepted. That same evening at
rehearsal I found that the entire bass section of the orchestra
consisted of three 'cellos. These were presided over by an inaudible,
and therefore negligible, little girl, a hoary sage who always arrived
very late and left very early, and myself. I shall never forget my
sensations when the sage, at a crucial point, suddenly packed up and
left me, an undeveloped musical Atlas, to bear the entire weight of the
orchestra on one pair of puny shoulders. Under these conditions it was a
memorable ordeal to read at sight 'The Trumpet Shall Sound.' The trumpet
sounded, indeed. That was more than the 'cello did in certain passages!
As for the dead being raised, however, that happened according to
programme.
After this high-tension episode, I pulled myself together, only to fall
into a cruel and unusual pit which the treacherous Händel dug for
'cellists by writing one single passage in that unfamiliar alto clef
which looks so much like the usual tenor clef that before the least
suspicion of impending disaster dawns, you are down in the pit,
hopelessly floundering.
I emerged from this rehearsal barely alive; but I had really enjoyed
myself so much more than I had suffered, or made others suffer, that my
initial impulse to rush at sight into strange orchestras now became
stereotyped into a habit. Since then what delightful evenings I have
spent in the old Café Martin and in the old Café Boulevarde where my
'cellist friends in the orchestras were ever ready to resign their
instruments into my hands for a course or two, and the leader always let
me pick out the music!
But one afternoon in upper Broadway I met with the sort of adventure
that figures in the fondest dreams of fiddlers errant. I had strolled
into the nearest hotel to use the telephone. As I passed through the
restaurant, my attention was caught by a vaguely familiar strain from
the musicians' gallery. Surely this was unusual spiritual provender to
offer a crowd of typical New York diners! More and more absorbed in
trying to recognize the music, I sank into an armchair in the lobby, the
telephone quite forgotten. The instruments were working themselves up to
some magnificent climax, and working me up at the same time. It began to
sound more and more like the greatest of all music,--the musician's very
holiest of holies. Surely I must be dreaming! My fingers crooked
themselves for a pinch. But just then the unseen instruments swung back
into the opening theme of the Brahms piano quartette in A major.
Merciful heavens! A Brahms quartette in Broadway? Pan in Wall Street?
Silence. With three jumps I was up in the little gallery, wringing the
hands of those performers and calling down blessings upon their
quixotism as musical missionaries. 'Missionaries?' echoed the leader in
amusement. 'Ah, no. We could never hope to convert those down there.' He
waved a scornful hand at the consumers of lobster below. 'Now and then
we play Brahms just in order that we may save our own souls.' The
'cellist rose, saluted, and extended his bow in my direction, like some
proud commander surrendering his sword. 'Will it please you,' he
inquired, 'to play the next movement?' It pleased me.
III
Fiddlers errant find that traveling with a 'cello is almost as good--and
almost as bad--as traveling with a child. It helps you, for example, in
cultivating friendly relations with fellow passengers. Suppose there is
a broken wheel, or the engineer is waiting for Number 26 to pass, or you
are stalled for three days in a blizzard,--what more jolly than to
undress your 'cello and play each of those present the tune he would
most like to hear, and lead the congregational singing of 'Dixie,'
'Tipperary,' 'Drink to me only,' and 'Home, Sweet Home'? A fiddle may
even make tenable one of those railway junctions which Stevenson cursed
as the nadir of intrinsic uninterestingness, and which Mr. Clayton
Hamilton praised with such _brio_.
But this is only the bright side. In some ways traveling with a 'cello
is as uncomfortable as traveling, not only with a baby, but with a
donkey. Unless indeed you have an instrument with a convenient hinged
door in the back so that you may pack it full of pyjamas, collars,
brushes, MSS, and so forth, thus dispensing with a bag; or unless you
can calk up its _f_ holes and use the instrument as a canoe on occasion,
a 'cello is about as inconvenient a traveling companion as the corpse in
R.L.S.'s tale, which would insist on getting into the wrong box.
Some idea of the awkwardness of taking the 'cello along in a sleeping
car may be gathered from its nicknames. It is called the 'bull-fiddle.'
It is called the 'dog-house.' But, unlike either bulls or kennels, it
cannot safely be forwarded by freight or express. The formula for
Pullman travel with a 'cello is as follows: First ascertain whether the
conductor will let you aboard with the instrument. If not, try the next
train. When successful, fee the porter heavily at sight, thus softening
his heart so that he will assign the only spare upper birth to your
baby. And warn him in impressive tones that the instrument is priceless,
and on no account to touch it. You need not fear thieves. Sooner than
steal a 'cello, the light-fingered would button his coat over a baby
white elephant and let it tusk his vitals.
I have cause to remember my first and only holiday trip with the
Princeton Glee, Mandolin, and Banjo Clubs. My function being to play
solos and to assist the Mandolin Club, I demanded for the 'cello an
upper berth in the special car. But I was overwhelmed with howls of
derision and assurances that I was a very fresh soph indeed. The first
night, my instrument reposed in some mysterious recess under a leaky
cooler, where all too much water flowed under its bridge before the
dawn. The second night it was compressed into a strait and narrow closet
with brushes and brooms, whence it emerged with a hollow chest, a stoop,
a consumptive quality of voice, and the malady known as _compressio
pontis_. Thereafter it occupied the same upper with me. Twice I overlaid
it, with well-nigh fatal consequences.
Short-distance travel with a 'cello is not much more agreeable. In
trolleys you have to hold it more delicately than any babe, and be ready
to give a straight-arm to any one who lurches in your direction, and to
raise it from the floor every time you jolt over cross-tracks or run
over pedestrians, for fear of jarring the delicate adjustment of the
sound-post. As for a holiday crush down town, the best way to negotiate
it with a 'cello is to fix the sharp end-pin in place, and then, holding
the instrument at charge like a bayonet, impale those who seem most
likely to break its ribs.
After my full share of such experiences, I learned that if you are a
fiddler errant it is better to leave your instrument at home and live on
the country, as it were, trusting to the fact that you can beg, borrow,
or rent some kind of fiddle and of chamber music almost anywhere, if you
know how to go about it.
IV
Only don't try it in Sicily!
For several months I had buried the fiddler in the errant pure and
simple, when, one sunset, across a gorge in Monte Venere, my first
strain of Sicilian music floated, to reawaken in me all the primeval
instincts of the musical adventurer. The melody came from the reed pipe
of a goat-herd as he drove his flock down into Taormina. Such a pipe was
perhaps to Theocritus what the fiddles of Stradivarius are to us. It was
pleasant to imagine that this goat-herd's music might possibly be the
same that used to inspire the tenderest of Sicilian poets twenty-three
hundred years ago.
Piercingly sweet, indescribably pathetic, the melody recalled the Largo
in Dvorák's New World Symphony. Yet, there on the mountain-side, with
Ætna rosy on the right, and the purple Mediterranean shimmering far
below, the voice of the reed sounded more divine than any English horn
or Boehm flute I had ever heard singing in the depths of a modern
orchestra. And I began to doubt whether music was so completely a
product of the last three centuries as it purported to be.
But that evening, when the goat-herd, ensnared by American gold, turned
himself into a modern chamber musician in our hotel room, I regained
poise. Removed from its properly romantic setting, like seaweed from the
sea, the pastoral stop of Theocritus became unmistakably a penny
whistle, with an intonation of the whistle's conventional purity. Our
captured Comatas seemed to realize that the environment was against him
and that things were going 'contrairy'; for he refused to venture on any
of the soft Lydian airs of Monte Venere, and confined himself strictly
to tarantellas, native dances, which he played with a magnificent
feeling for rhythm (if not for in-tuneness) while, with a pencil, I
caught--or muffed--them on the fly. One was to this effect:--
[Illustration: musical notation]
While this was going on, a chance hotel acquaintance dropped into the
room and revealed himself as a professor by explaining that the
tarantella was named for its birthplace, the old Greek city of Taranto
over yonder in the heel of the Italian boot; that dancing it was once
considered the only cure for the maddening bite of the spider known as
the Lycosa Tarantula; and that some of the melodies our goat-herd was
playing might possibly be ancient Greek tunes, handed down traditionally
in Taranto, and later dispersed over Calabria and Sicily.
This all sounded rather academic. But his next words sent the little
professor soaring in our estimation. He disclosed himself as a fiddler
errant by wistfully remarking that all this made him long for two
things: his violin, and a chance to play trios. Right heartily did we
introduce ourselves as pianist and 'cellist errant at his service. And
he and I decided to visit Catania next day to scout for fiddles and
music. We thought we would look for the music first.
Next day, accordingly, we invaded the largest music store in Catania.
Did they have trios for violin, violoncello, and piano? 'Certainly!' We
were shown a derangement of La Somnambula for violin and piano, and
another for 'cello and piano. If we omitted one of the piano parts, we
were assured, a very beautiful trio would result, as surely as one from
four makes three.
Finding us hard to please, the storekeeper referred us to the conductor
of the Opera, who offered to rent us all the standard works of chamber
music. The 'trios' he offered us turned out to be elementary pieces
labeled 'For Piano and Violin or 'Cello.' But nothing we could say was
able to persuade our conductor that 'or' did not mean 'and.' To this day
I feel sure that he is ready to defend his interpretation of this word
against all comers.
We turned three more music stores upside down and had already abandoned
the hunt in despair when we discovered a fourth in a narrow side street.
There were only five minutes in which to catch the train; but in thirty
seconds we had unearthed a genuine piece of chamber music. Hallelujah!
it was the finale of the first Beethoven trio!
Suddenly the oil of joy curdled to mourning. The thing was an
arrangement for piano solo! We left hurriedly when the proprietor began
assuring us that the original effect would be secured if the piano was
doubled in the treble by the violin and in the bass by the 'cello.
This piano solo was the nearest approach to chamber music that a
thorough search and research revealed in the island of Trinacria. But
afterwards, recollecting the misadventure in tranquility, we concluded
that it was as absurd to look for chamber music in Sicily as to look for
'Die Wacht am Rhein' among the idylls of Theocritus.
V
SCENE: a city composed of one department store and three houses, on the
forbidding shores of Newfoundland.
TIME: one of those times when a fellow needs a friend,--when he's in a
stern, strange land on pleasure bent--and has to have a check cashed. I
don't know why it is that one always runs out of ready money in
Newfoundland. Perhaps because salmon flies are such fleeting creatures
of a day that you must send many postal orders to St. Johns for more.
Perhaps because the customs officials at Port au Basques make you
deposit so much duty on your fishing tackle. At any rate, there I was
penniless, with the burly storekeeper scowling in a savage manner at my
check and not knowing at all whether to take a chance on it. Finally he
thought he wouldn't, but conceded that I might spend a night under his
roof, as there was really nowhere else to go.
At this pass something made me think of music. Perhaps it was the parlor
piano which, when new, back in the stone age, had probably been in tune.
I inquired whether there were any other instruments. The wreckage of a
violin was produced. With two pieces of string and a table fork I set up
the prostrate sound-post. I glued together the bridge and put it in
position. The technique of the angler proved helpful in splicing
together some strange-looking strings. The A was eked out with a piece
of salmon leader, while an old mandolin yielded a wire E.
When all was at last ready, a fresh difficulty occurred to me. The
violin was an instrument which I had never learned to play! But
necessity is the mother of pretension. I thought of that check. And
placing the small fiddle carefully between my knees, I pretended that it
was a 'cello.
So the daughter of the house seated herself at the relic of the stone
age, and we had a concert. Newfoundland appeared not to be over-finicky
in the matter of pitch and tone-quality. And how it did enjoy music! As
the audience was of Scotch-English-Irish descent, we rendered equal
parts of 'Comin' Through the Rye,' 'God Save the King,' and 'Kathleen
Mavourneen.' Then the proprietor requested the Sextette from _Lucia_.
While it was forthcoming he toyed furtively with his bandana. When it
ceased he encored it with all his might. Then he slipped out storewards
and presently returned with the fattest, blackest, most
formidable-looking cigar I ever saw, which he gravely proffered me.
'We like' he remarked in his quaint idiom, 'to hear music at scattered
times.' He was trying to affect indifference. But his gruff voice shook,
and I knew then that music hath charms to cash the savage check.
VI
This essay has rambled on an unconscionable while. The shades of
editorial night are already descending; and still I have not yet
described one of those unexpected and perfect orgies of chamber
music,--one of those little earthly paradises full of
Soul-satisfying strains--alas! too few,--
which true fiddlers errant hope to find in each new place they visit,
but which usually keep well in advance of them, like the foot of the
rainbow.
One such adventure came to me not long ago in a California city, while I
was gathering material for a book of travel. On my first evening there I
was taken to dine with a well-known writer in his beautiful home, which
he had built with his own two hands in the Spanish mission style during
fourteen years of joyous labor. This gentleman had no idea that I was to
be thrust upon him. But his hospitality went so far as to insist, before
the evening was over, that I must stay a week. He would not take no for
an answer. And for my part I had no desire to say no, because he was a
delightful person, his home with its leaf-filled patio was most
alluring, and I had discovered promising possibilities for fiddlers
errant in the splendid music-room and the collection of phonograph
records of Indian music which mine host had himself made in Arizona and
New Mexico. Then too there were rumors of skillful musical vagabonds in
the vicinity.
Such an environment fairly cried aloud for impromptu fiddling. So, armed
with a note to the best violinist in that part of California, I set
forth next morning on the trail of the ideal orgy. At the address given
I was told that my man had moved and his address was not known. That was
a setback, indeed! But determined fiddlers errant usually land on their
feet. On the way back I chanced to hear some masterly strains of
Bach-on-the-violin issuing from a brown bungalow. And ringing at a
venture I was confronted by the very man I sought.
Blocking the doorway, he read the note, looking as bored as
professionals usually do when asked to play with amateurs. But just as
he began to tell me how busy he was and how impossible, and so forth, he
happened to glance again at the envelope, and a very slight gleam came
into his eye.
'You're not by any chance the fellow who wrote that thing about fiddlers
in the _Atlantic_, are you?' he inquired. At my nod he very flatteringly
unblocked the doorway and dragged me inside, pumping my hand up and down
in a painful manner, shouting for his wife, and making various kind
representations, all at the same time. And his talk gradually simmered
down into an argument that of course the only thing to do was to fiddle
together that very night.
I asked who had the best 'cello in town. He told me the man's name, but
looked dubious. 'The trouble is, he loves that big Amati as if it were
twins. I doubt if he could bring himself to lend it to any one. Anyway,
let's try.'
He scribbled a card to his 'cellist friend and promised, if I were
successful, to bring along a good pianist and play trios in the evening.
So I set forth on the trail of the Amati. Its owner had just finished
his noonday stint in a hotel orchestra and looked somewhat tired and
cross. He glanced at the card and then assumed a most conservative
expression and tried to fob off on me a cheap 'cello belonging to one of
his pupils, which sounded very much as a three-cent cigar tastes. At
this point I gave him the secret thumb-position grip and whispered into
his ear one of those magic pass words of the craft which in a trice
convinced him that I was in a position to dandle a 'cello with as tender
solicitude as any man alive. On my promising, moreover, to taxicab it
both ways with the sacred burden, he passed the Amati over, and the orgy
of fiddlers errant was assured.
And that night how those beautiful Spanish walls did resound to
Beethoven and Dvorák and Brahms, most originally interspersed with the
voice of the Mexican servant's guitar, with strange, lovely songs of the
aboriginal West and South,--and with the bottled sunshine of Californian
hill-slopes; while El Alcalde Maiore, the lone gnarled tree-giant that
filled the patio, looked in through the open windows and contributed, by
way of accompaniment, leafy arpeggios _sotto voce_. And sometimes,
during rests, I remembered to be thankful that I had once snapped my
fingers at the howling wolf, and at fat pot-boilers, while I scribbled
for the _Atlantic_ that little essay on fiddlers which had gained me
this priceless evening.
Turtle Eggs for Agassiz
By Dallas Lore Sharp
It is one of the wonders of the world that so few books are written.
With every human being a possible book, and with many a human being
capable of becoming more books than the world could contain, is it not
amazing that the books of men are so few? and so stupid!
I took down, recently, from the shelves of a great public library, the
four volumes of Agassiz's _Contributions to the Natural History of the
United States_. I doubt if anybody but the charwoman, with her duster,
had touched those volumes for twenty-five years. They are an excessively
learned, a monumental, an epoch-making work, the fruit of vast and
heroic labors, with colored plates on stone, showing the turtles of the
United States, and their embryology. The work was published more than
half a century ago (by subscription); but it looked old beyond its
years--massive, heavy, weathered, as if dug from the rocks. It was
difficult to feel that Agassiz could have written it--could have built
it, grown it, for the laminated pile had required for its growth, the
patience and painstaking care of a process of nature, as if it were a
kind of printed coral reef. Agassiz do this? The big, human, magnetic
man at work upon these pages of capital letters, Roman figures,
brackets, and parentheses in explanation of the pages of diagrams and
plates! I turned away with a sigh from the weary learning, to read the
preface.
When a great man writes a great book he usually flings a preface after
it, and thereby saves it, sometimes, from oblivion. Whether so or not,
the best things in most books are their prefaces. It was not, however,
the quality of the preface to these great volumes that interested me,
but rather the wicked waste of durable book-material that went to its
making. Reading down through the catalogue of human names and of thanks
for help received, I came to a sentence beginning:--
'In New England I have myself collected largely; but I have also
received valuable contributions from the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of
Burlington; ... from Mr. D. Henry Thoreau of Concord; ... and from Mr.
J. W. P. Jenks of Middleboro'.' And then it hastens on with the thanks
in order to get to the turtles, as if turtles were the one and only
thing of real importance in all the world.
Turtles no doubt are important, extremely important, embryologically, as
part of our genealogical tree; but they are away down among the roots
of the tree as compared with the late Rev. Zadoc Thompson of Burlington.
I happen to know nothing about the Rev. Zadoc, but to me he looks very
interesting. Indeed any reverend gentleman of his name and day who would
catch turtles for Agassiz must have been interesting. And as for Henry
Thoreau, we know he was interesting. The rarest wood-turtle in the
United States was not so rare a specimen as this gentleman of Walden
Woods and Concord. We are glad even for this line in the preface about
him; glad to know that he tried, in this untranscendental way, to serve
his day and generation. If Agassiz had only put a chapter in his turtle
book about it! But this is the material he wasted, this and more of the
same human sort, for the Mr. Jenks of Middleboro' (at the end of the
quotation) was, years later, an old college professor of mine, who told
me some of the particulars of his turtle contributions, particulars
which Agassiz should have found a place for in his big book. The preface
says merely that this gentleman sent turtles to Cambridge by the
thousands--brief and scanty recognition. For that is not the only thing
this gentleman did. On one occasion he sent, not turtles, but turtle
_eggs_ to Cambridge--_brought_ them, I should say; and all there is to
show for it, so far as I could discover, is a sectional drawing of a bit
of the mesoblastic layer of one of the eggs!
Of course, Agassiz wanted to make that mesoblastic drawing, or some
other equally important drawing, and had to have the fresh turtle egg to
draw it from. He had to have it, and he got it. A great man, when he
wants a certain turtle egg, at a certain time, always gets it, for he
gets someone else to get it. I am glad he got it. But what makes me sad
and impatient is that he did not think it worth while to tell about the
getting of it, and so made merely a learned turtle book of what might
have been an exceedingly interesting human book.
It would seem, naturally, that there could be nothing unusual or
interesting about the getting of turtle eggs when you want them. Nothing
at all, if you should chance to want the eggs as you chance to find
them. So with anything else,--good copper stock, for instance, if you
should chance to want it, and should chance to be along when they chance
to be giving it away. But if you want copper stock, say of C & H
quality, _when_ you want it, and are bound to have it, then you must
command more than a college professor's salary. And likewise, precisely,
when it is turtle eggs that you are bound to have.
Agassiz wanted those turtle eggs when he wanted them--not a minute over
three hours from the minute they were laid. Yet even that does not seem
exacting, hardly more difficult than the getting of hen eggs only three
hours old. Just so, provided the professor could have had his private
turtle-coop in Harvard Yard; and provided he could have made his
turtles lay. But turtles will not respond, like hens, to meat-scraps and
the warm mash. The professor's problem was not to get from a mud
turtle's nest in the back yard to the table in the laboratory; but to
get from the laboratory in Cambridge to some pond when the turtles were
laying, and back to the laboratory within the limited time. And this, in
the days of Darius Green, might have called for nice and discriminating
work--as it did.
Agassiz had been engaged for a long time upon his _Contributions_. He
had brought the great work nearly to a finish. It was, indeed, finished
but for one small yet very important bit of observation: he had carried
the turtle egg through every stage of its development with the single
exception of one--the very earliest--that stage of first cleavages, when
the cell begins to segment, immediately upon its being laid. That
beginning stage had brought the _Contributions_ to a halt. To get eggs
that were fresh enough to show the incubation at this period had been
impossible.
There were several ways that Agassiz might have proceeded: he might have
got a leave of absence for the spring term, taken his laboratory to some
pond inhabited by turtles, and there camped until he should catch the
reptile digging out her nest. But there were difficulties in all of
that--as those who are college professors and naturalists know. As this
was quite out of the question, he did the easiest thing--asked Mr.
Jenks of Middleboro' to get him the eggs. Mr. Jenks got them. Agassiz
knew all about his getting of them; and I say the strange and irritating
thing is, that Agassiz did not think it worth while to tell us about it,
at least in the preface to his monumental work.
It was many years later that Mr. Jenks, then a gray-haired college
professor, told me how he got those eggs to Agassiz.
'I was principal of an academy, during my younger years,' he began, 'and
was busy one day with my classes, when a large man suddenly filled the
door-way of the room, smiled to the four corners of the room, and called
out with a big, quick voice that he was Professor Agassiz.
'Of course he was. I knew it, even before he had had time to shout it to
me across the room.
'Would I get him some turtle eggs? he called. Yes, I would. And would I
get them to Cambridge within three hours from the time they were laid?
Yes, I would. And I did. And it was worth the doing. But I did it only
once.
'When I promised Agassiz those eggs I knew where I was going to get
them. I had got turtle eggs there before--at a particular patch of sandy
shore along a pond, a few miles distant from the academy.
'Three hours was the limit. From the railroad station to Boston was
thirty-five miles; from the pond to the station was perhaps three or
four miles; from Boston to Cambridge we called about three miles. Forty
miles in round numbers! We figured it all out before he returned, and
got the trip down to two hours,--record time:--driving from the pond to
the station; from the station by express train to Boston; from Boston by
cab to Cambridge. This left an easy hour for accidents and delays.
'Cab and car and carriage we reckoned into our time-table; but what we
didn't figure on was the turtle.' And he paused abruptly.
'Young man,' he went on, his shaggy brows and spectacles hardly hiding
the twinkle in the eyes that were bent severely upon me, 'young man,
when _you_ go after turtle eggs, take into account the turtle. No! no!
that's bad advice. Youth never reckons on the turtle--and youth seldom
ought to. Only old age does that; and old age would never have got those
turtle eggs to Agassiz.
'It was in the early spring that Agassiz came to the academy, long
before there was any likelihood of the turtles laying. But I was eager
for the quest, and so fearful of failure, that I started out to watch at
the pond, fully two weeks ahead of the time that the turtles might be
expected to lay. I remember the date clearly: it was May 14.
'A little before dawn--along near three o'clock--I would drive over to
the pond, hitch my horse near by, settle myself quietly among some
thick cedars close to the sandy shore, and there I would wait, my kettle
of sand ready, my eye covering the whole sleeping pond. Here among the
cedars I would eat my breakfast, and then get back in good season to
open the academy for the morning session.
'And so the watch began.
'I soon came to know individually the dozen or more turtles that kept to
my side of the pond. Shortly after the cold mist would lift and melt
away, they would stick up their heads through the quiet water; and as
the sun slanted down over the ragged rim of tree-tops, the slow things
would float into the warm, lighted spots, or crawl out and doze
comfortably on the hummocks and snags.
'What fragrant mornings those were! How fresh and new and unbreathed!
The pond odors, the woods odors, the odors of the ploughed fields--of
water-lily, and wild grape, and the dew-laid soil! I can taste them yet,
and hear them yet--the still, large sounds of the waking day--the
pickerel breaking the quiet with his swirl; the kingfisher dropping
anchor; the stir of feet and wings among the trees. And then the thought
of the great book being held up for me! Those were rare mornings!
'But there began to be a good many of them, for the turtles showed no
desire to lay. They sprawled in the sun, and never one came out upon the
sand as if she intended to help on the great professor's book. The
embryology of her eggs was of small concern to her; her contribution to
the Natural History of the United States could wait.
'And it did wait. I began my watch on the 14th of May; June first found
me still among the cedars, still waiting, as I had waited every morning,
Sundays and rainy days alike. June first was a perfect morning, but
every turtle slid out upon her log, as if egg-laying might be a matter
strictly of next year.
'I began to grow uneasy,--not impatient yet, for a naturalist learns his
lesson of patience early, and for all his years; but I began to fear
lest, by some subtile sense, my presence might somehow be known to the
creatures; that they might have gone to some other place to lay, while I
was away at the school-room.
'I watched on to the end of the first week, on to the end of the second
week in June, seeing the mists rise and vanish every morning, and along
with them vanish, more and more, the poetry of my early morning vigil.
Poetry and rheumatism cannot long dwell together in the same clump of
cedars, and I had begun to feel the rheumatism. A month of morning mists
wrapping me around had at last soaked through to my bones. But Agassiz
was waiting, and the world was waiting, for those turtle eggs; and I
would wait. It was all I could do, for there is no use bringing a china
nest-egg to a turtle; she is not open to any such delicate suggestion.
'Then came a mid-June Sunday morning, with dawn breaking a little after
three: a warm, wide-awake dawn, with the level mist lifted from the
level surface of the pond a full hour higher than I had seen it any
morning before.
'This was the day: I knew it. I have heard persons say that they can
hear the grass grow; that they know by some extra sense when danger is
nigh. That we have these extra senses I fully believe, and I believe
they can be sharpened by cultivation. For a month I had been watching,
brooding over this pond, and now I knew. I felt a stirring of the pulse
of things that the cold-hearted turtles could no more escape than could
the clods and I.
'Leaving my horse unhitched, as if he, too, understood, I slipped
eagerly into my covert for a look at the pond. As I did so, a large
pickerel ploughed a furrow out through the spatter-docks, and in his
wake rose the head of an enormous turtle. Swinging slowly around, the
creature headed straight for the shore, and without a pause, scrambled
out on the sand.
'She was about the size of a big scoop-shovel; but that was not what
excited me, so much as her manner, and the gait at which she moved; for
there was method in it and fixed purpose. On she came, shuffling over
the sand toward the higher open fields, with a hurried, determined
see-saw that was taking her somewhere in particular, and that was bound
to get her there on time.
'I held my breath. Had she been a dinosaurian making Mesozoic
footprints, I could not have been more fearful. For footprints in the
Mesozoic mud, or in the sands of time, were as nothing to me when
compared with fresh turtle eggs in the sands of this pond.
'But over the strip of sand, without a stop, she paddled, and up a
narrow cow-path into the high grass along a fence. Then up the narrow
cow-path, on all fours, just like another turtle, I paddled, and into
the high, wet grass along the fence.
'I kept well within sound of her, for she moved recklessly, leaving a
trail of flattened grass a foot and a half wide. I wanted to stand
up,--and I don't believe I could have turned her back with a rail,--but
I was afraid if she saw me that she might return indefinitely to the
pond; so on I went, flat to the ground, squeezing through the lower
rails of the fence, as if the field beyond were a melon-patch. It was
nothing of the kind, only a wild, uncomfortable pasture, full of
dewberry vines, and very discouraging. They were excessively wet vines
and briery. I pulled my coat-sleeves as far over my fists as I could get
them, and with the tin pail of sand swinging from between my teeth to
avoid noise, I stumped fiercely, but silently, on after the turtle.
'She was laying her course, I thought, straight down the length of this
dreadful pasture, when, not far from the fence, she suddenly hove to,
warped herself short about, and came back, barely clearing me, at a clip
that was thrilling. I warped about, too, and in her wake bore down
across the corner of the pasture, across the powdery public road, and on
to a fence along a field of young corn.
'I was somewhat wet by this time, but not so wet as I had been before,
wallowing through the deep, dry dust of the road. Hurrying up behind a
large tree by the fence, I peered down the corn-rows and saw the turtle
stop, and begin to paw about in the loose, soft soil. She was going to
lay!
'I held on to the tree and watched, as she tried this place, and that
place, and the other place--the eternally feminine!--But _the_ place,
evidently, was hard to find. What could a female turtle do with a whole
field of possible nests to choose from? Then at last she found it, and
whirling about, she backed quickly at it, and, tail first, began to bury
herself before my staring eyes.
'Those were not the supreme moments of my life; perhaps those moments
came later that day; but those certainly were among the slowest, most
dreadfully mixed of moments that I ever experienced. They were hours
long. There she was, her shell just showing, like some old hulk in the
sand alongshore. And how long would she stay there? and how should I
know if she had laid an egg?
'I could still wait. And so I waited, when, over the freshly awakened
fields, floated four mellow strokes from the distant town clock.
'Four o'clock! Why, there was no train until seven! No train for three
hours! The eggs would spoil! Then with a rush it came over me that this
was Sunday morning, and there was no regular seven o'clock train,--none
till after nine.
'I think I should have fainted had not the turtle just then begun
crawling off. I was weak and dizzy; but there, there in the sand, were
the eggs! and Agassiz! and the great book! And I cleared the fence, and
the forty miles that lay between me and Cambridge, at a single jump. He
should have them, trains or no. Those eggs should go to Agassiz by seven
o'clock, if I had to gallop every mile of the way. Forty miles! Any
horse could cover it in three hours, if he had to; and upsetting the
astonished turtle, I scooped out her round, white eggs.
'On a bed of sand in the bottom of the pail I laid them, with what care
my trembling fingers allowed; filled in between them with more sand; so
with another layer to the rim; and covering all smoothly with more sand,
I ran back for my horse.
'That horse knew, as well as I, that the turtles had laid, and that he
was to get those eggs to Agassiz. He turned out of that field into the
road on two wheels, a thing he had not done for twenty years, doubling
me up before the dashboard, the pail of eggs miraculously lodged between
my knees.
'I let him out. If only he could keep this pace all the way to
Cambridge! or even half way there; and I would have time to finish the
trip on foot. I shouted him on, holding to the dasher with one hand, the
pail of eggs with the other, not daring to get off my knees, though the
bang on them, as we pounded down the wood road, was terrific. But
nothing must happen to the eggs; they must not be jarred, or even turned
over in the sand before they came to Agassiz.
'In order to get out on the pike it was necessary to drive back away
from Boston toward the town. We had nearly covered the distance, and
were rounding a turn from the woods into the open fields, when, ahead of
me, at the station it seemed, I heard the quick sharp whistle of a
locomotive.
'What did it mean? Then followed the _puff_, _puff_, _puff_, of a
starting train. But what train? Which way going? And jumping to my feet
for a longer view, I pulled into a side road, that paralleled the track,
and headed hard for the station.
'We reeled along. The station was still out of sight, but from behind
the bushes that shut it from view, rose the smoke of a moving engine. It
was perhaps a mile away, but we were approaching, head on, and topping
a little hill I swept down upon a freight train, the black smoke pouring
from the stack, as the mighty creature pulled itself together for its
swift run down the rails.
'My horse was on the gallop, going with the track, and straight toward
the coming train. The sight of it almost maddened me--the bare thought
of it, on the road to Boston! On I went; on it came, a half--a quarter
of a mile between us, when suddenly my road shot out along an unfenced
field with only a level stretch of sod between me and the engine.
'With a pull that lifted the horse from his feet, I swung him into the
field and sent him straight as an arrow for the track. That train should
carry me and my eggs to Boston!
'The engineer pulled the rope. He saw me standing up in the rig, saw my
hat blow off, saw me wave my arms, saw the tin pail swing in my teeth,
and he jerked out a succession of sharp halts! But it was he who should
halt, not I; and on we went, the horse with a flounder landing the
carriage on top of the track.
'The train was already grinding to a stop; but before it was near a
standstill, I had backed off the track, jumped out, and, running down
the rails with the astonished engineers gaping at me, had swung aboard
the cab.
'They offered no resistance; they hadn't had time. Nor did they have the
disposition, for I looked strange, not to say dangerous. Hatless,
dew-soaked, smeared with yellow mud, and holding, as if it were a baby
or a bomb, a little tin pail of sand.
"'_Crazy_," the fireman muttered, looking to the engineer for his cue.
'I had been crazy, perhaps, but I was not crazy now.
'"Throw her wide open," I commanded. "Wide open! These are fresh turtle
eggs for Professor Agassiz of Cambridge. He must have them before
breakfast."
'Then they knew I was crazy, and evidently thinking it best to humor me,
threw the throttle wide open, and away we went.
'I kissed my hand to the horse, grazing unconcernedly in the open field,
and gave a smile to my crew. That was all I could give them, and hold
myself and the eggs together. But the smile was enough. And they smiled
through their smut at me, though one of them held fast to his shovel,
while the other kept his hand upon a big, ugly wrench. Neither of them
spoke to me, but above the roar of the swaying engine I caught enough of
their broken talk to understand that they were driving under a full head
of steam, with the intention of handing me over to the Boston police, as
perhaps the easiest way of disposing of me.
'I was only afraid that they would try it at the next station. But that
station whizzed past without a bit of slack, and the next, and the next;
when it came over me that this was the through freight, which should
have passed in the night, and was making up lost time.
'Only the fear of the shovel and the wrench kept me from shaking hands
with both men at this discovery. But I beamed at them; and they at me. I
was enjoying it. The unwonted jar beneath my feet was wrinkling my
diaphragm with spasms of delight. And the fireman beamed at the
engineer, with a look that said, "See the lunatic grin; he likes it!"
'He did like it. How the iron wheels sang to me as they took the rails!
How the rushing wind in my ears sang to me! From my stand on the
fireman's side of the cab I could catch a glimpse of the track just
ahead of the engine, where the ties seemed to leap into the throat of
the mile-devouring monster. The joy of it! of seeing space swallowed by
the mile!
'I shifted the eggs from hand to hand and thought of my horse, of
Agassiz, of the great book, of my great luck,--luck,--luck,--until the
multitudinous tongues of the thundering train were all chiming "luck!
luck! luck!" They knew! they understood! This beast of fire and tireless
wheels was doing its very best to get the eggs to Agassiz!
'We swung out past the Blue Hills, and yonder flashed the morning sun
from the towering dome of the State House. I might have leaped from the
cab and run the rest of the way on foot, had I not caught the eye of the
engineer watching me narrowly. I was not in Boston yet, nor in
Cambridge either. I was an escaped lunatic, who had held up a train, and
forced it to carry me to Boston.
'Perhaps I had overdone the lunacy business. Suppose these two men
should take it into their heads to turn me over to the police, whether I
would or no? I could never explain the case in time to get the eggs to
Agassiz. I looked at my watch. There were still a few minutes left, in
which I might explain to these men, who, all at once, had become my
captors. But it was too late. Nothing could avail against my actions, my
appearance, and my little pail of sand.
'I had not thought of my appearance before. Here I was, face and clothes
caked with yellow mud, my hair wild and matted, my hat gone, and in my
full-grown hands a tiny tin pail of sand, as if I had been digging all
night with a tiny, tin shovel on the shore! And thus to appear in the
decent streets of Boston of a Sunday morning!
'I began to feel like a hunted criminal. The situation was serious, or
might be, and rather desperately funny at its best. I must in some way
have shown my new fears, for both men watched me more sharply.
'Suddenly, as we were nearing the outer freightyard, the train slowed
down and came to a stop. I was ready to jump, but I had no chance. They
had nothing to do, apparently, but to guard me. I looked at my watch
again. What time we had made! It was only six o'clock, with a whole
hour to get to Cambridge.
'But I didn't like this delay. Five minutes--ten--went by.
"'Gentlemen," I began, but was cut short by an express train coming
past. We were moving again, on--into a siding; on--on to the main track;
and on with a bump and a crash and a succession of crashes, running the
length of the train; on at a turtle's pace, but on,--when the fireman,
quickly jumping for the bell-rope, left the way to the step free,
and--the chance had come!
'I never touched the step, but landed in the soft sand at the side of
the track, and made a line for the yard fence.
'There was no hue or cry. I glanced over my shoulder to see if they were
after me. Evidently their hands were full, and they didn't know I had
gone.
'But I had gone; and was ready to drop over the high board-fence, when
it occurred to me that I might drop into a policeman's arms. Hanging my
pail in a splint on top of a post, I peered cautiously over--a very wise
thing to do before you jump a high board-fence. There, crossing the open
square toward the station, was a big, burly fellow with a club--looking
for me.
'I flattened for a moment, when some one in the yard yelled at me. I
preferred the policeman, and grabbing my pail I slid over to the
street. The policeman moved on past the corner of the station out of
sight. The square was free, and yonder stood a cab!
'Time was flying now. Here was the last lap. The cabman saw me coming,
and squared away. I waved a paper dollar at him, but he only stared the
more. A dollar can cover a good deal, but I was too much for one dollar.
I pulled out another, thrust them both at him, and dodged into the cab,
calling, "Cambridge!"
'He would have taken me straight to the police station, had I not said,
"Harvard College. Professor Agassiz's house! I've got eggs for Agassiz";
and pushed another dollar up at him through the hole.
'It was nearly half-past six.
'"Let him go!" I ordered. "Here's another dollar if you make Agassiz's
house in twenty minutes. Let him out; never mind the police!"
'He evidently knew the police, or there were none around at that time on
a Sunday morning. We went down the sleeping streets, as I had gone down
the wood roads from the pond two hours before, but with the rattle and
crash now of a fire brigade. Whirling a corner into Cambridge Street, we
took the bridge at a gallop, the driver shouting out something in
Hibernian to a pair of waving arms and a belt and brass buttons.
'Across the bridge with a rattle and jolt that put the eggs in jeopardy,
and on over the cobble-stones, we went. Half standing, to lessen the
jar, I held the pail in one hand and held myself in the other, not
daring to let go even to look at my watch.
'But I was afraid to look at the watch. I was afraid to see how near to
seven o'clock it might be. The sweat was dropping from my nose, so close
was I running to the limit of my time.
'Suddenly there was a lurch, and I dove forward, ramming my head into
the front of the cab, coming up with a rebound that landed me across the
small of my back on the seat, and sent half of my pail of eggs
helter-skelter over the floor.
'We had stopped. Here was Agassiz's house; and without taking time to
pick up the scattered eggs, I tumbled out, and pounded at the door.
'No one was astir in the house. But I would stir them. And I did. Right
in the midst of the racket the door opened. It was the maid.
'"Agassiz," I gasped, "I want Professor Agassiz, quick!" And I pushed by
her into the hall.
'"Go 'way, sir. I'll call the police. Professor Agassiz is in bed. Go
'way, sir!"
'"Call him--Agassiz--instantly, or I'll call him myself."
'But I didn't; for just then a door overhead was flung open, a great,
white-robed figure appeared on the dim landing above, and a quick, loud
voice called excitedly,--
'"Let him in! Let him in. I know him. He has my turtle eggs!"
'And the apparition, slipperless, and clad in anything but an academic
gown, came sailing down the stairs.
'The maid fled. The great man, his arms extended, laid hold of me with
both hands, and dragging me and my precious pail into his study, with a
swift, clean stroke laid open one of the eggs, as the watch in my
trembling hands ticked its way to seven--as if nothing unusual were
happening to the history of the world.'
* * * * *
'You were in time then?' I said.
'To the tick. There stands my copy of the great book. I am proud of the
humble part I had in it.'
A Father to his Freshman Son
By Edward Sanford Martin
No doubt, my son, you have got out of me already what there was to help
or mar you. You are eighteen years old and have been getting it, more or
less and off and on, for at least seventeen of those years. I regret the
imperfections of the source. No doubt you have recognized them. To have
a father who is attentive to the world, indulgent to the flesh, and with
a sort of kindness for the Devil--dear son, it is a good deal of a
handicap! Be sure I make allowances for you because of it. _Ex eo
fonte--fons_, masculine, as I remember; _fons_ and _mons_ and _pons_,
and one other. Should the pronoun be _illo?_ As you know, I never was an
accurate scholar, and I suppose you're not--_Ex eo fonte_ the stream is
bound to run not quite clear.
My advice to you is quite likely to be bad, partly from the imperfection
of its source, partly because I am not you, and partly because of my
imperfect acquaintance with the conditions you are about to meet. When I
came to college my father gave me no advice. He gave me his love and
some necessary money, which did not come, I fear, as easy as the love.
His venerable uncle who lived with us--my great uncle--gave me his
blessing and told me, I remember, that so far as book-learning went, I
could learn as much without going to college. Still he did not
discourage my going. He was quite right. I could have got more
book-learning out of college than I did get in college, and I suppose
that you, too, might get, out, more than you will get, in. Of course,
that's not the whole story; neither is it true of all people. For me,
college abounded in distractions, and I suppose it will for you. And I
was incorrigibly sociable and ready to spend time to get acquainted, and
more, to stay acquainted, and if you have that propensity you needn't
think it was left on the doorstep. You come by it lawfully. Getting
acquainted is, for most of us, one of the important branches. But it's
only one of them, and to devote one's whole time to it is a mistake, and
one that the dean will help you avoid if necessary, which probably, if I
know you at all, it won't be.
It is important to know people, but it is more important to be worth
knowing. College offers you at least two valuable details of
opportunity: a large variety of people to know, and a large variety of
means to make yourself better worth knowing. I hope, my son, that you
will avail yourself of both these details.
This is a mechanical age, and the most obtrusive of the current
mechanisms is the automobile. It has valves and cylinders and those
things that give it power and speed, and rubber tires that it runs on,
and a wheel and steering-gear and handles and treadles by which it is
directed. Your body, especially your stomach, is the rubber tires; your
brains are the cylinders and valves; and your will and the spiritual
part of you are the chauffeur and his wheel.
I beg you to be kind to your stomach, as heretofore. It needs no alcohol
at your time of life--if ever--and the less you find occasion to feed
into it, the more prosperous both your physical and mental conditions
are likely to be. I am aware that life, and college life in particular,
has its convivial intervals; but you might as well understand (and I
have been remiss, or have wasted time, if you do not understand it
already) that alcohol is one of the chief man-traps, abounding in
mischiefs if you play with it too hard. Be wary, always wary, with it,
my son, and especially with hard liquor.
Your mind, like your body, is a thing whereof the powers are developed
by effort. That is a principal use, as I see it, of hard work in
studies. Unless you train your body you can't be an athlete, and unless
you train your mind you can't be much of a scholar. The four miles an
oarsman covers at top speed is in itself nothing to the good, but the
physical capacity to hold out over the course is thought to be of some
worth. So a good part of what you learn by hard study may not be
permanently retained, and may not seem to be of much final value, but
your mind is a better and more powerful instrument because you have
learned it. 'Knowledge is power,' but still more the faculty of
acquiring and using knowledge is power. If you have a trained and
powerful mind, you are bound to have stored it with something, but its
value is more in what it can do, what it can grasp and use, than in what
it contains; and if it were possible, as it is not, to come out of
college with a trained and disciplined mind and nothing useful in it,
you would still be ahead, and still, in a manner, educated. Think of
your mind as a muscle to be developed; think of it as a searchlight that
is to reveal the truth to you, and don't cheat it or neglect it.
As to competitive scholarship, to my mind it is like competitive
athletics,--good for those who have the powers and like the game. Tests
are useful; they stimulate one's ambition, and so do competitions. But a
success in competitive scholarship, like a success in competitive
athletics, may, of course, be too dearly bought. Not by you, though, I
surmise, my son. If you were more urgent, either as a scholar or as an
athlete, I might think it needful to warn you not to wear your tires out
scorching too early in life. As things are, I say to you, as I often say
to myself: Don't dawdle; don't scramble. When you work, work; when you
play, play; when you rest, rest; and think all the time.
When you get hold of an instructor who is worth attention, give him
attention. That is one way of getting the best that a college has to
offer. A great deal you may get from books, but some of the most
valuable things are passed from mind to mind, and can only be had from
some one who has them, or else from the great Source of all truth. I
suspect that the subtle development we call 'culture' is one of those
things, and the great spiritual valuables are apt to come that way.
You know you are still growing, both in mind and body, and will continue
so to be for years to come,--I hope, always. One of the valuable things
about college is that it gives you time to grow. You won't have to earn
any money and will have time to think and get acquainted with yourself
and others, as well as with some of the wisdom that is spread upon the
records. You would be so engaged, more or less, in these years, wherever
you might be. But in college, where you are so much your own man, and
are freed from the demands and solicitudes of your parents, the
conditions for it are exceptionally favorable. I suppose that is one
thing that continues the colleges in business, since I read so often
that at present they are entirely misdirected and teach the wrong things
in the wrong way.
But nobody denies that they give the young a breathing spell. Breathe,
my son; breathe freely. Remember that the aim of all these prospective
processes is to bring out the man there is in you, and arm him more or
less for the jousts ahead. It is not to make you over into somebody
else: that can't be done,--not in three or four years, anyhow; but only
to bring out, and train as much as possible of you. There's plenty in
most of us if we can only get it out; more, very much more, than we ever
do get out. So will you please think of college as a nursery in which
you are to grow a while,--and mind you do grow,--and then, presently, to
be transplanted. It is not as if college was the chief arena of human
effort. Nevertheless, for your effort, while you are there, it is the
chief arena, and I am far from giving you the counsel to put off trying
until you leave.
I hear a good deal about clubs and societies: how many there are, how
important they are; how it is that, if a youth shall gain the whole of
scholarship and all athletics and not 'make' a proper club, he shall
still fall something short of success in college. Parents I meet who are
more concerned about clubs than about either scholarship or deportment.
They are concerned and at the same time bothered: so many strategies and
chances the clubs involve; so bad it may be to be in this one; so bad to
be out of that; so much choice there is between them, and so much
choice exercised within them, by which any mother's hopeful may be
excluded.
There is a democratic ideal of a great college without any clubs, where
the lion and the lamb shall escort one another about with tails
entwined, and every student shall be like every other student, and have
similar habits and associates. This ideal is a good deal discussed and a
good deal applauded in the public press. Whether it will ever come true
I can't tell, but there has been some form or other of clubs in our
older colleges, I suppose, for one or two centuries, and they are there
now and will at least last out your time; so it may be you will have to
take thought about them in due time.
Not much, however, until they take thought of you.
You see, clubs seem to be a sort of natural provision, just as tails
were, maybe, before humanity outgrew them. I guess there is a propensity
of nature toward groups, and the natural basis of grouping seems to be
likeness in feathers and habits. The propensity works to include the
like and, incidentally but necessarily, to exclude the unlike. Whether
it is the Knights of the Round Table or the Knights of the Garter or the
Phi Beta Kappa, you see these principles working. The measure of success
in a club is its ability to make people want to join it, and that seems
to be best demonstrated and preserved by keeping most of them out.
Now the advantages of the clubs are considerable. To have a place
always open where you can hang up your hat, and where a hospitable
welcome always awaits you, and where there is enough of a crowd and not
too much, and where you can in your later years inspect at all times a
family of selected undergraduates,--all that is valuable and good, and
pleasant besides, and this continuity of interest that the clubs foster
among their members helps to keep up in those members a lively and
helpful interest in their college. The drawback to the clubs is their
essential selfishness, and their disposition to take you out of a large
family and limit you to a small one, and one that is not yours by birth,
or entirely by choice, but is selected for you largely by other persons.
In any club you yield a certain amount of freedom and individuality, the
amount being determined by the degree in which the club absorbs you.
Don't yield too much! Don't take the mould of any club! A college is
always bigger than its clubs, and the biggest thing in a college is
always a man. The object of being in college is to develop as a man. If
clubs help in that development,--and I think they do help some
men,--they are a gain; but, of course, if they dwarf you down to the
dimensions of a club-man, they are a loss. Some men take their club
shape, such as it is, and find a sufficient satisfaction in it. Others
react on their clubs, take what they have to give, add to it what is to
be had elsewhere, and turn out rather more valuable people than if they
had had no club experience.
At all events, don't take this matter of the clubs too hard. For those
youths, comparatively few, who by luck and circumstances find themselves
eligible to them, they are an interesting form of discipline or
indulgence, and I will not say that they are unimportant. Neither would
I have you keep out of them because of their drawbacks. If you begin by
keeping out of all things that have drawbacks, your progress in this
world will involve constant hesitations. Alcohol has numerous drawbacks,
but I don't advise you to be a teetotaller. Tobacco has drawbacks, but I
believe you smoke it. Money has drawbacks, and so has advertisement.
But, bless you, we have to take things as they come and deal with them
as we can. The trick is to get the kernel and eliminate the shuck. A
large proportion of people do the opposite. If you can manage that way
with the clubs,--provided you ever get a chance,--you will be amused to
observe in due time how large a proportion of your brethren value these
organizations chiefly for their shuck, and grasp most eagerly at that.
For the shuck, as I see it, is exclusiveness, which is not valuable
except to persons justly doubtful of their own merits. Whereas the
kernel is the fellowship of like minds which has always been treasured
by the wise.
The clubs, my son, some more than others, are recruited considerably
from what is known as the leisure class. To be sure, I don't see any
very definite or important leisure class about in our land. Everybody
who amounts to anything works, and always did and must, for you can't
amount to anything otherwise; but the people who have money laid up
ahead for them, are apt to work somewhat less strenuously than the rest
of us, and not so much for money. Don't get it into your head that you
want to tie up to the leisure class, or that the condition of not having
to work is desirable. Have it in mind that you are to work just about as
hard as the quality of your tires and cylinders will warrant. Plan to
get into the game if you have to go on your hands and knees. Plan to
earn your living somehow. Don't aim to go through life spoon-fed; don't
aim to get a soft seat. If you do, you won't have your fair share of
fun. There is no real fun in ease, except as you need it because you
have worked hard.
I say, plan to earn your living! Whether you actually earn the money you
live on, makes no great difference, though in your case I guess you'll
have to if you are going to live at all well. But if you get money
without earning it, it leaves you in debt to society. Somebody has to
earn the money you spend. In mine, factory, railroad, or office,
somebody works for the money that supports you. No matter where the
money comes from, that is true: somebody has to earn it. If you get it
without due labor of your own, you owe for it. Recognize that debt and
qualify yourself to discharge it. Study to put back into the world
somewhat more than you take out of it. Study to be somewhat more than
merely worth your keep. Study to shoulder the biggest load your strength
can carry. That is life. That is the great sport that brings the great
compensations to the soul. Getting regular meals and nice clothes, and
acceptable shelter and transportation, and agreeable acquaintances, is
only a means to an end, and if you accept the means and shirk the end,
the means will pall on you.
I said 'agreeable acquaintances.' A very large proportion of the
acquaintances you can make will be agreeable if you can bring enough
knowledge and a sufficiently hospitable spirit to your relations with
them. I don't counsel you to cultivate the arts of popularity, for they
are apt not to wash,--apt, that is, to conflict with inside qualities
that are vastly more valuable than they are. But keep, in so far as you
can, an open heart. There is no one to whom you are not related if only
you can find the relation; there is no one but you owe him a benefit if
you can see one you can do him.
Don't be too nice. It is such an impediment to usefulness as stuttering
is to speech,--a sort of spiritual indigestion; a hesitation in your
carbureter. By all means, be a gentleman, in manners and spirit, in so
far as you know how, but be one from the inside out.
If you had come as far as you have in life without acquiring manners,
you might well blush for your parents and teachers. I don't think you
have, but I beg you hold on to all the good manners you have, and get
more. Good manners seem to me a good deal to seek among present-day
youth, but I suppose they have always been fairly scarce, and the more
appreciated for their scarcity. Tobacco manners are uncommonly free and
bad in this generation; more so, I think, than they were in mine. Since
cigarettes came in, especially, youths seem to feel licensed to smoke
them in all places and company. And the boys are prone to too much ease
of attitude, and lounge and loll appallingly in company, and I see them
in parlors with their legs crossed in such a fashion that their feet
might almost as well be in the ladies' laps.
Have a care for these matters of deportment. Be strict with yourself and
your postures. Keep your legs and feet where they belong; they were not
meant for parlor ornaments. Show respect for people! Lord bless me! the
things I see done by males with a claim to be gentlemen: tobacco-smoke
puffed in women's faces; men who ought to know better, smoking as they
drive out with ladies; men who put their feet on the table and expect
you to talk over them! Show respect for people; for all kinds of people,
including yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good
manners. They are the expression of discipline, of good-will, of respect
for other people's rights and comfort and feelings. I suppose good
manners are unselfish, but the most selfish people might well cultivate
them, they are so remunerative. In the details of life, in the public
vehicles, in crowds, and in all situations where the demand presses hard
on supply, what you get by hogging is incomparably less than what you
get by courtesy. The things you must scramble and elbow for are not
worth having; not one of them. They are the swill of life, my son; leave
them to swine.
You will have to think more or less about yourself, because that belongs
to your time of life, provided you are the sort that thinks at all. But
don't overdo it. You won't, because you will find it, as all healthy
people do, a subject in which over-indulgence tends rapidly to nausea.
To have one's self always on one's mind is to lodge a kill-joy; to act
always from calculation is a sure path to blunders.
Most of these specific counsels I set down more for your entertainment
than truly to guide you. You don't live by maxims any more than you
speak by rules of grammar. You will speak by ear (improving, I hope, in
your college environment), and you will live by whatever light there is
in you, getting more, I hope, as you go along.
Grow in grace, my son! If your spirit is right, the details of life
will take care of their own adjustment. Go to church; if not invariably,
then variably. They don't require it any more in college, but you can't
afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall--very imperfectly to
be sure--the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of
our civilization rests. Get understanding of that. It is by far the most
important knowledge in the whole book, the great fountain of sanity,
tolerance, and political and social wisdom, a gateway to all kinds of
truth, a rectifying and consoling current through all of life.
Intensive Living
By Cornelia A. P. Comer
Said Honoria casually,--
'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.'
The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her
Irish crochet.
'Oh, really? And how did you like the house?'
Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three
sat on a cottage veranda in the foothills of Southern California, one
February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to
the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and
country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing
to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open
spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand
(for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue
out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long,
delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep,
sturdy hills, brown brooks, elm-shaded streets and old friends, girding
at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace
was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown
gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge
encircling Martha's cottage.
'It is a good-looking mansion. She had a capable architect. The building
is Tudor,--consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is
a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly
how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified, comfortable
living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.'
'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are
keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?'
Again Honoria hesitated.
'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy
performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy,
indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me
at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know
how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in
some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was
thoroughly delightful, for where the rugs failed or the draperies
faltered, Adelaide's personality somehow stepped in and eked out all
insufficiencies, corrected all errors. It was hers entirely. In this
blameless achievement of architect and decorator, there are no
insufficiencies to be eked out, and so Adelaide's personality seems to
slip and slide helplessly upon a kind of glacial surface which it cannot
penetrate and make its own. I may be expressing myself very poorly, but
I know I have hold of something real. Adelaide's new house, good-looking
as it is, is not interesting,--that is what I mean,--and even the dear
woman herself seems less interesting, and less herself now that she is
enfolded in it.'
'Did you know,' interposed Martha, 'that the first winter in a new house
the heating actually requires more coal than is ever needed again?'
'No, I didn't know that--but I can well believe it. Why shouldn't it
take more coal to warm it when it evidently takes more vitality to cheer
it? It's a serious business, this breaking in of a large house to one's
self late in life, as so many Americans do. The draughts upon their
vital forces are more taxing than the coal bills.'
'We all ought to live in inherited homesteads,' suggested Grace,'where
the humanizing of the bricks and mortar has been done for us by our own
people.'
'Honoria,' Martha demanded, ignoring this unpractical suggestion, 'tell
me the truth! If you were in Adelaide's place and had _carte blanche_ to
incarnate your idea of a house for yourself and your family, wouldn't
you over-build and over-decorate too? I should enjoy doing it! The
furniture in my bungalow is altogether too sketchy at present, and I am
tired of eking it out with personality. You would feel differently if
you hadn't brought your old mahogany when you came West!'
Honoria set a few stitches, and looked at her friends with eyes in which
conviction flamed.
'I don't over-dress, and I don't over-eat, though I have abundant
opportunity,' she said, 'but it may be that I would over-build and
over-decorate, or at least that I would have done so until yesterday. I
don't think I would do it to-day--now that I know what ails Adelaide's
house. As for your bungalow, Martha, it is comfortable and it is alive.
There isn't a picture on the wall nor an ornament on the mantel that
hasn't a reason for being exactly where it is. That is triumph, and you
know it. I don't believe you would really exchange your house for
Adelaide's.'
'Try me and see! I would like just for once to ignore beauty and
suitability, and go in for size and sheer, luxurious comfort.'
'You would go distracted in two weeks in a place that was "sheer,
luxurious comfort" and nothing else,' returned Honoria decidedly. 'You
would hate it as you hate everything smug and fat and complacent. I have
known you too long, Martha, not to know the ways of you with a house. To
satisfy you, a domicile has to be livable. If you consider all the
houses, little and big, of your friends, you will see that there are
fixed limits to the amount of space in them that is truly and pleasantly
habitable. You can't get the lovable "lived-in look" in rooms where you
do not actually live, and you can't live all over a house that is bigger
than your needs. Why! life isn't long enough, especially if you seldom
stay at home! Think how dreary are most of the great houses we know.
Consider Mrs. King's new marble palace with its commanding site and its
ninety rooms. There isn't a single spot in it except her own bed-room
and sitting-room that wouldn't give your spirit a congestive chill if
you sat there for an hour. I know a woman in Colorado who so loathed her
big new house as it left the hands of a New York decorator, that she
would have moved back into the old one if she hadn't been afraid of her
friends' laughter. And, Grace, even inherited homesteads are sometimes
as difficult as uncongenial kin. Old houses have ways and wills of their
own.'
'Houses _are_ curious things,' said Grace. 'We take a morsel of
illimitable space and wall it in and roof it over. Suddenly it ceases to
be part of God's out-of-doors and becomes an entity with an atmosphere
of its own. We warm it with our fires, we animate it with our
affections, we furnish it with such things as seem good in our eyes. We
do this to get shelter for our bodies, but we acquire as well an
instrument for our spirits that reacts on us in its turn.'
'In other words,' returned Honoria, warming to her subject, 'as we live
our way into a house, adapting it to our need, the bricks and mortar,
the paint and plaster, cease to be inert matter and become alive.
Superficial sociologists have taunted woman with being "more anabolic or
plant-like" than man, but I count it her second glory. The plant is an
organism that "slowly turns lifeless into living matter," and this is
the thing that woman has done from the beginning with her shelter! In
our houses we achieve almost an organic extension of our very selves.
That is part of what I was trying to say. But, obviously, there should
exist some reasonable ratio between the self and its extensions. I take
it, the modern multitude of overgrown mansions, like the Kings' or the
Clays' or even Adelaide's smaller dwelling,--all these places whose
owners never find out why they are not at home in them,--are symptoms of
our modern disease of materialism. The essence of that disease is the
desire to grasp more matter than the spirit can fully animate. That the
infection can lay hold on Adelaide shows how all-pervading it is,
gripping the just as well as the unjust. When I saw her tired and
dissatisfied; when I felt the lack of charm and quality in the house,
and remembered how full of both her old house and garden had been, I
tried to think it out. It all works around to just this: you can't have
quality, you can't have charm in your material environment unless you
put them into it yourself. It is a plain question of your ability to
choose, arrange and vitalize things. And the latter requisite is by far
the most important of the three. For I have really seen, with these
eyes, poor, mean rooms where absolutely nothing was beautiful or
noteworthy, so charged with a gracious and comforting personality that
you forgot their shabbiness and said, "What a home-like place!" Please
note that that is the adjective we always use of places that draw us by
their personality--as if personality and nothing else were the essence
of home.
'Now Adelaide's old house had personality; it was completely vitalized.
It was all under her hand, and as high as her heart. But Adelaide's big
new house is as yet barren and chilly, for it is not vitalized at all.
Of course I know that after she has lived in it longer, it is bound to
improve, because it is her nature to humanize and modify all her
surroundings. But the crucial question is--_how big a house can she
humanize?_ Something bigger than a cottage probably--but certainly
something much smaller than a hotel. The longer I looked at this
question, the more it seemed to me that unconsciously I had put my
finger on the vital query that, in the ideal state, should underlie all
property, all education, all privilege.
'I have been talking about houses,--they are the most intimate, the
most organic of a woman's possessions,--but the argument applies to all
we own. It is the mark of our era to want more of everything than we can
use, yet when we get the Too-Much we demand, we are crushed by it, as
Tarpeia was crushed by the shields.'
'I have often thought' said Grace, 'that the sheer, brute mass of
life--of people to know, of books to read, of plays to hear, of pictures
to see, of things to do, buy, learn, enjoy--within reach of the
well-to-do person in the modern world, far outruns the capacity of any
human being to take it in and make of it the sane whole that a life
should be.'
'Yes--yet we go crazily on, trying to expand to illimitable
possibilities, thinking we shall be happier so soon as we have discarded
all our present belongings and opportunities for bigger, newer, richer
ones. How many people do you know who have not met a substantial
increase of income with a corresponding enlargement of their whole scale
of living, a senseless expansion sometimes out-running their increased
ability to provide for it? There is no future but chaos for a society
with such ambitions. They are centrifugal and can only lead to
disintegration.
'The truth is, we have no notion of the value and necessity of a
doctrine of limitations. Just as an illustration--not once in all the
mass of matter printed in the last twenty years about the gyro-car, the
aeroplane or other inventions capable of enormous swiftness, have I
seen the faintest intimation that human beings could not intelligently
direct a speed of two hundred miles an hour--yet the railroads are now
tardily discovering that the capacity of engineers is seriously taxed by
sixty miles!
'Don't mistake my meaning. I am not preaching the moral value of
poverty. I am no convert to asceticism. That method of ridding one's
self of the overweight of the material life is too extreme to the
correct solution. I am simply calling attention with all my might to the
æsthetic and vital value of Not-Too-Much. I am not afraid of Enough. I
am greatly afraid of Too-Much. And the reason I am afraid is this:--
'Just as the capacity of the human stomach is limited to a certain
quantity of food, so also is limited the capacity of the human spirit
for appropriating and assimilating property in its different forms.
Beyond a certain somewhat variable point, material possessions _do the
holder no more good_. The common saying, "All you get in this world is
your board and clothes," is the popular acknowledgment of this
restricted capacity. The affirmation of bounds to our capacity holds
good as regards the property of the mind--education, cultivation,
æsthetic satisfactions--just as it does of material goods. There is a
definite limit to what we can effectively make our own. Beyond that
limit, possession is a detriment.'
'The direct result of helping ourselves to too much of anything is to
coarsen and degrade. We can see this clearly as regards the primal
necessity of food. Nature promptly writes it, in large letters, all over
the man or woman of gross appetites.'
'It is as plainly printed, if in smaller type, on the faces of those who
want too much of other things,--houses, notoriety, money, power,--what
you will. The porcine brand is there, however disguised. Personally, I
fear the Mark of the Pig as I fear nothing else on earth. Shaler says
that certain lines of evolution terminate in such grotesque effects that
one almost believes the guiding thought behind the process was humorous.
I never see a stye with its squealing, shouldering inhabitants, without
thinking how tremendously satiric it is--a master-caricature of human
greed, not over-drawn! And I say, "Brother Pig, Heaven grant that I keep
my voracities better concealed than thou."'
Her companions regarded Honoria, in type thin, nervous, ardent, with a
keen and vivid face. The comparison was certainly not apparent--but the
heart knoweth its own gluttonies.
'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's
the next step in your argument, Honoria?'
'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it
burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with
intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point
beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise
and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is
the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the
Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable
classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of
limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in
our homes.
'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material
surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our
personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in
the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers
upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the
plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists,
but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically,
with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't
it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never
doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old
rugs, old china--all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives--that a
vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by
the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the
perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder
days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us.
Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is
it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for
those who come after me.'
Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long
expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material
possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her
household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says
little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living
things is one of her important natural functions.
'When I studied physics,' Honoria went on, 'I learned that science had
been compelled to posit ether, an all-pervading, absolutely elastic,
wave-bearing substance, to explain the commonest facts of our physical
experience. Later yet, I learned that the passage of thought-waves
through ether had found defenders among men of the exact sciences.
Naturally I said to myself, "Ah, the scientists are growing 'warm.'
Next, they will be demonstrating some of the things women have always
known. They will show how we send out vibrations that get caught and
entangled in our intimate belongings, never to be wholly freed again.
The thing will be worked out and demonstrated like a problem in
geometry. Doubtless they will be measuring everybody's wave-lengths and
teaching children in the Eighth Grade easy ways of charging their
belongings with their personality so unmistakably that stealing will
have to become a lost art." Well! They haven't done it yet. In fact,
they don't seem so near doing it as they once did. The mechanism of the
process by which I take a chair fresh from Grand Rapids and in the
course of years make it _my_ chair and no other woman's, is a secret
still, but I don't have to argue with anybody who ever had a favorite
chair that the thing is as I have stated it. Neither do I have to argue
that I could not so appropriate and make my own the output of an entire
factory. It must be equally obvious that the dignified, proper
environment for me and my family contains what we can thus make our own,
and not much more.'
'Of course there are people,' said Martha reflectively, 'the routine of
whose living demands large and formal apartments, impossible to do
anything with from your point of view.'
'Assuredly there are such people,' Honoria admitted, 'just as there are
people whose entertaining must be in the line of banquets rather than
little dinners. I am not predicating a world full of model cottages,
even though I think it might prove the happiest world. Still, outside of
official circles, the need of state drawing-rooms is certainly not
general, and it is of the very gist of my argument--my argument isn't
all developed yet, Martha, don't think it!--that for the sake of
developing a finer and more individual quality in our possessions, we
should cut off some superfluous ones. Please listen patiently while I
carry the idea to its logical limit, even though that limit lies beyond
the bounds of practicability.
'Economists profess that, in an ideal distribution of goods, each man
would have as much as he could consume without waste. But this takes no
account of the differing needs of men, developed through ages of the
upward struggle, nor of their different capabilities of turning goods to
account. If you are going to dabble at all in theories of ideal
distribution, why not have one that is genuinely ideal--that is,
non-material? _The true distribution would require that each man should
possess what goods he could animate and vitalize._ Even so, how vastly
would possessions differ in amount and quality!
'If life could be adjusted on this basis, it would automatically become
simplified, charged with beauty and with character. We should slough off
ugly and useless possessions, or, if we retained through affection
things ugly in themselves, that very affection would impart to them a
certain importance and distinction. We should then, at least, live in a
world in which everything had significance. Think of the infinite
satisfaction of that!'
'What do you mean when you say, "if life could be adjusted on this
basis," Honoria?' Grace inquired. 'Are you implying some kind of a final
socialistic state which calls for an omniscient Distributor of Goods who
shall know how much each man can vitalize?'
'Really, Grace, I am not a fool, even when I am evolving a reformed
society!' returned Honoria promptly. 'Most conceptions of an improved
state demand God for their Chief Executive and an enormous force of
government officials with the fine honor which, thus far, has only been
developed in human nature by conditions entirely different from those
the visionaries are forecasting. Unquestionably we have fallen into the
habit of thinking that if we only pass a law, any wrong at which we aim
is regulated. In fact, however, so long as that law only expresses the
practice of a minority, its enforcement will be evaded. Legislation
without character is as helpless as a motor without fuel,--and my little
reform, like every other effective change, must proceed from within
outward.
'So I believe that if I wish to live in a world where nobody has more
food, clothes, houses, wealth, power, than he can make significant and
vital use of, it is up to me to remake my own life on that basis first.
I am, if not the only woman whom I can reform, at least the most
suitable subject for my experimentation. And I admit that I have too
many possessions. Sometimes I am ridden to exhaustion by the care of my
"things," modest as they are when compared to the goods of my
neighbors. I know that if thousands of people did not feel as I do, the
"simple life" slogan would never have acquired the popularity it had
some years ago. We no longer hear much of the simple life, but we need
it increasingly. Personally, I am persuaded that the method I am trying
to set forth is workable.
'Why shouldn't a human being, seeking to get the most out of life, take
lessons from the husbandman seeking to get the richest returns from the
soil? It used to be thought that to cultivate many acres superficially
was the way to feed the world and enrich the farmer. But the study of
the soil as a science has taught us that we must resort, instead, to the
intensive farming which gives greater returns from reduced acreage. What
is true of the returns earth makes to our granaries, is true of the
returns life makes to our spirits. We need a science of intensive living
that we may get the larger crop from the smaller field. It will be
worked out by women, and it must begin in their domain, which still is,
in spite of the sociologists, the home.'
'The Norwegian maid who cared for my rooms at the hotel last winter had
figured out something of the sort for herself,' said Grace. 'After I had
put a few bits of things about, she said to me, "I like dis room. It
looks like Norway. Dere iss more moneys in America, but in Norway t'ings
iss more pretty. Even de kitchen iss good to see. Dere iss shelves an'
copper cooking-dishes all shiny, all so happy-looking. I like dem way
best. It iss better not so much moneys to haf, but to be more happy wit'
one's t'ings!"'
'That is the doctrine in a nutshell! In its poorer, more restricted
days, the world learned that secret of the art of living, and it still
lingers in corners that our blatant, crashing "civilization" passes
by--so that a Norwegian peasant's daughter may know far more than an
American girl "who has always had everything" about the priceless secret
of being "happy wit' one's t'ings." It is the richest knowledge a woman
can possess.'
'What is the real rock-bottom reason why people go on piling up money
after they have enough?' Martha demanded.
'I imagine,' said Honoria, 'that excessive accumulation is a form of
egotism. Now, if public opinion, the race-ideal, or what you please,
once demanded that we vitalize all our possessions; if it were once
admitted to be unspeakably gross to demand more property than we can
animate, as gross as it now is to over-eat, then the stress upon
possession would be transferred at once from "How much" to "How," and
large possessions would really become what some of the undistinguished
rich now fondly imagine them to be--a direct and sensitive register of
the finer qualities.'
Martha suddenly and irresistibly chuckled.
'I have a story for you, Honoria,' she said. 'A lot of ranchers over
there,' she vaguely gestured toward the southwest across the hills,
'have grown suddenly rich, raising sugar beets, and have bought
motor-cars and other paraphernalia proper to their improved condition.
One of them was heard to say, "I b'lieve these college graduates that
teach school 'round here really think they're as good as us rich folks."
That is the real attitude of your "undistinguished rich" toward the
gifts of culture and the finer qualities!'
'Honoria,' said Grace, 'haven't the sages always said, "Give me neither
poverty nor riches"? Why should your propaganda succeed where Job and
Socrates have failed? Job lived a long while ago! If the race were going
to be converted to his view, the process ought to be more advanced. You
will need very strong arguments for your doctrine of limitations.'
'Arguments are to be had for the picking up,' returned Honoria. 'What
kind will you have? Reasonable limitation on the material side always
brings some amazing flowering of mind or spirit like the blossoming of a
root-bound plant. If you want a racial argument, consider the Irish--the
poorest people in Europe and _therefore_ the richest in spirit. Poverty
forced them to concentrate their attention upon their neighbors; there
resulted an astonishing increase in sympathy, wit, and general
humanness.--If you want an argument from Art, consider the Middle Ages.
Peering out of a narrow world, hemmed in by ignorance and squalor, the
mediæval artist caught sight of beauty and immediately loved it with
such fervent, personal passion that everything he made in its image was
vital and wonderful. As his world broadened in the Renaissance, much of
his art grew florid and meaningless, lacking that marvelous, intimate
quality of the earlier, restricted day.--If you want an argument from
literary material, there's the _Picciola_ of Saintine. You can make an
imperishable literary masterpiece out of a convict's love for a tiny
plant struggling up between two stones in a prison-yard, but you cannot
make men listen to tales of great possessions. The interest in Monte
Cristo centres upon the process of _acquirement_, and it is the same in
any successful money-romance. Midas is only fit to point a moral, never
to adorn a tale.--If you want an argument from philology, consider that
the diminutives in every language show the lesser thing to be the dearer
thing, always. Remember Marie Antoinette and the Little Trianon!
Consider the increasing specialization in science--science which always
falls on its feet! I know a thousand arguments! The thing I am in need
of is converts!'
'If you could get them,' said Martha, 'there might really be a Woman's
Reformation, only it would begin at home instead of at the polls.'
'What other permanent thing is there in life but the hearthstone?
Nations rise and fall, laws and institutions come and go--but that
remains, the one fixed point in human society. I take it, therefore, it
is the one point from which the lever can successfully be brought to
bear on human society. If anything is to be moved or altered, the force
must be applied there.'
'But human society _has_ changed, Honoria,' urged Grace. 'Look at all
our new powers and possessions! Steam and electricity have remade the
world, and we are not yet adjusted to the alteration. No generation ever
lived under our conditions; thus we have no traditions for handling our
new environment. No heritage of ancestral wisdom tells us what of the
hundreds of new opportunities to accept, what to reject. Save in so far
as we are thinking beings--and that is not very far--we are as much at
the mercy of our desires as babies in a toy-shop, grabbing now this and
now that, heaping up a lapful of futilities and calling it a life.'
'Yes. But why should we make steam and electricity serve our greed only?
Why use them chiefly to darken the world and make life a horror? Dare
you affirm that we women and our demands are not at the very centre of
the tragic tangle of modern living? Isn't all this horrible speeding-up
of business largely an outgrowth of our exactions? What do men do
business for, anyhow, except to get us what we want! Homes are to other
material possessions what souls are to the bodies--the centre from which
the life moves outward. If there is no greed in the home, is there not
bound to be less greed in the offices?'
'I'm not so sure, Honoria,' Grace returned. 'No amount of intensiveness
in the home would eliminate man's love of power for its own sake.'
'Perhaps. Yet isn't the lust for power a secondary development? We begin
by being greedy because we want things; we keep on after we have more
things than we know what to do with, because greed has created the
power-lust. It is the aftermath from that ugly root. If the pressure the
home puts on the man for money were suddenly slackened all along the
line, above the point of poverty, might not the matter of unseemly
accumulations correct itself? If we women of the more favored classes
avowedly undertook to give quality to our belongings, instead of
demanding belongings which we hope will confer quality upon us, there
would surely be both a lessening in the stress of life and an
improvement in its texture. I can think of nothing else but the Golden
Rule that would help to solve so many menacing problems, such as the
high cost of living, the commercialization of life, and the divorce
problem. Oh, it would be very far-reaching, that attitude, if we could
only achieve it!'
'Why wouldn't plain Christianity do all your reforming, and do it
better?' demanded Martha abruptly.
'Assuredly it would--if Christianity were more generally a condition
instead of a theory among us. I wouldn't undertake to say off-hand why
the sanctions of common sense seem more precious to the present
generation than the sanctions of religion, when in so many points they
are identical, but I must conform my theorizings to the fact. Yet with
all our neglect of religion the traditions of the spirit have not
changed! They are the same from everlasting to everlasting. And one of
the things the nineteenth century most wonderfully made clear was that
the evolution of the spirit is the thing Nature has been seeking for
hundreds of millions of years. I don't suppose that age-long process
with the tremendous impetus of all creation behind it is really going to
be upset by the turmoil of one materialistic generation. But I do
believe that if we go with the current of materialism, we and all our
works shall be tossed aside as refuse, thrown into Nature's garbage-can.
I tell you, I can't bear the disgrace of it.'
'Honoria, you almost persuade me to be intensive,' said Grace, 'but I am
not reconciled to the doctrine at one point--the question of beauty. I
admit that one cannot vitalize a lot of senseless luxury. I admit, too,
that comfort and a certain amount of beauty can always be successfully
domesticated and charged with personality, as you phrase it, and that
the result is completely satisfying. But is one never to indulge one's
self in _all the beauty money will buy_, never to have everything of an
absolute perfection? You are against great houses, but there is Mountly
House, at home. It is big, but so beautiful that you are at home in it
all over. What of it, and others like it?'
'Big and beautiful it is, but it is on my side of the argument, none the
less. If you remember, the architect was also the decorator. It is the
triumph of his imagination. He designed it as a background for a woman
of opulent beauty and domestic tastes. He ransacked Europe for the
furnishings, tapestries, all sorts of exquisite, ancient things. He was
a great artist and he created a work of art. The family fit into the
picture more or less awkwardly. It is his house, not theirs at all. And
I truly believe that the ultimate purpose of our houses excludes our
going up and down another's stairs.
'Yet I believe in all the beauty one can vitalize. It is essentially
wholesome. It does not lend itself to morbid demands. The collector's
passion looks like greed, and doubtless for a time it is greed. But,
sooner or later, Too-Much sickens them. Their adorable possessions teach
them there is profanation in having more wonderful things than they can
enter into personal relation with. Therefore the inevitable end of all
overgrown collections is the museum or the auction-room. I have seen it
too often not to know it is true!--If you want a perfect illustration of
this in literature read Mrs. Wharton's _The Daunt Diana_. It cuts down
like a knife to the essential fact that our relations with beauty must
be limited enough to have the personal quality. And--don't you
see?--this automatic destruction of greed that beauty finally teaches to
the collector, is the same automatic destruction of it that I dare think
intensive living in our homes might bring to all greed. It is a proof of
the theory on another plane.'
'I think one might own a Mountly House without greed,' persisted Grace
wistfully. 'Having no house at all, I naturally refuse to think of
myself as ending my days in any less perfect domicile. What do you mean
by the "ultimate purpose" of our houses?'
'Ah! that,' said Honoria, with a quick indrawing of her breath, 'is the
very core of all my thought, and I don't know how to make you see it!'
She rose abruptly and walked to the end of the veranda. She stood there
a while, looking across at the spreading gables of her own brown
bungalow, with the yearning on her face that only house-mothers know.
Yonder was her home. Set on a mighty shoulder of the earth, facing the
sunset and the sea, it clung to the soil as the brown rocks cling.
Behind it were the mighty Sierras with their crests of snow; before it,
the sweetest land God ever smiled upon; within it, all the treasures of
her eyes, her mind, her heart. Just as it stood there in the February
sun, it was an abode compact of love, of aspiration, of desire. The
ancient love of man for his shelter had gone into it, and the love of
woman for the place of her appointed suffering. Desire for beauty and
hope of peace were in its making. Its walls had heard the birth-cries;
her children had played about its doors; out from it had been borne her
dead. Inconsiderable speck on the vast hill-shoulder that it was, it
could defy time and the elements, even as she defied them, for she had
given it of her own immortality.
'I have not yet said it all,' she said a little thickly. 'It is hard to
say, even to you. I have found an attitude of mind, a path, a way of
life I call intensive, for lack of a better name, and I believe in it,
not only because it increases my sane satisfaction in living, but also
because it finally leads _out_--out of all this tangle of our material
lives, into the eternal spaces.
'I see the world of men's business activities chiefly as a place of
wrath and greed, and yet even the most grasping must be blindly seeking
through their greed an ultimate satisfaction--not more houses or more
automobiles, or railroads, or mines, or even power, but something dimly
apprehended as beyond all these and more than they--something that is
good and that _endures_. For we all want the Enduring Thing. One man
sees it here, another there. As for me, I see it in my house. I tell
you, the Greeks and Romans did not make a religion of the hearthstone;
they merely recognized the religion that the hearthstone _is_. Under
that quiet roof I have learned that it is a woman's business to take
stones and make them bread. Only she can make our surroundings live and
nourish us.
'Beyond the need for bread, a woman's needs are two; deeper than all
cravings save the mother's passion, firm-rooted in our endless past, is
the heart-hunger. The trees that sweep my chimney have their roots at
the world's core! The flowers in my dooryard have grown there for a
thousand years! What millenniums have done, shall decades undo? We are
not so shallow, so plastic as that! We will go into the mills, the
shops, the offices, if we must, but we know we are off the track of
life. Neither our desire nor our power is there.
'I have talked glibly enough about restricting superfluous possessions
for the sake of developing a finer quality in those we have; I have said
only personality gives that quality to our surroundings--but I have not
said the final thing. It is this: I believe that in the humble business
of loving the material things that are given to us to own and love, in
shaping our homes around them, in making them vital and therefore
beautiful, so that they serve our spirits in their turn, we are not only
making the most of our resources in this life, but are doing more than
that. Somehow, I cannot tell you how, I know that we are _getting them
across_--into the timeless places! In making them vital we are making
them enduring.
'Christ tells us to lay up for ourselves treasures in heaven. What did
that mean to you when you were young? I thought it meant a procession of
self-denials and charities, more or less lifeless because the offering
was made slightly against the grain! I had no idea that when I loved
somebody very much or pitied somebody very much, when I shared my heart
or shared my roof eagerly, that I was doing the commanded thing. Still
less did I realize, when I worked hard to make my home more comfortable
or more beautiful, that I was sending vibrations from my everyday world
right into the eternal one--every deed an actual hammer stroke on my
house not made with hands. But so sure as that our mortal shall put on
immortality, I now hold it that what we first find in the eternal world
will be the things into which we have unstintingly flung our vitality,
our _feeling_, while we are briefly here.
'_Here we have no continuing city_. But when I am making my house live,
I and no other, putting into it as I best may something of the serenity
of Athens and the sacredness of Jerusalem and the beauty of Siena, then
it is taking its place beside my greater loves. Then I am creating a
home, not only in this world, but in the next. I have put something over
into the eternal world that fire cannot burn, nor floods destroy, nor
moth and rust corrupt. It is safe, even from myself, forever! No Heaven
can be holy to me if I have not made this spot holy. I shall not ask,
even from the mercy of the Merciful, a heavenly mansion if I have failed
to make this earthly dwelling live. Eternity begins beside my hearth,
shaped by my will. A woman knows!'
Reminiscence with Postscript
By Owen Wister
I
Not alone because of their good meat and drink are three meals shrined
at the heart of these following impressions. Singly, each one did
delightfully engage the palate, but the three together speak appealingly
to sentiment. It is of a great house, a little inn, and of the fair
region round about them that I shall mainly discourse--and whether I do
or don't give a final _x_ to the name of the house, there are people and
documents to say I have spelt it wrong: which comes very near to saying
that both ways are right. The _x_ shall remain, the majority seems to
favor it, and I at once beg that you share my relish of these posturing
Renaissance lines, written by royal command in honor of Chenonceaux:--
Au saint bal des dryades,
A Phoebus, ce grand dieu,
Aux humides nayades
J'ai consacré ce lieu.
This highly plaster-cast lyric was recited during the 'triomphe' held at
Chenonceaux to celebrate the arrival there of François II and Mary
Stuart. The hostess was as distinguished as her visitors; and never,
before I went to Chenonceaux, did I associate naiads and dryads and
poems of welcome with Catherine de'Medici. But we must allow this
monstrous personage an eye for good houses. She preferred Chenonceaux to
all her dwellings--she preferred it so much, indeed, that she made
another lady get out of it, exchanging for it the decidedly inferior
residence of Chaumont. And we have Catherine to thank (I fear) for the
strangely felicitous fancy that placed upon the arches built from the
rear of the house to the farther side of the river by her rejected
predecessor, Diane de Poitiers, that enchanting hall or gallery, which
rises three stories high, if you count the nine windows in the steeply
and gracefully pitched slate roof.
Basti si magnifiquement
Il est debout, comme un géant,
Dedans le lit de la rivière,
C'est-a-dire dessus un pont
Qui porte cent toises de long.
These verses bump down heavily upon the bridge, and, despite their
scrupulous statistics as to its length, they scarcely measure the
excellence of Chenonceaux, but rather the gap between French verse and
French architecture in the sixteenth century. Villon could have come
nearer the mark; but Villon was long gone before the ancient mill on the
river Cher was transfigured by its purchaser into the château he did not
live to complete. 'S'il vient à point' said Thomas Bohier, and he graved
it in many ornamental places of his edifice, 'me souviendra.'
And here am I writing his name and thinking about him, three hundred and
ninety-two years after his death. What a pleasant reason for being
remembered! What a quietly illustrious introduction to posterity: the
originator of the mansion whose sheer beauty brought a succession of
kings and queens and other great people to sojourn in it, whose walls
have listened to the blandishments of François I, the sallies of
Fontenelle and Voltaire, the sentimentalities of Rousseau. Do their
ghosts walk here upon these terraces? Do they meet in the long gallery
over the Cher? If they don't, they are less wise in the next world than
they were in this. Almost might one envy some figure in a well-preserved
piece of tapestry, hanging in any hall or chamber here and commanding a
view out of any window that looked up or down the placid river.
Embroidered thus for ever, amid high company, ladies and gentlemen of
importance with hawks and feathers and armor and steeds richly
caparisoned, ministered to by esquires and serfs, one would exist
admired, valued, and carefully dusted. Daily sight-seers from all lands
would be conducted into one's presence (Sundays included, 10-11 A.M.,
2-6 P.M.), thus animating one's feudal leisure with sufficient variety.
There one would be, an acknowledged masterpiece, for ever aloof from the
unstable present, nevermore driven to enlist against the restless evils
of the world. The trouble is, somebody from Pittsburg might buy one. Now
I could no more brook living as tapestry in America than I could live as
an American in Europe, expatriated and trivially evaporating amid
beauties and comforts that were none of my native heritage.
Do you know the country where Chenonceaux stands? Do you know the river?
Have you ever gone there from Tours, or come there the opposite way,
from Bourges through Vierzon and Montrichard?
The region shares a secret with certain rare people, whom all of us are
glad to count among our acquaintance. Certain men and women, immediately
on our first meeting them, make us desire to meet them again; not
because they have uttered remarkable thoughts or reminded us of Venus or
Apollo: perhaps they have said nothing that you and I couldn't say, and
we may know people much better looking. But they radiate--what is it
that they radiate? We feel it, we bask in it, it flows over us. It isn't
sunlight or moonlight, but a fairy-light of their own. When these
shining creatures come into the room, happiness enters with them. How do
they do it? It gets us nowhere to say that there is 'something' in the
tone of their voice, or 'something' in the look of their eyes: what is
the something? I'm glad I don't know; mystery is growing so scarce, that
I am thankful for anything which cannot be explained.
Now this rare quality (and don't flatter yourself that you understand it
because you happen to know its name) is possessed not only by men and
women, but also by places; and, no more than with people, has it
anything to do with their being remarkable or beautiful. The White
Mountains in New Hampshire haven't a trace of it; it fills the mountains
of North Carolina; there is almost none along our Atlantic seaboard, but
it hangs over and haunts nearly every foot of our Pacific Coast.
Whenever one of these happy spots has been long known to man, man has
invariably cherished it in word and deed. His chronicles celebrate it;
he sets it lovingly like a jewel in his romances, dramas, verse, prose,
song; he graces it with his best in architecture; his roads and gardens
bring it alike into his hours of work and of ease; in fine, he garlands
it with his imagination, weaves it into his life century after century,
until it comes to smile upon him from the heart of his History and
Literature, as well as upon his daily present. That is what mankind has
done beneath the spell of a place which has charm.
Thus Touraine to the Frenchman,--_beau pays de Touraine_, as the page in
Meyerbeer's _Huguenots_ sings of it in that opera's second act, which
takes place at Chenonceaux. I suppose--indeed I remember--that rain
falls in that country; yet, when I think about it, sunshine invariably
sparkles through the picture--not the kind that glares and burns, but
the kind that plays gently among leaves and shores and shadows; sunshine
upon the twinkling, feathered silver of the poplars, the grapes in
sloping vineyards, the green islands and tawny bluffs of the Loire, the
quiet waters of the Indre and the Cher; a jocund harmony seems to play
about the very names,--Beaulieu, Montrésor, Saint-Symphorien,--but were
I to begin upon the music in the names of France, I should run far
beyond the limits of Touraine and of your patience. Say to yourself
aloud, properly, Amboise, Châteaurenault, La Chapelle-Blanche,
Saint-Martin-le-Beau, and then say Naugatuck, Saugatuck, Pawtucket,
Woonsocket, Manayunk, Manunkachunk, and you will catch my drift.
Stevenson's joy in our names was at bottom purely that of the collector.
But have you ever seen the Loire and its tributary realm? I have already
owned myself (together with all other men) as unable to explain the
mystery of charm. No Niagara is hereabouts, nor Matterhorn, nor anything
you could call sublime; nothing so lustrously beautiful as Bar Harbor,
or the Berkshire Hills. Wildness is wholly absent, but so is tameness
too. It is somehow through its very moderation that the glamour of this
land is wrought. But we must nicely distinguish between the poetry and
the prose of moderation: Princeton Junction, New Jersey, is perfectly
moderate, and is also the type and pattern of hundreds of thousands of
square, comfortable, unoffending miles in the United States which you
would never wish to see again--indeed which you would never wish to see
once; whereas, even as I write, I am homesick for Touraine, though it
isn't my home.
Once again I must draw the parallel between human qualities and the ways
of our mother earth. We place at the top of our esteem those people who
take chivalrously the heavy blows of life, who are not brave merely, but
gallant. We draw scant inspiration from the sight of somebody who is all
too obviously and dutifully bearing something; who goes, day after day,
with a set and sombre expression that says as plainly as words: 'Just
watch me carrying my Cross. Just wait till you have one.' We prefer
those whose gayety so conceals the fact that they're behaving well, that
we should never suspect it, did we not know what they have passed, and
are passing, through. Thus also does Touraine conceal the tears and the
blood she has known. Louis the Eleventh, Catherine de' Medici, the
gibbet balcony of the Salle des Armes at Amboise, the iron cage and the
black dungeons of Loches,--Touraine, with her smiling, high-bred
elegance, keeps all this to herself, and gives you a bright welcome.
Often as she has been the scene of Tragedy, often as the glaive and not
the lute has been the instrument of her drama, she might well look in
her glass and exclaim with Richard the Second,--
Hath sorrow struck
So many blows upon this face of mine,
And made no deeper wounds?
Wearing no crape, betraying no scars, hinting naught of its dark
experience of life, this realm, this _beau pays_, more than any in
Europe, to my thinking, lies in the true key of high comedy, of masque
and pastoral. If, here and there above its trees or upon its hills, the
brooding frown of some tower, the gaunt stare of some donjon in ruins,
fierce with memories, brings one up short, so that in joy's mid-current
some smack of the bitter wells up--this is not Nature's doing. Look away
from these works of man to the feathered poplars, the vineyards, the
gentle waters, and see the earth's countenance, smiling and serene.
Decorous it is always; only the irregularities of the Loire and its
channel seem to bear any reference to the conduct of those beautiful
historic ladies who dispersed their reputations in the vicinity. Even
man did not always build a Langeais or a Loches. Urbane and gracious
amid their parks or on their bluffs rise those dwellings planned when
France's architectural genius was in its happiest mood--though not its
loftiest. They look like the good society which once assembled in them;
their mere aspect suggests the wits, the brilliant talkers and listeners
of a day when conversation was a living art still, the day which
furnishes us even now with those letters and memoirs which are the
dainty wainscotting and mantelpieces, the interior decorations of
Literature. You may wander almost anywhere among the poplars and the
chestnuts in the valleys of the Loire's quiet tributaries; you can
hardly go wrong; if the turrets of Ussé against their rising woodland do
not regale your eye, it will be Azay-le-Rideau, or something less
famous, or, best of all, Chenonceaux, to which I now return.
II
I saw it first upon an afternoon when no air was stirring, even in the
poplars, when the green of Touraine was changing to gold: golden fruit,
pears, and apples, where summer's fruit had been; golden leaves
flickering down from high branches, or raked into golden heaps; while
the faint, sweet smoke of burning twigs hovered in the autumn day. It
was the moment and scene of the year when, just because other things
have ceased to grow, memories blossom in the mind; and on every golden
heap of leaves retrospect seemed to be sitting. We visitors were three.
I can recall the first sight of the château's yellow façade, framed by
the distant end of the high, formal avenue into which we turned to
approach it. All sorts of feet had stepped where we were walking:
almost four centuries of distinguished feet had gone in and out of that
beautiful front door; but over its appealing associations the still more
appealing aspect of the wonderful house triumphed. If I knew about _Le
Devin du Village_ then, the scene of its first performance interested me
much more because that long and many-windowed gallery was built right
over the water, right across the Cher, upon arches that the glassy
surface of the stream reflected symmetrically. I was captured then and
for ever by the beauty and the originality of this residence. Our best
country houses take earth and air into partnership, but this abode of
grace possessed, embraced, a little river. To go in at your front door
on one green margin and come out of your back door on the other; to
dwell in a masterpiece that was house and bridge in one--I can still
recover my first sensations of delight at this triumph of French art.
Only--the concierge didn't let us go out of the back door; and my
disappointment was cherished through long years, until its sequel, which
I shall presently reach. This first afternoon became a chapter in the
most delightful of guide-books, from which I quote the following:--
'We took our way back to the Grand Monarque, and waited in the little
inn parlor for a late train to Tours. We were not impatient, for we had
an excellent dinner to occupy us; and even after we had dined we were
still content to sit a while and exchange remarks upon the superior
civilization of France. Where else, at a village inn, should we have
fared so well?... At the little inn at Chenonceaux the _cuisine_ was not
only excellent, but the service was graceful. We were waited on by
mademoiselle and her mamma; it was so that mademoiselle alluded to the
elder lady, as she uncorked for us a bottle of Vouvray mousseux.'
On another page of this same guide-book you may read how, at the Hôtel
de l'Univers in Tours, the château of Amboise was described to us by an
English lady of a type that I sadly miss to-day. One met her everywhere
then. She was a more fragile sister of that robust, brick-complexioned
spinster who used to climb all the Alps in practical but awful garments.
She didn't often venture to speak to you for fear you weren't
respectable, or might think she wasn't. When she did, it was apt to be
with explosive shyness, running all her words together, as she did about
Amboise. 'It's-very-very-dirty-and-very-keeawrious!' Curious and furious
she always pronounced to rhyme with glorious and victorious; and it
invariably made me think of 'God Save the Queen.'
In my interest as to whether we should again have the excellent fare and
graceful service which I so well remembered at the little inn, and
whether now at last my long-cherished wish to step out of that back door
on the river's farther side were to be gratified, Chenonceaux itself had
so dropped out of my thoughts that it fairly burst upon my sight.
Bursting is, of course, a thing which that delicate and restrained
edifice could never really do, only I wasn't thinking about it as our
party (we were four on this second visit, and it was spring-time) came
into the avenue. There at the other end stood the fair, gay vision of
the château, and its beauty and wonder so suddenly waked my admiration,
that I exclaimed, 'How young it looks!'
Yes; it didn't look new, but it looked young: youth is the particular
and essential note of this enchanted building. None of its neighbors
have it, not even Azay-le-Rideau or Blois, which are its rivals, though
never its equals. Chenonceaux was four hundred years old in January,
1915. Age makes one type of person decrepit, and so it is with houses.
But Chenonceaux, if ever it come to show its years, will belong to the
other type: it will look venerable. Did it, do you think, catch its
secret from the ring of Charlemagne, by whose sorceries its mistress,
Diane de Poitiers, was accused of preserving her youth? This lady's
success with François Premier so disconcerted the amiability of the
Duchesse d'Etampes, that she constantly reminded Diane she was born on
the day Diane was married.--But I resist the temptation to dwell upon
Diane and everybody else linked to Chenonceaux by history; it's all
accessible to you in books; and I proceed with the visit our party of
four made, this spring day.
Touraine was now all delicate in green; as lovely, as gracious, as
discreet in its budding leaves as when the leaves had flickered down,
spangling the air and grass and garden-walks with their gold. We had met
at the little inn the same welcome, the same excellent _cuisine_, the
same agreeable Vouvray mousseux. Mademoiselle was not there, but mamma
was. Her premises and herself showed no ill effect from the prosperity
brought to her through the guide-book I have already quoted. No
guide-book in its author's plan, it was now become established as one,
and he, petitioned in a letter from mamma, had corrected a certain
error. In the first edition, page 60, you may read that we took our way
back to the Grand Monarque; in later editions it is the Hôtel du
Bon-Laboureur. The confusion to travelers, the injury to her custom,
ensuing from the wrong name, madame had represented to the author; and
now all was well. The inn wasn't any larger, but more and more each
season were pilgrims with expectant appetites led to her door.
'Tenez, monsieur,' she said to me eagerly, when I narrated to her how I
had been present at the germination of her renown, 'tenez. Voilà!' She
showed me the precious guide-book. She treasured it, though she couldn't
read it, because it was in English. And I came in for her smiles and
cordiality, which really belonged to the author.
You will have perceived, our party this time took their _déjeuner_, not
their dinner, at the Bon-Laboureur. The good omelette and cheese and
fruit and wine, mamma's prosperity and her well-preserved state,--for
now she was really an elderly woman,--all this had brought us in
peaceful and pleased spirits to the château. When we had seen the rooms
downstairs and the concierge was conducting the other sightseers--some
ten or twelve--to the second story, our party under my guidance stole
away to the back door.
'Back door' implies no dishonorable passage through pantry and kitchen;
we simply didn't go up the staircase in the wake of the concierge, but
independently along the hall instead, and thus across the Cher through
Catherine's celebrated gallery. _Le Devin du Village_ came into my mind,
and I wondered which figure was the more diverting, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau composing opera, or Richard Wagner dabbling in philosophy.
The door was open. I emerged, the happy leader of my party, upon stone
steps, crossed a little draw-bridge, and our triumphant feet trod the
grass beneath the trees which shaded the river's bank. I had my wish;
and as my obedient band followed me, I fear my complacent back and
Anabasis manner expressed some sentiment like this: 'Only observe how it
pays to see France with a person who knows the ropes!' We sauntered, we
expatiated, we paused before what I'll call by metonymy the tocsin--a
great bell and chain suspended from strong framework; from this point
the château, with its fine, detached, cylindrical donjon tower of the
fifteenth century, looked, in the afternoon light, particularly well:
those poor sheep with the concierge weren't getting this view. We must
have lingered by the tocsin a quarter of an hour, enjoying ourselves,
before returning to the back door.
It was shut. It was locked. Rattling made no impression upon it, nor
shaking, nor kicking. We knocked then, fancying this to be an accident.
Next we called, or rather, I, the party's personal conductor and
competent guide, began to call. Nothing happened. I augmented my
efforts. Catherine's gallery, famous scene of the first performance of
Rousseau's _Devin du Village_, responded with cavernous echoes. Between
these reigned silence, and a gentle breeze rustled the young leaves of
the chestnuts. We abandoned the door and went a few steps down the river
to where our gesticulations could be seen from the windows of
Chenonceaux. We made these gesticulations with our four umbrellas,
whilst I shouted continually. Not a window blinked. It might have been a
sorcerer's palace, and we his four new victims, presently to be roasted,
boiled, or changed into cats. We looked down the river--no escape; up
the river half-a-mile was a bridge; but what impediment mightn't lie
between? And even if the way were clear, to go round by the bridge would
lose us our train to Tours. One of us, in her deep voice, said that she
hoped the robin-red-breasts would find her body and cover it with
leaves. Again we flourished our four umbrellas, during vociferations
from me, at the imperturbable château. Then, quite suddenly, something
did happen. Out of a window in the donjon tower of the fifteenth century
was thrust a head, and from across the river it wagged at us
malevolently.
It was the concierge. The shock of discovering he had locked us out
purposely in punishment of our independent excursion, threw me into
extreme rage. My Anabasis manner had already dropped from me; but
Xenophon got his party successfully back, and this same task was now
searchingly, compellingly, 'up to me.' More malevolent wagging from the
tower was all that resulted from my next demonstrations. In these I was
now alone; my party, at the apparition of the concierge, had become
abruptly quiet, thinking doubtless that loud calls and wavings would
diminish my dignity less than theirs, whose years and discretion were
more than mine. Therefore my companions brandished their umbrellas no
more, but stood upon the banks of the Cher decorously, in a reserved
attitude, patient yet stately, as if awaiting the tumbril; I, meanwhile,
hurled international threats across the river. These wrought no change.
In repose my French halts, but when roused it acquires both speed and
point; yet none of my idioms disturbed the concierge at his window. And
now I was visited by inspiration. I seized the chain and rang the
tocsin. It sounded as if Attila were coming at once. Somebody would have
come, undoubtedly,--the whole _arrondissement_ I should think,--but
after a few moments of that din, the head disappeared; in a few more the
door was unlocked, and my companions preceded me with restraint yet with
celerity across Catherine's gallery and out of Chenonceaux's front door
and away, down the avenue to the railway, whilst I delivered some final
idioms to the concierge. I am happy to record that these made him livid,
and in the presence of a highly attentive audience. But--we had in truth
small idea with whom we were dealing. Some time later we got final news
of him. He had committed a murder, been caught, tried, convicted,
sentenced, and executed.
You will remember the British lady at the Hôtel de l'Univers in Tours,
who, in her description of Amboise, pronounced curious to rhyme with
glorious. Her kind was still pervading the quieter hotels of the
continent (the Hôtel de l'Univers was still quiet) while her more
muscular sister was still climbing all the Alps in valiant weeds. This
time, another of the identical type sat next me at the table d'hôte, and
from the corner of my eye I perceived her to be making endless and
surreptitious dives with her head at my bottle of Vouvray mousseux.
Becoming sure that this was neither St. Vitus's dance nor kleptomania,
but a desire to learn the name of my wine, I made her a slight bow,
turning my bottle so that she could more easily read its label; at which
she squeaked skittishly, 'I-didn't-think-you'd-see-me!'
III
The mid-Victorian spinster was gone, the automobile was come, the much
expanded Hôtel de l'Univers was quiet no more and had abandoned the
table d'hôte for small tables when next I saw Chenonceaux. Eager as I
had been to return to it, still more did I desire to enjoy that
particular pleasure which one takes in introducing a scene one delights
in to a friend. We were, this time, as we had been the first time, a
party of three, and the day was July 4, 1914; but in the Cathedral of
Bourges that morning, and at Montrichard and along the Cher that
forenoon, firecrackers seemed remote. Later, the Hôtel de l'Univers had
illuminations and national melodies for the benefit of its American
patrons--these having now swelled to the lucrative proportions of
invasion.
But Chenonceaux hadn't changed, Chenonceaux looked just as young as
ever. Its bright, serene aspect showed no confusion at changing masters
so often. To my friends it more than fulfilled my promises for it, while
for me it was even fairer than my memory. The concierge, a woman this
time, told her band of sightseers enough, but much less than she knew.
She had acquired (one somehow divined and discerned) a certain scorn
for her sightseers. She had found (one saw) the affluent automobile to
be the chariot of well-informed stomachs, but seldom of intelligences
which had ever heard, or would ever care to hear, about Madame Dupin and
her many distinguished guests. They knew their Michelin, where to buy
_pétrol_ along the road, which roads to avoid; and the road they had
particularly avoided was the one conducting to civilization. Some of
them were present on this occasion with their goggles, their magenta
veils, and their brass voices. To these the concierge imparted what she
deemed them able to digest. She didn't mention the _Devin du
Village_--but I did! This brought an immediate _rapprochement_, as we
lingered with her behind the departing goggles. She knew and loved her
Chenonceaux; her scorn fell from her; but she told us nothing so
interesting as the fact that during the last twelvemonth _twenty
thousand_ visitors had given each their required franc to see the place.
The château, at this rate, will pay its way down the ages.
But what of the Bon-Laboureur? If the mid-Victorian spinster and the
table d'hôte hadn't survived the pace of the new century, what had the
automobile done to the innocent village inn? I hope you will be glad to
learn that it hadn't--as yet--done much. I have now reached the third of
those meals which I mentioned at the outset. The Bon-Laboureur seemed a
little larger,--people were lunching in two rooms instead of one, and
out behind, kitchenward, there was a hint of bustle and of chauffeurs,
and perhaps the personal note of welcome was fainter. But it wasn't
quite absent; and still the food was excellent, still the service was
courteous, a pleasant young woman waiting; and I felt that here was a
good, small tradition still somewhat holding out against the
beleaguering pressure of the wholesale. So I spoke to the pleasant young
woman and inquired if the old _patronne_ were still living.
'Mais si, monsieur!' I was, to my astonishment, answered. 'A deux pas
d'ici.'
The personal note of welcome warmed up on learning that I was an old
visitor here; the patronne would value a call from one who remembered
her good cooking; she was now very old; she had sold the business and
the good-will; she lived very quietly; would I not go to see her? And
her house was pointed out to me.
Along the street of the little white village I went, slowly, in the
midsummer warmth. The grape-leaves, trailing and basking on the walls,
the full-leaved trees, the light and laziness of earth and sky, conveyed
the same hush of repose that had exhaled from the golden autumn and the
delicate spring I remembered so well; in this July sunshine, also, the
pleasant land lay dreamy and unvexed. At a door standing slightly open,
I knocked. Though a pause followed, I felt I had been heard; then I was
bidden to enter, by a very old voice. Two rooms were accessible from the
tiny hall, but I entered the right one, and there by the window sat the
patronne. I had remembered her as moving alertly round her table, quiet
and vigorous, above average height. All of this was gone; and as her
dark, feeble eyes looked at me, I felt in them a certain apprehension,
and found myself unpremeditatedly saying,--
'Madame, I trust you will not think ill of an intruder when you learn
why it is that he has ventured to knock at your door. They assured me
you would like my visit. Here is my little story: One Sunday afternoon
in September, 1882, three travelers came to the Bon-Laboureur. I was one
of them; and never forgetting your excellent meal and service, I
returned at my first opportunity, in April, 1896. Meanwhile that good
meal of yours, and you its hostess, had been mentioned in a book by
another of those three guests; and you told me of the prosperity this
had brought you. Since that visit, thirty-two years ago, I have become a
writer of books too. Of me you will not have heard, but you cannot have
forgotten Mr. Henry James, whose praise brought so many guests to the
Bon-Laboureur.'
Her eyes, during my speech, had awakened, and now she stood up.
'My servant is absent,' she said, 'or you would not have had to come in
so. But my son lives close by in that large place. He will like very
much to see you. I will call him.'
She would have gone for him on her trembling feet, but this I begged she
would not do; I had but five minutes; friends were waiting for me.
'I am ninety years old,' she said. 'Ah, monsieur, il est bien triste de
vieillir. One has nothing any more.' She became suddenly moved, and
tears fell from her.
I need not recall the little talk we had then. Strangers though we were,
we did not speak as strangers; the memories that rose in each of us, so
separate, so different, flowed together in some way, united beneath our
spoken words, and made them sacred. But I may record that she got out
her old books to show me, her registry-books of the Bon-Laboureur,
little, old, modest volumes, where in many handwritings through many
years the names of her guests had been inscribed. They had come from
almost everywhere in the world. No longer strong enough, she had parted
with the business and the good-will; but from these tokens of her past
she could not part. She clung to the inanimate survivals of her good
days and her renown. And on a blank page of the last volume which she
placed before me, putting a pen in my hand, I wrote briefly for her of
my three pilgrimages to her _petit pays_. Of the international
distinction of her son she was touchingly and justly proud: famous
peonies have spread his name wide as their cultivator and producer. For
this, too, was the Bon-Laboureur in its way responsible.
Perhaps I may not see it again, or its grand neighbor, the château, that
secular shrine of a vivacious and select Past. But I shall need no
Michelin, or Baedeker, or Joanne, to guide my memories thither. They are
with me, every moment and breath of them, for my perpetual delight, a
safe possession, unweakened and undimmed; and to conjure them before me
it needs no more than the haunting syllables of Chenonceaux and the
quaint, cherished volumes of the patronne.
IN CHENONCEAUX
My noiseless thoughts, if changed to their just sound
Amid these courts of silence once so gay
With love and wit, that here full pleasure found
Where Kings put off their crownèd cares to play,
Would shake in laughter at some jest unheard;
Would sing like viols in a saraband;
Would whisper kisses--but express no word
That would not be too dim to understand.
Like to a child, who far from ocean's flood
Against his ear a shell doth fondly hold
To hear the murmur that is his own blood,
And half believes the fairy-tale he's told,
So I within this shell mistake my sea
Of musing for the tide of History.
The Other Side
By Margaret Sherwood
Like every other attentive reader of our periodical literature, I am
increasingly aware of our persistent exposure of sin and wrong-doing in
high places and in low; like many another attentive reader, I am growing
a bit rebellious against this constant demand and supply in the matter
of information regarding recent evil. Have we not grown over-alert in
the search for this special kind of news? We take vice with our
breakfast porridge; perjury with our after-dinner coffee; our essayists
vie with one another in seeing who can write up the most startling story
of crimes; and it is a bankrupt family nowadays that cannot produce one
member to expose civic or political corruption. Undoubtedly much genuine
ethical impulse lies back of all this; undoubtedly, too, much of the
picturesque and spectacular treatment springs from a desire to startle,
and ministers, in many a reader who would scorn paper-covered fiction,
to a love of the sensational. Surely it must seem to the people of other
countries that we take pride in the immensity of our sins, as we take
pride in Niagara, in the length of the Mississippi, in the extent of our
western plains.
Many may be, and must be, the good effects of throwing the searchlight
upon dark places, but the constant glare of the searchlight bids fair to
rob us of our normal vision of life. My poor mind has become a
storehouse of misdeeds not my own. I am sick with iniquity; I walk
abroad under the shadow of infamy, and I sup with horrors. I shrink from
meeting my friends,--not that they are not the best people in the world,
but I dread lest they pour into my ears some newly acquired knowledge of
wrong-doing. For me, as for others, the sun of noonday is clouded by
graft, bribery, treachery, and corruption; and I fear to close my eyes
in the dark because of the pictured crimes that crowd before them.
Suppose poor Christian had had to drag after him not only his own bag of
transgressions, but those of Mr. Worldly Wiseman, Mr. Facing-both-ways,
and all the denizens of Vanity Fair, what chance would he ever have had
of getting out of the Slough of Despond?
It is not that I wish to shirk; I am not afraid of facing anything that
I ought to know, and I have not the slightest doubt that we are all, in
great measure, responsible for our neighbors' sins. But I am not sure
that we are taking the wisest way to mend them. It seems to me
incontestable that, with the large issues of individual and of national
well-being in mind, we are over-doing the exposure, and slighting the
incentives to right action; emphasizing the negative at the expense of
the positive; and that, with our weakening convictions regarding the
things that are right, it is dangerous to go on loudly proclaiming the
things that are wrong. We are much in the position of a village
improvement society which has pulled down a bridge because it is
rotting, and is impotent to build another and a better. We have invested
our national all in wrecking machinery, and have nothing left for
constructive tools. It is said that in our explosive setting forth of
civic and national wrong-doing, we are all too prone to stop with the
explosion, as if mere knowledge of these things would set them right.
Mere knowledge never yet set anything right; only the ceaselessly
active, creative will can fashion a world of law out of chaos.
Of the criticism often made that exposure of wrong should be followed,
more closely than is done here, by constructive action, if anything is
to be really effected, it is not my task to speak. The aspect of the
matter which interests me especially concerns the youth of the land; it
is the educational aspect. Not through loud wailing over evil can a
nation be built, but through resolute dwelling with high ideals. In
certain ugly tendencies of recent years among the young, as, for
instance, the unabashed sensuality of much of the modern dancing, may we
not detect, perhaps, a cynical assumption that life is at basis
corrupt,--a natural result of continued harping on evil things, and of
failure to keep before them images of moral beauty? Our magazine writers
would be far better employed, if, instead of making our ears constantly
resound with reports of civic iniquities, they were, part of the time at
least, studying Plato's _Republic_, and filling mind and soul with the
hope of the perfect state. Wrong things we dare hope are of small and
fleeting consequence as compared with the right; it is not the sin of
Judas Iscariot, but the righteousness of his Master, that has brought
the human race a gleam of hope and possible redemption. When I was told,
not long ago, of a student in one of our great universities who had
elected 'Criminology 16,' I could not help reflecting that he might far
better have taken Idealistic Philosophy I.
Whether or not our study of evil should be lessened, our study of the
good needs to be vastly strengthened. We are losing the vision! 'Your
old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions,' said the
prophet, in promising wonders in the heavens and in the earth, after his
account of fasting, weeping, mourning, and beating the breast. There is
a time for beating the breast and for tearing the hair, and of this we
have had our day, but perpetual sitting upon the ash-heap and howling
will not raise the walls of state. Sitting there may, in time, even
become a luxury; can it be that we are doing so much of it partly
because it is easier, and because the heaven-sent task of building up
and shaping is too hard for us?
Take away from youth the power of seeing visions, of dreaming dreams,
and you take away the future. It would behoove us to remember, perhaps,
that the eras of great deeds have not been eras of analysis, but eras
when the creative imagination was at work. Yet our modern mental habit
is overwhelmingly a habit of analysis, for which science, in teaching us
to pick the world to bits, is partly, though not wholly, responsible. It
has brought us an immense amount of interesting information; it has
brought also a danger whose gravity we can hardly estimate, in the
constant lessening of the synthetic power. The power to image, to
fashion high ideals, and to create along the line of the imagining, is
weakening, instead of growing more strong. In the glorious days of Queen
Elizabeth, in the unparalleled days of Periclean Athens, great ideals
formed themselves before men's eyes and great achievements followed;
emotion, hope, vision, shaped human nature to great issues. I wonder
what influence those perfect marble representations of perfect form had
upon the very bodies of the youths and the maidens of Athens, what
creative force they exercised,--the imaginative grasp of the perfect
reaching forward toward perfectness in the human being. I wonder what
influence the character of Sir Philip Sidney alone, with 'high-erected
thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy,' has had upon succeeding
generations of English youth. 'A man to be greatly good,' said Shelley,
'must imagine intensely and comprehensively.'
Here my quarrel with our present intellectual trend and our present
system of education becomes more acute. We are not only losing the habit
of mind that fosters idealism, but we are more and more breaking with
the past. The door of that storehouse of noble thought and noble example
is being slowly but firmly closed, and there is little in modern
teaching that can meet the inroads made by the devastating knowledge of
evil of which we have been speaking; little that can build up where this
tears down. Study of Greek life, with its incomparable power of shaping
existence toward the beautiful, is all but cast aside; most
unfortunately now, when, with the rush of ignorant peoples to our
shores, it might have a far-reaching potency never attained before. The
ignorance of contemporary youth regarding that other and finer
loveliness of 'Gospel books' is amazing. More and more we are stripped
of the humanities; the incredulity of science in contemplating
philosophy, art, literature, as part of the educational curriculum, is
full of menace. There has never been, I think, in the history of the
civilized world, a time when people were so anxious to cast off the
past. In our eager Marathon race of material and physical progress we
want to go as lightly equipped as possible. The æroplane carries small
luggage; our light modern mind is ever ready to throw overboard even its
precious heritage, in its eagerness for swift flight. As earlier days
have reverenced the old, we reverence the new, and are all too
insistently contemporaneous.
We need, as we never needed before, a broader and deeper study of
history, of philosophy, of literature; for most of our young, a
knowledge of the mental and spiritual past of the race is of far greater
importance than a knowledge of the physical past, at the amoeba stage,
or any other. Science, much as it can do for us, can never meet our
deepest need; the world of imaginative beauty and the world of ethical
endeavor are apart from its domain. It has no spring to touch the will,
yet that which has, the magnificent inheritance of our literature, is
more and more neglected for the latest machinery that applied science
has devised, or the most recent treatise on insect, bird, or worm. It is
well to study insect, bird, and worm, for they are endlessly
interesting, but I maintain that neither the full sum of knowledge
concerning them, nor even the ultimate fact about the ultimate star, can
be a substitute for knowledge of the idealism of Thomas Carlyle, of the
categorical imperative of Kant,--for that study of the humanities which
means preserving, for the upbuilding of youth, that which was best and
finest in the past, as we go on toward the future.
If the swift retort should come, from those who think the present the
only era of attainment and the physical world the only source of wisdom,
that the past is full of villainies, of lapses from high standards, one
can but say that for ethical purposes our study should be frankly a
selective study, emphasizing the fine and high, subordinating the evil.
There is no hypocrisy in such selection; there is deliberate choice of
the higher upon which to dwell, as a formative power, quickening feeling
and imagination. I have heard it said that a woman, by resolute dwelling
on things noble and pure, may shape the inner nature of her unborn
child, and I have faith to believe it. Even so should the nation yet to
be be shaped by resolute dwelling on the good. It was not all cowardice,
as many a present writer thinks, that led the mothers of earlier days to
say little to their sons and daughters regarding evil things, and much
regarding right things. Doubtless greater frankness would have been
better, yet I doubt if our protracted dwelling on the evil will produce
better results.
Should any one object that this emphasis on the good means suppression
of the truth, we can but reply that, for the rational soul, the truth is
not necessarily the mechanically worked-out sum of all the facts. That
we have forgotten the distinction between fact--that which has indeed
come to pass, but which may be momentary--and truth, which endures, is
one of the many signs of what William Sharp calls the 'spiritual
degradation' of our time. Much of our modern thinking and teaching, much
of our realistic fiction, rests upon a failure to make the distinction;
much that is indisputable in individual instances of wrong-doing may be,
thank God! false in the long run.
'That is not true, scientifically true,' we hear often in regard to some
fine hope or aspiration of the race; but in the real import of the term
there is no such thing as scientific truth. It is a pity that a word of
such profound and distinctive meaning should come to be more and more
exclusively identified with the observation of physical phenomena, and
the formulation of physical laws, whereas the very root-meaning of the
word true, from Anglo-Saxon _treowe_, signifying faithful, gives
justification for the idealist's belief that vital truth is partly a
matter of the will, not of mere perception and of intellectual
deductions drawn therefrom. We have need of deeper truth than that of
mere fact; and the truth that shall set us free is a truth of choice, of
selection; it embraces that part of human thought and human experience
which is worth keeping.
Faithfulness to the best and finest in the past and in the present,
rather than horrified gaping at the present's worst, is the attitude
that means continued and bettered life, for we become what we will. What
are we offering, in the way of concrete examples, or of finely expressed
thought about virtue, to the young, to the ignorant nations who are
pouring in upon us, that will help them form their vision of the
perfect? With our narrowing knowledge of the greater past, our choice of
heroes becomes more and more local and national, yet our hierarchy of
sacred dead is too small to afford that variety of heroic action and
heroic choice that should always be kept before the minds of youth. We
teach them that George Washington never told a lie; we teach them
something--and there could be nothing better--of Lincoln; but those two
figures are lonely upon Olympus, and the great tragic story of the way
in which Lincoln faced the greatest crisis in our history will not alone
suffice to help the everyday citizen shape his thought and action toward
constructive idealism. The lesser heroes of our young republic have
acquitted themselves nobly in this struggle and in that, but the
struggles have been too closely akin in nature to give the embryo hero
that breadth and depth of nurture that he requires. We need an enlarged
vision of history, and the sight of great men of all ages faithful to
small tasks as to great; we need the companionship of heroes of other
times and of other nations, and not of military heroes alone. Saint
Francis with his unceasing tenderness to man and beast, Father Damien at
work among the lepers, might far better occupy the pages of our
magazines, than the pictured deeds of criminals and the achievements of
contemporary multimillionaires.
If we need a wider range of concrete examples of the good, we need
still more a wider range of nobly expressed ideals. Our thought grows
narrow; we smother for lack of breathing space. Benjamin Franklin's
philosophy was far from grasping the best of life, yet we remember him
better than we do our Emerson, whose plea for spiritual values as the
only real ones is lost in the louder and louder groaning of the wheels
of our machinery. The idealism that is taught the young in Sunday
schools is too often inextricably bound up with unnecessary theology;
and many and many a pupil, in discarding the latter, discards the other
also. The ideal of success upheld in much journalistic admonition is
often rather mean and low; the young of this country need no printed
incentives to urge them into commercialism and the victories of trade.
The best influences that are being brought to bear upon them are those
which concern social responsibilities and the needs of the poor. Yet all
this thought and endeavor should supplement and not supersede, as it is
doing, a deep concern with the things of the spirit; and no admonition
regarding hygiene for one's self or others is a substitute for--
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought
And rolls through all things.
The great things of the past in all nations, history can teach us; the
possible, both literature and philosophy can teach us. We must forego no
noble expression of idealistic faith, lest we impoverish our own souls,
and beggar those who come after us. The pure intellectual passion of
Bacon's _Advancement of Learning_, the noble stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius, the spiritual vision of Plato, of Spenser, the heroic strain
of Wordsworth's 'Liberty Sonnets' and his 'Happy Warrior,' Shelley's
ardent and generous sympathy, Browning's dynamic spiritual force, should
make up part of our life and thought, checking our insistent impulse
toward mechanical things, and correcting the evil within and without.
More than anything else, we need a revival of interest in great poetry.
'Now therein of all sciences,' said Sir Philip Sidney, 'is our poet the
monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a
prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter it.... He cometh
to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with,
or prepared for, the well-enchanting skill of music; and with a tale,
forsooth, he cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from
play, and old men from the chimney-corner, and, pretending no more, doth
intend the winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue.'
The poet's 'perfect picture' of the good, the great image, causes noble
passion, wakes us out of our 'habitual calm,' and stirs us almost
beyond our possibilities. The imagination is the miracle-working power
in human nature; through it alone can the human soul come to its own.
Only that which is fine and high can feed it aright, while baseness can
make of it a destructive tool of terrible power. As I think back to
childhood, I can remember the devastating effect that one tale of
cruelty had upon my mind, haunting me by day in vivid pictures, turning
my dreams to horror, and making me, while the obsession lasted, believe
that the world of grown folk must be all alike cruel. So, too, the
compelling vision of the good came through concrete instances; and the
people, both the living and the dead, in whom I passionately believed,
shaped all my faith.
The imagination of youth,--there is no power like it, no machine that
can equal it in dynamic force, nothing so full of power, so full of
danger. We become that which we look upon, contemplate, remember; it is
for this that I dread the ultimate effect of the long, imaginative
picturing of our neighbor's sins now presented in our periodicals.
Images of evil can hardly help dimming and tarnishing the bright ideals
of youth; is there no way--with all our modern wisdom can we find no
way--of limiting our exposure of crime to the people who can be of
service in helping check it, and keeping it from those who cannot help,
but can only be silently hurt? A moment, an hour of some fresh vision,
and a child's destiny is perhaps decided for good or for ill. One
afternoon's reading of Spenser made the boy Keats a poet; who, knowing
the potency of brief experience in the flush of youth, can doubt the
lasting wrong wrought again and again by the sudden shock of contact
with things evil?
Many images of wrong must of necessity come to the young; let them not
be multiplied in our feverish and morbid fashion of to-day. Above all,
let them be crowded out by constant suggestion of noble images and noble
thought, which will work both consciously and subconsciously, shaping
the dream when the dreamer is least aware. To hold up before the ardent
and impressionable young that which they may become in strength, in
purity, would surely be better than placing before them this perpetual
moving-picture show of our civic and national transgressions. I can but
believe, as I read article after article of exposure, that this
continued presentation to youth of the unholy side of life, with our
increasing tendency to make education a mere matter of the intellect and
of the eye, is bound to lessen the moral energy of the race. Would it
not be better if we were more diligent in searching history, philosophy,
literature, for 'whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are
lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,' and in bidding the young
think on these things?
On Authors
By Margaret Preston Montague
I write myself; therefore I feel free to say what I please about
authors; but if you, sir, or madam, who read, but do not write, were to
give voice to the reflections that are even now beginning to distill
from my pencil, I should doubtless resent them. And here, indeed, I am
faced by the sudden reflection that much of what I say myself I might
resent in the mouths of others. This leads to a whole new train of
thought, which, however, I refuse to take, and board instead the one I
set out for,--The Authors' Unlimited. There are many things to be
remarked about authors, but in so short a paper it is possible to touch
upon only a very few. One of the first facts that strikes the
investigator in this field is that members of my profession do not
always appear to endear themselves to those with whom they have
dealings.
'What do you think of authors?' I once asked an editor.
'I hate 'em!' he answered without a moment's hesitation.
Another editor assured me, with a weary sigh, that authors were 'kittle
cattle.' This affords a writer a little leap of amusement. So editors
suffer from authors, even as authors from editors! Well, yes, we _are_
kittle cattle! But some of this is due, no doubt, to what people expect
of us. I was presented once to a lady who immediately fixed me with an
eager eye.
'I am making a study of the habits of authors,' she announced. (Here a
dreadful sinking of the heart assailed me.) 'Kindly tell me at what hour
you retire.'
'Usually at half-past ten,' I answered wretchedly.
At that, as I had expected, her eyebrows went up. 'The author of _When
All Was Dark_,' she informed me, 'sits up all night. She says she cannot
sleep until she has savored the dawn.' However, she was kind enough to
give me another chance. 'What do you eat?' she asked.
'Three hearty meals a day,' I answered.
'Not _breakfast_!' she pleaded. 'Why, St. George Dreamer _never_ takes
more than three drops of brandy on a lump of sugar in the morning. Just
the sight of a coffee cup will upset his work for a week.'
And then she left me, sure, I have no doubt, that no real author could
confess to such distressingly normal habits as mine.
Doubtless she is an eager reader of all those little paragraphs
informing us how authors write. How this one has to have his black mammy
rub his head for an hour before he can even think of work; and that one
confesses that to write a love scene she must have the odor of decayed
bananas in the room. Well, the world would be a sadder place without
these little paragraphs. Would that I had something of a like nature to
offer! But alas! I have no black mammy, and the smell of over-ripe fruit
leaves my hero cold. Also, to give forth such gems of information one
must be able to observe a certain rule. It is, Don't laugh or you might
wake up. This rule is always sacredly in force at literary gatherings.
The fact of being an author, and of being at an authors' meeting,
induces, it appears, an intense seriousness. In my younger days I did
not realize this, and once at a gathering of this nature, I asked a
carefree question. 'Do you think,' I inquired of the author next me,
'that it is possible for an unmusical person to write verse?'
I confess now that I put the question somewhat in the spirit of the
Irishman, who, asking after his friend's health, added, 'Not that I care
a damn, but it makes conversation.' Heaven defend me from ever again
making so much conversation! A gleam shot up in my author's eye. 'Let us
go over and ask Professor ---- ' he cried. 'He wrote _What Poets Cannot
Do_. He's just the man to tell us!' And before I could escape, he
dragged me through the press of authors, and flung me before the
professor, with the tag, 'Unmusical, but aspires to write verse,--is
this possible?'
I know now how the beetle feels beneath the microscope. Seeing the
little group we made, two young authors 'hurried up, and more, and more,
and more.' They surrounded me to listen, to inspect, to comment; they
asked one another eager questions about me, they compared notes, they
appealed to the author of _What Poets Cannot Do_, and always their
dreadful eyes were fixed upon me. Never, never again will I dare the
dreadful seriousness of an authors' meeting with an idle question!
I have also learned another lesson. It is how to converse with authors.
I shudder now to think of my early and crude attempts in this matter.
The remembrance of one particular occasion stands out with dreadful
vividness. I had been introduced to a distinguished writer. She raised
her eyes to mine for a wan instant, a pale flicker of recognition passed
over her face, and then--silence. Readers,--nay, let me call you friends
while I make this terrible confession,--_I broke that silence!_ I was
young; I did not understand. I do now. I have never been able since to
read 'The Ancient Mariner'--I know too well the awfulness of having shot
an albatross. 'The lady,' I said to my inexperienced self, 'does not
care to converse; she expects you to do so.' Accordingly, I broke into
light and cheerful talk, something in conversation corresponding, I
fear, to what in dry goods the clerk recommends as 'a nice line of
spring styles.' I realize that only a series of illustrations can make
the situation clear. Imagine then, if you please, a tinkling cymbal
serenading a smouldering volcano; a puppy trying to woo the Sphinx to a
game of tag; sunlit waves breaking upon a 'stern and rock-bound coast,'
and you may get a faint idea of the situation. I began almost
immediately to experience that far-from-home sensation of which
Humpty-Dumpty speaks with so much feeling. As I beheld one after another
of my little remarks dash itself to nothingness against that stern and
rock-bound coast, only the time and the place kept me from bursting into
tears. Fortunately it did not last too long. In another minute one or
the other of us would have shattered into the maniac's wild laughter.
And I have every reason to fear that I should have been that one.
Others, however, realizing the awful thing I was doing, rushed up and
separated us. Sympathetic hands were stretched to her; low words were
murmured, and she was drawn into a secluded corner where her silence
might be preserved from any further onslaughts of a like sacrilegious
nature. But no one stretched a hand to _me_; no sympathetic words were
murmured in _my_ ear!
I now know that in conversations with authors there should be long
pauses. This is because every remark, after being received by the ear,
must be submitted to a strict brain analysis, and then given a soul-bath
before it is proper to venture a reply. I have found, also, that in
answering too quickly, I myself lose caste. I now make it a point never
to respond to a question addressed to me by an author until I have
counted twenty. If the author is very distinguished, I make it fifty for
good measure.
Much more remains to be said about authors. I realize that I have, as it
were, merely scraped the surface of the subject. Space, however, allows
me only room to add one last anecdote. But this one may indeed prove
more illuminating than all that has gone before. Once, then, in a
certain city where I was visiting, I was invited to attend a meeting of
its authors' club. 'Now at this meeting,' I instructed myself before
going, 'you will probably encounter the most serious species of author
native to this climate.' Accordingly I set forth with a light and
expectant heart. As I entered the hall I was aware of another person
entering from an opposite door,--a serious, awkward person, with just
that peculiar, vague, and almost feeble-minded expression that I have
come to associate with writers in general. 'Behold, my child, the
SERIOUS AUTHOR,' I commented happily to myself. I looked again, and saw
it was _myself in a mirror_!
The Provincial American
By Meredith Nicholson
_Viola._ What country, friends, is this?
_Captain._ Illyria, lady.
_Viola._ And what should I do in Illyria?
My brother he is in Elysium.
_--Twelfth Night._
I am a provincial American. My forbears were farmers or country-town
folk. They followed the long trail over the mountains out of Virginia
and North Carolina, with brief sojourns in Western Pennsylvania and
Kentucky. My parents were born, the one in Kentucky, the other in
Indiana, within two and four hours of the spot where I pen these
reflections, and I was a grown man and had voted before I saw the sea or
any Eastern city.
In attempting to illustrate the provincial point of view out of my own
experiences I am moved by no wish to celebrate either the Hoosier
commonwealth--which has not lacked nobler advertisement--or myself; but
by the hope that I may cheer many who, flung by fate upon the world's
byways, shuffle and shrink under the reproach of their metropolitan
brethren.
Mr. George Ade has said, speaking of our freshwater colleges, that
Purdue University, his own alma mater, offers everything that Harvard
provides except the sound of _a_ as in father. I have been told that I
speak our _lingua rustica_ only slightly corrupted by urban contacts.
Anywhere east of Buffalo I should be known as a Westerner; I could not
disguise myself if I would. I find that I am most comfortable in a town
whose population does not exceed a fifth of a million,--the kind of
place that enjoys street-car transfers, a woman's club, and a post
office with carrier delivery.
I
Across a hill-slope that knew my childhood, a bugle's grieving melody
used to float often through the summer twilight. A highway lay hidden in
the little vale below, and beyond it the unknown musician was quite
concealed, and was never visible to the world I knew. Those trumpetings
have lingered always in my memory, and color my recollection of all that
was near and dear in those days. Men who had left camp and field for the
soberer routine of civil life were not yet fully domesticated. My bugler
was merely solacing himself for lost joys by recurring to the vocabulary
of the trumpet. I am confident that he enjoyed himself; and I am equally
sure that his trumpetings peopled the dusk for me with great captains
and mighty armies, and touched with a certain militancy all my youthful
dreaming.
No American boy born during or immediately after the Civil War can have
escaped in those years the vivid impressions derived from the sight and
speech of men who had fought its battles, or women who had known its
terror and grief. Chief among my playthings on that peaceful hillside
was the sword my father had borne at Shiloh and on to the sea; and I
remember, too, his uniform coat and sash and epaulets and the tattered
guidon of his battery, that, falling to my lot as toys, yet imparted to
my childish consciousness a sense of what war had been. The young
imagination was kindled in those days by many and great names. Lincoln,
Grant, and Sherman were among the first lispings of Northern children of
my generation; and in the little town where I was born, lived men who
had spoken with them face to face. I did not know, until I sought them
later for myself, the fairy tales that are every child's birthright; and
I imagine that children of my generation heard less of
old, unhappy, far-off things
And battles long ago,
and more of the men and incidents of contemporaneous history. Great
spirits still on earth were sojourning. I saw several times, in his last
years, the iron-willed Hoosier War Governor, Oliver P. Morton. By the
time I was ten, a broader field of observation opening through my
parents' removal to the state capital, I had myself beheld Grant and
Sherman; and every day I passed in the street men who had been partners
with them in the great, heroic, sad, splendid struggle. These things I
set down as a background for the observations that follow,--less as text
than as point of departure; yet I believe that bugler, sounding charge
and retreat and taps in the dusk, and those trappings of war beneath
whose weight I strutted upon that hillside, did much toward establishing
in me a certain habit of mind. From that hillside I have since
ineluctably viewed my country and my countrymen and the larger world.
Emerson records Thoreau's belief that 'the flora of Massachusetts
embraced almost all the important plants of America,--most of the oaks,
most of the willows, the best pines, the ash, the maple, the beech, the
nuts. He returned Kane's arctic voyage to a friend of whom he had
borrowed it, with the remark, that most of the phenomena noted might be
observed in Concord.'
The complacency of the provincial mind is due less, I believe, to
stupidity and ignorance, than to the fact that every American county is
in a sense complete, a political and social unit, in which the sovereign
rights of a free people are expressed by the courthouse and town hall,
spiritual freedom by the village church-spire, and hope and aspiration
in the school-house. Every reader of American fiction, particularly in
the realm of the short story, must have observed the great variety of
quaint and racy characters disclosed. These are the _dramatis personæ_
of that great American novel which some one has said is being written in
installments. Writers of fiction hear constantly of characters who would
be well worth their study. In reading two recent novels that penetrate
to the heart of provincial life, Mr. White's _A Certain Rich Man_ and
Mrs. Watts's _Nathan Burke_, I felt that the characters depicted might,
with unimportant exceptions, have been found almost anywhere in those
American states that shared the common history of Kansas and Ohio. Mr.
Winston Churchill, in his admirable novels of New England, has shown how
closely the purely local is allied to the universal. 'Woodchuck
sessions' have been held by many American legislatures.
When _David Harum_ appeared, characters similar to the hero of that
novel were reported in every part of the country. I rarely visit a town
that has not its cracker-barrel philosopher, or a poet who would shine
but for the callous heart of the magazine editor, or an artist of
supreme though unrecognized talent, or a forensic orator of wonderful
powers, or a mechanical genius whose inventions are bound to
revolutionize the industrial world. In Maine, in the back room of a shop
whose windows looked down upon a tidal river, I have listened to tariff
discussions in the dialect of Hosea Biglow; and a few weeks later have
heard farmers along the un-salt Wabash debating the same questions from
a point of view that revealed no masted ships or pine woods, with a new
sense of the fine tolerance and sanity and reasonableness of our
American people. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, one of the shrewdest students
of provincial character, introduced me one day to a friend of his in a
village near Indianapolis who bore a striking resemblance to Abraham
Lincoln, and who had something of Lincoln's gift of humorous narration.
This man kept a country store, and his attitude toward his customers,
and 'trade' in general, was delicious in its drollery. Men said to be
'like Lincoln' have not been rare in the Mississippi Valley, and
politicians have been known to encourage belief in the resemblance.
Colonel Higginson has said that in the Cambridge of his youth any member
of the Harvard faculty could answer any question within the range of
human knowledge; whereas in these days of specialization some man can
answer the question, but it may take a week's investigation to find him.
In 'our town'--a poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine
own!--I dare say it was possible in that _post bellum_ era to find men
competent to deal with almost any problem. These were mainly men of
humble beginnings and all essentially the product of our American
provinces. I should like to set down briefly the ineffaceable impression
some of these characters left upon me. I am precluded by a variety of
considerations from extending this recital. The rich field of education
I ignore altogether; and I may mention only those who have gone. As it
is beside my purpose to prove that mine own people are other than
typical of those of most American communities, I check my exuberance.
Sad indeed the offending if I should protest too much!
II
In the days when the bugle still mourned across the vale, Lew Wallace
was a citizen of my native town of Crawfordsville. There he had amused
himself in the years immediately before the civil conflict, in drilling
a company of 'Algerian Zouaves' known as the Montgomery Guards, of which
my father was a member, and this was the nucleus of the Eleventh Indiana
Regiment which Wallace commanded in the early months of the war. It is
not, however, of Wallace's military services that I wish to speak now,
nor of his writings, but of the man himself as I knew him later at the
capital, at a time when, in the neighborhood of the federal building at
Indianapolis, any boy might satisfy his longing for heroes with a sight
of many of our Hoosier Olympians. He was of medium height, erect, dark
to swarthiness, with finely chiseled features and keen, black eyes, with
manners the most courtly, and a voice unusually musical and haunting.
His appearance, his tastes, his manner, were strikingly Oriental.
He had a strong theatric instinct, and his life was filled with
drama--with melodrama, even. His curiosity led him into the study of
many subjects, most of them remote from the affairs of his day. He was
both dreamer and man of action; he could be 'idler than the idlest
flowers,' yet he was always busy about something. He was an aristocrat
and a democrat; he was wise and temperate, whimsical and injudicious in
a breath. As a youth he had seen visions, and as an old man he dreamed
dreams. The mysticism in him was deep-planted, and he was always a
little aloof, a man apart. His capacity for detachment was like that of
Sir Richard Burton, who, at a great company given in his honor, was
found alone poring over a puzzling Arabic manuscript in an obscure
corner of the house. Wallace, like Burton, would have reached Mecca, if
chance had led him to that adventure.
Wallace dabbled in politics without ever being a politician; and I might
add that he practiced law without ever being, by any high standard, a
lawyer. He once spoke of the law as 'that most detestable of human
occupations.' First and last he tried his hand at all the arts. He
painted a little; he moulded a little in clay; he knew something of
music and played the violin; he made three essays in romance. As boy and
man he went soldiering; he was a civil governor, and later a minister to
Turkey. In view of his sympathetic interest in Eastern life and
character, nothing could have been more appropriate than his appointment
to Constantinople. The Sultan Abdul Hamid, harassed and anxious, used
to send for him at odd hours of the night to come and talk to him, and
offered him on his retirement a number of positions in the Turkish
government.
With all this rich experience of the larger world, he remained the
simplest of natures. He was as interested in a new fishing-tackle as in
a new book, and carried both to his houseboat on the Kankakee, where, at
odd moments, he retouched a manuscript for the press, and discussed
politics with the natives. Here was a man who could talk of the _Song of
Roland_ as zestfully as though it had just been reported from the
telegraph office.
I frankly confess that I never met him without a thrill, even in his
last years and when the ardor of my youthful hero worship may be said to
have passed. He was an exotic, our Hoosier Arab, our story-teller of the
bazaars. When I saw him in his last illness, it was as though I looked
upon a gray sheik about to fare forth unawed toward unmapped oases.
No lesson of the Civil War was more striking than that taught by the
swift transitions of our citizen soldiery from civil to military life,
and back again. This impressed me as a boy, and I used to wonder, as I
passed my heroes on their peaceful errands in the street, why they had
put down the sword when there must still be work somewhere for fighting
men to do. The judge of the federal court at this time was Walter Q.
Gresham, brevetted brigadier-general, who was destined later to adorn
the cabinets of presidents of two political parties. He was cordial and
magnetic; his were the handsomest and friendliest of brown eyes, and a
noble gravity spoke in them. Among the lawyers who practiced before him
were Benjamin Harrison and Thomas A. Hendricks, who became respectively
President and Vice-President.
Those Hoosiers who admired Gresham ardently were often less devotedly
attached to Harrison, who lacked Gresham's warmth and charm. General
Harrison was akin to the Covenanters who bore both Bible and sword into
battle. His eminence in the law was due to his deep learning in its
history and philosophy. Short of stature, and without grace of
person,--with a voice pitched rather high,--he was a remarkably
interesting and persuasive speaker. If I may so put it, his political
speeches were addressed as to a trial judge rather than to a jury, his
appeal being to reason and not to passion or prejudice. He could, in
rapid flights of campaigning, speak to many audiences in a day without
repeating himself. He was measured and urbane; his discourses abounded
in apt illustration; he was never dull. He never stooped to pietistic
clap-trap, or chanted the jaunty chauvinism that has so often caused the
Hoosier stars to blink.
Among the Democratic leaders of that period, Hendricks was one of the
ablest, and a man of many attractive qualities. His dignity was always
impressive, and his appearance suggested the statesman of an earlier
time. It is one of immortality's harsh ironies that a man who was a
gentleman, and who stood moreover pretty squarely for the policies that
it pleased him to defend, should be published to the world in a bronze
effigy in his own city as a bandy-legged and tottering tramp, in a frock
coat that never was on sea or land.
Joseph E. McDonald, a Senator in Congress, was held in affectionate
regard by a wide constituency. He was an independent and vigorous
character who never lost a certain raciness and tang. On my first timid
venture into the fabled East I rode with him in a day-coach from
Washington to New York on a slow train. At some point he saw a peddler
of fried oysters on a station platform, alighted to make a purchase, and
ate his luncheon quite democratically from the paper parcel in his car
seat. He convoyed me across the ferry, asked where I expected to stop,
and explained that he did not like the European plan; he liked, he said,
to have 'full swing at a bill of fare.'
I used often to look upon the towering form of Daniel W. Voorhees, whom
Sulgrove, an Indiana journalist with a gift for translating Macaulay
into Hoosierese, had named 'The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash.' In a
crowded hotel lobby I can still see him, cloaked and silk-hatted, the
centre of the throng, and my strict upbringing in the antagonistic
political faith did not diminish my admiration for his eloquence.
Such were some of the characters who came and went in the streets of our
provincial capital in those days.
III
In discussions under captions similar to mine it is often maintained
that railways, telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers are knitting us
together, so that soon we shall all be keyed to a metropolitan pitch.
The proof adduced in support of this is of the most trivial, but it
strikes me as wholly undesirable that we should all be ironed out and
conventionalized. In the matter of dress, for example, the women of our
town used to take their fashions from _Godey's_ and _Peterson's via_
Cincinnati; but now that we are only eighteen hours from New York, with
a well-traveled path from the Wabash to Paris, my counselors among the
elders declare that the tone of our society--if I may use so perilous a
word--has changed little from our good old black alpaca days. The hobble
skirt receives prompt consideration in the 'Main' street of any town,
and is viewed with frank curiosity, but it is only a one day's wonder. A
lively runaway or the barbaric yawp of a new street fakir may dethrone
it at any time.
New York and Boston tailors solicit custom among us biennially, but
nothing is so stubborn as our provincial distrust of fine raiment. I
looked with awe, in my boyhood, upon a pair of mammoth blue-jeans
trousers that were flung high from a flagstaff in the centre of
Indianapolis, in derision of a Democratic candidate for governor, James
D. Williams, who was addicted to the wearing of jeans. The Democrats
sagaciously accepted the challenge, made 'honest blue jeans' the
battle-cry, and defeated Benjamin Harrison, the 'kid-glove' candidate of
the Republicans. Harmless demagoguery this or bad judgment on the part
of the Republicans; and yet I dare say that if the sartorial issue
should again become acute in our politics the banner of bifurcated jeans
would triumph now as then. A Hoosier statesman who to-day occupies high
office once explained to me his refusal of sugar for his coffee by
remarking that he didn't like to waste sugar that way; he wanted to keep
it for his lettuce. I do not urge sugared lettuce as symbolizing our
higher provincialism, but mayonnaise may be poison to men who are
nevertheless competent to construe and administer law.
It is much more significant that we are all thinking about the same
things at the same time, than that Farnam Street, Omaha, and Fifth
Avenue, New York, should vibrate to the same shade of necktie. The
distribution of periodicals is so managed that California and Maine cut
the leaves of their magazines on the same day. Rural free delivery has
hitched the farmer's wagon to the telegraph office, and you can't buy
his wife's butter now until he has scanned the produce market in his
newspaper. This immediacy of contact does not alter the provincial point
of view. New York and Texas, Oregon and Florida, will continue to see
things at different angles, and it is for the good of all of us that
this is so. We have no national political, social, or intellectual
centre. There is no 'season' in New York, as in London, during which all
persons distinguished in any of these particulars meet on common ground.
Washington is our nearest approach to such a meeting-place, but it
offers only short vistas. We of the country visit Boston for the
symphony, or New York for the opera, or Washington to view the
government machine at work, but nowhere do interesting people
representative of all our ninety millions ever assemble under one roof.
All our capitals are, as Lowell put it, 'fractional,' and we shall
hardly have a centre while our country is so nearly a continent.
Nothing in our political system could be wiser than our dispersion into
provinces. Sweep from the map the lines that divide the states and we
should huddle like sheep suddenly deprived of the protection of known
walls and flung upon the open prairie. State lines and local pride are
in themselves a pledge of stability. The elasticity of our system makes
possible a variety of governmental experiments by which the whole
country profits. We should all rejoice that the parochial mind is so
open, so eager, so earnest, so tolerant. Even the most buckramed
conservative on the Eastern coastline, scornful of the political
follies of our far-lying provinces, must view with some interest the
dallyings of Oregon with the Referendum, and of Des Moines with the
Commission System. If Milwaukee wishes to try Socialism, the rest of us
need not complain. Democracy will cease to be democracy when all its
problems are solved and everybody votes the same ticket.
States that produce the most cranks are prodigal of the corn that pays
the dividends on the railroads the cranks despise. Indiana's amiable
feeling toward New York is not altered by her sister's rejection or
acceptance of the direct primary, a benevolent device of noblest
intention, under which, not long ago, in my own commonwealth, my fellow
citizens expressed their distrust of me with unmistakable emphasis. It
is no great matter, but in open convention also I have perished by the
sword. Nothing can thwart the chastening hand of a righteous people.
All passes; humor alone is the touchstone of democracy. I search the
newspapers daily for tidings of Kansas, and in the ways of Oklahoma I
find delight. The Emporia _Gazette_ is quite as patriotic as the
Springfield _Republican_ or the New York _Post_, and to my own taste,
far less depressing. I subscribed for a year to the Charleston _News and
Courier_, and was saddened by the tameness of its sentiments; for I
remember (it must have been in 1884) the shrinking horror with which I
saw daily in the Indiana Republican organ a quotation from Wade Hampton
to the effect that 'these are the same principles for which Lee and
Jackson fought four years on Virginia's soil.' Most of us are
entertained when Colonel Watterson rises to speak for Kentucky and
invokes the star-eyed goddess. When we call the roll of the states, if
Malvolio answer for any, let us suffer him in tolerance and rejoice in
his yellow stockings. 'God give them wisdom that have it; and those that
are fools, let them use their talents.'
Every community has its dissenters, protestants, kickers, cranks, the
more the merrier. I early formed a high resolve to strive for membership
in this execrated company. George W. Julian,--one of the n
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