Modern Essays
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Title: Modern Essays
Editor: Christopher Morley
Contributor: Harry Morgan Ayres
Sir Max Beerbohm
Hilaire Belloc
David W. Bone
Rupert Brooke
Heywood Broun
Thomas Burke
James Branch Cabell
Joseph Conrad
Harry Esty Dounce
Oscar W. Firkins
Philip Guedalla
Louise Imogen Guiney
A. P. Herbert
Robert Cortes Holliday
Joyce Kilmer
Stephen Leacock
John Albert Macy
Don Marquis
William McFee
A. A. Milne
Sir William Osler
Bertrand Russell
George Saintsbury
George Santayana
Stuart Pratt Sherman
Logan Pearsall Smith
Marian Storm
Simeon Strunsky
H. M. Tomlinson
Robert Palfrey Utter
Stewart Edward White
William Allen White
Release date: December 11, 2011 [eBook #38280]
Most recently updated: January 23, 2022
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/38280
Credits: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ESSAYS ***
MODERN ESSAYS
SELECTED BY
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
COPYRIGHT. 1921, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
RAHWAY, N. J.
PREFACE
IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the
labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland
sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a
collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be
the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the
mind.
Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are
burdensome. There are so many considerations to be tenderly weighed;
personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan;
for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned
and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the
authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be enjoyable
(for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered
over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally
sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times--twenty at least--I
have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's _The Victorian Age in
Literature_ to reconsider whether his ten pages on Dickens, or his
glorious summing-up of Decadents and Æsthetes, were not absolutely
essential. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in
_The Education of Henry Adams_ and in Mr. Wells's _Outline of History_,
which, I assured myself, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly
excerpted.
But I usually concluded that would not be quite fair. I have not been
overscrupulous in this matter, for the essay is a mood rather than a
form; the frontier between the essay and the short story is as
imperceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and Dixon line.
Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country between the two empires lie (to
my way of thinking) some of the most fertile fields of prose--fiction
that expresses feeling and character and setting rather than action and
plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the
essayist's mood. This is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get
into the movies. I think of short stories such as George Gissing's, in
that too little known volume _The House of Cobwebs_, which I read again
and again at midnight with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget;
and again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They have no
brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no worked-up 'situations'
which have to be taken at high speed to pass without breakdown over
their brittle bridgework of credibility. They have only the modest and
faintly melancholy savor of life itself.
Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay does not have easily
recognizable manners. It may be severely planned, or it may ramble in
ungirdled mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it from the
short story proper, or the merely personal memoir. That distinction,
easily felt by the sensitive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps
the true meaning of the word _essay_--an attempt--gives a clue. No
matter how personal or trifling the topic may be, there is always a
tendency to generalize, to walk round the subject or the experience, and
view it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short story)
cutting a carefully landscaped path through a chosen tract of human
complication. So an essay can never be more than an attempt, for it is
an excursion into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that in
the composition of a short story many entertaining and valuable
elaborations may rise in the mind of the author which must be strictly
rejected because they do not forward the essential motive. But in the
essay (of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot, but relevance
to mood. That is why there are so many essays that are mere marking
time. The familiar essay is easier to write than the short story, but it
imposes equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in fiction the
writer is controlled and limited and swept along by his material; but in
the essay, the writer rides his pen. A good story, once clearly
conceived, almost writes itself; but essays are written.
There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay--the temptation to
become too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word
which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine flavor and
genius of the essay--as in Bacon and Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt,
Thackeray, Thoreau; perhaps even in Stevenson--is the rich bouquet of
personality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. One might put
it thus: that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious
revelation of self done inadvertently.
The art of the anthologist is the art of the host: his tact is exerted
in choosing a congenial group; making them feel comfortable and at ease;
keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly
alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general
cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the
background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and
seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one into some
characteristic and felicitous vein. I think I can offer you, in this
parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the most genuine sort; and
having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more.
But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do,
just why this particular company has been called together. My intention
is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that
too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating
those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to
be frank, a secret ambition that a book of this sort may even be used as
a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to
the student that as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in
the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces
reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is
foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos,
politics, and the picturesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a
work of art. And I would call the reader's attention to this: that the
greater number of these essays were written not by retired æsthetes, but
by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press.
The names of some of the most widely bruited essayists of our day are
absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include
material less generally known.
I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal tone of the
introductory notes on each author. But I conceived the reader in the
rôle of a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.
Pulling out one's favorites and talking about them, now and then reading
a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some time after midnight) by
choosing some special volume for the guest to take to bed with him--in
the same spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the editorial
comments have too much the manner of dressing gown and slippers; but
what a pleasant book this will be to read in bed!
And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a small contribution to
Anglo-American friendliness. Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-,
but that is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are much
better acquainted with what their professional colleagues are doing in
Britain, than they with our concerns. But surely there should be a
congenial fraternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue in
print. There are some of us who even imagine a day when there may be
regular international exchanges of journalists, as there have been of
scholars and students. The contributions to this book are rather evenly
divided between British and American hands; and perhaps it is not
insignificant that two of the most pleasing items come from Canada,
where they often combine the virtues of both sides.
It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and publishers who have
assented to the reprinting of these pieces. To the authors themselves,
and to the following publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the
use of material copyrighted by them:--Doubleday Page and Company for the
extracts from books by John Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall
Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's _Niagara Falls_; the
New York _Sun_ for Don Marquis's _Almost Perfect State_; the George H.
Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday;
Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to _A
Personal Record_; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M.
Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osler for the essay
by the late Sir William Osler; Henry Holt and Company for Thomas Burke's
_The Russian Quarter_; E. P. Dutton and Company for _A Word for Autumn_,
by A. A. Milne; the New York _Evening Post_ for the essays by Stuart P.
Sherman and Harry Esty Dounce; Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's _A
Woodland Valentine_; Dodd, Mead and Company for Simeon Strunsky's
_Nocturne_, from his volume _Post-Impressions_; the Macmillan Company
for _Beer and Cider_, from Professor Saintsbury's _Notes on a Cellar
Book_; Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's _A Free Man's
Worship_, from _Mysticism and Logic_; Robert M. McBride and Company for
the selection from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and Company for
the essay by Heywood Broun; _The Weekly Review_ for the essays by O. W.
Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The present
ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I have
been unable to discover. It was published in _Patrins_ (Copeland and
Day, 1897), which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity of my
motives I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce Miss
Guiney's exquisite work to the younger generation that knows her hardly
at all.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
OCTOBER, 1921
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface iii
AMERICAN LITERATURE _John Macy_ 3
MARY WHITE _William Allen White_ 22
NIAGARA FALLS _Rupert Brooke_ 30
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE _Don Marquis_ 39
"THE MAN O' WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND" _David W. Bone_ 49
THE MARKET _William McFee_ 60
HOLY IRELAND _Joyce Kilmer_ 67
A FAMILIAR PREFACE _Joseph Conrad_ 81
ON DRAWING _A. P. Herbert_ 94
O. HENRY _O. W. Firkins_ 100
THE MOWING OF A FIELD _Hilaire Belloc_ 113
THE STUDENT LIFE _William Osler_ 128
THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA _Stephen Leacock_ 145
AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION _Harry Morgan Ayres_ 153
THE RUSSIAN QUARTER _Thomas Burke_ 160
A WORD FOR AUTUMN _A. A. Milne_ 173
"A CLERGYMAN" _Max Beerbohm_ 177
SAMUEL BUTLER _Stuart P. Sherman_ 187
BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS _H. M. Tomlinson_ 210
THE PRECEPT OF PEACE _Louise Imogen Guiney_ 219
ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT _Stewart Edward White_ 229
A WOODLAND VALENTINE _Marian Storm_ 236
THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY _George Santayana_ 241
NOCTURNE _Simeon Strunsky_ 246
BEER AND CIDER _George Saintsbury_ 253
A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP _Bertrand Russell_ 263
SOME HISTORIANS _Philip Guedalla_ 278
WINTER MIST _Robert Palfrey Utter_ 291
TRIVIA _Logan Pearsall Smith_ 297
BEYOND LIFE _James Branch Cabell_ 304
THE FISH REPORTER _Robert Cortes Holliday_ 316
SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG _Harry Esty Dounce_ 331
THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON _Heywood Broun_ 338
MODERN ESSAYS
AMERICAN LITERATURE
_By_ JOHN MACY
This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter of
John Macy's admirable volume _The Spirit of American Literature_,
published in 1913--a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, which has
unfortunately never reached one-tenth of the many readers who would
find it permanently delightful and profitable. Mr. Macy has no
skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to himself: no shafts
of limelight have followed him across the stage. But those who have
an eye for criticism that is vivacious without bombast, austere
without bitterness, keen without malice, know him as one of the
truly competent and liberal-minded observers of the literary scene.
Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877; graduated from Harvard in 1899;
did editorial service on the _Youth's Companion_ and the _Boston
Herald_; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Village, writing
a good deal for _The Freeman_ and _The Literary Review_. Perhaps,
if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, you
might see him treading thoughtfully along, with a wide sombrero
hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray forelock that droops over
his brow. You would know, as soon as you saw him, that he is a man
greatly lovable. I like to think of him as I first saw him, some
years ago, in front of the bright hearth of the charming St.
Botolph Club in Boston, where he was usually the center of an
animated group of nocturnal philosophers.
The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawakening of
American creative work that began in the 'teens of this century.
The reader will find it interesting to consider how far Mr. Macy's
remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.
_The Spirit of American Literature_ has been reissued in an
inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well worth
owning.
AMERICAN literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are
English books written in Scotland or South Africa. Our literature lies
almost entirely in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of
the western world were freely interchanged among the nations and became
accessible to an increasing number of readers. In literature nationality
is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. M.
Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to French
literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is already an English
classic. Geography, much less important in the nineteenth century than
before, was never, among modern European nations, so important as we
sometimes are asked to believe. Of the ancestors of English literature
"Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than
our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the true progenitors
of English literature are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and French.
American literature and English literature of the nineteenth century are
parallel derivatives from preceding centuries of English literature.
Literature is a succession of books from books. Artistic expression
springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a
river which is swollen throughout its course by new tributaries and by
the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows,
taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, but its power and
volume descend from distant headwaters and affluents far up stream. Or
it may be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or
impoverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or damage, but
which flows on through us, strangely impersonal and beyond our power to
kill or create.
It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will draw my
inspiration from life!" For we have too many books that are simply
better books diluted by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not
born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage,
and students find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism
reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled
at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers are often prolific of
anæmic offspring. The stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and
returns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. But of the main
fact of descent there is no doubt.
American literature is English literature made in this country. Its
nineteenth-century characteristics are evident and can be analyzed and
discussed with some degree of certainty. Its "American"
characteristics--no critic that I know has ever given a good account of
them. You can define certain peculiarities of American politics,
American agriculture, American public schools, even American religion.
But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is just as
American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as American as Whittier. The
American spirit in literature is a myth, like American valor in war,
which is precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The
American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which he calls America,
can say that the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American
home life. An Irish Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely
idealized image of America, surprised that a face does not fit his
image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in that galley?" There is no answer.
You never can tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and
lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Professor van Dyke
says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do
not understand what that means. Facts are uncomfortable consorts of
prejudices and emotional generalities; they spoil domestic peace, and
when there is a separation they sit solid at home while the other party
goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious
care, said: "It has been a matter of marvel, to European readers, that a
man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable
English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a marvel that Blake
and Keats flowered in the brutal city of London a hundred years ago.
The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is influenced and
mastered, by the accumulated riches of literature. In the last century
the strongest thinkers in our language were Englishmen, and not only the
traditional but the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists
were British. This may account for one negative characteristic of
American literature--its lack of American quality. True, our records
must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of nightingales and Persian
gardens, have not altogether forgotten the mocking-bird and the woods of
Maine. Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and
Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those
mighty commonwealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men
about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits
and scenery of that county. But wherever an English-speaking man of
imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is
subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot
escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave
of him. He is assigned to the department of the service for which his
gifts qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by
drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far from his
birthplace.
Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who writes of
California, and Bret Harte influences Kipling, who writes of India. Each
is intensely local in subject matter. The affinity between them is a
matter of temperament, manifested, for example, in the swagger and
exaggeration characteristic of all three. California did not "produce"
Bret Harte; the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras
and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that never existed,
and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling
invented an army and an empire unknown to geographers and war-offices.
The ideas at work among these English men of letters are
world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is
on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows
west across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe
influenced Rossetti; Whitman influenced Henley. For a century Cooper has
been in command of the British literary marine. Literature is
reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, as individual
citizens, afflicted with local prides and hostilities. It takes only a
dramatic interest in the guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly
uttered by Gaston Paris in the Collège de France in 1870, when the city
was beleaguered by the German armies: "Common studies, pursued in the
same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions
of diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country which no
war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where souls find that refuge and
unity which in former times was offered them by the city of God." The
catholicity of English language and literature transcends the temporal
boundaries of states.
What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American province of the
empire of British literature? Is it an observable general
characteristic, and is it a virtue or a vice? There is a sense in which
American literature is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all
literature is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing outside of Greece and
needed to know nothing. The Old Testament is tribal in its
provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and
sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. If this racial
localism is not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is
inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our
cosmopolitan age and there are few traces of it in American books. No
American poet has sung of his neighborhood with naïve passion, as if it
were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously American, but his
sympathies are universal, his vision is cosmic; when he seems to be
standing in a city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his
spirit is racing with the winds.
The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an admirable kind
of provincialism; it shows us defective in local security of judgment.
Some of us have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of European
culture that we could not see a poet in our own back yard until European
poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to
a disposition found in some Americans to disregard world standards and
proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of
San Francisco. The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about "The
American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the
mouth of that sort of gaping village reverence.
Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce
so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our
poets desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Elizabethan dramas
and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on
the banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they croon
the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his noble steed. This is
not a very grave offence, for poets live among the stars, and it makes
no difference from what point of the earth's surface they set forth on
their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully
about nightingales, and a New England Unitarian may write beautifully
about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.
The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been few of them; they
have not been adequate in numbers or in genius to the task of describing
the sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits from New
Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small band as they are, with great
domestic opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes
to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and to Italy,
where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense American literature
is too globe-trotting, it has too little savor of the soil.
Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, like other men
of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice
sometimes imputed to them by provincial critics who view literature from
the office of a London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of
American colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example,
Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in outlook, but
cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their provinciality by a
self-conscious internationalism. Probably English and French writers may
be similarly classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's
collection of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and
exquisite specimen of _provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification
of men." It is nothing like that. It is an example of what happens when
a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected into a volume
because he turns out to be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not
more remarkable for the number of nonentities it includes than "The
Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was hack for a
bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets that the taste of the time
encouraged the bookseller to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit; his
prejudices were personal and highly original, usually against the
prejudices of his _moment and milieu._ Hawthorne is less provincial, in
the derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, as will
become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American notes on England,
written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. James's British
notes on America ("The American Scene"), written in our happy days of
spacious vision.
Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like the sky above
a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew more about American life and
about what other people ought to do than any other British writer
earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly complains that Emerson is not
sufficiently local and concrete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's
Life, American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson loves and
wonders at, well _Emersonised._" Longfellow would not stay at home and
write more about the excellent village blacksmith; he made poetical
tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from several languages
for the delight of the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so
heartily cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of
Anglomania--which proves their provincialism but acquits him. Mr.
Howells has written a better book about Venice than about Ohio. Mark
Twain lived in every part of America, from Connecticut to California, he
wrote about every country under the sun (and about some countries beyond
the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of men in the
English-speaking world, and he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is
difficult to come to any conclusion about provincialism as a
characteristic of American literature.
American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely
finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the
_Youth's Companion._ The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men of
genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American
literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not
lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom come
to grips with the problems of life, especially the books cast in
artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, and preachers attack life
vigorously and wrestle with the meaning of it. The poets are thin,
moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and
dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to exceptions,
are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen volumes of the _Atlantic
Monthly_, which are a treasure-house of the richest period of American
literary expression. In those volumes one finds a surprising number of
vigorous, distinguished papers on politics, philosophy, science, even on
literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose names are not
well remembered, are clustered there about the half dozen salient men of
genius; and the collection gives one a sense that the New England mind
(aided by the outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an
abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, except
for some verses by the few standard poets. And the fiction is naïve.
Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is almost the only
story there that one comes on with a thrill either of recognition or of
discovery.
It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and
passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American
life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty
things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the
absence of international copyright threw our market open too
unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an
unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without
paying royalty and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does
not explain. For there were many American novelists, published, read,
and probably paid for their work. The trouble is that they lacked
genius; they dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not
take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no doubt
they were in another sense serious enough about their poor productions.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions to
the prevailing weakness and superficiality of American novels.
Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its intensities,
its significance? The American Civil War was the most tremendous
upheaval in the world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative
reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses,
Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which came before the war but
is part of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second
series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man Without a Country"--and
what else? The novels laid in war-time are either sanguine melodrama or
absurd idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front--a tragic theme if
tragically and not sentimentally conceived. Perhaps the bullet that
killed Theodore Winthrop deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil
War, for he was on the right road. In a general speculation such a
might-have-been is not altogether futile; if Milton had died of whooping
cough there would not have been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this
is that some geniuses whose works ought inevitably to have been produced
by this or that national development may have died too soon. This
suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is that the
American literary imagination after the Civil War was almost sterile. If
no books had been written, the failure of that conflict to get itself
embodied in some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands
of books were written by people who knew the war at first hand and who
had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these books none
rises to distinction.
An example of what seems to be the American habit of writing about
everything except American life, is the work of General Lew Wallace.
Wallace was one of the important secondary generals in the Civil War,
distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote
"Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and
it shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, so
dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war experiences.
"Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergyman with a pretty literary gift,
is a ridiculous inanity to come from a man who has seen the things that
Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of experience may not
write at all, and, on the other hand, that the man of secluded life may
have the imagination to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with
experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering the ability and the
ambition to write--for him to make spurious oriental romances which
achieve an enormous popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical,
yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The American
literary artist has written about everything under the skies except what
matters most in his own life. General Grant's plain autobiography, not
art and of course not attempting to be, is better literature than most
of our books in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity
and the profound importance of the subject-matter.
Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, but their faces
have been averted from the mightier issues of life. They have been
high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to the
real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years
from Irving's first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel,
most of our books are eminent for just those virtues which America is
supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are fanciful, dainty,
reserved; they are literose, sophisticated in craftsmanship, but
innocently unaware of the profound agitations of American life, of life
everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of reality, Whitman,
Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell
and Emerson at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beautiful
and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious of
contemporaneous realities, too seldom vibrate with a tremendous sense of
life.
The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed his life in
a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous seas is a
connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss
Marie Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. He who is
figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the desert with the
steam locomotive, sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little
garden. The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most
tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love stories that
would have made Jane Austen smile.
Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac had seen
Pittsburgh, he would have cried: "Give me a pen!" The truth is, the
whole country is crying out for those who will record it, satirize it,
chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient as life and
fresh as a wilderness. American literature is one occupation which is
not over-crowded, in which, indeed, there is all too little competition
for the new-comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest young
writers are discovering the fertility of a soil that has scarcely been
scratched.
American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are not
assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong is crude. The
stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are
admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, not of large
vitality. On the other hand, some of the stronger American fictions fail
in workmanship; for example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid
and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded; the novels of
Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, who attempted to
put national economics into something like an epic of daily bread; and
Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A
few American novelists have felt the meaning of the life they knew and
have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various reasons failed
to make first-rate novels; for example, Edward Eggleston, whose stories
of early Indiana have the breath of actuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe,
author of "The Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great
ability, whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he died;
George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who
gives a genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its people;
and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of
Courage" and "Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short stories
America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Annie Trumbull
Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward
Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are
some of those whose short stories are perfect in their several kinds.
But the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains an
inferior production.
On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and drama in the English
language are the works of ten British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G.
Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr.
Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Sinclair, Mr. William De
Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes,
and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but two Americans, Mrs.
Edith Wharton and Mr. Theodore Dreiser. There may be others, for one
cannot pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet for
every American that should be added, I would agree to add four to the
British list. However, a contemporary literature that includes Mrs.
Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt" both
published last year, is not to be despaired of.
In the course of a century a few Americans have said in memorable words
what life meant to them. Their performance, put together, is
considerable, if not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one
feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion between a limited
expression and the multifarious immensity of the country. Our
literature, judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, is
insufficient to the opportunity and the need. The American Spirit may be
figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and
eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.
MARY WHITE
By WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
Mary White--one seems to know her after reading this sketch written
by her father on the day she was buried--would surely have laughed
unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together
with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the
pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave.
This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy
comment. It was written for the Emporia _Gazette,_ which William
Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best-known,
most public-spirited and most truly loved of American journalists.
He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two
characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that
vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that
seems to be a Kansas birthright.
Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.
THE Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death
declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she
would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life.
Horses have fallen on her and with her--"I'm always trying to hold 'em
in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one
was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death
resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured
her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the
parking.
The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home
from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on
the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She
climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was
doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the
country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode
through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passers-by. She
knew everyone in town. For a decade the little figure with the long
pig-tail and the red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of
Emporia, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her.
She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of the Normal Library,
and waved at them; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on,
and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North
Merchant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a
lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still
moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A _Gazette_ carrier passed--a
High School boy friend--and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand;
the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging
limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came.
But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,
staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite recovered consciousness.
But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year
or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and
she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and
to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a
physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back
of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the
streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong,
muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first
years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released
a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she
was happy because she was enlarging her horizon. She came to know all
sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one
of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom
O'Connor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police
judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her special friends, and all
the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in
Pepville and Stringtown, were among her acquaintances. And she brought
home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage
was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a continual bubble of
joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous
without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary
White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five
minutes in her life.
With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her
table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy,
"Creative Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark
Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was ten--all of their writings.
Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted her. She was
entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assistant editor of the
High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship
of the Annual next year. She was a member of the executive committee of
the High School Y. W. C. A.
Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to
draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her school books,
funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and took a course--rather
casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong
purposes--and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having
her pictures accepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of
delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do
the cartooning for that book this spring, was too beautiful for words.
She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were
accepted, and her pride--always repressed by a lively sense of the
ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting--was a really gorgeous
thing to see. No successful artist ever drank a deeper draught of
satisfaction than she took from the little fame her work was getting
among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse--but
never her car.
For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never
had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but
she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to
fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White--white and
black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing
better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an
occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went
to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy
proposition" didn't interest her--yet. But young people--great
spring-breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads
of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun
she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that
got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home;
scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a
wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own
Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it
all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While
there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing
but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags
enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to
make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And
the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored
girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet,
because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those
who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with
her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness;
and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the
Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly
for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
would have hooted at a "testimony." But even as a little child she felt
the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance,
and she wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes
meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but
eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but
a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly
seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by
with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above
every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a
child. The tom-boy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put
away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.
Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have
wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from
her Brother Bill's Harvard classmen--Heavens, how proud that would have
made her! and the red roses from the _Gazette_ force--in vases at her
head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on "Love" from the
Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her
democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor and police
judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down
for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow,
poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which she loved,
and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first
movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in
certain moods on the phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends
in the High School.
That was all.
For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen; her Latin teacher--W.
L. Holtz; her High School principal, Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank
Foncannon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the _Gazette_ office,
Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to
know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been
transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to
direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.
A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her
coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But
the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was
flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.
NIAGARA FALLS
_By_ RUPERT BROOKE
The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not
merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle
suggestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of
description was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters sent
to the _Westminster Gazette_ describing his trip in the United
States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume _Letters
from America_ to which Henry James contributed so affectionate and
desperately unintelligible a preface--one of the last things James
wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth reading: they are
full of delightful and lively comments, though sometimes much (oh,
very much!) too condescending. The last paragraph in this essay is
interesting in view of subsequent history.
Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; was at
King's College, Cambridge; died of blood-poisoning in the Ægean,
April 23, 1915.
Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveler
could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling
himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake
of their too-human comments. It is his fault if a peasant's _naïveté_
has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen
are more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at
observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from
trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the
wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara means
nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything.
It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for
Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian
character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water
falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human
race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to
surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity.
Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends,
stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-place for all
the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous,
greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly,
take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle;
professionals, amateurs, and _dilettanti_, male and female; touts who
would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked
background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into
cars, char-à-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a
carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards,
moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and
touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just
purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to
tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls.
He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but
they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the
Canadian and the American.
Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water of the
great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion. It descends
with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into
a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. Sometimes it is
divided by islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see nothing but a
waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even
seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously
forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and
you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and
foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water.
Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this
weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of
the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile
or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of
almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But
it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. Here
and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that
faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really
stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance,
the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their
fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience.
They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are
preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the
sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot on
towards the verge.
But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and
blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend
and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of disaster
the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in
ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder
and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of
violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they
fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps
up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The
spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that
fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air,
graining it, and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and
houses, and so vanishes.
The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks of the river
above the Falls told me that the center of the riverbed at the Canadian
Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill this
up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the power-houses.
And this, he said, would supply the need for more power, which will
certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary
sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real secret of
the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the
feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the
plunge of that vast body of water. If that were taken away, there would
be little visible change, but the heart would be gone.
The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the
Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water
does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is
almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily level, one long
curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is
on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark
against them. With both Falls the color of the water is the
ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into
one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun.
Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow
from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white
intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there
are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a
great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top
to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the cliff
opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accompanies
you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and
awakens again as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler
who attempts the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare open
his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in
span, leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling beside
him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that place was
a complete circle, such as I have never seen before, and so near that I
could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind
the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the
water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of
falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So,
if you are close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recognize
liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware
that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front
of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar
and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible
plane of air.
Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor of
marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum that was foam.
It slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly
exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries more swiftly,
smooth and ominous. As the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs,
and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more
terrifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its bands
of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as
if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly
convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up
into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible
speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along the shining
curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually
suggests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids moves one
with a different sense of awe and terror from that of the Falls. Here
the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost resolute;
masculine vigor compared with the passive gigantic power, female,
helpless and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every
hour, and especially by night, when the cloud of spray becomes an
immense visible ghost, straining and wavering high above the river,
white and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close below
the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy
thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind;
for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind
the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were
like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of
life--caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct
or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise
in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single
current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a
community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream;
a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In
such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet
comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to
their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to
it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And
as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs
over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying.... With some such
thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder
of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can
never give.
THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE
_By_ DON MARQUIS
Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym; it is pronounced
_Markwiss_, not _Markee_. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's
amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have
appeared in the column (_The Sun Dial_) conducted by him for ten
years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional motto of
sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers only the serene
hours; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight of his Muse is
shining, it casts darker and even more precious shadows of satire
and mysticism. His many readers know by this time the depth and
reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis is a true philosopher and wit,
his humor adorns a rich and mellow gravity. When strongly moved he
sometimes utters an epigram that rings like steel leaving the
scabbard.
There are many things to be said against American newspapers, but
much of the indictment is quashed when one considers that every now
and then they develop a writer like Don Marquis. The violent haste,
pressure and instancy of newspaper routine, purgatorial to some
temperaments, is a genuine stimulus to others--particularly if they
are able, as in the case of the columnist, to fall back upon
outside contributors in their intervals of pessimism or sloth.
Mr. Marquis's _The Old Soak_, a post-prohibition portrait of a
genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American humor
since _Mr. Dooley_--some say since Mark Twain. His _Prefaces_ and
his poems will also be considered by the judicious. He was born in
Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in Philadelphia and
Atlanta before coming to the _Sun_ in 1912.
I
No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not
nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can,
somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a
few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not
attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is
a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals
as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they
die.
Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all
the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is
untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly
untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing
that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing
and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against
them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is certainly far from a
uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time
of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow
into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that
a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in
spite of his troubles.
It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And
most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and
racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of
all.
In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years
before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living ... things will be so
arranged economically that this will be possible for each individual.
Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence
and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years
old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and
accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten
years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.
During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that
we have been forced by circumstances to forego. We have always been
compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be
prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful
of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but
we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our
observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the
argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as
associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the
radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the
idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the
sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know
any of them, far less become intimate with them.
Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall
be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to
be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not
walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic
beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a
bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and
write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our
chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the
lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we
want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window
and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have
been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall
... but we don't wish to make any one envious of the good time that is
coming to us ... we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored
and disorderly old age.
(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you can't have us pinched
and deported for our yearnings.)
We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old
age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not
want the kind we want ... some of you may prefer prunes and morality to
the bitter end. Some of you may be dissolute now and may look forward to
becoming like one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem. But for
our part we have always been a hypocrite and we shall have to continue
being a hypocrite for a good many years yet, and we yearn to come out in
our true colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you want to
be, during those last ten years, that you may be, in the Almost Perfect
State.
Any system of government under which the individual does all the
sacrificing for the sake of the general good, for the sake of the
community, the State, gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things
that cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all the time.
The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you
have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth
doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and
get some joy out of it.
Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too
continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much
you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching
you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
BUT ... overstrain yourself _now and then_. For this reason: The things
you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and
joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when
you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new
self--if you get what we mean. And if you should ask us suddenly just
what this has to do with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair
we should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed to sort o' run into
it, somehow.
II
Interplanetary communication is one of the persistent dreams of the
inhabitants of this oblate spheroid on which we move, breathe and suffer
for lack of beer. There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if
we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we might learn from
them something to our advantage. There is a disposition to concede the
superiority of the fellows Out There ... just as some Americans
capitulate without a struggle to poets from England, rugs from
Constantinople, song and sausage from Germany, religious enthusiasts
from Hindustan and cheese from Switzerland, although they have not
tested the goods offered and really lack the discrimination to determine
their quality. Almost the only foreign importations that were ever
sneezed at in this country were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.
But are the Martians ... if Martians there be ... any more capable than
the persons dwelling between the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn,
between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.?
Perhaps the Martians yearn toward earth, romantically, poetically, the
Romeos swearing by its light to the Juliets; the idealists and
philosophers fabling that already there exists upon it an ALMOST PERFECT
STATE--and now and then a wan prophet lifting his heart to its gleams,
as a cup to be filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and courage.
For this earth, it is also a star.
We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in the far stars, the
philosophers, poets, the prophets ... or _are_ they wrong?
They are both right and wrong, as we are probably both right and wrong
about them. If we tumbled into Mars or Arcturus or Sirius this evening
we should find the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the
inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers, no doubt ...
and they would be equally disappointed by the way we flitter, frivol,
flutter and flivver.
And yet, that other thing would be there too ... that thing that made
them look at our star as a symbol of grace and beauty.
Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it
in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE.
We used sometimes to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, that song in stone
and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist, at dusk, when the
tides of shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a surf of glory
and mystery and illusion against the tall towers of Manhattan. Seen from
the middle arch of the bridge at twilight, New York with its girdle of
shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its quick pulsations
of unstable light is a miracle of splendor and beauty that lights up the
heart like the laughter of a god.
But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with the details. The dirty
old shed from which the "L" trains and trolleys put out with their
jammed and mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the unknown
bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same dirty old shed; on a hot,
damp night the pasty streets stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you
are trodden and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their
hopping victims; you are encompassed round about by the ugly and the
sordid, and the objectionable is exuded upon you from a myriad candid
pores; your elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snowflakes
that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery brow, and you say:
"Beauty? Aw, h--l! What's the use?"
And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was created by these
people and people like these.... You have seen the tall towers of
Manhattan, wonderful under the stars. How did it come about that such
growths came from such soil--that a breed lawless and sordid and prosaic
has written such a mighty hieroglyphic against the sky? This glamor out
of a pigsty ... how come? How is it that this hideous, half-brute city
is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?
It comes about because the wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy
to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored;
no conscious thought; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of
commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of
them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the
broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one
labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and
trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul; the
aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were
the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one
of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the
silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the
unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation,
the inchoate art, the submerged spirit--these groped and found each
other and gathered themselves together and worked themselves into the
tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow
of the sunrise and the sea winds.
Humanity triumphs over its details.
The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and
expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being
of the race.
The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it
first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots. Coming
closer, you will be profoundly discouraged at the number of low spots,
not to say two-spots. Coming still closer, you will become discouraged
once more by the reflection that the same stuff that is in the high
spots is also in the two-spots.
"THE MAN-O'-WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND"
_By_ DAVID W. BONE
Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his ship
will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone describes the
loss of the _Cameronia_, his command, torpedoed in the
Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive us for
pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title pays
tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the
sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not
less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture of a
sea tragedy is taken from _Merchantmen-at-Arms_, a history of the
British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of enthralling
power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother, Muirhead
Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers.
David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow) in 1873; his
father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his great-grandfather
was a boyhood companion of Robert Burns. Bone went to sea as an
apprentice in the _City of Florence_, an old-time square-rigger, at
the age of fifteen; he has been at sea ever since. He is now master
of S.S. _Columbia_ of the Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New
York Harbor, as she has carried passengers between the Clyde and
the Hudson for more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea
tale, The _Brass-bounder_, published in 1910, has become a classic
of the square-sail era; his _Broken Stowage_ (1915) is a collection
of shorter sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have
reflected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone
will take a permanent and honorable place.
A sense of security is difficult of definition. Largely, it is founded
upon habit and association. It is induced and maintained by familiar
surroundings. On board ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be
contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be sailing beyond the
influences of the land and of other ships. The sea is the same we have
known for so long. Every item of our ship fitment--the trim arrangement
of the decks, the set and rake of mast and funnel, even the furnishings
of our cabins--has the power of impressing a stable feeling of custom,
normal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought to recall
that in their homely presence we are endangered. Relating his
experiences after having been mined and his ship sunk, a master confided
that the point that impressed him most deeply was when he went to his
room for the confidential papers and saw the cabin exactly in everyday
aspect--his longshore clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella
standing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard.
Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assurance. Unlike us, they
cannot carry their home with them to the battlefields. All their scenes
and surroundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance and comfort
from the familiar presence of their comrades. At sea in a ship there is
a yet greater incitement to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless
sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. The atmosphere that
is so familiar and comforting to us, is to many of them an environment
of dread possibilities.
It is with some small measure of this sense of security--tempered by our
knowledge of enemy activity in these waters--we pace the bridge. Anxiety
is not wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flotsam that may
have come from the decks of a French mail steamer, torpedoed three days
ago. The passing of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the
steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly presence of
familiar surroundings has effect in allaying immediate fears. The rounds
of the bridge go on--the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass,
the small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. Two days out
from Marseilles--and all well! In another two days we should be
approaching the Canal, and then--to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a
term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accompany us for the present,
but the filmy glare of the sun, now low, and a backward movement of the
glass foretells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed to make
the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each bow, our two escorting
destroyers conform to the angles of our zigzag--spurring out and
swerving with the peculiar "thrown-around" movement of their class.
Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch of the ship's crew,
military signalers are posted; the boats swung outboard have each a
party of troops on guard.
An alarmed cry from aloft--a half-uttered order to the steersman--an
explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in
her stride!
The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, a huge
column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent
on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and
hangs--watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water--the
steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on
his forehead.... Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the
thrust of the engines marking the heartbeats of the stricken ship.
Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days
on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of
our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow
comes, the explosion killing many outright. We had counted on a
proportion of the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to
balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw in emergency.
Hurrying from the mess-decks as enjoined, the quick movement gathers way
and intensity: the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gangways and
passages are blocked in the struggle. There is the making of a
panic--tuned by their outcry, _"God! O God! O Christ!"_ The swelling
murmur is neither excited nor agonized--rather the dull, hopeless
expression of despair.
The officer commanding troops has come on the bridge at the first
alarm. His juniors have opportunity to take their stations before the
struggling mass reaches to the boats. The impossibility of getting among
the men on the lower decks makes the military officers' efforts to
restore confidence difficult. They are aided from an unexpected quarter.
The bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. "Hey! Steady up
you men doon therr," he shouts. "Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels
croodin' th' ledders!"
We could not have done it as well. The lad is plainly in sight to the
crowd on the decks. A small boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr!" The
effect is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is arrested.
The engines are stopped--we are now beyond range of a second
torpedo--and steam thunders in exhaust, making our efforts to control
movements by voice impossible. At the moment of the impact the
destroyers have swung round and are casting here and there like hounds
on the scent: the dull explosion of a depth-charge--then another, rouses
a fierce hope that we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has
broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial still holds and,
when a measure of order on the boatdeck allows, we send a message of our
peril broadcast. There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our
bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. We have
nearly three thousand on board. There are boats for sixteen
hundred--then rafts. Boats--rafts--and the glass is falling at a rate
that shows bad weather over the western horizon!
Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with only
half-complements in them, will not serve. We pass orders to lower away
in any condition, however overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it
is with some apprehension we watch the packed boats that drop away from
the davit heads. The shrill ring of the block-sheaves indicates a
tension that is not far from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats
reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the
tackles--far beyond their working load--is too great for all to stand to
it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently
to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A
third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at
parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights,
disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We
can make no attempt to reach the men in the water. Their life-belts are
sufficient to keep them afloat: the ship is going down rapidly by the
head, and there remains the second line of boats to be hoisted and swung
over. The chief officer, pausing in his quick work, looks to the bridge
inquiringly, as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two hands
suffice to mark our estimate.
The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch of the bows. Pumps are
utterly inadequate to make impression on the swift inflow. The chief
engineer comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only a
question of time. How long? Already the water is lapping at a level of
the foredeck. Troops massed there and on the forecastle-head are
apprehensive: it is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them
for so long. The commanding officer sets example by a cool nonchalance
that we envy. Posted with us on the bridge, his quick eyes note the
flood surging in the pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have
removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the sea.
Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving _Nemesis_ to steam fast
circles round the sinking ship, _Rifleman_ swings in and brings up
alongside at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety and distress,
we cannot but admire the precision of the destroyer captain's
manœuver--the skilful avoidance of our crowded life-boats and the men
in the water--the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant that brings
her to a standstill at the lip of our brimming decks. The troops who
have stood so well to orders have their reward in an easy leap to
safety. Quickly the foredeck is cleared. _Rifleman_ spurts ahead in a
rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to eddy in her wash. She takes
up the circling high-speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in
and embark a number of our men.
It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the
gallant service of the destroyers. There remain the rafts, but many of
these have been launched over to aid the struggling men in the water.
Half an hour has passed since we were struck--thirty minutes of frantic
endeavor to debark our men--yet still the decks are thronged by a packed
mass that seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers alters
the outlook. _Rifleman's_ action has taken over six hundred. A sensible
clearance! _Nemesis_ swings in with the precision of an express, and the
thud and clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a continuous
drumming note of deliverance. Alert and confident, the naval men accept
the great risks of their position. The ship's bows are entered to the
water at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weighing, casting
her stern high in the air. The bulkheads are by now taking place of keel
and bearing the huge weight of her on the water. At any moment she may
go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of the destroyer and
bear her down. For all the circling watch of her sister ship, the
submarine--if still he lives--may get in a shot at the standing target.
It is with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. Her decks
are jammed to the limit. She can carry no more. _Nemesis_ lists heavily
under her burdened decks as she goes ahead and clears.
Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheelhouse goes on ringing the
angles of time and course as though we were yet under helm and speed.
For a short term we have noted that the ship appears to have reached a
point of arrest in her foundering droop. She remains upright as she has
been since righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like the
lady she always was, she has added no fearsome list to the sum of our
distress. The familiar bridge, on which so many of our safe sea-days
have been spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold uneasy. She
cannot remain for long afloat. The end will come swiftly, without
warning--a sudden rupture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight.
We are not now many left on board. Striving and wrenching to man-handle
the only remaining boat--rendered idle for want of the tackles that have
parted on service of its twin--we succeed in pointing her outboard, and
await a further deepening of the bows ere launching her. Of the
military, the officer commanding, some few of his juniors, a group of
other ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a muster of
seamen, a few stewards, are banded with us at the last. We expect no
further service of the destroyers. The position of the ship is
over-menacing to any approach. They have all they can carry. Steaming at
a short distance they have the appearance of being heavily overloaded;
each has a staggering list and lies low in the water under their deck
encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick out-throw of the
remaining boat and the chances of a grip on floating wreckage to count
upon.
On a sudden swift sheer, _Rifleman_ takes the risk. Unheeding our
warning hail, she steams across the bows and backs at a high speed: her
rounded stern jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch on
a projection and give with the ring of buckling steel--she turns on the
throw of the propellers and closes aboard with a resounding impact that
sets her living deck-load to stagger.
We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, our small company
endeavors to get foothold on her decks. The destroyer widens off at the
rebound, but by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged aboard. One
fails to reach safety. A soldier loses grip and goes to the water. The
chief officer follows him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the
devoted labors of the last half-hour, he is in no condition to effect a
rescue. A sudden deep rumble from within the sinking ship warns the
destroyer captain to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our
shipmates: the propellers tear the water in a furious race that sweeps
them away, and we draw off swiftly from the side of the ship.
We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last
buoyant breath of _Cameronia_ is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to
the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly,
steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she
goes down.
THE MARKET
_By_ WILLIAM MCFEE
William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his writing
he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a background than
as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen this brief
and colorful little sketch to represent his talent because it is
different from the work with which most of his readers are
familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic of
him--an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings of
commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been for
some years an engineer in the sea service of the United Fruit
Company, with a Mediterranean interim--reflected in much of his
recent writing--during the War.
The publication of McFee's _Casuals of the Sea_ in 1916 was
something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to the
reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and subtlety.
His earlier books, _An Ocean Tramp_ and _Aliens_ (both republished
since), had gone almost unnoticed--which, it is safe to say, will
not happen again to anything he cares to publish. His later books
are _Captain Macedoine's Daughter_, _Harbours of Memory_, and _An
Engineer's Notebook_. He was born at sea in 1881, the son of a
sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb of London, served his
apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, and has been in ships
most of the time since 1905.
There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door; a rap having within
its insistent urgency a shadow of delicate diffidence, as though the
person responsible were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe
to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four-forty. One of the
dubious by-products of continuous service as a senior assistant at sea
is the habit of waking automatically about 4 A. M. This gives one
several hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one's sins, frailties, and
(more rarely) triumphs and virtues. For a man who gets up at say
four-thirty is regarded with aversion ashore. His family express
themselves with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and meditate, or
suffer the ignominy of being asked when he is going away again.
But this morning, in these old Chambers in an ancient Inn buried in the
heart of London City, I have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for
this momentous departure from a life of temporary but deliberate
indolence is a lady. "Cherchez la femme," as the French say with the dry
animosity of a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being on the
outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as already hinted, with a sharp
insistent delicacy. To this romantic summons I reply with an articulate
growl of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve the anxiety
of any reader who imagines an impending elopement it may be stated in
succinct truthfulness that we are bound on no such desperate venture. We
are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand, to Covent Garden
Market, to see the arrival of the metropolitan supply of produce.
Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as primitive as that favored
by gentlemen aroused to go on watch, and placating an occasional
repetition of the tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I
take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts of my door,
discover a young woman standing by the window looking out upon the
quadrangle of the old Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is
continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for articles in the
press. That is her profession, or one of her professions--writing
articles for the press. The other profession is selling manuscripts,
which constitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual agent's
commission she is selling one of my manuscripts. Being an unattached
and, as it were, unprotected male, she plans little excursions about
London to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is attired in the
flamboyant finery of a London flowergirl. She is about to get the
necessary copy for a special article in a morning paper. With the
exception of a certain expectant flash of her bright black Irish eyes,
she is entirely businesslike. Commenting on the beauty of an early
summer morning in town, we descend, and passing out under the ponderous
ancient archway, we make our leisurely progress westward down the
Strand.
London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that
extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about
her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness
which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are shining in the
sunlight as though paved with "patines of bright gold." Early 'buses
rumble by from neighboring barns where they have spent the night. And,
as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward into the great
rivers of traffic soon to pour round its base like some bold Byzantine
promontory, we see Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high.
From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross the great wains
are arriving from Paddington Terminal, from the market-garden section of
Middlesex and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts laden with
vegetables from Brentwood and Coggeshall, and neat vans packed with
crates of watercress which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and
Cambridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four-horse vehicles
from the docks, vehicles with peaches from South Africa, potatoes from
the Canary Islands, onions from France, apples from California, oranges
from the West Indies, pineapples from Central America, grapes from Spain
and bananas from Colombia.
We turn in under an archway behind a theatre and adjacent to the
stage-door of the Opera House. The booths are rapidly filling with
produce. Gentlemen in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable marbled
note-books walk about with an important air. A mountain range of
pumpkins rises behind a hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being
suspended from rails. The heads of barrels are being knocked in,
disclosing purple grapes buried in corkdust. Pears and figs, grown under
glass for wealthy patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken
crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in a splash of ruddy
gold on the plank runway. A wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets,
and the broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the air is
heavy with the acrid sweetness.
We pick our way among the booths and stalls until we find the flowers.
Here is a crowd of ladies, young, so-so and some quite matronly, and all
dressed in this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken. They are
grouped about an almost overpowering mass of blooms. Roses just now
predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a
glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without
ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge
aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one
imagines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round baskets,
eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to the majestic blazonry of
the roses and the dew-spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by.
"And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a
moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs
piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and
displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs
and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh,
penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the
flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps
Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see the
timber pier and the long line of rackety open-slatted cars jangling into
the dark shed, pushed by a noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys
lying asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats covering their
faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise the blue mountains; behind is
the motionless blue sea. I hear the whine of the elevators, the
monotonous click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible and
argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the tropic day, and see the
gleam of the white waves breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I
recall the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a solitude
alive, if one is equipped with knowledge, with a ceaseless warfare of
winged and crawling hosts. And while my companion is busily engaged in
getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out
of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his
two-wheeled barrow is the last link in the immense chain of
transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the
cockney pedestrian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a banana for
a couple of pennies.
HOLY IRELAND
_By_ JOYCE KILMER
This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kilmer
ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and insight that
lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub Street. In him,
as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become legendary, it was
part of his religion and his dream-life, and he treated it with
real affection and humor. You will find it cropping out many times
in his verses. The Irish problem as it is reflected in this country
is not always clearly understood. Ireland, in the minds of our
poets, is a mystical land of green hills, saints and leprechauns,
and its political problems are easy.
Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at Rutgers
College and Columbia University; taught school; worked on the staff
of the Standard Dictionary; passed through phases of socialism and
Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and joined the Sunday
staff of the New York _Times_ in 1913. He was killed fighting in
France in 1918. This sketch is taken from the second of the three
volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday, his friend and executor,
has collected Joyce Kilmer's work.
We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day--the third of a
four days' journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles
were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen
stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a
little house in a side street.
"Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and
dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a
spotless stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three
children--a girl of eight years, a boy of five, a boy of three. They
stared with round frightened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first
they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at once climbed
to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night. First we
lifted the packs from one another's aching shoulders: then, without
spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.
For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an occasional groan, an
oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a
forest. Then a voice came from the corner:
"Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily searched. There was no
Sergeant Reilly to be found.
"I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint," said the voice. And
with the curiosity of the American and the enthusiasm of the Irish we
lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.
He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were off and his
bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to
expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the
little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years of
soldiering and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic
sweetness, he was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More." We
listened respectfully.
"They cheer the King and then salute him," said Sergeant Reilly.
"A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we all joined in the chorus,
"Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More."
"Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to
talk at the top of their voices. What they said Heaven knows, but the
tones were friendly, even admiring.
"Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, "the lady who
runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take
off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don't
crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs."
Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true bourgeoise, with all
the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the
authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the
attic of her house to sleep in--nothing more; no light, no heat. Also,
wood is very expensive in France--for reasons that are engraven in
letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless--
"Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And she brought nearer to
the fire all the chairs the establishment possessed and some chests and
boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was
Solange, went out into the snow and came back with heaping armfuls of
small logs. The fire blazed merrily--more merrily than it had blazed
since August, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was
thick with steam from our drying socks.
Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had generously admitted all eleven of
us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in
spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French
was "du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon jour." Those of us who knew a
little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for the
others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We learned
that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle just one
month before our arrival in her home. She showed us with simple pride
and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she showed us those
of her two brothers--one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner
of war--of her mother and father, of herself dressed for First
Communion.
This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we
would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if
Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Communion, then
Madame's face cleared.
"Mais oui!" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous êtes Catholiques,
n'est-ce pas?"
At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this
question affirmatively. Tattered prayer-books and somewhat dingy
scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered their
surprise and delight to each other, and every exhibit called for a new
outburst.
"Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voilà, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le
Sacré Cœur!" (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent
as it looks in print).
Now other treasures, too, were shown--treasures chiefly photographic.
There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame
and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They admired
and sympathized; they exclaimed appropriately at the beauty of every
girl's face, the tenderness of every pictured mother. We had become the
intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and we her into
ours.
Soldiers--American soldiers of Irish descent--have souls and hearts.
These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But our
stomachs remained--and that they yearned was evident to us. We had made
our hike on a meal of hardtack and "corned willy." Mess call would sound
soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through the snowy
streets to the temporary mess-shack? We knew our supply wagons had not
succeeded in climbing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread
and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great depression settled
upon us.
But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.
"Boys," he said, "this here lady has got a good fire going, and I'll bet
she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?"
The proposal was received joyously at first. Then some one said:
"But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I--not a damn sou!" said
another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.
Again Sergeant Reilly spoke:
"I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he said. "But let's have
a show-down. I guess we've got enough to buy somethin' to eat."
It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of the
search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made up for
the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins on the
table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a Chinese
piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money
came in all to eight francs.
It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry soldiers these days
in France. But there was no harm in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an
ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly in
explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that we
were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and that
we wanted her to cook us something to eat.
Now Madame was what they call in New England a "capable" woman. In a
jiffy she had the money in Solange's hand and had that admirable child
cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what
she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for
supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the fire,
the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed.
Nothing in the way of a food cupboard could be seen. And the only other
room of the house was the bare attic.
When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself these
articles: (1) two loaves of war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3)
three cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat; (6) a bag of
coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated, exactly
the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.
Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then with a veritable French
trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange
had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a chain
over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed, Madame
standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret that I do
not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping the
potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their part
to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.
We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The only
absentees were the two little boys, Michael and Paul. And they were
really absent only from our board--they were in the room, in the great
built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange. Their
little bodies were covered by the three-foot thick mattress-like red
silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us
unblinkingly all the evening.
But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of
dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame
stopped her chattering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped her
chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather searchingly
at us. We didn't know what was the matter, but we felt rather
embarrassed.
Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make
foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was
surprised to see that American Catholics did not say grace before
eating like French Catholics.
We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved
the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an
ex-seminarian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if a
bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after we had
blessed ourselves: "Benedicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat
Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen."
Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we
sat down again to eat.
It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation--except on the
part of Madame and Solange--but there was plenty of good cheer. Also
there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of
us--half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who
drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an
apple pie without stopping to take breath, was satisfied. There were
toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly--toasts to Madame, and to
the children, and to France, and to the United States, and to the Old
Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent only
to illuminati of Sergeant Reilly's circle).
The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly said, we sat
before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and
full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by
Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the
evening's expenditures--totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.
Now when soldiers are unhappy--during a long, hard hike, for
instance--they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy,
as on the evening now under consideration, they sing to express their
satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." We shook the
kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We
informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact, the whole village,
that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana
home. We grew sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant Reilly
obliged with a reel--in his socks--to an accomplishment of whistling and
handclapping.
Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She
responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and
finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking
down some paper-covered books.
There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of
pages. Then, after some preliminary coughing and humming, the music
began--the woman's rich alto blending with the child's shrill but sweet
notes. And what they sang was "Tantum ergo Sacramentum."
Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this
company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why we
found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem
appropriate to all of us--to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive
a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on
Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fitting. Not
one of us then or later expressed any surprise that this hymn, familiar
to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down
the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to
us in this strange land and in these strange circumstances.
Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the season
was appropriate, one of us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item
on the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our ex-seminarian knew
all the words and the rest of us came in strong with "Venite, adoremus
Dominum."
Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies
obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune" and other simple ballads of old
France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and
there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening's
entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections. We
sang--as best we could--the "Star-Spangled Banner," Solange and her
mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we
attempted "La Marseillaise." Of course, we did not know the words.
Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the
song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got to work in
earnest. Madame sang with us, and Solange. But during the final stanza
Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and
looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from under the red
comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred
hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about
that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's widow--we all felt it.
And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.
There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchanging, that hang over the
green slopes of some mountains I know. I have seen them on the Irish
hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they are
made of the tears of good brave women.
Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant
Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw.
Blankets, shelter-halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep.
Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The
final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a corner of his mouth.
"That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said. "We sure were in luck
when we struck this billet."
He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes. Then
he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the floor,
where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.
"You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is right. What do you know
about that lady, anyway?"
"Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty white."
"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how much trouble that woman
took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a
damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give
her. And she's out about six francs for firewood, too--I wish to God I
had the money to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and
hungry, too.
"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an
occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she
cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit
down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and
the little Sallie there sung for us.
"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing
them church hymns to me that way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn
sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I
sort of realize what we're fighting for now, and I never did before.
It's for women like that and their kids.
"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing them hymns. I
remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there's many
women like that in France now--telling their beads and singing the old
hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she's just after treating
us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I
think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.'"
A FAMILIAR PREFACE
_By_ JOSEPH CONRAD
This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in whatever
form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It is from
the preface to _A Personal Record_, that fascinating
autobiographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of
a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in English. As
a companion piece, those who have the honor of the writer's craft
at heart should read Conrad's preface to _The Nigger of the
Narcissus_.
"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to wonder
what some newspaper owners--say Mr. Hearst--would reply to that?
Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here. If by
any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be to his
soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.
As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
ourselves; yet this little book[A] is the result of a friendly
suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself
with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice
insisted, "You know, you really must."
It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must!...
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of
sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this
by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable
than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a
whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the other hand, you
cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek.
Shouted with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction, these two by
their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's "virtue" for
you if you like!... Of course, the accent must be attended to. The right
accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering or the
tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was
an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics
commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the
right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
What a dream for a writer! Because written words have their accent, too.
Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out
aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It
may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's
no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a
pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and
fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world
unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and
something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
posterity. Among other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose
advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
embroil one with one's friends.
"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine among
either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the
mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in
his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among
imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains,
to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a
seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.
In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help
thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic
author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons
esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the
opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of
fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print
till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of
his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
they recommend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its
men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
am incorrigible.
Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
sea life, I have a special piety toward that form of my past; for its
impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me,
and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then,
that in my two exclusively sea books--"The Nigger of the Narcissus," and
"The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth"
and "Typhoon")--I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
hands and the objects of their care.
One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to
write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of
what the French would call _sécheresse du cœur_. Fifteen years of
unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I
feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can
only express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom
an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of
either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the
reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or
contempt. No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which
only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a
task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the
world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the
regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the
dignity of one's work.
And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as
the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
distant edge of the horizon.
Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for
love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound
to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea
training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one
thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of
losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which
is the first condition of good service. And I have earned my notion of
good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never
sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of
pure esthetes.
As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable
or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general
principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough, perhaps, and of
necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
giggles.
These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however
humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his
thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit
of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much
the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to
believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for
other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work?
To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is
not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he
may be, since his aim is to reach the wry fount of laughter and tears.
The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy
of respect, too. And he is not insensible who pays them the
undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one
of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will
is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
How. As the Frenchman said, "_Il y a toujours la manière_." Very true.
Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as
old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of
Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way
or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty
convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards
ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace
of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at
these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All
claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from
which a philosophical mind should be free.
ON DRAWING
_By_ A. P. HERBERT
A. P. Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger English
writers, and has done remarkable work in fields apparently
incompatible: light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beautifully
written tragic novel, _The Secret Battle_. This last was
unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War, but
its sale was tragically small. _The House by the River_, a later
book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale, apparently
cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery story," but
really a study of selfishness and cowardice done with startling
irony and intensity.
Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College, Oxford,
where he took his degree in 1914. He saw military service at the
Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the staff of _Punch_.
There is no young writer in England from whom one may more
confidently expect a continuance of fine work. This airy and
delicious little absurdity is a perfect example of what a genuine
humorist can do.
If there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the
oldfashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let
him examine Mr. Herbert's _The Secret Battle_. This book often
sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek--e.g.,
Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet,
informal and swift. If these are not the cardinal prose virtues,
what are?
It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is
true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I
have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have
to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such
functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can
satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing
during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an
expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know
Drawing as well as it can be known.
The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and
by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials.
An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give
you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and
very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is
essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much
artistic pleasure--except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose
between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and
making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.
Much the best committees from the point of view of material are
committees about business which meet at business premises--shipping
offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white
blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the
directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two
pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.
When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away,
the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the
chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but
just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for
their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when
they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they
had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.
As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. 1).
[Illustration: FIG. 1]
When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most
difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where the eye goes.
If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man
spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye
(Fig. 2).
[Illustration: FIG. 2]
Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a
gamble. Personally, I go in for _strong heads_ (Fig. 3).
[Illustration: FIG. 3]
I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is
not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads; they make it so
difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck.
The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this
the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4).
[Illustration: FIG. 4]
I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the
southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you
can't go back; not unless you are on a _very_ good committee which
provides india-rubber as well as pencils.
Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy or black, or lightish
and thin. It depends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For
myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up better
(Fig. 5).
[Illustration: FIG. 5]
Until one draws hair one never realizes what large heads people have.
Doing the hair takes the whole of a speech, usually, even one of the
chairman's speeches.
This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place.
And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he
would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at
the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.
I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing.
Sometimes I draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is
always a dud.
There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a
low forehead and beetling brows--a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a
powerful face. The one on the left was meant to be another Bolshevik,
arguing with him. But he has turned out to be a lady, so I have had to
give her a "bun." She is a lady solicitor; but I don't know how she came
to be talking to the Bolshevik.
[Illustration: FIG. 6]
When you have learned how to do men, the only other things in Drawing
are Perspective and Landscape.
PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road
with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).
I have put in a fence as well.
LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most
amusing, especially fluffy trees.
Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).
Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would
have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.
[Illustration: FIG. 7]
[Illustration: FIG. 8]
But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like
this through.
There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a
man front-face. It can't be done.
O. HENRY
_By_ O. W. FIRKINS
Several years ago I turned to _Who's Who in America_ in hope of
finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilliant
reviews--chiefly of poetry--were appearing in _The Nation_. I found
no entry, but every few months I would again rummage that stout red
volume with the same intention, forgetting that I had done so
before without success. It seemed hardly credible that a critic so
brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious compilers of that
work, which includes hundreds of hacks and fourflushers. When
gathering the contents of this book I tried _Who's Who_ again,
still without result. I wrote to Mr. Firkins pleading for
biographical details; modestly, but firmly, he denied me.
So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind one
of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. One
sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destination by
the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and paradoxes. That
is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, an author who has
often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not say overpraised) by
people incompetent to appreciate his true greatness. Mr. Robert
Cortes Holliday, in an essay called "The Amazing Failure of O.
Henry," said that O. Henry created no memorable characters. Mr.
Firkins suggests the obvious but satisfying answer--New York itself
is his triumph. The New York of O. Henry, already almost erased
physically, remains a personality and an identity.
Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of Minnesota,
and a contributing editor of _The Weekly Review_, in which this
essay first appeared in September, 1919. The footnotes are, of
course, his own.
There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle class views him
as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy; part of the higher
criticism sees in him little but sensation and persiflage. Between these
views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens are _ipso
facto_ the demons of Christianity. Unmixed assertions, however, are
commonly mixtures of truth and falsehood; there is room to-day for an
estimate which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither.
There is one literary trait in which I am unable to name any writer of
tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry.[B] It is not primary or
even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value _per se_ than
the condition or foundation of values. But its utility is manifest, and
it is rare among men: Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of
its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence
would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories--not to
the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer
phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed,
but to the disposition of masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a
half-educated American provincial should have been original in a field
in which original men have been copyists is enough of itself to make his
personality observable.
Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely superfluous. I supply
two instances. Two lads, parting in New York, agree to meet "After
Twenty Years" at a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful;
but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual silence and
ignorance have turned the one into a dashing criminal, the other into a
sober officer of the law. Behind the picturesque and captivating
rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral problem of
arresting gravity. This is dealt with in six pages of the "Four
Million." The "Furnished Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve
pages. Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower West Side a man
trails a woman. Chance leads him to the very room in which the woman
ended her life the week before. Between him and the truth the avarice of
a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of a lie. In the bed in which
the girl slept and died, the man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of
the deadly fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mournful
coincidence forever from the knowledge of mankind. O. Henry gave these
tales neither extension nor prominence; so far as I know, they were
received without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body of work in
which such specimens are undistinguished hardly requires comment.
A few types among these stories may be specified. There are the Sydney
Cartonisms, defined in the name; love-stories in which divided hearts,
or simply divided persons, are brought together by the strategy of
chance; hoax stories--deft pictures of smiling roguery; "prince and
pauper" stories, in which wealth and poverty face each other, sometimes
enact each other; disguise stories, in which the wrong clothes often
draw the wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim sacrifices
his beloved watch to buy combs for Della, who, meanwhile, has sacrificed
her beloved hair to buy a chain for Jim.
This imperfect list is eloquent in its way; it smooths our path to the
assertion that O. Henry's specialty is the enlistment of original method
in the service of traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty
years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane to the old homestead.[C]
Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives and antitheses in
which his own faculty delighted. In mechanical invention he is almost
the leader of his race. In a related quality--a defect--his leadership
is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the probable, or, more
precisely, of the available in the improbable, ever became equally
weakened or deadened in a man who made his living by its exercise. The
improbable, even the impossible, has its place in art, though that place
is relatively low; and it is curious that works such as the "Arabian
Nights" and Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the incredible,
are the works which give almost no trouble on the score of
verisimilitude. The truth is that we reject not what it is impossible to
prove, or even what it is possible to disprove, but what it is
impossible to imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimaginable--that
is his crime.
The right and wrong improbabilities may be illustrated from two burglar
stories. "Sixes and Sevens" contains an excellent tale of a burglar and
a citizen who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the score of
their common sufferings from rheumatism. This feeling in practice would
not triumph over fear and greed; but the feeling is natural, and
everybody with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. Nature
_tends_ towards that impossibility, and art, lifting, so to speak, the
lid which fact drops upon nature, reveals nature in belying fact. In
another story, in "Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in
which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette of their mutual
relation by formulas derived from short stories with which both are
amazingly conversant. This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an
imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the maturity of small
boys will have naught to do with this insanity.
But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inventions in his tales the
very utterance of which--not the mere substance but the utterance--on
the part of a man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses the
reader as incredible. In a "Comedy in Rubber," two persons become so
used to spectatorship at transactions in the street that they drift into
the part of spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. Can
human daring or human folly go further? O. Henry is on the spot to prove
that they can. In the "Romance of a Busy Broker," a busy and forgetful
man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his hand to the
stenographer _whom he had married the night before_.
The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I came upon the
following sentence: "Never will the imagination approach the
improbabilities and the antitheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated
February 21, 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was not born
till September of the same year.
Passing on to style, we are still in the land of antithesis. The style
is gross--and fine. Of the plenitude of its stimulus, there can be no
question. In "Sixes and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental
morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and blows. O. Henry's
public seems imaged in that young man. But I draw a sharp distinction
between the _tone_ of the style and its _pattern_. The tone is brazen,
or, better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incorrigible; it
reeks with that air of _performance_ which is opposed to real
efficiency. But the pattern is another matter. The South rounds its
periods like its vowels; O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in
his boyhood. His sentences are _built_--a rare thing in the best writers
of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, he was strong, though it
must be confessed that the tale-teller was now and then hustled from the
rostrum by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce a felicity
with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the
sovereigns of English. "In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs.
McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat
went into Mrs. McCaskey."
I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet even for these
levities with which his pages are so liberally besprinkled or bedaubed,
some half-apology may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is
consummate. A horseman who should dismount to pick up a bauble would be
childish; O. Henry picks it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is
most pardonable in the man with whom its use is least exclusive and
least necessary. There are men who, going for a walk, take their dogs
with them; there are other men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute
slang for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to the second
will exactly illustrate the superiority of O. Henry to the abject
traffickers in slang.
In the "Pendulum" Katy has a new patch in her crazy quilt which the ice
man cut from the end of his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate,"
threading the mazes of a banana grove is compared to "paging the palm
room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith." O. Henry's is the type
of mind to which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room are
presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging continuity. There was
hardly an object in the merry-go-round of civilized life that had not
offered at least an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming eyes.
Nothing escapes from the besom of his allusiveness, and the style is
streaked and pied, almost to monotony, by the accumulation of lively
details.
If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but it is part of the
grimness of the bargain that destiny drives with us that the mixture of
the crude and the rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites
and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the kingdom of style O.
Henry's estates were princely, but, to pay his debts, he must have sold
them all.
Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have been offset by
extraordinary defects. To lift our author out of the class of brilliant
and skilful entertainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I should
answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowledge of setting, which is clear
and first-hand, but subsidiary, above the order of events, which is,
generally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which are sound and
warm, but almost purely derivative, there is a rather small, but
impressive body of first-hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his
endurance may hinge.
I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York. With the
exception of his New Orleans, I care little for his South and West,
which are a boyish South and West, and as little, or even less, for his
Spanish-American communities. My objection to his opera-bouffe republics
is, not that they are inadequate as republics (for that we were entirely
prepared), but that they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his
show from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even among
pretenses, and a faith must be induced before its removal can enliven
us. But his New York has quality. It is of the family of Dickens's
London and Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the family. Mr.
Howells, in his profound and valuable study of the metropolis in a
"Hazard of New Fortunes," is penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand,
is _penetrated_. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is caught in
the mesh of the imagination.
O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human destiny and human
nature. In these pictures he is not formally accurate; he could never or
seldom set his truth before us in that moderation and proportion which
truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality. He was apt to present
his insight in a sort of parable or allegory, to upraise it before the
eyes of mankind on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggeration.
Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a lie, and tales which are
dramatized epigrams are subject to a like constraint. The force,
however, is real. I could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful
exposition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial story in the
volume which appropriates its title. It wanted only the skilled romantic
touch of a Gautier or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the
masterpieces of its kind in contemporary letters.
Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly perceptible; we draw
close to the bare fact. O. Henry, fortunate in plots, is peculiarly
fortunate in his renunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it
is also costly. There is an admirable little story called the "Pendulum"
(in the "Trimmed Lamp"), the simplicity of whose fable would have
satisfied Coppée or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom, has
come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture. She departs for a few
hours, and, by the break in usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to
womanhood. She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That is all. O.
Henry could not have given us less--or more. Farcical, clownish, if you
will, the story resembles those clowns who carry daggers under their
motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious hat, the reader
smiles, and quails. I will mention a few other examples of insights with
the proviso that they are not specially commended to the man whose quest
in the short story is the electrifying or the calorific. They include
the "Social Triangle," the "Making of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign
Policy of Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief Début of
Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Complete Life of John Hopkins" in
the "Voice of the City." I cannot close this summary of good points
without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive portrayal of humane
and cheerful scoundrels in the "Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false
to species, is faithful to genus.
O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side, both in merits and
defects, reminds us of those park benches so characteristic of his tales
which are occupied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at the
other. But, to complete the image, we must add as a casual visitor to
that bench a seer or a student, who, sitting down between the previous
comers and suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should gaze
with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison upon the passing crowd.
In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian tradition meet. His
mind, quick to don the guise of modernity, was impervious to its spirit.
The specifically modern movements, the scientific awakening, the
religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, the
enfranchisement of women--these never interfered with his artless and
joyous pursuit of the old romantic motives of love, hate, wealth,
poverty, gentility, disguise, and crime. On two points a moral record
which, in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, rises
almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excitement had become
available and permissible, this worshiper of stimulus never touched with
so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The
second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. His passionate
concern for this wrong derives a peculiar emphasis from the general
refusal of his books to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in
its collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he is asked: "Are
you one of the bunch?" (meaning one of the bunch of grasping and
grinding employers), the response, through all its slang, is
soul-stirring. "'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the fellow
that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind man for his
pennies.'" The author of that retort may have some difficulty with the
sentries that watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none with
the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem.
THE MOWING OF A FIELD
_By_ HILAIRE BELLOC
We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of the
scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious fellow:
if you read him much you will find yourself trying to imitate him;
there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught the trick from
Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the essay I wrote about
him in a book called _Shandygaff_. You can refer to it there, which
will be good business all round. I know it is a worthy essay, for
much of it was cribbed from an article by Mr. Thomas Seccombe,
which an American paper lifted from the English journal which,
presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for it. I wrote it for the Boston
_Transcript_, where I knew the theft would be undetected; and in
shoveling together some stuff for a book (that was in 1917, the
cost of living was rising at an angle of forty-five degrees, as so
many graphs have shown) I put it in, forgetting (until too late)
that some of it was absolute plunder.
Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake to
think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish it to
become _their_ property, so that they may more perfectly respect
it."
And by the way, Max Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in _A Christmas
Garland_, is something not to be missed. It is one of the best
proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm does not
waste his time mimicking the small fry.
Hilaire Belloc--son of a French father and an English mother; his
happy junction of both English and French genius in prose is
hereditary--was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex as a
child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol
College, Oxford, 1893-95, and sat four years (1906-10) in the House
of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gatherings of
essays) _On Nothing_, _On Everything_, _On Something_, _Hills and
the Sea_, _First and Last_; then you can read _The Path to Rome_,
and _The Four Men_, and _Caliban's Guide to Letters_ and _The
Pyrenees_ and _Marie Antoinette_. If you desire the bouillon (or
bullion) of his charm, there is _A Picked Company_, a selection (by
Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work. It is published
by Methuen and Company, 36 Essex Street W. C., London.
Having done so, come again: we will go off in a corner and talk
about Mr. Belloc.
There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear,
where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the
scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to
that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they
choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone
leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable: now green
where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the
homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they
reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot
attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the
floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by
lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great
rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that
other. But the plains above which they have traveled and the Weald to
which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall.
The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the
salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was
nourished here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and
all the life that all things draw from the air.
In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches
that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a
glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and
glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw the sea. To this place
very lately I returned.
The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not
less charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much
more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not
intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy
ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more
beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me
as I approached--a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a
small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a
low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things
fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the
place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its
better reality. "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say
is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined
save in a moment when at last it is attained."
When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house
I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I
saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for
the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do--of those
things at least which are very old--there is an exact moment when they
are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it
works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not
given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with
delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn
of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in
the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is
thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has
already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for
delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it
comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between
the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are
over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had
come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind;
and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which
always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the
very end of that rain--but not later--that grass should be cut for hay.
True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than
the grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the
latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower
and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a
harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before
maturity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our
hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and
Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes
always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass
too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to
these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.
June was in full advance; it was the beginning of that season when the
night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it,
never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.
Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the
mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window,
all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald,
where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the
hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the
rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had
awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to
where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I
remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe,
just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were
many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and
the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.
When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there
were already many colors in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen
my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry.
Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to
get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an
advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait
till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours of
work (and those the coolest), and next--which is more important--you
lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. So
I at once began to sharpen my scythe.
There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe, and it is worth
describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will
see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then
also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good
thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's
mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from
you, and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping
it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade-edge and
then down the other, beginning near the handle and going on to the point
and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps,
cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen
to you.
To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and
stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp
enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite
silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much
for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily
recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower.
Mowing well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing at all--are separated
by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle,
and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing.
For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower
Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all
these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the
point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the
handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with
his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it
clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the
ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his
stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the
meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be
done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of
these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just
barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of
his mowing are always the same.
So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much
is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with
which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on
good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed
wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you
treat it honorably and in a manner that makes it recognize its service.
The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that
swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength
into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work.
The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force
the scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as
nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up
every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every
stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing
a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive
mood: be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious
only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound. In
this mowing should be like one's prayers--all of a sort and always the
same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them, as it
were, with half your mind: that happier half, the half that does not
bother.
In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went
forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and
bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until
the air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I sharpened my
scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down
again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell rang
in the chapel above me--that is, long before six o'clock, which is the
time for the Angelus--I had many swathes already lying in order parallel
like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great contrast
with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of
Val-ès-Dunes, where--
The tall son of the Seven Winds
Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made
a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)
was like a scythe
In Arcus when the grass is high
And all the swathes in order lie,
And there's the bailiff standing by
A-gathering of the tithe.
So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and
from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be
seen.
I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the
village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in
older times, before I had left the Valley.
He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but
which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or
Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and
makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the
Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it active
and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors
turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that
our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and
ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I believe, an
older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the
strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and
camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the
upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road
from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and
mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and
were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed. They remain;
and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin
and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.
To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said
to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in
duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand;
and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good
custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous
pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was
his labor at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were
free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the
dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the
Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and
observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not
begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom
with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own
steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say
that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder,
according to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking critically
at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains.
There is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their
exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig
you have there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine
pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in
one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I
say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the
pig, and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved
by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming
half the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in
silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly,
till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will
also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the
pig--and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly
accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a
spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you
what I _will_ do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value,
the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in
the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or lime, always with
elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and
more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the
mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred
and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a
motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two
thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might
take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising
the land.
Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get
his scythe. But I went into this house and brought out a gallon jar of
small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small
ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs
called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because
he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the
other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun
rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there
was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of
linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
lying around them when the battle is over and done.
Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man
and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the
musical sharpening of a scythe.
The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley;
for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading;
and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the
field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes
between the dead and yellow swathes.
These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our
return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could,
for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to
spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling
blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the
carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little
over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and
deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the
rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the
trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I
paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should
meet in the same place before sunrise.
He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do,
making their walking a part of the easy but continual labor of their
lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north
and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind
the woods of No Man's Land.
THE STUDENT LIFE
By WILLIAM OSLER
Sir William Osler, one of the best-loved and most influential
teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began his
education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, where he
served as professor of medicine, 1874-84. Wherever he worked his
gifted and unique personality was a center of inspiration--at the
University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns Hopkins, 1889-1904.
In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Professor of Medicine; he died
in England in 1919.
Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great
doctor's place in their own world; but one would like to see his
honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. His
generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully
expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can
afford to overlook _Æquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Alabama
Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Immortality and
Counsels and Ideals_, this last an anthology collected from his
professional papers by one of his pupils. He stands in the
honorable line of those great masters who have found their highest
usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. His lucid and
exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quotation from
the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness,
put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. One could get a
liberal education in literature merely by following up all his
quotations and references. He was more deeply versed in the
classics than many professors of Greek and Latin; the whole music
of English poetry seemed to be current in his blood. His essay on
Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful story _Via Wireless_, tells
the student more about that poet than many a volume of biography.
When was biography more delightfully written than in his volume _An
Alabama Student?_
Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osler attended him years ago, "Osler
believes in the gospel of encouragement--of putting the best
construction on things--the best foot forward. He's a fine fellow
and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel of
encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight reader.
Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his books
are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young
student. As one who has found them an unfailing delight, I venture
to hope that our medical confrères may not be the only readers to
enjoy their vivacity and charm.
EXCEPT it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study
than a student. Shakespeare might have made him a fourth in his immortal
group. The lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine frenzy,
the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the student aflame with the
desire for knowledge are of "imagination all compact." To an absorbing
passion, a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring energy, if
the student is to become a devotee of the gray-eyed goddess to whose law
his services are bound. Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of
Minerva is not for all. For the one, the pure life; for the other, what
Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." Here again the student
often resembles the poet--he is born, not made. While the resultant of
two molding forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the hidden
germinal energies, which produce in each one of us national, family, and
individual traits, the true student possesses in some measure a divine
spark which sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies
definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by which you may
recognize the genuine article from a Boojum--an absorbing desire to know
the truth, an unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open,
honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.
At the outset do not be worried about this big question--Truth. It is a
very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as
much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the
whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be
content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the
thirst--a thirst that from the soul must rise!--the fervent longing, are
the be-all and the end-all. What is the student but a lover courting a
fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is
brought out his second great characteristic--steadfastness of purpose.
Unless from the start the limitations incident to our frail human
faculties are frankly accepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you.
The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that
the best men accept--with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining
at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger
portion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive does the student
escape perdition. It is not, as Charles Lamb remarks, that some people
do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, but the
tragic fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condition of
mind-blindness in which the truth is not recognized, though it stares
you in the face. This can never happen to a man who has followed step by
step the growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases of its
evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of life that every truth has
to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey
knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years
demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to publish the
facts on which the truth was based.[D]
Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift
his position to meet the new conditions in which new truths are born, or
old ones modified beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense
of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say
advisedly an honest heart--the honest head is prone to be cold and
stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain
that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put
the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It
will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by
the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of
a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a
lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.
You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since
that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude
of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be
in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most
delightful way, signifying a bond of intellectual filiation. A fraternal
attitude is not easy to cultivate--the chasm between the chair and the
bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a
cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a
height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The
new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps
unconsciously by his very manner antagonizing minds to whose level he
cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his
juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no
appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught--both are in the
same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated,
the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor,
whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first
consideration.
The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the
education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a
medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years
under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will falter and fail in
the race or whether you will be faithful to the end depends on the
training before the start, and on your staying powers, points upon which
I need not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few may become
great students, and now and again one of you will be found who does
easily and well what others cannot do at all, or very badly, which is
John Ferriar's excellent definition of a genius.
In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which is the life of this
continent, it is not easy to train first-class students. Under present
conditions it is hard to get the needful seclusion, on which account it
is that our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I have
always been much impressed by the advice of St. Chrysostom: "Depart from
the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is
hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep her fruit till it be
ripe." The dilettante is abroad in the land, the man who is always
venturing on tasks for which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind
fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curriculum: and while
many things are studied, few are studied thoroughly. Men will not take
time to get to the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the
price the modern student pays for success. Thoroughness is the most
difficult habit to acquire, but it is the pearl of great price, worth
all the worry and trouble of the search. The dilettante lives an easy,
butterfly life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which the
treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or wrung by patient
research in the laboratories. Take, for example, the early history of
this country--how easy for the student of the one type to get a
smattering, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of the
French and Spanish settlements. Put an original document before him, and
it might as well be Arabic. What we need is the other type, the man who
knows the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in what may be
called the embryology of history, has yet a powerful vision for the
minutiæ of life. It is these kitchen and backstair men who are to be
encouraged, the men who know the subject in hand in all possible
relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is possible to become
so absorbed in the problem of the "enclitic de," or the
structure of the flagella of the Trichomonas, or of the toes of the
prehistoric horse, that the student loses the sense of proportion in his
work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which are valueless
because not in touch with current knowledge. You remember poor Casaubon,
in "Middlemarch," whose painful scholarship was lost on this account.
The best preventive to this is to get denationalized early. The true
student is a citizen of the world, the allegiance of whose soul, at any
rate, is too precious to be restricted to a single country. The great
minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language,
and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company
of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the
cosmopolitan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the
full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands
other than his own--French, English, German, American, Japanese,
Russian, Italian--there must be no discrimination by the loyal student
who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind
and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what
stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the
rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be
effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How
often has it happened that years of precious time have been given to a
problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, because of the
ignorance of what had been done elsewhere. And it is not only book
knowledge and journal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not
only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises,
but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate
better the failings or successes in his own line of work, perhaps to
look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose
limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own.
Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concentration must then
be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a
knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the
slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he
may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but
which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think
that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt--men who
took the whole field of knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from
a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can
tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle,
as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of
the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will
look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal
to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-continental railway. He
is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to
order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when or
where he may arise. The conditions seem to be present even under the
most unlikely externals. Some of the greatest students this country has
produced have come from small villages and country places. It is
impossible to predict from a study of the environment, which a "strong
propensity of nature," to quote Milton's phrase again, will easily bend
or break.
The student must be allowed full freedom in his work, undisturbed by the
utilitarian spirit of the Philistine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts
pure science. The present remarkable position in applied science and in
industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible by men who did
pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, in biology, and in physiology,
without a thought in their researches of any practical application. The
members of this higher group of productive students are rarely
understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as little their
unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect of the practical side of
the problems.
Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as an honored member of
the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of
some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack and
wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swearings and starings,
pribbles and prabbles"; but all that has changed with the curriculum,
and the "Meds" now roar you as gently as the "Theologs." On account of
the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your studies, what I
have said upon the general life and mental attitude of the student
applies with tenfold force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily
anomalies and diseases--the machine in order, the machine in disorder,
and the business yours to put it to rights. Through all the phases of
its career this most complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will
be the subject of our study and of your care--the naked, new-born
infant, the artless child, the lad and the lassie just aware of the tree
of knowledge overhead, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman
with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the aged, peaceful in
the contemplation of the past. Almost everything has been renewed in the
science and in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries
there has been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential
features of the life which is our contemplation and our care. The sick
love-child of Israel's sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the
great Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and
"Tully's daughter mourned so tenderly," are not of any age or any
race--they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, and
the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is
laid, and this eternal note of sadness would be insupportable if the
daily tragedies were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and
devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain you more potently
than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may
be thought, the true poetry of life--the poetry of the commonplace, of
the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with their loves and
their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. The comedy, too, of life
will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor
at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his
patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned
towards him as the tragic. Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your
stars if they have given you the proper sense to enable you to
appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which we catch our
fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one of the free gifts of the gods,
unevenly distributed, not bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions.
In undue measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the
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