LITERATURE AND LIFE
SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS
By William Dean Howells
CONTENTS
WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK
I.
II.
III.
SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN
I.
II.
III.
IV.
WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT
I.
II.
III.
IV
A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
A SHE HAMLET
I.
II.
III.
THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
SAWDUST IN THE ARENA
I.
II.
III.
AT A DIME MUSEUM
I.
II.
AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE
I.
II.
THE HORSE SHOW
I.
II.
III.
IV.
THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER
I.
II.
III.
AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO
I.
II.
FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
THE ART OF THE ADSMITH
I.
II.
III.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM
I.
II.
PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION
I.
II.
THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART
I.
II.
III.
POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
I.
II.
III.
IV.
STORAGE
I.
II.
III.
IV
“FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O”
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK
The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I
came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization,
which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish now
to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration.
I.
The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was
really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being
tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of
frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of
resentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passing
through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the
sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the
sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no
peddlers’ carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four
shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases in
their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer
saloons. The butchers’ windows were painted with patterns of frost,
through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous
stalactites from the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sympathy
with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine,
which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers
of powdered quartz.
But it was before I reached this final point that I received into my
consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an
increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so
small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she
appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail
which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened
hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her
little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would have been more
effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth obliges me to
own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. The pail-which was
half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to overflowing with small
pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been for this I might have
taken her for a child of the better classes, she was so comfortably clad.
But in that case she would have had to be fifteen or sixteen years old, in
order to be doing so efficiently and responsibly the work which, as the
child of the worse classes, she was actually doing at five or six. We
must, indeed, allow that the early self-helpfulness of such children is
very remarkable, and all the more so because they grow up into men and
women so stupid that, according to the theories of all polite economists,
they have to have their discontent with their conditions put into their
heads by malevolent agitators.
From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest; it
was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothing of
it. From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits of coke
that tumbled from her heaping pail. She could not consent to lose one of
them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of them stay on
the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her jacket, and
trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, who planted
himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands in his
pockets. I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in his furtive eye
that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance to have fun with her by
upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about till she cried with
vexation, was one which might not often present itself, and I do not know
what made him forego it, but I know that he did, and that he finally
passed her, as I have seen a young dog pass a little cat, after having
stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it.
I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towards
the river again I received the second instalment of my present perplexity.
A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard which I now
perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed two brisk old women,
snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold like the child, who
vied with each other in catching up the lumps of coke that were jolted
from the load, and filling their aprons with them; such old women, so
hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the withered apples red in
their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may have been about sixty years,
or sixty-five, the time of life when most women are grandmothers and are
relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats of their children’s
homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visions of lilac and
lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren. The fancy can
hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimble beldams, who
hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking up their day’s
supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart. Even the attempt
is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not bred to
strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that
figure. I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; I can only
imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it;
who had begun to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one
with the pail, and must fight without ceasing to their graves. But I am
not unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I saw to be one of
the things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that
they always have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I could out
of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about him
at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of
pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind him.
II.
It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is
what to do with the fact. The question began with me almost at once, or at
least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the wind at
my back. I was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic instinct
thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I could make of
what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I have something very
pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick up coke
for her sick daughter’s freezing orphans till she fell sick herself?
What should I do with the family in that case? They could not be left at
that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of about
eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble
neighborhood, who should take her grandmother’s place. I decided
that I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, and
could manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena;
either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw that
I must make her Venetian. Here I was on safe ground, and at once the
love-interest appeared to help me out. By virtue of the law of contrasts;
it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent,
blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance with
Scandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels. His name was Janssen, a good,
distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I
thought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from
that of a Swedish waitress we once had.
Janssen—Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina’s
grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of
coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep
indifference. At first he noticed Marina—or Nina, as I soon saw I
must call her—with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother’s
hood and jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward,
she looked exactly like the old woman. I thought I would have Nina make
her self-sacrifice rebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do,
and follow the cokecart with tears. This would catch Janssen’s
notice, and he would wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old
woman was crying about, and then he would see that it was not the old
woman. He would see that it was Nina, and he would be in love with her at
once, for she would not only be very pretty, but he would know that she
was good, if she were willing to help her family in that way.
He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, Northern way. He would
do nothing to betray himself. But little by little he would begin to
befriend her. He would carelessly overload his cart before he left the
yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not only
this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he would
drive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load.
Nina would get to watching for him. She must not notice him much at first,
except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart. But after
several mornings she must see that he is very strong and handsome. Then,
after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, her vivid black eyes,
with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his cold blue eyes. This
must be the climax; and just at this point I gave my fancy a rest, while I
went into a drugstore at the corner of Avenue B to get my hands warm.
They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and I had suffered past
several places trying to think of an excuse to go in. I now asked the
druggist if he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, and this
put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was very polite.
We agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave way respectfully
when I doubted his opinion that the winters were getting milder. I made
him reflect that there was no reason for this, and that it was probably an
illusion from that deeper impression which all experiences made on us in
the past, when we were younger; I ought to say that he was an elderly man,
too. I said I fancied such a morning as this was not very mild for people
that had no fires, and this brought me back again to Janssen and Marina,
by way of the coke-cart. The thought of them rapt me so far from the
druggist that I listened to his answer with a glazing eye, and did not
know what he said. My hands had now got warm, and I bade him good-morning
with a parting regret, which he civilly shared, that he had not the thing
I had not wanted, and I pushed out again into the cold, which I found not
so bad as before.
My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and I saw that to be truly
modern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy and
strength, I must not let them get further acquainted with each other. The
affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning Jan must note
that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who was following
his cart. She must be very weak from a long sickness—I was not sure
whether to have it the grippe or not, but I decided upon that
provisionally and she must totter after Janssen, so that he must get down
after a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-board
of his cart, or something of that kind; I did not care for the detail.
They should get into talk in the broken English which was the only
language they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, and
tell him that now Nina was sick; I imagined making this very simple, but
very touching, and I really made it so touching that it brought the lump
into my own throat, and I knew it would be effective with the reader. Then
I had Jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, and the old
woman limp feebly after.
There should not be any more, I decided, except that one very cold
morning, like that; Jan should be driving through that street, and should
be passing the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, just as a
little procession should be issuing from it. The fact must be told in
brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. The last touch must
be Jan’s cart turning the street corner with Jan’s figure
sharply silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. Nothing more.
But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic,
so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world
which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his
suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from
the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will
have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the head of
it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youth
with ear-rings who had long had her heart.
With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, at
the fond reader’s expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic,
in such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. I
should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and
that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan’s part that Nina
might very well have known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the
very end I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had
no such feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine.
III.
The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is what
has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my
ever writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying useless on my
hands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might be wrought into a
short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and I
think I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the broken
English of Jan and Nina’s grandmother, and certainly something
novel. All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the
reader, and let him decide for himself how it should end.
The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served for
having regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all;
that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I ought
to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried to
learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer my knowledge
again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and happy in the
indifference which ignorance breeds in us. I own there is something in
this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged by nice people
that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that it is
offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that we
ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating grandes
dames for their amusement. This sort of people could say to the humanist
that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall off from
for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment; for if one
is to be interested in such things at all, it must be aesthetically,
though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction already
overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours.
SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN
It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer a
small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from
continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly upon
them, to show how sharp and swift the ship’s course is, but they
seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid
down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous
somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the
rush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and incidents
contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the raw
March morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal
seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and
cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in
sight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes from the
turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the white walls
and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became the dreaming
sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through air became the
sole reality.
I.
Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever
offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. Those low hills, that
climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summer
sky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the coast of
Maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palms
and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you had
never noticed these growths in Maine before, where you were so familiar
with the cedars. The hotel itself, which has brought the Green Mountains
with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the
white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly
waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying
and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back
to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find
it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home,
somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the same
American groups looking out over them, and rocking and smoking, though,
alas! not so many smoking as rocking.
But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue
jackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and color
here to the veranda groups? Where should one get the house walls of
whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun,
and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? These things must come
from some other association, and in the case of him who here confesses,
the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters as far away
in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian Junes haunts
the coral shore. (They are beginning to say the shore is not coral; but no
matter.) To be sure, the white roofs are not accounted for in this
visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the snowfalls of
home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely tropical, together
with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries. They at least
suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one remembers seeing it
through Titbottom’s spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofs of
brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the lagoon-like expanses
that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so Venetian, indeed, that
it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers, in place of the
dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to complete the coming
and going illusion; and there is no good reason why the rough little isles
that fill the bay should not call themselves respectively San Giorgio and
San Clemente, and Sant’ Elena and San Lazzaro: they probably have no
other names!
II.
These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural Eden,
that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, when once
she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound in the
Summer Islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found. There are
some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no other
reptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that its
vibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it has
never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchal
age, and are fond of Boston brown bread and baked beans, if their
preferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the care of
an American family living on the islands. The observer who contributes
this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-fish, on the
same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple cockatoo that,
seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense of something
like cruelty in its exile from its native waters. The angel-fish he thinks
not so much like angels; they are of a transparent purity of substance,
and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they terminate in two tails,
which somehow will not lend themselves to the resemblance.
Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might
better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it
haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable
growths about it. All things here are of a weird convertibility to the
alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish
themselves in humble association with the commonest and most familiar. You
drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and realize only now and
then that these willows are thick clumps of oleanders; and through them
you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled
patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite
live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a
mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them
that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York.
The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring
which compensates for the lilies’ lack, and the palms give no just
cause for complaint, unless because they are not nearly enough to
characterize the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains so
northern in aspect. They were much whipped and torn by a late hurricane,
which afflicted all the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal
palms were blown down. Where these are yet standing, as four or five of
them are in a famous avenue now quite one-sided, they are of a majesty
befitting that of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign except
Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments could pass between them.
The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but
boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden,
employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It often
flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take away the
reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and enterprise: a
century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise
for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. One such must be
in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house which this very
writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from the steamer to
the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior one of the many
multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersed among the
pleasant places of the earth. It fills the night with a heavy heliotropean
sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the waxing moon,
the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legal owners stretches
itself in an interminable reverie, and hears Youth come laughing back to
it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other white houses
(which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning. In this dream the
multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel with the young girls
in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn; and, being but a
vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation which shall night-long
gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of military and naval
uniforms. Of course the multiple has been at the dance too (with a shadowy
heartache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows enough not to
confuse the uniforms.
III.
In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling
in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops.
They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a
deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so
varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here,
seven hundred miles from any larger land? Some think, on the stronger
wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men
brought them. Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarm
about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier birds
with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands. Still, the
sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places the catbird
makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and holds its own
against them. The little ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and
markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps
not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anything prettier than
these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which
sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green
upon their translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor
against the midday sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak
to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real
bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, and they attack
fiercely anything they suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning
their nests.
They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer Islands,
where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find it
again. Sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human quality,
and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are in no wise
light. Our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the large majority,
and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the full enjoyment
of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves from their old
inferiority. They do the hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do
not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom here, as in
our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their existence
involves for him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke with
that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. If you have them
against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes,
nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air and sky; nor
are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, where visitors
of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question. Such visitors
spare no islander of any color. Once, in the pretty Public Garden which
the multiple had claimed for its private property, three unmerciful
American women suddenly descended from the heavens and began to question
the multiple’s gardener, who was peacefully digging at the rate of a
spadeful every five minutes. Presently he sat down on his wheelbarrow, and
then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to the other. Then he
rose and braced himself desperately against the tool-house, where, when
his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to the soft eye of pity pinned to
the wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed points were buried in
the stucco behind him, and whose feathered shafts stuck out half a yard
before his breast.
Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was. At
least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a Jamaican regiment
of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the white street,
with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet and gold upon
the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole were coming
towards you, or a mighty tulip. These gorgeous creatures seem so much
readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to test them with a joke.
But it might fail. The Summer Islands are a British colony, and the joke
does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some other things.
To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hear it
first named, and when you are offered a ‘loquat’, if you are
of a frivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with ‘loquor’
which it seems to intimate. Failing in this, you taste the fruit, and
then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness as
if you had bitten a green persimmon. But if it is ripe, it is delicious,
and may be consumed indefinitely. It is the only native fruit which one
can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimed
that with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws. These break out in
clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which may have
some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinite summer.
They are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little muskmelon which
has grown too near a patch of squashes.
One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard. It is
best when plucked by a young islander of Italian blood whose father orders
him up the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to oblige the
signori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with them
about the two bad years there have been in Bermuda, and the probability of
his doing better in Nuova York. He has not imagined our winter, however,
and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the signori go
with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses.
The roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment which
attends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude,
and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake at
another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit
and white blossoms on the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose and
eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the
tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausibly
deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in
mid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet?
IV.
What remains? The events of the Summer Islands are few, and none out of
the order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what may be
called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight. But far
better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain of such like
quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, now from the
south and now from the north, with the languor of the one and the vigor of
the other in them. There were drives upon drives that were always to
somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they had been mere
goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through
the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but
were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which,
where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their
inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape
often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late
August; and why not, after all its interminable, innumerable summers?
Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coral hills (if they are coral)
sink into are the patches of potatoes and lilies and onions drawing their
geometrical lines across the brown-red, weedless soil; and in very
sheltered spots are banana-orchards which are never so snugly sheltered
there but their broad leaves are whipped to shreds. The white road winds
between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disintegration, but held
together against ruin by a network of maidenhair ferns and creepers of
unknown name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs and hangs in
spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them with speary stems as tall
and straight as the stalks of the neighboring bamboo. The loquat-trees
cluster—like quinces in the garden closes, and show their pale
golden, plum-shaped fruit.
For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it
climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and
wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs
of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostrate rainbow.
All this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how will it
be when one has turned one’s back upon it? Will it not lapse into
the gross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who
swap them cannot themselves believe? What will be said to you when you
tell that in the Summer Islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard
and take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to
living in it? What, when you relate that among the northern and southern
evergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no
fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping
them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend
that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and
spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the
drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and
in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the
ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them
the holes they emerged from?
These every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, even
in their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant back
to New York you foresee that they will become impossible. As impossible as
the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderingly
figures it a Bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting
icicles and snowballs in the March air!
WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT
Looking through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey’s charming book on the
Flowers of Field, Hill, and Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly
reminded of the number of these pretty, wilding growths which I had been
finding all the season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks
of artificial stone in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who has
been kept in New York, as I have been this year, beyond the natural time
of going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan
invasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it.
I.
Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early
spring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue
hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down
Broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the
cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must
find itself at home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any
sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the
passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars.
The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey’s
book. He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my
delight, I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in
August. It is a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be
sought along the shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road
overhead forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes
such swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man’s
Curve and the corners of Twenty third Street. This is in flower now, and
will be till September; and St.-John’s-wort, which some call the
false goldenrod, is already here. You may find it in any moist, low
ground, but the gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock
Exchange, are not too dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in
evidence with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. The other
night, however, on the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was
delighted to see it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in
response to the cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile
there at the base of a potted ever green. This lonely insect had no sooner
sounded its winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically
to wave and droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many
hill-side pastures! But this may have been only a transitory response to
the cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he
will find golden-rod there every night. I believe there is always Golden
Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of
“deep, cool, moist woods,” where Mrs. Creevey describes it as
growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as
Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman’s
breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop’s—cap,
and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder’s-tongue,
and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which
must have got their names from some fairy of genius. I should say it was a
female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex
among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was
thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives.
The author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in
her words, but one would know how they looked from their names; and when
you call them over they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the
dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous
excavations whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.
II.
That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket’s cry flowered the
dome with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra
sloped all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the
half-dollar gale that always blows over the city at that height. But as
one turns the leaves of Mrs. Creevey’s magic book-perhaps one ought
to say turns its petals—the forests and the fields come and make
themselves at home in the city everywhere. By virtue of it I have been
more in the country in a half-hour than if I had lived all June there.
When I lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints
the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun
against the air after dwelling on his brightness. The rose-mallow flaunts
along Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the
house fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times
that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing
illusion.
Yet Mrs. Creevey’s book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit
by any of the ordinary arts. It is rather matter of fact in form and
manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its
subject. One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such
titles of chapters as “Wet Meadows and Low Grounds”; “Dry
Fields—Waste Places —Waysides”; “Hills and Rocky
Woods, Open Woods”; and “Deep, Cool, Moist Woods”; each
a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of
suggestion. The spring and, summer months pass in stately processional
through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the names of her
characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms
themselves.
They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or
their own wayward wills led them astray. A singularly fascinating chapter
is that called “Escaped from Gardens,” in which some of these
pretty runagates are catalogued. I supposed in my liberal ignorance that
the Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that the
Pansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, the
Snapdragon, the Prince’s Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star of
Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone
Crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company. One is not surprised to meet
the Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart;
but that the Baby’s Breath should be found wandering by the
road-sides from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender
pang as for a lost child. Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in
barns and feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the
Baby’s Breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant.
III.
As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they
were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the
flowers. Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and
I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience, but
she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well know; and
she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name of the
flowers she loves to write of. I am not saying that the Day-Lily would not
smell as sweet by her title of ‘Hemerocallis Fulva’, or that
the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her
scholar’s cap and gown of ‘Saponaria Officinalis’; but
merely that their college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to
verse, or even melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after
nowadays. So I like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies
gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for
them makes them grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that they
would all vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms. As long as I
talk of cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back
fences help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff
spears; but if I called them ‘Typha Latifolia’, or even
‘Typha Angustifolia’, there is not the hardiest and fiercest
prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my
voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The
street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my
sylvan pageant if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the ‘Viola
Pedata’; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the
gentle Poison Dogwood maligned as the ‘Rhus Venenata’. The
very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt
to invoke our simple American Cowslip as the ‘Dodecatheon Meadia’.
IV
Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and I
should be far from undervaluing this side of Mrs. Creevey’s book. In
fact, I secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever I
get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to some of the humblest
flowers, such as I can feel myself on easy terms with, and tell them what
they are in Latin. I think it will surprise them, and I dare say they will
some of them like it, and will want their initials inscribed on their
leaves, like those signatures which the medicinal plants bear, or are
supposed to bear. But as long as I am engaged in their culture amid this
stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best to invite their presence by
their familiar names, and I hope they will not think them too familiar. I
should like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thousands of
poor city children, who never saw them growing in their native places,
might have some notion of how bountifully the world is equipped with
beauty, and how it is governed by many laws which are not enforced by
policemen. I think that would interest them very much, and I shall not
mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, and carrying them home by the
armfuls. When good-will costs nothing we ought to practise it even with
the tramps, and these are very welcome, in their wanderings over the city
pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to.
A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS
We dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have more
than our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past we
have been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as great misery
as famine in that kind could be. For our sins, or some of our friends’
sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of three rings and two
raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in the country there are
still circuses of one ring and no platform at all. We are accustomed, in
the gross and foolish-superfluity of these city circuses, to see no feat
quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at the most important instant
in the hope of greater wonders in another ring. We have four or five
clowns, in as many varieties of grotesque costume, as well as a lady clown
in befitting dress; but we hear none of them speak, not even the lady
clown, while in the country circus the old clown of our childhood, one and
indivisible, makes the same style of jokes, if not the very same jokes,
that we used to hear there. It is not easy to believe all this, and I do
not know that I should quite believe it myself if I had not lately been
witness of it in the suburban village where I was passing the summer.
I.
The circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by the
vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell
upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with
their festive pink. They prophesied it in a name borne by the first circus
I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must all have
died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie attached
to it. I did not know this when I heard the band braying through the
streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the
mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the procession
through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves
for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck
through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the
darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the
vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know
what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had done lunch. My
heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in
comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two-platform circuses);
the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women and lean men; the horses
tethered in the background and stamping under the fly-bites; the old,
weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like the ghost of the grand
chariot which used to drag me captive in its triumph; and the canvas
shelters where the cooks were already at work over their kettles on the
evening meal of the circus folk.
I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but
there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a crowd. I
bought my admittances without a moment’s delay, and the man who sold
me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to look at
the change he had given me, mostly nickels. “I thought I didn’t
give you enough,” he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to
the doorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed. It
was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be, to
give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. They were
already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices from the
tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took my
seat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermost
tread of the benches, so that I had to step across its prostrate form.
These reserved seats were carpeted; but I had forgotten how little one
rank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon the back
and legs. But for the carpeting, I could not see how I was advantaged
above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and I reflected how often
in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor. I could not see but
they were as well off as I; they were much more gayly dressed, and some of
them were even smoking cigars, while they were nearly all younger by ten,
twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more. They did not look like the
country people whom I rather hoped and expected to see, but were
apparently my fellow-villagers, in different stages of excitement. They
manifested by the usual signs their impatience to have the performance
begin, and I confess that I shared this, though I did not take part in the
demonstration.
II.
I have no intention of following the events seriatim. Front time to time
during their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the
circus-men. They were quite the same people, I believe, but strangely
softened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and looking not a day older,
which I cannot say of myself, exactly. The supernumeraries were patently
farmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit of adventure,
and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and a pair of
striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating
bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very
glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dog to keep boys
from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not
look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man came up and asked
the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child
had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all the great,
kind-hearted, simple circus family. He was good to the poor supes, and
instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best to manage the guy ropes
for the nets when the trapeze events began.
There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over the whole
circus. This was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extreme proximity to
its performances; I had never been on quite such intimate terms with
equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but I think it was also largely
from the good hearts of the whole company. A circus must become, during
the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especially sisterhood, and
its members must forget finally that they are not united by ties of blood.
I dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives and fathers and
mothers, if not as brothers.
The domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady in
a Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting
for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. She really
looked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must
have worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined in the
bath, or just out of it. But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown,
and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on her
slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most
goddesses. What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood
there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were
their collective sister. They were all in their shirt-sleeves for the sake
of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away as
indifferent to her as so many born brothers.
Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of the
ring, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might have
been; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully,
left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why
we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other
people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze
acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to
the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her
anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her
lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of
her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which she forbade
herself any shrinking or reluctance.
III.
How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! Why should
such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhaps it does
not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of the many
delusions we are in with regard to each other in this bewildering world.
They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose that in
the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from the clown and his
clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. I remember that I liked hearing his
old jokes, not because they were jokes, but because they were old and
endeared by long association. He sang one song which I must have heard him
sing at my first circus (I am sure it was he), about “Things that I
don’t like to see,” and I heartily agreed with him that his
book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth the
half-dime asked for it, though I did not buy it.
Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, I will
not allow that I did not feel for him and suffer with him because of the
thick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with the
sweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain. He
was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke (though
you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively, I dare
say he outdated the pyramids. They must have made clowns whiten their
faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the
antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means. All the
same, I pitied this clown for it, and I fancied in his wildest waggery the
note of a real irascibility. Shall I say that he seemed the only member of
that little circus who was not of an amiable temper? But I do not blame
him, and I think it much to have seen a clown once more who jested audibly
with the ringmaster and always got the better of him in repartee. It was
long since I had known that pleasure.
IV.
Throughout the performance at this circus I was troubled by a curious
question, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeur
as the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin and
slight, too. We all know how the places of our childhood, the heights, the
distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was it possible
that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses? The doubt
was painful, but I was forced to own that there might be more truth in it
than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. Very likely
circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness and variety of
their entertainments, and I was spoiled for the simple joys of this. But I
could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the young faces around
me, and I must confess that there was at least so much of the circus that
I left when it was half over. I meant to go into the side-shows and see
the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the giant by the hand and
the armless man by his friendly foot, if I might be so honored. But I did
none of these things, and I am willing to believe the fault was in me, if
I was disappointed in the circus. It was I who had shrunk and dwindled,
and not it. To real boys it was still the size of the firmament, and was a
world of wonders and delights. At least I can recognize this fact now, and
can rejoice in the peaceful progress all over the country of the simple
circuses which the towns never see, but which help to render the summer
fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes and hearts they appeal to. I
hope it will be long before they cease to find profit in the pleasure they
give.
A SHE HAMLET
The other night as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre and
waited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the
rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain upon
any Hamlet passed through my eager frame. There is, indeed, no scene of
drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than that
which opens the great tragedy. The sentry pacing up and down upon the
platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greeting between him and
the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of the bitter cold;
the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these before they can part; the
mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of protesting
it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the ghost, taking the word from
their lips and hushing all into a pulseless awe: what could be more simply
and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? What promise of high
mystical things to come there is in the mere syllabling of the noble
verse, and how it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, to a
disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in
the solemn accents! As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in
my time passed in long procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so
much of their world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls
itself the actual one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find
myself one of the less considered persons of the drama who were seen but
not heard in its course.
I.
The trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for an
intelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands. You
do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your mind are
a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not really effective
for the purpose. The best way is to own yourself unfair at the start, and
then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if not your
subject. In other words, if you went to see the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt
frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely in the end to
be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blame her if you
were. To be ideally fair to that representation, it would be better not to
have known any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet of Shakespeare.
From the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelmingly
against her—her sex, her race, and her speech. You never ceased to
feel for a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy Dane,
and that the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess. These
three removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the
impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is in
nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so
little French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry
expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which the French words
always failed to convey. The battle was lost from the first, and all you
could feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was not
war.
While the battle went on I was the more anxious to be fair, because I had,
as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and I welcomed, in the interest
of critical impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind, through
readily traceable associations. This was a Hamlet also of French
extraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeply
derived than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large imagination of
Charles Fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of her subtlest
womanish intuition. His was the first blond Hamlet known to our stage, and
hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for a complexion;
and it was of the quality of his Hamlet in masterly technique.
II.
The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past,
and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was
figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in
being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It
was romantic as Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense of the
word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was romanticistic. It was, therefore,
the most realistic Hamlet ever yet seen, because the most naturally
poetic. Mme. Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her school; for
Fechter’s poetic naturalness differed from the conventionality of
the accepted Hamlets in nothing so much as the superiority of its
self-instruction. In Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet, as in his, nothing was
trusted to chance, or “inspiration.” Good or bad, what one saw
was what was meant to be seen. When Fechter played Edmond Dantes or Claude
Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in Hamlet
even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it might be held to be
nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and after all, you said Hamlet
was a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave you did not
mind its being in a broken vessel. When he challenged the ghost with
“I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane,” you Would hardly have
had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when he said
to Rosencrantz, “Will you pleh upon this pyip?” it was with
such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of
the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness
afterwards. For the most part you were not aware of these betrayals of his
speech; and in certain high things it was soul interpreted to soul through
the poetry of Shakespeare so finely, so directly, that there was scarcely
a sense of the histrionic means.
He put such divine despair into the words, “Except my life, except
my life, except my life!” following the mockery with which he had
assured Polonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal
than his leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for
thirty years, and I had been alert for them with every Hamlet since. But
before I knew, Mme. Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever.
Her Hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think
the points of Hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation
of the translator’s interpretation of Shakespeare that they passed
unrecognized. Soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for the
most part, but as such things go that soliloquy of Hamlet’s, “To
be or not to be,” is at least very noble poetry; and yet Mme.
Bernhardt was so unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of
its delivery. Perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre
melancholy of Shakespeare’s thought was transmitted in phrases that
refused it its proper mystery. But there was always a hardness, not always
from the translation, upon this feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell
with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia’s grave,
where he reproaches Laertes with those pathetic words—
“What is the reason that you use me thus?
I loved you ever; but it is no matter.”
Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not a
man. At the close of the Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a mad
whirl, her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, a
mischievous she-crow.
There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leaden
lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her
elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit. Her
voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong
emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman. At times her
movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly
womanish, especially those of the whole person. Her quickened pace was a
woman’s nervous little run, and not a man’s swift stride; and
to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman’s
high heels to her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them.
In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and American
Hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two
brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme.
Bernhardt’s preferred full-length, life-size family portraits. The
dead king’s effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the
scene-painter’s art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by
giving place to it in the wall at the right moment. She achieved a novelty
by this treatment of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone
she took with the wretched queen. Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but
though it could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the
part of a good daughter to give it her?
One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become
impossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet as a man, if
it ever had been possible. She had traversed the bounds which tradition as
well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an
actress may personate a man. This condition is that there shall be always
a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all the time
that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself such
before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man
only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it. Shakespeare had
rather a fancy for women in men’s roles, which, as women’s
roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be
more naturally managed then than now. But when it came to the
eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of
women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have
been confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of
doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or
Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in
men’s roles. These characters are, of course, “lighter motions
bounded in a shallower brain” than the creation she aimed at; but
she could at least have made much of them, and she does not make much of
Hamlet.
III.
The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence to
an ideal. Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types
that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing
Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from
the fancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with
crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady. Hamlet is in
nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself
unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them. If we
could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites
us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his perplexities with
the delightful precipitation of his putative sex. As the niece of a wicked
uncle, who in that case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to
Hamlet’s father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have
made short work of her vengeance. No fine scruples would have delayed her;
she would not have had a moment’s question whether she had not
better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the
doubt by first passing it through her aunt’s breast.
To be sure, there would then have been no play of “Hamlet,” as
we have it; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet,
Mme. Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully. It is in attempting a
masculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an ideal.
It is not thinkable. After you have seen it done, you say, as Mr. Clemens
is said to have said of bicycling: “Yes, I have seen it, but it’s
impossible. It doesn’t stand to reason.”
Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable
in the work of an artist is inartistic. By the time I had reached these
bold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to
declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would be
forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something
precious and sacred.
In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in
the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to
judgment when they violate them. After Mme. Bernhardt was perversely
willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it
well or not was of slight consequence. She had already made her failure in
wishing to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of
a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the
assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. There is an
obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for
the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader. I can note merely
that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary actions to
figure as men than for men to figure as women. In the theatre we have
conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less obvious
reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. A woman may tell a
story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot
write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman
without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. One feels this true
even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in
point. Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect than a
man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play Hamlet at all.
That sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not
be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible. No harm could be done
by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would
still leave the ideal untouched. Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would
be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to
feed her famine for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time,
at least, in its vital essence. I felt that it would take many returns to
the Hamlet of Shakespeare to efface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt’s
Hamlet; and as I prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the darkening
theatre, I experienced a noble shame for having seen the Dane so
disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell’s word. I had not been obliged to
come; I had voluntarily shared in the wrong done; by my presence I had
made myself an accomplice in the wrong. It was high ground, but not too
high for me, and I recovered a measure of self-respect in assuming it.
THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON
He had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper
men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under
the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into
their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive
sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to
see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it in
his experience so largely subjective. If there was any drama at all it was
wholly in his own consciousness. But the thing was certainly impressive in
its way.
I.
He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by chance,
and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised to
recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the pleasure
of seeing.
Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all
hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though
upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see
his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of bread
which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the
next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and the sight
of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of knowing just what it
was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an
earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the double file
of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from the
corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the stroke
of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with his
perspicacity.
It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup,
warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and was
wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as a
duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming
them for his health. He now practised another piece of self-denial: he let
the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry him to
the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the Christmas
party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety
about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut
his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He got the child, with
her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coup, and then
he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to
listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: “When you get up there
near that bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have a look at those men.”
“All right, sir,” said the driver intelligently, and he found
his why skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable
Christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till
they could get round to it with their carts.
When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it
was a few minutes before. Except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with
their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the
corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. A tall, lumbering
United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the coup with
a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was
carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central Station. He
listened with half an ear to the child’s account of the fun she had
at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men
waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.
He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an
apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the
place where he had left them. But the driver remembered, and checked his
horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater
number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along
the side street. They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the
night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week
stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their
mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where
the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before they were
all gone.
II.
My friend’s heart beat with glad anticipation. He was really to see
this important, this representative thing to the greatest possible
advantage. He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the
midnight loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way:
the next day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to
those who needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise.
She understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with
the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked
very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic.
Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having fancied
it.
He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would get
out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving the
bread. Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them about
themselves. At the time it did not strike him that it would be indecent.
A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture. It was
not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as the
saying is. They were all there because they were hungry, or else they were
there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. But it was always
possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any test was
applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving. If one
were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not so much
matter.
It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they
would tell him lies. A fantastic association of their double files and
those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey
Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. He smiled, and then
he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts —slaves
to want and self-convicted of poverty. All at once he fancied them
actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives taken
in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to buy. He
thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would ever be
abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would the world ever outlive it?
Would some New-Year’s day come when some President would proclaim,
amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more? That would
be fine.
III.
He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped a little
out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the rest
remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. They
might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no more
need of defence from the cold than the dead have.
He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a
second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among
them. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not
true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff,
wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their
deceit.
He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions,
his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be
something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and
being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the fact.
To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great
dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the
blue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near
that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal,
after vain prayer.
Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind. How
early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of
bread? As early as ten, as nine o’clock? If so, did the fact argue
habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? Did the slaves in the
coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they
were closely neighbored night after night by their misery? Perhaps they
joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes. Which
of them were old-comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel over
questions of precedence? Had they some comity, some etiquette, which a man
forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back? Could one
say to his next-hand man, “Will you please keep my place?” and
would this man say to an interloper, “Excuse me, this place is
engaged”? How was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or
swiftly past the door where the bread and coffee were given out, and word
passed to the rear that the supply was exhausted? This must sometimes
happen, and what did they do then?
IV.
My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts for all
the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he
reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? But what was the
use? There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round.
The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. He was not only walking
by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by. His action caught the notice
of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned and faced it,
like soldiers under review making ready to salute a superior. They were
perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce
the coupe through and through.
My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he
stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never,
never hope to know. He was Society: Society that was to be preserved
because it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they hated him in his
capacity of Better Classes. He no longer thought of getting out and
watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. He would have
liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it; that
he was their friend, and wished them well—as well as might be
without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he
could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He put his hand on
that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least with
intelligence.
“You mustn’t mind. What we are and what we do is all right. It’s
what they are and what they suffer that’s all wrong.”
V.
“Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?” I asked,
when he had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently
not coloring it at all.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “It seems to be the
only way out.”
“Well, it’s an easy way,” I admitted, “and it’s
an idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon.”
THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY
I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as
beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I
have to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July,
four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near
New York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within
reach of them. I know very well that the excursionists must go somewhere,
and as a man and a brother I am willing they should go anywhere, but as a
friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to have them come much
where I am. It is not because I would deny them a share of any pleasure I
enjoy, but because they are so many and I am so few that I think they
would get all the pleasure and I none. I hope the reader will see how this
attitude distinguishes me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in
their remoteness from excursionists.
I.
It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow-beings whose mere
multitude was too much for me. They were otherwise wholly without offence
towards me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they were, in fact,
the most entirely peaceable multitude I ever saw in any country, and the
very quietest.
There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, of them,
in every variety of age and sex; yet I heard no voice lifted above the
conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of its
privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying the
attractions of the spectacle in his charge. I used to think the American
crowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived in
Italy, I celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of the Italian
crowds. But we have certainly changed all that within a generation, and if
what I saw the other day was a typical New York crowd, then the popular
joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the
peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness,
either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic extraction; yet
there were large numbers of Americans with rather fewer recognizable Irish
among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews
of these several nationalities.
There was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in every
kind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables under
all the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet I saw
not one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women. No one that I
saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or
unseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic
ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal conduct,
I have not any notion who or what the people were, or how virtuous or
vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that no society assemblage
could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all that
the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd.
I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all the
Americans in it, were Long-Islanders from the inland farms and villages
within easy distance of the beach. They had probably the hereditary habit
of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of their fathers
and grandfathers, who had
—“many an hour whiled away
Listening to the breakers’ roar
That washed the beach at Rockaway.”
But the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaper
dress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countryman
apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and I can
only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk I saw were from New York and
Brooklyn. They came by boat, and came and went by the continually arriving
and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, both sexes. A
few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of the neighborhood, but by
far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor the trains had brought
had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so
poor as not to be able to keep. The bicyclers stormed into the frantic
village of the beach the whole afternoon, in the proportion of one woman
to five men, and most of these must have ridden down on their wheels from
the great cities. Boys ran about in the roadway with bunches of brasses,
to check the wheels, and put them for safekeeping in what had once been
the stable-yards of the hotels; the restaurants had racks for them, where
you could see them in solid masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and
no shop was without its door-side rack, which the wheelman might slide his
wheel into when he stopped for a soda, a cigar, or a sandwich. All along
the road the gay bicycler and bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the
inns, munching, lunching, while their wheels formed a fantastic decoration
for the underpinning of the house and a novel balustering for the steps.
II.
The amusements provided for these throngs of people were not different
from those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of much
the same mind and taste the world over. I had fine moments when I moved in
an illusion of the Midway Plaisance; again I was at the Fete de Neuilly,
with all of Paris but the accent about me; yet again the county
agricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me. At
none of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainous
chute, and I made haste to experience the variety these afforded,
beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chute
might be closed for the day if I waited to view it last. I meant only to
enjoy the pleasure of others in it, and I confined my own participation to
the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the watery steep
into the oblong pool below. When I bought my ticket for the car that
carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, certifying
for me, “You have shot the chute,” and I resolved to keep this
and show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is a
curious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwards
could not find the medal. So I will frankly own that for me it was quite
enough to see others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myself
in the car. There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with
its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main
object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute.
There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that flew
down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who
clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but
sometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, who
was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their father for
any harm that came of it. Apparently no harm came of it in any case.
The boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half-
perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struck
again and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farther
shore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with their
viscera, and to get their breath as they could. I did not ask any of them
what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as I could conjecture,
the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare transport of a
fall from a ten-story building and the delight of a tempestuous passage of
the Atlantic, powerfully condensed.
The mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite I might have
had to witness the feats of strength performed by Madame La Noire at the
nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at the door-to
testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force may be masked
in vast masses of adipose. She had a weary, bored look, and was not
without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse the public;
but I could not find her quite justifiable as a Sunday entertainment. One
forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time I did not pretend to be
so much better than my neighbors that I would not compromise upon a visit
to, an animal show a little farther on. It was a pretty fair collection of
beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and in the cage of the lions
there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired young man, exciting them to
madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom I was extremely glad to
have get away without being torn in pieces, or at least bitten in two. A
little later I saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless,
dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness one could wish.
But perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with the intimacy of lions and
lionesses. He had had his little triumph; one spectator of his feat had
declared that you would not see anything like that at Coney Island; and
soiled and dusty as he was in his cotton tights, he was preferable to the
living picture of a young lady whom he replaced as an attraction of the
show. It was professedly a moral show; the manager exhorted us as we came
out to say whether it was good or not; and in the box-office sat a kind
and motherly faced matron who would have apparently abhorred to look upon
a living picture at any distance, much less have it at her elbow.
Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the people to
whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently,
than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmless
enough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in the
living picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face
respectable enough.
I would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not in
every respect decorous. As a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both
horizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, and
was none the worse for being called by the French name of carrousel, for
our people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallic
wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. At every other step there
were machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there were
photographers’ booths, and X-ray apparatus for showing you the
inside of your watch; and in one open tent I saw a gentleman (with his
back to the public) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an
Egyptian seeress. Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the
softer drinks abounded.
III.
I think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat and
sitting down to your wine or beer at a table. Again I say that I saw no
effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built
out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the
braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures
by the fumes of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that reigned
here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards which hung
from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced that
gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry umbrellas or
canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit on the floor.
The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; they
seemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young
wives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for the
day’s pleasure. A slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby,
passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the child’s
father meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to lay
it. Almost any place would do; at another great restaurant I saw two
chairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid the
coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home.
Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especially
frankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them.
They disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels,
piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brown
in deep skillets of fat. The old acrid smell of frying brought back many
holidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on the Riva at Venice,
and in the Mercato Vecchio at Florence. But the Continental Sunday cannot
be felt to have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; the Puritan
leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consent willingly
to the transformation, I fancy they always enjoy themselves on Sunday with
a certain consciousness of wrong-doing.
IV.
I have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day it
was. Nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds. It was
the Fourth of July, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, and it was
the high day of the week. But if it was very wicked, and I must recognize
that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feel bound to
say that the people themselves did not look wicked. They looked harmless;
they even looked good, the most of them. I am sorry to say they were not
very good-looking. The women were pretty enough, and the men were handsome
enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect of beauty than the
average is anywhere else; I was lately from New England, where the people
were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all those thousands at
Rockaway I found no striking types. It may be that as we grow older and
our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become more fastidious as to
the looks of others. At any rate, there seems to be much less beauty in
the world than there was thirty or forty years ago.
On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they should
be in compensation. When we were all so handsome we could well afford to
wear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poor
things must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices of
the modiste and the tailor. I do not mean that there was any distinction
in the dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly or
grotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as good as the customs, and I
have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. I believe I must except
the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in effect when
dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for tottering about, in
their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-pointed,
silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am! But those high heels seemed to
take all honesty from their daring in the wholesome exercise of the wheel,
and to keep them in the tradition of cheap coquetry still, and imbecilly
dependent.
V.
I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that there
is a sea somewhere about at Rockaway Beach, and it is this that the people
have come for. I might well forget that modest sea, it is so built out of
sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backs and shops that
border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaring along the road
that divides the village, and the planked streets that intersect this. But
if you walk southward on any of the streets, you presently find the planks
foundering in sand, which drifts far up over them, and then you find
yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean bathing. Swarms and
heaps of people in all lolling and lying and wallowing shapes strew the
beach, and the water is full of slopping and shouting and shrieking human
creatures, clinging with bare white arms to the life-lines that run from
the shore to the buoys; beyond these the lifeguard stays himself in his
boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incoming surf.
All that you can say of it is that it is queer. It is not picturesque, or
poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. An enfilading glance gives this
impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine
restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added
effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs’
legs inverted in a downward plunge.
On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humble
condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. This
made us beg each other’s pardon; he said that he did not know I was
there, and I said it did not matter. Then we both looked at the bathing,
and he said:
“I don’t like that.”
“Why,” I asked, “do you see any harm in it?”
“No. But I don’t like the looks of it. It ain’t nice. It’s
queer.”
It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not
dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a
very public appearance. This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of
the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it
could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct. Here and there a
gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and
there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight of
naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. But otherwise all was a
damp and dreary decorum. I challenged my philosopher in vain for a
specific cause of his dislike of the scene.
Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a
multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the
sea-bathing. A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were
cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over
them. There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who
seemed getting the most of the good that was going.
VI.
But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the
good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I
have since thought of it as rather melancholy. It was in fact no wiser or
livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded.
The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own
devices. The established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but
one could eschew them. The more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps;
for I doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day’s
rest is more than most people can bear. They endure it in passing, but
they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel.
The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and
double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly
increased the difficulties of his profession.
SAWDUST IN THE ARENA
It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus events I
wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit of seeing
two circuses there. Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire circus that I
saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory of a circus on
its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in adversity.
I.
The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the exception of the
clowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always Americans, or
advertised as such, in Italy. Its chief and almost absorbing event was a
reproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at Rome in
celebration of Prince Tommaso’s coming of age, and for a copy of a
copy it was really fine. It had fitness in the arena, which must have
witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and I am sensible still
of the pleasure its effects of color gave me. There was one beautiful
woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have ridden, as she
was, out of a canvas of Titian’s, if he had ever painted equestrian
pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent Carpaccio. Then, the
‘Clowns Americani’ were very amusing, from a platform devoted
solely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me to
think that we were almost the only people present who understood their
jokes. In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked very
little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady’s hat in front
of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we
were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been
needed to distinguish the features of the actors. I could not make out,
therefore, whether the ‘Clowns Americani’ had the national
expression or not, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the United
States language with a cockney accent. I suspect that he was an Englishman
who had passed himself off upon the Italian management as a true Yankee,
and who had formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of
the recent English humorists have patterned after certain famous wits of
ours. I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even if
occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own
primacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erring
aspirates.
The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience
always is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions
concerning the place and people. I reflected that it was the same race
essentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in that
arena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among these
spectators persons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians who had
left their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claim
this or that seat for their own. In fact, there was so little difference,
probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that I felt the
process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if Nature had
been present, I might very well have asked her why, when she had once
arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on repeating it
indefinitely? How were all those similar souls to know themselves apart in
their common eternity? Merely to have been differently circumstanced in
time did not seem enough; and I think Nature would have been puzzled to
answer me. But perhaps not; she may have had her reasons, as that you
cannot have too much of a good thing, and that when the type was so fine
in most respects as the Italian you could not do better than go on
repeating impressions from it.
Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the young
officer of ‘bersaglieri’, who had come down from antiquity to
the topmost gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined
against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his
side, while his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind. I have
since wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he
did not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the
young officer of ‘bersaglieri’.
II.
I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus I
have mentioned. This event was one that I have often witnessed elsewhere,
but never in such noble and worthy keeping. The top of the outer arena
wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the centre of its
oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet. At its base an immense net was
stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat was figuring
about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing the guy-ropes, and
testing every particular of the preparation with his own hands. While this
went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the
spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently
stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even from the loveliness of
the officer of ‘bersaglieri’. There the man in the Prince
Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and looked up at
her.
She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized,
denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, “Is it all
right?”
He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, “Yes; keep to the
left,” and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till,
just before she reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its
elastic mesh.
It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerous
it was; but I think that the brief English colloquy was the great wonder
of the event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been perfectly happy
again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy my curiosity
concerning the speakers. A few evenings after that, I was at that copy of
a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, I saw the man of the
Prince Albert coat and the derby hat. I had already made up my mind that
he was an American, for I supposed that an Englishman would rather perish
than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as I had wished all my life to
speak to a circus-man, I went down and boldly accosted him. “Are you
a brother Yankee?” I asked, and he laughed, and confessed that he
was an Englishman, but he said he was glad to meet any one who spoke
English, and he made a place for me by his side. He was very willing to
tell how he happened to be there, and he explained that he was the manager
of a circus, which had been playing to very good business all winter in
Spain. In an evil hour he decided to come to Italy, but he found the
prices so ruinously low that he was forced to disband his company. This
diving girl was all that remained to him of its many attractions, and he
was trying to make a living for both in a country where the admission to a
circus was six of our cents, with fifty for a reserved seat. But he was
about to give it up and come to America, where he said Barnum had offered
him an engagement. I hope he found it profitable, and is long since an
American citizen, with as good right as any of us to wear a Prince Albert
coat with a derby hat.
III.
There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where many Venetians had
the only opportunity of their lives to see a horse. The horses were the
great attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitual
destitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good. It
was so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does,
especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, on
his back-bared horse, and ends by waving an American flag in triumph at
having been so tiresome.
I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumps
through paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to render
her transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hop
over a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a manner to
minify her exertion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at all
circuses. At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of the
Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the ground and
back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the
goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the other day; and
apparently there are more circuses in the world than circus events. It
must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind as in romanticistic
fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely resembles.
At a circus which played all one winter in Florence I saw for the first
time-outside of polite society—the clown in evening dress, who now
seems essential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I
missed so gladly at my village circus. He is nearly as futile as the lady
clown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of New
Womanhood.
Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most the clown who
catches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrown
across the ring by an accomplice. This is a very pretty sight always, and
at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted creature take his stand
high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats on his head
from a flight of a hundred feet through the air. This made me proud of
human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether I do not think
that after a real country circus there are many better things in life than
the Hippodrome. It had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, a polish, which I
should not know where to match, and when the superb coach drove into the
ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of their events, there was
a majesty in the effect which I doubt if courts have the power to rival.
Still, it should be remembered that I have never been at court, and speak
from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only.
AT A DIME MUSEUM
“I see,” said my friend, “that you have been writing a
good deal about the theatre during the past winter. You have been
attacking its high hats and its high prices, and its low morals; and I
suppose that you think you have done good, as people call it.”
I.
This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I prepared myself to take
it up warily. I said I should be very sorry to do good, as people called
it; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pride
for the doer and general demoralization for the doee. Still, I said, a law
had lately been passed in Ohio giving a man who found himself behind a
high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and if
the passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly to
my teachings, I should not altogether grieve for the good I had done. I
added that if all the States should pass such a law, and other laws fixing
a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the
managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in
Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays—
“I see what you mean,” said my friend, a little impatiently.
“You mean sumptuary legislation. But I have not come to talk to you
upon that subject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking
yourself. I want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper
amusements of this metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and
charming things one may see there for a very little money.”
“Ten cents, for instance?”
“Yes.”
I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; and
I expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the
amusement that could be had for that money. I questioned if anything
intellectual could be had for it.
“What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?” my friend
retorted. “And do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is
intellectual?”
I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my
grief with it.
Then he said: “I don’t contend that it is intellectual, but I
say that it is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it
is less often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines. I think the
average of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar
theatres; and it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you
come to that. The other day,” said my friend, and in squaring
himself comfortably in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the
corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, “I went to
a dime museum for an hour that I had between two appointments, and I must
say that I never passed an hour’s time more agreeably. In the curio
hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it—they had
several lecturers in white wigs and scholars’ caps and gowns—there
was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very
high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured
upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a
three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one
cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On a platform at the end of the hall
was an Australian family a good deal gloomier than the apes, who sat in
the costume of our latitude, staring down the room with varying
expressions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who gave me such a
pang of compassion as I have seldom got from the tragedy of the two-dollar
theatres. They allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed my
pity upon their wild dejection in exile without stint. I couldn’t
enter into conversation with them, and express my regret at finding them
so far from their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but
I know they felt my sympathy, it was so evident. I didn’t see their
performance, and I don’t know that they had any. They may simply
have been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, and the sight
of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price of admission.
“After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue
to a close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles
lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a
small model of it. None of the events were so exciting that we could
regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the
entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the
theatre was about to begin. He invited us to buy tickets at an additional
charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle,
or orchestra.
“I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once. We were
three in the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the
little boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a
dozen at least in the orchestra circle. An attendant shouted, ‘Hats
off!’ and the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from
under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it. The curtain
rose, and the entertainment began at once. It was a passage apparently
from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of
the landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good
deal of conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with
unflagging energy. The young woman was equipped for the dance she brought
into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain in the
drama. It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she was tired
of it, but was not going to falter. She delivered her lines with a hard,
Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come up in a
simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong
local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, or Peg
Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not.
“Her performance was followed by an event involving a single
character. The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to
his dress he was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he
had temperament. I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began to
address his entire drama to me. This was not surprising, for it would not
have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the other
man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom
he would hardly have given the preference over me. I felt the compliment,
but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me
a publicity I would willingly have foregone. I did what I could to reject
it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even frowned a measure of
disapproval; but this merely stimulated his ambition. He was really a
merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which
were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a
woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, ‘I
hope I’m not disturbing you any,’ I broke down and laughed,
and that delivered me into his hand. He immediately said to me that now he
would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, eight
of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then for no reason he seemed
to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song written expressly for
him—by an expressman; and he went on from one wild gayety to
another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy of
enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off.
“I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad that the next
performers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of Spanish-
American extraction, behaved more impartially. They were really remarkable
artists in their way, and though it’s a painful way, I couldn’t
help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses. The
gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. I think
perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailed among us,
we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approval as a
gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety in
witnessing her skill. But I could see that the poor girl was hurt in her
artist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did I led off the
applause with my umbrella. She instantly lighted up with a joyful smile,
and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathy
to me while she clapped. We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it
was very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I had better go.”
“And do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?” I
asked, with a smile that was meant to be sceptical.
“Profitable?” said my friend. “I said agreeable. I don’t
know about the profit. But it was very good variety, and it was very
cheap. I understand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar
theatre to come down to, or up to.”
“Not exactly, or not quite,” I returned, thoughtfully, “though
I must say I think your time was as well spent as it would have been at
most of the plays I have seen this winter.”
My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: “It was all
very pathetic, in a way. Three out of those five people were really
clever, and certainly artists. That colored brother was almost a genius, a
very common variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his
calling that couldn’t be disputed. He was a genuine humorist, and I
sorrowed over him—after I got safely away from his intimacy—as
I should over some author who was struggling along without winning his
public. Why not? One is as much in the show business as the other. There
is a difference of quality rather than of kind. Perhaps by-and-by my
colored humorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you
are always hoping to do with yours.”
“You don’t think you’re making yourself rather
offensive?” I suggested.
“Not intentionally. Aren’t the arts one? How can you say that
any art is higher than the others? Why is it nobler to contort the mind
than to contort the body?”
“I am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind,”
I returned, “and I feel that to aim at nothing higher than the
amusement of your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the
level of the show business.”
“Yes, I know that is your pose,” said my friend. “And I
dare say you really think that you make a distinction in facts when you
make a distinction in terms. If you don’t amuse your readers, you
don’t keep them; practically, you cease to exist. You may call it
interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? You do
your little act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you
fancy you are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler
places, with perhaps cruder means—”
“I don’t know whether I like your saws less than your
instances, or your instances less than your saws,” I broke in.
“Have you been at the circus yet?”
II.
“Yet?” demanded my friend. “I went the first night, and
I have been a good deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever
since. I can’t find out just why I have so much pleasure in the
trapeze. Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time
I do look away; but I wouldn’t spare any actor the most dangerous
feat. One of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net
after her performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprained
ankle. It made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give up
her perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but
it didn’t take away my interest in the other trapezists flying
through the air above another net.
“If I had honestly complained of anything it would have been of the
superfluity which glutted rather than fed me. How can you watch three sets
of trapezists at once? You really see neither well. It’s the same
with the three rings. There should be one ring, and each act should have a
fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; I would willingly
give the time. Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays going
on at once!”
“No, don’t fancy that!” I entreated. “One play is
bad enough.”
“Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the
same time to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two
platforms between the rings,” my friend calmly persisted. “The
three rings are an abuse and an outrage, but I don’t know but I
object still more to the silencing of the clowns. They have a great many
clowns now, but they are all dumb, and you only get half the good you used
to get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. Why, it’s
as if the literary humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a
subtle jest, and then put asterisks where the humor ought to come in.”
“Don’t you think you are going from bad to worse?” I
asked.
My friend went on: “I’m afraid the circus is spoiled for me.
It has become too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the
best thing in the way of an entertainment that there is. I’m still
very fond of it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because I have
been embarrassed with riches, and have been given more than I was able to
grasp. My greed has been overfed. I think I must keep to those
entertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till ten
at night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall of
the curtain. I suppose you would object to them because they’re
getting rather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the
first seats.”
I said that I did not think this too much for twelve hours, if the
intellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high.
“It’s as high as that of some magazines,” said my
friend, “though I could sometimes wish it were higher. It’s
like the matter in the Sunday papers—about that average. Some of it’s
good, and most of it isn’t. Some of it could hardly be worse. But
there is a great deal of it, and you get it consecutively and not
simultaneously. That constitutes its advantage over the circus.”
My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked:
“Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the
dime museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place
of the theatres?”
“You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn’t
seem to have met with much favor, though you urged their comparative
cheapness. Now, why not suggest something that is really level with the
popular taste?”
AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE
A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable
primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for
material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. He
said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to
a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an imaginative frame
in the reporter), that among us, “the old race of writers of
distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and Washington Irving,
have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are most prominent in
cultivated European opinion in art or literature, like Sargent, Henry
James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America, and draw their
inspiration from England, France, and Italy.”
I.
If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what many
Americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort
of self-love which calls itself patriotism. If it would at all help to put
an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated with
us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad to believe
that it was driving our literary men out of the country. This would be a
tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the millionaires and
the tramps. But I am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither our
very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state of polite learning
among us; though for the matter of that, I believe that economic
conditions have little to do with it; and that if a general mediocrity of
fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and to get poor, the
state of polite learning would not be considerably affected. As matters
stand, I think we may reasonably ask whether the Americans “most
prominent in cultivated European opinion,” the Americans who “live
habitually out of America,” are not less exiles than advance agents
of the expansion now advertising itself to the world. They may be the
vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to overrun the earth
from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to our advantage.
They probably themselves do not know it, but in the act of “drawing
their inspiration” from alien scenes, or taking their own where they
find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe “the struggle
for material prosperity,” which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal to
them here?
There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the
question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm
our patriotism. Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr.
Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as well
as in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very
great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair
measure of home-keeping authorship. Our destitution is not nearly so great
now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in the times
before the “struggle for material prosperity” when Washington
Irving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nigh
half his life.
Sir Lepel Griffin—or Sir Lepel Griffin’s reporter—seems
to forget the fact of Irving’s long absenteeism when he classes him
with “the old race” of eminent American authors who stayed at
home. But really none of those he names were so constant to our air as he
seems—or his reporter seems —to think. Longfellow sojourned
three or four years in Germany, Spain, and Italy; Holmes spent as great
time in Paris; Bryant was a frequent traveller, and each of them “drew
his inspiration” now and then from alien sources. Lowell was many
years in Italy, Spain, and England; Motley spent more than half his life
abroad; Hawthorne was away from us nearly a decade.
II.
If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I am
proving too much in another. My facts go to show that the literary spirit
is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere. If any good American
were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I should first advise
him that American literature was not derived from the folklore of the red
Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition of English
literature, and was independent even of our independence. Then I should
entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had found it more
comfortable or more profitable to live out of their respective countries
than in them. I should allege for his consolation the case of Byron,
Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterly that of the Brownings and
Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italian to an English sojourn; and
yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who voluntarily lived
several years in Vermont, and has “drawn his inspiration” in
notable instances from the life of these States. It will serve him also to
consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have
both lived long in France and Italy. Heinrich Heine loved to live in Paris
much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in Hamburg; and Tourguenief
himself, who said that any man’s country could get on without him,
but no man could get on without his country, managed to dispense with his
own in the French capital, and died there after he was quite free to go
back to St. Petersburg. In the last century Rousseau lived in France
rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried to live in Prussia, and
was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni left fame and friends in
Venice for the favor of princes in Paris.
Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an American vice
or an American virtue. It is an expression and a proof of the modern sense
which enlarges one’s country to the bounds of civilization. I cannot
think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if any American
feels it a grievance, I suggest that he do what he can to have embodied in
the platform of his party a plank affirming the right of American authors
to a public provision that will enable them to live as agreeably at home
as they can abroad on the same money. In the mean time, their absenteeism
is not a consequence of “the struggle for material prosperity,”
not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not less in Europe than in
America, and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as competitive
conditions endure, but is the result of chances and preferences which mean
nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable.
THE HORSE SHOW
“As good as the circus—not so good as the circus—better
than the circus.” These were my varying impressions, as I sat
looking down upon the tanbark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison
Square Garden; and I came away with their blend for my final opinion.
I.
I might think that the Horse Show (which is so largely a Man Show and a
Woman Show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but I
could not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. Perhaps the
circus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master are
joined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator. I am sure that
I have never been able quite to dissociate from it the picturesqueness of
chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest to me the last
correctness of fashion. It is through the horse that these far extremes
meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expression of
aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder world
prophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the Swell shall have
evolved into the Centaur.
Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as
you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about
you and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier.
In this first affair of the new-comer, the horses are not so much on show
as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossing manes,
with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines of people
coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feet deep,
against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there in perfect
relief, and it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you. The fact
is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is that they are
there to be seen.
The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which I tasted with
pleasure. It was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization, and
the American might feel a characteristic pride that what came to Rome in
five hundred years had come to America in a single century. There was
something fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and I
perceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive in
its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramatically
apparent. “Yes,” I found myself thinking, “this is what
it all comes to: the ‘subiti guadagni’ of the new rich, made
in large masses and seeking a swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly
accumulated fortunes, put together from sparing and scrimping, from
slaving and enslaving, in former times, and now in the stainless white
hands of the second or third generation, they both meet here to the
purpose of a common ostentation, and create a Horse Show.”
I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now they
had got it; and, so far as I have been able to observe them, people of
wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of being
bored in the midst of their amusements. This reserve of rapture may be
their delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered;
and I should not have objected to the swells at the Horse Show looking
dreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardness
of the countenance (which I found my own sympathetically taking on) I
should not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may have
been merely the consequence of being so much stared at. Perhaps, indeed,
they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but only companies of
ordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes; I
understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization so far
misled. But certainly if they were swells they did not look quite up to
themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities of foreign
countries, and on one or two occasions when I have seen them, kings and
emperors have failed me in like manner. They have all wanted that
indescribable something which I have found so satisfying in aristocracies
and royalties on the stage; and here at the Horse Show, while I made my
tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on foot who could much
better have taken the role of the people in the boxes. The promenaders may
not have been actors at all; they may have been the real thing for which I
was in vain scanning the boxes, but they looked like actors, who indeed
set an example to us all in personal beauty and in correctness of dress.
I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. We have not
distinction, as a people; Matthew Arnold noted that; and it is not our
business to have it: When it is our business our swells will have it, just
as our actors now have it, especially our actors of English birth. I had
not this reflection about me at the time to console me for my
disappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what I took for an
absence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of it
that the result was necessarily a species of indistinction. But in the
complexion of any social assembly we Americans are at a disadvantage with
Europeans from the want of uniforms. A few military scattered about in
those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons,
would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been heaping
upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in
personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the Horse
Show that I am complaining. If the men had borne their part as well, there
would not have been these tears: and yet, what am I saying? There was here
and there a clean-shaven face (which I will not believe was always an
actor’s), and here and there a figure superbly set up, and so
faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, and gloves as
to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clothes which I
will not at last call less than distinction.
II.
At any rate, I missed these marked presences when I left the lines of the
promenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers above the
boxes. I am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not one of
those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poor who
could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets. I bought it of
a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that I
conceived it the last in the house; but I found the chairs by no means all
filled, though it was as good an audience as I have sometimes seen in the
same place at other circuses. The people about me were such as I had noted
at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers from
provincial towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home with,
and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown upon me
during my association with the swells below. My neighbors were
sufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than their
betters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion upon
them, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring.
There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of costume. The bugler
who stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare (I
hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to enter
from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that filled my
romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management I thought
very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. At any rate,
their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the
boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes are always more
sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. As I have hinted, I do not
know just what costumes they were, but they took the light well from the
girandole far aloof and from the thousands of little electric bulbs that
beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed the sullenness of the dull,
rainy afternoon. When the knights entered the lists on the seats of their
dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems
before them, they took the light well, too, and the spectacle was so
brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for
the pageantries of the past. I do not know to this moment whether these
knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only their deputies, driving their
tandems for them, and I am equally at a loss to account for the variety,
of their hats. Some wore tall, shining silk hats; some flat-topped, brown
derbys; some simple black pot-hats;—and is there, then, no rigor as
to the head-gear of people driving tandems? I felt that there ought to be,
and that there ought to be some rule as to where the number of each tandem
should be displayed. As it was, this was sometimes carelessly stuck into
the seat of the cart; sometimes it was worn at the back of the groom’s
waist, and sometimes full upon his stomach. In the last position it gave a
touch of burlesque which wounded me; for these are vital matters, and I
found myself very exacting in them.
With the horses themselves I could find no fault upon the grounds of my
censure of the show in some other ways. They had distinction; they were
patrician; they were swell. They felt it, they showed it, they rejoiced in
it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory of
blood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands
and ages. Their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, and for
an aristocracy I suppose that they had a high average of intelligence,
though there might be two minds about this. They made me think of mettled
youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spirit of the beholder
with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvetting and caracoling, as
they jingled in their shining harness around the long ring. Their noble
uselessness took the fancy, for I suppose that there is nothing so
superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of the best society.
It is something which only the ambition of wealth and unbroken leisure can
mount to; and I was glad that the display of tandems was the first event
of the Horse Show which I witnessed, for it seemed to me that it must
beyond all others typify the power which created the Horse Show. I wished
that the human side of it could have been more unquestionably adequate,
but the equine side of the event was perfect. Still, I felt a certain
relief, as in something innocent and simple and childlike, in the next
event.
III.
This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty Shetland
ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. A cry of delight went up from a
group of little people near me, and the spell of the Horse Show was
broken. It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet and kindly
pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had ever had, or
ever wished to have, a Shetland pony; the touch of nature made the whole
show kin. I could not see that the freakish, kittenish creatures did
anything to claim our admiration, but they won our affection by every
trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy. The small colts broke away from
the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark in wanton groups, with gay
or plaintive whinnyings, which might well have touched a responsive chord
in the bosom of fashion itself: I dare say it is not so hard as it looks.
The scene remanded us to a moment of childhood; and I found myself so fond
of all the ponies that I felt it invidious of the judges to choose among
them for the prizes; they ought every one to have had the prize.
I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions;
no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribe when
it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-working donkeys, and
some of us may be toys and playthings without too great reproach. I gazed
after the broken, refluent wave of these amiable creatures, with the vague
toleration here formulated, but I was not quite at peace in it, or fully
consoled in my habitual ethicism till the next event brought the hunters
with their high-jumping into the ring. These noble animals unite use and
beauty in such measure that the censor must be of Catonian severity who
can refuse them his praise. When I reflected that by them and their
devoted riders our civilization had been assimilated to that of the
mother-country in its finest expression, and another tie added to those
that bind us to her through the language of Shakespeare and Milton; that
they had tamed the haughty spirit of the American farmer in several parts
of the country so that he submitted for a consideration to have his crops
ridden over, and that they had all but exterminated the ferocious
anise-seed bag, once so common and destructive among us, I was in a fit
mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were now set up at four or five
places for the purposes of the high-jumping. As to the beauty of the
hunting-horse, though, I think I must hedge a little, while I stand firmly
to my admiration of his use. To be honest, the tandem horse is more to my
taste. He is better shaped, and he bears himself more proudly. The hunter
is apt to behave, whatever his reserve of intelligence, like an excited
hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bred away to nothing where the ideal
horse abounds; he has the behavior of a turkey-hen when not behaving like
the common or garden hen. But there can be no question of his jumping,
which seems to be his chief business in a world where we are all appointed
our several duties, and I at once began to take a vivid pleasure in his
proficiency. I have always felt a blind and insensate joy in running
races, which has no relation to any particular horse, and I now
experienced an impartial rapture in the performances of these hunters.
They looked very much alike, and if it had not been for the changing
numbers on the sign-board in the centre of the ring announcing that 650,
675, or 602 was now jumping, I might have thought it was 650 all the time.
A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses have
got half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it is still
a fine sight. I became very fastidious as to which moment of it was the
finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when his aerial hoof
touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking his rider’s head
half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective; and I do not
know to this hour which I prefer. But I suppose I was becoming gradually
spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on I noticed that I was not
satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses’ execution.
Will it be credited that I became willing something should happen,
anything, to vary it? I asked myself why, if some of the more exciting
incidents of the hunting-field which I had read of must befall; I should
not see them. Several of the horses had balked at the barriers, and almost
thrown their riders across them over their necks, but not quite done it;
several had carried away the green-tufted top rail with their heels; when
suddenly there came a loud clatter from the farther side of the ellipse,
where a whole panel of fence had gone down. I looked eagerly for the
prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but they were cantering safely
away.
IV.
It was enough, however. I perceived that I was becoming demoralized, and
that if I were to write of the Horse Show with at all the superiority one
likes to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come away. But I
came away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus for
circus, the Greatest Show on Earth which I had often seen in that place
had certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show. It had three rings and
two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in the
races, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands,
instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses’
ears. The events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitely
more varied and picturesque. As for the people in the boxes, I do not know
that they were less distinguished than these at the Horse Show, but if
they were not of the same high level in which distinction was impossible,
they did not show it in their looks.
The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the first
qualities; and I had moments of suspecting that it was no more than the
evolution of the county cattle show. But in any case I had to own that its
great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole, appeals
to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than any
other interest, not excepting politics or religion. I cannot, indeed,
regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot be always
civilizing.
THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER
It has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how and
where to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged to
spend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in the
proportion of one’s ability to spend it wherever and however one
chose. Few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few
are greatly to be pitied. I know that they are often envied and hated for
it by those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake. If we
could look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so much
misery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach them
with their better fortune, or what appeared so.
I.
For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summer
brings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted.
They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard
necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed
somewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are an
infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. Their bane is
not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has no choice
of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must
begin at once to distinguish. It is the problem of the East rather than of
the West (where people are much more in the habit of staying at home the
year round), and it is the problem of the city and not of the country. I
am not sure that there is one practical farmer in the whole United States
who is obliged to witness in his household those sad dissensions which
almost separate the families of professional men as to where and how they
shall pass the summer. People of this class, which is a class with some
measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly of varying and decided
minds, and I once knew a family of the sort whose combined ideal for their
summer outing was summed up in the simple desire for society and solitude,
mountain-air and sea-bathing. They spent the whole months of April, May,
and June in a futile inquiry for a resort uniting these attractions, and
on the first of July they drove to the station with no definite point in
view. But they found that they could get return tickets for a certain
place on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for
it. There they decided next morning to push on to the mountains, and sent
their baggage to the station, but before it was checked they changed their
minds, and remained two weeks where they were. Then they took train for a
place on the coast, but in the cars a friend told them they ought to go to
another place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at the
junction they decided again to keep on. They arrived at their original
destination, and the following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel
farther down the coast. The answer came that there were no rooms, and
being by this time ready to start, they started, and in due time reported
themselves at the hotel. The landlord saw that something must be done, and
he got them rooms, at a smaller house, and ‘mealed’ them (as
it used to be called at Mt. Desert) in his own. But upon experiment of the
fare at the smaller house they liked it so well that they resolved to live
there altogether, and they spent a summer of the greatest comfort there,
so that they would hardly come away when the house closed in the fall.
This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always turn
out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trust themselves to
Providence in these matters than they do. There is really an infinite
variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could quite safely
leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should go, and check
one’s baggage accordingly. I think the chances of an agreeable
summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and- fast choice
of a certain place and sticking to it. My own experience is that in these
things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most
non-moral things.
II.
A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the
kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who
left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle
in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels. Yet such people were
in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient
persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe
discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts,
and reformed them altogether. I believe the city boarding-house remains
very much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the country
boarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it. As for the
summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of
except the prices. I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of- town
summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief
sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have already spoken
of.
I have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice you
make, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense of
responsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you.
I observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish they
did not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and I have been
told that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so
eminently detachable. To great numbers Europe looks from this shore like a
safe refuge from the American summer problem; and yet I am not sure that
it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe; one has
to choose where to go when one has got there. A European city is certainly
always more tolerable than an American city, but one cannot very well pass
the summer in Paris, or even in London. The heart there, as here, will
yearn for some blessed seat
“Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,”
and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world,
you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere in
particular.
III.
It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as I say, my
heart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer the
consequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but must
stay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that they
have any work to keep them there. I am not meaning now, of course,
business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread—or,
more correctly, the cake—of their families in the country, or even
their clerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people
as I sometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant
midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms over
sewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenement
streets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending over
wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without. These all get
on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not to accuse
themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another. Their fate
is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those who decide their
fate are always rebelling against it. They it is whom I am truly sorry
for, and whom I write of with tears in my ink. Their case is hard, and it
will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish they will look and how
flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they are asked about their
summer outings. I do not really suppose we shall be held to a very strict
account for our pleasures because everybody else has not enjoyed them,
too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yet there is an old-fashioned
compunction which will sometimes visit the heart if we take our pleasures
ungraciously, when so many have no pleasures to take. I would suggest,
then, to those on whom the curse of choice between pleasures rests, that
they should keep in mind those who have chiefly pains to their portion in
life.
I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, or
counselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has been
accurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as
things now are; but I would seriously entreat them to consider whether
they could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at the
sea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others
in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. I know very well that
it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality to take
comfort in one’s advantages from the disadvantages of others, and
this is not quite what I mean to teach. Perhaps I mean nothing more than
an overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages, which
would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of the summer
outer. It might be very interesting, and possibly it might be amusing, for
one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock to inquire into the
reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is not beyond the bounds
of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion on this subject would go
far to enlighten the world upon a question that has vexed the world ever
since mankind was divided into those who work too much and those who rest
too much.
AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO
A study of New York civilization in 1849 has lately come into my hands,
with a mortifying effect, which I should like to share with the reader, to
my pride of modernity. I had somehow believed that after half a century of
material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before, New York in
1902 must be very different from New York in 1849, but if I am to trust
either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, New York is
essentially the same now that it was then. The spirit of the place has not
changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly commercial. Even the
body of it has undergone little or no alteration; it was as shapeless, as
incongruous; as ugly when the author of ‘New York in Slices’
wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or overgrown, on the
moral and material lines which seem to have been structural in it from the
beginning. He felt in his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in
its architectural anarchy that I have felt in my time, and he noted how
all dignity and beauty perished, amid the warring forms, with a prescience
of my own affliction, which deprives me of the satisfaction of a
discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of being rather old-fashioned in
my painful emotions.
I.
I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his New
York with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; but I
am afraid I must own that ‘New York in Slices’ affects one as
having first been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings
to the study of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a
country visitor. This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he
wished to make with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a
certain innocent charm to his work. I may make myself better understood if
I say that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller New York is
much the same as that of Mr. Stead towards the wickedness of a much larger
Chicago. He seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of the
prisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs
(who then called themselves b’hoys and g’hals), the quacks,
the theatres, and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their
iniquities with a ready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with
him.
But if he treated of these things alone, I should not perhaps have brought
his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers. He treats also
of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all, “the literary
soirees” of that remote New York of his in a manner to make us
latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it. Fifty-odd years ago
journalism had already become “the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous
thing” we now know, and very different from the thing it was when
“expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from
the lightning’s blue and fiery film.” Reporterism was
beginning to assume its present importance, but it had not yet become the
paramount intellectual interest, and did not yet “stand shoulder to
shoulder” with the counting-room in authority. Great editors, then
as now, ranked great authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double
primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the same personality. They
were often the owners as well as the writers of their respective papers,
and they indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous
rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if
not the chief use, of our contemporaneous journals. Apparently, however,
notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the
delight of their readers, and the press had not become the detective
agency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities.
But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre as
still eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism. “How can you
expect,” our author asks, “a frank and unbiassed criticism
upon the performance of George Frederick Cooke Snooks . . . when the
editor or reporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak
and stewed potatoes at Windust’s, and regaling himself on
brandy-and-water cold, without, at the expense of the aforesaid George
Frederick Cooke Snooks?” The severest censor of the press, however,
would hardly declare now that “as to such a thing as impartial and
independent criticism upon theatres in the present state of the relations
between editors, reporters, managers, actors—and actresses—the
thing is palpably out of the question,” and if matters were really
at the pass hinted, the press has certainly improved in fifty years, if
one may judge from its present frank condemnations of plays and players.
The theatre apparently has not, for we read that at that period “a
very great majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage depend
mostly for their piquancy and their power of interesting an audience upon
intrigues with married women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating,
and fraud of every description . . . . Stage costume, too, wherever there
is half a chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible;
and a freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece
which would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the
audacity to make its appearance there.”
II.
I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if not
quite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts were
presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849.
That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artists
clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among
themselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions were
finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. While they lasted,
however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and
intellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as our
private views now are, or ought to be; and the author “devotes an
entire number” of his series “to a single institution”—fearless
of being accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the
influences of the fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind.
He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides
treating of various literary celebrities at the “literary soirees,”
he imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants. At
Delmonico’s, where if you had “French and money” you
could get in that day “a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with
a picture by Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers,”
he meets such a musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an
intellectual epicurean as N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno
Hoffman. But it would be a warm day for Delmonico’s when the
observer in this epoch could chance upon so much genius at its tables,
perhaps because genius among us has no longer the French or the money.
Indeed, the author of ‘New York in Slices’ seems finally to
think that he has gone too far, even for his own period, and brings
himself up with the qualifying reservation that if Willis and Hoffman
never did dine together at Delmonico’s, they ought to have done so.
He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical critic, and he
has no scruple in assembling for us at his “literary soiree” a
dozen distinguished-looking men and “twice as many women....
listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by
a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading
a basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . the annual Valentine Party,
to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the purpose
of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few
hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise which a cold
world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb- spinners.”
It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a ‘salon’
as this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its
celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently
intending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich and
full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of
posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear
in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as “John Inman,
the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and magazines,”
or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes to be “stalking
about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . . an early copy of
his forthcoming ‘Female Poets of America’”; or as Lewis
Gaylord Clark, the “sunnyfaced, smiling” editor of the
Knickerbocker Magazine, “who don’t look as if the Ink-Fiend
had ever heard of him,” as he stands up to dance a polka with
“a demure lady who has evidently spilled the inkstand over her dress”;
or as “the stately Mrs. Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over
the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an
antique fountain by moonlight”; or as “the spiritual and
dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby,”
where she sits “nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a
bird escaped from its cage”; or as Margaret Fuller, “her
large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip
prophesying like a Pythoness”?
I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said at the outset, affirming
the persistent equality of New York characteristics and circumstances, I
wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warn malign foreign
observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us as we see
ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in the taste
of 1849. Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the author of
‘New York in Slices’ would have us believe; and perhaps any
one who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived
by a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our
modern “society journalism.”
FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND
There is, of course, almost a world’s difference between England and
the Continent anywhere; but I do not recall just now any transition
between Continental countries which involves a more distinct change in the
superficial aspect of things than the passage from the Middle States into
New England. It is all American, but American of diverse ideals; and you
are hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects,
which are the more apparent to you the more American you are. If you want
the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave New York on a Sound
boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle State civilization and wake
into the civilization of New England, which seems to give its stamp to
nature herself. As to man, he takes it whether native or alien; and if he
is foreign-born it marks him another Irishman, Italian, Canadian, Jew, or
negro from his brother in any other part of the United States.
I.
When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out,
and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England’s influence of
this sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I
could wish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man
can well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along
shore in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young
chicken in the road. The natural expectation is that any chicken in these
circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a
loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat (it was
a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks
and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which passed over its
head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then fall still. The
poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it
well, compared with my driver. He could hardly stop lamenting it; and when
presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. “You goin’ past
Jim Marden’s?” “Yes.” “Well, I wish you’d
tell him I just run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess. I
guess it was a pretty big one.” “Oh no,” I put in,
“it was only a broiler. What do you think it was worth?” I
took out some money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my hand;
“About half a dollar, I guess.” On this I put it all back in
my pocket, and then he said, “Well, if a chicken don’t know
enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain’t to blame.” I
expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. When we
parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let the
owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled his
pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I have no
doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid
for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered
hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without
any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England
had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain
by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening
him, while I was off in my train without a pang for the owner and with
only an agreeable pathos for the pullet.
II.
The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in a
psychological direction away from the simpler differences which I meant to
note in New England. They were evident as soon as our train began to run
from the steamboat landing into the country, and they have intensified, if
they have not multiplied, themselves as I have penetrated deeper and
deeper into the beautiful region. The land is poorer than the land to the
southward—one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and often so
thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borne any
other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, cut away the primeval
woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light. But wherever you
come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of the village
groups that New England farm-houses have always liked to gather themselves
into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of a repair that ought
to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything
is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to
the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering
over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony
pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone
are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June,
the breath of the clover blows honey—sweet into the car windows, and
the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem
to smoke in the sun.
We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continental
weather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering by
anticipation. But the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the shade
of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass that grows so
tall about them that the June roses have to strain upward to get
themselves free of it. Behind each dwelling is a billowy mass of orchard,
and before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches above the quiet
street. There is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as the American
elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these New England villages, which
are themselves, I think, the prettiest and wholesomest of mortal sojourns.
By a happy instinct, their wooden houses are all painted white, to a
marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and the contrast of their
dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. There was an evil hour, the
terrible moment of the aesthetic revival now happily past, when white
walls and green blinds were thought in bad taste, and the village houses
were often tinged a dreary ground color, or a doleful olive, or a gloomy
red, but now they have returned to their earlier love. Not the first love;
that was a pale buff with white trim; but I doubt if it were good for all
kinds of village houses; the eye rather demands the white. The pale buff
does very well for large colonial mansions, like Lowell’s or
Longfellow’s in Cambridge; but when you come, say, to see the great
square houses built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; early in this century,
and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our
climate, even in the towns.
In such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way to the
beach it was of an absolute fitness; and I wish I could convey a due sense
of the exquisite keeping of the place. Each white house was more or less
closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; the grassy
door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing rose embowered the
door-way with its bloom. Away backward or sidewise stretched the woodshed
from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the whole under one cover; the
turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over which the elms rose
and drooped; and from one end of the village to the other you could not,
as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. I know Holland; I have
seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up for Sunday to the very middle
of their brick streets, but I doubt if Dutch cleanliness goes so far
without, or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanliness of New
England. I felt so keenly the feminine quality of its motive as I passed
through that village, that I think if I had dropped so much as a piece of
paper in the street I must have knocked at the first door and begged the
lady of the house (who would have opened it in person after wiping her
hands from her work, taking off her apron, and giving a glance at herself
in the mirror and at me through the window blind) to report me to the
selectmen in the interest of good morals.
III.
I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the
New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I am
still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the
relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there.
At best I was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it used to give
me great pleasure—so penetratingly does the place qualify even the
sojourning Westerner—to think of the defect of New York in the
virtue that is next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head for shame
at the mortifying contrast of the Boston streets to the well-swept asphalt
which I had left frying in the New York sun the afternoon before. Later,
however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces I remembered so
well—good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of
challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof—they not only ignored
the disgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a
state of transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind
it; and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares and
narrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, and
seemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them.
In New York you see the American face as Europe characterizes it; in
Boston you see it as it characterizes Europe; and it is in Boston that you
can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all
alien things must yield to till they take the American cast. It is almost
dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew; and in
the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your
conscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from it and
make ready to do penance for them. I felt almost as if I had brought the
dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lying about, so
impossible were they with reference to the Boston face.
It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and it
looked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of our
elderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we drove
away from the station. It was a little rigorous with us, as requiring us
to have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it was
patient from long experience. In New York there are no elderly hackmen;
but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe they would be capable of
bad faith with travellers. In fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere as
predatory as it is painted; but in Boston it appears to have the public
honor in its keeping. I do not mean that it was less mature, less
self-respectful in Portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so it
could not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both
places, and all through New England it is of native birth, while in New
York it is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numbers
towards the Celtic strain. The prevalence of the native in New England
helps you sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are in
America as the first Americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in New
England is the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautiful
old seaport of New Hampshire. In fact, without being quite prepared to
defend a thesis to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is preeminently
American, and in this it differs from Newburyport and from Salem, which
have suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and,
though among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after Boston, are now
largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actually the
majority, I believe, in Newburyport.
IV.
The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the century, but before that
time she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able to
build themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of a
grandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country. I do not know what
architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worth
remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful
proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of
pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house
our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. The decoration is
oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement;
or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate
iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultless
propriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the arching
elms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behind them
to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances. They are all of wood,
except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout edifices
rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as if they
might keep it yet another century.
Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whose
gravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needs
cleaning. Even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives the
most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as if the
wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the
narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd
each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water—side, are
doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New
England conscience against getting them untidy.
When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high-
shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few with their
gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with their
mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the whole
place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the past, from
the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water’s edge
till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants and
opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome space
of gardened ground.
My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty,
and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of
the town. Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich field
when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for it needs some
minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to express a
fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the present I know
nothing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and sigh my
longing soul into their dim interiors. When now and then a young shape in
summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered
out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have
been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some girl of those flitting
through the warm, odorous twilight must become the creative historian of
the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now growing up in
Portsmouth.
V.
If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shown
herself in fiction, I might say the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already
with us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material.
One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from New Hampshire into Maine, and
took the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country, we
suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are a little
different sort of New-Englanders from those of Miss Wilkins. They began to
flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and grandmothers, and
nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youth of marriageable
age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the Sunday
best which they had worn to the graduation exercises at the High School,
where we took them mostly up. The womenkind were in a nervous twitter of
talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond their wont, “passing
the time of day” with one another, and helping the more tumultuous
sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car. They courteously made room
for one another, and let the children stand between their knees, or took
them in their laps, with that unfailing American kindness which I am
prouder of than the American valor in battle, observing in all that
American decorum which is no bad thing either. We had chanced upon the
high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year, when people might well
have been a little off their balance, but there was not a boisterous note
in the subdued affair. As we passed the school-house door, three dear,
pretty maids in white gowns and white slippers stood on the steps and
gently smiled upon our company. One could see that they were inwardly
glowing and thrilling with the excitement of their graduation, but were
controlling their emotions to a calm worthy of the august event, so that
no one might ever have it to say that they had appeared silly.
The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or
gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private
ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people
along its obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was
just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins’s story where the
bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me
think more of Miss Jewett’s people. The shore folk and the
Down-Easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have
belonged in The Country of the Pointed Firs’, or ‘Sister Wisby’s
Courtship’, or Dulham Ladies’, or ‘An Autumn Ramble’,
or twenty other entrancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try her
front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she
had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the
ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their
grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or
the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half
house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself.
The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in an
effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it
climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the
country road which it followed. It is a land of low hills, broken by
frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see
how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. It
scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a
sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud
caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. Its course does
not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but as yet
there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one would
think. The landscape has already accepted it, and is making the best of
it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. It passes
everybody’s front door or back door, and the farmers can get
themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth
in an hour, twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are open, with
transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of wind
or rain. In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The
young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let a car
from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out in a
blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. “But the
cah was so wa’m, I neva suff’ed a mite.”
“Well,” I summarized, “it must be a great advantage to
all the people along the line.”
“Well, you wouldn’t ‘a’ thought so, from the kick
they made.”
“I suppose the cottagers”—the summer colony—“didn’t
like the noise.”
“Oh yes; that’s what I mean. The’s whe’ the kick
was. The natives like it. I guess the summa folks ‘ll like it, too.”
He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both
understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow
to the will of the majority.
THE ART OF THE ADSMITH
The other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a bad
conscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky
book under his arm, and said, “I see by a guilty look in your eye
that you are meaning to write about spring.”
“I am not,” I retorted, “and if I were, it would be
because none of the new things have been said yet about spring, and
because spring is never an old story, any more than youth or love.”
“I have heard something like that before,” said my friend,
“and I understand. The simple truth of the matter is that this is
the fag-end of the season, and you have run low in your subjects. Now take
my advice and don’t write about spring; it will make everybody hate
you, and will do no good. Write about advertising.” He tapped the
book under his arm significantly. “Here is a theme for you.”
I.
He had no sooner pronounced these words than I began to feel a weird and
potent fascination in his suggestion. I took the book from him and looked
it eagerly through. It was called Good Advertising, and it was written by
one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almost to the
grade of an art, or a humanity.
“But I see nothing here,” I said, musingly, “which would
enable a self-respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in
giving due hold upon the public interest those charming characteristics of
his book which no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate so
persuasively.”
“I expected some such objection from you,” said my friend.
“You will admit that there is everything else here?”
“Everything but that most essential thing. You know how we all feel
about it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense of
insufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poor
authors. The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for the
reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher—”
“I see what you mean,” said my friend. “But you must
have patience. If the author of this book can write so luminously of
advertising in other respects, I am sure he will yet be able to cast a
satisfactory light upon your problem. The question is, I believe, how to
translate into irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which
a writer feels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its
singular beauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print,
without infringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is the
distinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?”
“Something like that. But you understand.”
“Perhaps a Roentgen ray might be got to do it,” said my
friend, thoughtfully, “or perhaps this author may bring his mind to
bear upon it yet. He seems to have considered every kind of advertising
except book-advertising.”
“The most important of all!” I cried, impatiently.
“You think so because you are in that line. If you were in the line
of varnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or
of malt—”
“Still I should be interested in book—advertising, because it
is the most vital of human interests.”
“Tell me,” said my friend, “do you read the
advertisements of the books of rival authors?”
“Brother authors,” I corrected him.
“Well, brother authors.”
I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to add that I thought them
little better than a waste of the publishers’ money.
II.
My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, but
seemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter.
“I have often wondered,” he said, “at the enormous
expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted.
But my author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was
unwittingly groping for. When you take up a Sunday paper”—I
shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence—“you are simply
appalled at the miles of announcements of all sorts. Who can possibly read
them? Who cares even to look at them? But if you want something in
particular—to furnish a house, or buy a suburban place, or take a
steamer for Europe, or go, to the theatre—then you find out at once
who reads the advertisements, and cares to look at them. They respond to
the multifarious wants of the whole community. You have before you the
living operation of that law of demand and supply which it has always been
such a bore to hear about. As often happens, the supply seems to come
before the demand; but that’s only an appearance. You wanted
something, and you found an offer to meet your want.”
“Then you don’t believe that the offer to meet your want
suggested it?”
“I see that my author believes something of the kind. We may be full
of all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying
influence of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I
have a feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to
potential wants is largely thrown away. You must want a thing, or think
you want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of
impertinence.”
“There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I read
without the slightest interest in the subject matter. Simply the beauty of
the style attracts me.”
“I know. But does it ever move you to get what you don’t want?”
“Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that
sort of advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint.”
“He doesn’t contemn it, quite. But I think he feels that it
may have had its day. Do you still read such advertisements with your
early zest?”
“No; the zest for nearly everything goes. I don’t care so much
for Tourguenief as I used. Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconic
suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the season’s
wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction. The advertising expert—”
“This author calls him the adsmith.”
“Delightful! Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it. It’s
as legitimate as lunch. But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have
caught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists
have caught the American social tone.”
“Yes,” said my friend, “and he seems to have prospered
as richly by it. You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty
thousand dollars by adsmithing. They have put their art quite on a level
with fiction pecuniarily.”
“Perhaps it is a branch of fiction.”
“No; they claim that it is pure fact. My author discourages the
slightest admixture of fable. The truth, clearly and simply expressed, is
the best in an ad.
“It is best in a wof, too. I am always saying that.”
“Wof?”
“Well, work of fiction. It’s another new word, like lunch or
ad.”
“But in a wof,” said my friend, instantly adopting it, “my
author insinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity,
while in an ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible
succinctness. In one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay
by the word. That is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground
than the wofsmith.”
“I should think your author might have written a recent article in
The————-, reproaching fiction with its unhallowed
gains.”
“If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. He would have been
incapable of it. My author is no more the friend of honesty in adsmithing
than he is of propriety, He deprecates jocosity in apothecaries and
undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business; and he is as
severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attention by disgusting
or shocking the reader.
“He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and I
shouldn’t have minded his criticising the ready wofsmith. I hope he
attacks the use of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the
poster- plastered fences around vacant lots. In New York there is only one
paper whose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves.”
“Well,” said my friend, “he attacks foolish and
ineffective display.”
“It is all foolish and ineffective. It is like a crowd of people
trying to make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice.
A paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congested
and delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions it
is unnecessary, and it is futile. Compare any New York paper but one with
the London papers, and you will see what I mean. Of course I refer to the
ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with pictures and
scare heads as all the rest. I wish your author could revise his opinions
and condemn all display in ads.”
“I dare say he will when he knows what you think,” said my
friend, with imaginable sarcasm.
III.
“I wish,” I went on, “that he would give us some
philosophy of the prodigious increase of advertising within the last
twenty-five years, and some conjecture as to the end of it all. Evidently,
it can’t keep on increasing at the present rate. If it does, there
will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up
with the advertisements of things.”
“Before that time, perhaps,” my friend suggested, “adsmithing
will have become so fine and potent an art that advertising will be
reduced in bulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing its
effectiveness.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “some silent electrical process will
be contrived, so that the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the
fascination of a spring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady’s
consciousness without even the agency of words. All other facts of
commercial and industrial interest could be dealt with in the same way. A
fine thrill could be made to go from the last new book through the whole
community, so that people would not willingly rest till they had it. Yes,
one can see an indefinite future for advertising in that way. The adsmith
may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century. He may assemble in his
grasp, and employ at will, all the arts and sciences.”
“Yes,” said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice,
“that is very well. But what is to become of the race when it is
penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world’s demand and
supply?”
“Oh, that is another affair. I was merely imagining the possible
resources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising while
guarding the integrity of the planet. I think, very likely, if the thing
keeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able to
criticise the others. Or possibly the thing may work its own cure. You
know the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotism
to which conditions appeal. They do not deny that these foster greed and
rapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth-
winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and good comes
of it all. I never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn’t a
sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess and
invasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to us
still more by the adsmith? Come, isn’t there hope in that?”
“I see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream,”
said my friend. “Why don’t you turn it to account?”
“You know that isn’t my line; I must leave that sort of
wofsmithing to the romantic novelist. Besides, I have my well-known
panacea for all the ills our state is heir to, in a civilization which
shall legislate foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of
the possibility of existence. Most of the adsmithing is now employed in
persuading people that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. But in
any civilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much less
foisted upon the community by adsmiths.”
“I see what you mean,” said my friend; and he sighed gently.
“I had much better let you write about spring.”
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM
A late incident in the history of a very widespread English novelist,
triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist had
casually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the real
author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics. The
friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuously
dismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but
declared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist’s
works. The novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so using material
in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or idea from life,
and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answer critics who
regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation. In a manner he
brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general public that
the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his own way, duly to
ticket the flies preserved in his amber.
I.
When I read this haughty vindication, I thought at first that if the case
were mine I would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friend as
that; but since, I have not been so sure. I have asked myself upon a
careful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be frankly avowed,
as in nowise dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would take the
affair into consideration and make it clear for me. If we are to suppose
that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that public
dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently plagiarism
is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it does not
disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, defines it as “the crime of
literary theft”; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting
shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the
offence, if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the
word is not harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as
white-lying.
The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took his own where he found
it, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the things
other people have rushed in with before them. But really they seem to need
neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they are caught in
the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rash intruder upon
their premises. The novelist in question is by no means the only recent
example, and is by no means a flagrant example. While the ratification of
the treaty with Spain was pending before the Senate of the United States,
a member of that body opposed it in a speech almost word for word the same
as a sermon delivered in New York City only a few days earlier and
published broadcast. He was promptly exposed by the parallel-column
system; but I have never heard that his standing was affected or his
usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him. A few years ago an
eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own the sermon of a
brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected and promptly
exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever happened from
the exposure. Every one must recall like instances, more or less remote. I
remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a journalist who used as
his own all the denunciatory passages of Macaulay’s article on
Barrere, and applied them with changes of name to the character and
conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty to devote to
infamy. He was caught in the fact, and by means of the parallel column
pilloried before the community. But the community did not mind it a bit,
and the journalist did not either. He prospered on amid those who all knew
what he had done, and when he removed to another city it was to a larger
one, and to a position of more commanding influence, from which he was
long conspicuous in helping shape the destinies of the nation.
So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as
harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from
time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its
foundations. They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings,
rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I do
not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest
victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or heads
of his readers.
II.
I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. I
am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from my own
sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever another’s
have found him out. But as yet I have not convinced myself that the sort
of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave
no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the dictionary (with very
unnecessary brutality) calls a “crime” and a “theft.”
If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not differently
natured, from all other crimes and thefts. These may be more or less
artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable
detection with it. If you take a man’s hat or coat out of his hall,
you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his horse out
of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it; if you
take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the crowd,
and easily prove your innocence. But if you take his sermon, or his essay,
or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery. The world is
full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as
detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness,
and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel
columns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you
take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of
one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten
to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display
his erudition. A man may escape for centuries and yet be found out. In the
notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender seemed finally secure
of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was
able to detect him at last, and to restore the goods to their rightful
owner, Sir Francis Bacon.
In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure,
plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probability
that it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, and
journalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mind
at the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere. Now and then it
takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when the plagiarist
openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece of literary
property. When Mr. William Allen Butler’s famous poem of “Nothing
to Wear” achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girl
declared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lost
the MS. in an omnibus. All her friends apparently believed so, too; and
the friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed the
authorship of “Beautiful Snow” and “Rock Me to Sleep”
were ready to support them by affidavit against the real authors of those
pretty worthless pieces.
From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader that
plagiarism is not the simple “crime” or “theft”
that the lexicographers would have us believe. It argues a strange and
peculiar courage on the part of those who commit it or indulge it, since
they are sure of having it brought home to them, for they seem to dread
the exposure, though it involves no punishment outside of themselves. Why
do they do it, or, having done it, why do they mind it, since the public
does not? Their temerity and their timidity are things almost
irreconcilable, and the whole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what
one would do if one’s own plagiarisms were found out. But this is a
mere question of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of the
nature or essence of the thing itself.
PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION
The question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of reality
does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of those
inquiries to which there is no very final answer. The most baffling fact
of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident; and if you go about
to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the convictions of those
whom they have persuaded. It will not do to affirm anything wholesale
concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary present themselves if
you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which you
cannot gainsay. The most that you can do is to appeal to your own
consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best
test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art which created the
picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it true to human experience
generally? If it is so, then it cannot well be false to the special human
experience it deals with.
I.
Not long ago I heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically,
illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of our
writers, whose art is of the kind I mean. A lady was driving with a young
girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New York through one of those
little towns of the North Shore in Massachusetts, where the small; wooden
houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schooners slip, in
and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if they were blown
about through the tall grass. She tried to make her feel the shy charm of
the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to the manner born
are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned New England villages; but she
found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored cottages,
with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yards lit by
patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with their
close-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them,
and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of them
altogether. She said that they were terrible, and she knew that in each of
them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, or unhappy
wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in Miss Wilkins’s
stories.
She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of
these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious,
deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this cannot
make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical
sorrows. Without being so very young, I, too, have found the humor hardly
enough at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in
tragedy itself, one gets through a remote New England village, at
nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in quite the mood that
Miss Wilkins’s bleaker studies leave one in. At midday, or in the
bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to fling off the
melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction; and I
have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or, that
one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house and in placing
one of her muted dramas in it. One cannot know the people of such places
without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know New England
without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England character,
though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort of stories could
be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of New
England village life.
To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident that
their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is
seldom on show anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy
and Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I went
through Russia and met none of their people. I should be rather more
surprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga’s or
Fogazzaro’s, but that would be because I already knew Italy a
little. In fact, I suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes
only to the connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the
artist himself. One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an
author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great
deal of patience to the scrutiny. Types are very backward and shrinking
things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you
seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is
distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author’s
reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his
truth.
II.
The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there finds
them dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions are
dramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in real
life are recreantly undramatic. One might go through a New England village
and see Mary Wilkins houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet not witness a
scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. It is only too
probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaint or
humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; and yet I
should not question her revelation on that account. The life of New
England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and Miss Sarah O. Jewett, and
Miss Alice Brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except to the
accustomed eye. It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by the Puritanic
theology. One must not be very positive in such things, and I may be too
bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some New Englanders
approaches this theology the belief of most is now far from it; and yet
its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the New England
character that Puritanism survives in the moral and mental make of the
people almost in its early strength. Conduct and manner conform to a dead
religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to
be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. A people
are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations without acquiring a
spiritual pride that remains with them long after they cease to believe
themselves chosen. They are often stiffened in the neck and they are often
hardened in the heart by it, to the point of making them angular and cold;
but they are of an inveterate responsibility to a power higher than
themselves, and they are strengthened for any fate. They are what we see
in the stories which, perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction.
As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so Puritanical
as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the inherited
Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it from the
manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however, always a
revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and securest; this
resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet
been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who
cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or
pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which awaits
full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from the dust of systems
and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine,
has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New England manners. It is
often a last state of Unitarianism, which prevailed in the larger towns
and cities when the Calvinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is
often an effect of the spiritualism so common in New England, and, in
fact, everywhere in America. Then, there is a wide-spread love of
literature in the country towns and villages which has in great measure
replaced the old interest in dogma, and which forms with us an author’s
closest appreciation, if not his best. But as yet little hint of all this
has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual
life of New England, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one
to say that Puritanism was a blessing if it made the New-Englanders what
they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in
the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital of that New England nation
which is fast losing itself in the American nation, is no longer of its
old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high
thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at
large. The good causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there,
and in a wholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New
England conscience, has imparted itself to the American people.
Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to
have in such excellent degree, has spread from New England. That is,
indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there been
brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of
Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs.
Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture of New
England village life in some of its more obvious phases. I say obvious
because I must, but I have already said that this is a life which is very
little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought the portrait to
the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and unnatural,
though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic was wrong.
THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART
One of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of the
artist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarely
care for their work artistically. They care for it morally, personally,
partially. I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled preference
for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a philistine
question of the material when it should, aesthetically speaking, be
concerned solely with the form.
I.
The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and amusing
illustration of my point. They were playing a most soul-filling melodrama,
of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first that there will
be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just as it should,
no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. An
over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigencies of the stage,
could not fail to intervene at the critical moment in behalf of innocence
and virtue, and the spectator never had the least occasion for anxiety.
Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villain in the piece; so very
black-hearted that he seemed not to have a single good impulse from first
to last. Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage Providence, as harmless
as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly aims. He accomplished no more
mischief, in fact, than if all his intents had been of the best; except
for the satisfaction afforded by the edifying spectacle of his defeat and
shame, he need not have been in the play at all; and one might almost have
felt sorry for him, he was so continually baffled. But this was not enough
for the audience, or for that part of it which filled the gallery to the
roof. Perhaps he was such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very,
very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out
to him by the dramatist could not suffice. At any rate, the gallery took
such a vivid interest in his punishment that it had out the actor who
impersonated the wretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout
his deliberate passage across the stage before the curtain. The hisses
were not at all for the actor, but altogether for the character. The
performance was fairly good, quite as good as the performance of any
virtuous part in the piece, and easily up to the level of other villanous
performances (I never find much nature in them, perhaps because there is
not much nature in villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but
the mere conception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too
much for an audience of the average popular goodness. It was only after he
had taken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectators
forbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparently
they did not care to “give him a realizing sense that there was a
punishment after death,” as the man in Lincoln’s story did
with the dead dog.
II.
The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me upon
thinking (I like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-century essayists
were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable reprobate
is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers at pictures and
statues, listeners to music, and so on through the whole list of the arts.
It is absolutely different from the artist’s attitude, from the
connoisseur’s attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their
attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist works
for. Art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is
produced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally,
personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions.
Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not,
he, does not succeed without it. Their brute liking or misliking is the
final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all. Only, in some
cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o’clock on the
first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but remain open forever,
and the voting goes on. Still, even the first day’s canvass is
important, or at least significant. It will not do for the artist to
electioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of his
defeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universal
interest. He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to his
fellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, but
whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. If he can make something
that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may not have
done any great thing, but if he has made something that they will neither
cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter how well, how
finely, how truly he has done the thing.
This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one’s artist-pride
such as one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. Not long
ago I was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to
my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from reading
poetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps
putting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoy
pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul
to those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly to
interest painters. He replied that it was a confession of weakness in a
painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the
spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that
if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he
was denying his office, which was to say something clear and appreciable
to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even insisted that a picture
ought to tell a story.
The difficulty in humbling one’s self to this view of art is in the
ease with which one may please the general by art which is no art. Neither
the play nor the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor was
hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at all
fine; and yet I perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a supreme
effect. If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be very
sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very proud if, on the
level I chose and with the quality I cared for, I could invent a villain
that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassing wickedness.
In other words, I think it a thousand pities whenever an artist gets so
far away from the general, so far within himself or a little circle of
amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens no response in the
multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger of the arts among us, and
how to escape it is not so very plain. It makes one sick and sorry often
to see how cheaply the applause of the common people is won. It is not an
infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting to any performance, we may
be pretty sure it is not the greatest performance.
III.
The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, to confound
us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that. We talk, for
instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is
different from talking of cookery for cooks. Poetry is not made for poets;
they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for people who are
not poets. If it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is
poetry which has failed of its truest office. It is none the less its
truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to do it.
The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this
truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study
how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are
wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. Leaving the drama out of
the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the favor
of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a race more
open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours. The artist who
feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now and here a
chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the world before.
Of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanity are the
simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when the complex and
the recondite may not universally please. 288
The art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them in him.
Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters a foot
high.
The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has a success
to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that it goes no
further. He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar because bad
art pleases them. It is part of his reason for being that he should please
them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is wanting in force,
however much he abounds in fineness. Who would not wish his picture to
draw a crowd about it? Who would not wish his novel to sell five hundred
thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid love of gain which I am
told governs novelists? One should not really wish it any the less because
chromos and historical romances are popular.
Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer together
in a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions. I
put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be more than
living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in the mean
time I think that the artist might very well study the springs of feeling
in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quite humbly go to
that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and inquire how his
wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not being
a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of that play and
its public.
POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
No thornier theme could well be suggested than I was once invited to
consider by an Englishman who wished to know how far American politicians
were scholars, and how far American authors took part in politics. In my
mind I first revolted from the inquiry, and then I cast about, in the
fascination it began to have for me, to see how I might handle it and
prick myself least. In a sort, which it would take too long to set forth,
politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were to deal quite
frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one might accuse one’s
self of an unwarrantable personality. So, in what I shall have to say in
answer to the question asked me, I shall seek above all things not to be
quite frank.
I.
My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors no
longer living. Not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safe to
say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of men among
us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Curtis, Emerson, and Bryant more or less
promptly and openly took sides against slavery. Holmes was very much later
in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his final strenuousness;
as for Hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially a spectator of life to
be classed with either party, though his associations, if not his
sympathies, were with the Northern men who had Southern principles until
the civil war came. After the war, when our political questions ceased to
be moral and emotional and became economic and sociological, literary men
found their standing with greater difficulty. They remained mostly
Republicans, because the Republicans were the anti-slavery party, and were
still waging war against slavery in their nerves.
I should say that they also continued very largely the emotional tradition
in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things the politics of
literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional. In fact, though the
questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly the greater number
of Americans are so. Nothing else would account for the fact that during
the last ten or fifteen years men have remained Republicans and remained
Democrats upon no tangible issues except of office, which could
practically concern only a few hundreds or thousands out of every million
voters. Party fealty is praised as a virtue, and disloyalty to party is
treated as a species of incivism next in wickedness to treason. If any one
were to ask me why then American authors were not active in American
politics, as they once were, I should feel a certain diffidence in
replying that the question of other people’s accession to office
was, however emotional, unimportant to them as compared with literary
questions. I should have the more diffidence because it might be retorted
that literary men were too unpractical for politics when they did not deal
with moral issues.
Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might even
be regarded as complimentary. It is not our custom to be tender with any
one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be bettered,
especially in public affairs. We are apt to call such a one out of his
name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. This may be a
better reason than either given why authors do not take part in politics
with us. They are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, and always averse
to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrust their fitness to
lead, when they have quite a firm faith in their convictions. They
hesitate to urge these in the face of practical politicians, who have a
confidence in their ability to settle all affairs of State not surpassed
even by that of business men in dealing with economic questions.
I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at least for
the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not. Our
politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so far, our
fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunned our good
society—which is not picturesque or apparently anything but a
tiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under the
same name. In nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with our
politics as material, they have given the practical politicians only too
much reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand the
mere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life.
II.
There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did not
withhold me I might name some striking ones. Privately and
unprofessionally, I think our authors take as vivid an interest in public
affairs as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry to think
that they took a less intelligent interest. Now and then, but only very
rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side. In this
event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like to visit
difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him.
Such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man need
shrink from, but they have a bearing upon what I am trying to explain, and
in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in our literary
men. No one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown at him, though
they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrown in joke. But
it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes them seriously,
he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrown at him. He might
burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; but if he
spoke of public questions with heart and conscience, he could not do it
with impunity, unless he were authorized to do so by some practical
relation to them. I do not mean that then he would escape; but in this
country, where there were once supposed to be no classes, people are more
strictly classified than in any other. Business to the business man, law
to the lawyer, medicine to the physician, politics to the politician, and
letters to the literary man; that is the rule. One is not expected to
transcend his function, and commonly one does not. We keep each to his
last, as if there were not human interests, civic interests, which had a
higher claim than the last upon our thinking and feeling. The tendency has
grown upon us severally and collectively through the long persistence of
our prosperity; if public affairs were going ill, private affairs were
going so well that we did not mind the others; and we Americans are, I
think, meridional in our improvidence. We are so essentially of to-day
that we behave as if to-morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. We
have taught ourselves to believe that it will all come out right in the
end so long that we have come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic
fatalists.
III.
The turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if I may so
phrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largely
attracted literary men. It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy himself,
whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vast
numbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field of practical
politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of economic
equality. But he virtually founded the Populist party, which, as the vital
principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing its candidate for
the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first among our
authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side since the
days of the old antislavery agitation. Without too great disregard of the
reticence concerning the living which I promised myself, I may mention Dr.
Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson as prominent
authors who encouraged the Nationalist movement eventuating in Populism,
though they were never Populists. It may be interesting to note that Dr.
Hale and Colonel Higginson, who later came together in their sociological
sympathies, were divided by the schism of 1884, when the first remained
with the Republicans and the last went off to the Democrats. More
remotely, Colonel Higginson was anti slavery almost to the point of
Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the war. Dr. Hale was of
those who were less radically opposed to slavery before the war, but
hardly so after it came. Since the war a sort of refluence of the old
anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in Southern tradition Mr.
George W. Cable, who, against the white sentiment of his section, sided
with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant renunciation of his
fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to be the first
of Southern authors, though he would still have continued the author of at
least one of the greatest American novels.
If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, as I
seem really to be doing, I may mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, as an
author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, Mr. Hamlin
Garland has been known from the first as a zealous George man, or
single-taxer. Mr. John Hay, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry Cabot
Lodge are Republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men. Mr.
Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing Uncle Remus, writes political
articles in a leading Southern journal. Mark Twain is a leading
anti-imperialist.
IV.
I am not sure whether I have made out a case for our authors or against
them; perhaps I have not done so badly; but I have certainly not tried to
be exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to the
reader, and I wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himself
whether American literary men take part in American politics or not. I
think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope (it
may be too fondly) is the American way. They are none of them politicians
in the Latin sort. Few, if any, of our statesmen have come forward with
small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in Spain; none of
our poets or historians have been chosen Presidents of the republic as has
happened to their French confreres; no great novelist of ours has been
exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled as Zola has been,
though I have no doubt that if, for instance, one had once said the
Spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally ‘conspue’. They
have none of them reached the heights of political power, as several
English authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors,
ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed for
political reasons. I fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather
faithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses or conventions.
As for the other half of the question—how far American politicians
are scholars—one’s first impulse would be to say that they
never were so. But I have always had an heretical belief that there were
snakes in Ireland; and it may be some such disposition to question
authority that keeps me from yielding to this impulse. The law of demand
and supply alone ought to have settled the question in favor of the
presence of the scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him
among us for almost a generation past. Perhaps the response has not been
very direct, but I imagine that our politicians have never been quite so
destitute of scholarship as they would sometimes make appear. I do not
think so many of them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as
the politicians of forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be
merely part of the impression of the general worsening of things, familiar
after middle life to every one’s experience, from the beginning of
recorded time. If something not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a
study of finance, of economics, of international affairs is in question,
it seems to go on rather more to their own satisfaction than that of their
critics. But without being always very proud of the result, and without
professing to know the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that
under an outside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in
our statesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even so
unscholarly as it might be supposed. It is not the effect of specific
training, and yet it is the effect of training. I do not find that the
matters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and in
this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislation
or administration; but still I should not like to say that none of our
politicians were scholars. That would be offensive, and it might not be
true. In fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted to call
scholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not to
deal quite frankly with this inquiry.
STORAGE
It has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the one half
of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might be brought
together in a family affection not now so observable in human relations.
Probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still be things, to
bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is so
interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one can
hardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in the
advantage of the ignorant, to find one’s excuse with the better
informed.
I.
City and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that one
can safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things.
For instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, they
sell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or a
hundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vast
warehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage.
The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and
ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and
carefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof,
slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have
devastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not
destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such a
warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the
private tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only to the
tenants or their order. The aisles are concreted, the doors are iron, and
the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by steam and
lighted by electricity. Behind the iron doors, which in the New York
warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout all our other
cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households is stored—the
effects of people who have gone to Europe, or broken up house-keeping
provisionally or definitively, or have died, or been divorced. They are
the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their yet living bodies held
in hypnotic trances; destined again in some future time to animate some
house or flat anew. In certain cases the spell lasts for many years, in
others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs itself indefinitely.
I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw visiting the warehouse to
take out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years. He
had been all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come home and
begin life again, in his own land. That dream had passed, and now he was
taking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to Italy. I did not envy
him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him in
formless resurrection. It was not that they were all broken or defaced. On
the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far more heartbreaking
than any decay. In well-managed storage warehouses the things are handled
with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into the appointed rooms that
if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in fifteen or fifty years.
The places are wonderfully well kept, and if you will visit them, say in
midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden away
behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall find their
far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up
and down their concrete length with some such sense of secure finality as
you would experience in pacing the aisle of your family vault.
That is what it comes to. One may feign that these storage warehouses are
cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whose shelves
are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners’
lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one’s
dead self that one revisits them. If one takes the fragments out to fit
them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and
incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they
are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it
upon them forever. One feels then that the old way was far better, and
that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as
chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to pay
for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. Failing
this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the
cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best
recourse. Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted
the reconstruction of their homes with these
“Portions and parcels of the dreadful past”
have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their
belongings in an indiscriminate ruin.
II.
In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you,
if comfort is to attend the enterprise. It is not only sorrowful but it is
futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness in
taking them out and using them again. It is not that they will not go into
place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang
they will inflict through the suggestion of the other places where they
served their purpose in other years will be only the keener for the
perfection with which they do it now. If they cannot be sold, and if no
fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they had better be
stored with no thought of ever taking them out again.
That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort
of storage they are put into. The inexperienced in such matters may be
surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the
fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the
rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a
family’s living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it
can be sheltered. Yet the space required is not very great; three
fair-sized rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce
satisfaction in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely
about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away.
To be sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their
sides or backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or
dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions,
pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses
pad the walls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture
that would otherwise rend each other. Carpets sewn in cotton against
moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a
whole brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and
supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof
ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from
their companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all
the what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the
repletion.
There is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects;
against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front of and
on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may be first
wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency of the
homeless life of the owners, pending removal. The lightest and slightest
articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a kind of
fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind. The effect
is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the Roman Capuchins
design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt of their church,
but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it, and feel an
artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance.
It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futile
dream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past on the
old terms. It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and when an
end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as a suspense
of function. When the poor break up their homes, with no immediate hope of
founding others, they must sell their belongings because they cannot
afford to pay storage on them. The rich or richer store their household
effects, and cheat themselves with the illusion that they are going some
time to rehabilitate with them just such a home as they have dismantled.
But the illusion probably deceives nobody so little as those who cherish
the vain hope. As long as they cherish it, however—and they must
cherish it till their furniture or themselves fall to dust—they
cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have kept nothing of the sort
to link them to the past. This is one of the disabilities of the
prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of it till some means of
storing the owner as well as the’ furniture is invented. In the
immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps not impossible. Why
not, while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious antidote which shall
drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse for the reconstruction
of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as
unchanged as the things with which we shall again array it? Here is a
pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy fabric of a romance,
and I handsomely make a present of it to the first comer. If the dreamer
is of the right quality he will know how to make the reader feel that with
the universal longing to return to former conditions or circumstances it
must always be a mistake to do so, and he will subtly insinuate the
disappointment and discomfort of the stored personality in resuming its
old relations. With that just mixture of the comic and pathetic which we
desire in romance, he will teach convincingly that a stored personality is
to be desired only if it is permanently stored, with the implication of a
like finality in the storage of its belongings.
Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot be
established in its former function without a sense of its comparative
inadequacy. It stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet a
new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be more
appropriate, if I may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time is new,
and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly
passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which
render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them
painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of
those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the
article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader
to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? Such a
meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tender joy, a rapture
that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears.
But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not it a cruel
embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide? The old
friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are
they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the other at that end of the
earth from which he came? Have they any use for each other such as people
of unbroken associations have?
I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are bound
together more closely than most men in a community of interests,
occupations, and ideals. During a long separation they had kept account of
each other’s opinions as well as experiences; they had exchanged
letters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully to each
other, and found themselves constantly in accord. When they met they made
a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the other just what he
used to be. They talked a long, long time, fighting the invisible enemy
which they felt between them. The enemy was habit, the habit of other
minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and things which in their
separation they had not had in common. When the old friends parted they
promised to meet every day, and now, since their lines had been cast in
the same places again, to repair the ravage of the envious years, and
become again to each other all that they had ever been. But though they
live in the same town, and often dine at the same table, and belong to the
same club, yet they have not grown together again. They have grown more
and more apart, and are uneasy in each other’s presence, tacitly
self-reproachful for the same effect which neither of them could avert or
repair. They had been respectively in storage, and each, in taking the
other out, has experienced in him the unfitness which grows upon the
things put away for a time and reinstated in a former function.
III.
I have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose of
finding some way out of the coil. There seems none better than the counsel
of keeping one’s face set well forward, and one’s eyes fixed
steadfastly upon the future. This is the hint we will get from nature if
we will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takes out
of storage. Fancy rehabilitating one’s first love: how nature would
mock at that! We cannot go back and be the men and women we were, any more
than we can go back and be children. As we grow older, each year’s
change in us is more chasmal and complete. There is no elixir whose magic
will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps we shall
return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, to come.
Some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but only on
condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, and
hoard its mummified image in our hearts. We must not seek to store
ourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof of
others, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from one
place to another. It is a curious and significant property of our outworn
characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serve admirably in
the life of some other, and that this other can profitably make them his
when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to resume them. They
not only go down to successive generations, but they spread beyond our
lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we never knew to be within the
circle of our influence.
Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes are
clothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been stored
would have left the inferiors rude and barbarous. We have only to think
how socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautiful
manners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion when
it dropped them.
All earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and not
preserved against decay by any unnatural artifice. Even when broken and
disabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which must
commend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive grace of
ruin. An old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in the
woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, with all
its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a broken home.
Spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that is itself
falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they are dragged
from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft of fresh tow,
and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they were a few
years ago. A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered kettle on a
rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and copper-ware
stored in the possibility of future need. However carefully handed down
from one generation to another, the old objects have a forlorn incongruity
in their successive surroundings which appeals to the compassion rather
than the veneration of the witness.
It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne declared against any
sort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generation
should newly house itself. He preferred the perishability of the wooden
American house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which in
Europe affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of sires
and sons and grandsons that had died out of them. But even of such
structures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with the
passage of time. Where once a great city of them stood, you shall find a
few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than “the
cellar and the well” which Holmes marked as the ultimate monuments,
the last witnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations.
It is the law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and
if by reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishable
shall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannot
be felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men’s
happiness or cheerfulness. Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the
gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares
has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and
the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world. As far as his
comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities had not
been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all their
contemporaries.
IV
No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam:
if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period, and
are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned against putting
them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type. Better, far
better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to a continuous
use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will take them, then
hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames. By that means
you shall bear witness against a custom that insults the order of nature,
and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes, where there is
scarcely space for the living homes. Do not vainly fancy that you shall
take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to the ends that it
served before it was put in. You will not be the same, or have the same
needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new place which you shall
hope to equip with it will receive it with cold reluctance, or openly
refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions that render it ridiculous
or impossible. The law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as
it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude ‘graffiti’
apparently inscribed by accident in the process of removal, has only such
exceptions as prove the rule.
The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all the
difference. Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods and
fashions change. The ideals remain, and these alone you can go back to,
secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they were
yesterday. This perhaps is because they have never been in storage, but in
constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken
out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods
and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them
that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods
and fashions reappear.
“FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O”
There was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of a
mid-March day at Pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chimneys
gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fell with the
constant rain which it dyed its own black. But early memories stirred
joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness I was making my
tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lying beside the
wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing its best to
represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in the old
days. It had the help of three others in its generous effort, and the
levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and
succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and
agricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-worn stones,
in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud. The boats
and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made upon them by the
light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who were setting out
on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and for whom
much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitated the past.
I.
When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save it
from the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of the
steamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them.
From the clerk’s office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the
saloon stretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous
splendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, and
fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass. Midway between the
great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stove at
the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which the
tradition of Western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundred
years, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactly
duplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could have
believed themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the
events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience. When
they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of belated
steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty faces and
snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of other days
that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecide feasts, and made
up for the long fraud practised upon them with the appetites of the year
1850.
II.
A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the table
of the good steamboat ‘Avonek’ left something to be desired,
if tested by more sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread
it was of an inapproachable preeminence. This bread was made of the white
corn which North knows not, nor the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes
at breakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in the
abundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice.
The only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in a
land flowing with ham and bacon was that the ‘Avonek’ had not
imagined providing either for the guests, no one of whom could have had a
religious scruple against them.
The thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in the passengers,
was their perfectly American race and character. At the start, when with
an acceptable observance of Western steamboat tradition the ‘Avonek’
left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, there were very few
passengers; but they began to come aboard at the little towns of both
shores as she swam southward and westward, till all the tables were so
full that, in observance of another Western steamboat tradition; one did
well to stand guard over his chair lest some other who liked it should
seize it earlier. The passengers were of every age and condition, except
perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none the worse for being
more like Americans of the middle of the last century than of the
beginning of this. Their fashions were of an approximation to those of the
present, but did not scrupulously study detail; their manners were those
of simpler if not sincerer days.
The women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from the
study of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhere
else about, and open to observation. They were not so open to
conversation, for your mid-Westerner is not a facile, though not an
unwilling, talker. They sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval
pattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silently
ruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at their
feet. They would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenest
intelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have
none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by Dickens and other
averse aliens. They had mostly faces of resolute power, and such a looking
of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promised well for
any collectively or individually opposing them. If ever the sense of human
equality has expressed itself in the human countenance it speaks
unmistakably from American faces like theirs.
They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few striking
exceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where they
were notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty.
They were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face,
absolute Greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and
slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting down
and leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and
gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young comeliness he
was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing and
a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm.
He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-Western human-beings
about him. One heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of
cities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk; and it may
have been not far enough West for the true Western humor. At any rate,
when they were not silent these men still were serious.
The women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associated
with the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, in
the spectator’s eye. The average of them was certainly not above the
American woman’s average in good looks, though one young mother of
six children, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type
some masters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows.
She had the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes
fitly with such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many
of the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman when
she is New. As she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his mother
seeming.
All these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along the
stream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, if
quiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco and
spat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior. The
use of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuously
rather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise, however
they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steak deserved no
gentler usage, indeed. They were usually young, and they were constantly
changing, bent upon short journeys between the shore villages; they were
mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were said to be going to find
work at the great potteries up the river for wages fabulous to
home-keeping experience.
One personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists was a
Kentucky mountaineer who, after three years’ exile in a West
Virginia oil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all
his brood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had never
ceased to pine. His eagerness to get back was more than touching; it was
awing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that could own
no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region. He had prospered at
high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and children had
managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the family expenses from it,
but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that he might return to a
land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they came out and
made you come in and eat. “When you eat where I’ve been living
you pay fifty cents,” he explained. “And are you taking all
your household stuff with you?” “Only the cook-stove. Well, I’ll
tell you: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and
they were not worth-moving.” Here was the backwoods surviving into
the day of Trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from
the old ideals!
III.
The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently
expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of
oil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the
myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into
the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful
suns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless
means of millionairing? There must be iron and coal as well as wheat and
corn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread. If
the combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giant
clutch upon all those warring industries beside the Ohio and swept them
into one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than
competition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings of
the universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealths
have always had the vision.
The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all the
land to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in its
strenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. That was rather
of farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of the
stream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough could
drive. In the spring and in the Mall, when it is suddenly swollen by the
earlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims over
those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves the
cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the forests
were first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields have never had
any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied into their
laps. They feel themselves so rich that they part with great lengths and
breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for the river, and
is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose ease learns slowly,
are beginning more and more to fence their borders with the young willows
which form a hedge in the shallow wash such a great part of the way up and
down the Ohio. Elms and maples wade in among the willows, and in time the
river will be denied the indigestion which it confesses in shoals and bars
at low water, and in a difficulty of channel at all stages.
Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to the
stream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly that
they are never out of sight. Most commonly they are of brick, but
sometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences high
enough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river that
they cannot fail of its passing life. Usually a group of planted
evergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will not
lose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the paling fence
to watch the ‘Avonek’ float by: motionless men and women, who
lean upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their
skirts and hands. There is not the eager New England neatness about these
homes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discord
with their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenly in
a ruinous neglect. Except where a log cabin has hardily survived the
pioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facades
front the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-story
forms the attic of the two stories below. Gardens of pot-herbs flank them,
and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stables stretch into
the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantily wooded, but ever
lovely in the lines that change with the steamer’s course.
Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition
beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no
such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of
name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is
not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it
to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to
waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only
distinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industry
above the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it is hoped
is not dishonest. But, honest or dishonest, it is there apparently to stay
in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeat on
Occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far Cathay.
They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found
absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every
other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly
naturalized to their memories of it. The houses had in common the form of
a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or
longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of
stovepipe softly smoking from its roof. The windows might be curtained or
they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinction among
the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among the willows,
or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake on shore. There
were cases in which they had not followed the fall of the river promptly
enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to a more habitable
level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house had gone down with
the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. But they all gave
evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul of the beholder
envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lord of the
house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse some
household utensil at its stern. Infrequently a group of the house- boat
dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event they exhibited
a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuous characterized
their attitude on any other occasion. The accepted theory of them was that
they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do and live, and that by
night their forays on the bordering farms supplied the simple needs of
people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but only to emulate
Solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion. The joyful witness
of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any amount of the
facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them and left them
slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax- gatherer.
Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true interpretation of
the sage’s philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet’s
aspiration.
“Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things.”
How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from the
fishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night? Did they read the new
historical fictions aloud to one another? Did some of them even meditate
the thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude? Perhaps the ladies of the
house-boats, when they found themselves—as they often did—in
companies of four or five, had each other in to “evenings,” at
which one of them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic.
IV.
The trader’s boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition,
sometimes shouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it,
too, was a peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand
with commerce. When the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of a
neighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river’s tide
to where it meets the ocean’s tide in the farthermost Mississippi,
and there either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his
home to some returning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses,
back to the upper Ohio. But his home is not so interesting as that of the
houseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor of
logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current. As
the pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is
adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wide
berth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole. By day
the raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its
convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have
broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or
stamps. Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving
beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of
corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have
brought down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows are tufted
gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a
disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple,
where it would form building material for countless generations of birds.
The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the
farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere
were proofs of the river’s power to devastate as well as enrich its
shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments of
insensate rage, and the land no protection from its encroachments except
in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if planted, sometimes
refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept the torrent from
the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly
into it.
The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders’
boats, but the most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of
coal-barges which, going or coming, the ‘Avonek’ met every few
miles. Whether going or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the
powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and
rode the mid-current with them, when they were full, or kept the slower
water near shore when they were empty. They claimed the river where they
passed, and the Avonek’ bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the
full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight,
with the chimneys of their steamer towering above them and her gay
contours gradually making themselves seen, till she receded from the
encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water
from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the
tapering masts or the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match
it.
V.
So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest
scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. They
perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck,
and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting
shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered
themselves to their choice up and down the shores. The weather commonly
favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river when
the weather was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulled their
nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through
veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself
again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water- elms and
watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting
flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread
their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. There
were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no
subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent
fields.
When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or uninvited,
but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of the two who
were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of the
river on which all their days had been passed. They knew from indelible
association every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling
by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the
river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky.
They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban
cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German
prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had
been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals
which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. Were not the
canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if the State unnaturally
abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads which the
rivermen had always fought, and which would have made a solitude of the
river if they could?
But they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightful
in this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffic
had strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. Perhaps it
was not; perhaps the fondness of those Ohio-river-born passengers was
abused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a
vivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. But again,
perhaps not. They were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs of
both in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript
steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, and
climbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotest
hills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal.
VI.
The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men.
She would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with his
telescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to
gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wished
to ship. She lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging
one cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which we
call commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws. But
wherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot’s marvellous
skill; for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place,
could be twice the same. At each return the varying stream and shore must
be studied, and every caprice of either divined. It was always a triumph,
a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under the
pilot’s inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and
without a jar slipped from them again and went on her course.
But the landings by night were of course the finest. Then the wide fan of
the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and the heavy
staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing the willow
hedges in it’s fall, and scarcely touching the land before a black,
ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a line fast to
the trunk of the nearest tree. Then the work of lading or unlading rapidly
began in the witching play of the light that set into radiant relief the
black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the deck-hands
struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of
nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked or cursed at
in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back to the deck
down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken sleep
wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the heaps of freight.
No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! why
should their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be all
so gay and glad? But ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hard
world, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, who still
endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden of their
brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their mother
earth?
PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Absence of distinction
Advertising
Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers
Anise-seed bag
Any man’s country could get on without him
Begun to fight with want from their cradles
Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets
Clemens is said to have said of bicycling
Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog
Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts
Do not want to know about such squalid lives
Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable
Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years
Even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear
Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future
Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety
For most people choice is a curse
General worsening of things, familiar after middle life
Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us
Hard to think up anything new
Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows
Heighten our suffering by anticipation
If one were poor, one ought to be deserving
Lascivious and immodest as possible
Literary spirit is the true world-citizen
Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof
Malevolent agitators
Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation
Neatness that brings despair
Noble uselessness
Openly depraved by shows of wealth
People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions
People might oftener trust themselves to Providence
People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy
Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it
Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence
Refused to see us as we see ourselves
Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it
So many millionaires and so many tramps
So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat
Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer
Some of it’s good, and most of it isn’t
Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach
Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great
Take our pleasures ungraciously
The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others
They are so many and I am so few
Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it
Those who work too much and those who rest too much
Unfailing American kindness
Visitors of the more inquisitive sex
We cannot all be hard-working donkeys
We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it
Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it