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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/13739-0.txt b/13739-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0deebeb --- /dev/null +++ b/13739-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7404 @@ +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13739 *** + +SHANDYGAFF + +by + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY + +1918 + + + + + + + +A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, +interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to +the Reader + + + +[Illustration: Photo by Charles H. Davis + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS, THUNDER +ON THE LEFT, ETC.] + + + + +TITLES AND DEDICATIONS + +I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the +immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of +elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and +penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum +Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted +trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry, +were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice + + +----------------------------+ + | | + | THESE BASINS ARE FOR | + | CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY | + | | + +----------------------------+ + +I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these +fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, +must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow +O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso. + +The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of dedicating +them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have +occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance. + + I thought of dedicating the book to + CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER + The Laird of Westcolang + + I thought of dedicating to the + TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE WORLD + Blackwell's in Oxford and + Leary's in Philadelphia + + I thought of dedicating to + THE 8:13 TRAIN + + I thought of dedicating to + EDWARD PAGE ALLINSON + The Squire of Town's End Farm + Better known as Mifflin McGill + In affectionate memory of + Many unseasonable jests + + I thought of dedicating to + PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. GUMMERE + From an erring pupil + + I thought of dedicating to + FRANCIS R. BELLAMY + Author of "The Balance" + Whose Talent I Revere, + But Whose Syntax I Deplore + + I thought of dedicating to + JOHN N. BEFFEL + My First Editor + Who insisted on taking me seriously + + I thought of dedicating to + GUY S.K. WHEELER + The Lion Cub + + I thought of dedicating to + ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY + The Urbanolater + + I thought of dedicating to + SILAS ORRIN HOWES + Faithful Servant of Letters + + But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedicate this book to + THE MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS + More Sinned Against Than Sinning + + * * * * * + +For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York _Evening Post_, The +Boston _Transcript_, The _Bellman_, The _Smart Set_, The New York _Sun_, +The New York _Evening Sun_, The _American Oxonian_, _Collier's_, and The +_Ladies' Home Journal_. + +Wyncote, Pa. + +November. 1917. + + + +SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or +beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, +and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, +journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII +as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a +continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the +resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide +no other tipple. + +John Mistletoe: _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_. + + + + +CONTENTS + +The Song of Shandygaff +Titles and Dedications +A Question of Plumage +Don Marquis +The Art of Walking +Rupert Brooke +The Man +The Head of the Firm +17 Heriot Row +Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader +William McFee +Rhubarb +The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine +Ingo +Housebroken +The Hilarity of Hilaire +A Casual of the Sea +The Last Pipe +Time to Light the Furnace +My Friend +A Poet of Sad Vigils +Trivia +Prefaces +The Skipper +A Friend of FitzGerald +A Venture in Mysticism +An Oxford Landlady +"Peacock Pie" +The Literary Pawnshop +A Morning in Marathon +The American House of Lords +Cotswold Winds +Clouds +Unhealthy +Confessions of a Smoker +Hay Febrifuge +Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers. + + + + +A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE + +Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He was +the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only +netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The +owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done +by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those +publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike +view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so +the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue. + +But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht, +that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to +a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty +dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to +be done. The house was still being paid for on the installment plan. +There were plumbers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for +the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and +the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club--his only extravagance. A simple +middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a +treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To +accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends, +Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below +that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the +Elizabethan song naïvely puts it. + +There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama. + +Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his +fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote +painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on +Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the proprietor ordered. Though he +did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book +publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest +thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells +in _Harper's Magazine_ for the honourable quality of his criticisms. + +But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and +enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used up the first +fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current +poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The +preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty +journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him +only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a +Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of +intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had +time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, +which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged +about six dollars a week. + +That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the +limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars or so needed +for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways. +Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far +into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote +"Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting +lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on +poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in +the same place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy +he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first +year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30--not one-third as much, +he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short +story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the +sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature. + +It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were +wrong when they wrote to him admiringly--as they did twice a +year--asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man +of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr. +Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for +membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and +so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called +on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hôte, with an +apologetic murmur. + +But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or +discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the +existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again, +with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that +there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters +in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton +rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he was one of those +estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their +wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous +and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books, +and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a +corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in +New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was +when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary +essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous +sign in the British Museum washroom. + +It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn +bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row. +Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of +traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as +becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind, +and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work +until one o'clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their +tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then +be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, +and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof +until past midnight. + +One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for +to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across +the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on +the shining river and consider his course. + +A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry +articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an +English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time +he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at +length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened +that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and +to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from +the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism. + +Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in +the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter +prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a +remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men, +although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they +would ever meet, he had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever +visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on +this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying +that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon. + +The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature +it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but +little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to +Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was +small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop +for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure +pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an +enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance +she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the +drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of +the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for +several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How +like a poet! + +In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they +would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of +evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things +that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the +hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour? +This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to +Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, +Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary +club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of +Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings +all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New +Utrecht! + +Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but +the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of +out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby, +makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much +explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the +fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and +slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds +or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously. +English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American +reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have +bought books on Paternoster Row, have drunk half-and-half and eaten +pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with +laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton. + +Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean, +bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios. +What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a +mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco! + +Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all +in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they +had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to +grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the +poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for +dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as +ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tenderness. They would send the +three younger children to their grandmother, to be interned there until +the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she +could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the +boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had +children of his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by +the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet +was aver here for a lecture tour--he would be entertained and fêted +everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had +started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad. + +He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple routine +of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three +o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious +habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office +on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doctor's assistant call +for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he +called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a +moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his +playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman, +and undoubtedly he knew all about wines. + +Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that +all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had +planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from +doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, +the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair," +the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's +"contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good +humour for a humourist. + +"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? Or has +George Moore sent in a new novel?" + +Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he +confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who wore life +lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis, +with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful +comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the +reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist +was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a +married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble. + +"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of +year." + +"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and +have some ale. That'll put you on your feet." + +"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to +make up my page. I tell you what, though--" + +He hesitated, and flushed a little. + +"Say it," said Bolles kindly. + +"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old +Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him +around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet +some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time, +and I--I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I +were a member, you know." + +"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle Light'? And +you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than +Masefield. Take him to lunch--I should say I will; Why, I'll put him in +the colyum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an +orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you +knew him." + +"I don't--yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this +afternoon." + +"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran +downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never +read. + +The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that +he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had done duty for three +winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he +blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried +outdoors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to +draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first +clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street. + +Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was +compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for usually Mrs. +Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky star was in the +zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he +might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste, +and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the +humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted +with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely +improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut +that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was +unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly +transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the +purchase price and fled to the subway. + +When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw that +the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes +before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship +office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the official admitted him +to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling +a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no +less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and +wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet +the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache +looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible +that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of +Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring +outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight. + +What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to +stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the +mustard-coloured trousers one more round--they were much too long for +him--and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a +peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his +wedding. + +He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he was very +familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured down the +slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of +superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of +England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his +surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells +and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to +the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after +traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage; +gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save +for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by +nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne. + +Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that--the second class? +His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther +down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking. + +There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still thronged. +Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green +ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four +children in single file, each holding fast to the one in front like +Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous +care not to slip on the cleated boards. To his amazement the reviewer +recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet. + +Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a +wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin. +The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the +skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in +which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children +watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. +"Daddy, look out for Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the +poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two +smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. +"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and +promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file. + +Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself +known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving +the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they +waited for the customs examination. With mingled feelings he saw that +Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, +indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic +cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood +in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around +him. He shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home +with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and +introduced himself. + +Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he +presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two +girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately uttered +cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to him. + +"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit. + +"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath. + +Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the +throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created +two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now +their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing +that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you +must consider yourself a citizen of that nation." + +Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the +poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your +telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have you." + +"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact +we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has +some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children +are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some +lectures." + +A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow. + +"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs. +Stockton and I were hoping--" + +"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your +hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some quiet +hotel where we can stay the night." + +Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any +hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, and then +remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he +recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the +Obelisk. + +After the customs formalities were over--not without embarrassment, as +Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red +union suits and a half-empty bottle of brandy--Stockton convoyed them to +a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite +ashamed of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors +whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the +spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward +the nearest telephone booth. + +As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the +Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful +to spend a few days with the Stocktons." + +"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how +shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and +your clothes--well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know +if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bankrupt." + +The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the +country near New York," he said. + +"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes? +He looked like a canary." + + + + +DON MARQUIS + + +There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the +victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of +your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be +considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war +and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew +with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly +misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be +offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn +Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives +in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout.... + +Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well, +call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob +pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and +Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening +Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists +and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is +far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian +Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a +novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes +the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in +his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk +he is a dramatist. + +He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre +Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting +satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only +"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it: + + A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other + evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time + to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair + broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us + sad. + + The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul + into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in + the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more + than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral + chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or + flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its + heart and soul. + +Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as +a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well +known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier. +Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing +sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done. + +The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to +look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship. +The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill +Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially +warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged +from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to +transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his +best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on +an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a +picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_ +got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy +race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would +dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_ +building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle. + +"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like +dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the +echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. +Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading +their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for +that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, +fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into +circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published +October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a +blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this +man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question +the answerless face of life-- + + Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, + Still broods the dull distrust; + Which shall have ultimate dominion, + Dream, or dust? + +Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble +verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of +Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can +turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll +Durham cigarettes. + +How neat this is: + + TO A DANCING DOLL + + Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, + You begin your steps demurely-- + There's a spirit almost prim + In the feet that move so surely. + So discreetly, to the chime + Of the music that so sweetly + Marks the time. + + But the chords begin to tinkle + Quicker, + And your feet they flash and flicker-- + Twinkle!-- + Flash and flutter to a tricksy + Fickle meter; + And you foot it like a pixie-- + Only fleeter! + + Not our current, dowdy + Things-- + "Turkey trots" and rowdy + Flings-- + For they made you overseas + In politer times than these + In an age when grace could please, + Ere St. Vitus + Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; + Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us! + +But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he +sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the +slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is +a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from +Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious +inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his +brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real +earnestness that underlies his chaff. + +I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the +hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a +submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by +Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in +his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of +letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some +contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but +nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six +times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret +compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops: + + MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.) + + TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea. + (COLD ROAST BEEF.) + + WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF + STEW.) + + THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.) + + FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued, + sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main + business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR + CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.) + + SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself + for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.) + + SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we + have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers. + +But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always +tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry +battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real +voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, +the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular +Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an +Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of +Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling +has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them +between book-covers. + +One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a +number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms +and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly +envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They +had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, +and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where +they could find more. + +I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether +they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any +pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do +more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts. + + By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he + orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. + + If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know + you are loafing? + + Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that + minorities are always right. + + Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. + The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart. + + I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising + young man for twenty years. + +In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the +mirthquake: + + If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it. + + If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the + little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper + colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry, + Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its + revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will + find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your + ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever + carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best + trousers. + +But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite +denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the +gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a +clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, +just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany: + + This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth + Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... + As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, + Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, + Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb-- + Who frowned above him, proud and grim, + While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore + Of fire and steel and stone and war: + She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth + + Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... + His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur. + + Tip from the wild red Welter of the past + Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last. + + Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. + We have been slow as doom. Our dead + Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed-- + We have denied each pleading ghost-- + We have been slow: God, make us sure. + We have been slow. Grant we endure + Unto the uttermost, the uttermost. + + Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? + Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, + Into one single swinging sword. + +I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is +disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this +sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives +of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the +press: + + Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be + disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has + swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up + again. + +Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all +its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of +more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that +furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels! + +There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than +the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the +past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or +three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper +some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad +to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to +give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton +Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia +Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood. + +But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it +the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day +long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope +of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down +on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his +queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his +only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the +street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write +his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in +the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I +have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in +that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben +Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and +set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a +kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the +tavernacular. + +He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic, +and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is +best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky, +and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this +country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel +Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benét +in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and +mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army. + +Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the +dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's +Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the +azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more +publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's +drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, +endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers +libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for +quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, +opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if +Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something +thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine +him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of +the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I +feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who +lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? +Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to +punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the +fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his +typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many +devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach +himself. + +The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with +whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask +a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter. +Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through +an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler +takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the +portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British +cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in +neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case +agate: + + it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for + said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the + captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was + fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where + the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and + serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if + there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me + the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs + to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert + said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top + crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right + under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that + noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking + off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert + said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush + upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i + am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships + surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy + that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the + false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this + pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a + port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling + off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as + he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god + said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered + the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the + hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the + mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust + gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw + the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the + starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant + cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british + navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the + strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would + start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my + forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the + first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said + the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian + drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and + hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every + afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach + even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must + stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me + another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had + been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be + inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh + exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and + here i am. + + archy + +So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original +contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These +are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust +repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is +compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured +with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product. +Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and +superscription of America. + +And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is +unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation +suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great +Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But +Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out +Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society +or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt +away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the +scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true +in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. + +He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some +quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, +Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea +spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, +he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; +faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few +spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until, +chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top +speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly +revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, +the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as +anywhere else. + +What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the +young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of +literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don +Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying +at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a +dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle +Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words: + + Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the + Republican party. + + My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time + and place free of charge. + + Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left + the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat. + + In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in + the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for + some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power. + It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening, + after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late + President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed + through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had + heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of + showing me how greatly he appreciated it. + + Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public + tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the + Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a + position as reporter on a Washington paper. + + Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier + years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented, + peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since. + + There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the + Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting + against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the + Republican party again. + + This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which + I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more + particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself. + + It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person: + + Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little + finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good + hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200 + pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in + type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears + No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of + trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for + the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw + missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from + possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with + respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates + undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on + little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to + psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his + verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in + possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek + bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a + thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story + writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your + business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of + painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, + publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in + insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers + as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on + right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of + room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese, + "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical + comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam + heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized + charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses + on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; + belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy + eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in + teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, + with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; + voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly + wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes + prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose + over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested. + +I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that +Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a +cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick +Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not +infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_ +comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or +drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment +on some bolshevictory in Russia: + + A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of + Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip. + +For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a +very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is +purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a +ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and +fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have +made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss +the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of +his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of +the machine: + + I pray Thee, make my colyum read, + And give me thus my daily bread. + Endow me, if Thou grant me wit, + Likewise with sense to mellow it. + Save me from feeling so much hate + My food will not assimilate; + Open mine eyes that I may see + Thy world with more of charity, + And lesson me in good intents + And make me friend of innocence ... + Make me (sometimes at least) discreet; + Help me to hide my self-conceit, + And give me courage now and then + To be as dull as are most men. + And give me readers quick to see + When I am satirizing Me.... + Grant that my virtues may atone + For some small vices of mine own. + +And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his +prayer with this comment: + + People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really + want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think + the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be + sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of + affectation crept in. + + + + +THE ART OF WALKING + + Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries! + He is as old as his calves--his garteries.... + + --_Meditations of Andrew McGill_. + +"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea." + +This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of +William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near +Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in +any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that +the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by +all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps +arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are +barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth +would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic +pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have +traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of +exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other +stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was +indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is +most excellent in his writings." + +A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost +heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous +precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one +sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a +gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life": + + Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the + streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to + go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was + carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon + earth a man so little curious in the world as he is. + +Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes +upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When +he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of +sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He +writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are +often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because +walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to +that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour. + +Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking. +The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether +Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road) +to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically +from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was +Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that +spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, +and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy +the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of +their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little +walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient +Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the +adventure. + +De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth +and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile +all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first +meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement +of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself +with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind +hastening to decay. + +I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised +before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's +famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth +century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving +meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days +and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary +travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any +of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up. +Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century +earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many +lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads. +It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of +his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it +over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than +a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long +before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that +cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one +foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him +as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy. + +After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you +paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On +Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than +the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, +1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He +must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on +Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know +that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the +financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to +better purpose! + +There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker: +get these by rote in some membrane of memory: + + The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky + sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of + state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel + playing before it. + +The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns +were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of +Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, +Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first +read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August, +1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George +Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of +the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom +Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to +that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous +half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not +dominate the conversation. + +There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the +Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on +the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed +in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for +the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them." +There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One +could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though +literature were a co-product of legs and head. + +Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due +course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall +Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight +the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious +as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one +goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the +country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the +harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and +muscle exercised alike. + +Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no +soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who +salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to +grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are +his months: + + For love we Earth then serve we all; + Her mystic secret then is ours: + We fall, or view our treasures fall, + Unclouded, as beholds her flowers. + + Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, + Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, + When lowly, with a broken neck, + The crocus lays her cheek to mire. + +I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the +bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary +of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's +"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals +from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, +and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands +"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to +utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education," +by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in +1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious +essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert +Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has +beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who +has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in +walking tours: + + No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should + ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in + arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of + men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall + be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and + two, since the world began, there have always been young men who + have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still + one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for + him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. + Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so + ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be + taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now, + one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake + before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be + confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they + fill. + + They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. + They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with + them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; + and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they + would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or + yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot + rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of + going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape + from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in + yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to + that great order called society that you have for a period got away + from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a + vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with + him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of + etiquette. + + He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has + fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, + to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which + he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on + earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a + breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of + course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural + instinct of women. + +Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of +locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be +admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make +memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published. + +Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an +itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed +stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he +proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know +he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives +and deacons tremble! + +Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems +at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their +eating; but despite the naïveté of his eagerness to sing, there is a +plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to +know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote +a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at +all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know +that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been +fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a +year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but +he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the +local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will +be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore +spats in his life. + +But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets +at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut +carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers +and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday +night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least +two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising +humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the +full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming +measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence +of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty +of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and +celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream +soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark +Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he +finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and +beauty. + +This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has +scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and +puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping +when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging +his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any +American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little +pamphlet used on many a road: + + +RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD + +Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois, +June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money. + +This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a +tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West and back, +during which he will observe the following rules: + + (1) Keep away from the cities. + + (2) Keep away from the railroads. + + (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage. + + (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven. + + (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five. + + (6) Travel alone. + + (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. + + (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. + + In order to carry out the last rule there will be three exceptions + to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief + printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry + this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry a small + portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view + of the history of art, especially as it applies to America. + +Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his +theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting. +"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the +exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this +decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and +well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil" +figure from Springfield, Illinois. + +A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a +lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in +"The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best +friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget it! + +The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have made the +highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and +private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the +footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven +there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the +limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick, +we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the +ways of God to man. + +And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells come most +often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination +lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When +a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most +vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending +to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card +index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail +me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, +who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, +even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the +endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the +wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is scouring the +hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road +to walk to Royston in the rain.... + +Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of +a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills +in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to +some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a +table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an +elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our +Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: +"Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, +rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." _Haec studio, +pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur_. + + + + +RUPERT BROOKE + + +Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born +of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin, +golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham, +in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at +Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church. + +In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge, +England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_. +This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at +Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to +time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own +small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. +His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's +_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14. + +Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows +along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the +Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country +is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields +bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard +willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of +the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top +with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the +favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and +monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire. + +But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café des Westens in +Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed. +Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, +and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, +Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang +of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the +verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that +neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with +painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which +I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the +way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the +recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being +famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate +devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final +expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal +questions of youth which have no country and no clime-- + + Say, is there Beauty yet to find? + And Certainty? and Quiet kind? + +No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to +forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may +perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of +young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past +decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he +tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily +observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and +flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War; +he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in +training for the Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled +"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first +published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's +quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as +the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called +forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London +_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet: + + "If I should die, think only this of me: + That there's some corner of a foreign field + That is for ever England." + +and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I +sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This +was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the +biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did: +wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had +sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from +London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23, +1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on +Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of +the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due +to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous +touch of sunstroke. + +A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who +Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to +the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited. +The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been +killed in action: + + We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the + valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, + but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and + Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely + grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen + trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an + olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth. + + About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their + way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave. + The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with + lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty + officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was + not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave. + + We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the + coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined + the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive + wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read + the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and + the bugles sounded the "Last Post." + + And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards + those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet + towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to + be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than + Skyros, and no quieter resting place. + + On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his + company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon + it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of + the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the + servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the + deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks." + + The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his + grave. + +It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke. +The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful +of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden +cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any +laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may +say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray +is quoted: + +"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of +one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of +youth and poetry." + +In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found +at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He +would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph. + +His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty +of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in +1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of +24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly +youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and +Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism, +bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot +on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a +part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he +says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster. + +And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise. +Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's +undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of +sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his +introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may +well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in +the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day +That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross +and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in +Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's +poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily +put, in _Grantchester_.) + +This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and +there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all +young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our +humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a +young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his +day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many +vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few +touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part +of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he +did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his +poems of 1905-08 are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet," +and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in +the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and +yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_: + + Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, + Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass, + You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; + Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, + When we are old, are old...." "And when we die + All's over that is ours; and life burns on + Through other lovers, other lips," said I, + --"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!" + + "We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here. + Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said: + "We shall go down with unreluctant tread + Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were + And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. + --And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. + +The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the +"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been +separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate +beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems," +containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England +and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to +save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the +complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first +American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought +after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth +of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting +flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. +From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or +_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to +sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the +form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song: + + "Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings, + And Triumph is his crown. + Earth fades in flame before his wings, + And Sun and Moon bow down." + But that, I knew, would never do; + And Heaven is all too high. + So whenever I meet a Queen, I said, + I will not catch her eye. + + "Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, + "The Gift of Love is this; + A crown of thorns about thy head, + And vinegar to thy kiss!"-- + But Tragedy is not for me; + And I'm content to be gay. + So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady, + I went another way. + + And so I never feared to see + You wander down the street, + Or come across the fields to me + On ordinary feet. + For what they'd never told me of, + And what I never knew; + It was that all the time, my love, + Love would be merely you. + +We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing +of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the +throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of +Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and +yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of +doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here +is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to +England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of +the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on +the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those +white Greek bodies against the green! + + Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, + And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, + With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, + To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. + +To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the +answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the +farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in +surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, +which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words +all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make +Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In +his hands the thing became a trumpet"-- + + +THE DEAD + + Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! + There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, + But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. + These laid the world away; poured out the red + Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be + Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, + That men call age; and those who would have been, + Their sons, they gave, their immortality. + + Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth + Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. + Honour has come back, as a King, to earth, + And paid his subjects with a royal wage; + And Nobleness walks in our ways again; + And we have come into our heritage. + +It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo +of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete +without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all +the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious +details of existence must be his poem _The Great Lover_ where he +catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines +speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he +holds dear-- + + White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; + And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; + And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, + Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; + Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon + Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss + Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is + Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen + Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; + The benison of hot water; furs to touch; + The good smell of old clothes; and other such-- + ...All these have been my loves. + +Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to speak; +but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than +_Heaven_ where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a +future life. + + This life cannot be All, they swear, + For how unpleasant, if it were! + One may not doubt that, somehow, Good + Shall come of Water and of Mud; + And, sure, the reverent eye must see + A Purpose in Liquidity. + We darkly know, by Faith we cry + The future is not Wholly Dry.... + But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, + Is wetter water, slimier slime! + +No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that +exquisite bit of fooling. + +Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke, +"the latest and greatest of young Englishmen." + + + + +THE MAN + + +The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold drizzle, the +first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were +beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the +long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was +a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It was the end of March. + +In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was +on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare +shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were +gray--a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue +eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow +in the padded chair. His right hand--the long, firm, nervous hand of a +scholar--rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his +fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he +was revising. + +Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two +and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure showed some +trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of +modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the +bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had +been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do +certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a +lifelong student of history, he had surprised his associates by the +clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in +the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than +he--save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney +piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for +his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the +picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, +pain-wrenched mouth. + +This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor +student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning visions of +great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of positions to guide his +country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher, +idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes +steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism +that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt him, +but had never abated his purpose. In a world reeling and smoking with +the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message +of the spirit, for the glory of humanity; for the settlement of disputes +by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To +that he had clung. + +He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen. + +What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the +golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announcing that +the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered +the first meeting thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious +faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in +the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully +planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation. + +In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could +have believed that great nations would discard without compunction all +the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in +the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the +highest military honours? That a supposedly friendly nation would fill +another land with spies--even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy? + +Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one +nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour +to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still +different. That his country, disregarding the old fetishes of honour and +insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things, +suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the +wounds and fill the starving mouths. That one nation--not because she +was weak, but because she was strong--should, with God's help, make a +firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never +conquer force. + +"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." +Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as +the utterance of a man years in advance of his time--but what rolling +thunders of vituperation they had cost him! _Too proud to fight_!... If +only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from +Judea! + +But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the +nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies +of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeakable horror on +non-combatants, women and children, he had realized that his cherished +dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great +nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and--with bleeding heart--even +the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With +face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on +the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. _Arabic_, +_Lusitania_, _Persia_, _Laconia_, _Falaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_, +_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief. +And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ... + +He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped +from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal +typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed +into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and +university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his +theses on the church door at Wittenberg: + +"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_." + +They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet +of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing.... + +"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the +step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it +involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of +the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war +against the Government and people of the United States_...." + +The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the +keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of +his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer +divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in +one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind. + +"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht +anders_...." + +"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward +them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse +that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their +previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill +their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to +bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an +opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for +peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic +nations_.... + + "_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to + a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow + interest of their own_." + +With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his +chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a +faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star. +Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing +heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to +feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning +breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, +spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of +little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the +footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags +leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with +gunners at their sterns--in one aching synthesis the vastness and +dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of +various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold! + +Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he +returned quietly to the typewriter: + +"_We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for +the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.... The world +must be made safe for democracy_." + +_The world must be made safe for democracy_! As the wires leaped and the +little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes +passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander +days, years before. + +He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the +German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness +of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving +rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the +Moselle. And England--dear green England, fairest of all--the rich blue +line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and +yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had +bicycled for tea, and the naïve rustic folk who had made him welcome. + +What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and +maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children, +millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness +of life--where were they now? Life, innocent human life--the most +precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and +win our own joys of home and love and food--what Black Death had +maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be +free and sweet again? + +The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of +anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men +now living. But for the sake of the generations to come--he thought of +his own tiny grandchildren--for the love of God and the mercy of +mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war +let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful +thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace." + +Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off +the closing words: + +"_To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything +that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who +know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood +and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and +the peace which she has treasured_." + +He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With +elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All +the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him, +but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "_Ich kann +nicht anders_," he whispered. + +Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly: + +"_God helping her, she can do no other_." + + + + +THE HEAD OF THE FIRM + + +He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting in his +private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and +yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and +other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers +and magazines. He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would +skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk +angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips. +For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons +that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of +his firm. + +His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he +was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the +same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead +would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes +would flash--and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk. + +When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not +well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he had +always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes remembered what +a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He +who loses his temper will lose everything." + +But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties +to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in +childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an +infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous +swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than +most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the +army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family +business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight. + +No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the +affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, +pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a +successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the +confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and +grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new +executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding +criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread +the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have +our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine +instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly +plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the +firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself +as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of +the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but +he paid little heed. + +The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen +in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe. +Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He +himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the +interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, +the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He +sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and +other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram +after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed +congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to +foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He employed +famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his +factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him. + +This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty +years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all +written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go +by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His +temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had +the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch, +sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of +energy in him often showed signs of overstress. + +It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last +months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of +business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his +old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them +the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted +from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the +commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was +out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The +strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and +unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own +family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to +resign by bankruptcy: + +"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common +enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your +deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid +from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by +right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have +dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to +welcome you at the earliest opportunity." + +The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it +is worth while to remember what it was that killed it--and him. While +the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would +bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that +would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more +startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may +be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth +away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed +word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer +the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him +cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted +into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge +organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in +Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had +cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had +them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of +free communities to live their own lives. + +Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that +perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him. +He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud, +was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of +the business to save and some of the goodwill intact. + +It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the +world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful +toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and +yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring +in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on +his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a +mocking cartoon. + +I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with +embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from +over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might +of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public opinion, that hung +like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word +incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt. +Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together +like beads of mercury on a plate, quivering into rhythm and concord, +become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires +to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when +once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, +it moves onward like the tide up a harbour. + +The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such +colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy +known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His +managers had foreseen every phase of this unprecedented competition, and +his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents +began to focus themselves. + +Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents, +solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized that +one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric +of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the +executors, pending a reorganization. + + + + +17 HERIOT ROW + + +There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year +to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to Edinburgh, +made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of +1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the +unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would +that one might again steer _Shotover_ (dearest of pushbikes) along the +Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way +to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English +landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me. + +That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and perchance may +serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of +wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more +interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him. +Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions. +For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the only time +in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during +nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional +Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no +excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one +take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot +month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon +exchange at two cents per penny. + + £ | s. | d + +July 16 pint cider | | 4 + ½ pint cider | | 1½ + lunch at Banbury | 2 | 2 + pint cider at Ettington | | 3 + supper at Stratford | 1 | 3 + stamp and postcard | | 2 + ____ _____ _____ + | 4 | 3½ + + +July 17 Postcards and stamps | | 9 + pencil | | 1 + Warwick Castle | 2 | - + cider at the _Bear and Baculus_ | | + (which Mifflin _would_ call the | | + _Bear and Bacillus) _ | | 2½ + _Bowling Green Inn, _bed and | | + breakfast | 3 | 2 + Puncture | 1 | - + Lunch, Kenilworth | 1 | 6 + Kenilworth Castle | | 6 + Postcards | | 4 + Lemonade, Coventry | | 4 + Cider | | 2½ + Supper, Tamworth, _The Castle Hotel_ | 2 | 1 + ____ _____ _____ + | 16 | 5½ + + +July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield | | 3 + cider at _The Three Crowns_ | | 4 + postcard and shave | | 4 + _The King's Head_, bed and breakfast | 3 | 7 + cider | | 2 + tip on road[A] | | 1½ + lunch, Uttoxeter | 1 | 3 + cider, Ashbourne, _The Green | | + Man_ | | 3 + landlord's drink, Ashbourne[B] | | 1 + supper, _Newhaven House_, | 1 | - + lemonade, Buxton | | 3 + ____ _____ _____ + + TOTAL £1 4 1 + ($5.78) + +[Footnote A: As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather +tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway +crossing.] + +[Footnote B: This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a +ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us +excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that +neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and +he agreed.] + +That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that +ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and +emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reckoning shillings +and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a +firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over +the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the +swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in +his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, +"Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something +that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke--"Four and +eleven pence half-penny so far to-day!" + +Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The +McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the +afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's +Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight! + +There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since the days +when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud to one +another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A +score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew +them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes +Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of +Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills--O my friends, do those +names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the +brotherhood--what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world! + +In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a +large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city +was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King +and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our +satisfaction we were known as "the smoking-room gentlemen" throughout +our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the +Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and +coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that +somewhere in his letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew +Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. +Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out +above all others of his youth--Rutland Square. And while that was of +course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad to +know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we +were on ground well loved by Tusitala. + +The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in Auld +Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row--famous address, which had +long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a +tablet on the house commemorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our +surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign TO SELL was +prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought +struck us. Could we not go over the house in the character of +prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and +concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the +Signet. + +Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once). + + + 16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. + + 26th July, 1911 + + + DEAR SIR, + + 17 HERIOT ROW + + We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be + seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view + it we shall arrange to have it opened. + + We are, + + Yours faithfully, + + GUILD AND SHEPHERD. + +Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the +figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember +that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling +with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was +in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and +subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always +take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of +amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if +you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman. + +The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show +that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attachés, +appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric +young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes, +each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the +attaché in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We +explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was +alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had +presence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, +and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was +quoted. + +He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped +softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very track of the +Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined +R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie +light the street-lamps outside--a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining +brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn +heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street +gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, +returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling +mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining +room facing the street--and we imagined Louis and his parents at +breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a +spacious and attractive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and +opening off it the little room where faithful Cummie slept. But in vain +we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room +that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the +endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded +and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and +forlorn. + +With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, seeing +everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous +young agent. And what was it he said?--"This was the house of Lord +So-and-so" (I forget the name)--"and incidentally, Robert Louis +Stevenson lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the +deeds." + +_Incidentally_!... + +Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant +of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than +the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other +"offices" with care, imagining that little "Smoutie" may have run here +and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that +childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed +to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the +Stevensons for thirty years (1857-1887)--surely even the thirty years +that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those +dear ghosts we conjured up! + +We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and +Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent +deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one has yet put a +tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day. + +In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern +dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come +and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of +the dining-room windows: + + For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, + And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more; + And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, + O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night! + +But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting +up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame +cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 +("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in +Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have +a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R.L.S., of whom +he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular +lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were +Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn +Street." He seemed to think Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned +that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, +and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you +still light the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder +beacons on Flanders fields? + +One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was +still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were down on hands and +knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light +in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man +passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, +never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as +the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we +followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy +shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze. + +Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces prom +No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin +and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the +adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once described when setting +down some recollections of childhood. + + In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame + boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much + shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, + like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and + _goody_ story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after many + days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted + him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to + play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like + a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the + venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, for it was + a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was + the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate + aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into + talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular + may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and + knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling + along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on + his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great + affair to me. + +We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's +Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the +Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an +exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend +in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter +flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one +yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the +Edinburgh street lamps," says R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all +shines on Heriot Row. + +The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the +dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to +go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more +enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him. + + + + +FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER + +[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the +extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the +head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know +him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable +manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very +good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia +was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre +books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and +unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read +MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet +in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last +wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here +in memory of my very dear friend_.] + + +In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself. +Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal +trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never +did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I +am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy. +My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other +more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to +speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is +interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a +symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while +reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. +My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. +Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter +my message without fear or favour. + +As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and +nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, +poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and +strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they +beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most +preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful +authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid +blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly +sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is +in the blood. + +Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible. +George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas +and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is +still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many +unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he +said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety." +But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as +publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did +they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich +garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and +younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on +into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing. + +But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true +specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is +content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican +that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of +good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some +winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular +conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his +thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et +dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing +terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the +publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I +believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully +when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote +an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a +week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the +head reader of a large publishing house. + +One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the +profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will +rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration; +only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the +others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away +their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript +which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it +betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable +to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere +in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into +her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his +ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a +score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me +once, containing this immortal couplet: + + She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse + on the air, + A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen + to set it there. + +Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral +ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when +one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs' +trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert +Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity. + +Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are +repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its +absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack +of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords +to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in +many cantos, beginning + + Our heart is but a bundle of muscle + In which our passions tumble and tussle. + +Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis: + + "Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual + circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being + a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the + day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a + paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced + case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by + a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been + bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles + and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female, + under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well + as in large cities and fashionable watering places. + +But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition, +let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a +manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one +publisher's office. + + She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant + figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. + Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured + like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and + combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing + tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful + crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and + tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its + own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of + the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering + strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of + the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was + destined to be pushed forward by sighs. + +Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such +plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero +in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently: + + For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah + Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the + appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases. + His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close + together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in + many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his + lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper + lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across + his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and + expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine + proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges + there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show + unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in + the kindest advances one would wish to see. + + It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley. + +I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the +A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read +too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output +of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional +reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which +distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history, +poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes +a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of +things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is +fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable +treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on +using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And +with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of +writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg. + +Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is +all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for +the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on +foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging +anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of +intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and +talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of +substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts +all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? +Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the +authors! + + + + +WILLIAM McFEE + + M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a + cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it, + and half the ship has to clean up the mess. + + --RUDYARD KIPLING. + + +The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they +would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and +William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck +steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at +Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages! + +William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer +in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude +toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not +know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his +feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his +disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the +purveyors of publicity, you may know him. + +One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the +open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young +man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to +Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker, +like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the +titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned +to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was +about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve +months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when +I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a +telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him +Casuals_!" + +It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16 +that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the +not-to-be-forgotten words. + +MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA. + +Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a +copy. + +My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this +note: + +"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up +with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before +the open fire." + +My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are +interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike +County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly +readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her +first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings +she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was +our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for +her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee. + +_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in +America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a +popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents +that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who +regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the +seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections, +indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the +first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened +to with respect. + +Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at +that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were +_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has +been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very +singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on +human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for +himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well +take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this +generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the +artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of +a paragraph:-- + + Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I + suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the + sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine + artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live + like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the + artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with + irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my + living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their + ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my + theme, the problem of human folly. + +Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he +has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of +it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London +twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful +machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering. +And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have +cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers +at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how +delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes +for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude +toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own +phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has +hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but +not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on +a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in +the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the +desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and +a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft +to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the +man who really has something to say. + +Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How +the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell +Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W. +Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets +does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only +raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the +raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these +States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing +paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as +is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? +Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the +stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me +quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot +refuse facts." + +William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English +skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long +voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New +Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was +educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the +Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar +school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a +high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer. + +At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate. +This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse, +Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office +of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His +father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an +apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred +pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the +money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else +is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at +the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will +find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out +in _Aliens_. + +After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on +various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at +Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile +verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time +of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either +imitating Kipling or reacting from him. + +His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives +and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by +socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to +live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at +first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic +Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum +reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he +attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent +engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As +early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them. + +In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room +of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance. +Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year +(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The +reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he +reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain +liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of +his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain +how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley +(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.) + +The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair +prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time +monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I +speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's +certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A +small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting +study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only +diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do +not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies +of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour. + +I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his +induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour +of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable +weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing +suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a +seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating +things about the life of an engineer: + + It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of + work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help + wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick. + Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the + R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean, + when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as + my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my + friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or + the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty + toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the + naval auxiliary are the same. + + I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment + of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession + have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to + toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet + auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of + his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to + superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the + navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an + architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not + expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts + door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you + do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer + has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding + precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in + other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind. + I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which + to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the + peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of + it, and I know what I am talking about. + + _The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the + responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He, + the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest + and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available + twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. + Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge + instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. + When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described. + +The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these +laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as +well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea +have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university. +The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his +acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. +He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the +University of the Seven Seas. + +If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem +that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a +man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has +worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When +his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the +bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or +reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no +gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from +some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most +engineers: + + As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool) + the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the + pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores + dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie + were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up + writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend + more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door. + + I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish + them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that + character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_ + character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it, + can you? + + I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst + of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people + live, of ordinary human possibilities. + + A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap + stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I + don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse + what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big + name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as + well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To + hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_! + + I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the + amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort + who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter + him! + +His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the +hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging +from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to +be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of +"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in +the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London +journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time +to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that +make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written +weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a +humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern +cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor +on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines. + +When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his +engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was +interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too. +And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board +of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to +rest on his gauges. + +In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local +colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the +United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither +_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for +years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his +manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the +United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he +was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war. + +Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a +vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my +proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all +three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two +magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the +Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to +every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of +letters. They can never be quoted too often: + +"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the +miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs +deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the +undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile +which is not a grin." + +That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich +family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered +the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps +cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the +cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in +store for us. + +And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers +with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth +remembering, and I leave it with you: + +"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, +instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing +murderous blows." + + + + +RHUBARB + + +We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which +we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them, +imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche +Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz. + +The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable +Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting +way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic +corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and +as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, +no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty +trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, +so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of +an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the +Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten +Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a year. People who +find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The +only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of +Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read. + +Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little +German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a +man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all +expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent +_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the +stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and +dream of Stuttgart. + +It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an +educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was +very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the +other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire, +dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it +more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop +into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell +into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her +shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their +pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she +so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive. + +It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that +he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We +sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little +sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was +over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes +would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of +a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life. + +What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the +rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin +abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang +Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's +Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, +marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of +paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy +trousers--infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say. + +I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first +impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always +in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back; +his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He +had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a +decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx. +Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some +harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave. +"I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. +It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong +like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his +broad, thick hand. + +Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche +Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda +fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked +for anything more complex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake +his head solemnly and say: "That I have not got." Motorists sometimes +turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for +banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But +they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit +of absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged +water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag his +beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when +the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and +rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue. + +At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it +high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna +entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed +and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. This +she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on +top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in +stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black +bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on +Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense +carnation" bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics +of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naïve +pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he," +which amused us. + +On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and +during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog +which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. Sometimes we met +him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to +himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black +dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down, +pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past. + +As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war. +Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the +shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat +upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for converting the +old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected +them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the +spine of his contention was that the German army was unbeatable. He got +out his faded discharge ticket from the Würtemberger Landsturm to show +the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at +the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and +over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard +aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came +in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped. +But often the glass top of the perfume counter was requisitioned as a +large-scale battleground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to +represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was +Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty +completely on the perfume counter. "_Warte doch_!" he would cry. "Just +wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!" + +Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew +well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our +arguments were wholly lacking in personal animus. When I told him of the +Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing +me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" +made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the +British; he would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his +conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he +would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a +panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin +at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good +night. + +How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a +true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all +that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal +simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt +for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the +men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of +the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans +_en masse_, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the +drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue +it out. + +But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German sentiment in +the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried +over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would +explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more surprised to meet +her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, sloshing along the road in the +liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black +paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing +outdoors on a day like this?" I said. + +"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen +didn't get her airing." + +"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said +severely. + +Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was snowbound in +Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent +business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away, +so we had no news from Kings. + +We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our +absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an +hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe +and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped +at the drugstore on my way to the train to get some iodine. + +Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone of white +powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from well. There were +great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat +spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and +went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands. + +"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that +the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week? +Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his +heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze +seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At +last he turned round. His broad, naïve face was quivering like +blanc-mange. + +"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more? +Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia." + +As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor. +The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my +feet. + + + + +THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE + +A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY + + + +Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint +little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the +_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the +others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish +din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your +eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. +Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above +the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the +famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio +Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down +your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in +Strychnine. + +Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press +agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and +untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an +unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among +physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful +ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with +innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the +contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept +away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end +that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find +himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at +length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells +clanging in your ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag +soaring behind the jade canal. + +The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into +the curious seven-wheeled _sforza_ lettered _Hôtel Decameron_. We +rumbled _andante espressivo_ over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussée +d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of +the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of +lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what +quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes in a +strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the _markt-platz_ +where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are +delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese +cathedral) on the cliff. + +The Hôtel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender +there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche +overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory +of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch +is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after +which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French +frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer +without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The _haut ton_ of +the section in which the Hôtel Decameron finds itself can readily be +seen by the fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on +the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hôtel. The +antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the two. + +The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak +heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the +terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a +bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my +time exploring the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which +stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and +vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing +than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the +Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts +of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some +particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will +some day make Strychnine a place of _pélérinage_ for all the world. _Pay +homage to the fromage_ is a rough translation of the motto of the town, +which is carved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself. +Limberg, Gruyère, Alkmaar, Neufchâtel, Camembert and Hoboken--all these +famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the +Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the +burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' Guild at +the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by the town +council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and +a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial +cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present +donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat +the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by +the workmen in the quarries to prevent prostration. + +It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would +gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and +sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping +my _verre_ of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of +travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned ambulance to catch my +even more old-fashioned train. The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine +when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese +carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some +day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them +to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then +Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance +that way, a fragrant memory. + +And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal +and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys. + + + + +INGO + +"ZUM ANDENKEN" + + +The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart +to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of +blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown +calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the +German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good +fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque +German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the +absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was! + +Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call +memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black +Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and +asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen +in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn") +found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern +in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low +building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering +little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in +winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely +aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a +door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the +haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the +summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery +under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow +coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the +valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the +dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that +summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of +cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining +table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's +niece when they essayed the native idiom. "_Sie arbeiten immer_!" she +used to say; "_Sie werden krank_!" ("You're always working; you'll be +ill!") + +There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days +two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there +more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans. +On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the +military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the +Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful +organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every +village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in +those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in +waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, +and played games with Ingo. + +Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, +self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. +His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a +corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk +along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by +the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations +for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the +immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a +muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he +was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing +smile: "_Von den Sternen_!" ("Of the stars.") + +The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's +smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes +were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous +amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple +pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy +days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and +sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task +of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet +one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the +word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every +time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of +a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to +guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game +entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent +over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little +brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task. +"Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would +laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning +a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo. + +The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of +winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to +construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way +out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the +room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages, +then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the +other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity +to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his +sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous +places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, +and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to +make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless +despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom. + +After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come +trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony +under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book _Till +Eulenspiegel_, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that +immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every +paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. +Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear +Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright +boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What +a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with +deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest +transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely +ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth. +His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive +stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, +"_Gott! wie er freut sich_!" The progress of our reading was held up by +these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo +explaining. + +Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to +reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and +there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure +Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the +tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's +eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's +sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn +we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read +of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall +when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the +quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses. + +I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those +hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, +sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus +zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect +and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight +with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric +American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons +with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as +often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a +child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, +and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me +my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me +was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one +afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook. + +And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Märchen" that +I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to +learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them, +they ran like this: + + For Ingo to learn English will very easy be + If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me; + Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes, + And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes-- + Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend: + To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend. + +If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot +get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate. + + + + +HOUSEBROKEN + + +After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he +needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew +his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening +spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no +two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for +something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and +smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous +evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the +click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after +glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at +night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their +pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight--these were the things that +made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in +the suburbs like a tame cat! + +Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last +he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp +retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to +his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took +it quite calmly. + +"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an +evening with your friends." + +A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go. + +"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be +lonely." + +This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting +the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the +evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow +of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the +pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars +who never stir from the house at night. + +On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to +shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very +cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room +shining with firelight and the shabby armchair. + +"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked. + +"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak +in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you." + +He kissed her and went off. + +When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired +and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of +drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face +bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway. + +At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, +shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran. + +He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force +seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering +how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly. + +At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street +and had almost entered his gate when he paused. + +Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably +by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart +leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely +eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and +masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and +tiptoed away. + +That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a +little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he +sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again +returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced +his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, +biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a +box of crackers. + +At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the +lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more +trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering +with weariness and cold, he went home. + +He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned +over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily. + +"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?" + +"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock +struck half-past ten and supported him. + +"Did you have a good time?" + +"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with +the boys now and then." + + + + +THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE + + +I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to +Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, +seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about +to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine. +He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of +laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, +labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young +visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising +verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost +inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as +one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the +bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a +swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way. + + +I + +That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with +energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters +for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's +verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of +an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that +Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too +some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has +heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but +there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful +tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how +engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is. + +[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce +Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.] + +Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of +his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his +grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother +was wounded at Waterloo. + +His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in +France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of +Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and +Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are +in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Père la +Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an +English wife. + +The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at +Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was +called--until 1914. + +Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to +live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling +have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, +became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque +villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts. + +In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas +Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of +biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period: + +"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in +'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a +clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his +instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and +this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, +he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of +him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the +old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was +calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which +he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I +understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it +would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In +those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a +certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His +rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series +of triumphs during his whole school career." + +In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field +artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic +heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, +and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he +starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil +is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that +book--everyone should have six copies. + +After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical +contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, +Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in +England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known +as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean +and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of +the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the +barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the +public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have +seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He +swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He +read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the +fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus +of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long +readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still +recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and +wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at +Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up. + +Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in +Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. +It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western +Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. +But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her +into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her +wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and +the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. +This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think +it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young +energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked +brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued +passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked +authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of +the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, +partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the +most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a +tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without +assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite +of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any +reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority. + +Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says: + +"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college +friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the +ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone +with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, +so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly +spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in +his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner +unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears." + +No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote +the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer +War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and +overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind. + + TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA + + Years ago when I was at Balliol, + Balliol men--and I was one-- + Swam together in winter rivers, + Wrestled together under the sun. + And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, + Loved already, but hardly known, + Welded us each of us into the others: + Called a levy and chose her own. + + Here is a House that armours a man + With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, + And a laughing way in the teeth of the world + And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again: + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + + I have said it before, and I say it again, + There was treason done, and a false word spoken, + And England under the dregs of men, + And bribes about, and a treaty broken: + But angry, lonely, hating it still, + I wished to be there in spite of the wrong. + My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill + And the hammer of galloping all day long. + + Galloping outward into the weather, + Hands a-ready and battle in all: + Words together and wine together + And song together in Balliol Hall. + Rare and single! Noble and few!... + Oh! they have wasted you over the sea! + The only brothers ever I knew, + The men that laughed and quarrelled with me. + + * * * * * + + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again; + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + +Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever +experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who +finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the +thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy +rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless +throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human +history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never +outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so +imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the +undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room +that did not shelve one or two of his volumes. + + +II + +There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage +to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); +his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary +France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing +essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly +from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was +very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and +humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 +he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent +spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams +of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here +was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor +startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary +stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not +soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the +early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly +administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign +against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the +very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must +look for leadership and inspiration." + +Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's +importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to +a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking +or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in +an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, +or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. +Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make +splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of +verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important +contribution? + +What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of +Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous +Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human +suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad +necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his +academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old +volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an +hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk +about this greatest figure of the Renaissance. + +Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of +Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, +physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own +justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what +you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a +perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The +gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too? + +Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in +which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands +Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing +is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His +extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity +and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list +of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are +included. + +Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that +he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find +the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights +in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then +look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us +"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its +literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of +'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels." + + +III + +In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. +Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of +English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, +politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, +nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities +of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work +he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) +It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of +anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. +His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, +biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His +passion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing +persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are +the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant. +Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe. + +Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and +whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite +tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing +earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little +volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some +of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, +companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and +inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills +at twilight--in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that +make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind": + + A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength + of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something + worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of + heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such + health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man + spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding + against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the + end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is + as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days + of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of + intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And + the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has + been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and + turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which + nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship + are at their noblest. + + +IV + +And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but +ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the +poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for +impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly +and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music: + + I never get between the pines + But I smell the Sussex air; + Nor I never come on a belt of sand + But my home is there. + And along the sky the line of the Downs + So noble and so bare. + + A lost thing could I never find, + Nor a broken thing mend: + And I fear I shall be all alone + When I get towards the end. + Who will there be to comfort me + Or who will be my friend? + + I will gather and carefully make my friends + Of the men of the Sussex Weald, + They watch the stars from silent folds, + They stiffly plough the field. + By them and the God of the South Country + My poor soul shall be healed. + + If I ever become a rich man, + Or if ever I grow to be old, + I will build a house with deep thatch + To shelter me from the cold, + And there shall the Sussex songs be sung + And the story of Sussex told. + + I will hold my house in the high wood + Within a walk of the sea, + And the men that were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + + + + +A CASUAL OF THE SEA + + He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea. + + --GEORGE HERBERT. + + +Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old +Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S. +_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the +second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same +novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him +working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one +more proof of the surprising power of the written word? + +For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print. +The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote +about him, brought (so he naïvely told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, +simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to +help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the +long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands +of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your +"round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes." + +"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His +father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the +support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with +their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships +and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle +for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more +bread for supper--that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top +of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His +grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little +family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to +school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window +because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only +slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands. + +Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils +given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He +chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his +great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the +Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came. + +After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, +and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his +grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the +docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running +to him. + +"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the _Queen +Eleanor_!" + +It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the _Queen Eleanor_, a British +tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the +chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly. + +"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away--we sail +at four o'clock." + +"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!) + +The chief roars with laughter. + +"Too small!" he says. + +Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward. + +"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and +come back again. Then we'll see how you look!" + +Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy +grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the +_Queen Eleanor_. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds +five a month. + +Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the +engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin +boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He +used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would +overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few +times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy. + +"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened +him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still. + +Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him +friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about +the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on +the _Fernfield_ in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. +This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and +Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired +a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster. + +One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer +had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be +the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, +before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, +Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And +what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even +then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important +rôle! + +The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, +as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the +world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New +York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht _Alvina._ He +was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral +in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across +the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there +still was one then!) + +Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when +his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the +window a picture of the Scotch engineer--his best friend, the only man +in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the +engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English +transport. He scanned the poster with amazement. + +Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical +seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and +bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the +book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for +years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how +the writer, who was the former second engineer of the _Fernfield_, had +done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at +sea. Then came another surprise. + +"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the +bookseller. + +It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee, +who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers +found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and +playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's +surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent +liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee +had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that +he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for +several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good +advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, +and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that +Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his +yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under +his arm. + +Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my +interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that +one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy +asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the _Alvina_ was to sail the +next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed. + +Then I saw in the papers that the _Alvina_ had been halted in the +Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected +that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on +her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of +Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, +pending an investigation. + +Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in the +very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I +overheard another member of the _Alvina's_ crew asking about "Casuals +of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, +too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends +walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired +hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began +explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor +who had been there a few days before. + +So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to +see Tommy and the _Alvina_. + +I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible +excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion in the breast +of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder +putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo +Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of +the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of +West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the +West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners, +and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met +Captain Claret of the _Minnehaha_, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape +of the _Orduña_, Mr. Jones of the _Lusitania_ and many another. They +knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the +officers' cabins on the _Lusitania_ when she went down, God rest her. I +know, because I put them there. + + * * * * * + +And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the +landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet +our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of +earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on +every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels--the _James L. Morgan_, dour +little tug, shoving two barges; _Themistocles_, at anchor, with the blue +and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the _Comanche_ +outward bound for Galveston (I think); the _Ascalon_, full-rigged ship, +with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit snugging the canvas. +And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate +indignities--and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy +Hook.... + +At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The _Alvina_ was not there. +One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly +taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came +to my aid. "There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his +gesture, and saw her--a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel +with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places +on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman +wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was +interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into +trouble with "39"--"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the +Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on +a dollar and a quarter. + +That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader! +Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a +"bight"--surrounded by ships and the men who sail them--I might almost +have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long Island commuters are nurtured +to a tough and perilous his, and I clambered the _Alvina's _side without +dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts. + +Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me +to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The +first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a +stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those _Dioscuri_ of seamen, had been at +work. The skipper was ashore. He owns a saloon. + +The _Alvina_ is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me, +and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the +staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached; +she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating +apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. +But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in +preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck +was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in +January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons. + +I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch +lad--round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me +all his treasures--his certificates of good conduct from all the ships +(both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother, +who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta--a very pretty +girl--who is also mentioned in _Casuals of the Sea._ The drunken fireman +in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the +same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of +letters from Mr. McFee. + +I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to this +Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they were. Tommy +is one of his own "casuals"-- + + --those frail craft upon the restless Sea + Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, + Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, + Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started-- + +and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of chance +are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put it +in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, libraries, and art +galleries; get to know something about this great America if you intend +to settle down there--that is the kind of word Tommy gets from his +friend. + +Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of +life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable +because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven +chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle +face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner +together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where +men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing +tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy +from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common +sense. + +When I left her that afternoon, the _Alvina_ was getting up steam, and +she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, and +for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and thoughts of the simple, +childlike men who live on ships. I realized for the first time the truth +of that background of aimless hazard that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a +book of more than passing merit. + +As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not. +When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in +the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to work oiling the +dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way +up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton correspondence course on steam +engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. +That lasted just two weeks. The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. +The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound. + +But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart +his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put him in +a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our +day, you will find him--a casual of the sea! + + + + +THE LAST PIPE + + The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a + clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most + polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe + every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his + back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly + inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced by + the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of + emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed. + + --LEIGH HUNT. + + +The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in +value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of +diminishing returns. I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the +fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. It is true +that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs, +inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a +morning pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread +in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if +possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a +lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, +and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot +bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is +overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot +Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds +hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a +second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, +let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a +sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of +breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the +invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae. + +After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf, +mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober +pacing: then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of +the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the +cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free--and then for your +_säckerhets tändstickor!_ A day so begun is well begun, and sin will +flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and +tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; +the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks +with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The +first pipe! + +But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the +after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in +mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure +sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins +to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for +thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. As the smoke drifts and +shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable +energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most +potent force in existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred +the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing +dottel in your briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down +the stem. The most precious things in the world are also vivid with +poison. + +Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he have +written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid of +science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his indigestion and +snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous use of the weed makes +the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to forgers, +second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, who had little enough +truck with churchmen, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop +of London. Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and +rightly, his first impulse was to decline. But before answering the +Bishop's letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. The latter +(the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in +the fold of the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and +hugely enjoyed himself. + +There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information for all +acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art +and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social History of Smoking," by +G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives somewhere +in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to +return it. If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and +relent. Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (_Canadian +journals please copy!_) + + * * * * * + +I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically with the +weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course the +incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his tongue and grows +callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best +not to smoke during office hours. This may be a hard saying to some, but +a proper respect for the art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast +can be at his devotions always. It is not those who are horny with +genuflection who are nearest the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak +in all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto now and then! + +This is the schedule I vouch for: + +After breakfast: 2 pipes + +At luncheon: 2 pipes + +Before dinner: 2 pipes + +Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes + +(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.) + +The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If your meal +is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from +the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food +into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left +in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs +at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such +times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes +automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your eyes +see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents, +or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below +hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien +and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like +stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however, +when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his +whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating +bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. +You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason, +emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this +desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little +fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. +Such a régime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a +continuance of intellect. + +Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the +choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted +by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in +pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a sovereign +consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the +fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any ginseng in the +herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort +virgins not to marry men who do not smoke. + +Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art +and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the +so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to +weariness. + +No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of +_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology. +Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define +life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of +consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, +interrupted by intervals of recuperation. + +Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates +being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve +ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the +recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of +saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is +the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe +ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just +before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef. + +The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my +eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school +poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after +piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some +hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and +slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, +invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General +Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of +learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a +repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, +that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland +for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by +which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that +afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober +research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous précis of +the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly +paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY: +by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price, +relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the +lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents +belabour one another! + +With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be +smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering +interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the +glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn +to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue. + +"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in the most +necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may +be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is annexed a Description of +the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes, +with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from +the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. +Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. _At the Clarendon +Press_." + +Or this: + +"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure. +Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii + +104. 5s. net." + +O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an +introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his +Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the +catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in +exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as +leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest +are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good +hands." + +One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and +curiosity are now both going strong. + +"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie +incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest +English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net." + +Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial +enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of +this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of +"Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of +Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of +Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum +Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. +Field. 1865. Two volumes £6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane +History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution +of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the +Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz +and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp +550. 10s. net." + +But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is +another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos +are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent +poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the +editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends. +He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial +products in the text of the magazine. + +But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us +call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony: + +"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone +man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's +cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for +stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, +there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven." + +And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General +Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and +kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The +window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars ... a +distant chime ... and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian +herb about me. + + + + +TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE + + +The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs. +Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until +Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires +courage. + +Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab commutes +by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, the +African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to tow him to the +office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered +soul, inured to privation and calamity. At seven-thirty in the morning +he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife +he is going to work. + +How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. and +Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And hoping +that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the furnace until +the last touchdown had been made. + +But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new cook, had +begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda came from the +West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the sophistries of the +employment agencies. She could boil an egg without cracking it, she +could open a tin can without maiming herself. She was neat, guileless, +and cheerful. But, she was accustomed to a warm climate. + +The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner, +Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how chilly the +evenings were growing. But across the table came one of those glances +familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with rebuke, +charged with the lightning of instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze +struck him dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze! + +Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich in +calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully what +Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of coal bills +danced in his mind. + + * * * * * + +After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and Mrs. +Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in +washing the dishes. + +"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't you +better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days +Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from +Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. She said she +couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've given her my old +fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One other remark like that +of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, Bob, use your skull!" + +Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating wisdom of +women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply. + +Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility. + +"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected by +chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the +thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If you +must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. Otherwise +we'll have to start the furnace at once." + +Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the +simple-minded race of husbands. + +"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on. +Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance remark!" + +The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, Mr. +Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for hot soup," +he said. "All the men at the office were talking about the unseasonable +hot weather. I think we'd better have a window open." To Mrs. +Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room windows, admitting +a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she was game, and presently +called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda was in the room they talked +pointedly of the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau +notes from the evening paper. + +After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force of +habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just as he was +setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other wistfully, for +the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully +took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirtsleeves until +Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire, +by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before retiring, so +that Belinda might suspect nothing in the morning. + +The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm Beach suit. +Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They both sneezed +vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town to-day, I think I +caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell. + +Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer with a +puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the attic. But +the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. Blackwell explained +that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a similar +psychological campaign. Belinda and Mrs. Chester's cook, +Tulip--jocularly known as the Black Tulip--were friends, and would +undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed not to start her +furnace without consultation with Mrs. Blackwell. + +October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather remained sunny, +but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic +bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but +sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late +at night. "I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm +sure it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She never opens the +windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning." + +"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. Blackwell +drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but +underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels. + + * * * * * + +Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in +psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train less +fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to +him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to +dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men loudly clamoured for +permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering +jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when +the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no, +Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream to-night. I don't +w--want to get chilled. Bring me some hot coffee." As she brought his +cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration. +"By George," he thought, "this mental suggestion business certainly +works." Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze +in an ulster. + +The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the +doctor in the hall. + +"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?" + +"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. "It's +the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is the +17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has all the +symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat." + + + + +MY FRIEND + + +To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time. + +Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will +not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many +of his kind. + +In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that +many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry +leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look +to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, +and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon +Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent. + +My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these +parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things, +but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and +distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his +person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his +own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great +literature. + +I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to +bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love +(I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for +beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry +considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him +his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die +than dishonour that chosen instrument. + +I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in +my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal +situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary +critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some +unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, +a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the +slipshod and insincere. + +Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his +daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit +what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling +ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than +comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or +fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a +publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to me, "because I am +convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling +books: what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called +literature." + +I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this devotion to +high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is +unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded +simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been +haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters +where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not +find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of +men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man. + +In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly +wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to +cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that +confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to +those who understand. + +Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort +and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding +English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine +prose. + +I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak +spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet; + + And the men who were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + +Indeed let us hope that they will. + + + + +A POET OF SAD VIGILS + + +There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably +the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of +tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss +Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary +remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary +of hers. + +I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn +"The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White? +But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump +volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place +near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal +Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of +several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's +remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire +that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was +the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! +Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even +Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a +parlous sport. + +The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane +Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little +time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are +grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and +overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was +still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read +because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are +so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so +indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that +Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on +plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived +to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter +of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's +College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a +poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and +honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As +Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to +him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so +soon have been removed from the world. + +He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents; +his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest +years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from +his books, even at mealtimes. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a +Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it +to his mother. Southey's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius +is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary +feeling." + +His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was +employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the +prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to +start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The +work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in +the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the +office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and +Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were +dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little +garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his +supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to +eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a +deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal +ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The Wealth +of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were +some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy +that I know. No one, after reading Southey's memoir, will overload his +brain again. + +At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother +Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at +this amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged to enter into this +resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading +romances." He is human enough to add, however, that "after long and +fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson +Crusoe' afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' +I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the +English language." + +The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in +London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. Henry permitted +himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the +benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem to have carried on a +mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville was inclined to belittle +the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his +brother's unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and +"instructive" topics. Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for +self-improvement. If our great-grandparents were all like that what an +age it had been for the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is +requisite to make one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, +_sound sense_." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural +abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but it +is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the trouble of +writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any art, however +trivial, that did not require some application at first." He begs the +astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he +reads. "You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself." Does +one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave? + +Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of prizes won +in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch +globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions to the _Monthly +Mirror_. He was also admitted a member of a famous literary society then +existing in Nottingham, and although the youngest of the sodality he +promptly announced that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With +mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering assembled at the appointed +time, and the inspired youth harangued them for two hours on the subject +of Genius. The devil, or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for +destruction. + +In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He published +a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as Consumption, +Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the Night Previous to +Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, The Eve +of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female Lunatic to a Lady, had been +warmly welcomed by the politest magazines of the time. To wish to +publish them in more permanent form was natural; but the unfortunate +young man conceived the thought that the venture might even be a +profitable one. He had found himself troubled with deafness, which +threatened to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was +canting seriously toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college +career and then the church were lively in his mind. + +The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his manuscript for +the printer. Probably never before or since, until the Rev. John +Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about garnering his +collected works into that volume which is the delight of the wicked, has +a human heart mulled over indifferent verses with so honest a pleasure +and such unabated certainty of immortality. The first two details to be +attended to were the printing of what were modestly termed +_Proposals_--i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for +pledges of subscription--and, still more important, securing the +permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. +The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and +saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it +might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the +manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine +brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of +Devonshire. A very humble letter from honest Henry accompanied it, +begging leave of her Grace to dedicate his "trifling effusions" to her. + +Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are very +entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such +circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would be +sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already got +twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready: + +"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at all, among +my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the +conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got abroad, and has been +received more favourably than I expected." + +But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind the +poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of +Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so feelingly calls a +weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's heels, but +no word arrived from the duchess. She was known to be assaulted from all +sides by such applications: indeed her mail seems to have been very +nearly as large as that of Mary Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his +unspeakable anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all +parcels sent to the duchess, unless marked with a password known only to +her particular correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter +to be reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried +Henry in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits +to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. Finally, +after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. Even then +undaunted, this long-suffering older brother made one more try in the +poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, and +called on her in person, wisely leaving the manuscript at home; and with +the complaisance of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's +modest request. Her name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the +little volume, and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy +reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises +that "Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it +is probable that she never opened the book." + +"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in 1803. + +It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more +seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see +what Henry's reading had been--Milton, Collins, and Gray, evidently. His +unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how +thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his mind and +became part of his own outpourings. _Il Penseroso_ gushes to the surface +of poor Henry's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of +Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we +may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of his +poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. +Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful +vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his +quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his +thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary +information, but in the more active business of life, must not be +expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a +Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace." + +The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an +unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came +home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He +nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies. +After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he +dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure +hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when the _Monthly +Review_ for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: +in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put _boy_ to rhyme +with _sky_, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course, +"If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, +produce better sense and better rhymes." + +The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested +opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent, +but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be +an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so +inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross +and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his +health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, +however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review +that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused +Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise himself above his +level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death +edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have +him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge +looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the +fervour of his industry and ambition. + +Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger. +The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination +for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he himself always felt +that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened +with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet--epilepsy--his frail and +uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of +1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where +he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday +to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He +had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university, +and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law. +Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie +down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six. +His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs +to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile +in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's +step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but +after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading. +Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of +extreme depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his +sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very +touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the +cliché and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight +musings at their highest pitch:-- + + TO CONSUMPTION + + Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head, + Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay, + Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, + And softly go to slumber with the dead. + And if 'tis true what holy men have said, + That strains angelic oft foretell the day + Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey, + O let the aerial music round my bed, + Dissolving sad in dying symphony, + Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; + That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye, + Ere I depart upon my journey drear: + And smiling faintly on the painful past, + Compose my decent head, and breathe my last. + +But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at +Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near +his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit +for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer +nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of +drenched and muddy clothes. + +Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after +all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who +promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St. +John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers, +who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman +in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a +year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters during this +period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while +boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. +He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The +proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters +weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic. + +In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St. +John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of +two very different undergraduates--William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler. +His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and +overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a pleasant +picture of his quiet rambles through the town, his solitary cups of tea +as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear +his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one +at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is +his account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the +bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). +Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the +traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for +his coal bin. + +But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the haven +of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill health, his +tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship examination in +December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded physical inability, +they dosed him with "strong medicines" to enable him to face the +examiners. After the ordeal he was so unstrung that he hurried off to +London to spend Christmas with his aunt. + +The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors were, +according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as far as +possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense enough to +restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he was always at +work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or what not. In a +memorandum found in his desk his life was thus planned: "Rise at +half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel and breakfast till +eight. Study and lectures till one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk +and dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. Nine to ten, +devotions. Bed at ten." + +In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of his year, +and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him the unusual +compliment of keeping him in college through the vacation with a special +mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics being +considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete +rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was +simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he +was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic +nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart +and lungs, and he died on October 19, 1806. + +Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. His +letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps +once a twelve-month he displays a sad little vein of pleasantry, but not +for long. Probably the light-hearted undergraduates about him found him +a very prosy, shabby, and mournful young man, but if one may judge by +the outburst of tributary verses published after his death he was +universally admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation +from a tribute paid him by a lady versifier: + + If worth, if genius, to the world are dear, + To Henry's shade devote no common tear. + His worth on no precarious tenure hung, + From genuine piety his virtues sprung: + If pure benevolence, if steady sense, + Can to the feeling heart delight dispense; + If all the highest efforts of the mind, + Exalted, noble, elegant, refined, + Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret, + Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful debt! + + + + +TRIVIA + + The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, + clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame. + + --HOBBES, _Leviathan_, Chap. VIII. + + +The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian +civilization demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family, +should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the +World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of +mature years who do not know the relative batting averages of the Red +Sox and the Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of from +thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what one means by bachelor) +must either marry and settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to +Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay +please notice. + +The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled the +shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous +sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without ruth. + +But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent +middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and +crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful born +bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. + +Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But that most +amiable of cities does not encourage detached and meditative +bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known as "a guarded +education in morals and manners" at Haverford College, our hero passed +to Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to Oxford. Literature and +liberalism became his pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself +engrossed in the task of proving to the British electorate that England +need not always remain the same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir +Henry Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful short stories +about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on +the history and habits of the English language. + +But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his mental +humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by incomprehensible +twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, leading the life of the +typical English bachelor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit, +evening clothes and tweeds; passing from country house to London club, +from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the +cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic +aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, +ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with +irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage. + +Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he +succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the +spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of +the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie +open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he +were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set +them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched +by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which +presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, +whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a +middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a +decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately +intellectual brainslide of our generation. + +This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith +is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, +tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness +which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds +of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our +home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a +flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as +disturbing as devilled crabs. + +Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from +mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I +know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty +little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful +inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. +A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so +far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare +not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm--all this is "Trivia." Where +are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of +old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy +elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of +that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences--the mind of a strolling +bachelor. + +Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all +hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away. +"These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a +Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom +which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet +bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." + +But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last +despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And +his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his +sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I +wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a +Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great +Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in +a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and +other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the +platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly +post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and +accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man, +with the thought of the meaningless creation crashing blindly through +frozen space. His other great consolation is his dear vice of +reading--"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, +this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication." + +It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just figment of +the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little +volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a radiant, dancing +spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we catch, now and then, a +flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, sudden, and +defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English lawns we follow that +gracious figure, down dusky London streets where he is peering in at +windows and laughing incommunicable jests. + +But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming pans and +the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again will he +tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes about +Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville +Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will +never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play +that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit +propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might +have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The +exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has +gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an +underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn +the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright? + +Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a +famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall +Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are +now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don +attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact +that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and +he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major +Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the +Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more +serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him +in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was +badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now +we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift, +and he will never write an American "Trivia." + + + + +PREFACES + + +It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of +authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than +dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary +months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions +of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during +composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given +gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth +who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary +men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that +topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition +should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely touch at +the end. + +How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is +over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, after +the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. Or it may be +a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without a preface. Better +a preface without a book.... + +Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have written +prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of the subtlest +pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet written; but the +prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort of +thing I mean. + + +PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL" + +How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in the +dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one +brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent--there came a rush up the +stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open. +Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; I never saw him look so +glorious. Tall and thin--he was always very thin, _see_ p. 219 and +_passim_--with his long, brown face and sparkling black eyes--I can see +him still rambling about the room in his flannels, his curly hair damp +on his forehead. "Buzzard," he said--he always called me Buzzard--"guess +what's happened?" + +"In love again?" I asked. + +He laughed. A bright, golden laugh--I can hear it still. His laughter +was always infectious. + +"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've won the +Sylvanus Stall fellowship." + +I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the college +garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls +deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant for me. I, too, in +my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling +him. Must I confess it? I had never dared mention the subject for fear +he, too, would compete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. O +petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now! + +"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't +congratulated!" + +I pulled myself together. + +"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname +sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed." + +It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him +again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the +Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before +commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came +back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with +the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article +in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost +every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters, +so full of _verve_ and _élan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was +always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a +Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, +dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I +have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p. +189). + +He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a +pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of +Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for +the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache +of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from +it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never +be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!" + +All the world knows how he died.... + + +PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK + +(In six volumes) + +The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length +finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by +those small bickerings over _minutiæ_ so dear to all scrupulous +writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments +on the functions of the historian. + +There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from +the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has +been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor +Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is +particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too +gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the +unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack +the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, +has observed this. + +Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very +good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of +learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too +witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said. + +I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this regard; +but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that most +dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a maxim that +contemporary history cannot be judicially written. + +Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the +controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge--of the Sorbonne--in the +matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to the Constituent +Assembly of 1848, will remark several hitherto unobserved errors in +Lamartine which I have been privileged to point out. For instance, +Lamartine (who is supported _in toto_ by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the +elections took place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am +able to demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew +Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rougegorge's +assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests upon a humorous +misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be looked +up by the curious in Annette User's "Années avec les Lamartines." Oser +was for many years the cook in Lamartine's household, and says some +illuminating things regarding L.'s dislike of onions.) + +It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually the +generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so many +scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names would be like +Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an ungracious mode of +returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention Professor +Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, _optimus maximus_ among modern +historians. Of him I may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet +aeternumque sedebit." + +My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my Slavic +orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. To her, and +to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often penetrated to my +study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the whole. _89, Decameron +Gardens._ + + +PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS + +This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title "Rari +Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have chosen from +my published works those poems which seemed to me most faithfully to +express my artistic message; and the title obviously implies that I +think them the ones most likely to weather the maëlstroms of Time. Be +that as it may. + +Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one +glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse +to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the +robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that I could agree; +but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial +taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes or +Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. +Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the +noise and rushings of winds--and what avails? _Parturiunt montes_ ...you +know the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary +floor. They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray +felines, are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the +Poetry Society see them not. + +It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel and I sail +to-morrow for Nova Zembla. + +_The Grotto, Yonkers._ + + +PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION + +A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have added +three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the +"Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his +express request. The success of the first edition has been very +gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to _Bleak +House, Nova Zembla_. + + +PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION + +The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to +production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include +several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe," +and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to +convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the +praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of +_Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review. + +Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore +I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf +Stream," which has great promise. + +The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to +hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked +off. + + + + +THE SKIPPER + + +I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, +"A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it +has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, +that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the +structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much +to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the +trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the +delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia +creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching +unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us +with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to +suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar +with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable +minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words +horizontally in parallel lines? + +The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this +continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous +indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the +pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list +of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hôte +white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in +1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever +heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one +day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small +club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at +the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of +R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked +him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same +passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he +thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir +Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of +loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I +know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a +new name to me. + +Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read +one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was +"Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon +of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a +very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad +would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had +ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon +carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an +ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway +just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head +through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down +into the 'tweendecks. + +But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated +here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative +tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a +grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at +midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now +living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face +of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" +one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the +Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well +acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set +this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is +Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and +the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of +his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, +and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would +omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal +confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of +autobiography as it is rarely written. + +One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled +complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as +lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words +that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror +of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself +which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to +the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says +that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a +hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and +that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the +surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be +carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is +the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the +creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears +that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are +complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the +great simplicity of life and death. + +Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the +synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where +the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood +and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A +statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise +from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was +all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive +biographical résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas +B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was +bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the +delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad +devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical +reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the +tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical +comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is +a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from +the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us +with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his +uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our +delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters +constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for +dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews +the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole +mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the +only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the +human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the +dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel +he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and +exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of +piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a +writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially +impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and +Glucose school! + +This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that +deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, +this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of +Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in +our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the +kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks +of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting +out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and +sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first +contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less +than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the +sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly +burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again +with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to +meet the Skipper face to face. + +Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to +invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so +closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes +is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own +noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And +how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, +the smile which is not a grin. + + + + +A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD + + Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on. + + --EDWARD FITZGERALD. + + +I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the +Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to +do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take +up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know +as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and +great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a +man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He +shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I +think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad +not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder +had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the +Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the +Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the +delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later +years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell +came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories. + +There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some +ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the +hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower +and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shabby +schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the +river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's +stories. In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port +and a town of thriving commerce. But now--well, it is little heard of in +the annals of the world. + +Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and +her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was +apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily +entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," a +versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships +with greater men. Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand, +came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters +now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. +They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb. Also I have always +thought it very much to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian +named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. +Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as +birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors +as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In +the years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some all +the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to gossip +about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club +of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge +(please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from seed +brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the +tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the +FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's father was (I believe) a +schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England's jewels just +missed being a Woodbridgian! + +Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool +Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the +Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally +set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from +the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your +nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong +tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old +Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your +bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling +Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. +(But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is +full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the +"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk +blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers +who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century +ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St. +Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!) +and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey +ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out +Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in +1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from +Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. +Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's +painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay +or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to +Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You +will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and +sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, +vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few +hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel +and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs +of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the +windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. +You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion +for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come from +one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of Armada that +Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a +bomb--"dud" it was--in John Loder's garden; the old man had to be +restrained from running out to seize it with his own hands. + +John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His grandfather, +Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and printing business, +which continues to-day at the old shop on the Thoroughfare under John +Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days before the railway came through, +Woodbridge was the commercial centre for a large section of East +Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the quays were crowded with shipping. +But when transportation by rail became swift and cheap and the provinces +began to deal with London merchants, the little town's prosperity +suffered a sad decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several +generations' standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great +London "stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its +best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers as +FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left school at +thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the traditional printer's +devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, +coming down the street from Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for +forty years) with a large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet +sat perched on a high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the +work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by +for a basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at +their work. + +Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little Friends' +burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's +half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother was buried there, one +snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember how old John Loder came +forward to the grave, bareheaded and leaning on his stick, to drop a +bunch of fresh violets on the coffin. + +Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt +House--that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly +commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old +Gardens"--and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I +remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his +little retreat with a well-stained pipestem: + + But walk'st about thine own dear bounds, + Not envying others' larger grounds: + For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent + Of land makes life, but sweet content. + +Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost fabulous now. +He had known quite well an English soldier who was on guard over Boney +at St. Helena--in fact, he once published in some newspaper this man's +observations upon the fallen emperor, but I have not been able to trace +the piece. He had been in Paris before the troubles of '48. I believe he +served some sort of bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at +any rate, he used to be in touch with the London book trade as a young +man, and made the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's +most famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had +not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter +instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were offered by +Quaritch for a penny apiece. + +I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner or +later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes of the +literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with him owing +to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait +of herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. Robert H. Groome, +the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome, +the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" and was said by Watts +Dunton to have known far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were among +his correspondents.[D] John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon +Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward Clodd, +Leon Vincent--such men as these wrote or came to John Loder when they +wanted special news about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a great +many curios and personal treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for +sale at any price (anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) +but if any one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he +would give them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old +musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This +scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful engravings, +prints, and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, and operatic +stars of whom Fitz was enivré as a young man. Among them are a great +many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an +enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there +are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook +was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in +London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights +of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous +Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many +nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, +whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House." + +[Footnote D: No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite +tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes +Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about +Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to +include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's modesty was always as +great as his generosity: he would not consent.] + +When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, the old +man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of +mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's too late!" And he +followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which +Ainger had given him. + +Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, eager and +merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when any one came in +who was qualified to discuss the literature which interested him. He and +FitzGerald had long cracks together and perhaps Loder may have +accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those trips down the Deben on +the _Scandal_ or the _Meum and Tuum_ (the _Mum and Tum_ as Posh, Fitz's +sailing master, called her). He played a prominent part in the life of +the town, became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench +until he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, +came a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing +business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left him a +handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from anxiety +and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet generosities +which had always been his secret delight. + +Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how pale and +mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him +before you as he was in those last days! I used to go up to Burkitt +House to see him: in summer we would sit in the little arbour in the +garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining room. He would talk and I +would ask him questions; now and then he would get up to pull down a +book, or to lead me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. He +used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very close to the fire, with his shoe +laces untied. In summer he would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, +with a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well +stained by much smoking, his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as +ever. Every warm morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping +over Market Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, +hailing every child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally +full of peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. +His long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always +to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No +recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a +hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk breed. +Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a man as the +"Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced. + +He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months and four +days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety--he went in +bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps +the sincerest tribute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from my +journal, dated July 16, 1913: + +"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled +Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. I +think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of +his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' he +said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner than his wont--and I +left with an armful of books which he had given me 'to keep me out of +mischief.' We had a good talk after tea--he told me about the adventures +of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most +delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and +wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his +smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He +took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some +which would be acceptable to me--'May as well give 'em away before it's +too late, ye know'--and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff +at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me--he has +such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his +cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He +chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard +(alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). He constantly +speaks of things he wants to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the +daisies.' He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the +Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered +here--this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was +greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning +mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for +the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats. + +"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at +writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who +cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a former +Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard to do him +justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a swift and +painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into +a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory and his pipe and +his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he +can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall--then may the +quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land." + + + + +A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM + + +I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for +our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of +that stuff into practice. + +"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep quiet of +your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must be +full of gladness and love for every person and every tiniest thing. +Great activity and worry is needless--it is poison to the soul. Learn to +reflect, and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the mystic who finds +all that is most precious in life. The flowers of meditation blossom in +his heart." I cut out these words and pasted them in my hat. I have +always felt that my real genius lies in the direction of philosophic +calm. I determined to override the brutal clamour of petty things. + +The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but lovely +thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight +o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see that Professor +Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am +brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her. + +She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed. + +I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will convince you +that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar, +and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's inquiries. + +At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My employer is +not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at +home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from mystical. "Get here +by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he said. + +I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the +senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of +gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the world. +"I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized me by the +shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting "Another nut!" + +When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred papers. +The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. "Here +he is now," I heard her say. + +It was Dennis & Company on the wire. + +"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have yesterday +without fail?" said Dennis. + +I took the 'phone. + +"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The matter is +purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune yourself--" + +He rang off. + +I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of +a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging +transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores, +proofs of the weekly ad. for the _Fishmongers' Journal_, a telegram from +the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery +trucks--how could I jeopardize my faculty of meditation by worrying over +these trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted myself to +meditation. After all, the harassing domination of material things can +easily be thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I +seemed to see the future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. +My soul was thrilled with a universal love of humanity. + +The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted to see +me. + +Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and +call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective +of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous +new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, +should I, bow to the force of impertinent trivialities? + +I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity. + +By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face convinced +me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to the +soul. Certainly his face was poisonous. + +"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? Dennis +just called me up about that herring order--" + +"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is a +strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...." + +A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay in my +pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for +the stairway from the office to the street is long and dusty; but I +recalled what Professor Tagore had said about vicissitudes being the +true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I remembered +the creed pasted in it. After pacing a block or so, my soul was once +more tranquil. + +I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was crowded +with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a +corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon the majestic vision of +the brotherhood of man. + +Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. Never +mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others do is +beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of endless vistas +of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for some time, but still +no corporeal and physical units of food reached me. + +The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. Full of +love for humanity I spoke to him. + +"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will +you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of +your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is +mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming +luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm. + +He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he +cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket." + +By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt +ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were +beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street, +walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people +trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I +reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of +infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my +hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers +in his teeth and nipped them vigorously. + +I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst +into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, +cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to +snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at +the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing +of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit +clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the +lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the +motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was +perfectly happy! + + + + +AN OXFORD LANDLADY + + +It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was +chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the +flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter +and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle +but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley. + +If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not +forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen +Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and +with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the +admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later +days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball +together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I +can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was +loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not +rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, +and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily +has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see +Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before +the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very +fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of +dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a +lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and +placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley. + +She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the +leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals. + +"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves +'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do." + +"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play +hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I +think her name must be Kathleen...." + +Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful +way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other +gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young +ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was +engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought +it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman." + +"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested: + + "Beauty must be scorned in none + Though but truly served in one." + +"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. +Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly +embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into +the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her. + +"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about +dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her +quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three +who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares +there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. +That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?" + +The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the +ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with +Mr. Williams," I said. + +"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the +table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A +pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the +cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit +and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about +that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind +gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I +think he wrote it 'imself." + +"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a +book. + +"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?" +asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he +knew." + +"We might send him a telegram," I said. + +"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic +thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning," +she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find +'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder +what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly. + +"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad +a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus +gentleman 'e was.) + +"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's +sign mean?' + +"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never +gets 'em back." + +Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away +chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey. + +_October, 1912._ + + + + +"PEACOCK PIE" + + +Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real +tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the +vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the +really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the +literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly +forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William +McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most +of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River +Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season +when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of +all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de +la Mare. + +"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable +to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of +present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over +here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in +England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all +shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He +has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" +is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden +of Verses." + +I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more +likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun +fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in +imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and +fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are +among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to +open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the +seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's +dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as +compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And +it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens +where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for +Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil +Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native +in our hearts, and we might as well admit it. + +To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests +perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly +burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the +subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering +blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin +is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is +the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without +offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the +Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order +of poets who do not wear rubbers. + +One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a +book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems +for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper +for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that +the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a +changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the +pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle +channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring +you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it +will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through +with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a +bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not +know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the +morning. + +One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter +simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the +memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can +read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his +head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is +young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection: + + Three jolly Farmers + Once bet a pound + Each dance the others would + Off the ground. + Out of their coats + They slipped right soon, + And neat and nicesome, + Put each his shoon. + One--Two--Three-- + And away they go, + Not too fast, + And not too slow; + Out from the elm-tree's + Noonday shadow, + Into the sun + And across the meadow. + Past the schoolroom, + With knees well bent + Fingers a-flicking, + They dancing went.... + +Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade? + +The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that +they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of +the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, +even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the +superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not +a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know +nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The +haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of +superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of +iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly +tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the +meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his +voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist +journals please copy. + +One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of +this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much +of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange +things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of +whim and Æsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you +one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry. + + THE LITTLE BIRD + + My dear Daddie bought a mansion + For to bring my Mammie to, + In a hat with a long feather, + And a trailing gown of blue; + And a company of fiddlers + And a rout of maids and men + Danced the clock round to the morning, + In a gay house-warming then. + And when all the guests were gone, and + All was still as still can be, + In from the dark ivy hopped a + Wee small bird: and that was Me. + +"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip +of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous. +It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of +outlets of sky. + +As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his +songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that +even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our +universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and +professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is +forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has +evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four +children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil +Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful +hardiness. + + + + +THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP + + +Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary +man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for +immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his +saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a +hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of +these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, +to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a +transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though +nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his +neck." + +As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) +puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with +life. + +Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a +ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these +will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet +the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it +sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence +collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along +Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it +for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing. + +This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained +by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous +writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days. +There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, +their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that +would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of +famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it +for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such +fictitious value as manuscript. + +Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in +Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His +early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping +paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar +Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits +of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for +funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would +offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts! + +Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an +appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even +though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken +somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have +been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our +pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will +be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the +first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true +talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely +bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later. + +The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) +letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable +Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue +saloons when he might have been fêted by the Authors' League had he +lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that +tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his +executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in +1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted +genius: + +"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed +my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic +has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of +'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was +too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to +tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the +other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and +inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as +a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him +downstairs. The stinking bounder! + +"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally +true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself +to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did +get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they +found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my +pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson +Street, waiting for the cafés to open (I was too done to walk half a +dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my +pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting +up a building. + +"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my +hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at +auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, +July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary +mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in +charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This +cancer is getting me surely. + +"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for +him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, +bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red +cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw +onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. +I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.' + +"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to +give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name, +so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my +heart, if I still have one...." + +It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and +Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter. + +Will not some literary agent think over this idea? + + + + +A MORNING IN MARATHON + + +One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past +four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early +rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the +steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping +down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly +awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back +steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are +leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel +Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the +moonshine without a qualm. + +There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless +suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls +on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little +bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace +needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may +warm the radiators upstairs. Then the big agate kettle must be set over +the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa. +Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut +Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are +ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and +shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train +waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station. + +But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine +mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock +being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day +in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the +ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is +an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 +and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in +the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four. + +I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before +the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in +"Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of +night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern +sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at +last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost +its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night +receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the +horizon. + +But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head +from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still +nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just +before departing. + +The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious. +Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep +blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air +was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very +cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and +read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco +and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The +exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea. + +I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun +came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As +we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light +shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the +basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the +thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination +for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross, +Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls +and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place +after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. +It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains? +No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke +of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue +English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run. + +In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its +high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of +commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting +by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch +counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to +stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and +garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I +was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or +six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that +the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was +reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth +book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to +translate "a litter of puppies." + +My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit +my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged +from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a +degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was +just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto +the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. +The day was begun. + + + + +THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS + + +I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do +not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the +thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords. +Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease +mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke +cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with +sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane. + +But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train +is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is +none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently +these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape, +condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in +leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven +to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they +smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end +than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear +shoes with fawn-coloured tops. + +Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am +faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading +poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver +gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto +sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the +brass veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. +And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I +left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me +at least a whiskey and soda to get them out. + +It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am cigarless +and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white margins inside my +vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in which I was married +(I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I +look up from Emily Dickinson's poems with a trembling thrill of painful +ecstasy, I am frightened by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes +opposite me. + +The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order a +bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that nauseates +me? At any rate, I want to get home--home to that star-sown meadow and +the two brown arms at the journey's end. + +_December, 1914._ + + + + +COTSWOLD WINDS + + +Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still sits +close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over the +sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an adventure. I +am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. Give me a two-mile +spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the muscles and sweep the +morning's books and tobacco from the brain--and then turn and at it! It +is like swimming against a great crystal river. Cap off, head up--no +crouching over the handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind +in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of +leg-drive straining on the pedals--three minutes of it intoxicates you. +You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and +exultation into the face of the blast. + +I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before "Schools." In +mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while +she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide we scatter. The +Prince to Germany--the dons to Devon--the reading parties to quiet +country inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are +in those glorious dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's +"Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips +in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and solitude. + +There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a green +valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There is a +well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But I am not +for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious business, these last +two months before Schools, and I and my books are camped in a "pensive +citadel" up on the hill, where the postman's wife cares for me and +worries because I do not eat more than two normal men. There is a +low-ceilinged sitting room with a blazing fire. From one corner a +winding stair climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes and tobacco, +pens and a pot of ink. There are books--all historical volumes, the only +evidence of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one +of Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three +hours' bicycling--that leaves four hours for eating and other +emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, and turn a +probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible Third. + +And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? The +valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in England, I +think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the stream, now and +then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from most of +the things one likes to leave behind. There are lambs, little black +fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing +with a flirt of white hindquarters into their wayside burrows; in +Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost +as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in +the upper blue--and these are all your company. Now and then a great +yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in corduroys--but no one else. That +is the kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the +Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted +better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the green water +dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the Houses of +Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth Woods if it +could--and so would I. + +But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting Shotover is +pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a +hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles +homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye. +Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old +village well; back to four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then +for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_ + +And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will +have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet +and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be +what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels, +and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now. +There are the Schools.... + +_Bibury, April, 1913_. + + + + +CLOUDS + + +Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell, +perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling +amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of +Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The +travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of +those piled-up mysteries of heaven! + +We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg. +That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the +English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!) +converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a +mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which +tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, +hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height +of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of +golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in +ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, +reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his +speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture +clothes itself! + +Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways +of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of +form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had +fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the +Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the +bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons. +Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes--now +scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage +way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what +abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of +the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale +and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish +moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a +sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of +our visible world? Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap +in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with +amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are +suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones +and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds? + +There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding +within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the rain, +chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as +the face of God--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the +viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the +bright mountains of the sky! + +At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County, +fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had +long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above +us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last +banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of +glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in +the shadow of dusk. + +We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had +reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play. +Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue +lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by +beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of +pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This +happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And +then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our +cloud drifted gently away. + +Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who +knows? + + + + +UNHEALTHY + + +On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. On +Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the obscure +creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post meridiem is +a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we list. + +The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as our +_stell-dich-ein_. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to say, I arrive +at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated reflection. There is +plenty to think about. One may stand between the outer and inner lines +of glass doors and watch the queer little creatures that come tumbling +out of the cloak and suit factory across the street. Or one may stand +inside the store, on a kind of terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc +lights, looking down upon the bustle of women on the main floor. Best of +all, one may stroll along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts +and conditions of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet +them at one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the +mahogany victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for +lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long morning +coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of this social +gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots that are suggestive +of corns. There is an information bureau there, where one may learn +everything except the time one may expect one's wife to arrive. But I +have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am waiting for Titania, and +beginning to despair of her arrival, I have only to go to a telephone to +call her up. As soon as I have put the nickel in, she is sure to appear. +Nowadays I save the nickel by going into a booth and _pretending_ to +telephone. Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots. + +We have a jargon of our own. + +"Eye-polishers?" say I. + +"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm _so_ +sorry, Grump." + +"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because riding +on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the word connotes +anything that produces that desirable result, such as bunches of +violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, spring millinery, +or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a rite suggested by the +old song: + + And though maids sweep their hearths no less + Than they were wont to do, + Yet who doth now for cleanliness + Find sixpence in her shoe? + +A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece. + +We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized beginning +of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a quarter to thirty +cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily compensated by the Grump +buying Sweet Caporals instead of something Turkish. A packet of +cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an adventure. On other days +publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on Saturdays cigarettes are +possible. + +"Antipasto?" + +"No, thanks." + +"Minestrone or consommé?" + +"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine, +please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable Moretti +lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, excellent +savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a pungent pourri of +smells, and the jangle of thick china, how diverting it is! The +franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches us complaisantly from his +counter where he sits flanked by flasks of Hoboken chianti and a case of +brittle cigars. + +How good Moretti's _minestrone_ tastes to the unsophisticated tongue. +What though it be only an azoic extract of intense potato, dimly tinct +with sargasso and macaroni--it has a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not +the prelude to an Adventure? + +Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over azimuth +and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude more earnestly +than Titania and I argue our possible courses. Generally, however, she +leaves it to me to chart the journey. That gives me the pride of +conductor and her the pleasure of being surprised. + +According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a +waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a +little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and +plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a +picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from +footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We laid a +romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming a little +snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused us: + + "My old man's a fireman + Now what do you think of that? + He wears goblimey breeches + And a little goblimey hat." + +She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too far on +the back of my head. + +The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one leaves +Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been very +fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, animal +shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old dismantled +Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: one of the +dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge four-pronged grinder as +big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. Oysters going out, the new +brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the saloons mark the vernal equinox. + +A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains rumbling +by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A cutting wind +blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid two nickels and +we got into the front car of the northbound train. + +Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an aeroplane, +or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything so thrilling as +soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. Rocking, racketing, +roaring over those crazy trestles, now a glimpse of the leaden river to +the east, now a peep of church spires and skyscrapers on the west, and +the dingy imitation lace curtains of the third-story windows flashing by +like a recurring pattern--it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand +at the front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far +ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping nearer +and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus a swaying, +jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the seat in front; but +the L swings you up and over the housetops, smooth and sheer and swift. + +We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. A broad, +dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton apartments, +led in a gentle descent toward the river. The neighbourhood was noisy, +quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, bitter March the thaw had come at +last: the street was viscous with slime, the melting snow lay in grayish +piles along the curbs. Small boys on each side of the Street were +pelting sodden snowballs which spattered around us as we walked down the +pavement. + +But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung round +at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th Street showed +the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat and respectable. A +little side street branching off to the left (not recorded by Mercator) +revealed some quaint cottages with gables and shuttered windows so +mid-Victorian that my literary heart leaped and I dreamed at once of +locating a novel in this fascinating spot. And then we rounded the +corner and saw the little park. + +It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her hands, +and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of little houses +of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy bay windows and +polished door knockers. In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut +up into irregular hills, where children were flying kites. And beyond +that, an embankment and the river in a dim wet mist. There was +Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge slipping by. In the distance we +could see the colossal span of the new Hell Gate bridge. With the +journalist's instinct for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest +single span in the world. I wonder if it is? + +As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On the +embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. It was as +picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A ferryboat, +crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. Tugs, puffing up +past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, replied with mellow +blasts. The pungent tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all +my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned. + +And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk our +landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this delicious +spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East End Avenue the +Cheyne Walk of New York--we might even import an English imagist poet to +lend cachet to the coterie--I saw by Titania's face that something was +wrong. + +I pressed her for the reason of her frown. + +She thought the region was unhealthy. + +Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further argument is +possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions I have never been +able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape of the houses, or the +lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect +from the front instead of from the back. But however she arrives at the +conclusion, it is immutable. + +Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or +picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy. + +Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry Bend, or +the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin to pucker. "Do +you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she +does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway +station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that bracing ether her spirits +revive. + +So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York, +outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the +bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on +the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park. +Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park--the +convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone. + +I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy. + + + + +CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER + + +True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather with his +snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first years I never +saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail +for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did not smoke until I was +twenty? By the time I was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an +acorn and a straw, and had experimented with excelsior as fuel. From +that time I passed through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod +cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true +Olympus) Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school +recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a +twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem. + +I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other heroes of +fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease--but +stay, there was a cunning mixture devised by some comrades at college +that harboured in its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of rubber +bands. That was sheer poison, I grant you. + +The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where Raleigh, +Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful Elia best +of all--where these have spoken so greatly, the feeble voice may well +shrink. But that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hierarchies are +lost, all are brothers in the mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich +Virginia the older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the new +freshman, be he never so humble. + +What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of +the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for +instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours +"quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of +Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where Carlyle and Emerson +counted the afternoon well spent, though neither one had said a hundred +words--had they not smoked together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they +trudged together to "prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill--did not the +reek of their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old +Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go sailing +with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry--what mixture did he fill and light? +Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be sworn. Or, to come down +to more recent days, think of Captain Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in +Bessborough Gardens, lighting that apocalyptic pipe that preceded the +first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the +privileged landlady's daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast +dishes that morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?[E] + +[Footnote E: The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A +Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly +obscure.--EDITOR.] + +It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine +friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for drummers, your +cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset +votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with meerschaum, calabash, +cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of +things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women's clubs; but when +Damon and Pythias meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in +order. Cigars are all right in fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel +Géraldine when they visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was +Leigh Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), +who uttered the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I +will wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it. + +The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a +usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried and hygienic age +has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let +you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke. +This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments. "Will +it please you to impart your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, +having savored his mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very +excellent leaf," offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and +many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book +"The Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and +breviary to every smoker con amore. + +But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and +companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender affection on +the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip, +some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some +remote alehouse. These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the +compass of halting words. Never again perhaps will we throw care over +the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, filling the +air with laughter and the fumes of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is +the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened +cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a +hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen +faltered in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. +Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe +will never fail you. + +How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot even +read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to +light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred +times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking +about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay. God bless him and +his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews"--he lights a +pipe on every page! + +I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be consummated +in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in +my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter. It is a +weakness, though not a shameful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and +fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" (do you know that English mixture?) +and I am yours to the last ash. + +I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I have a +tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I +had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield. We +weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr. +Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there were +those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17 +Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie +to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come +again! + +When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the +devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns. + +Not such bad advice. + + + + +HAY FEBRIFUGE + + +Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the +world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new +form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas +tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per +eye of any arondissement served by the R---- railway, and the most +bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the +editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the +author of one of the best selling books that ever was written. + +Not bad for one village. + +Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is +where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will +give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It +is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the +east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants. + +It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, +confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, +feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de +frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun +emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux +de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The +general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a +spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the château de +Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred +years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles. + +Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants +and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the +cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as +lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed +terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other +props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A. +Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile. + +There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a +drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It +would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush +herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes +notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy. + +Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent +parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, +asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N. +Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving +in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies. +Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day. + +Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or +drugstore. + +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's +journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot. + +But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say +Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such +extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their +ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the +classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of +self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a +superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the +intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by +the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like +gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it +not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to +the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to +sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second +century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere +nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin +filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted +from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. +Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. +I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their +essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts +in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.) + +I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities +between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of +literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature. Upon the +literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling, +Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch +of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals +were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm +ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River: + + Ed Grimes always did hate me + Because I wrote better poetry than he did. + In the hay fever season I used to walk + Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible + Away from pollen. + One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me + While I was writing a sonnet, + Tied my hands and feet, + And carried me into a hayfield and left me. + I sneezed myself to death. + At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod, + And I think it must have been Ed + Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave. + +The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great +credit for lending himself to the cult in this way. + +I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even +thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without +collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his +called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and +certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war. +Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most +eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed +anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a +honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them: +they leap from his eye, distil from his lean and waving hand. Good God, +not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one +human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables. +I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, +transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, +teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. +Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has +confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too +deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are +recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at +lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you +testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened, +clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. Lee, frown not: +I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this +country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a +coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with +dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a +whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad. + +But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the +stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of +Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets of sky my +yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions and +plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies of +all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a +new bosom for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But +alas, the recurring explosions of the loathsome and intellectual disease +keep my nose on the grindstone--or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on +upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief. + +The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a +constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering +voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set +him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his +thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a +locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has +shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment: +his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; words +assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne +and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound +down and tethered and stifled by their limousines and coupons and +factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire +and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging +words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely +impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine +sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph. + +All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who +has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost +control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a packet of Roman +candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the +north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by chickweed, +and on the west by a sleepless night. + +I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss it, but +that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of thought, those +grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind shimmering like a +poplar tree in sun and wind--jetting and spouting like plumbing after a +freeze-up--'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the +sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent +and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of +sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of +bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else +to do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever! + +And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what you +think you think, effervescence of that kind always results. + + + + +APPENDIX + +SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS + + +This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use by +teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is +recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds have +become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not hold +himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and reserves +the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual pressure. + +For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found valuable +for classroom consideration: + + 1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral + purpose in this book? + + 2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth Stockton + to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his income. + + 3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example. + + 4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward + + (a) vers libre poets + + (b) beefsteak and onions + + (c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail) + + (d) The Republican Party + + 5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he notable? + + 6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The Head + of the Firm"? + + 8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, 1911? + + 9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of? + + 10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why? + + 11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in Kings, + Long Island? + + 12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the + tourist? Explain + + (a) The Gin Palace + + (b) Kurdmeister + + (c) unedifying Zollverein + + 13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home? + + 14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three + examples. + + 15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do? + + 16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the ideal + conditions for a morning pipe. + + 17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace? + + 18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a credit + to the profession. 19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening + meal ascend the stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher? + Why "in vain"? + + 20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith + classify himself? + + 21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the + context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate? + + 22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying + about the floor? + + 28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel Lindsay? + + 24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against Mr. + Richard Le Gallienne? + + 25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous + carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their waistcoats? + + 26. What is _minestrone_? Name three ingredients. + + 27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke pipes? + + 28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox? + + 29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like this + book. + + 30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by + the hand? + + 31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on these + phrases: + + (a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables + + (b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles + + (c) Scawfell become Mount Tom + + +FINIS CORONAT OPUS + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13739 *** diff --git a/13739-h/13739-h.htm b/13739-h/13739-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..281dadd --- /dev/null +++ b/13739-h/13739-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,7402 @@ +<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> +<html> +<head> +<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> +<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Shandygaff, by Christopher Morley</title> +<style type="text/css"> +/*<![CDATA[ XML blockout */ +<!-- + P { margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; + } + H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + } + HR { width: 33%; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-bottom: 1em; + } + BODY{margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; + } + .bb {border-bottom: solid 2px} + .note {margin-left: 2em; margin-right: 2em; margin-bottom: 1em;} /* footnote */ + .blkquot {margin-left: 4em; margin-right: 4em;} /* block indent */ + .poem {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;} + .poem br {display: none;} + .poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + .poem span {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;} + .poem span.i2 {display: block; margin-left: 2em;} + .poem span.i4 {display: block; margin-left: 4em;} + .poem span.i1 {display: block; margin-left: 1em;} + .poem span.i6 {display: block; margin-left: 6em;} + .poem span.i8 {display: block; margin-left: 8em;} + hr.full { width: 100%; + height: 5px; } + a:link {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + link {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + a:visited {color:blue; + text-decoration:none} + a:hover {color:red} + pre {font-size: 9pt;} + // --> + /* XML end ]]>*/ +</style> +</head> +<body> +<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13739 ***</div> +<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shandygaff, by Christopher Morley</h1> +<hr class="full" noshade> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<h1>SHANDYGAFF</h1> +<h3>BY</h3> +<h2>CHRISTOPHER MORLEY</h2> +<p style='text-align: center;'>A number of most agreeable +<i>Inquirendoes</i> upon <i>Life & Letters</i>, interspersed +with <i>Short Stories & Skits</i>, the whole most Diverting to +the Reader</p> +<p style='text-align: center;'>1918</p> +<center><img src='images/shand.jpg' width='600' height='498' alt='' +title=''></center> +<p style='text-align: center;'><i>Photo by Charles H. Davis</i></p> +<h3>CHRISTOPHER MORLEY,<br> +AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS,<br> +THUNDER ON THE LEFT, ETC.</h3> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS' id= +"TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS"></a><br> +<h2>TITLES AND DEDICATIONS</h2> +<p>I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory +of the immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my +arbiter of elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, +homeless and penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the +lavatory of the Museum Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But +the flinty hearted trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for +bath-tub and laundry, were exceeding wroth, and set up the +notice</p> +<table align='center' border='1' cellpadding='10' cellspacing='0' +summary=''> +<tr> +<td align='center'>THESE BASINS ARE FOR<br> +CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY</td> +</tr> +</table> +<p>I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: +these fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of +letters, must not be too bitterly resented, even by their +publishers. To borrow O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than +Tasso.</p> +<p>The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of +dedicating them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many +dedications have occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them +all a chance.</p> +<div class='poem' style='margin-left: 35%;'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating the book +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>CLAYTON SEDGWICK +COOPER</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The Laird of +Westcolang</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating to +the</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE +WORLD</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Blackwell's in Oxford +and</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Leary's in +Philadelphia</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>THE 8:13 +TRAIN</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>EDWARD PAGE +ALLINSON</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>The Squire of Town's +End Farm</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>Better known as Mifflin +McGill</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>In affectionate memory +of</i><br></span> <span class='i8'><i>Many unseasonable +jests</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. +GUMMERE</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>From an erring +pupil</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>FRANCIS R. +BELLAMY</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Author of "The +Balance"</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>Whose Talent I +Revere,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But Whose Syntax I +Deplore</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>JOHN N. BEFFEL</i><br></span> +<span class='i4'><i>My First Editor</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Who insisted on taking me seriously</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>GUY S.K. +WHEELER</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The Lion +Cub</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>ROBERT CORTES +HOLLIDAY</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The +Urbanolater</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>SILAS ORRIN +HOWES</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Faithful Servant of +Letters</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But my final and irrevocable decision +is to dedicate this book to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>THE +MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>More +Sinned Against Than Sinning</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York <i>Evening +Post</i>, The Boston <i>Transcript</i>, The <i>Bellman</i>, The +<i>Smart Set</i>, The New York <i>Sun</i>, The New York <i>Evening +Sun</i>, The <i>American Oxonian</i>, <i>Collier's</i>, and The +<i>Ladies' Home Journal</i>.</p> +<p>Wyncote, Pa.</p> +<p>November. 1917.</p> +<br> +<a name='SHANDYGAFF' id="SHANDYGAFF"></a> +<p><i>SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of +bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower +classes in England, and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, +newspaper men, journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been +invented by Henry VIII as a solace for his matrimonial +difficulties. It is believed that a continual bibbing of shandygaff +saps the will, the nerves, the resolution, and the finer faculties, +but there are those who will abide no other tipple</i>.</p> +<p><i>John Mistletoe</i>: <i>Dictionary of Deplorable +Facts</i>.</p> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<br> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 35%'><a href='#SHANDYGAFF'><b>The Song of +Shandygaff</b></a><br> +<a href='#TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS'><b>Titles and +Dedications</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE'><b>A Question of +Plumage</b></a><br> +<a href='#DON_MARQUIS'><b>Don Marquis</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_ART_OF_WALKING'><b>The Art of Walking</b></a><br> +<a href='#RUPERT_BROOKE'><b>Rupert Brooke</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_MAN'><b>The Man</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM'><b>The Head of the Firm</b></a><br> +<a href='#HERIOT_ROW'><b>17 Heriot Row</b></a><br> +<a href='#FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER'><b>Frank +Confessions of a Publisher's Reader</b></a><br> +<a href='#WILLIAM_McFEE'><b>William McFee</b></a><br> +<a href='#RHUBARB'><b>Rhubarb</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE'><b>The Haunting Beauty +of Strychnine</b></a><br> +<a href='#INGO'><b>Ingo</b></a><br> +<a href='#HOUSEBROKEN'><b>Housebroken</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE'><b>The Hilarity of +Hilaire</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA'><b>A Casual of the Sea</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_LAST_PIPE'><b>The Last Pipe</b></a><br> +<a href='#TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE'><b>Time to Light the +Furnace</b></a><br> +<a href='#MY_FRIEND'><b>My Friend</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS'><b>A Poet of Sad Vigils</b></a><br> +<a href='#TRIVIA'><b>Trivia</b></a><br> +<a href='#PREFACES'><b>Prefaces</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_SKIPPER'><b>The Skipper</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD'><b>A Friend of +FitzGerald</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM'><b>A Venture in +Mysticism</b></a><br> +<a href='#AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY'><b>An Oxford Landlady</b></a><br> +<a href='#PEACOCK_PIEquot'><b>"Peacock Pie"</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP'><b>The Literary +Pawnshop</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON'><b>A Morning in +Marathon</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS'><b>The American House of +Lords</b></a><br> +<a href='#COTSWOLD_WINDS'><b>Cotswold Winds</b></a><br> +<a href='#CLOUDS'><b>Clouds</b></a><br> +<a href='#UNHEALTHY'><b>Unhealthy</b></a><br> +<a href='#CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER'><b>Confessions of a +Smoker</b></a><br> +<a href='#HAY_FEBRIFUGE'><b>Hay Febrifuge</b></a><br> +<a href='#APPENDIX'><b>Appendix: Suggestions for +Teachers.</b></a><br></div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<h1><i>SHANDYGAFF</i></h1> +<a name='A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE' id="A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE"></a><br> +<h2>A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE</h2> +<p>Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. +He was the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but +this job only netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to +get that much. The owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of +having the reviews done by the sporting editor, and confining them +to the books of those publishers who bought advertising space. This +simple and statesmanlike view the owner had frequently expressed in +Mr. Stockton's hearing, so the latter was never very sure how long +his job would continue.</p> +<p>But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New +Utrecht, that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the +problem out to a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the +average, eighty dollars a week, his household would cease to +revolve. It simply had to be done. The house was still being paid +for on the installment plan. There were plumbers' bills, servant's +wages, clothes and schooling for the children, clothes for the +wife, two suits a year for himself, and the dues of the Sheepshead +Golf Club—his only extravagance. A simple middle-class +routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a treadmill. +As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To +accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain +friends, Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he +fell below that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort +his fill," as the Elizabethan song naïvely puts it.</p> +<p>There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama.</p> +<p>Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn +his fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came +in, wrote painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his +literary page on Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the +proprietor ordered. Though he did so with reluctance, he was forced +now and then to approach the book publishers on the subject of +advertising. He gave earnest and honest thought to his literary +department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells in <i>Harper's +Magazine</i> for the honourable quality of his criticisms.</p> +<p>But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of +energy and enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used +up the first fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his +article on current poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading +imitation literary weekly. The preparation of this involved a +careful perusal of at least fifty journals, both American and +foreign, and I blush to say it brought him only fifteen dollars a +week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a Chicago paper of +bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of intimacy the +goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had time or +opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, +which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he +averaged about six dollars a week.</p> +<p>That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close +to the limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars +or so needed for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned +in various ways. Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary +typewriter clacking far into the night. He wrote short stories, of +only fair merit; and he wrote "Sunday stories," which is the lowest +depth to which a self-respecting lover of literature can fall. Once +in a while he gave a lecture on poetry, but he was a shy man, and +he never was asked to lecture twice in the same place. By almost +incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy he wrote a novel, +which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first year. His +royalties on this amounted to $348.30—not one-third as much, +he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short +story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving +the sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature.</p> +<p>It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, +were wrong when they wrote to him admiringly—as they did +twice a year—asking for loans, and praising the bold and +debonair life of a man of letters in the great city. They did not +know that for ten years Mr. Stockton had refused the offers of his +friends to put him up for membership at the literary club to which +his fancy turned so fondly and so often. He could not afford it. +When friends from out of town called on him, he took them to Peck's +for a French table d'hôte, with an apologetic murmur.</p> +<p>But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or +discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the +existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand +again, with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, +know that there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. +The characters in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have +thought Stockton rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he +was one of those estimable men who have sense enough to give all +their money to their wives and keep none in their trousers. And +though his life was arduous and perhaps dull to outward view, he +was a passionate lover of books, and in his little box at the back +of the newspaper office, smoking a corncob and thumping out his +reviews, he was one of the happiest men in New York. His thirst for +books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was when he found time +to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary essays, which +he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous sign in +the British Museum washroom.</p> +<p>It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the +Brooklyn bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on +Park Row. Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding +the rush of traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little +along the way, as becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry +would jell in his mind, and he would be at his desk a little after +eleven. There he would work until one o'clock with the happy +concentration of those who enjoy their tasks. At that time he would +go out for a bite of lunch, and would then be at his desk steadily +from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, and after that he +worked persistently in his little den under the roof until past +midnight.</p> +<p>One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of +perplexity, for to-day his even routine was in danger of +interruption. Halfway across the bridge Stockton paused in some +confusion of spirit to look down on the shining river and consider +his course.</p> +<p>A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry +articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an +English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to +time he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English +magazines, and at length he had ventured a graceful article of +appreciation. It happened that he was the first in this country to +recognize Verne's talent, and to his great delight he had one day +received a very charming letter from the poet himself, thanking him +for his understanding criticism.</p> +<p>Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest +nature in the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in +Verne's letter prompted him to warm response. Thus began a +correspondence which was a remarkable pleasure to the lonely +reviewer, who knew no literary men, although his life was passed +among books. Hardly dreaming that they would ever meet, he had +insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever visit the States he +would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on this very +morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying that +Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon.</p> +<p>The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive +nature it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could +offer but little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on +the way to Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; +the house was small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been +made into a workshop for the two boys, where they built steam +engines and pasted rotogravure pictures from the Sunday editions on +the walls. The servant was an enormous coloured mammy, with a heart +of ruddy gold, but in appearance she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom +plumbing was out of order, the drawing-room rug was fifteen years +old, even the little lawn in front of the house needed trimming, +and the gardener would not be round for several days. And Verne had +given them only a few hours' notice. How like a poet!</p> +<p>In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant +time they would have when the writer should come to visit. He had +spoken of evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours +of the things that interest literary men. What would Verne think +when he found the hearth only a gas log, and one that had a +peculiarly offensive odour? This sickly sweetish smell had become +in years of intimacy very dear to Stockton, but he could hardly +expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, Hampstead (O Shades of +Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary club, to +understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of Jules +Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings all +his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New +Utrecht!</p> +<p>Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to +none but the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment +of out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the +shabby, makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so +much explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna +Doone, the fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals +with the family and slept with the children at night. Verne was +probably used to staghounds or Zeppelin hounds or something of the +sort, he thought humorously. English poets wear an iris halo in the +eyes of humble American reviewers. Those godlike creatures have +walked on Fleet Street, have bought books on Paternoster Row, have +drunk half-and-half and eaten pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, +and have probably roared with laughter over some alehouse jest of +Mr. Chesterton.</p> +<p>Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a +lean, bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of +old folios. What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge +of New Utrecht, a mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to +pay for shag tobacco!</p> +<p>Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not +at all in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April +sun, they had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning +frantically to grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself +had stopped at the poultry market on his way to the trolley to +order two plump fowls for dinner, and had pinched them with his +nervous, ink-stained fingers, as ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test +their tenderness. They would send the three younger children to +their grandmother, to be interned there until the storm had blown +over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she could to take down +the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the boys fondly +called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had children of +his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by the +incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet +was aver here for a lecture tour—he would be entertained and +fêted everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation +which Stockton had started by his modest little essay had grown to +the dimension of a fad.</p> +<p>He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple +routine of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this +afternoon three o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, +as was his unconscious habit when nervous. In desperation he +stopped at a veterinary's office on Frankfort Street, and left +orders to have the doctor's assistant call for Lorna Doone and take +her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he called at a wine +merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a moderate +vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his +playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a +Frenchman, and undoubtedly he knew all about wines.</p> +<p>Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning +that all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday +editor, who had planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch +time, refrained from doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian +brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week +conductor of "The Electric Chair," the paper's humorous column, +came in to see what was up. Bob's "contribs" had been generous that +morning, and he was in unusually good humour for a humourist.</p> +<p>"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? +Or has George Moore sent in a new novel?"</p> +<p>Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How +could he confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who +wore life lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he +played tennis, with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the +author of a successful comedy, and a member of the smart literary +club which was over the reviewer's horizon, although in the great +ocean of letters the humourist was no more than a surf bather. +Stockton shook his head. No one but a married man and an +unsuccessful author could understand his trouble.</p> +<p>"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this +time of year."</p> +<p>"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the +club and have some ale. That'll put you on your feet."</p> +<p>"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it +to-day. Got to make up my page. I tell you what, though—"</p> +<p>He hesitated, and flushed a little.</p> +<p>"Say it," said Bolles kindly.</p> +<p>"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson +of old Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish +you'd take him around to the club for lunch some day while he's +here. He ought to meet some of the men there. I've been +corresponding with him for a long time, and I—I'm afraid I +rather promised to take him round there, as though I were a member, +you know."</p> +<p>"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle +Light'? And you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the +man's bigger than Masefield. Take him to lunch—I should say I +will; Why, I'll put him in the colyum. Both of you come round there +to-morrow and we'll have an orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and +convolvulus salad. I didn't know you knew him."</p> +<p>"I don't—yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his +steamer this afternoon."</p> +<p>"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he +ran downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but +had never read.</p> +<p>The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded +Stockton that he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had +done duty for three winters, and would hardly suffice for the +honours to come. Hastily he blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them +into the wire basket, and hurried outdoors to seek the nearest +tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to draw out fifty dollars for +emergencies. Then he entered the first clothier's shop he +encountered on Nassau Street.</p> +<p>Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when +he was compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for +usually Mrs. Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky +star was in the zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, +and he was afraid he might be late for the steamer, which docked +far uptown. In his haste, and governed perhaps by some subconscious +recollection of the humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he +allowed himself to be fitted with an ochre-coloured suit of some +fleecy checked material grotesquely improper for his unassuming +figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut that one sees only in the +windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was unaware of the enormity of +his offence against society, and rapidly transferring his +belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the purchase price and +fled to the subway.</p> +<p>When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw +that the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several +minutes before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the +steamship office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the +official admitted him to the pier, and he took his stand at the +first cabin gangway, trembling a little with nervousness, but with +a pleasant feeling of excitement no less. He gazed at the others +waiting for arriving travellers and wondered whether any of the +peers of American letters had come to meet the poet. A stoutish, +neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache looked like Mr. +Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible that he, the +obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of Verne's +arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring +outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight.</p> +<p>What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet +was to stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the +mustard-coloured trousers one more round—they were much too +long for him—and watched the great hull slide along the side +of the pier with a peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt +since the day of his wedding.</p> +<p>He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he +was very familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured +down the slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and +stamp of superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred +soil of England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. +To his surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as +Mr. Howells and the publisher greet people who had not the +slightest resemblance to the poet, and go with them to the customs +alcoves. Traveller after traveller hurried past him, followed by +stewards carrying luggage; gradually the flow of people thinned, +and then stopped altogether, save for one or two invalids who were +being helped down the incline by nurses. And still no sign of +Finsbury Verne.</p> +<p>Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that—the +second class? His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, +fifty yards farther down the pier, where the second-cabin +passengers were disembarking.</p> +<p>There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still +thronged. Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little +man in green ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little +woman and four children in single file, each holding fast to the +one in front like Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, +taking almost ludicrous care not to slip on the cleated boards. To +his amazement the reviewer recognized the dark beard and soulful +eyes of the poet.</p> +<p>Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but +a wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's +chin. The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung +steadfastly to the skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other +hand a large glass jar in which two agitated goldfish were +swimming, while the four children watched their parents with +anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. "Daddy, look out for +Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the poodle very +nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two smiling +stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. "Mother, +are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and +promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file.</p> +<p>Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making +himself known until the Vernes had recovered from the +embarrassments of leaving the ship. He followed them at a distance +to the "V" section where they waited for the customs examination. +With mingled feelings he saw that Finsbury Verne was no +cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, indifferently clad, +shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic cares of a family +man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood in his bulging +greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around him. He +shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home +with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and +introduced himself.</p> +<p>Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and +he presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys +and two girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately +uttered cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to +him.</p> +<p>"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow +suit.</p> +<p>"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath.</p> +<p>Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were +in the throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They +had created two imaginary countries, named in honour of the +goldfish, and it was now their whim to claim for their respective +countries any person or thing that struck their fancy. "Castoria +was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you must consider yourself a +citizen of that nation."</p> +<p>Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned +to the poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. +"I got your telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have +you."</p> +<p>"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of +fact we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My +wife has some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and +the children are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to +Harvard to give some lectures."</p> +<p>A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow.</p> +<p>"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. +"Mrs. Stockton and I were hoping—"</p> +<p>"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your +hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some +quiet hotel where we can stay the night."</p> +<p>Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of +any hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, +and then remembered that it had been demolished years before. At +last he recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once +stayed at the Obelisk.</p> +<p>After the customs formalities were over—not without +embarrassment, as Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several +pairs of bright red union suits and a half-empty bottle of +brandy—Stockton convoyed them to a taxi. Noticing the frayed +sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite ashamed of the aggressive +newness of his clothes. And when the visitors whirled away, after +renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the spring, he +stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward the +nearest telephone booth.</p> +<p>As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of +the Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been +delightful to spend a few days with the Stocktons."</p> +<p>"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans +see how shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in +rags, and your clothes—well, I don't know what they'll think +at Harvard. You know if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we +shall be simply bankrupt."</p> +<p>The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place +in the country near New York," he said.</p> +<p>"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such +clothes? He looked like a canary."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='DON_MARQUIS' id="DON_MARQUIS"></a><br> +<h2>DON MARQUIS</h2> +<br> +<p>There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who +is the victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the +hollow of your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he +wants to be considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol +his songs of war and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, +jovial merryandrew with never a care in the world save the cellar +plumbing. You may utterly misrepresent him, and hang some albatross +round his neck that will be offensive to him forever. You may say +that he hails from Brooklyn Heights when the fact is that he left +there two years ago and now lives in Port Washington. You may even +(for instance) call him stout....</p> +<p>Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, +'08—well, call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and +fond of corncob pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful +blend of Falstaff and Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial +in the New York <i>Evening Sun</i> since 1912. He stands out as one +of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol +that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he +is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the +roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian +gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a +novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart +and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk he is a +dramatist.</p> +<p>He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers +Libre Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful +and cutting satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey +Arch, elicits only "a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the +other evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before +from time to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when +the chair broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but +it makes us sad.</p> +<p>The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his +soul into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative +grins in the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; +he is more than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a +cerebral chuckle—and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks +a chair or flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs +with, all its heart and soul.</p> +</div> +<p>Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the +slapstick as a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the +slapstick! it was well known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) +But he prefers the rapier. Probably his Savage Portraits, +splendidly truculent and slashing sonnets, are among the finest +pieces he has done.</p> +<p>The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small +thing to look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of +fine workmanship. The swamis and prophets of piffle, the +Bhandranaths and Fothergill Finches whom he detests, can only +create in an atmosphere specially warmed, purged and rose-watered +for their moods. Marquis has emerged from the underworld of +newspaper print just by his heroic ability to transform the +commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his best and +subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on an +upturned packing box. (When the <i>American Magazine</i> published +a picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the +<i>Sun</i> got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men +are a hardy race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a +newspaper office would dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was +born in the old <i>Sun</i> building, now demolished, once known as +Vermin Castle.</p> +<p>"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, +"is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to +hear the echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will +surely come. Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock +coats and reading their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don +Marquis has no taste for that sort of mummery. But little by little +his potent, yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of every +day, are winning their way into circulation. Any reader who went to +<i>Dreams and Dust</i> (poems, published October, 1915) expecting +to find light and waggish laughter, was on a blind quest. In that +book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this man, quick to see +beauty and grace in common things, quick to question the answerless +face of life—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Still mounts the dream on shining +pinion,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Still broods the dull +distrust;</i><br></span> <span><i>Which shall have ultimate +dominion,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Dream, or +dust?</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write +nimble verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has +something of Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, +austere music. He can turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as +a paying teller can roll Durham cigarettes.</p> +<p>How neat this is:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO A DANCING DOLL</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Formal, quaint, precise, and +trim,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>You begin your steps +demurely—</i><br></span> <span><i>There's a spirit almost +prim</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>In the feet that move so +surely.</i><br></span> <span><i>So discreetly, to the +chime</i><br></span> <span><i>Of the music that so +sweetly</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Marks the +time.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But the chords begin to +tinkle</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Quicker,</i><br></span> +<span><i>And your feet they flash and flicker—</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>Twinkle!—</i><br></span> <span><i>Flash +and flutter to a tricksy</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Fickle +meter;</i><br></span> <span><i>And you foot it like a +pixie—</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Only +fleeter!</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Not our current, dowdy</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>Things—</i><br></span> <span><i>"Turkey +trots" and rowdy</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Flings—</i><br></span> <span><i>For they made you +overseas</i><br></span> <span><i>In politer times than +these</i><br></span> <span><i>In an age when grace could +please,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Ere St. +Vitus</i><br></span> <span><i>Clutched and shook us, spine and +knees;</i><br></span> <span><i>Loosed a plague of jerks to smite +us!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in +rhyme: he sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle +upward from the slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The +evolutionary theme is a favourite with him: the grand pageant of +humanity groping from Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million +years two precarious inches of forehead. Much more often than +F.P.A., who used to be his brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares +to disclose the real earnestness that underlies his chaff.</p> +<p>I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands +in the hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber +and a submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled +long ago by Plato in the <i>Republic</i> (not the <i>New +Republic</i>) or by Samuel Butler in his Notebooks. Contribs come +valiantly to hand with a barrowful of letters every day—("The +ravings fed him" as Don captioned some contrib's quip about Simeon +Stylites living on a column); but nevertheless the direct and +alternating current must be turned on six times a week. His jocular +exposal of the colyumist's trade secret compares it to the +boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)</p> +<p>TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious +idea. (COLD ROAST BEEF.)</p> +<p>WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF +STEW.)</p> +<p>THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of +Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)</p> +<p>FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of +Monday's serious idea—there creeps into our copy a more +subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, +the main business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH +OR CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)</p> +<p>SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing +ourself for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY +IN IT.)</p> +<p>SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where +we have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.</p> +</div> +<p>But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with +barley always tastes as good as, or even better than, the original +roast. His dry battery has generated in the past few years a dozen +features with real voltage—the Savage Portraits, Hermione, +Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French +Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, Our Own +Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an Almanac, a +Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, +etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling has +been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them +between book-covers.</p> +<p>One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, +enclosing a number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to +examine the aphorisms and orisonswettmardenisms they had been +printing on their weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and +peptonizing of their employees. They had been using quotations from +Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, and had run out of +"sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where they could find +more.</p> +<p>I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know +whether they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would +adorn any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on +whiskey would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than +a bushel of tracts.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before +he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.</p> +<p>If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to +know you are loafing?</p> +<p>Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that +minorities are always right.</p> +<p>Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, +beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in her own +heart.</p> +<p>I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising +young man for twenty years.</p> +</div> +<p>In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in +the mirthquake:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.</p> +<p>If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not +come—the little ball will not settle upon the right number or +the proper colour—the girl will marry the other man—the +public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!—the +cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity—the Welsh +rabbit will be stringy—you will find there are not enough +rhymes in the language to finish your ballade—the primrose by +the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier—and your +fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.</p> +</div> +<p>But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his +favourite denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric +shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and +then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and +heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed +diplomatic relations with Germany:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>This Beast we know, whom time brings +to his last rebirth</i><br></span> <span><i>Bull-thewed, +iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...</i><br></span> +<span><i>As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,</i><br></span> +<span><i>Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,</i><br></span> +<span><i>Armoured the skull and braced the heavy +limb—</i><br></span> <span><i>Who frowned above him, proud +and grim,</i><br></span> <span><i>While he sucked from her salty +dugs the lore</i><br></span> <span><i>Of fire and steel and stone +and war:</i><br></span> <span><i>She taught brute facts, brute +might, but not the worth</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Of spirit, honour and clean mirth +...</i><br></span> <span><i>His shape is Man, his mood is +Dinosaur.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Tip from the wild red Welter of the +past</i><br></span> <span><i>Foaming he comes: let this rush, be +his last.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Too patient we have been, thou +knowest, God, thou knowest.</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been +slow as doom. Our dead</i><br></span> <span><i>Of yesteryear lie on +the ocean's bed—</i><br></span> <span><i>We have denied each +pleading ghost—</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been slow: +God, make us sure.</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been slow. Grant +we endure</i><br></span> <span><i>Unto the uttermost, the +uttermost.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Did our slow mood, O God, with thine +accord?</i><br></span> <span><i>Then weld our diverse millions, +Lord,</i><br></span> <span><i>Into one single swinging +sword.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is +disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this +sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing +archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance +about the press:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to +be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it +has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring +up again.</p> +</div> +<p>Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for +sapping all its author's time and calories. No writer in America +has greater of more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less +time stoking that furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your +novels!</p> +<p>There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial +than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful +lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think +particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral +column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest +wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay +of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but +among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton Scollard, Edith +M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, +Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.</p> +<p>But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he +does it the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him +alone. All day long they drop into his office, or call him up on +the phone in the hope of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has +become an institution down on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the +day you call, you will find his queue there chivvying him. He is +too gracious to throw them out: his only expedient is to take them +over to the gin cathedral across the street and buy them a drink. +Lately the poor wretch has had to write his Dial out in the pampas +of Long Island, bringing it in with him in the afternoon, in order +to get it done undisturbed. How many times I have sworn never to +bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in that +neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben +Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don +and set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding +over a kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of +the tavernacular.</p> +<p>He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, +critic, and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country +whose praise is best worth having, and least easy to win, would be +Marquis, Strunsky, and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three +leading poets male in this country to-day are Marquis, William Rose +Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis +has an immense advantage over Will Benét in his stoutness. +Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and mares' milk +for months before they would admit him to the army.</p> +<p>Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have +attained the dignity of book publication, and now stand on the +shelf beside "Danny's Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." +This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has +perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's +writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection +for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration +with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly +Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of +blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening +paper on the train, looks first of all to see if Archy is in the +Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something thoroughly +racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine him, for +instance, in <i>Punch</i>? His author has never told us which one +of the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, +but I feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated +eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. +Could it be Amy Lowell? Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's +carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not mere +ostentation, but arises from the fact that he is not strong enough +to work the shift key of his typewriter. Ingenious readers of the +Sun Dial have suggested many devices to make this possible, but +none that seem feasible to the roach himself.</p> +<p>The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a +person with whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the +British Navy, ask a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, +replies the waiter. Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs +into the pork pie through an air hole, and prepares his soul for +parlous times. The naval butler takes the pie on board a launch, +and Archy, watching through one of the portholes of the pastry, +sees that they are picked up by a British cruiser "an inch or two +outside the three-mile line." (This was in neutral days, remember.) +Archy continues the narrative in lower case agate:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing +for said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie +the captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was +fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where +the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and +serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if +there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me +the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs +to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert +said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top +crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right +under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that +noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking +off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert +said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush +upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i +am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships +surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy +that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the +false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this +pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a +port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling +off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as +he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god +said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered +the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the +hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the +mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top +crust gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us +throw the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the +starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant +cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the +british navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the +time the strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the +clock would start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled +down my forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick +said the first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity +wait said the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful +east indian drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could +still see and hear for days and days a council of war was held +about me every afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save +the cockroach even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty +england must stand by the smaller nations and every hour the +surgeon gave me another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the +cabin boy who had been thinking deeply all the time suggested that +a plug of wood be inserted in my place which was done and i fell to +the deck well nigh exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the +captains gig and here i am.</p> +<p>archy</p> +</div> +<p>So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original +contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. +These are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline +and robust repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, +but it is compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, +joyously flavoured with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, +is a native product. Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented +it, it bears the image and superscription of America.</p> +<p>And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is +unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This +nation suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our +Great Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute +Struggle. But Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer +letters or fill out Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or +join the Poetry Society or attend community masques. And somehow +all these things seem to melt away, and you look round the map and +see Don Marquis taking up all the scenery.... He has such an +[oe]cumenical kind of humour. It's just as true in Brooklyn as it +is in the Bronx.</p> +<p>He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or +some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, +Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the +idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, +offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the +rotation accelerates; faster and faster he twirls the thought +(sometimes losing a few spectators whose centripetal powers are not +starch enough) until, chuckling, he holds up the flashing, +shimmering conceit, whirling at top speed and ejaculating sparks. +What is so beautiful as a rapidly revolving idea? Marquis's mind is +like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, the steadier it is. There +are laws of dynamics in colyums just as anywhere else.</p> +<p>What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that +turns the young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied +ethers of literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo +Trine, Don Marquis—are there other Knox men in the game, too? +Marquis was studying at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish +War. He has worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel +Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle Remus's Magazine." But let him +tell his biography in his own words:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the +Republican party.</p> +<p>My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the +time and place free of charge.</p> +<p>Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I +left the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to +defeat.</p> +<p>In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position +in the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled +for some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in +power. It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one +evening, after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, +the late President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I +passed through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He +had heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way +of showing me how greatly he appreciated it.</p> +<p>Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public +tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the +Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a +position as reporter on a Washington paper.</p> +<p>Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my +earlier years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the +contented, peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man +ever since.</p> +<p>There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the +Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of +voting against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I +left the Republican party again.</p> +<p>This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in +which I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to +more particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself.</p> +<p>It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third +person:</p> +<p>Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on +little finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly +into good hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; +weight, 200 pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely +criminal in type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and +onions; wears No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside +seam of trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard +animals for the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side +of upper jaw missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints +from possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying +with respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates +undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on +little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to +psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his +verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in +possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek +bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a +thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story +writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your +business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of +painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, +publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in +insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers +as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on +right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of +room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort +cheese, "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most +musical comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, +steam heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized +charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses +on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; +belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy +eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in +teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, +with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; +voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly +wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes +prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose +over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if +arrested.</p> +</div> +<p>I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not +insist that Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a +soapslide but rather as a cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. +He has something of the quick Stevensonian instinct for the moral +issue, and the Devil not infrequently winces about the time the +noon edition of the <i>Evening Sun</i> comes from the press. There +is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or drop the acid just where +it will disinfect. For instance, this comment on some bolshevictory +in Russia:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets +of Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip.</p> +</div> +<p>For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial +is a very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much +that is purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat +men is a ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, +deals texts and fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of +Canterbury he would have made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and +his congregation rarely miss the point of the sermon. We cannot +close better than by quoting part of his Colyumist's Prayer in +which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of the machine:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I pray Thee, make my colyum +read,</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me thus my daily +bread.</i><br></span> <span><i>Endow me, if Thou grant me +wit,</i><br></span> <span><i>Likewise with sense to mellow +it.</i><br></span> <span><i>Save me from feeling so much +hate</i><br></span> <span><i>My food will not +assimilate;</i><br></span> <span><i>Open mine eyes that I may +see</i><br></span> <span><i>Thy world with more of +charity,</i><br></span> <span><i>And lesson me in good +intents</i><br></span> <span><i>And make me friend of innocence +...</i><br></span> <span><i>Make me (sometimes at least) +discreet;</i><br></span> <span><i>Help me to hide my +self-conceit,</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me courage now and +then</i><br></span> <span><i>To be as dull as are most +men.</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me readers quick to +see</i><br></span> <span><i>When I am satirizing +Me....</i><br></span> <span><i>Grant that my virtues may +atone</i><br></span> <span><i>For some small vices of mine +own.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he +follows his prayer with this comment:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really +want—and intend to have if they can get it—but for what +they think the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain +attempt to be sincere in the above verses; but even at that no +doubt a lot of affectation crept in.</p> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_ART_OF_WALKING' id="THE_ART_OF_WALKING"></a><br> +<h2>THE ART OF WALKING</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Away with the stupid adage about a man +being as old as his arteries!</i><br></span> <span><i>He is as old +as his calves—his garteries....</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>—Meditations of Andrew +McGill</i>.<br></span></div> +</div> +</div> +<p>"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the +sea."</p> +<p>This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the +life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet +cottage near Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word +"walking" occurs in any description of Wordsworth's existence. De +Quincey assures us that the poet's props were very ill +shapen—"they were pointedly condemned by all female +connoisseurs in legs"—but none the less he was <i>princeps +arte ambulandi</i>. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads +are barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think +Wordsworth would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the +classic pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs +W. must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English +miles—a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of +alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; +to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded +happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his +writings."</p> +<p>A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to +my inmost heart. The best books are always those that set down with +"amorous precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How +one sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) +about a gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out +of Life":</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the +streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed +to go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he +was carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been +upon earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.</p> +</div> +<p>Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he +goes upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand +quaintnesses. When he writes a book he fills it full of food, +drink, tobacco, the scent of sawmills on sunny afternoons, and +arrivals at inns late at night. He writes what Mr. Mosher calls a +book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are often best of all because +they abound in these matters. And because walking can never again +be what it was—the motorcars will see to that—it is our +duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.</p> +<p>Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about +walking. The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped +from Nether Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and +full forty by road) to make the acquaintance of William and +Dorothy. That is practically from the Bristol Channel to the +English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was Wordsworth's pamphlet +describing a walk across France to the Alps that spurred Coleridge +on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, and William +and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy the +companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of +their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a +little walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The +Ancient Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses +of the adventure.</p> +<p>De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about +Wordsworth and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a +forty-mile all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the +evening after first meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the +intellectual excitement of the day, and through a summer night +"divinely calm" he busied himself with meditation on the sad +spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind hastening to decay.</p> +<p>I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much +practised before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador +Jusserand's famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the +fourteenth century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures +of moving meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's +"Coaching Days and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no +means safe for solitary travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph +Andrews" (1742) whenever any of the characters proceed afoot they +are almost certain to be held up. Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was +a considerable rambler a century earlier than this, and in his +Derbyshire hills must have passed many lonely gullies; but footpads +were more likely to ambush the main roads. It would be a +hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of his +basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped +it over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more +baggage than a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for +Beggars" long before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is +true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically +placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I +always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an +instrument of philosophy.</p> +<p>After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of +course—have you paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who +have not read Hazlitt's "On Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was +there more fruitful walk than the early morning stroll from +Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, 1816, that produced "Much +have I travelled in the realms of gold." He must have set out early +enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke's +table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know that the copy +of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial +editor of the <i>Times</i>? Never did financial editor live to +better purpose!</p> +<p>There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the +walker: get these by rote in some membrane of memory:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open +sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown—the Air is our +robe of state—the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty +minstrel playing before it.</p> +</div> +<p>The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; +inns were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's +Hall of Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, +Kingsley, Meredith, Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget +the day when he first read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it +was the 24th of August, 1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. +Then there were George Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire +moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of the princes of the clan and +founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom Meredith was one. Walt +Whitman would have made a notable addition to that posse of +philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous half-baked old +barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not dominate +the conversation.</p> +<p>There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies +(the Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas +who died on the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis +Ledwidge, who was killed in Flanders. Who can forget his noble +words, "I have taken up arms for the fields along the Boyne, for +the birds and the blue sky over them." There is Walter Prichard +Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One could extend the +list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though literature +were a co-product of legs and head.</p> +<p>Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed +in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, +and Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in +Town" will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities. But +urban wanderings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we mean +by walking. On pavements one goes by fit and start, halting to see, +to hear, and to speculate. In the country one captures the true +ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the harmonious glow of mind +and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and muscle exercised +alike.</p> +<p>Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country +walkers: no soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the +stiffer breed who salute frost and lashing rain and roaring +southwest wind, who leap to grapple with the dissolving riddles of +destiny. February and March are his months:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>For love we Earth then serve we +all;<br></span> <span class='i2'>Her mystic secret then is +ours:<br></span> <span>We fall, or view our treasures +fall,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Unclouded, as beholds her +flowers.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>Earth, from a night of frosty +wreck,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Enrobed in morning's mounted +fire,<br></span> <span>When lowly, with a broken neck,<br></span> +<span class='i2'>The crocus lays her cheek to +mire.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form +the bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's +Breviary of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. +Trevelyan's "Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," +shards and crystals from all the others I have mentioned. Michael +Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On +my private shelf stands "Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, +who has good pleasantry to utter on this topic; and a manly little +volume, "Walking as Education," by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the +walking parson," published in England in 1910. On that same shelf +there will soon stand a volume of delicious essays by one of the +most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, +the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has beckoned to +the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who has +bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate +in walking tours:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), +should ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one +walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let +us suppose) of men's given names, agrees that if either should have +a son he shall be named after the other. Walking in the gathering +dusk, two and two, since the world began, there have always been +young men who have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one +is not still one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys +are over for him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not +journeys. Mention should be made in passing that some have been +found so ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they +might be taken in company with members, or a member, of the other +sex. Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at +the stake before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it +must be confessed that it is another season in the life of man that +they fill.</p> +<p>They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. +They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with +them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these +matters; and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you +could they would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about +them or yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They +cannot rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very +marrow of going a journey. One reason for this is that they can +never escape from the idea of society: You are in their society, +they are in yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which +connect you all to that great order called society that you have +for a period got away from physically are present. Like the +business man who goes on a vacation from his business and takes his +business habits along with him, so on a journey they would bring +society along, and all sort of etiquette.</p> +<p>He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he +has fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the +moment, to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in +that which he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia +for this on earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey +escapes, for a breath of air, from all conventions; without which, +though, of course, society would go to pot; and which are the very +natural instinct of women.</p> +</div> +<p>Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art +of locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may +be admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and +now make memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be +published.</p> +<p>Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will +bring an itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a +knobbed stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and +pettifogging spirit: he proceeds as an army with banners: he +intends that the world shall know he is afoot: the Great Elian of +Springfield is unleashed—let alewives and deacons +tremble!</p> +<p>Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite +his poems at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting +on with their eating; but despite the naïveté of his +eagerness to sing, there is a plain and manly simplicity about +Vachel that delights us all. We like to know that here is a poet +who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote a Class Day poem at +Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at all, and who lets +the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know that he has +tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been fumigated in +New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a year he +lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but he +is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as +the local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive +it will be a Ford. Here is <i>homo americanus</i>, one of +ourselves, who never wore spats in his life.</p> +<p>But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city +streets at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, +peanut carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with +crackers and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with +the Saturday night marketing—he feels the thrill of being +one, or at least two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, +pathetic, and surprising humanity. The sense of fellowship with +every other walking biped, the full-blooded understanding that +Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming measure, comes by gulps and +twinges to almost all. That is the essence of Lindsay's feeling +about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty of sirloin and +onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and celebrates the +great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream soda, +electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark +Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic +humanity he finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, +reverence, love, and beauty.</p> +<p>This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel +has scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening +larders and puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his +technique—"stopping when he had a mind to, singing when he +felt inclined to"—and begging his meals and bed. I suppose he +has had as many free meals as any American citizen; and, this is +how he does it, copied from his little pamphlet used on many a +road:</p> +<br> +<p>RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD</p> +<p>Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, +Illinois, June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for +money.</p> +<p>This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life +on a tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West +and back, during which he will observe the following rules:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>(1) Keep away from the cities.</p> +<p>(2) Keep away from the railroads.</p> +<p>(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.</p> +<p>(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.</p> +<p>(5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of +five.</p> +<p>(6) Travel alone.</p> +<p>(7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square.</p> +<p>(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.</p> +<p>In order to carry out the last rule there will be three +exceptions to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a +brief printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will +carry this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry +a small portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of +his view of the history of art, especially as it applies to +America.</p> +</div> +<p>Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down +his theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them +interesting. "The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore +but better for the exercise. And when the fascinating story of +American literature in this decade (1910-20) is finally written, +there will be a happy and well-merited corner in it for a dusty but +"neat, truthful, and civil" figure from Springfield, Illinois.</p> +<p>A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset +on a lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be +found in "The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one +of the best friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget +it!</p> +<p>The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have +made the highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the +mystic and private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us +the byways, the footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and +sweet. Thank heaven there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the +victrola and the limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, +with pipe and stick, we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and +dinner, and glorify the ways of God to man.</p> +<p>And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells +come most often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of +peregrination lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a +season afoot. When a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs +this angel is most vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel +where I am pretending to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The +filing case, thermostat, card index, typewriter, automatic +telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even the visits +of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, who rustle in and +out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, even these +lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the +endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon +the wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is +scouring the hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along +the Great North Road to walk to Royston in the rain....</p> +<p>Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that +comes of a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine +walking on the hills in the direction of the sea"; or a winding +road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour +lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let +there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard +of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the +pewter and study those mellow words: "Certainly it is heaven upon +earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and +turn upon the poles of truth." <i>Haec studio, pernoctant nobiscum, +peregrinantur, rusticantur</i>.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='RUPERT_BROOKE' id="RUPERT_BROOKE"></a><br> +<h2>RUPERT BROOKE</h2> +<br> +<p>Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He +was born of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy +skin, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. +Walsingham, in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was +a master at Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.</p> +<p>In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of +Cambridge, England, issued a little anthology called <i>Cambridge +Poems 1900-1913</i>. This volume was my first introduction to +Brooke. As an undergraduate at Oxford during the years 1910-13 I +had heard of his work from time to time; but I think we youngsters +at Oxford were too absorbed in our own small versemakings to watch +very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. His poem <i>The Old +Vicarage, Grantchester</i>, reprinted in Heffer's <i>Cambridge +Poems</i>, first fell under my eye during the winter of +1913-14.</p> +<p>Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the +meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door +to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that +Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; +patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow +streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of +the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen +miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel +of King's clear against the sky. It is the favourite lament of +Cambridge men that their "<i>Umgebung</i>" is so dull and +monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.</p> +<p>But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café +des Westens in Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and +fair indeed. Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green +pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the +outlying villages, Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably +when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in +Berlin hugely. But the verses are more than of merely passing +interest. To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture is +cannily vivid. To me it brings back with painful intensity the +white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which I have bicycled +hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the way—the +<i>Waggon and Horses</i>, the <i>Plough</i>, the <i>King's +Arms</i>—and the recurring blue signboard <i>Fine Royston +Ales</i> (the Royston brewery being famous in those parts). Behind +the fun there shines Brooke's passionate devotion to the soil and +soul of England which was to reach its final expression so +tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal questions of +youth which have no country and no clime—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Say, is there Beauty yet to +find?<br></span> <span>And Certainty? and Quiet +kind?<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely +to forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, +one may perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of +the score of young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had +graduated in the past decade and who are all doing fine and +promising work. Even though he tarried here in the United States +("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily observed) and many hold precious +the memory of his vivid mind and flashing face, to most of us he +was totally unknown. Then came the War; he took part in the +unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in training for the +Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled "1914". I +do not know exactly when they were written or where first +published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's +quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them +as the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had +called forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from +the London <i>Times</i>. No one could read the matchless +sonnet:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>"If I should die, think only this of +me:<br></span> <span class='i2'>That there's some corner of a +foreign field<br></span> <span>That is for ever +England."<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to +whom I sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without +tears." This was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, +we kent it by the biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must +have done as I did: wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the +perfect words. But he had sailed for the Mediterranean long before. +Presently came a letter from London saying that he had died on the +very day of my letter—April 23, 1915. He died on board the +French hospital ship <i>Duguay-Trouin</i>, on Shakespeare's +birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of the +hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, +due to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a +previous touch of sunstroke.</p> +<p>A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old +Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls +Stevenson's last journey to the Samoan mountain top which Brooke +himself had so recently visited. The account was written by one of +Brooke's comrades, who has since been killed in action:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the +valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, +but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, +and Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most +lovely grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about +a dozen trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head +droops an olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all +undergrowth.</p> +<p>About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made +their way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the +grave. The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men +with lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by +petty officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that +it was not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave.</p> +<p>We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on +the coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We +lined the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an +olive wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the +afternoon read the service very simply. The firing party fired +three volleys and the bugles sounded the "Last Post."</p> +<p>And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head +towards those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his +feet towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would +like to be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one +than Skyros, and no quieter resting place.</p> +<p>On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of +his company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name +upon it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back +of the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies +the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died +for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."</p> +<p>The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his +grave.</p> +</div> +<p>It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert +Brooke. The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses +and a handful of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift +translation in the golden cloudland of English letters. There will +never, can never, be any laggard note in the praise of his work. +And of a young poet dead one may say things that would be too +fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray is quoted:</p> +<p>"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to +think of one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal +radiance of youth and poetry."</p> +<p>In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, +Brooke found at least one Certainty—that of being "among the +English poets." He would probably be the last to ask a more +high-sounding epitaph.</p> +<p>His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, +fifty of which were published in his first book, issued (in England +only) in 1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written +before the age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These +last are thoroughly youthful in formula. We all go through the old +familiar cycle, and Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. +Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping +out of doors, walking barefoot on the crisp English turf, channel +crossings and what not—it is all a part of the grand game. We +can only ask that the man really see what he says he sees, and +report it with what grace he can muster.</p> +<p>And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome +praise. Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even +Brooke's undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the +usual grooves of sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor +Woodberry (his introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good +that lesser hands may well pause) finds in them "more of the +intoxication of the god" than in the later rounder work. They +include the dreaming tenderness of <i>Day That I Have Loved</i>; +they include such neat little pictures of the gross and sordid as +the two poems <i>Wagner</i> and <i>Dawn</i>, written on a trip in +Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in +Brooke's poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it +again, wittily put, in <i>Grantchester</i>.)</p> +<p>This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here +and there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. +Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy +basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. +There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not +scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers +at King's would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included +in the volume at hand. The few touches that we have in this vein +show a masculine fear on Brooke's part of being merely pretty in +his verse. In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at +coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 1905-08 +are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet," and +lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in +the <i>Shropshire Lad</i> stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex +images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet +<i>The Hill</i>:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Breathless, we flung us on the windy +hill,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Laughed in the sun, and kissed +the lovely grass,<br></span> <span class='i2'>You said, "Through +glory and ecstasy we pass;<br></span> <span>Wind, sun, and earth +remain, the birds sing still,<br></span> <span>When we are old, are +old...." "And when we die<br></span> <span class='i2'>All's over +that is ours; and life burns on<br></span> <span>Through other +lovers, other lips," said I,<br></span> <span>—"Heart of my +heart, our heaven is now, is won!"<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>"We are Earth's best, that learnt her +lesson here.<br></span> <span class='i2'>Life is our cry. We have +kept the faith!" we said:<br></span> <span class='i2'>"We shall go +down with unreluctant tread<br></span> <span>Rose-crowned into the +darkness!" ... Proud we were<br></span> <span>And laughed, that had +such brave true things to say.<br></span> <span>—And then you +suddenly cried, and turned away.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that +the "1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been +separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of +consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 +and Other Poems," containing the thirty-two later poems, which was +published in England and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page +& Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will +always be more precious than the complete edition. As there were +only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is +extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. +But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke's +power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of +his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. +From the perfected brutality of <i>Jealousy</i> or <i>Menelaus and +Helen</i> or <i>A Channel Passage</i> (these bite like Meredith) we +see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell +his utter mastery of the form. What could better the wit and beauty +of this song:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of +Kings,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Triumph is his +crown.<br></span> <span>Earth fades in flame before his +wings,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Sun and Moon bow +down."<br></span> <span>But that, I knew, would never +do;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Heaven is all too +high.<br></span> <span>So whenever I meet a Queen, I +said,<br></span> <span class='i2'>I will not catch her +eye.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they +said,<br></span> <span class='i2'>"The Gift of Love is +this;<br></span> <span>A crown of thorns about thy head,<br></span> +<span class='i2'>And vinegar to thy kiss!"—<br></span> +<span>But Tragedy is not for me;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And +I'm content to be gay.<br></span> <span>So whenever I spied a +Tragic Lady,<br></span> <span class='i2'>I went another +way.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>And so I never feared to see<br></span> +<span class='i2'>You wander down the street,<br></span> <span>Or +come across the fields to me<br></span> <span class='i2'>On +ordinary feet.<br></span> <span>For what they'd never told me +of,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And what I never knew;<br></span> +<span>It was that all the time, my love,<br></span> <span class= +'i2'>Love would be merely you.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be +sparing of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young +England; the throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from +its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the +absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an +answer to all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of +"1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad +enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that +she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) +recur—what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on the +Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those +white Greek bodies against the green!</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Now, God be thanked who has matched us +with His hour,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And caught our youth, +and wakened us from sleeping,<br></span> <span>With hand made sure, +clear eye, and sharpened power,<br></span> <span class='i2'>To +turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, +there is the answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has +sung, but the farewell of those who, loving life with infinite +zest, have yet found in surrendering it to her the Beauty, the +Certainty, yes and the Quiet, which they had sought. On those five +pages are packed in simple words all the love of life, the love of +woman, the love of England that make Brooke's memory sweet. Never +did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In his hands the thing +became a trumpet"—</p> +<br> +<div style='margin-left: 14em;'>THE DEAD</div> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Blow out, you bugles, over the rich +Dead!<br></span> <span class='i2'>There's none of these so lonely +and poor of old,<br></span> <span class='i2'>But, dying, has made +us rarer gifts than gold.<br></span> <span>These laid the world +away; poured out the red<br></span> <span>Sweet wine of youth; gave +up the years to be<br></span> <span class='i2'>Of work and joy, and +that unhoped serene,<br></span> <span class='i2'>That men call age; +and those who would have been,<br></span> <span>Their sons, they +gave, their immortality.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for +our dearth<br></span> <span class='i2'>Holiness, lacked so long, +and Love, and Pain.<br></span> <span>Honour has come back, as a +King, to earth,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And paid his subjects +with a royal wage;<br></span> <span>And Nobleness walks in our ways +again;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And we have come into our +heritage.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with +the echo of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be +complete without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he +found in all the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers +of the precious details of existence must be his poem <i>The Great +Lover</i> where he catalogues a sort of trade order list of his +stock in life. The lines speak with the very accent of Keats. These +are some of the things he holds dear—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span class='i6'>White plates and cups, +clean-gleaming,<br></span> <span>Ringed with blue lines; and +feathery, faery dust;<br></span> <span>Wet roofs, beneath the +lamp-light; the strong crust<br></span> <span>Of friendly bread; +and many tasting food;<br></span> <span>Rainbows; and the blue +bitter smoke of wood;<br></span> <span>And radiant raindrops +couching in cool flowers;<br></span> <span>And flowers themselves, +that sway through sunny hours,<br></span> <span>Dreaming of moths +that drink them under the moon;<br></span> <span>Then, the cool +kindliness of sheets, that soon<br></span> <span>Smoothe away +trouble; and the rough male kiss<br></span> <span>Of blankets; +grainy wood; live hair that is<br></span> <span>Shining and free; +blue-massing clouds; the keen<br></span> <span>Unpassioned beauty +of a great machine;<br></span> <span>The benison of hot water; furs +to touch;<br></span> <span>The good smell of old clothes; and other +such—<br></span> <span class='i6'>...All these have been my +loves.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to +speak; but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire +than <i>Heaven</i> where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering +the problem of a future life.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>This life cannot be All, they +swear,<br></span> <span>For how unpleasant, if it were!<br></span> +<span>One may not doubt that, somehow, Good<br></span> <span>Shall +come of Water and of Mud;<br></span> <span>And, sure, the reverent +eye must see<br></span> <span>A Purpose in Liquidity.<br></span> +<span>We darkly know, by Faith we cry<br></span> <span>The future +is not Wholly Dry....<br></span> <span>But somewhere, beyond Space +and Time,<br></span> <span>Is wetter water, slimier +slime!<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that +exquisite bit of fooling.</p> +<p>Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner +Brooke, "the latest and greatest of young Englishmen."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_MAN' id="THE_MAN"></a><br> +<h2>THE MAN</h2> +<br> +<p>The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold +drizzle, the first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The +crocuses were beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden +mold. One of the long French windows stood ajar, and in the air +that slipped through was a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It +was the end of March.</p> +<p>In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His +chin was on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, +spare shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes +were gray—a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was +gray; his gray-blue eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he +seemed only a darker shadow in the padded chair. His right +hand—the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar—rested +on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his fingers as +he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he was +revising.</p> +<p>Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the +past two and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure +showed some trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the +greatest crisis of modern times he had steadfastly pursued an +ideal, regardless of the bitterness of criticism and the sting of +ridicule. The difficulties had been tremendous. Every kind of +influence had been brought upon him to do certain things, none of +which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a lifelong student of +history, he had surprised his associates by the clearness of his +vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in the history of +the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than he—save +one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney piece, +hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for his +ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the +picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, +pain-wrenched mouth.</p> +<p>This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of +a poor student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning +visions of great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of +positions to guide his country in the difficult path of a higher +patriotism. Philosopher, idealist, keen student of men, he had been +able to keep his eyes steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable +cloud of unjust criticism that had rolled round him. Venomous and +shameful attacks had hurt him, but had never abated his purpose. In +a world reeling and smoking with the insane fury of war, one nation +should stand unshaken for the message of the spirit, for the glory +of humanity; for the settlement of disputes by other means than +gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To that he had +clung.</p> +<p>He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen.</p> +<p>What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went +back to the golden August day when the telegram was laid on his +desk announcing that the old civilization of Europe had fallen into +fragments. He remembered the first meeting thereafter, when his +associates, with grave, anxious faces, debated the proper stand for +them to take. He remembered how, in the swinging relaxation of an +afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully planned the wording of his +first neutrality proclamation.</p> +<p>In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who +could have believed that great nations would discard without +compunction all the carefully built-up conventions of international +law? That murder in the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, +would be rewarded by the highest military honours? That a +supposedly friendly nation would fill another land with +spies—even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy?</p> +<p>Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to +keep one nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. +Giving due honour to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his +own course was still different. That his country, disregarding the +old fetishes of honour and insult, should stand solidly for +humanity; should endure all things, suffer all things, for +humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the wounds and fill the +starving mouths. That one nation—not because she was weak, +but because she was strong—should, with God's help, make a +firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never +conquer force.</p> +<p>"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." +Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in +history as the utterance of a man years in advance of his +time—but what rolling thunders of vituperation they had cost +him! <i>Too proud to fight</i>!... If only it had been possible to +carry through to the end this message from Judea!</p> +<p>But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen +that the nation must take another step. Little by little, as the +inhuman frenzies of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting +unspeakable horror on non-combatants, women and children, he had +realized that his cherished dream must be laid aside. For the first +time in human history a great nation had dared to waive pride, +honour, and—with bleeding heart—even the lives of its +own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With face buried in +his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on the seas. +He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. <i>Arabic</i>, +<i>Lusitania</i>, <i>Persia</i>, <i>Laconia</i>, <i>Falaba</i>, +<i>Gulflight</i>, <i>Sussex</i>, <i>California</i>—the names +were etched in his brain in letters of grief. And now, since the +"barred-zone" decree ...</p> +<p>He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish +slipped from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to +his personal typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a +phrase flashed into his mind—the words of Martin Luther, the +Thuringian peasant and university professor, who four hundred years +before had nailed his theses on the church door at Wittenberg:</p> +<p>"<i>Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders</i>."</p> +<p>They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh +sheet of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing....</p> +<p>"<i>With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical +character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities +which it involves</i>.... <i>I advise that the Congress declare the +recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact +nothing less than war against the Government and people of the +United States</i>...."</p> +<p>The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently +over the keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before +him some of his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his +country, no longer divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material +pursuits, but massed in one by the force and fury of a valiant +ideal, came into his mind.</p> +<p>"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "<i>Ich kann +nicht anders</i>...."</p> +<p>"<i>We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no +feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not +upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this +war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval</i>.... +<i>Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states with +spies, or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical +posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike +and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for peace can never be +maintained except by a partnership of democratic +nations</i>....</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p><i>"Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour +steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any +narrow interest of their own</i>."</p> +</div> +<p>With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose +from his chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in +the west shone a faint band of clear apple green in which burned +one lucent star. Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city +like the pulsing heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of +tension, he seemed to feel the whole vast stretch of the continent +throbbing; the yearning breast of the land trembling with energy; +the great arch of sky, spanning from coast to coast, quiver with +power unused. The murmur of little children in their cradles, the +tender words of mothers, the footbeat of men on the pavements of +ten thousand cities, the flags leaping in air from high buildings, +ships putting out to sea with gunners at their sterns—in one +aching synthesis the vastness and dearness and might of his land +came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of various and clashing +breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold!</p> +<p>Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and +he returned quietly to the typewriter:</p> +<p>"<i>We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the +world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples +included.... The world must be made safe for democracy</i>."</p> +<p><i>The world must be made safe for democracy</i>! As the wires +leaped and the little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his +strong fingers, scenes passed in his mind of the happy, happy +Europe he had known in old wander days, years before.</p> +<p>He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black +Forest; the German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, +cordial friendliness of that lovely land. He remembered French +villages beside slow-moving rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of +sun; apple orchards of the Moselle. And England—dear green +England, fairest of all—the rich blue line of the Chiltern +Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and yellow in the +autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had bicycled for +tea, and the naïve rustic folk who had made him welcome.</p> +<p>What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them +and maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of +children, millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in +the richness of life—where were they now? Life, innocent +human life—the most precious thing we know or dream of, +freedom to work for a living and win our own joys of home and love +and food—what Black Death had maddened the world with its +damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be free and sweet +again?</p> +<p>The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a +tide of anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the +lives of men now living. But for the sake of the generations to +come—he thought of his own tiny grandchildren—for the +love of God and the mercy of mankind, let this madness be crushed. +If his country must enter the war let it be only for the love and +service of humanity. "It is a fearful thing," he thought, "but the +right is more precious than peace."</p> +<p>Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys +clicked off the closing words:</p> +<p>"<i>To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, +everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride +of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged +to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her +birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured</i>."</p> +<p>He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached +hotly. With elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes +with his hands. All the agony, the bitterness, the burden of +preceding days swept over him, but behind it was a cool and +cleansing current of peace. "<i>Ich kann nicht anders</i>," he +whispered.</p> +<p>Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly:</p> +<p>"<i>God helping her, she can do no other</i>."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM' id="THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM"></a><br> +<h2>THE HEAD OF THE FIRM</h2> +<br> +<p>He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting +in his private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where +bright red and yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, +parallelograms, and other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance +hastily through the papers and magazines. He was familiar with +several foreign languages, and would skim through the text. Then he +would pound the table with his fist, walk angrily about the floor, +and tear the offensive journals into strips. For very often he +found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons that were +most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of his +firm.</p> +<p>His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, +but he was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. +Always the same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the +seam-worn forehead would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb +nervously. His gray eyes would flash—and the fist come down +heavily on the mahogany desk.</p> +<p>When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is +not well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he +had always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes +remembered what a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, +forty-five years before: "He who loses his temper will lose +everything."</p> +<p>But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had +difficulties to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he +himself was puny in childhood; infantile paralysis withered his +left arm when he was an infant; but in spite of these handicaps he +had made himself a vigorous swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could +shoot better with one arm than most sportsmen with two. After +leaving the university he served in the army, but at his father's +death the management of the vast family business came into his +hands. He was then twenty-eight.</p> +<p>No one can question the energy with which he set himself to +carry on the affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, +stubborn, pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the +elements of a successful man of business. His first act was to +dismiss the confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both +his father and grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's +growth. But the new executive was determined to run the business +his own way. Disregarding criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he +declared it his mission to spread the influence of the business to +the ends of the earth. "We must have our place in the sun," he +said; and announced himself as the divine instrument through whom +this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly plain that no +man's opposition would balk him in the management of the firm's +affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself as +the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions +of the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for +this, but he paid little heed.</p> +<p>The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had +been seen in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all +over the globe. Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were +seen on every ocean. He himself with his accustomed energy +travelled everywhere to advance the interests of trade. In England, +Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, the Holy Land, he made +personal visits to the firm's best customers. He sent his brother +to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and other +members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram +after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed +congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to +foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He +employed famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of +his factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after +him.</p> +<p>This is no place to record minutely the million activities of +thirty years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. +It is all written down in history. Suffice it to say that those +years did not go by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an +incurable disease. His temperament, like high tension steel, was of +a brittle quality; it had the tendency to snap under great strains, +living always at fever pitch, sparing himself no fatigue of body or +soul, the whirring dynamo of energy in him often showed signs of +overstress.</p> +<p>It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those +last months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his +line of business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived +to see his old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for +decades, some of them the foreign representatives of his own firm, +out of a job and hunted from their homes by creditors. He had lived +to realize that the commodity he and his family had been +manufacturing for generations was out of date, a thing no longer +needed or wanted by the modern world. The strain which his mind was +enduring is shown by the febrile and unbalanced tone of one of his +letters, sent to a member of his own family who ran one of the +company's branch offices but was forced to resign by +bankruptcy:</p> +<p>"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by +our common enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you +that your deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with +further aid from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of +which no man by right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance +on those who have dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands +on you. We hope to welcome you at the earliest opportunity."</p> +<p>The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; +and it is worth while to remember what it was that killed +it—and him. While the struggle was still on there were many +arguments as to what would bring matters to an end; some cunning +invention, some new patent that would outwit the methods of his +firm. But after all it was nothing more startling than the printing +press and the moral of the whole matter may be put in those fine +old words, "But above all things, truth beareth away the victory." +Little by little, the immense power of the printed word became too +strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer the mahogany +desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him cracked +even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted into +the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge +organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, +in Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that +had cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, +or had them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, +the right of free communities to live their own lives.</p> +<p>Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but +that perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep +within him. He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, +obstinate, proud, was still not an evil face. He broke down while +there was still some of the business to save and some of the +goodwill intact.</p> +<p>It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine +in the world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are +but wasteful toys. For when the printing presses are united the +planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million +inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, were telling him the truth. When +his assistants found him, on his desk lay a half-ripped magazine +where he had tried to tear up a mocking cartoon.</p> +<p>I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring +with embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to +him from over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the +shadowy might of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public +opinion, that hung like dark wings above his head. For little by +little the printed word incarnates itself in power, and in ways +undreamed of makes itself felt. Little by little the wills of +common men, coalescing, running together like beads of mercury on a +plate, quivering into rhythm and concord, become a mighty force +that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires to powder. +Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when once +the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, +it moves onward like the tide up a harbour.</p> +<p>The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with +such colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every +energy known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull +through. His managers had foreseen every phase of this +unprecedented competition, and his warehouses were stocked. But +slowly the forces of his opponents began to focus themselves.</p> +<p>Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents, +solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized +that one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the +huge fabric of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in +the hands of the executors, pending a reorganization.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HERIOT_ROW' id="HERIOT_ROW"></a><br> +<h2>17 HERIOT ROW</h2> +<br> +<p>There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice +a year to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to +Edinburgh, made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in +the summer of 1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, +savoury with the unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand +literary passion. Would that one might again steer <i>Shotover</i> +(dearest of pushbikes) along the Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's +lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way to Stratford! Never was +more innocent merriment spread upon English landscape. When I die, +bury the black notebook with me.</p> +<p>That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and +perchance may serve future historians as a document proving the +moderate cost of wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. +Pepys' diary is more interesting than his meticulous record of what +his amusements cost him. Mayhap some future economist will pore +upon these guileless confessions. For in the black memorandum book +I succeeded, for almost the only time in my life, in keeping an +accurate record of the lapse of coin during nine whole days. I +shall deposit the document with the Congressional Library in +Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no excuse +for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one take +amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot +month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please +reckon exchange at two cents per penny.</p> +<table align='center' border='0' cellpadding='2' cellspacing='0' +summary=''> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 16</td> +<td align='center'>£</td> +<td align='center'>s.</td> +<td align='center'>d</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pint cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>½ pint cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lunch at Banbury</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pint cider at Ettington</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>supper at Stratford</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>stamp and postcard</td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +<td align='center'>3½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 17</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Postcards and stamps</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>9</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pencil</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Warwick Castle</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider at the <i>Bear and Baculus</i><br> +(which Mifflin <i>would</i> call<br> +the <i>Bear and Bacillus)</i></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'><i>Bowling Green Inn,</i>bed and<br> +breakfast</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Puncture</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Lunch, Kenilworth</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>6</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Kenilworth Castle</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>6</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Postcards</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Lemonade, Coventry</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Supper, Tamworth,<br> +<i>The Castle Hotel</i></td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>2</td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>16</td> +<td align='center'>5½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 18</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Johnson house, Lichfield</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider at <i>The Three Crowns</i></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>postcard and shave</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'><i>The King's Head</i>, bed and breakfast</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +<td align='center'>7</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>tip on road<a name='FNanchor_A_1' id= +"FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href='#Footnote_A_1'><sup>[A]</sup></a></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lunch, Uttoxeter</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider, Ashbourne,<i>The Green Man</i></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>landlord's drink, Ashbourne<a name='FNanchor_B_2' +id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_B_2'><sup>[B]</sup></a></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>supper, <i>Newhaven House</i>,</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lemonade, Buxton</td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>TOTAL</td> +<td align='center'>£1</td> +<td align='center'>s.4</td> +<td align='center'>d.1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td align='center' colspan='3'>($5.78)</td> +</tr> +</table> +<a name='Footnote_A_1' id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_A_1'>[A]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather +tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a +railway crossing.</p> +</div> +<a name='Footnote_B_2' id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_B_2'>[B]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a +ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us +excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in +that neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great +writer," and he agreed.</p> +</div> +<p>That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to +reckon that ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring +luxuries and emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in +reckoning shillings and pence, and our fervour in posting our +ledgers would have gladdened a firm of auditors. I remember lying +on the coping of a stone bridge over the water of Teviot near +Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the swift stream bickering +over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in his notebook on the +other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, "Bless the lad, he's +jotting down some picturesque notes of something that has struck +his romantic eye." And just then he spoke—"Four and eleven +pence half-penny so far to-day!"</p> +<p>Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting +itinerary. The McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 +miles; it was the afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping +hearts we saw Arthur's Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was +in sight!</p> +<p>There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since +the days when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud +to one another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of +the north. A score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of +the master. We knew them better than any other syllables in the +world. Heriot Row, Princes Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston +Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the +Pentland Hills—O my friends, do those names mean to you what +they did to us? Then you are one of the brotherhood—what was +to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world!</p> +<p>In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent +lodging, in a large chamber which was really the smoking room of +the house. The city was crowded with tourists on account of an +expected visit of the King and Queen; every other room in the hotel +was occupied. Greatly to our satisfaction we were known as "the +smoking-room gentlemen" throughout our stay. Our windows opened +upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the Caledonian Railway +sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and coupling irons were +heard all night long. I seem to remember that somewhere in his +letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew Rutland Square +well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. Writing +from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out above +all others of his youth—Rutland Square. And while that was of +course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad +to know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway +terminal we were on ground well loved by Tusitala.</p> +<p>The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in +Auld Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row—famous +address, which had long been as familiar to us as our own. I think +we expected to find a tablet on the house commemorating the beloved +occupant; but no; to our surprise it was dark, dusty, and +tenantless. A sign TO SELL was prominent. To take the name of the +agent was easy. A great thought struck us. Could we not go over the +house in the character of prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I +went back to our smoking room and concocted a genteel letter to +Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the Signet.</p> +<p>Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once).</p> +<table align='center' border='0' width='500' summary=''> +<tr> +<td> +<div class='blkquot'> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>16 Charlotte +Square,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>Edinburgh.</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>26th July, +1911</div> +<br> +<p>DEAR SIR,</p> +<p>17 HERIOT ROW</p> +<p>We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can +be seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to +view it we shall arrange to have it opened.</p> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 12em;'>We are,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 8em;'>Yours +faithfully,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 1em;'>GUILD AND +SHEPHERD.</div> +</div> +</td> +</tr> +</table> +<p>Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed +as to the figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You +must remember that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest +twenties, travelling with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a +fortnight on the road. I was in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; +Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and subfusc Norfolk. Our only +claims to gentility were our monocles. Always take a monocle on a +vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of amusement and +passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if you can +screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the +tradesman.</p> +<p>The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless +show that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young +attachés, appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was +met by two eccentric young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel +hats, waterproof capes, each with an impressive monocle. Let it be +said to the honour of the attaché in question that he showed +no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We explained, I think, that we +were scouting for my father, who (it was alleged) greatly desired +to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had presence of mind enough to +enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, and the condition of +the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was quoted.</p> +<p>He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we +stepped softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very +track of the Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely +rooms. We imagined R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the +windows at dusk to see Leerie light the street-lamps +outside—a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining brown eyes; +or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn heralded +by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street gardens. +We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, +returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or +sparkling mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, +large dining room facing the street—and we imagined Louis and +his parents at breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored +with parquet oak, a spacious and attractive chamber. Above this +again, the nursery, and opening off it the little room where +faithful Cummie slept. But in vain we looked for some sign or +souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room that echoed to his +childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the endless nights +of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded and burst +into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and +forlorn.</p> +<p>With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, +seeing everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the +courteous young agent. And what was it he said?—"This was the +house of Lord So-and-so" (I forget the name)—"and +incidentally, Robert Louis Stevenson lived here once. His signature +occurs once or twice in the deeds."</p> +<p><i>Incidentally</i>!...</p> +<p>Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a +steep slant of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or +more higher than the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, +store-rooms, and other "offices" with care, imagining that little +"Smoutie" may have run here and there in search of tid-bits from +the cook. Visions of that childhood, fifty years before, were +almost as real as our own. We seemed to hear the young treble of +his voice. That house was the home of the Stevensons for thirty +years (1857-1887)—surely even the thirty years that have gone +by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those dear +ghosts we conjured up!</p> +<p>We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild +and Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our +innocent deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one +has yet put a tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do +so, some day.</p> +<p>In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long +Northern dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for +Leerie to come and light the famous lamp which still stands on the +pavement in front of the dining-room windows:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>For we are very lucky, with a lamp +before the door,</i><br></span> <span><i>And Leerie stops to light +it as he lights so many more;</i><br></span> <span><i>And O! before +you hurry by with ladder and with light,</i><br></span> <span><i>O +Leerie, see a little child and nod to him +to-night!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come +posting up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a +flame cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 +("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all +lamplighters in Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, +and we used to have a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We +told him of R.L.S., of whom he had vaguely heard, and explained the +sanctity of that particular lamp. He in turn talked freely of his +craft, and learning that we were Americans he told us of his two +sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn Street." He seemed to think +Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned that the Misses Leerie +lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, and sending back +money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you still light +the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder beacons on +Flanders fields?</p> +<p>One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the +lamp-post was still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were +down on hands and knees on the pavement, examining the base of the +pillar by match-light in search of possible dates. A very seedy and +disreputable looking man passed, evidently regarding us with +apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, never at a loss, remarked +loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as the ragged one passed +hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we followed him. At +the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy shuffle, and +Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze.</p> +<p>Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces +prom No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, +and Mifflin and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where +took place the adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once +described when setting down some recollections of childhood.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a +lame boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much +shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, +like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and +<i>goody</i> story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after +many days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally +accosted him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would +you like to play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds +exactly like a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved +me to the venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, +for it was a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This +incident was the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a +desperate aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had +got into talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last +particular may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my +lame lad, and knew him again at once. He was then a man of great +strength, rolling along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a +butcher's basket on his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, +but it was a great affair to me.</p> +</div> +<p>We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in +Ramsay's Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the +valley between the Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist +rises at night like an exhalation from the old gray stones. The +lamps shining through it blend in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot +here and there with brighter flares. As the sky darkens the castle +looms in silhouette, with one yellow square below the Half Moon +Battery. "There are no stars like the Edinburgh street lamps," says +R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all shines on Heriot Row.</p> +<p>The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down +from the dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his +boyish wish to go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit +many and more enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never +saw him.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER' id= +"FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER"></a><br> +<h2>FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<p>[<i>Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet +and the extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for +many years the head reader for a large publishing house. It was my +good fortune to know him intimately, and when he could be severed +from his innumerable manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, +even in bed, he was very good company. His premature death from +reader's cramp and mental hernia was a sad loss to the world of +polite letters. Thousands of mediocre books would have been loaded +upon the public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. When he +lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read MSS., he sent for me, +and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It +contained the following confession, and it was his last wish that +it should be published without alteration. I include it here in +memory of my very dear friend</i>.]</p> +</div> +<br> +<p>In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for +myself. Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild +animal trainer—such were the visions with which I put myself +to sleep. Never did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into +my ken. But here I am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of +a commercial democracy. My only excuse for setting down these +paragraphs is the hope that other more worthy members of the +ancient and honorable craft may be induced to speak out in meeting. +In these days when every type of man is interviewed, his modes of +thinking conned and commented upon, why not a symposium of +manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while reading a +manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. My +old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. +Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to +utter my message without fear or favour.</p> +<p>As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their +days and nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over +mediocre stuff, poking and poring in the unending hope of finding +something rich and strange. A gradual <i>stultitia</i> seizes them. +They take to drink; they beat their wives; they despair of +literature. Worst, and most preposterous, they one and all nourish +secret hopes of successful authorship. You might think that the +interminable flow of turgid blockish fiction that passes beneath +their weary eyes would justly sicken them of the abominable +gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is in the blood.</p> +<p>Great men have graced the job—and got out of it as soon as +possible. George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; +also E.V. Lucas and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's +comments on a manuscript is still preserved. Writing of a novel by +a lady who was the author of many unpublished stories, all marked +by perseverance rather than talent, he said, "Age cannot wither nor +custom stale her infinite lack of variety." But alas, we hear too +little of these gentlemen in their capacity as publishers' +pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did they not +bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich garniture +of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and younger +men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on into +the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.</p> +<p>But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. +Your true specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old +percheron who is content to go on, year after year, sorting over +the literary pemmican that comes before him, inexhaustible in his +love for the delicacies of good writing, happy if once or twice a +twelve-month he chance upon some winged thing. He is not the +pettifogging pilgarlic of popular conception: he is a devoted +servant of letters, willing to take his thirty or forty dollars a +week, willing to suffer the <i>peine forte et dure</i> of his +profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing terse and +marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the +publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I +believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh +wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their +own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book +manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a +year—that is a fair showing for the head reader of a large +publishing house.</p> +<p>One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid +about the profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned +in there will rarely be more than three or four that merit any +serious consideration; only about one in a hundred will be +acceptable for publication. And the others—alas that human +beings should have invented ink to steal away their brains! "Only a +Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript which I read the +other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an +ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable to a +polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere in +Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into +her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice +his ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read +almost a score every week. Often I think of a poem which was +submitted to me once, containing this immortal couplet:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>She damped a pen in the ooze of her +brain and wrote a verse on the air,</i><br></span> <span><i>A verse +that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen to set it +there.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your +cerebral ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year +or so, when one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned +into pigs' trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la +Mare, some Rupert Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's +sanity.</p> +<p>Or else—what is indeed more frequent—the reader's +fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the +manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a +kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so +complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the +sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in many +cantos, beginning</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Our heart is but a bundle of +muscle</i><br></span> <span><i>In which our passions tumble and +tussle.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Another lady begins her novel with the following +psychanalysis:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual +circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause +being a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had +done the day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own +ailment, a paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a +pronounced case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, +aggravated by a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities +which had been bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, +modern foibles and follies peculiar to the human species, both male +and female, under favorable social conditions, found in provincial +towns as well as in large cities and fashionable watering +places.</p> +</div> +<p>But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul +malnutrition, let me append a description of a robuster female, +taken verbatim from a manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which +became a by-word in one publisher's office.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant +figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. +Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured +like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre +and combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a +flowing tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a +graceful crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic +rubies and tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully +concealed its own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to +the azure of the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and +her tapering strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a +time-keeper of the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded +bosom that was destined to be pushed forward by sighs.</p> +</div> +<p>Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire +such plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of +the hero in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk +recently:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah +Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of +the appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many +phases. His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and +close together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a +point in many lines, and from the point back to where it joined +above his lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. +His upper lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth +ran across his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to +the smiles and expressions he employed. Below those features was a +chin of fine proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in +his jaw hinges there was a device that worked splendidly, when he +wished to show unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such +occasions in the kindest advances one would wish to see.</p> +<p>It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley.</p> +</div> +<p>I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and +join the A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: +I have read too many of them. If their forming a trade union will +better the output of American literature I am keen for it. I know +that the professional reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he +acquires a parallax which distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, +now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, +exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of +slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't so. +Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is fired at him +first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable treatise on +the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on using +moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And with +it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of +writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.</p> +<p>Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. +There is all too little clannishness among us. We who are the +helpless target for the slings and arrows of every writer who +chooses to put pen on foolscap—might we not meet now and then +for the humour of exchanging anecdotes? No class of beings is more +in need of the consolations of intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let +us order a tierce of malmsey and talk it over! Perchance, too, a +trade union among readers might be of substantial advantage. Is it +not sad that a man should read manuscripts all the sweet years of +his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? Let us make sixty +the minimum—or let there be a pogrom among the authors!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='WILLIAM_McFEE' id="WILLIAM_McFEE"></a><br> +<h2>WILLIAM McFEE</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a +cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows +it, and half the ship has to clean up the mess.</p> +<p>—RUDYARD KIPLING.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish +they would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as +purser, and William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don +Marquis as deck steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I +would like to be at Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks +booking passages!</p> +<p>William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch +engineer in Mr. Kipling's <i>Brugglesmith</i>, but I feel sure that +his attitude toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. +Unhappily I do not know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but +I know and respect his feelings as a writer, his love of honourable +and honest work, his disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's +attitude toward the purveyors of publicity, you may know him.</p> +<p>One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting +by the open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively +inoffensive young man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The +Golden Journey to Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker +in London. Mr. Secker, like many other wise publishers, inserts in +the back of his books the titles of other volumes issued by him. +Little did I think, as I turned to look over Mr. Secker's +announcements, that a train of events was about to begin which +would render me, during the succeeding twelve months, a monomaniac +in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when I was blessed +with a son and heir just a year later I received a telegram signed +by a dozen of them: "<i>Congratulations. Name him Casuals</i>!"</p> +<p>It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of +1915-16 that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon +the not-to-be-forgotten words.</p> +<p>MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA.</p> +<p>Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I +wrote for a copy.</p> +<p>My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains +this note:</p> +<p>"Finished reading <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, a good book. +H—— still laid up with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat +and read Bible aloud to Celia before the open fire."</p> +<p>My first impressions of "<i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, a good book" +are interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid +from Pike County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house +by nightly readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick +(that was her first voyage away from home) and in spite of +persistent Bible readings she fled after two weeks, back to her +home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was our first servant, and we had +prepared a beautiful room in the attic for her. However, that has +nothing to do with Mr. McFee.</p> +<p><i>Casuals of the Sea</i> is a novel whose sale of ten thousand +copies in America is more important as a forecast of literary +weather than many a popular distribution of a quarter million. Be +it known by these presents that there are at least ten thousand +librivora in this country who regard literature not merely as an +emulsion. This remarkable novel, the seven years' study of a busy +engineer occupied with boiler inspections, indicator cards and +other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the first really +public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened to with +respect.</p> +<p>Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, +but at that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. +They were <i>Letters from an Ocean Tramp</i> (1908) and +<i>Aliens</i> (1914); the latter has been rewritten since then and +issued in a revised edition. It is a very singular experiment in +the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on human folly by a man +who has made it his hobby to think things out for himself. And the +new version is headlighted by a preface which may well take its +place among the most interesting literary confessions of this +generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, +the artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the +whittling of a paragraph:—</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I +suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the +sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes—genuine +artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live +like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the +artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with +irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my +living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their +ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my +theme, the problem of human folly.</p> +</div> +<p>Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer +because he has never had to write for a living. He has been writing +for the fun of it ever since he was an apprentice in a big +engineering shop in London twenty years ago. His profession deals +with exacting and beautiful machinery, and he could no more do hack +writing than hack engineering. And unlike the other English +realists of his generation who have cultivated a cheap flippancy, +McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers at middle-class +morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how +delightfully he flays it in <i>Aliens</i>) but he loves the middle +classes for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. +His attitude toward his creations is that of a "benevolent +marbleheart" (his own phrase). He has seen some of the seams of +life, and like McAndrew he has hammered his own philosophy. It is a +manly, just, and gentle creed, but not a soft one. Since the war +began he has been on sea service, first on a beef-ship and +transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in the +British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the +desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast +and a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the +dumb-waiter shaft to make room for him. It is a disconcerting +figure in Grub Street, the man who really has something to say.</p> +<p>Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new +finds. How the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves +when Harold Bell Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar +mage, Elsbury W. Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on +publishers' press sheets does not dig very deep in the iron soil of +time. We are all only raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in +his little parable; even the raft that Homer made for Helen must +break up some day. Who in these States knows the works of Nat +Gould? Twelve million of his dashing paddock novels have been sold +in England, but he is as unknown here as is Preacher Wright in +England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? Sometimes it is the +worst sellers that come to life, roll away the stone, and an angel +is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me quote Mr. McFee +once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot refuse +facts."</p> +<p>William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an +English skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast +after a long voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They +settled in New Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, +and here McFee was educated in the city schools of which the first +pages of <i>Casuals of the Sea</i> give a pleasant description. +Then he went to a well-known grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds in +Suffolk—what we would call over here a high school. He was a +quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.</p> +<p>At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in +Aldersgate. This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the +Charterhouse, Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. +In fact, the office of the firm was built over one of the old +plague pits of 1665. His father had died several years before; and +for the boy to become an apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. +McFee had to pay three hundred pounds sterling. McFee has often +wondered just what he got for the money. However, the privilege of +paying to be better than someone else is an established way of +working out one's destiny in England, and at the time the mother +and son knew no better than to conform. You will find this problem, +and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out in +<i>Aliens</i>.</p> +<p>After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the +firm on various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping +installation at Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very +creditable juvenile verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's +mantle. This was at the time of the Boer War, when everybody in +trousers who wrote verses was either imitating Kipling or reacting +from him.</p> +<p>His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the +lives and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly +influenced by socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with +books. He came to live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had +already tasted life at first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere +of that literary and artistic Utopia made him uneasy. His +afternoons were spent at the British Museum reading room, his +evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he attended classes, +and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent engineer as +he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As early as +1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.</p> +<p>In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the +engine room of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at +the chance. Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save +for one year (1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, +to write. The reader of <i>Aliens</i> will be pretty familiar with +Nutley by the time he reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin +disguise. I suspect a certain liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. +Did not Frank Stockton write some of his best tales there? Some day +some literary meteorologist will explain how these intellectual +anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley (N.J.), Galesburg +(Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)</p> +<p>The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a +fair prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the +same time monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home +ties are (I speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the +coveted chief's certificate is won, ambition has little further to +look forward to. A small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship +is not an inviting study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. +Haig and Haig are the only diversions of most of the profession. +Art, literature, and politics do not interest them. Picture +postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies of the port are the +glamour of his that they delight to honour.</p> +<p>I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in +<i>Aliens</i>) of his induction into the profession of marine +engineering has no faint colour of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's +mind. The filth, the intolerable weariness, the instant necessity +of the tasks, stagger the easygoing suburban reader. And only the +other day, speaking of his work on a seaplane ship in the British +Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating things about the life of an +engineer:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty +of work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot +help wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the +stick. Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of +the R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't +mean, when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work +such as my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, +nor my friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying +men, or the officers of the watch. I mean <i>work</i>, hard, +sweating, nasty toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. +Most ships of the naval auxiliary are the same.</p> +<p>I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular +fragment of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other +profession have the officers responsible for the carrying out of +the work to toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, +in fleet auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the +waste-pipe of his regimental latrines. You do not expect the +surgeon to superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not +expect the navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not +expect an architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You +do not expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law +courts door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. +Yet you do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine +engineer has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work +corresponding precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, +which are in other professions relegated to the humblest and +roughest of mankind. I blame no one. It is tradition, a most +terrible windmill at which to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to +set down once at least the peculiar nature of an engineer's +destiny. I have had some years of it, and I know what I am talking +about.</p> +<p><i>The</i> point to distinguish is that the engineer not only +has the responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do +it. He, the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours +of rest and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available +twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. +Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge +instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. +When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described.</p> +</div> +<p>The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon +these laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of +intellect as well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, +purposeful. His years at sea have been to him a more fruitful +curriculum than that of any university. The patient sarcasm with +which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his acquaintance does +not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. He has stood +as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting <i>viva +voce</i>—the University of the Seven Seas.</p> +<p>If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I +would deem that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege +of getting a man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of +course! But how he has worked for his mastery of the art of life +and the theory thereof! When his colleagues at sea were dozing in +their deck chairs or rattling the bones along the mahogany, he was +sweating in his bunk, writing or reading. He has always been deeply +interested in painting, and no gallery in any port he visited ever +escaped him. These extracts from some of his letters will show +whether his avocations were those of most engineers:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston +(Liverpool) the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted +against the pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague +Cheshire shores dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an +indulgent genie were to appear and make me an offer I would +cheerfully give up writing for painting. As it is, I see things in +pictures and I spend more time in the Walker Gallery than in the +library next door.</p> +<p>I've got about all I <i>can</i> get out of books, and now I +don't relish them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I +suppose, is that character, not incident, is my <i>metier</i>. And +you can <i>draw</i> character, <i>paint</i> character, but you +can't very well blat about it, can you?</p> +<p>I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The +worst of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how +people live, of ordinary human possibilities.</p> +<p>A——. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas +about "cheap stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a +failure if I don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a +blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never +made a big name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, +to do it as well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility +ended.... To hell with writing, I want <i>to feel</i> and +<i>see</i>!</p> +<p>I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to +the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some +sort who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are +alter him!</p> +</div> +<p>His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the +hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, +ranging from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. +Happening to be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in +this country of "futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the +current discussion in the newspaper correspondence columns. He +wrote for a leading London journal an article on "The Conditions of +Labour at Sea." He finds time to contribute to the <i>Atlantic +Monthly</i> pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the +sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written weekly to the +artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a humorous and +ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern cultivated men. +I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor on Russian +fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.</p> +<p>When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common +with his engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a +prig. He was interested in everything that they were, but in a +great deal more, too. And after obtaining his extra chief's +certificate from the London Board of Trade, with a grade of +ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to rest on his +gauges.</p> +<p>In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather +local colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship +for the United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. +Neither <i>Aliens</i> nor <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, which he had +been at work on for years, met with the favour of New York +publishers. He carried his manuscripts around the town until weary +of that amusement; and when the United Fruit Company asked him to +do some engineering work for them he was not loath to get back into +the old harness. And then came the war.</p> +<p>Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever +officer a vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these +remarks. But I made my proposal not wholly at random, for in +Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is something of the +same artistic creed. In those two magnificent prefaces—to +<i>A Personal Record</i> and to <i>The Nigger of the +Narcissus</i>—Conrad has set down, in words that should be +memorable to every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of +the man of letters. They can never be quoted too often:</p> +<p>"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the +miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs +deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays +them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and +of a smile which is not a grin."</p> +<p>That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the +Gooderich family in <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>. Somewhere in that +book he has uttered the immortal remark that "The world belongs to +the Enthusiast who keeps cool." I think there is much of himself in +that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent +marbleheart, has many fine things in store for us.</p> +<p>And there is one other sentence in <i>Casuals of the Sea</i> +that lingers with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. +It is worth remembering, and I leave it with you:</p> +<p>"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as +such, instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God +and dealing murderous blows."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='RHUBARB' id="RHUBARB"></a><br> +<h2>RHUBARB</h2> +<br> +<p>We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, +which we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded +them, imparting a special potency. He was a little German +druggist—<i>Deutsche Apotheker</i>—and his real name +was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.</p> +<p>The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the +Debatable Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags +in a sporting way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It +is the most rustic corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as +remote as Helgoland and as little known. It has no movie theatre, +no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist. The railroad +station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, +might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in +discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of an old +hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the +Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the +weather-beaten Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a +year. People who find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to +Kings to cool off. The only way one can keep servants out there is +by having the works of Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the +cook to read.</p> +<p>Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite +a little German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side +of him and a man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly +at all expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent +<i>Rheingold</i>, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would +sit by the stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber +on the table and dream of Stuttgart.</p> +<p>It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was +an educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of +which he was very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart +Oberrealschule; the other his license to practise homicidal +pharmacy in the German Empire, dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik +der reinen Vernunft", and found it more interesting than Henry +James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop into his shop of an +evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell into talk. His +Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her shoulders, would +come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their pet +dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she +so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive.</p> +<p>It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German +University that he really showed me the life that lay behind his +shopman activity. We sometimes talked German together, and he took +me into their little sitting room to see his photographs of home +scenes at Stuttgart. It was over thirty years since he had seen +German soil, but still his eyes would sparkle at the thought. He +and Minna, being childless, dreamed of a return to the Fatherland +as their great end in life.</p> +<p>What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was +fascinated by the rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with +mysterious Latin abbreviations. There were cases of patent +remedies—Mexican Mustang Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, +Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish +Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, marshmallows, tobacco, jars of +rock candy, what a medley of paternostrums! And old Rhubarb +himself, in his enormous baggy trousers—infinite breeches in +a little room, as Julia used to say.</p> +<p>I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The +first impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He +was always in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his +broad back; his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served +as cravat. He had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep +gurgling gutturals and a decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and +farther down into his larynx. Once, when we got to know each other +fairly well, I ventured some harmless jest about Barbarossa. He +chuckled; then his face grew grave. "I wish Minna could have the +beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. It would be a fine +breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong like a horse, +I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his broad, thick +hand.</p> +<p>Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the +Deutsche Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had +installed a soda fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him +sorely, and if he was asked for anything more complex than +chocolate ice cream soda he would shake his head solemnly and say: +"That I have not got." Motorists sometimes turned off the Jericho +turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for banana splits or grape +juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But they had to take +chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit of +absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged +water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag +his beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling +again when the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the +spilt soda and rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue.</p> +<p>At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, +piling it high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver +oil. Then Minna entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot +chocolate which seethed and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue +gas burner underneath. This she served in thick china mugs with a +clot of whipped cream swimming on top. Julia would buy a box of the +cheese crackers that Schulz kept in stock specially for her, and +give several to the sleek little black bitch that stood pleading +with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on Julia's slippers. +Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense carnation" +bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics of his +pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with +naïve pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the +little dog "he," which amused us.</p> +<p>On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, +and during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by +the dog which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. +Sometimes we met him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a +cudgel and humming to himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he +halted, the little black dachshund would look up at him, and he +would stoop ponderously down, pick her up and carry her in his arms +until all danger was past.</p> +<p>As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the +war. Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, +keeping the shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would +argue without heat upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no +zeal for converting the old fellow from his views; I understood his +sympathies and respected them. Reports of atrocities troubled him +as much as they did me; but the spine of his contention was that +the German army was unbeatable. He got out his faded discharge +ticket from the Würtemberger Landsturm to show the perfect +system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at the +back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and +over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his +beard aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other +customers came in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and +the topic was dropped. But often the glass top of the perfume +counter was requisitioned as a large-scale battleground, and the +pink bottle of rose water set to represent Von Hindenburg while the +green phial of smelling salts was Joffre or Brussilov. We fought +out the battle of the Marne pretty completely on the perfume +counter. "<i>Warte doch</i>!" he would cry. "Just wait! You will +see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!"</p> +<p>Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. +She knew well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not +understand that our arguments were wholly lacking in personal +animus. When I told him of the Allies' growing superiority in +aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing me clippings about the +German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" made of solid +cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the British; he +would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his +conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" +And he would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to +cry in a panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb +and I would grin at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and +we would say good night.</p> +<p>How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him +in a true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to +typify all that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the +frugal simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He +and I felt for each other, I think, something of the humorous +friendliness of the men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast +us on different sides of the matter. But when I felt tempted to see +red, to condemn the Germans <i>en masse</i>, to chant litanies of +hate, I used to go down to the drugstore for tobacco or a mug of +chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue it out.</p> +<p>But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German +sentiment in the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. +Then he was worried over Minna. Often she did not appear in the +evenings, and he would explain that she had gone to bed. I was all +the more surprised to meet her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, +sloshing along the road in the liquid mire, the little dog +squattering sadly behind, her small black paws sliding on the +ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing outdoors on a day +like this?" I said.</p> +<p>"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if +Lischen didn't get her airing."</p> +<p>"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," +I said severely.</p> +<p>Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was +snowbound in Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to +Montreal on urgent business. Julia went to the city to visit her +mother while I was away, so we had no news from Kings.</p> +<p>We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in +our absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and +for an hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle +with a pipe and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next +morning I stopped at the drugstore on my way to the train to get +some iodine.</p> +<p>Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone +of white powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from +well. There were great pouches under his eyes; his beard was +unkempt; his waistcoat spotted with food stains. The lady waiting +received her package, and went out. Rhubarb and I grasped +hands.</p> +<p>"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you +see that the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards +deep last week? Do you still think Germany will win?" To my +surprise he turned on his heel and began apparently rummaging along +a row of glass jars. His gaze seemed to be fastened upon a tall +bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At last he turned round. His +broad, naïve face was quivering like blanc-mange.</p> +<p>"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me +any more? Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia."</p> +<p>As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along +the floor. The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and +frisked about my feet.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE' id= +"THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE"></a><br> +<h2>THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE</h2> +<h3>A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY</h3> +<br> +<p>Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a <i>vers libre</i> poem) the +quaint little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform +each of the <i>fiacre</i> drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and +tries to outring the others. You step from the railway +carriage—and instantly the hellish din of those droschky +bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your eye has caught the +superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. Over the +sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above the +rugged scarp where the blue-bloused <i>ouvriers</i> are quarrying +the famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the +Palazzio Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo +eddies down your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At +last you are in Strychnine.</p> +<p>Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press +agents—there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far +and untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an +unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous +among physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The +sorrowful ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. <i>Chemise de +fer</i> (with innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has +kept out the contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly +interdicted, has also kept away the rich and garrulous tourist. But +he who will endure to the end that tortuous journey among flat +fields of rye and parsimony, will find himself well rewarded. The +long tunnel through Mondragone ends at length, and you find +yourself on the platform with the droschky bells clanging in your +ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag soaring +behind the jade canal.</p> +<p>The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I +stepped into the curious seven-wheeled <i>sforza</i> lettered +<i>Hôtel Decameron</i>. We rumbled <i>andante espressivo</i> +over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussée d'Arsenic, +crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of the +cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of +lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what +quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes +in a strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the +<i>markt-platz</i> where a man in a white coat was busily selling +hot icons. They are delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande +(the great cheese cathedral) on the cliff.</p> +<p>The Hôtel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once +a bartender there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place +Nouveau Riche overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by +Edward VII in memory of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine +baths the merry monarch is said to have called for a corncob pipe +and a plate of onions, after which he made his escape by walking +over the forest track to the French frontier, although previous to +this he had not walked a kilometer without a cane since John Bull +won the Cowes regatta. The <i>haut ton</i> of the section in which +the Hôtel Decameron finds itself can readily be seen by the +fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on the rue +Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hôtel. The +antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the +two.</p> +<p>The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a +weak heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger +on the terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band +and eat a bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a +great deal of my time exploring the chief glory of the town, the +Casa Grande, which stands on the colossal crag honeycombed +underneath with the shafts and vaults of the cheese mine. There is +nothing in the world more entrancing than to stand (with a +vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the Casa, looking down +over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts of the workmen +as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some particularly +rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will some day +make Strychnine a place of <i>pélérinage</i> for all +the world. <i>Pay homage to the fromage</i> is a rough translation +of the motto of the town, which is carved in old Gothic letters on +the apse of the Casa itself. Limberg, Gruyère, Alkmaar, +Neufchâtel, Camembert and Hoboken—all these famous +cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the +Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation +of the burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' +Guild at the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by +the town council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese +industry, and a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of +the ceremonial cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all +those present donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the +English to combat the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen +helmets are worn by the workmen in the quarries to prevent +prostration.</p> +<p>It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I +would gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin +Palace, and sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the +terrace sipping my <i>verre</i> of native wine. But duties recalled +me to the beaten paths of travel, and once more I drove in the +old-fashioned ambulance to catch my even more old-fashioned train. +The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine when there is a stern wind, +as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese carried in the luggage +van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some day some American +efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them to couple +their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then +Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may +chance that way, a fragrant memory.</p> +<p>And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx +canal and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='INGO' id="INGO"></a><br> +<h2>INGO</h2> +<h3>"ZUM ANDENKEN"</h3> +<br> +<p>The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost +my heart to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little +sailor suit of blue and white striped linen; his short trousers +showed chubby brown calves above his white socks; his round golden +head cropped close in the German fashion. His blue eyes were grave +and thoughtful. By great good fortune we sat next each other at +table, and in my rather grotesque German I began a conversation. +How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the absurdities of my syntax! +How very courteous he was!</p> +<p>Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we +call memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in +the Black Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of +nowhere and asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who +had ever been seen in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur +Krone ("the Crown Inn") found them very amusing. Perhaps you have +never seen a country tavern in the Schwarzwald? Then you have +something to live for. A long, low building with a moss-grown roof +and tremendous broad eaves sheltering little galleries; and the +barn under the same roof for greater warmth in winter. One side of +the house was always strong with an excellent homely aroma of cow +and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a door +that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the +haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the +summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery +under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the +yellow coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long +vista of the valley, the women with bright red jackets working in +the fields, and the dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. +There was much rain that summer; the mountains were often veiled +all day long in misty shreds of cloud, and the two Americans sat +with pipes and books at the long dining table, greeted by gales of +laughter on the part of the robust landlord's niece when they +essayed the native idiom. "<i>Sie arbeiten immer</i>!" she used to +say; "<i>Sie werden krank</i>!" ("You're always working; you'll be +ill!")</p> +<p>There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those +happy days two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I +suppose, are there more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people +than the South Germans. On the front of the inn there was a big +yellow metal sign, giving the military number of the district, and +the mobilization points for the Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we +realized that even here the careful organization of the military +power had numbered and ticketed every village. But what did it mean +to us? War was a thing unthinkable in those days. We bicycled +everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in waterfalls, chatted +fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, and played games +with Ingo.</p> +<p>Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, +impudent, self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest +little creature. His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find +him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about the stars. On +clear evenings we would walk along the road together, in the +mountain hush that was only broken by the brook tumbling down the +valley, and he would name the constellations for me. His little +round head was thrilled through and through by the immense +mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a +muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner +what he was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes +and flashing smile: "<i>Von den Sternen</i>!" ("Of the stars.")</p> +<p>The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, +Ingo's smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite +pastimes were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found +enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of +"Hangman," a simple pastime which had sometimes entertained my own +small brother on rainy days; apparently it was new in Germany. One +player thinks of a word, and sets down on paper a dash for each +letter in this word. It is the task of the other to guess the word, +and he names the letters of the alphabet one by one. Every time he +mentions a letter that is contained in the word you must set it +down in its proper place in the word, but every time he mentions a +letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of a person +depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to +guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the +game entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little +face bent over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and +happy little brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish +his grim task. "Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself +hung!" and he would laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a +jollier way of learning a foreign language than by playing games +with Ingo.</p> +<p>The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, +labyrinths of winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil +point. The task was to construct a maze so complicated that the +other could not find his way out, starting at the middle. We would +sit down at opposite ends of the room to construct our mysteries of +blind alleys and misleading passages, then each one would be turned +loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the other. Ingo would stand at my +side while I tried in obstinate stupidity to find my way through +his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his sailor blouse would +pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous places where an +exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, and his +blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to +make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless +despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom.</p> +<p>After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come +trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little +balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite +book <i>Till Eulenspiegel</i>, and we sped joyously through the +adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took +turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an +explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but +it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning +plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave +determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic +pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an +elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of +glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely +ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent +mirth. His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a +digestive stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in +the German way, "<i>Gott! wie er freut sich</i>!" The progress of +our reading was held up by these interludes, but I could never +resist the temptation to start Ingo explaining.</p> +<p>Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair +to reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, +and there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of +'Treasure Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! +I read the tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the +shining of Ingo's eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered +with the little lad's sleep, and his mother was a good deal +disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together. How +close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at the +<i>Admiral Benbow</i>: and how his face would fall when, clear and +hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quick +<i>clop, clop</i> of the mail-man's horses.</p> +<p>I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory +than those hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I +took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and +left the Gasthaus zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed +little lad stands up erect and stiff in the formal German way, and +I can see his blue eyes alight with friendliness, and a little bit +unhappy because his eccentric American comrade was gomg away and +there would be no more afternoons with <i>Till Eulenspiegel</i> on +the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as often as I do of him? +He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a child's heart +that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, and I +pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me +my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present +to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully +all one afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.</p> +<p>And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's +Märchen" that I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the +English words that he was to learn how to translate when he should +grow older! As I remember them, they ran like this:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>For Ingo to learn English will very +easy be</i><br></span> <span><i>If someone is as kind to him as he +has been to me;</i><br></span> <span><i>Plays games with him, reads +fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,</i><br></span> <span><i>And +never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he +makes—</i><br></span> <span><i>Then he will find, as I did, +how well two pleasures blend:</i><br></span> <span><i>To learn a +foreign language, and to make a foreign +friend.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I +cannot get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HOUSEBROKEN' id="HOUSEBROKEN"></a><br> +<h2>HOUSEBROKEN</h2> +<br> +<p>After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as +though he needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, +for he knew his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream +of an evening spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. +However, there were no two ways about it: the old unregenerate male +in Simmons yearned for something more exciting than the fireside +armchair, the slippers and smoking jacket, and the quiet game of +cards. Visions of the old riotous evenings with the boys ran +through his mind; a billiard table and the click of balls; the +jolly conversation at the club, and glass after glass of that cold +amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at night, the +warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their pyramids of +bottles flashing in the gaslight—these were the things that +made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little +cage in the suburbs like a tame cat!</p> +<p>Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and +at last he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet +a sharp retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer +garden to his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his +amazement Ethel took it quite calmly.</p> +<p>"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to +have an evening with your friends."</p> +<p>A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he +didn't go.</p> +<p>"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be +lonely."</p> +<p>This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, +meeting the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would +spend the evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went +about in a glow of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an +offhand way of the pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and +pitied the prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at +night.</p> +<p>On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long +enough to shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress +and seemed very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw +the familiar room shining with firelight and the shabby +armchair.</p> +<p>"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.</p> +<p>"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has +a steak in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait +up for you."</p> +<p>He kissed her and went off.</p> +<p>When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was +tired and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a +lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching +Ethel's face bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her +anyway.</p> +<p>At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was +laughing, shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned +and ran.</p> +<p>He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible +force seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, +wondering how all the other men could read their papers so +contentedly.</p> +<p>At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along +the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused.</p> +<p>Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting +comfortably by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her +lap. His heart leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in +now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's +need of relaxation and masculine comradeship—why, she would +never stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away.</p> +<p>That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was +a little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long +while he sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, +and again returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little +the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the +little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as +the drugstore and bought a box of crackers.</p> +<p>At last—it seemed years—the church chimes struck ten +and he saw the lights go out in his house. He forced himself to +make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he +could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness and cold, he went +home.</p> +<p>He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He +leaned over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.</p> +<p>"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't +you?"</p> +<p>"One o'clock," he lied bravely—and just then the +dining-room clock struck half-past ten and supported him.</p> +<p>"Did you have a good time?"</p> +<p>"Bully—perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a +night with the boys now and then."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE' id= +"THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE"></a><br> +<h2>THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE</h2> +<br> +<p>I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to +Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the +cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from +France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of +bottling the wine. He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with +competitive shouts of laughter the fun went forward. The wine was +strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the +vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling +and infectious gaiety—improvising verses, shouting with +merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to +Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as one of the +most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling +was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging +tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.</p> +<br> +<h3>I</h3> +<p>That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, +bursting with energy, hospitality, and wit: the <i>enfant +terrible</i> of English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. +Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's verses is very welcome.<a name= +'FNanchor_C_3' id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_C_3'><sup>[C]</sup></a> His introduction is charming: +the tribute of an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little +in proving that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master +of prose; perhaps too some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, +and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a +little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grateful for +in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. Perhaps we do not +enough realize how outstanding and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc +is.</p> +<a name='Footnote_C_3' id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_C_3'>[C]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. +New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.</p> +</div> +<p>Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. +Four of his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father +of his grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his +grandmother was wounded at Waterloo.</p> +<p>His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived +both in France and England, and was famous as the translator into +French of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works +by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, +whose pictures are in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb +may be seen in Père la Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton +Belloc, a lawyer, who married an English wife.</p> +<p>The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born +at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870—the "Terrible Year" it +was called—until 1914.</p> +<p>Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire +went to live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and +Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. +Slindon, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean +little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs moulded +his boyish thoughts.</p> +<p>In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. +Thomas Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a +number of biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this +period:</p> +<p>"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory +School—some time in '83, I suppose. He was a small, squat +person, of the shaggy kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright +eyes. Being amongst English boys, his instinctive combativeness +made him assume a decidedly French pose, and this no doubt brought +on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well able +to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I +recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old +Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was +calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process +which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell +him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or +deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be +taught by a 'brat.' In those days the boys used to act Latin plays +of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first +year Belloc was remarkable. His rendering of the impudent servant +maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole +school career."</p> +<p>In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French +field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived +the Gallic heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk +continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in +"The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the +passage; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is +the perpetual fate of that book—everyone should have six +copies.</p> +<p>After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a +comical contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol +College, Oxford—admittedly the most rarefied and +azure-pedalled precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol in +January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the "characters" of the +college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford +in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, +where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at +first horrified and then captivated the men from the public +schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed +to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He +swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. +Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed +his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms +were a continual focus of noise: troops of friends, song, loud +laughter, and night-long readings from Rabelais. And probably his +battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol buttery, would +show a larger quantity of ale and wine consumed than by any other +man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day perhaps +some scholar will look the matter up.</p> +<p>Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older +colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the +70's and 80's. It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her +with the Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring +a flush to a Balliol cheek. But whatever the merciless hand of the +architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes +and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, +her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of +her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake +of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther +back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found +himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a +notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against +every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, +complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the +donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, +partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship +(the most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has +retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read +without assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was +the favourite of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He +has never had any reverence for a man merely because he held a post +of authority.</p> +<p>Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:</p> +<p>"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his +college friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the +contagion and the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled +and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There +never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval +trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous in rhapsody and +extravaganza, so positive and final in his judgments—who +spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to +our public-school-French-attuned ears."</p> +<p>No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to +quote the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of +the Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life +and overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the +mind.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN +AFRICA</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Years ago when I was at +Balliol,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Balliol men—and I +was one—</i><br></span> <span><i>Swam together in winter +rivers,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Wrestled together under +the sun.</i><br></span> <span><i>And still in the heart of us, +Balliol, Balliol,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Loved already, +but hardly known,</i><br></span> <span><i>Welded us each of us into +the others:</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Called a levy and +chose her own.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Here is a House that armours a +man</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>With the eyes of a boy and +the heart of a ranger,</i><br></span> <span><i>And a laughing way +in the teeth of the world</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a +holy hunger and thirst for danger:</i><br></span> <span><i>Balliol +made me, Balliol fed me,</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Whatever I had she gave me again:</i><br></span> +<span><i>And the best of Balliol loved and led me,</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>God be with you, Balliol +men.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I have said it before, and I say it +again,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>There was treason done, +and a false word spoken,</i><br></span> <span><i>And England under +the dregs of men,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And bribes +about, and a treaty broken:</i><br></span> <span><i>But angry, +lonely, hating it still,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>I +wished to be there in spite of the wrong.</i><br></span> +<span><i>My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>And the hammer of galloping all day +long.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Galloping outward into the +weather,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Hands a-ready and +battle in all:</i><br></span> <span><i>Words together and wine +together</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And song together in +Balliol Hall.</i><br></span> <span><i>Rare and single! Noble and +few!...</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Oh! they have wasted you +over the sea!</i><br></span> <span><i>The only brothers ever I +knew,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>The men that laughed and +quarrelled with me.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span class= +'i6'><i>* * * * *</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Balliol made me, Balliol fed +me,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Whatever I had she gave me +again;</i><br></span> <span><i>And the best of Balliol loved and +led me,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>God be with you, Balliol +men.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one +ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager +student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant +life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of +acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and +debate; the endless throb of passionate speculation into all the +crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those +younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of +our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the +Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: +you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two +of his volumes.</p> +<br> +<h3>II</h3> +<p>There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic +voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died +in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on +Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and +topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical +burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen—it did not take +England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he +was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated +changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the +Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit +that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams +of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. +Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful +tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of +parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British +politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc +introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party +funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His +vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has +placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those +to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and +inspiration."</p> +<p>Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of +Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his +heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and +his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as +every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a +passing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest +hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. Braithwaite, which happens to +so few. His "The South Country" will make splendid many an +anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, +debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important +contribution?</p> +<p>What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child +gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give +in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford—that noble +building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs +of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of +cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of +notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval +French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half—or was +it three hours?—with flashing extempore talk about this +greatest figure of the Renaissance.</p> +<p>Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming +tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the +priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that +life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful +self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a +thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the +details of human affairs! <i>The gospel of +exuberance</i>—that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?</p> +<p>Rabelais came from Touraine—the heart of Gaul, the island +of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. +One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, +Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from +which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind +packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his +exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools +whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.</p> +<p>Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without +seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: +there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues +that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of +speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to +Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born +spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, +and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of 'begats.' +Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."</p> +<br> +<h3>III</h3> +<p>In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English +minds. Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he +is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex +weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, +novels, satires, nonsense rhymes—all these we may set aside +as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, +say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was +ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the +thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, +everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. His +prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, +biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. +His passion for places—roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his +dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of +vagabondage—these are the glories of a style that is quick, +close-knit, virile, and vibrant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, +Swift, and Defoe.</p> +<p>Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, +pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with +an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited +on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure +for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. +E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. +Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light +wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love +of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight—in +short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life +so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the +strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is +something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be +full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we +have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. +No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, +riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but +at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. +It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds +are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone +and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in +man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical +compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, +resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war +by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in +companionship are at their noblest.</p> +</div> +<br> +<h3>IV</h3> +<p>And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but +ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of +the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him +for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write +as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken +music:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I never get between the +pines</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But I smell the Sussex +air;</i><br></span> <span><i>Nor I never come on a belt of +sand</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But my home is +there.</i><br></span> <span><i>And along the sky the line of the +Downs</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>So noble and so +bare.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>A lost thing could I never +find,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Nor a broken thing +mend:</i><br></span> <span><i>And I fear I shall be all +alone</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>When I get towards the +end.</i><br></span> <span><i>Who will there be to comfort +me</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Or who will be my +friend?</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I will gather and carefully make my +friends</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Of the men of the Sussex +Weald,</i><br></span> <span><i>They watch the stars from silent +folds,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>They stiffly plough the +field.</i><br></span> <span><i>By them and the God of the South +Country</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>My poor soul shall be +healed.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>If I ever become a rich +man,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Or if ever I grow to be +old,</i><br></span> <span><i>I will build a house with deep +thatch</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>To shelter me from the +cold,</i><br></span> <span><i>And there shall the Sussex songs be +sung</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And the story of Sussex +told.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I will hold my house in the high +wood</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Within a walk of the +sea,</i><br></span> <span><i>And the men that were boys when I was +a boy</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Shall sit and drink with +me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA' id="A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA"></a><br> +<h2>A CASUAL OF THE SEA</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 30%; margin-right: 30%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.</p> +<p>—GEORGE HERBERT.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. +Fifteen-year-old Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) +on the S.S. <i>Fernfield</i> in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have +suspected that the second engineer would write a novel and put him +in it; or that that same novel would one day lift him out of focsle +and galley and set him working for a publishing house on far-away +Long Island. Is it not one more proof of the surprising power of +the written word?</p> +<p>For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in +print. The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an +article I wrote about him, brought (so he naïvely told me) +tears to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! How little did +you think, when you signed on to help the <i>Fernfield</i> carry +coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle +press was already waiting for you; that thousands of good people +reading a certain novel would be familiar with your "round rosy +face and clear sea-blue eyes."</p> +<p>"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in +1896. His father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to +nothing to the support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. +They lived with their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, +where the masts of ships and the smell of tar interfered with their +lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a +fine thick stew and plenty more bread for supper—that and the +Dutch school where he stood near the top of his class are what +Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His grandmother took in +washing, and had a hard time keeping the little family going. She +was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to school in the +mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window because +his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only slouchy +good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands.</p> +<p>Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star +pupils given the privilege of learning an extra language in the +evenings. He chose English because most of the sailors he met +talked English, and his great ambition was to be a seaman. His +uncle was a quartermaster in the Dutch navy, and his father was at +sea; and Tommy's chance soon came.</p> +<p>After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, +chocolates, and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little +cash to help his grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 +he was down on the docks with his little packet of wares, when a +school friend came running to him.</p> +<p>"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the +<i>Queen Eleanor</i>!"</p> +<p>It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the <i>Queen +Eleanor</i>, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and +Vladivostok. He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining +eagerly.</p> +<p>"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right +away—we sail at four o'clock."</p> +<p>"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely +thirteen!)</p> +<p>The chief roars with laughter.</p> +<p>"Too small!" he says.</p> +<p>Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room +steward.</p> +<p>"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants +and come back again. Then we'll see how you look!"</p> +<p>Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, +and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he +hastened back to the <i>Queen Eleanor</i>. The chief cackled, but +he took him on at two pounds five a month.</p> +<p>Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups +the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to +cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant +success. He used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the +water would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea +boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp +steamer's cabin boy.</p> +<p>"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they +christened him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still.</p> +<p>Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper +kept him friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him +scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first +voyage as A.B. was on the <i>Fernfield</i> in 1911, and there he +met a certain Scotch engineer. This engineer had a habit of being +interested in human problems, and Tommy's guileless phiz attracted +him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and +soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.</p> +<p>One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the +engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The +Duchess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the +other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, +Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, +Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said +had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in +which he, Tommy, would play an important rôle!</p> +<p>The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private +yachts, as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy +drifted about the world. One day when he was twenty years old he +was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on +the steam yacht <i>Alvina.</i> He was one of a strictly neutral +crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on +to take a millionaire's pet plaything across the wintry ocean. She +had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one +then!)</p> +<p>Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station +when his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see +in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer—his best +friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father +to him. He knew that the engineer was far away in the +Mediterranean, working on an English transport. He scanned the +poster with amazement.</p> +<p>Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a +practical seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the +shop and bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, +who had read the book. He told the bookseller that he had known the +author, and that for years they had served together on the same +vessels at sea. He told how the writer, who was the former second +engineer of the <i>Fernfield</i>, had done many things for the +little Dutch lad whose own father had died at sea. Then came +another surprise.</p> +<p>"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the +bookseller.</p> +<p>It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, +William McFee, who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; +and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as +"Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you +imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond +measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney +he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged +him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an +officer; and that though they had not met for several years he +still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about +saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, and not +to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that Hoboken +and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his +yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" +under his arm.</p> +<p>Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing +my interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw +him that one of the characters in the story was in New York. I +wrote to Tommy asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the +<i>Alvina</i> was to sail the next day, and he could not get away. +I supposed the incident was closed.</p> +<p>Then I saw in the papers that the <i>Alvina</i> had been halted +in the Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having +suspected that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it +that she was on her way to the Azores, there to take on armament +for the house of Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station +at Staten Island, pending an investigation.</p> +<p>Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in +the very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I +overheard another member of the <i>Alvina's</i> crew asking about +"Casuals of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his +adventure, and he, too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does +one meet one's friends walking in a 500-page novel!) By the +never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of chance I was standing at +Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began explaining to the book clerk +that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been there a few +days before.</p> +<p>So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my +way to see Tommy and the <i>Alvina</i>.</p> +<p>I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a +plausible excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion +in the breast of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A +tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than +anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of +what avail a meeting of the Authors' League when one can know the +sights, sounds, and smells of West or South Street? I used to lug +volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the West-Street piers to give them +to captains and first mates of liners, and get them to talk about +the ways of the sea. That was how I met Captain Claret of the +<i>Minnehaha</i>, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape of the +<i>Orduña</i>, Mr. Jones of the <i>Lusitania</i> and many +another. They knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes +of Conrad in the officers' cabins on the <i>Lusitania</i> when she +went down, God rest her. I know, because I put them there.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for +the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps +to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem +the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of +ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of +vessels—the <i>James L. Morgan</i>, dour little tug, shoving +two barges; <i>Themistocles</i>, at anchor, with the blue and white +Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the <i>Comanche</i> +outward bound for Galveston (I think); the <i>Ascalon</i>, +full-rigged ship, with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit +snugging the canvas. And who is so true a lover of the sea as one +who can suffer the ultimate indignities—and love her still! I +am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy Hook....</p> +<p>At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The <i>Alvina</i> +was not there. One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone +to sea. I was duly taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for +nothing? Then another came to my aid. "There she is, up in the +bight," he said. I followed his gesture, and saw her—a long, +slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel with a graceful rake; the +Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places on her shining side. +I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman wanted three +dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was +interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get +into trouble with "39"—"39" being a United States destroyer +lying in the Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering +we compromised on a dollar and a quarter.</p> +<p>That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's +reader! Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water +of a "bight"—surrounded by ships and the men who sail +them—I might almost have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long +Island commuters are nurtured to a tough and perilous his, and I +clambered the <i>Alvina's</i> side without dropping hat, stick, or +any of my pocketful of manuscripts.</p> +<p>Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He +introduced me to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, +and the "second." The first officer was too heavy with liquor to +notice the arrival of a stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those +<i>Dioscuri</i> of seamen, had been at work. The skipper was +ashore. He owns a saloon.</p> +<p>The <i>Alvina</i> is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they +told me, and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany +throughout; the staterooms all have brass double beds and private +bathrooms attached; she has her own wireless telegraph and +telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything to make the +owner and his guests comfortable. But her beautiful furnishings +were tumbled this way and that in preparation for the sterner +duties that lay before her. The lower deck was cumbered with sacks +of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in January is likely to +be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons.</p> +<p>I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical +Dutch lad—round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue +eyes. He showed me all his treasures—his certificates of good +conduct from all the ships (both sail and steam) on which he has +served; a picture of his mother, who died when he was six; and of +his sister Greta—a very pretty girl—who is also +mentioned in <i>Casuals of the Sea.</i> The drunken fireman in the +story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the +same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet +of letters from Mr. McFee.</p> +<p>I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to +this Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they +were. Tommy is one of his own "casuals"—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>—those frail craft upon the +restless Sea</i><br></span> <span><i>Of Human Life, who strike the +rocks uncharted,</i><br></span> <span><i>Who loom, sad phantoms, +near us, drearily,</i><br></span> <span><i>Storm-driven, +rudderless, with timbers started—</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of +chance are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your +money; put it in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, +libraries, and art galleries; get to know something about this +great America if you intend to settle down there—that is the +kind of word Tommy gets from his friend.</p> +<p>Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the +laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book +is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, +strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In +Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when +we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange +barren life of the sea where men float about for years like +driftwood. And out of all this ebbing tide of aimless, +happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy from +Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common +sense.</p> +<p>When I left her that afternoon, the <i>Alvina</i> was getting up +steam, and she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked +with her crew, and for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and +thoughts of the simple, childlike men who live on ships. I realized +for the first time the truth of that background of aimless hazard +that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a book of more than passing +merit.</p> +<p>As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew +it not. When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found +him a job in the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to +work oiling the dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine +chance to work his way up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton +correspondence course on steam engineering and enchanted his +Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. That lasted just two weeks. +The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. The last I heard he was +on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound.</p> +<p>But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in +his heart his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer +has put him in a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most +honest novels of our day, you will find him—a casual of the +sea!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_LAST_PIPE' id="THE_LAST_PIPE"></a><br> +<h2>THE LAST PIPE</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a +clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most +polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe +every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his +back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly +inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced +by the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the +purpose of emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to +bed.</p> +<p>—LEIGH HUNT.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all +differ in value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank +heaven, no law of diminishing returns. I may puff all day long +until I nigresce with the fumes and soot, but the joy loses no +savour by repetition. It is true that there is a peculiar blithe +rich taste in the first morning puffs, inhaled after breakfast. +(Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a morning pipe as I +know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread in a chamber +of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if +possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a +lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted +butter, and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a +platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point +where softness is overlaid with the faintest crepitation of +crackle, of crispyness. If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much +the better. And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also with brown sugar. +It must be permissible to call for a second serving of the +scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, let there be a +round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a sprinkle of +mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of breakfast they +used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the invention of +innkeepers with their crass formulae.</p> +<p>After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of +plain turf, mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime +trees for sober pacing: then and there is the fit time and place +for the first pipe of the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press +it lovingly down with the cushion of the thumb; see that the +draught is free—and then for your <i>säckerhets +tändstickor!</i> A day so begun is well begun, and sin will +flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and +tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the +fume; the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill +your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists +and twirls. The first pipe!</p> +<p>But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the +after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow +in mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of +pure sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain +quickens, begins to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to +welcome problems for thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. +As the smoke drifts and shreds about your neb, your mind is +surcharged with that imponderable energy of thought, which cannot +be seen or measured, yet is the most potent force in existence. All +the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred the growing leaf in its +odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing dottel in your +briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down the stem. +The most precious things in the world are also vivid with +poison.</p> +<p>Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he +have written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid +of science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his +indigestion and snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous +use of the weed makes the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less +irksome to forgers, second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, +who had little enough truck with churchmen, was once invited to +stay a week-end by the Bishop of London. Distrusting the +entertaining qualities of bishops, and rightly, his first impulse +was to decline. But before answering the Bishop's letter he passed +it to his manservant for advice. The latter (the immortal Alfred +Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in the fold of the +paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and hugely enjoyed +himself.</p> +<p>There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information +for all acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom +upon the art and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social +History of Smoking," by G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John +Marshall (he lives somewhere in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it +from me, and obstinately declines to return it. If he should ever +see this, may his heart be loosened and relent. Dear John, I wish +you would return that book. (<i>Canadian journals please +copy!</i>)</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically +with the weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of +course the incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his +tongue and grows callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For +that reason it is best not to smoke during office hours. This may +be a hard saying to some, but a proper respect for the art impels +it. Not even the highest ecclesiast can be at his devotions always. +It is not those who are horny with genuflection who are nearest the +Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak in all reverence) must play +billiards or trip a coranto now and then!</p> +<p>This is the schedule I vouch for:</p> +<p>After breakfast: 2 pipes</p> +<p>At luncheon: 2 pipes</p> +<p>Before dinner: 2 pipes</p> +<p>Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes</p> +<p>(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.)</p> +<p>The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If +your meal is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane +energies from the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell +a plethora of food into subjection and assimilation, there is no +power of speculation left in the top storeys. You sink brutishly +into an armchair, warm your legs at the fire, and let the +leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such times smoking +becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes +automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your +eyes see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous +currents, or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are +down below hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into +submission the alien and distracting mass of food that you have +taken on board. They are like stevedores, stowing the cargo for +portability. A little later, however, when this excellent work is +accomplished, the bosun may trill his whistle, and the deck hands +can be summoned back to the navigating bridge. The mind casts off +its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. You begin once more to +live as a rational composition of reason, emotion, and will. The +heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this desirable state. Let it +then be said that light dining is best: a little fish or cutlets, +white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. Such a +régime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for +a continuance of intellect.</p> +<p>Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the +choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly +conducted by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those +who are in pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a +sovereign consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it +calms the fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any +ginseng in the herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did +Stevenson exhort virgins not to marry men who do not smoke.</p> +<p>Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into +the art and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of +all before the so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the +body succumbs to weariness.</p> +<p>No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory +definition of <i>living</i>. An alternating systole and diastole, +says physiology. Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These +stir me not. I define life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: +recurring periods of consciousness in which the enjoyability of +smoking is manifest, interrupted by intervals of recuperation.</p> +<p>Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the +co-ordinates being Time and the +Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve ascends from +its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the +recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode +of saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at +night. It is the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. +The sweetest pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the +<i>Hesperus</i> was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed +by the poet on that angry reef.</p> +<p>The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just +before "my eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your +primary school poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations +of the day, after piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or +<i>schreibmaschine</i> for some hours, a drowsy languor begins to +numb the sense. In dressing gown and slippers I seek my couch; Ho, +Lucius, a taper! and some solid, invigorating book for +consideration. My favourite is the General Catalogue of the Oxford +University Press: a work so excellently full of learning; printed +and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a repository or +Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, that it +sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland for +the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by +which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as +that afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and +sober research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous +précis of the works of the human spirit. And here and there, +buried in a scholarly paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE +OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY: by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, +offered at an insignificant price, relieves English scholarship of +the necessity of recourse to the lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do +even professors and privat-docents belabour one another!</p> +<p>With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, +to be smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand +brain-murdering interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air +drawn through the glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With +reposeful heart I turn to some favourite entry in my well-loved +catalogue.</p> +<p>"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in +the most necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or +Body, that may be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is +annexed a Description of the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched +Field, eight severall wayes, with the Art of Limming and other +Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from the edition of 1634; first +edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv ++ 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. <i>At the Clarendon +Press</i>."</p> +<p>Or this:</p> +<p>"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends +pleasure. Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. +1906. Pp xviii + 104. 5s. net."</p> +<p>O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an +introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving +his Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler +of the catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride +"strongly bound in exceptionally tough paper and more than once +described by reviewers as leather. Some of the books are here +printed for the first time, the rest are reproductions of the +original editions, many having prefaces by good hands."</p> +<p>One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my +pipe and curiosity are now both going strong.</p> +<p>"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing +Mortalitie incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. +1598. The earliest English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. +6d. net."</p> +<p>Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial +enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys +of this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown +delights of "Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's +Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the +"Backbite of Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt +sive Veterum Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum +Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865. Two volumes £6 6s. net" or +"Shuckford's Sacred and Profane History of the World, from the +Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at +the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declension of The Kingdom of +Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the +Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp 550. 10s. +net."</p> +<p>But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat +is another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite +tobaccos are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy +and excellent poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I +delight to honour, the editor made me substitute fictitious names +for my dearly loved blends. He said that sound editorial policy +forbids mentioning commercial products in the text of the +magazine.</p> +<p>But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." +Let us call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony:</p> +<p>"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be +a lone man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a +sad man's cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, +sir; while for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling +of the stomach, there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of +heaven."</p> +<p>And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear +General Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the +pillow; gently and kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow +out the flame. The window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see +a glimpse of stars ... a distant chime ... and fall asleep with the +faint pungence of the Indian herb about me.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE' id= +"TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE"></a><br> +<h2>TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE</h2> +<br> +<p>The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and +Mrs. Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until +Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires +courage.</p> +<p>Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab +commutes by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by +elephant, the African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to +tow him to the office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a +tough and tempered soul, inured to privation and calamity. At +seven-thirty in the morning he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, +palace, or kraal, and tells his wife he is going to work.</p> +<p>How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. +and Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And +hoping that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the +furnace until the last touchdown had been made.</p> +<p>But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new +cook, had begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda +came from the West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the +sophistries of the employment agencies. She could boil an egg +without cracking it, she could open a tin can without maiming +herself. She was neat, guileless, and cheerful. But, she was +accustomed to a warm climate.</p> +<p>The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at +dinner, Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about +how chilly the evenings were growing. But across the table came one +of those glances familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion +distorted, vibrant with rebuke, charged with the lightning of +instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze struck him dumb with +alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze!</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich +in calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully +what Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of +coal bills danced in his mind.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and +Mrs. Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily +engaged in washing the dishes.</p> +<p>"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't +you better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last +few days Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She +comes from Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. +She said she couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've +given her my old fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One +other remark like that of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's +sake, Bob, use your skull!"</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating +wisdom of women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply.</p> +<p>Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility.</p> +<p>"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected +by chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the +thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If +you must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. +Otherwise we'll have to start the furnace at once."</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the +simple-minded race of husbands.</p> +<p>"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now +on. Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance +remark!"</p> +<p>The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, +Mr. Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for +hot soup," he said. "All the men at the office were talking about +the unseasonable hot weather. I think we'd better have a window +open." To Mrs. Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room +windows, admitting a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she +was game, and presently called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda +was in the room they talked pointedly of the heat, and Mr. +Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau notes from the evening +paper.</p> +<p>After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force +of habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just +as he was setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other +wistfully, for the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. +Blackwell manfully took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his +shirtsleeves until Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless +and lit a roaring fire, by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt +the fire before retiring, so that Belinda might suspect nothing in +the morning.</p> +<p>The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm +Beach suit. Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They +both sneezed vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town +to-day, I think I caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell.</p> +<p>Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer +with a puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the +attic. But the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. +Blackwell explained that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had +promised to carry on a similar psychological campaign. Belinda and +Mrs. Chester's cook, Tulip—jocularly known as the Black +Tulip—were friends, and would undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. +Chester had agreed not to start her furnace without consultation +with Mrs. Blackwell.</p> +<p>October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather +remained sunny, but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an +oil-stove for her attic bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more +complaints of the cold, but sometimes she and her husband could +hear uneasy creakings upstairs late at night. "I wonder if Barbados +really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm sure it can't be warmer +than Belinda's room. She never opens the windows, and the oil-stove +has to be filled every morning."</p> +<p>"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. +Blackwell drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for +dinner, but underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in +psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train +less fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, +referred to him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and +Mrs. Chester came to dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men +loudly clamoured for permission to remove their coats, and sat with +blanched and chattering jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence +at mopping his brow, but when the dessert proved to be ice-cream +his nerve forsook him. "N-no, Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for +ice-cream to-night. I don't w—want to get chilled. Bring me +some hot coffee." As she brought his cup he noticed that her honest +brown brow was beaded with perspiration. "By George," he thought, +"this mental suggestion business certainly works." Late that +evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze in an +ulster.</p> +<p>The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he +met the doctor in the hall.</p> +<p>"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?"</p> +<p>"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. +"It's the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here +it is the 17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has +all the symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='MY_FRIEND' id="MY_FRIEND"></a><br> +<h2>MY FRIEND</h2> +<br> +<p>To-day we called each other by our given names for the first +time.</p> +<p>Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps +it will not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There +are not many of his kind.</p> +<p>In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed +that many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the +sorry leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no +Bellocs. I look to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, +to Clayton Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to remedy +this. If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but +not yet properly corpulent.</p> +<p>My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in +these parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of +trivial things, but it would be impossible for him not to write +with beauty and distinction far above his theme. His style is a +perfect echo of his person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To +plunder a phrase of his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the +scents, the colours, of great literature.</p> +<p>I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and +try to bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But +what I love (I use this great word with care) in my friend is that +his zeal for beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh +utterly the paltry considerations of expediency and comfort which +sway most of us. To him his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the +surgeon. He would rather die than dishonour that chosen +instrument.</p> +<p>I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has +taken in my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of +his personal situation. I see in him personified the rising +generation of literary critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a +deliterated democracy. By some unknowable miracle of birth or +training he has come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is +fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slipshod and +insincere.</p> +<p>Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of +his daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to +exploit what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of +quibbling ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, +because more than comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more +than wife or fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. +"I cannot write a publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to +me, "because I am convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not +interested in selling books: what I have to do with is that strange +and esoteric thing called literature."</p> +<p>I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this +devotion to high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to +work with. He is unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in +absent-minded simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only +half-clad, and been haled back to his boudoir by indignant +bluecoats; but in all matters where absolute devotion to truth and +honour are concerned I would not find him lacking. Wherever a love +of beauty and a ripened judgment of men and books are a business +asset, he is a successful business man.</p> +<p>In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His +shyly wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant +devotion to cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on +topics that confound the unlettered—these are amiable trifles +that endear him to those who understand.</p> +<p>Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of +comfort and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in +resounding English, and to spread a little wider his love of the +niceties of fine prose.</p> +<p>I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a +weak spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite +couplet;</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>And the men who were boys when I was a +boy</i><br></span> <span><i>Shall sit and drink with +me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Indeed let us hope that they will.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS' id="A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS"></a><br> +<h2>A POET OF SAD VIGILS</h2> +<br> +<p>There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. +Unquestionably the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of +tea, plenty of tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if +the adorable Miss Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps +would be the literary remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young +man who was a contemporary of hers.</p> +<p>I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his +beautiful hymn "The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of +Henry Kirke White? But on the drawing-room tables of our +grandmothers' girlhood the plump volume, edited with a fulsome +memoir by Southey, held honourable place near the conch shell from +the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal Palace. Mr. Southey, +in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of several young +versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's remains to +the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire that +would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was +the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! +Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even +Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis +is a parlous sport.</p> +<p>The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, +Jane Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves +us little time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. +His verses are grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of +biliousness and overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when +the word female was still used as a substantive. But they are +highly entertaining to read because they so faithfully mirror the +backwash of romanticism. They are so thoroughly unhealthy, so +morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so indentured by the ayenbite of +inwit, that it is hard to believe that Henry's father was a butcher +and should presumably have reared him on plenty of sound beefsteak +and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or Dr. Anna Howard Shaw +could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived to write poems +on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter of fact, he +was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's College, +Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a +poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and +honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight +hours. As Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is +honourable to him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for +heaven should so soon have been removed from the world.</p> +<p>He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman +parents; his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From +his earliest years he was studious in temper, and could with +difficulty be drawn from his books, even at mealtimes. At the age +of seven he wrote a story of a Swiss emigrant and gave it to the +servant, being too bashful to show it to his mother. Southey's +comment on this is "The consciousness of genius is always +accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary +feeling."</p> +<p>His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's +time was employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and +rumps to the prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made +an effort to start him in line for business by placing him in a +stocking factory. The work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly +afterward he was employed in the office of a busy firm of lawyers. +He spent twelve hours a day in the office and then an hour more in +the evening was put upon Latin and Greek. Even such recreation +hours as the miserable youth found were dismally employed in +declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little garret at the +top of the house he began to collect his books; even his supper of +bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to eat +with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a +deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal +ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The +Wealth of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held +him, there were some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest +indictment of overstudy that I know. No one, after reading +Southey's memoir, will overload his brain again.</p> +<p>At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older +brother Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend +above one hour at this amusement [novel reading]. I have been +obliged to enter into this resolution in consequence of a vitiated +taste acquired by reading romances." He is human enough to add, +however, that "after long and fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' +or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson Crusoe' afford a pleasing and +necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' I shall observe that it +is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the English +language."</p> +<p>The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was +living in London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. +Henry permitted himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial +instincts for the benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem +to have carried on a mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville +was inclined to belittle the divine calling of poets in their +teens; while Henry deplored his brother's unwillingness to write at +length and upon serious and "instructive" topics. Alas, the +ill-starred young man had a mania for self-improvement. If our +great-grandparents were all like that what an age it had been for +the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is requisite to make +one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, <i>sound +sense</i>." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural +abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, +"but it is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the +trouble of writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any +art, however trivial, that did not require some application at +first." He begs the astounded Neville to fill his letters with his +opinions of the books he reads. "You have no idea how beneficial +this would be to yourself." Does one not know immediately that +Henry is destined to an early grave?</p> +<p>Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of +prizes won in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of +twelve-inch globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions +to the <i>Monthly Mirror</i>. He was also admitted a member of a +famous literary society then existing in Nottingham, and although +the youngest of the sodality he promptly announced that he proposed +to deliver them a lecture. With mingled curiosity and dismay the +gathering assembled at the appointed time, and the inspired youth +harangued them for two hours on the subject of Genius. The devil, +or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for destruction.</p> +<p>In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He +published a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as +Consumption, Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the +Night Previous to Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave +of His Mistress, The Eve of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female +Lunatic to a Lady, had been warmly welcomed by the politest +magazines of the time. To wish to publish them in more permanent +form was natural; but the unfortunate young man conceived the +thought that the venture might even be a profitable one. He had +found himself troubled with deafness, which threatened to annul his +industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was canting seriously +toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college career and +then the church were lively in his mind.</p> +<p>The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his +manuscript for the printer. Probably never before or since, until +the Rev. John Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about +garnering his collected works into that volume which is the delight +of the wicked, has a human heart mulled over indifferent verses +with so honest a pleasure and such unabated certainty of +immortality. The first two details to be attended to were the +printing of what were modestly termed <i>Proposals</i>—i.e., +advertisements of the projected volume, calling for pledges of +subscription—and, still more important, securing the +permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the +book. The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the +sere and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a +volume if it might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. +Accordingly the manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, +the philistine brother, was called upon to leave it at the +residence of the Duchess of Devonshire. A very humble letter from +honest Henry accompanied it, begging leave of her Grace to dedicate +his "trifling effusions" to her.</p> +<p>Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are +very entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such +circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would +be sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already +got twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready:</p> +<p>"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at +all, among my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit +nor draw the conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got +abroad, and has been received more favourably than I expected."</p> +<p>But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind +the poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her +Grace of Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so +feelingly calls a weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon +the postman's heels, but no word arrived from the duchess. She was +known to be assaulted from all sides by such applications: indeed +her mail seems to have been very nearly as large as that of Mary +Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his unspeakable anxiety, the +miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all parcels sent to the +duchess, unless marked with a password known only to her particular +correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter to be +reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried Henry +in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits +to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. +Finally, after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he +succeeded. Even then undaunted, this long-suffering older brother +made one more try in the poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of +introduction to the duchess, and called on her in person, wisely +leaving the manuscript at home; and with the complaisance of the +great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's modest request. Her +name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the little volume, +and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy reached her. +Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises that +"Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it +is probable that she never opened the book."</p> +<p>"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in +1803.</p> +<p>It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more +seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to +see what Henry's reading had been—Milton, Collins, and Gray, +evidently. His unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great +credit, as showing how thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It +seeped into his mind and became part of his own outpourings. <i>Il +Penseroso</i> gushes to the surface of poor Henry's song every few +lines; precious twigs and shreds of Milton flow merrily down the +current of his thought. And yet smile as we may, every now and then +friend Henry puts something over. One of his poems is a curious +foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. Every now and +then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful vapours +were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his +quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from +his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary +information, but in the more active business of life, must not be +expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of +a Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace."</p> +<p>The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows +found an unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little +book came home from the printer he was prostrated to find several +misprints. He nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully +corrected all the copies. After writing earnest and very polite +letters to all the reviewers he dispatched copies to the leading +periodicals, and sat down in the sure hope of rapid fame. How +bitter was his chagrin when the <i>Monthly Review</i> for February, +1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: in particular the +critic took umbrage at his having put <i>boy</i> to rhyme with +<i>sky</i>, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college +course, "If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, +doubtless, produce better sense and better rhymes."</p> +<p>The review was by no means unjust: it said what any +disinterested opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's +ambitions were excellent, but that neither he, nor indeed any +two-footed singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seventeen. +But Henry's sensitive soul had been so inflated by the honest pride +of his friends that he could only see gross and callous malignity +and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his health, his +peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, however +(as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review +that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance +aroused Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise +himself above his level in the world and it was the laureate who +after Henry's death edited his letters and literary remains, and +gave him to us as we have him. Southey tells us that after the +young man's death he and Coleridge looked over his papers with +great emotion, and were amazed at the fervour of his industry and +ambition.</p> +<p>Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly +linger. The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong +fascination for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he +himself always felt that he had not a long span before him. +Hindered by deafness, threatened with consumption, and a deadlier +enemy yet—epilepsy—his frail and uneasy spirit had full +right to distrust its tenement. The summer of 1804 he spent partly +at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where he took +lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday to +recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He +had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the +university, and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do +well at the law. Night after night he would read till two or three +in the morning, lie down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again +to work at five or six. His mother, who was living with him in his +retreat, used to go upstairs to put out his candle and see that he +went to bed; but Henry, so docile in other matters, in this was +unconquerable. When he heard his mother's step on the stair he +would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but after she had +retired he would light it again and resume his reading. Perhaps the +best things he wrote were composed in this period of extreme +depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his sonnets, +breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very +touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the +cliché and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his +midnight musings at their highest pitch:—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO CONSUMPTION</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Gently, most gently, on thy victim's +head,</i><br></span> <span><i>Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me +decay,</i><br></span> <span><i>Like the expiring lamp, unseen, +away,</i><br></span> <span><i>And softly go to slumber with the +dead.</i><br></span> <span><i>And if 'tis true what holy men have +said,</i><br></span> <span><i>That strains angelic oft foretell the +day</i><br></span> <span><i>Of death, to those good men who fall +thy prey,</i><br></span> <span><i>O let the aerial music round my +bed,</i><br></span> <span><i>Dissolving sad in dying +symphony,</i><br></span> <span><i>Whisper the solemn warning in +mine ear;</i><br></span> <span><i>That I may bid my weeping friends +good-bye,</i><br></span> <span><i>Ere I depart upon my journey +drear:</i><br></span> <span><i>And smiling faintly on the painful +past,</i><br></span> <span><i>Compose my decent head, and breathe +my last.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy +at Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, +and near his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream +he would sit for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the +trees on summer nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the +lightning, and heedless of drenched and muddy clothes.</p> +<p>Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to +college after all; and by the generosity of a number of friends +(including Neville who promised twenty pounds annually) he was able +to enter himself for St. John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn +he left his legal employers, who were very sorry to lose him, and +took up quarters with a clergyman in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) +under whom he pursued his studies for a year, to prepare himself +thoroughly for college. His letters during this period are mostly +of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while boating on +the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. He +had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The +proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and +sisters weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this +topic.</p> +<p>In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at +St. John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic +home of two very different undergraduates—William Wordsworth +and Samuel Butler. His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the +cloisters, and overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters +give us a pleasant picture of his quiet rambles through the town, +his solitary cups of tea as he sat by the fire, and his +disappointment in not being able to hear his lecturers on account +of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one at all familiar with +the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is his account of the +thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the bed, cares for +the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). Poor Henry's +tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the traditional +way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for his +coal bin.</p> +<p>But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the +haven of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill +health, his tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship +examination in December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded +physical inability, they dosed him with "strong medicines" to +enable him to face the examiners. After the ordeal he was so +unstrung that he hurried off to London to spend Christmas with his +aunt.</p> +<p>The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors +were, according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as +far as possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense +enough to restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he +was always at work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, +or what not. In a memorandum found in his desk his life was thus +planned: "Rise at half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. +Chapel and breakfast till eight. Study and lectures till one. Four +and a half clear reading. Walk and dinner, and chapel to six. Six +to nine reading. Nine to ten, devotions. Bed at ten."</p> +<p>In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of +his year, and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him +the unusual compliment of keeping him in college through the +vacation with a special mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with +him, mathematics being considered his weakness. As his only chance +of health lay in complete rest during the holiday, this plan of +spending the summer in study was simply a death sentence. In July, +while at work on logarithm tables, he was overtaken by a sudden +fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic nature. The malady gained +strength, aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and he died +on October 19, 1806.</p> +<p>Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. +His letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn +speculation. Perhaps once a twelve-month he displays a sad little +vein of pleasantry, but not for long. Probably the light-hearted +undergraduates about him found him a very prosy, shabby, and +mournful young man, but if one may judge by the outburst of +tributary verses published after his death he was universally +admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation from a +tribute paid him by a lady versifier:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>If worth, if genius, to the world are +dear,</i><br></span> <span><i>To Henry's shade devote no common +tear.</i><br></span> <span><i>His worth on no precarious tenure +hung,</i><br></span> <span><i>From genuine piety his virtues +sprung:</i><br></span> <span><i>If pure benevolence, if steady +sense,</i><br></span> <span><i>Can to the feeling heart delight +dispense;</i><br></span> <span><i>If all the highest efforts of the +mind,</i><br></span> <span><i>Exalted, noble, elegant, +refined,</i><br></span> <span><i>Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt +regret,</i><br></span> <span><i>Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful +debt!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TRIVIA' id="TRIVIA"></a><br> +<h2>TRIVIA</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, +clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.</p> +<p>—HOBBES, <i>Leviathan</i>, Chap. VIII.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly +utilitarian civilization demands that a man of forty should be +rearing a family, should go to an office five times a week, and +pretend an interest in the World's Series. It is unthinkable to us +that there should be men of mature years who do not know the +relative batting averages of the Red Sox and the Pirates. The +intellectual and strolling male of from thirty-five to fifty-five +years (which is what one means by bachelor) must either marry and +settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to Europe or the +MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay please +notice.</p> +<p>The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled +the shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the +bonbonniverous sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without +ruth.</p> +<p>But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent +middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and +crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful +born bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan +Pearsall Smith.</p> +<p>Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But +that most amiable of cities does not encourage detached and +meditative bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known +as "a guarded education in morals and manners" at Haverford +College, our hero passed to Harvard, and thence by a swifter +decline to Oxford. Literature and liberalism became his pursuits; +on the one hand, he found himself engrossed in the task of proving +to the British electorate that England need not always remain the +same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir Henry Wotton, a volume +of very graceful and beautiful short stories about Oxford ("The +Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on the history and +habits of the English language.</p> +<p>But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his +mental humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by +incomprehensible twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, +leading the life of the typical English bachelor, equipped with +gladstone bag, shaving kit, evening clothes and tweeds; passing +from country house to London club, from Oxford common room to +Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the cultivated classes now +and then burst upon him in its truly comic aspect. The tinder and +steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, ignited a shower +of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with irreverent +laughter in some lonely railway carriage.</p> +<p>Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he +succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then +the spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the +gravity of the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and +sanctuaries lie open to the scourge. Menaced by serious +intellectual disorders unless he were to give vent to these +disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set them down under the +title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched by the +spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which +presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, +whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of +a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve +a decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately +intellectual brainslide of our generation.</p> +<p>This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. +Smith is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated +social life, tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by +an aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes +to us trailing clouds of glory from the heaven of pure and +unfettered speculation which is our home. He is an elf of utter +simplicity and infinite candour. He is a flicker of absolute Mind. +His little book is as precious and as disturbing as devilled +crabs.</p> +<p>Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver +from mind to mind, leaping—a shy and shining spark—from +brain to brain! I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these +ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow +nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these +pointed sparklers of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! +Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, +merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of +dispelling the charm—all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus +Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old +time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy +elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given +scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences—the +mind of a strolling bachelor.</p> +<p>Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought +of all hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare +us away. "These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear +Reader, by a Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the +Animal Kingdom which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue +and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee."</p> +<p>But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last +despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. +And his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his +sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, +"I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows +and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great +Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom +in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants +and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against +the platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can +hardly post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the +excellence and accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles +himself, good man, with the thought of the meaningless creation +crashing blindly through frozen space. His other great consolation +is his dear vice of reading—"This joy not dulled by Age, this +polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long +intoxication."</p> +<p>It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just +figment of the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, +cathartic little volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a +radiant, dancing spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we +catch, now and then, a flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy +within, shy, sudden, and defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English +lawns we follow that gracious figure, down dusky London streets +where he is peering in at windows and laughing incommunicable +jests.</p> +<p>But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming +pans and the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again +will he tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes +about Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the +Toonerville Trolley and the Prince Albert ads—these mean +nothing to him. He will never compile an anthology of New York +theatrical notices: "The play that makes the dimples to catch the +tears." Careful and adroit propaganda, begun twenty years ago by +the Department of State, might have won him back, but now it is +impossible to repatriate him. The exquisite humours of our American +life are faded from his mind. He has gone across the great divide +that separates a subway from an underground and an elevator from a +lift. I wonder does he ever mourn the scrapple and buckwheat cakes +that were his birthright?</p> +<p>Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" +describes a famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he +and Pearsall Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two +gentlemen who are now Master of Balliol and British Minister of +Education. The Balliol don attributed the British defeat in this +international tourney to the fact that his tennis shoes (shall we +say his "sneakers?") came to grief and he had to play the crucial +games in stocking feet. But though Major Putnam and his young ally +won the set of <i>patters</i> (let us use the Wykehamist word), the +Major allowed the other side to gain a far more serious victory. +They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him in England +until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was badly +done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now we +shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a +lift, and he will never write an American "Trivia."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='PREFACES' id="PREFACES"></a><br> +<h2>PREFACES</h2> +<br> +<p>It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function +of authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant +than dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all +the dreary months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to +the intentions of the book; allusions to the unexpected +difficulties encountered during composition; neatly phrased +gratitude to eminent friends who have given gracious assistance; +and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth who has done +the indexing—one of the trials of the wives of literary men +not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that +topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition +should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely +touch at the end.</p> +<p>How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil +is over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, +after the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. +Or it may be a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without +a preface. Better a preface without a book....</p> +<p>Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have +written prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of +the subtlest pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet +written; but the prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me +show you the sort of thing I mean.</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL"</p> +<p>How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in +the dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a +book one brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent—there +came a rush up the stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his +voice, and hurried to open. Poor, dear fellow, he was just back +from tennis; I never saw him look so glorious. Tall and +thin—he was always very thin, <i>see</i> p. 219 and +<i>passim</i>—with his long, brown face and sparkling black +eyes—I can see him still rambling about the room in his +flannels, his curly hair damp on his forehead. "Buzzard," he +said—he always called me Buzzard—"guess what's +happened?"</p> +<p>"In love again?" I asked.</p> +<p>He laughed. A bright, golden laugh—I can hear it still. +His laughter was always infectious.</p> +<p>"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've +won the Sylvanus Stall fellowship."</p> +<p>I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the +college garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of +Canadian girls deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant +for me. I, too, in my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the +prize, but without telling him. Must I confess it? I had never +dared mention the subject for fear he, too, would compete. I knew +that if he did he was sure to win. O petty jealousies, that seem so +bitter now!</p> +<p>"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't +congratulated!"</p> +<p>I pulled myself together.</p> +<p>"Brindle," I said—I always called him Brindle; how sad the +nickname sounds now—"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm +overjoyed."</p> +<p>It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never +saw him again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset +from the Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for +the week before commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my +health. I never came back to New York; and he remained there. But I +followed his career with the closest attention. Every newspaper +cutting, every magazine article in which his name was mentioned, +went into my scrapbook. And almost every week for twenty years he +wrote to me—those long, radiant letters, so full of +<i>verve</i> and <i>élan</i> and ringing, ruthless wit. +There was always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to +be born a Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman +instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of +Montmartre! Stead of which I have the mess of pottage—stodgy, +porridgy Scots pottage" (<i>see</i> p. 189).</p> +<p>He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when +in a pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles +of Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. +"Oh, for the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, +marrowy soul-ache of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of +tragedy. Tragedy springs from it, tall and white and stately like +the lily from the dung. I will never be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of +Arbroath!"</p> +<p>All the world knows how he died....</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK</p> +<p>(In six volumes)</p> +<p>The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at +length finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened +only by those small bickerings over <i>minutiæ</i> so dear to +all scrupulous writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize +for a few moments on the functions of the historian.</p> +<p>There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite +apart from the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, +I might add, has been singularly neglected by modern historians. My +old friend, Professor Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent +in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this +ground. I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of +preliminary calm—what Hobbes calls "the unprejudicated mind." +But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with +the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, has observed +this.</p> +<p>Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to +my very good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned +seat of learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply +was witty—too witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he +said.</p> +<p>I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this +regard; but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that +most dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a +maxim that contemporary history cannot be judicially written.</p> +<p>Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the +controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge—of the +Sorbonne—in the matter of Lamartine's account of the +elections to the Constituent Assembly of 1848, will remark several +hitherto unobserved errors in Lamartine which I have been +privileged to point out. For instance, Lamartine (who is supported +<i>in toto</i> by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the elections took +place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am able to +demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew +Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. +Rougegorge's assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests +upon a humorous misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The +matter may be looked up by the curious in Annette User's +"Années avec les Lamartines." Oser was for many years the +cook in Lamartine's household, and says some illuminating things +regarding L.'s dislike of onions.)</p> +<p>It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually +the generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so +many scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names +would be like Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an +ungracious mode of returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to +mention Professor Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, <i>optimus +maximus</i> among modern historians. Of him I may say, in the fine +words of Virgil, "Sedet aeternumque sedebit."</p> +<p>My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my +Slavic orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. +To her, and to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often +penetrated to my study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the +whole. <i>89, Decameron Gardens.</i></p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS</p> +<p>This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title +"Rari Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have +chosen from my published works those poems which seemed to me most +faithfully to express my artistic message; and the title obviously +implies that I think them the ones most likely to weather the +maëlstroms of Time. Be that as it may.</p> +<p>Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port +(one glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of +the Muse to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to +dwell on the robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that +I could agree; but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down +to menial taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes +or Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. +Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, +the noise and rushings of winds—and what avails? +<i>Parturiunt montes</i> ...you know the rest. The ridiculous mice +squeak and scamper on the granary floor. They may play undisturbed, +for the real poets, those great gray felines, are sifting loam +under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the Poetry Society see them +not.</p> +<p>It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel +and I sail to-morrow for Nova Zembla.</p> +<p><i>The Grotto, Yonkers.</i></p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION</p> +<p>A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have +added three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. +Also the "Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, +at his express request. The success of the first edition has been +very gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to +<i>Bleak House, Nova Zembla</i>.</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION</p> +<p>The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to +production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include +several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice +Floe," and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have +been able to convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova +Zembla <i>locale</i> the praise is due to my friendly and +suggestive critic, the editor of <i>Gooseflesh</i>, the leading +Nova Zemblan review.</p> +<p>Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, +therefore I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode +to the Gulf Stream," which has great promise.</p> +<p>The success of this little book has been such that I am +encouraged to hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will +soon be worked off.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_SKIPPER' id="THE_SKIPPER"></a><br> +<h2>THE SKIPPER</h2> +<br> +<p>I have been reading again that most delightful of all +autobiographies, "A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. +Conrad's mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by years of +vigorous life and sober thinking, that it pushes tendrils of +radiant speculation into every crevice of the structure upon which +it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much to be desired +and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the trellis +growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the +delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or +Virginia creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on +itself, branching unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and +repeatedly enchanting us with some delicate criss-cross of mental +fibres. One hesitates even to suggest that there may be admirers of +Mr. Conrad who are not familiar with this picture of his +mind—may we call it one of the most remarkable minds that has +ever concerned itself with the setting of English words +horizontally in parallel lines?</p> +<p>The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on +this continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad +grows numerous indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. +Henry and the pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to +enumerate the list of those who have assured me (over the sworn +secrecy of a table d'hôte white wine) that they read the +proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in 1895, etc., etc. For my own +part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever heard of Mr. Conrad +before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one day short of +the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small club of +earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at the +Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of +R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone +asked him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt +the same passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living +whose work he thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English +literature. Sir Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, +and a sworn enemy of loose statement; let me not then pretend to +quote him exactly; but I know that the name he mentioned was that +of Joseph Conrad, and it was a new name to me.</p> +<p>Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I +read one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it +was "Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class +dining saloon of the <i>Celtic</i>, crossing from New York in +January, 1913. There was a very violent westerly gale at the +time—a famous shove, Captain Conrad would call it—and I +remember that the barometer went lower than had ever been recorded +before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon carried away, +and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an ideal +stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway +just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my +head through a window I could see excellent combers of green +sloshing down into the 'tweendecks.</p> +<p>But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be +imitated here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the +undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a +smile which is not a grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But +sometimes, when one sits at midnight by the fainting embers and +thinks that of all novelists now living one would most ardently +yearn to hear the voice and see the face of Mr. Conrad, then it is +happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" one comes as close as +typography permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself. He +tells us that he has never been very well acquainted with the art +of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set this down as +polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is Marlowe ipse, +pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and the famous +preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of his +genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, +and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who +would omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in +these informal confessions there are pieces that are destined to be +classics of autobiography as it is rarely written.</p> +<p>One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally +labelled complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as +simple as lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, +sincerity—those are the words that stand again and again +across his pages. "I have a positive horror of losing even for one +moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first +condition of good service." He has carried over to the world of +desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says that he has +been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a +hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he +sees, and that the attempt to move others to the extremities of +emotion means the surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing +one's self to be carried away beyond the bounds of normal +sensibility. Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, the decency +of the artist. This, indeed, is the creed of the simple man in +every calling; and from this angle it appears that it is the +Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are complicated and +subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the great +simplicity of life and death.</p> +<p>Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since +the synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts +as where the writer was born, and when, and the customary +demonology of boyhood and courtship and the first pay envelope, are +gloriously ignored. A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a +literary accountant, would rise from the volume nervously shattered +from an attempt to grasp what it was all about. The only person in +the book who is accorded any comprehensive biographical +résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. +Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to +Moscow, and was bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of +Lithuania. To the delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of +his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his most affectionate and tender +power of whimsical reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of +family history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me than +several volumes of historical comment. In his prose of that +superbly rich simplicity of texture—it is a commonplace that +it seems always like some notable translation from the +French—he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes +us with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him +to his uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And +to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long +chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is +waiting for dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable +tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, +telling us the whole mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, +sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever +written: true to the inner secrets of the human soul. It is the +passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the dear creations of +his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel he has +written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and +exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that +spirit of piety toward all things human which sanctions the +conceptions of a writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, +how essentially impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels +of the Slop and Glucose school!</p> +<p>This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything +that deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of +probability, this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad +from the heart of Europe was integrated into the greatest living +master of those who in our tongue strive to portray the riddles of +the human heart—such is the kind of calculus that makes "A +Personal Record" unique among textbooks of the soul. It is as +impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting out only with +the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and sensations +connected with the writing of my first book and with my first +contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing +less than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. +And the sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler +would gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and +start all over again with truer ideals for his craft, could he by +so doing have chance to meet the Skipper face to face.</p> +<p>Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been +necessary to invent him, the indescribable improbability of his +career speaks so closely to the heart of every lover of literary +truth. Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us as he himself? How +imperiously, by his own noble example, he recalls us to the service +of honourable sincerity. And how poignantly these memories of his +evoke the sigh which is not a sob, the smile which is not a +grin.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD' id= +"A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD"></a><br> +<h2>A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.</p> +<p>—EDWARD FITZGERALD.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the +Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill +equipped to do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a +duty that I take up gladly. It is not often that a young man has +the good fortune to know as a friend one who has been a crony of +his own grandfather and great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in +the case of John Loder, a man whose life was all sturdy simplicity +and generous friendship. He shines in no merely reflected light, +but in his own native nobility. I think there are a few lovers of +England and of books who will be glad not to forget his unobtrusive +services to literature. If only John Loder had kept a journal it +would be one of the minor treasures of the Victorian Age. He had a +racy, original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo that so +delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the delicacies of +rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later years that +he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell came +too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories.</p> +<p>There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the +Deben, some ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are +clustered on the hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a +massive, gray church tower and a great windmill are conspicuous +landmarks. Broad barges and shabby schooners, with ruddy and amber +sails, lie at anchor or drop down the river with the tide, bearing +the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's stories. In the old days +before the railway it was a considerable port and a town of +thriving commerce. But now—well, it is little heard of in the +annals of the world.</p> +<p>Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, +too, and her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of +Aldeburgh was apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first +poem, unhappily entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, +"the Quaker poet," a versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by +reason of his friendships with greater men. Addressed to Bernard +Barton, in a plain, neat hand, came scores of letters to Woodbridge +in the eighteen-twenties, letters now famous, which found their way +up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. They were from no less a man +than Charles Lamb. Also I have always thought it very much to +Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian named Pulham was a +fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. Perhaps Mr. Pulham +introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as birthplace and +home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors as Carlyle +and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In the +years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some +all the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to +gossip about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar +Khayyam Club of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the +grave at Boulge (please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had +been raised from seed brought from the bush that sheds its petals +over the dust of the tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge +and Ipswich celebrated the FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert +Brooke's father was (I believe) a schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas +that another of England's jewels just missed being a +Woodbridgian!</p> +<p>Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at +Liverpool Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue +locomotives of the Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester +and Ipswich and finally set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at +Woodbridge. As you step from the stuffy compartment the keen salt +Deben air will tingle in your nostrils; and you may discover in it +a faint under-whiff of strong tobacco—the undying scent of +pipes smoked on the river wall by old Fitz, and in recent years by +John Loder himself. If you have your bicycle with you, or are +content to hire one, you will find that rolling Suffolk country the +most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. (But carry a +repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is full of +memories—of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the +"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of +Suffolk blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the +four brothers who founded the great publishing house of Harper and +Brothers a century ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You +will bike to Bury St. Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our +beloved William McFee also!) and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear +the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey ringing under the waves. If you +are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out Cockfield Rectory, near +Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in 1872. (Colvin +himself came from Bealings, only two miles from Woodbridge.) You +may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. Britling; +and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's +painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln +Quay or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop +down to Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the +shingle. You will pace the river walk to Kyson—perhaps the +tide will be out and sunset tints shimmer over those glossy +stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, vivid green samphire, purple flats +of slime where the river ran a few hours before, a steel-gray +trickle of water in the scour of the channel and a group of stately +swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs of the town with +the stately church tower and the waving arms of the windmill +looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. You +may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion +for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come +from one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of +Armada that Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One +dropped a bomb—"dud" it was—in John Loder's garden; the +old man had to be restrained from running out to seize it with his +own hands.</p> +<p>John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His +grandfather, Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and +printing business, which continues to-day at the old shop on the +Thoroughfare under John Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days +before the railway came through, Woodbridge was the commercial +centre for a large section of East Suffolk; it was a busy port, and +the quays were crowded with shipping. But when transportation by +rail became swift and cheap and the provinces began to deal with +London merchants, the little town's prosperity suffered a sad +decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several generations' +standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great London +"stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its +best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers +as FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left +school at thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the +traditional printer's devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the +quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, coming down the street from +Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for forty years) with a +large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet sat perched on a +high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the work. And +at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by for a +basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at +their work.</p> +<p>Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little +Friends' burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay +the visitor's half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother +was buried there, one snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember +how old John Loder came forward to the grave, bareheaded and +leaning on his stick, to drop a bunch of fresh violets on the +coffin.</p> +<p>Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt +House—that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly +commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old +Gardens"—and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his +youth. I remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing +round his little retreat with a well-stained pipestem:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But walk'st about thine own dear +bounds,</i><br></span> <span><i>Not envying others' larger +grounds:</i><br></span> <span><i>For well thou know'st, 'tis not +th' extent</i><br></span> <span><i>Of land makes life, but sweet +content.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost +fabulous now. He had known quite well an English soldier who was on +guard over Boney at St. Helena—in fact, he once published in +some newspaper this man's observations upon the fallen emperor, but +I have not been able to trace the piece. He had been in Paris +before the troubles of '48. I believe he served some sort of +bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at any rate, he used +to be in touch with the London book trade as a young man, and made +the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's most +famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had +not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter +instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were +offered by Quaritch for a penny apiece.</p> +<p>I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner +or later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes +of the literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with +him owing to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a +beautiful portrait of herself in return for some courtesy he showed +her. Robert H. Groome, the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant +son, Francis Hindes Groome, the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk +Friends" and was said by Watts Dunton to have known far more about +the gipsies than Borrow) were among his correspondents.<a name= +'FNanchor_D_4' id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_D_4'><sup>[D]</sup></a> John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis +Wright, Canon Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt +Miller, Edward Clodd, Leon Vincent—such men as these wrote or +came to John Loder when they wanted special news about FitzGerald. +FitzGerald had given him a great many curios and personal +treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for sale at any price +(anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) but if any +one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he would give +them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old musical +scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This +scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful +engravings, prints, and drawings of the famous composers, +musicians, and operatic stars of whom Fitz was enivré as a +young man. Among them are a great many drawings of Handel; +FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an enthusiastic Handelian. The +pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there are also two drawings of +Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook was compiled by +FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in London, +visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights of +young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous +Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many +nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, +whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House."</p> +<a name='Footnote_D_4' id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_D_4'>[D]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite +tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis +Hindes Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great +deal about Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher +was eager to include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's +modesty was always as great as his generosity: he would not +consent.</p> +</div> +<p>When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, +the old man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to +keep you out of mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's +too late!" And he followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of +Lamb's letters, which Ainger had given him.</p> +<p>Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, +eager and merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when +any one came in who was qualified to discuss the literature which +interested him. He and FitzGerald had long cracks together and +perhaps Loder may have accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of +those trips down the Deben on the <i>Scandal</i> or the <i>Meum and +Tuum</i> (the <i>Mum and Tum</i> as Posh, Fitz's sailing master, +called her). He played a prominent part in the life of the town, +became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench until +he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, came +a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing +business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left +him a handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from +anxiety and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet +generosities which had always been his secret delight.</p> +<p>Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how +pale and mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I +but put him before you as he was in those last days! I used to go +up to Burkitt House to see him: in summer we would sit in the +little arbour in the garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining +room. He would talk and I would ask him questions; now and then he +would get up to pull down a book, or to lead me into his bedroom to +see some special treasure. He used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very +close to the fire, with his shoe laces untied. In summer he would +toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, with a tweed cap over one +ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well stained by much smoking, +his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as ever. Every warm +morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping over Market +Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, hailing every +child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally full of +peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. His +long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always +to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No +recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a +hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk +breed. Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a +man as the "Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced.</p> +<p>He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months +and four days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly +ninety—he went in bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his +eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps the sincerest tribute I can pay him +is these lines which I copy from my journal, dated July 16, +1913:</p> +<p>"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly +veiled Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear +old man. I think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with +me, instead of his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed +the parting guest,' he said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober +manner than his wont—and I left with an armful of books which +he had given me 'to keep me out of mischief.' We had a good talk +after tea—he told me about the adventures of his brothers, +one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most delightful +brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and wrinkling up +his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his smooth bald +pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He took me +into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some which +would be acceptable to me—'May as well give 'em away before +it's too late, ye know'—and then he settled back in his easy +chair to puff at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which +tickled me—he has such a knack for the proverbial and the +epigrammatic. 'He's cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he +said of a certain scapegrace. He chuckled over the Suffolk phrase +'a chance child,' for a bastard (alluding to one such of his +acquaintance in old days). He constantly speaks of things he wants +to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the daisies.' He told me old +tales of Woodbridge in the time of the Napoleonic wars when there +was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered here—this was one +of the regions in which an attack by Boney was greatly feared. He +says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning mist or fog) +originates from that time, as being weather suitable for the French +to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats.</p> +<p>"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand +at writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for +him who cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a +former Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard +to do him justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a +swift and painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not +linger on into a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory +and his pipe and his books begin to fail him, when those keen old +eyes grow dim and he can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the +river-wall—then may the quick and quiet ferryman take dear +old John Loder to the shadow land."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM' id= +"A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM"></a><br> +<h2>A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM</h2> +<br> +<p>I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of +calm for our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to +put some of that stuff into practice.</p> +<p>"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep +quiet of your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite +peace. You must be full of gladness and love for every person and +every tiniest thing. Great activity and worry is needless—it +is poison to the soul. Learn to reflect, and to brood upon eternal +beauty. It is the mystic who finds all that is most precious in +life. The flowers of meditation blossom in his heart." I cut out +these words and pasted them in my hat. I have always felt that my +real genius lies in the direction of philosophic calm. I determined +to override the brutal clamour of petty things.</p> +<p>The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but +lovely thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay +until eight o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see +that Professor Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to +the office. "I am brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her.</p> +<p>She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed.</p> +<p>I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will +convince you that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a +beard. I lit a cigar, and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's +inquiries.</p> +<p>At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My +employer is not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained +that I was at home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from +mystical. "Get here by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he +said.</p> +<p>I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the +senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of +gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the +world. "I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized +me by the shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting +"Another nut!"</p> +<p>When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred +papers. The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify +someone. "Here he is now," I heard her say.</p> +<p>It was Dennis & Company on the wire.</p> +<p>"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have +yesterday without fail?" said Dennis.</p> +<p>I took the 'phone.</p> +<p>"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The +matter is purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune +yourself—"</p> +<p>He rang off.</p> +<p>I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the +unclouded eye of a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these +pettifogging transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the +Cameron Stores, proofs of the weekly ad. for the <i>Fishmongers' +Journal</i>, a telegram from the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires +needed for one of the delivery trucks—how could I jeopardize +my faculty of meditation by worrying over these trifles? I leaned +back in my chair and devoted myself to meditation. After all, the +harassing domination of material things can easily be thrown off by +a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I seemed to see the +future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. My soul was +thrilled with a universal love of humanity.</p> +<p>The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted +to see me.</p> +<p>Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the +beck and call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long +perspective of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? +In this luminous new vision of my importance as a fragment of +immortal mind, could I, should I, bow to the force of impertinent +trivialities?</p> +<p>I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity.</p> +<p>By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face +convinced me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is +poison to the soul. Certainly his face was poisonous.</p> +<p>"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? +Dennis just called me up about that herring order—"</p> +<p>"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is +a strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...."</p> +<p>A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay +in my pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and +unpleasant, for the stairway from the office to the street is long +and dusty; but I recalled what Professor Tagore had said about +vicissitudes being the true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not +with me, but I remembered the creed pasted in it. After pacing a +block or so, my soul was once more tranquil.</p> +<p>I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was +crowded with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a +vacant seat in a corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon +the majestic vision of the brotherhood of man.</p> +<p>Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. +Never mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others +do is beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of +endless vistas of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for +some time, but still no corporeal and physical units of food +reached me.</p> +<p>The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. +Full of love for humanity I spoke to him.</p> +<p>"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws +nigh, will you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your +rolls and one of your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of +humanity, all that is mine is yours; and <i>per contra</i>, all +that is yours is mine." Beaming luminously upon him, I laid a +friendly hand on his arm.</p> +<p>He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for +rent!" he cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket."</p> +<p>By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and +I felt ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty +were beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded +street, walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, +three people trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a +passport to eternity. I reflected that men were perhaps not yet +ready for these doctrines of infinite peace. How much more wise +were the animals—and I raised my hand to stroke a huge +dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers in his teeth and +nipped them vigorously.</p> +<p>I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. +I burst into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and +fought, shoved, cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old +ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before they could get +theirs. I leaped into the car at the head of a flying wedge of +sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and +peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit clergyman outside, +and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the lurching, +trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the +motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?—I +was perfectly happy!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY' id="AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY"></a><br> +<h2>AN OXFORD LANDLADY</h2> +<br> +<p>It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind +was chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching +the flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet +tam-o'-shanter and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap +at the door, gentle but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.</p> +<p>If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have +not forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike +Queen Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance +featly and with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness +was the admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in +Oxford—and even in later days when she and Dr. Warren always +opened the Magdalen servants' ball together. She and the courtly +President were always the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir +Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was loosed long ago, and she +has expanded with the British Empire. Not rotund, but rather +imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, and when you +come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily has gone +off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. +Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before +the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, +very fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and +full of dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, +bold as a lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles +humorous and placable—such is our Mrs. Beesley.</p> +<p>She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching +the leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.</p> +<p>"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the +leaves 'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen +do."</p> +<p>"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers +play hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating +creature. I think her name must be Kathleen...."</p> +<p>Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that +delightful way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all +the other gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for +the young ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, +an' he was engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he +did. I thought it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit +gentleman."</p> +<p>"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I +suggested:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>"Beauty must be scorned in +none</i><br></span> <span><i>Though but truly served in +one."</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. +Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly +embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther +into the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind +her.</p> +<p>"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to +see about dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em +all." (That is her quaint way of saying that she thinks me the +leading spirit of the three who dig with her.) "How about a little +jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares there are in Cowley Road now. I +thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' +tea?"</p> +<p>The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all +the ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare +agrees with Mr. Williams," I said.</p> +<p>"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner +of the table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. +"A pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well +with the cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a +Welsh rabbit and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw +me, ''Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, +dear, 'e <i>is</i> a kind gentleman! 'E gave us a book +once—''Istory of Magdalen College,' I think he wrote it +'imself."</p> +<p>"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began +looking for a book.</p> +<p>"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for +dinner?" asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd +come if he knew."</p> +<p>"We might send him a telegram," I said.</p> +<p>"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a +fantastic thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened +this morning," she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. +But we didn't find 'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e +usually does. 'I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' +said Em'ly.</p> +<p>"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You +know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is +things—a Jesus gentleman 'e was.)</p> +<p>"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a +pawnbroker's sign mean?'</p> +<p>"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one +you never gets 'em back."</p> +<p>Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled +away chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play +hockey.</p> +<p><i>October, 1912.</i></p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='PEACOCK_PIEquot' id="PEACOCK_PIEquot"></a><br> +<h2>"PEACOCK PIE"</h2> +<br> +<p>Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which +brings a real tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which +responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar +the years is by the really good books they bring one. Each twelve +month the gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast some +shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year +that introduced me to William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and +Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remember as Rupert +Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River Anthology, if you +prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first +got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of all, in +1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la +Mare.</p> +<p>"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is +seasonable to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and +delightful of present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so +little known over here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," +was published in England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written +novels and essays, all shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle +of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in +delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic +knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."</p> +<p>I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet +more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and +fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and +haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life +where rewards and fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson +and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of +gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with +"Peacock Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clashing +crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coarsening the fibres +of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty +horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long +Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens where De la +Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie +or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil +Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not +native in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.</p> +<p>To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland +suggests perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in +the hurly burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his +rubbers in the subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is +found wandering blithely in Central Park while the Women's +Athenaeum of the Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him +to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more modern figure who might +readily (I hope I speak without offense) be mistaken for a New York +stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. +Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order of poets who do not wear +rubbers.</p> +<p>One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who +reads a book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a +collection of poems for children. But it is not that, any more than +"The Masses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before you have gone +very far you will find that the imaginary child you set out with +has been magicked into a changeling. The wee folk have been at work +and bewitched the pudding—the pie rather. The fire dies on +the hearth, the candle channels in its socket, but still you read +on. Some of the poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. +When at last you go up to bed, it will be with the shuddering sigh +of one thrilled through and through with the sad little beauties of +the world. You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the +doorstep to appease the banshee—did you not know that the +janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.</p> +<p>One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his +utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that +intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever +after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig +over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he +shaves, whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to resist the +jolly madness of its infection:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Three jolly Farmers</i><br></span> +<span><i>Once bet a pound</i><br></span> <span><i>Each dance the +others would</i><br></span> <span><i>Off the ground.</i><br></span> +<span><i>Out of their coats</i><br></span> <span><i>They slipped +right soon,</i><br></span> <span><i>And neat and +nicesome,</i><br></span> <span><i>Put each his +shoon.</i><br></span> +<span><i>One—Two—Three—</i><br></span> +<span><i>And away they go,</i><br></span> <span><i>Not too +fast,</i><br></span> <span><i>And not too slow;</i><br></span> +<span><i>Out from the elm-tree's</i><br></span> <span><i>Noonday +shadow,</i><br></span> <span><i>Into the sun</i><br></span> +<span><i>And across the meadow.</i><br></span> <span><i>Past the +schoolroom,</i><br></span> <span><i>With knees well +bent</i><br></span> <span><i>Fingers a-flicking,</i><br></span> +<span><i>They dancing went....</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?</p> +<p>The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is +not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the +natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this +is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they +affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and +ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they +vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be +new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la +Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness +and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee +is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. +Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the +trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice +before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist +journals please copy.</p> +<p>One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the +gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something +fey about much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of +twilight and sees strange things. In its love of children, its +inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and Æsopian brevity, +I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you one more slice of +this rarely seasoned pastry.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>THE LITTLE BIRD</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>My dear Daddie bought a +mansion</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>For to bring my Mammie +to,</i><br></span> <span><i>In a hat with a long +feather,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a trailing gown of +blue;</i><br></span> <span><i>And a company of +fiddlers</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a rout of maids and +men</i><br></span> <span><i>Danced the clock round to the +morning,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>In a gay house-warming +then.</i><br></span> <span><i>And when all the guests were gone, +and</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>All was still as still can +be,</i><br></span> <span><i>In from the dark ivy hopped +a</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Wee small bird: and that was +Me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his +scrip of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the +most callous. It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, +It is full of outlets of sky.</p> +<p>As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps +behind his songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and +we may hope that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He +lectured at some of our universities and endured the grotesque +plaudits of dowagers and professors who doubtless pretended to have +read his work. Although he is forty-four, and has been publishing +for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded "Who's Who." He lives in +London, is married, and has four children. For a number of years he +worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Truly the Muse sometimes +lends to her favourites a merciful hardiness.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP' id="THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP"></a><br> +<h2>THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP</h2> +<br> +<p>Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only +literary man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a +manuscript for immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams +had in his saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as +well worth a hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." +Offering one of these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. +Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas but the latter +had so little stomach for a transaction of this sort that "he cried +out, 'Coming, sir,' though nobody called; and ran downstairs +without any fear of breaking his neck."</p> +<p>As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these +matters) puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly +coordinated with life.</p> +<p>Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A +watch, a ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, +all these will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which +happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle +in your drawer though it sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and +five or ten years hence collectors may list it in their catalogues. +No mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no +Hartford Lunch will exchange it for corned beef hash and dropped +egg. This is a dismal thing.</p> +<p>This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be +gained by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the +most famous writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in +their early days. There were times when they would have sold their +epics, their novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. +Think of the booty that would accumulate in the shop of a literary +pawnbroker. The early work of famous men would fill his safe to +bursting. Later on he might sell it for a thousand times what he +gave. There is nothing that grows to such fictitious value as +manuscript.</p> +<p>Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant +in Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. +His early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and +wrapping paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few +shillings. Or Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's +illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits of depression caused by his helpless +dependence upon his father for funds. What a splendid opportunity +these crises in writers' lives would offer to the enterprising +buyer of manuscripts!</p> +<p>Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself +an appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor +stuff, even though the author of it be starving. Richard Le +Gallienne has spoken somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books +that should never have been written to the customers who should +never have been born." Our pawnbroker must guard himself against +buying this kind of stuff. He will be besieged with it. Very likely +Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him some. But +his task will be to discover new and true talent beneath its rags, +and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely bite will mean more +than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.</p> +<p>The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the +(unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary +of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered +the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been fêted by the +Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, +the full story of that tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts +still cherished by his executor made public. In the meantime, this +letter, which he wrote in 1908, gives a sad and vivid little +picture of the straits of unadmitted genius:</p> +<p>"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my +best—indeed my only—friend in this city, when every +editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt. Of +course I know why ... the author of 'Vermin' deserves not, nor +wants, their hypocritical help. The book was too true to life to +please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to tickle the +prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the other +day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and +inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with +it—as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he +meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking bounder!</p> +<p>"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is +literally true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not +bring myself to come back to the saloon where he would willingly +have fed me. I did get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie +ferryboat, but they found out I did not belong to the union. I had +two dollars in my pocket—a fortune—but while I was +dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting for the cafés +to open (I was too done to walk half a dozen blocks to an all-night +restaurant), some snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a +big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.</p> +<p>"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for +cash? In my hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that +will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know +it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents +on it. If there were a literary mount of piety—a sort of +Parnassus of piety as it were—the uncle in charge might bless +the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This cancer is +getting me surely.</p> +<p>"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's +bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps +upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real +breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the +inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and +two big schooners of the amber. I'm working on my Third Avenue +novel called 'The L.'</p> +<p>"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down +here to give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't +the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third +Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one...."</p> +<p>It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems +"Pavements, and Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for +$250 last winter.</p> +<p>Will not some literary agent think over this idea?</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON' id="A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON"></a><br> +<h2>A MORNING IN MARATHON</h2> +<br> +<p>One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at +half-past four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden +moonlight. Early rising in order to quicken the furnace and start +the matinsong in the steampipes becomes its own reward when such an +orange moon is dropping down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile +Irish terrier) was plainly awed by the blaze of pale light, and +hopped gingerly down the rimy back steps. But the cat was +unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are leagued with the +powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (he +is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the +moonshine without a qualm.</p> +<p>There are certain little routine joys known only to the +servantless suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of +crisp French rolls on the front porch. Every morning the milkman +deposits his little bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. +Every morning the furnace needs a little grooming, that the cheery +thump of rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs. Then the +big agate kettle must be set over the blue gas flame, for hot water +is needed both for shaving and cocoa. Our light breakfast takes +only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut Brown Maid comes +singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the +sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and shaved and +telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train waits +for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.</p> +<p>But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine +mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm +clock being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy +head. The day in question was early February when snow lay white +and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon +had to be caught. There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves +the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, +to make a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. That was why +the alarm clock rang at half-past four.</p> +<p>I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight +before the dawn. No description that I have ever read—not +even the daybreak in "Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure +gold over the rim of night—would be just to that exquisite +growth of colour in the eastern sky. The violet star faded to +forget-me-not and then to silver and at last closed his weary eye; +the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost its fairy-tale air of +mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night receded into +infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the +horizon.</p> +<p>But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise +his head from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown +Maid was still nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some +tea and toast just before departing.</p> +<p>The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was +delicious. Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which +were casting deep blue shadows in the strange light—waning +moon and waxing day. The air was very chill—only just above +zero—and the smoking car seemed very cold and dismal. I +huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and read the paper. +But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco and this +morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The +exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering +nausea.</p> +<p>I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then +the sun came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the +snow afire. As we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could +see the morning light shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when +we glided into the basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart +was already attuned to the thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps +it can never have the fascination for me that the old dingy London +terminals have—King's Cross, Paddington, or Saint Pancras, +with their delicious English bookstalls and those porters in +corduroy—but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place after all, +a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. It +seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the +trains? No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to +watch the Duke of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of +those green or blue English locomotives with lordly names, being +groomed for the run.</p> +<p>In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its +high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood +of commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally +sitting by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the +marble lunch counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes +and coffee to stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are +being swept and garnished. As I passed through on my way to the +Philadelphia train I was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch +terrier puppies—five or six of them tumbling over one another +in their play and yelping so that the station rang. "Every little +bit yelps" as someone has said. I was reminded of the last words I +ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth book of the +Aeneid)—<i>stant litore puppes</i>, which I always yearned to +translate "a litter of puppies."</p> +<p>My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City +as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. +When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge +(which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a +crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another +moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the +fully minted gold of superb morning. The day was begun.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS' id= +"THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS"></a><br> +<h2>THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS</h2> +<br> +<p>I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) +so I do not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, +irresistibly the thought comes that I have strayed into the +American House of Lords. Unworthily I sit among our sovereign +legislators, a trifle ill at ease mayhap. In the day coach I am at +home with my peers—those who smoke cheap tobacco; who nurse +fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with sandwich crumbs and +lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.</p> +<p>But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a +limited train is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary +chamber, but it is none the less the camera stellata of our +prosperous carnivora. Patently these men are Lords. In two facing +rows, averted from the landscape, condemned to an uneasy scrutiny +of their mutual prosperity, they sit in leather chairs. They curve +roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven to the raw, soberly +clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they smoke cigars, +those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end than at the +other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear shoes with +fawn-coloured tops.</p> +<p>Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking +traveller, am faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget +myself while reading poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, +missing the little silver gourd that rests by my left foot. +Straight the white-jacketed mulatto sucks them up with a vacuum +cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the brass veranda at the +end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. And returning, +the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I left +under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me +at least a whiskey and soda to get them out.</p> +<p>It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am +cigarless and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white +margins inside my vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one +in which I was married (I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall +never forget it) and when I look up from Emily Dickinson's poems +with a trembling thrill of painful ecstasy, I am frightened by the +long row of hard faces and cynic eyes opposite me.</p> +<p>The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order +a bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that +nauseates me? At any rate, I want to get home—home to that +star-sown meadow and the two brown arms at the journey's end.</p> +<p><i>December, 1914.</i></p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='COTSWOLD_WINDS' id="COTSWOLD_WINDS"></a><br> +<h2>COTSWOLD WINDS</h2> +<br> +<p>Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still +sits close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over +the sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an +adventure. I am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. +Give me a two-mile spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the +muscles and sweep the morning's books and tobacco from the +brain—and then turn and at it! It is like swimming against a +great crystal river. Cap off, head up—no crouching over the +handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind in your hair, +the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of leg-drive +straining on the pedals—three minutes of it intoxicates you. +You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and +exultation into the face of the blast.</p> +<p>I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before +"Schools." In mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away +for six weeks while she decks herself against the spring. Far and +wide we scatter. The Prince to Germany—the dons to +Devon—the reading parties to quiet country inns here and +there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are in those glorious +dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's "Scènes de +la Vie de Bohème" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips +in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and +solitude.</p> +<p>There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a +green valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There +is a well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But +I am not for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious +business, these last two months before Schools, and I and my books +are camped in a "pensive citadel" up on the hill, where the +postman's wife cares for me and worries because I do not eat more +than two normal men. There is a low-ceilinged sitting room with a +blazing fire. From one corner a winding stair climbs to the bedroom +above. There are pipes and tobacco, pens and a pot of ink. There +are books—all historical volumes, the only evidence of +relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one of +Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, +three hours' bicycling—that leaves four hours for eating and +other emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, +and turn a probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible +Third.</p> +<p>And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? +The valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in +England, I think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the +stream, now and then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you +far away from most of the things one likes to leave behind. There +are lambs, little black fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are +scores of rabbits disappearing with a flirt of white hindquarters +into their wayside burrows; in Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, +gold and blue and scarlet, almost as tame as barnyard fowls; +everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in the upper blue—and +these are all your company. Now and then a great yellow farm-wagon +and a few farmers in corduroys—but no one else. That is the +kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the +Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever +tasted better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the +green water dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the +Houses of Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth +Woods if it could—and so would I.</p> +<p>But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting +Shotover is pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees—and +we come out onto a hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from +there it is eight miles homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad +blue horizon to meet the eye. Back to the tiny cottage looking out +onto the village green and the old village well; back to four cups +of tea and hot buttered toast; and then for Metternich and the +Vienna Congress. <i>Solvitur bicyclando!</i></p> +<p>And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford +will have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud +and sleet and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however +cold, it will be what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will +be white flannels, and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But +that is not for us now. There are the Schools....</p> +<p><i>Bibury, April, 1913</i>.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='CLOUDS' id="CLOUDS"></a><br> +<h2>CLOUDS</h2> +<br> +<p>Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice +Meynell, perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty +with tumbling amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The +heavenly hills of Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. +said it better—"The travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how +much is still to be said of those piled-up mysteries of heaven!</p> +<p>We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to +Stroudsburg. That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is +just as lovely as the English Avon, but how much more likely we are +to praise the latter!) converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, +drawing the foam of many a mountain creek down through that +matchless passway. Over the hills which tumble steeply on either +side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the +sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness +on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden +vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in +ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, +reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce +or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating +moisture clothes itself!</p> +<p>Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the +highways of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their +miracles of form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the +stockades of earth had fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant +cliff, the spires of the Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood +one has dreamed of scaling the bulwarks of the clouds, of riding +the ether on those strange galleons. Unconscious of their own +beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes—now scudding on that +waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage way. If one +could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what abysses +would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of the +sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in +pale and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the +greenish moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming +solidness on a sunny morning—are they not the most superbly +heart-easing miracles of our visible world? Watch them as they +shimmer down toward the Water Gap in every shade of silver and rose +and opal; or delicately tinged with amber when they have caught +some jewelled chain of lightning and are suffused with its lurid +sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones and stars: has he +never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds?</p> +<p>There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. +Holding within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the +rain, chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and +unbearable as the face of God—dissolving into a crystal +nothing, reborn from the viewless caverns of air—here let us +erect one enraptured altar to the bright mountains of the sky!</p> +<p>At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike +County, fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of +clouds that had long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible +airy summit far above us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and +pallid. And then one last banner of rosy light beaconed over its +highest turret—a final flare of glory to signal curfew to all +the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in the shadow of dusk.</p> +<p>We thought that was the end. But no—a little later, after +we had reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were +still at play. Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden +gush of pale blue lightning. And while we watched, with hearts +almost painfully sated by beauty, through some leak the precious +fire ran out; a great stalk of pure and unspeakable brightness fled +passionately to earth. This happened again and again until the +artery of fire was discharged. And then, slowly, slowly, the stars +began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our cloud drifted gently +away.</p> +<p>Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of +dawn? Who knows?</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='UNHEALTHY' id="UNHEALTHY"></a><br> +<h2>UNHEALTHY</h2> +<br> +<p>On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. +On Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the +obscure creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post +meridiem is a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we +list.</p> +<p>The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as +our <i>stell-dich-ein</i>. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to +say, I arrive at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated +reflection. There is plenty to think about. One may stand between +the outer and inner lines of glass doors and watch the queer little +creatures that come tumbling out of the cloak and suit factory +across the street. Or one may stand inside the store, on a kind of +terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc lights, looking down upon the +bustle of women on the main floor. Best of all, one may stroll +along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts and conditions +of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet them at +one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the mahogany +victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for +lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long +morning coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of +this social gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots +that are suggestive of corns. There is an information bureau there, +where one may learn everything except the time one may expect one's +wife to arrive. But I have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am +waiting for Titania, and beginning to despair of her arrival, I +have only to go to a telephone to call her up. As soon as I have +put the nickel in, she is sure to appear. Nowadays I save the +nickel by going into a booth and <i>pretending</i> to telephone. +Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots.</p> +<p>We have a jargon of our own.</p> +<p>"Eye-polishers?" say I.</p> +<p>"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm +<i>so</i> sorry, Grump."</p> +<p>"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because +riding on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the +word connotes anything that produces that desirable result, such as +bunches of violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, +spring millinery, or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a +rite suggested by the old song:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>And though maids sweep their hearths +no less</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Than they were wont to +do,</i><br></span> <span><i>Yet who doth now for +cleanliness</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Find sixpence in her +shoe?</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece.</p> +<p>We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized +beginning of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a +quarter to thirty cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily +compensated by the Grump buying Sweet Caporals instead of something +Turkish. A packet of cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an +adventure. On other days publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on +Saturdays cigarettes are possible.</p> +<p>"Antipasto?"</p> +<p>"No, thanks."</p> +<p>"Minestrone or consommé?"</p> +<p>"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine, +please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable +Moretti lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, +excellent savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a +pungent pourri of smells, and the jangle of thick china, how +diverting it is! The franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches +us complaisantly from his counter where he sits flanked by flasks +of Hoboken chianti and a case of brittle cigars.</p> +<p>How good Moretti's <i>minestrone</i> tastes to the +unsophisticated tongue. What though it be only an azoic extract of +intense potato, dimly tinct with sargasso and macaroni—it has +a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not the prelude to an +Adventure?</p> +<p>Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over +azimuth and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude +more earnestly than Titania and I argue our possible courses. +Generally, however, she leaves it to me to chart the journey. That +gives me the pride of conductor and her the pleasure of being +surprised.</p> +<p>According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a +waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a +little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and +plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a +picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from +footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We +laid a romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming +a little snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused +us:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>"My old man's a fireman</i><br></span> +<span><i>Now what do you think of that?</i><br></span> <span><i>He +wears goblimey breeches</i><br></span> <span><i>And a little +goblimey hat."</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too +far on the back of my head.</p> +<p>The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one +leaves Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been +very fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, +animal shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old +dismantled Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: +one of the dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge +four-pronged grinder as big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. +Oysters going out, the new brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the +saloons mark the vernal equinox.</p> +<p>A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains +rumbling by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A +cutting wind blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid +two nickels and we got into the front car of the northbound +train.</p> +<p>Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an +aeroplane, or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything +so thrilling as soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. +Rocking, racketing, roaring over those crazy trestles, now a +glimpse of the leaden river to the east, now a peep of church +spires and skyscrapers on the west, and the dingy imitation lace +curtains of the third-story windows flashing by like a recurring +pattern—it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand at the +front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far +ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping +nearer and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus +a swaying, jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the +seat in front; but the L swings you up and over the housetops, +smooth and sheer and swift.</p> +<p>We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. +A broad, dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton +apartments, led in a gentle descent toward the river. The +neighbourhood was noisy, quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, +bitter March the thaw had come at last: the street was viscous with +slime, the melting snow lay in grayish piles along the curbs. Small +boys on each side of the Street were pelting sodden snowballs which +spattered around us as we walked down the pavement.</p> +<p>But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung +round at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th +Street showed the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat +and respectable. A little side street branching off to the left +(not recorded by Mercator) revealed some quaint cottages with +gables and shuttered windows so mid-Victorian that my literary +heart leaped and I dreamed at once of locating a novel in this +fascinating spot. And then we rounded the corner and saw the little +park.</p> +<p>It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her +hands, and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of +little houses of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy +bay windows and polished door knockers. In front of them was the +lumpy little park, cut up into irregular hills, where children were +flying kites. And beyond that, an embankment and the river in a dim +wet mist. There was Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge +slipping by. In the distance we could see the colossal span of the +new Hell Gate bridge. With the journalist's instinct for +superlatives I told Titania it was the largest single span in the +world. I wonder if it is?</p> +<p>As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On +the embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. +It was as picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A +ferryboat, crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. +Tugs, puffing up past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, +replied with mellow blasts. The pungent tang of the East River +tickled our nostrils, and all my old ambition to be a tugboat +captain returned.</p> +<p>And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk +our landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this +delicious spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East +End Avenue the Cheyne Walk of New York—we might even import +an English imagist poet to lend cachet to the coterie—I saw +by Titania's face that something was wrong.</p> +<p>I pressed her for the reason of her frown.</p> +<p>She thought the region was unhealthy.</p> +<p>Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further +argument is possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions +I have never been able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape +of the houses, or the lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that +the garbage men collect from the front instead of from the back. +But however she arrives at the conclusion, it is immutable.</p> +<p>Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or +picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy.</p> +<p>Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry +Bend, or the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin +to pucker. "Do you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I +ask anxiously. If she does, there is nothing for it but to clutch +at the nearest subway station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that +bracing ether her spirits revive.</p> +<p>So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in +New York, outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in +splinters at the bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old +Carl Schurz mansion on the hill, and we departed for the airy +plateaus of Central Park. Desperately I pointed to the fading +charms of East River Park—the convent round the corner, the +hokey pokey cart by the curbstone.</p> +<p>I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER' id= +"CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER"></a><br> +<h2>CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER</h2> +<br> +<p>True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather +with his snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first +years I never saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when +asleep. Of what avail for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I +did not smoke until I was twenty? By the time I was eight years old +I had constructed a pipe of an acorn and a straw, and had +experimented with excelsior as fuel. From that time I passed +through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod cigars, hayseed, +corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true Olympus) +Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school recess. +Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a +twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem.</p> +<p>I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other +heroes of fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a +moment's unease—but stay, there was a cunning mixture devised +by some comrades at college that harboured in its fragrant shreds +neatly chopped sections of rubber bands. That was sheer poison, I +grant you.</p> +<p>The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where +Raleigh, Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the +whimful Elia best of all—where these have spoken so greatly, +the feeble voice may well shrink. But that is the joy of true +worship: ranks and hierarchies are lost, all are brothers in the +mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich Virginia the older saints +of the mellow leaf genially greet the new freshman, be he never so +humble.</p> +<p>What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great +ones of the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation +and Cat, for instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into +the small hours "quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and +smoking pipes of Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where +Carlyle and Emerson counted the afternoon well spent, though +neither one had said a hundred words—had they not smoked +together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they trudged together to +"prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill—did not the reek of +their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old +Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go +sailing with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry—what mixture did he +fill and light? Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be +sworn. Or, to come down to more recent days, think of Captain +Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in Bessborough Gardens, lighting that +apocalyptic pipe that preceded the first manuscript page of +"Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the privileged landlady's +daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast dishes that +morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?<a name= +'FNanchor_E_5' id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_E_5'><sup>[E]</sup></a></p> +<a name='Footnote_E_5' id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_E_5'>[E]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A +Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly +obscure.—EDITOR.</p> +</div> +<p>It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of +masculine friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for +drummers, your cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the +ripened, boneset votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with +meerschaum, calabash, cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the +inscrutable order of things, like crossing sweepers and presidents +of women's clubs; but when Damon and Pythias meet to talk things +over, well-caked briars are in order. Cigars are all right in +fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel Géraldine when they +visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was Leigh Hunt, in the +immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), who uttered +the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I will +wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it.</p> +<p>The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an +etiquette, a usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried +and hygienic age has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to +ask your friend to let you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three +or four mouthfuls of smoke. This afforded opportunity for a +gracious exchange of compliments. "Will it please you to impart +your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, having savored his +mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very excellent leaf," +offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and many other +excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book "The +Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and +breviary to every smoker con amore.</p> +<p>But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace +and companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender +affection on the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some +walking trip, some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained +counters of some remote alehouse. These are the memories that are +bittersweet beyond the compass of halting words. Never again +perhaps will we throw care over the hedge and stride with Mifflin +down the Banbury Road, filling the air with laughter and the fumes +of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is the tribute we pay to the +sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened cutty that has been +with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a hundred weary +dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen faltered +in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. +Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your +pipe will never fail you.</p> +<p>How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot +even read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers +itching to light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and +baked a hundred times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply +can't help talking about tobacco, and I strike a match for every +essay. God bless him and his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in +"Joseph Andrews"—he lights a pipe on every page!</p> +<p>I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be +consummated in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or +bury my head in my coat. People see me in the street, vainly +seeking shelter. It is a weakness, though not a shameful one. But +set me in a tavern corner, and fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" +(do you know that English mixture?) and I am yours to the last +ash.</p> +<p>I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I +have a tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that +Mifflin and I had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn +at Lichfield. We weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there +in honour of Dr. Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his +bust. Then there were those pipes we used to smoke at twilight +sitting on the steps of 17 Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in +Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie to come by and light the lamps. +Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come again!</p> +<p>When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of +the devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.</p> +<p>Not such bad advice.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HAY_FEBRIFUGE' id="HAY_FEBRIFUGE"></a><br> +<h2>HAY FEBRIFUGE</h2> +<br> +<p>Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in +the world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of +that new form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the +most fragrant gas tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest +number of cinders per eye of any arondissement served by the +R—— railway, and the most bitterly afflicted hay fever +sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the editor of the most +widely circulated magazine in the world, and the author of one of +the best selling books that ever was written.</p> +<p>Not bad for one village.</p> +<p>Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. +That is where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed +envelope I will give you the name of our village, and instructions +for avoiding it. It is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the +south by ragweed, on the east by asthma and the pollen of +anemophylous plants.</p> +<p>It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor +Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, +repartees, feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, +chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, +machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all +the other travaux de fantaisie that make life worth living for +retired manufacturers. The general effect is emetic in the extreme. +Hard by the castle is a spurious and richly gabled stable in the +general style of the château de Chantilly. One brief strip of +lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred years in architecture, and +restrains Runnymede from Versailles.</p> +<p>Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock +merchants and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, +remove the cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The +countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, +rolling terrain, stewed terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, +spare tires, and other props. But we are equally infamous for +hideous houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era. Every prospect +pleases, and man alone is vile.</p> +<p>There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and +a drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. +It would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to +ambush herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, +and takes notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.</p> +<p>Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an +eminent parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to +N. Romanoff, asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. +And now N. Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no +knouting or giving in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other +check on the ladies. Knitting instead of knouting is the order of +the day.</p> +<p>Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy +or drugstore.</p> +<p>Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a +day's journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot.</p> +<p>But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to +life," say Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at +certain times such extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to +unfit them for their ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that +it is a disease of the classes rather than the masses we may take +the viewpoint of self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as +indicating a superiority in culture and civilization of the +favoured few. When the intimate connection of pollinosis and +culture has been firmly grasped by the public mind, the complaint +will perhaps come to be looked upon like gout, as a sign of +breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it not.... As +civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to the +one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to +sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or +twenty-second century may be a being of pure intellect whose +organization of mere nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong +emotion, like a pumpkin filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen +Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted from the Medical Record, March +18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. Mencken, fellow sufferer, for +sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. I hope to live to grasp +Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their essay is marked by +a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts in this +hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)</p> +<p>I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the +affinities between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the +debased form of literary parody) to those of great intellectual +stature. Upon the literary vehicles of expression habitually +employed by Rudyard Kipling, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and +Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch of ragweed and goldenrod; with +surprising results. These intellectuals were not more immune than +myself. For instance, this is the spasm ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee +Masters, of Spoon River:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Ed Grimes always did hate +me</i><br></span> <span><i>Because I wrote better poetry than he +did.</i><br></span> <span><i>In the hay fever season I used to +walk</i><br></span> <span><i>Along the river bank, to keep as far +as possible</i><br></span> <span><i>Away from +pollen.</i><br></span> <span><i>One day Ed and his brother crept up +behind me</i><br></span> <span><i>While I was writing a +sonnet,</i><br></span> <span><i>Tied my hands and +feet,</i><br></span> <span><i>And carried me into a hayfield and +left me.</i><br></span> <span><i>I sneezed myself to +death.</i><br></span> <span><i>At the funeral the church was full +of goldenrod,</i><br></span> <span><i>And I think it must have been +Ed</i><br></span> <span><i>Who sowed that ragweed all round my +grave.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves +great credit for lending himself to the cult in this way.</p> +<p>I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have +even thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and +without collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable +book of his called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most +original, and certainly the most verbose, book that has been +written about the war. Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get +this right) is the most eminent victim of words that ever lived in +New England (or indeed anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd +upon him like flies upon a honey-pot: he is helpless to resist +them. His brain buzzes with them: they leap from his eye, distil +from his lean and waving hand. Good God, not since Rabelais and +Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one human being been so +beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables. I adore him for +it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, transcendent vocables +swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, teasing him with +visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. Wordsworth's were. +The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has confessed it himself) +can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too deep for +publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are +recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat +at lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can +give you testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I +listened, clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. +Lee, frown not: I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man +and one book this country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and +"WE." Set me upon a coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate +the world with dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a +breeding-ground for a whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the +New Haven Railroad.</p> +<p>But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I +the stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of +obesity) of Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets +of sky my yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by +prismatic omissions and plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster +spirals and eddies of all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, +weaving a new economics and a new bosom for advertisiarchs in the +mere act of brushing his teeth. But alas, the recurring explosions +of the loathsome and intellectual disease keep my nose on the +grindstone—or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on upward +pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief.</p> +<p>The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a +constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering +voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to +set him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over +his thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a +locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his +mind has shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, +and Nourishment: his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract +thought; words assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down +among them, overborne and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that +millionaires are bound down and tethered and stifled by their +limousines and coupons and factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee +himself, who is a millionaire and landed proprietor of ideas, is +equally the slave of his thronging words. They cluster about him +like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely impeding his progress. He +is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine sentences. He ought to be +confined to an eight-hour paragraph.</p> +<p>All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is +one who has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer +has lost control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a +packet of Roman candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our +village is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by +ragweed, on the east by chickweed, and on the west by a sleepless +night.</p> +<p>I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss +it, but that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of +thought, those grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind +shimmering like a poplar tree in sun and wind—jetting and +spouting like plumbing after a freeze-up—'tis beyond me. I +fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the sheets were untucked at +his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent and dove-throated and +opaline a philosophy of the desirability of sleeping with cold +feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of bed to +rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else to +do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever!</p> +<p>And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what +you think you think, effervescence of that kind always results.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='APPENDIX' id="APPENDIX"></a><br> +<h2>APPENDIX</h2> +<h3>SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS</h3> +<br> +<p>This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use +by teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is +recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds +have become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not +hold himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and +reserves the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual +pressure.</p> +<p>For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found +valuable for classroom consideration:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral +purpose in this book?</p> +<p>2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth +Stockton to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his +income.</p> +<p>3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example.</p> +<p>4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) vers libre poets</li> +<li>(b) beefsteak and onions</li> +<li>(c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail)</li> +<li>(d) The Republican Party</li> +</ul> +<p>5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he +notable?</p> +<p>6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The +Head of the Firm"?</p> +<p>8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, +1911?</p> +<p>9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of?</p> +<p>10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why?</p> +<p>11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in +Kings, Long Island?</p> +<p>12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the +tourist? Explain</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) The Gin Palace</li> +<li>(b) Kurdmeister</li> +<li>(c) unedifying Zollverein</li> +</ul> +<p>13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home?</p> +<p>14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three +examples.</p> +<p>15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do?</p> +<p>16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the +ideal conditions for a morning pipe.</p> +<p>17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace?</p> +<p>18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a +credit to the profession.</p> +<p>19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal ascend the +stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher? Why "in +vain"?</p> +<p>20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith +classify himself?</p> +<p>21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the +context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate?</p> +<p>22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying +about the floor?</p> +<p>28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel +Lindsay?</p> +<p>24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against +Mr. Richard Le Gallienne?</p> +<p>25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous +carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their +waistcoats?</p> +<p>26. What is <i>minestrone</i>? Name three ingredients.</p> +<p>27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke +pipes?</p> +<p>28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox?</p> +<p>29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like +this book.</p> +<p>30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb +by the hand?</p> +<p>31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on +these phrases:</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables</li> +<li>(b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles</li> +<li>(c) Scawfell become Mount Tom</li> +</ul> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<br> +<h2>FINIS CORONAT OPUS</h2> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13739 ***</div> +</body> +</html> diff --git a/13739-h/images/shand.jpg b/13739-h/images/shand.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..4f3db12 --- /dev/null +++ b/13739-h/images/shand.jpg diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..b9bdc6b --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #13739 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13739) diff --git a/old/13739-8.txt b/old/13739-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d796ea6 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/13739-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,7794 @@ +The Project Gutenberg eBook, Shandygaff, by Christopher Morley + + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Shandygaff + +Author: Christopher Morley + +Release Date: October 13, 2004 [eBook #13739] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF*** + + +E-text prepared by Stephen Schulze and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team + + + +SHANDYGAFF + +by + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY + +1918 + + + + + + + +A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, +interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to +the Reader + + + +[Illustration: Photo by Charles H. Davis + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS, THUNDER +ON THE LEFT, ETC.] + + + + +TITLES AND DEDICATIONS + +I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the +immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of +elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and +penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum +Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted +trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry, +were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice + + +----------------------------+ + | | + | THESE BASINS ARE FOR | + | CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY | + | | + +----------------------------+ + +I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these +fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, +must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow +O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso. + +The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of dedicating +them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have +occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance. + + I thought of dedicating the book to + CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER + The Laird of Westcolang + + I thought of dedicating to the + TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE WORLD + Blackwell's in Oxford and + Leary's in Philadelphia + + I thought of dedicating to + THE 8:13 TRAIN + + I thought of dedicating to + EDWARD PAGE ALLINSON + The Squire of Town's End Farm + Better known as Mifflin McGill + In affectionate memory of + Many unseasonable jests + + I thought of dedicating to + PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. GUMMERE + From an erring pupil + + I thought of dedicating to + FRANCIS R. BELLAMY + Author of "The Balance" + Whose Talent I Revere, + But Whose Syntax I Deplore + + I thought of dedicating to + JOHN N. BEFFEL + My First Editor + Who insisted on taking me seriously + + I thought of dedicating to + GUY S.K. WHEELER + The Lion Cub + + I thought of dedicating to + ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY + The Urbanolater + + I thought of dedicating to + SILAS ORRIN HOWES + Faithful Servant of Letters + + But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedicate this book to + THE MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS + More Sinned Against Than Sinning + + * * * * * + +For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York _Evening Post_, The +Boston _Transcript_, The _Bellman_, The _Smart Set_, The New York _Sun_, +The New York _Evening Sun_, The _American Oxonian_, _Collier's_, and The +_Ladies' Home Journal_. + +Wyncote, Pa. + +November. 1917. + + + +SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or +beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, +and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, +journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII +as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a +continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the +resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide +no other tipple. + +John Mistletoe: _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_. + + + + +CONTENTS + +The Song of Shandygaff +Titles and Dedications +A Question of Plumage +Don Marquis +The Art of Walking +Rupert Brooke +The Man +The Head of the Firm +17 Heriot Row +Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader +William McFee +Rhubarb +The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine +Ingo +Housebroken +The Hilarity of Hilaire +A Casual of the Sea +The Last Pipe +Time to Light the Furnace +My Friend +A Poet of Sad Vigils +Trivia +Prefaces +The Skipper +A Friend of FitzGerald +A Venture in Mysticism +An Oxford Landlady +"Peacock Pie" +The Literary Pawnshop +A Morning in Marathon +The American House of Lords +Cotswold Winds +Clouds +Unhealthy +Confessions of a Smoker +Hay Febrifuge +Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers. + + + + +A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE + +Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He was +the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only +netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The +owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done +by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those +publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike +view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so +the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue. + +But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht, +that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to +a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty +dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to +be done. The house was still being paid for on the installment plan. +There were plumbers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for +the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and +the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club--his only extravagance. A simple +middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a +treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To +accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends, +Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below +that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the +Elizabethan song naïvely puts it. + +There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama. + +Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his +fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote +painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on +Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the proprietor ordered. Though he +did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book +publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest +thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells +in _Harper's Magazine_ for the honourable quality of his criticisms. + +But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and +enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used up the first +fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current +poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The +preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty +journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him +only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a +Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of +intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had +time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, +which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged +about six dollars a week. + +That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the +limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars or so needed +for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways. +Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far +into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote +"Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting +lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on +poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in +the same place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy +he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first +year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30--not one-third as much, +he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short +story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the +sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature. + +It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were +wrong when they wrote to him admiringly--as they did twice a +year--asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man +of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr. +Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for +membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and +so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called +on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hôte, with an +apologetic murmur. + +But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or +discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the +existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again, +with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that +there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters +in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton +rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he was one of those +estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their +wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous +and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books, +and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a +corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in +New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was +when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary +essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous +sign in the British Museum washroom. + +It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn +bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row. +Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of +traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as +becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind, +and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work +until one o'clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their +tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then +be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, +and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof +until past midnight. + +One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for +to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across +the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on +the shining river and consider his course. + +A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry +articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an +English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time +he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at +length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened +that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and +to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from +the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism. + +Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in +the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter +prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a +remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men, +although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they +would ever meet, he had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever +visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on +this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying +that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon. + +The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature +it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but +little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to +Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was +small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop +for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure +pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an +enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance +she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the +drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of +the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for +several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How +like a poet! + +In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they +would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of +evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things +that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the +hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour? +This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to +Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, +Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary +club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of +Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings +all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New +Utrecht! + +Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but +the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of +out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby, +makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much +explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the +fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and +slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds +or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously. +English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American +reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have +bought books on Paternoster Row, have drunk half-and-half and eaten +pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with +laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton. + +Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean, +bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios. +What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a +mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco! + +Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all +in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they +had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to +grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the +poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for +dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as +ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tenderness. They would send the +three younger children to their grandmother, to be interned there until +the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she +could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the +boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had +children of his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by +the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet +was aver here for a lecture tour--he would be entertained and fêted +everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had +started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad. + +He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple routine +of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three +o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious +habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office +on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doctor's assistant call +for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he +called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a +moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his +playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman, +and undoubtedly he knew all about wines. + +Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that +all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had +planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from +doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, +the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair," +the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's +"contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good +humour for a humourist. + +"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? Or has +George Moore sent in a new novel?" + +Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he +confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who wore life +lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis, +with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful +comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the +reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist +was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a +married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble. + +"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of +year." + +"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and +have some ale. That'll put you on your feet." + +"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to +make up my page. I tell you what, though--" + +He hesitated, and flushed a little. + +"Say it," said Bolles kindly. + +"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old +Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him +around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet +some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time, +and I--I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I +were a member, you know." + +"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle Light'? And +you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than +Masefield. Take him to lunch--I should say I will; Why, I'll put him in +the colyum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an +orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you +knew him." + +"I don't--yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this +afternoon." + +"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran +downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never +read. + +The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that +he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had done duty for three +winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he +blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried +outdoors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to +draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first +clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street. + +Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was +compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for usually Mrs. +Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky star was in the +zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he +might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste, +and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the +humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted +with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely +improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut +that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was +unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly +transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the +purchase price and fled to the subway. + +When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw that +the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes +before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship +office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the official admitted him +to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling +a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no +less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and +wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet +the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache +looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible +that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of +Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring +outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight. + +What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to +stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the +mustard-coloured trousers one more round--they were much too long for +him--and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a +peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his +wedding. + +He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he was very +familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured down the +slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of +superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of +England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his +surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells +and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to +the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after +traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage; +gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save +for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by +nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne. + +Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that--the second class? +His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther +down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking. + +There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still thronged. +Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green +ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four +children in single file, each holding fast to the one in front like +Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous +care not to slip on the cleated boards. To his amazement the reviewer +recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet. + +Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a +wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin. +The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the +skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in +which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children +watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. +"Daddy, look out for Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the +poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two +smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. +"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and +promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file. + +Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself +known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving +the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they +waited for the customs examination. With mingled feelings he saw that +Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, +indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic +cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood +in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around +him. He shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home +with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and +introduced himself. + +Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he +presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two +girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately uttered +cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to him. + +"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit. + +"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath. + +Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the +throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created +two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now +their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing +that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you +must consider yourself a citizen of that nation." + +Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the +poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your +telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have you." + +"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact +we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has +some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children +are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some +lectures." + +A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow. + +"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs. +Stockton and I were hoping--" + +"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your +hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some quiet +hotel where we can stay the night." + +Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any +hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, and then +remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he +recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the +Obelisk. + +After the customs formalities were over--not without embarrassment, as +Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red +union suits and a half-empty bottle of brandy--Stockton convoyed them to +a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite +ashamed of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors +whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the +spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward +the nearest telephone booth. + +As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the +Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful +to spend a few days with the Stocktons." + +"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how +shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and +your clothes--well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know +if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bankrupt." + +The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the +country near New York," he said. + +"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes? +He looked like a canary." + + + + +DON MARQUIS + + +There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the +victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of +your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be +considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war +and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew +with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly +misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be +offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn +Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives +in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout.... + +Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well, +call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob +pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and +Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening +Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists +and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is +far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian +Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a +novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes +the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in +his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk +he is a dramatist. + +He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre +Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting +satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only +"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it: + + A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other + evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time + to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair + broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us + sad. + + The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul + into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in + the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more + than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral + chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or + flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its + heart and soul. + +Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as +a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well +known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier. +Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing +sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done. + +The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to +look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship. +The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill +Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially +warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged +from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to +transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his +best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on +an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a +picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_ +got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy +race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would +dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_ +building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle. + +"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like +dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the +echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. +Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading +their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for +that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, +fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into +circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published +October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a +blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this +man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question +the answerless face of life-- + + Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, + Still broods the dull distrust; + Which shall have ultimate dominion, + Dream, or dust? + +Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble +verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of +Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can +turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll +Durham cigarettes. + +How neat this is: + + TO A DANCING DOLL + + Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, + You begin your steps demurely-- + There's a spirit almost prim + In the feet that move so surely. + So discreetly, to the chime + Of the music that so sweetly + Marks the time. + + But the chords begin to tinkle + Quicker, + And your feet they flash and flicker-- + Twinkle!-- + Flash and flutter to a tricksy + Fickle meter; + And you foot it like a pixie-- + Only fleeter! + + Not our current, dowdy + Things-- + "Turkey trots" and rowdy + Flings-- + For they made you overseas + In politer times than these + In an age when grace could please, + Ere St. Vitus + Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; + Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us! + +But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he +sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the +slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is +a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from +Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious +inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his +brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real +earnestness that underlies his chaff. + +I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the +hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a +submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by +Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in +his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of +letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some +contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but +nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six +times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret +compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops: + + MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.) + + TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea. + (COLD ROAST BEEF.) + + WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF + STEW.) + + THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.) + + FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued, + sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main + business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR + CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.) + + SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself + for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.) + + SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we + have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers. + +But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always +tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry +battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real +voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, +the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular +Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an +Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of +Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling +has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them +between book-covers. + +One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a +number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms +and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly +envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They +had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, +and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where +they could find more. + +I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether +they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any +pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do +more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts. + + By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he + orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. + + If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know + you are loafing? + + Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that + minorities are always right. + + Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. + The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart. + + I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising + young man for twenty years. + +In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the +mirthquake: + + If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it. + + If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the + little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper + colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry, + Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its + revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will + find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your + ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever + carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best + trousers. + +But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite +denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the +gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a +clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, +just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany: + + This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth + Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... + As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, + Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, + Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb-- + Who frowned above him, proud and grim, + While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore + Of fire and steel and stone and war: + She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth + + Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... + His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur. + + Tip from the wild red Welter of the past + Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last. + + Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. + We have been slow as doom. Our dead + Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed-- + We have denied each pleading ghost-- + We have been slow: God, make us sure. + We have been slow. Grant we endure + Unto the uttermost, the uttermost. + + Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? + Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, + Into one single swinging sword. + +I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is +disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this +sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives +of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the +press: + + Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be + disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has + swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up + again. + +Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all +its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of +more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that +furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels! + +There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than +the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the +past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or +three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper +some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad +to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to +give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton +Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia +Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood. + +But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it +the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day +long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope +of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down +on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his +queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his +only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the +street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write +his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in +the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I +have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in +that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben +Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and +set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a +kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the +tavernacular. + +He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic, +and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is +best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky, +and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this +country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel +Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benét +in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and +mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army. + +Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the +dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's +Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the +azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more +publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's +drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, +endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers +libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for +quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, +opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if +Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something +thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine +him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of +the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I +feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who +lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? +Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to +punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the +fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his +typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many +devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach +himself. + +The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with +whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask +a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter. +Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through +an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler +takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the +portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British +cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in +neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case +agate: + + it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for + said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the + captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was + fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where + the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and + serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if + there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me + the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs + to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert + said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top + crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right + under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that + noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking + off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert + said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush + upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i + am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships + surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy + that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the + false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this + pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a + port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling + off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as + he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god + said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered + the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the + hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the + mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust + gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw + the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the + starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant + cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british + navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the + strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would + start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my + forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the + first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said + the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian + drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and + hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every + afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach + even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must + stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me + another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had + been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be + inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh + exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and + here i am. + + archy + +So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original +contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These +are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust +repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is +compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured +with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product. +Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and +superscription of America. + +And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is +unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation +suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great +Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But +Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out +Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society +or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt +away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the +scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true +in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. + +He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some +quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, +Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea +spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, +he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; +faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few +spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until, +chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top +speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly +revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, +the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as +anywhere else. + +What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the +young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of +literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don +Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying +at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a +dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle +Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words: + + Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the + Republican party. + + My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time + and place free of charge. + + Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left + the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat. + + In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in + the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for + some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power. + It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening, + after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late + President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed + through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had + heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of + showing me how greatly he appreciated it. + + Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public + tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the + Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a + position as reporter on a Washington paper. + + Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier + years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented, + peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since. + + There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the + Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting + against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the + Republican party again. + + This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which + I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more + particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself. + + It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person: + + Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little + finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good + hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200 + pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in + type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears + No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of + trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for + the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw + missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from + possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with + respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates + undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on + little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to + psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his + verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in + possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek + bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a + thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story + writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your + business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of + painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, + publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in + insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers + as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on + right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of + room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese, + "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical + comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam + heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized + charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses + on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; + belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy + eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in + teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, + with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; + voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly + wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes + prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose + over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested. + +I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that +Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a +cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick +Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not +infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_ +comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or +drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment +on some bolshevictory in Russia: + + A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of + Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip. + +For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a +very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is +purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a +ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and +fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have +made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss +the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of +his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of +the machine: + + I pray Thee, make my colyum read, + And give me thus my daily bread. + Endow me, if Thou grant me wit, + Likewise with sense to mellow it. + Save me from feeling so much hate + My food will not assimilate; + Open mine eyes that I may see + Thy world with more of charity, + And lesson me in good intents + And make me friend of innocence ... + Make me (sometimes at least) discreet; + Help me to hide my self-conceit, + And give me courage now and then + To be as dull as are most men. + And give me readers quick to see + When I am satirizing Me.... + Grant that my virtues may atone + For some small vices of mine own. + +And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his +prayer with this comment: + + People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really + want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think + the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be + sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of + affectation crept in. + + + + +THE ART OF WALKING + + Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries! + He is as old as his calves--his garteries.... + + --_Meditations of Andrew McGill_. + +"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea." + +This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of +William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near +Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in +any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that +the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by +all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps +arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are +barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth +would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic +pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have +traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of +exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other +stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was +indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is +most excellent in his writings." + +A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost +heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous +precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one +sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a +gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life": + + Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the + streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to + go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was + carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon + earth a man so little curious in the world as he is. + +Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes +upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When +he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of +sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He +writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are +often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because +walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to +that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour. + +Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking. +The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether +Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road) +to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically +from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was +Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that +spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, +and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy +the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of +their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little +walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient +Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the +adventure. + +De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth +and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile +all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first +meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement +of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself +with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind +hastening to decay. + +I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised +before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's +famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth +century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving +meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days +and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary +travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any +of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up. +Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century +earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many +lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads. +It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of +his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it +over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than +a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long +before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that +cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one +foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him +as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy. + +After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you +paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On +Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than +the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, +1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He +must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on +Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know +that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the +financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to +better purpose! + +There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker: +get these by rote in some membrane of memory: + + The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky + sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of + state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel + playing before it. + +The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns +were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of +Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, +Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first +read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August, +1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George +Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of +the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom +Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to +that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous +half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not +dominate the conversation. + +There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the +Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on +the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed +in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for +the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them." +There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One +could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though +literature were a co-product of legs and head. + +Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due +course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall +Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight +the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious +as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one +goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the +country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the +harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and +muscle exercised alike. + +Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no +soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who +salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to +grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are +his months: + + For love we Earth then serve we all; + Her mystic secret then is ours: + We fall, or view our treasures fall, + Unclouded, as beholds her flowers. + + Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, + Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, + When lowly, with a broken neck, + The crocus lays her cheek to mire. + +I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the +bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary +of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's +"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals +from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, +and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands +"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to +utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education," +by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in +1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious +essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert +Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has +beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who +has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in +walking tours: + + No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should + ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in + arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of + men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall + be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and + two, since the world began, there have always been young men who + have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still + one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for + him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. + Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so + ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be + taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now, + one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake + before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be + confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they + fill. + + They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. + They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with + them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; + and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they + would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or + yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot + rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of + going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape + from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in + yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to + that great order called society that you have for a period got away + from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a + vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with + him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of + etiquette. + + He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has + fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, + to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which + he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on + earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a + breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of + course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural + instinct of women. + +Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of +locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be +admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make +memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published. + +Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an +itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed +stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he +proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know +he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives +and deacons tremble! + +Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems +at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their +eating; but despite the naïveté of his eagerness to sing, there is a +plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to +know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote +a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at +all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know +that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been +fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a +year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but +he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the +local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will +be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore +spats in his life. + +But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets +at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut +carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers +and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday +night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least +two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising +humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the +full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming +measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence +of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty +of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and +celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream +soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark +Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he +finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and +beauty. + +This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has +scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and +puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping +when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging +his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any +American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little +pamphlet used on many a road: + + +RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD + +Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois, +June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money. + +This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a +tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West and back, +during which he will observe the following rules: + + (1) Keep away from the cities. + + (2) Keep away from the railroads. + + (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage. + + (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven. + + (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five. + + (6) Travel alone. + + (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. + + (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. + + In order to carry out the last rule there will be three exceptions + to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief + printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry + this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry a small + portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view + of the history of art, especially as it applies to America. + +Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his +theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting. +"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the +exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this +decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and +well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil" +figure from Springfield, Illinois. + +A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a +lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in +"The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best +friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget it! + +The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have made the +highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and +private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the +footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven +there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the +limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick, +we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the +ways of God to man. + +And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells come most +often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination +lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When +a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most +vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending +to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card +index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail +me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, +who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, +even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the +endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the +wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is scouring the +hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road +to walk to Royston in the rain.... + +Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of +a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills +in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to +some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a +table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an +elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our +Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: +"Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, +rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." _Haec studio, +pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur_. + + + + +RUPERT BROOKE + + +Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born +of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin, +golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham, +in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at +Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church. + +In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge, +England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_. +This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at +Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to +time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own +small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. +His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's +_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14. + +Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows +along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the +Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country +is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields +bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard +willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of +the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top +with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the +favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and +monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire. + +But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café des Westens in +Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed. +Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, +and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, +Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang +of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the +verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that +neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with +painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which +I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the +way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the +recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being +famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate +devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final +expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal +questions of youth which have no country and no clime-- + + Say, is there Beauty yet to find? + And Certainty? and Quiet kind? + +No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to +forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may +perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of +young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past +decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he +tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily +observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and +flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War; +he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in +training for the Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled +"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first +published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's +quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as +the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called +forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London +_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet: + + "If I should die, think only this of me: + That there's some corner of a foreign field + That is for ever England." + +and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I +sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This +was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the +biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did: +wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had +sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from +London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23, +1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on +Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of +the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due +to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous +touch of sunstroke. + +A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who +Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to +the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited. +The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been +killed in action: + + We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the + valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, + but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and + Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely + grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen + trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an + olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth. + + About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their + way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave. + The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with + lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty + officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was + not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave. + + We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the + coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined + the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive + wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read + the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and + the bugles sounded the "Last Post." + + And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards + those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet + towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to + be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than + Skyros, and no quieter resting place. + + On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his + company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon + it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of + the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the + servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the + deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks." + + The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his + grave. + +It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke. +The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful +of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden +cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any +laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may +say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray +is quoted: + +"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of +one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of +youth and poetry." + +In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found +at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He +would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph. + +His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty +of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in +1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of +24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly +youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and +Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism, +bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot +on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a +part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he +says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster. + +And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise. +Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's +undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of +sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his +introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may +well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in +the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day +That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross +and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in +Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's +poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily +put, in _Grantchester_.) + +This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and +there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all +young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our +humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a +young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his +day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many +vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few +touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part +of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he +did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his +poems of 1905-08 are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet," +and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in +the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and +yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_: + + Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, + Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass, + You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; + Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, + When we are old, are old...." "And when we die + All's over that is ours; and life burns on + Through other lovers, other lips," said I, + --"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!" + + "We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here. + Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said: + "We shall go down with unreluctant tread + Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were + And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. + --And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. + +The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the +"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been +separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate +beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems," +containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England +and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to +save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the +complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first +American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought +after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth +of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting +flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. +From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or +_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to +sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the +form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song: + + "Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings, + And Triumph is his crown. + Earth fades in flame before his wings, + And Sun and Moon bow down." + But that, I knew, would never do; + And Heaven is all too high. + So whenever I meet a Queen, I said, + I will not catch her eye. + + "Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, + "The Gift of Love is this; + A crown of thorns about thy head, + And vinegar to thy kiss!"-- + But Tragedy is not for me; + And I'm content to be gay. + So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady, + I went another way. + + And so I never feared to see + You wander down the street, + Or come across the fields to me + On ordinary feet. + For what they'd never told me of, + And what I never knew; + It was that all the time, my love, + Love would be merely you. + +We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing +of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the +throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of +Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and +yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of +doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here +is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to +England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of +the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on +the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those +white Greek bodies against the green! + + Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, + And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, + With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, + To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. + +To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the +answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the +farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in +surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, +which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words +all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make +Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In +his hands the thing became a trumpet"-- + + +THE DEAD + + Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! + There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, + But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. + These laid the world away; poured out the red + Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be + Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, + That men call age; and those who would have been, + Their sons, they gave, their immortality. + + Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth + Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. + Honour has come back, as a King, to earth, + And paid his subjects with a royal wage; + And Nobleness walks in our ways again; + And we have come into our heritage. + +It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo +of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete +without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all +the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious +details of existence must be his poem _The Great Lover_ where he +catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines +speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he +holds dear-- + + White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; + And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; + And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, + Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; + Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon + Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss + Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is + Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen + Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; + The benison of hot water; furs to touch; + The good smell of old clothes; and other such-- + ...All these have been my loves. + +Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to speak; +but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than +_Heaven_ where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a +future life. + + This life cannot be All, they swear, + For how unpleasant, if it were! + One may not doubt that, somehow, Good + Shall come of Water and of Mud; + And, sure, the reverent eye must see + A Purpose in Liquidity. + We darkly know, by Faith we cry + The future is not Wholly Dry.... + But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, + Is wetter water, slimier slime! + +No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that +exquisite bit of fooling. + +Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke, +"the latest and greatest of young Englishmen." + + + + +THE MAN + + +The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold drizzle, the +first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were +beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the +long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was +a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It was the end of March. + +In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was +on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare +shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were +gray--a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue +eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow +in the padded chair. His right hand--the long, firm, nervous hand of a +scholar--rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his +fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he +was revising. + +Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two +and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure showed some +trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of +modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the +bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had +been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do +certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a +lifelong student of history, he had surprised his associates by the +clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in +the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than +he--save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney +piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for +his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the +picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, +pain-wrenched mouth. + +This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor +student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning visions of +great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of positions to guide his +country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher, +idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes +steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism +that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt him, +but had never abated his purpose. In a world reeling and smoking with +the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message +of the spirit, for the glory of humanity; for the settlement of disputes +by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To +that he had clung. + +He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen. + +What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the +golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announcing that +the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered +the first meeting thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious +faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in +the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully +planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation. + +In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could +have believed that great nations would discard without compunction all +the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in +the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the +highest military honours? That a supposedly friendly nation would fill +another land with spies--even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy? + +Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one +nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour +to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still +different. That his country, disregarding the old fetishes of honour and +insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things, +suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the +wounds and fill the starving mouths. That one nation--not because she +was weak, but because she was strong--should, with God's help, make a +firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never +conquer force. + +"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." +Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as +the utterance of a man years in advance of his time--but what rolling +thunders of vituperation they had cost him! _Too proud to fight_!... If +only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from +Judea! + +But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the +nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies +of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeakable horror on +non-combatants, women and children, he had realized that his cherished +dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great +nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and--with bleeding heart--even +the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With +face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on +the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. _Arabic_, +_Lusitania_, _Persia_, _Laconia_, _Falaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_, +_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief. +And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ... + +He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped +from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal +typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed +into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and +university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his +theses on the church door at Wittenberg: + +"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_." + +They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet +of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing.... + +"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the +step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it +involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of +the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war +against the Government and people of the United States_...." + +The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the +keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of +his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer +divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in +one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind. + +"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht +anders_...." + +"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward +them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse +that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their +previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill +their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to +bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an +opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for +peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic +nations_.... + + "_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to + a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow + interest of their own_." + +With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his +chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a +faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star. +Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing +heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to +feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning +breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, +spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of +little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the +footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags +leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with +gunners at their sterns--in one aching synthesis the vastness and +dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of +various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold! + +Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he +returned quietly to the typewriter: + +"_We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for +the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.... The world +must be made safe for democracy_." + +_The world must be made safe for democracy_! As the wires leaped and the +little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes +passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander +days, years before. + +He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the +German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness +of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving +rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the +Moselle. And England--dear green England, fairest of all--the rich blue +line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and +yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had +bicycled for tea, and the naïve rustic folk who had made him welcome. + +What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and +maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children, +millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness +of life--where were they now? Life, innocent human life--the most +precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and +win our own joys of home and love and food--what Black Death had +maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be +free and sweet again? + +The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of +anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men +now living. But for the sake of the generations to come--he thought of +his own tiny grandchildren--for the love of God and the mercy of +mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war +let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful +thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace." + +Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off +the closing words: + +"_To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything +that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who +know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood +and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and +the peace which she has treasured_." + +He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With +elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All +the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him, +but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "_Ich kann +nicht anders_," he whispered. + +Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly: + +"_God helping her, she can do no other_." + + + + +THE HEAD OF THE FIRM + + +He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting in his +private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and +yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and +other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers +and magazines. He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would +skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk +angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips. +For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons +that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of +his firm. + +His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he +was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the +same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead +would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes +would flash--and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk. + +When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not +well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he had +always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes remembered what +a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He +who loses his temper will lose everything." + +But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties +to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in +childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an +infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous +swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than +most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the +army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family +business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight. + +No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the +affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, +pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a +successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the +confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and +grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new +executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding +criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread +the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have +our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine +instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly +plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the +firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself +as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of +the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but +he paid little heed. + +The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen +in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe. +Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He +himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the +interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, +the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He +sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and +other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram +after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed +congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to +foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He employed +famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his +factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him. + +This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty +years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all +written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go +by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His +temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had +the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch, +sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of +energy in him often showed signs of overstress. + +It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last +months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of +business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his +old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them +the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted +from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the +commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was +out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The +strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and +unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own +family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to +resign by bankruptcy: + +"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common +enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your +deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid +from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by +right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have +dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to +welcome you at the earliest opportunity." + +The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it +is worth while to remember what it was that killed it--and him. While +the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would +bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that +would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more +startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may +be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth +away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed +word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer +the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him +cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted +into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge +organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in +Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had +cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had +them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of +free communities to live their own lives. + +Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that +perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him. +He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud, +was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of +the business to save and some of the goodwill intact. + +It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the +world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful +toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and +yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring +in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on +his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a +mocking cartoon. + +I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with +embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from +over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might +of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public opinion, that hung +like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word +incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt. +Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together +like beads of mercury on a plate, quivering into rhythm and concord, +become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires +to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when +once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, +it moves onward like the tide up a harbour. + +The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such +colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy +known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His +managers had foreseen every phase of this unprecedented competition, and +his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents +began to focus themselves. + +Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents, +solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized that +one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric +of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the +executors, pending a reorganization. + + + + +17 HERIOT ROW + + +There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year +to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to Edinburgh, +made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of +1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the +unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would +that one might again steer _Shotover_ (dearest of pushbikes) along the +Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way +to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English +landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me. + +That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and perchance may +serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of +wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more +interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him. +Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions. +For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the only time +in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during +nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional +Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no +excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one +take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot +month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon +exchange at two cents per penny. + + £ | s. | d + +July 16 pint cider | | 4 + ½ pint cider | | 1½ + lunch at Banbury | 2 | 2 + pint cider at Ettington | | 3 + supper at Stratford | 1 | 3 + stamp and postcard | | 2 + ____ _____ _____ + | 4 | 3½ + + +July 17 Postcards and stamps | | 9 + pencil | | 1 + Warwick Castle | 2 | - + cider at the _Bear and Baculus_ | | + (which Mifflin _would_ call the | | + _Bear and Bacillus) _ | | 2½ + _Bowling Green Inn, _bed and | | + breakfast | 3 | 2 + Puncture | 1 | - + Lunch, Kenilworth | 1 | 6 + Kenilworth Castle | | 6 + Postcards | | 4 + Lemonade, Coventry | | 4 + Cider | | 2½ + Supper, Tamworth, _The Castle Hotel_ | 2 | 1 + ____ _____ _____ + | 16 | 5½ + + +July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield | | 3 + cider at _The Three Crowns_ | | 4 + postcard and shave | | 4 + _The King's Head_, bed and breakfast | 3 | 7 + cider | | 2 + tip on road[A] | | 1½ + lunch, Uttoxeter | 1 | 3 + cider, Ashbourne, _The Green | | + Man_ | | 3 + landlord's drink, Ashbourne[B] | | 1 + supper, _Newhaven House_, | 1 | - + lemonade, Buxton | | 3 + ____ _____ _____ + + TOTAL £1 4 1 + ($5.78) + +[Footnote A: As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather +tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway +crossing.] + +[Footnote B: This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a +ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us +excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that +neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and +he agreed.] + +That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that +ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and +emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reckoning shillings +and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a +firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over +the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the +swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in +his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, +"Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something +that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke--"Four and +eleven pence half-penny so far to-day!" + +Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The +McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the +afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's +Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight! + +There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since the days +when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud to one +another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A +score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew +them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes +Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of +Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills--O my friends, do those +names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the +brotherhood--what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world! + +In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a +large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city +was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King +and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our +satisfaction we were known as "the smoking-room gentlemen" throughout +our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the +Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and +coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that +somewhere in his letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew +Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. +Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out +above all others of his youth--Rutland Square. And while that was of +course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad to +know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we +were on ground well loved by Tusitala. + +The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in Auld +Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row--famous address, which had +long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a +tablet on the house commemorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our +surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign TO SELL was +prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought +struck us. Could we not go over the house in the character of +prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and +concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the +Signet. + +Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once). + + + 16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. + + 26th July, 1911 + + + DEAR SIR, + + 17 HERIOT ROW + + We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be + seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view + it we shall arrange to have it opened. + + We are, + + Yours faithfully, + + GUILD AND SHEPHERD. + +Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the +figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember +that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling +with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was +in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and +subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always +take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of +amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if +you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman. + +The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show +that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attachés, +appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric +young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes, +each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the +attaché in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We +explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was +alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had +presence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, +and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was +quoted. + +He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped +softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very track of the +Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined +R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie +light the street-lamps outside--a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining +brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn +heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street +gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, +returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling +mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining +room facing the street--and we imagined Louis and his parents at +breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a +spacious and attractive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and +opening off it the little room where faithful Cummie slept. But in vain +we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room +that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the +endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded +and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and +forlorn. + +With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, seeing +everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous +young agent. And what was it he said?--"This was the house of Lord +So-and-so" (I forget the name)--"and incidentally, Robert Louis +Stevenson lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the +deeds." + +_Incidentally_!... + +Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant +of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than +the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other +"offices" with care, imagining that little "Smoutie" may have run here +and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that +childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed +to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the +Stevensons for thirty years (1857-1887)--surely even the thirty years +that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those +dear ghosts we conjured up! + +We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and +Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent +deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one has yet put a +tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day. + +In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern +dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come +and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of +the dining-room windows: + + For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, + And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more; + And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, + O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night! + +But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting +up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame +cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 +("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in +Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have +a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R.L.S., of whom +he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular +lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were +Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn +Street." He seemed to think Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned +that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, +and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you +still light the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder +beacons on Flanders fields? + +One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was +still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were down on hands and +knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light +in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man +passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, +never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as +the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we +followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy +shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze. + +Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces prom +No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin +and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the +adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once described when setting +down some recollections of childhood. + + In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame + boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much + shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, + like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and + _goody_ story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after many + days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted + him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to + play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like + a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the + venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, for it was + a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was + the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate + aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into + talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular + may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and + knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling + along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on + his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great + affair to me. + +We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's +Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the +Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an +exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend +in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter +flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one +yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the +Edinburgh street lamps," says R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all +shines on Heriot Row. + +The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the +dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to +go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more +enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him. + + + + +FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER + +[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the +extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the +head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know +him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable +manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very +good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia +was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre +books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and +unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read +MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet +in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last +wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here +in memory of my very dear friend_.] + + +In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself. +Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal +trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never +did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I +am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy. +My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other +more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to +speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is +interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a +symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while +reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. +My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. +Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter +my message without fear or favour. + +As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and +nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, +poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and +strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they +beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most +preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful +authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid +blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly +sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is +in the blood. + +Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible. +George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas +and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is +still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many +unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he +said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety." +But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as +publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did +they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich +garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and +younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on +into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing. + +But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true +specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is +content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican +that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of +good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some +winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular +conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his +thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et +dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing +terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the +publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I +believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully +when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote +an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a +week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the +head reader of a large publishing house. + +One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the +profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will +rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration; +only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the +others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away +their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript +which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it +betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable +to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere +in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into +her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his +ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a +score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me +once, containing this immortal couplet: + + She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse + on the air, + A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen + to set it there. + +Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral +ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when +one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs' +trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert +Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity. + +Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are +repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its +absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack +of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords +to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in +many cantos, beginning + + Our heart is but a bundle of muscle + In which our passions tumble and tussle. + +Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis: + + "Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual + circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being + a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the + day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a + paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced + case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by + a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been + bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles + and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female, + under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well + as in large cities and fashionable watering places. + +But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition, +let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a +manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one +publisher's office. + + She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant + figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. + Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured + like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and + combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing + tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful + crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and + tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its + own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of + the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering + strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of + the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was + destined to be pushed forward by sighs. + +Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such +plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero +in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently: + + For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah + Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the + appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases. + His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close + together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in + many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his + lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper + lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across + his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and + expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine + proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges + there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show + unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in + the kindest advances one would wish to see. + + It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley. + +I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the +A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read +too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output +of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional +reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which +distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history, +poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes +a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of +things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is +fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable +treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on +using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And +with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of +writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg. + +Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is +all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for +the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on +foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging +anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of +intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and +talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of +substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts +all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? +Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the +authors! + + + + +WILLIAM McFEE + + M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a + cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it, + and half the ship has to clean up the mess. + + --RUDYARD KIPLING. + + +The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they +would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and +William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck +steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at +Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages! + +William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer +in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude +toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not +know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his +feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his +disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the +purveyors of publicity, you may know him. + +One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the +open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young +man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to +Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker, +like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the +titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned +to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was +about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve +months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when +I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a +telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him +Casuals_!" + +It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16 +that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the +not-to-be-forgotten words. + +MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA. + +Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a +copy. + +My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this +note: + +"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up +with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before +the open fire." + +My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are +interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike +County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly +readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her +first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings +she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was +our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for +her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee. + +_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in +America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a +popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents +that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who +regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the +seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections, +indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the +first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened +to with respect. + +Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at +that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were +_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has +been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very +singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on +human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for +himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well +take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this +generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the +artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of +a paragraph:-- + + Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I + suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the + sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine + artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live + like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the + artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with + irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my + living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their + ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my + theme, the problem of human folly. + +Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he +has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of +it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London +twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful +machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering. +And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have +cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers +at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how +delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes +for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude +toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own +phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has +hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but +not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on +a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in +the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the +desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and +a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft +to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the +man who really has something to say. + +Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How +the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell +Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W. +Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets +does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only +raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the +raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these +States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing +paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as +is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? +Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the +stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me +quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot +refuse facts." + +William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English +skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long +voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New +Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was +educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the +Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar +school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a +high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer. + +At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate. +This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse, +Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office +of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His +father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an +apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred +pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the +money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else +is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at +the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will +find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out +in _Aliens_. + +After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on +various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at +Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile +verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time +of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either +imitating Kipling or reacting from him. + +His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives +and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by +socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to +live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at +first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic +Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum +reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he +attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent +engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As +early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them. + +In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room +of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance. +Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year +(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The +reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he +reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain +liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of +his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain +how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley +(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.) + +The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair +prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time +monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I +speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's +certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A +small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting +study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only +diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do +not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies +of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour. + +I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his +induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour +of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable +weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing +suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a +seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating +things about the life of an engineer: + + It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of + work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help + wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick. + Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the + R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean, + when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as + my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my + friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or + the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty + toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the + naval auxiliary are the same. + + I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment + of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession + have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to + toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet + auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of + his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to + superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the + navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an + architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not + expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts + door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you + do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer + has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding + precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in + other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind. + I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which + to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the + peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of + it, and I know what I am talking about. + + _The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the + responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He, + the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest + and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available + twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. + Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge + instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. + When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described. + +The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these +laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as +well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea +have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university. +The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his +acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. +He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the +University of the Seven Seas. + +If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem +that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a +man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has +worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When +his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the +bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or +reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no +gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from +some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most +engineers: + + As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool) + the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the + pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores + dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie + were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up + writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend + more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door. + + I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish + them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that + character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_ + character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it, + can you? + + I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst + of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people + live, of ordinary human possibilities. + + A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap + stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I + don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse + what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big + name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as + well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To + hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_! + + I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the + amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort + who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter + him! + +His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the +hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging +from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to +be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of +"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in +the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London +journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time +to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that +make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written +weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a +humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern +cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor +on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines. + +When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his +engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was +interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too. +And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board +of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to +rest on his gauges. + +In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local +colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the +United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither +_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for +years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his +manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the +United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he +was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war. + +Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a +vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my +proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all +three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two +magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the +Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to +every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of +letters. They can never be quoted too often: + +"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the +miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs +deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the +undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile +which is not a grin." + +That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich +family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered +the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps +cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the +cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in +store for us. + +And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers +with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth +remembering, and I leave it with you: + +"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, +instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing +murderous blows." + + + + +RHUBARB + + +We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which +we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them, +imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche +Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz. + +The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable +Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting +way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic +corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and +as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, +no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty +trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, +so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of +an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the +Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten +Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a year. People who +find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The +only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of +Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read. + +Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little +German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a +man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all +expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent +_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the +stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and +dream of Stuttgart. + +It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an +educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was +very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the +other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire, +dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it +more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop +into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell +into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her +shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their +pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she +so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive. + +It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that +he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We +sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little +sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was +over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes +would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of +a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life. + +What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the +rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin +abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang +Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's +Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, +marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of +paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy +trousers--infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say. + +I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first +impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always +in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back; +his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He +had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a +decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx. +Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some +harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave. +"I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. +It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong +like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his +broad, thick hand. + +Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche +Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda +fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked +for anything more complex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake +his head solemnly and say: "That I have not got." Motorists sometimes +turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for +banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But +they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit +of absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged +water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag his +beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when +the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and +rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue. + +At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it +high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna +entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed +and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. This +she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on +top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in +stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black +bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on +Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense +carnation" bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics +of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naïve +pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he," +which amused us. + +On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and +during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog +which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. Sometimes we met +him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to +himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black +dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down, +pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past. + +As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war. +Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the +shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat +upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for converting the +old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected +them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the +spine of his contention was that the German army was unbeatable. He got +out his faded discharge ticket from the Würtemberger Landsturm to show +the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at +the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and +over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard +aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came +in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped. +But often the glass top of the perfume counter was requisitioned as a +large-scale battleground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to +represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was +Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty +completely on the perfume counter. "_Warte doch_!" he would cry. "Just +wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!" + +Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew +well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our +arguments were wholly lacking in personal animus. When I told him of the +Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing +me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" +made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the +British; he would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his +conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he +would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a +panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin +at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good +night. + +How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a +true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all +that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal +simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt +for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the +men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of +the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans +_en masse_, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the +drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue +it out. + +But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German sentiment in +the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried +over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would +explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more surprised to meet +her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, sloshing along the road in the +liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black +paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing +outdoors on a day like this?" I said. + +"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen +didn't get her airing." + +"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said +severely. + +Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was snowbound in +Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent +business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away, +so we had no news from Kings. + +We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our +absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an +hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe +and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped +at the drugstore on my way to the train to get some iodine. + +Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone of white +powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from well. There were +great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat +spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and +went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands. + +"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that +the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week? +Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his +heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze +seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At +last he turned round. His broad, naïve face was quivering like +blanc-mange. + +"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more? +Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia." + +As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor. +The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my +feet. + + + + +THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE + +A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY + + + +Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint +little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the +_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the +others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish +din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your +eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. +Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above +the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the +famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio +Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down +your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in +Strychnine. + +Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press +agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and +untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an +unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among +physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful +ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with +innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the +contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept +away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end +that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find +himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at +length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells +clanging in your ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag +soaring behind the jade canal. + +The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into +the curious seven-wheeled _sforza_ lettered _Hôtel Decameron_. We +rumbled _andante espressivo_ over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussée +d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of +the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of +lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what +quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes in a +strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the _markt-platz_ +where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are +delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese +cathedral) on the cliff. + +The Hôtel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender +there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche +overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory +of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch +is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after +which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French +frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer +without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The _haut ton_ of +the section in which the Hôtel Decameron finds itself can readily be +seen by the fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on +the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hôtel. The +antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the two. + +The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak +heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the +terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a +bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my +time exploring the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which +stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and +vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing +than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the +Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts +of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some +particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will +some day make Strychnine a place of _pélérinage_ for all the world. _Pay +homage to the fromage_ is a rough translation of the motto of the town, +which is carved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself. +Limberg, Gruyère, Alkmaar, Neufchâtel, Camembert and Hoboken--all these +famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the +Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the +burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' Guild at +the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by the town +council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and +a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial +cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present +donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat +the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by +the workmen in the quarries to prevent prostration. + +It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would +gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and +sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping +my _verre_ of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of +travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned ambulance to catch my +even more old-fashioned train. The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine +when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese +carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some +day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them +to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then +Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance +that way, a fragrant memory. + +And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal +and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys. + + + + +INGO + +"ZUM ANDENKEN" + + +The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart +to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of +blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown +calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the +German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good +fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque +German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the +absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was! + +Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call +memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black +Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and +asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen +in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn") +found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern +in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low +building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering +little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in +winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely +aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a +door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the +haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the +summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery +under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow +coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the +valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the +dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that +summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of +cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining +table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's +niece when they essayed the native idiom. "_Sie arbeiten immer_!" she +used to say; "_Sie werden krank_!" ("You're always working; you'll be +ill!") + +There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days +two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there +more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans. +On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the +military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the +Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful +organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every +village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in +those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in +waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, +and played games with Ingo. + +Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, +self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. +His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a +corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk +along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by +the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations +for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the +immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a +muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he +was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing +smile: "_Von den Sternen_!" ("Of the stars.") + +The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's +smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes +were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous +amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple +pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy +days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and +sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task +of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet +one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the +word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every +time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of +a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to +guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game +entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent +over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little +brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task. +"Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would +laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning +a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo. + +The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of +winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to +construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way +out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the +room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages, +then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the +other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity +to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his +sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous +places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, +and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to +make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless +despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom. + +After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come +trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony +under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book _Till +Eulenspiegel_, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that +immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every +paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. +Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear +Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright +boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What +a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with +deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest +transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely +ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth. +His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive +stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, +"_Gott! wie er freut sich_!" The progress of our reading was held up by +these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo +explaining. + +Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to +reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and +there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure +Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the +tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's +eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's +sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn +we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read +of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall +when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the +quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses. + +I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those +hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, +sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus +zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect +and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight +with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric +American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons +with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as +often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a +child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, +and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me +my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me +was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one +afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook. + +And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Märchen" that +I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to +learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them, +they ran like this: + + For Ingo to learn English will very easy be + If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me; + Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes, + And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes-- + Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend: + To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend. + +If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot +get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate. + + + + +HOUSEBROKEN + + +After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he +needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew +his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening +spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no +two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for +something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and +smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous +evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the +click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after +glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at +night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their +pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight--these were the things that +made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in +the suburbs like a tame cat! + +Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last +he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp +retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to +his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took +it quite calmly. + +"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an +evening with your friends." + +A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go. + +"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be +lonely." + +This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting +the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the +evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow +of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the +pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars +who never stir from the house at night. + +On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to +shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very +cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room +shining with firelight and the shabby armchair. + +"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked. + +"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak +in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you." + +He kissed her and went off. + +When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired +and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of +drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face +bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway. + +At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, +shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran. + +He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force +seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering +how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly. + +At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street +and had almost entered his gate when he paused. + +Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably +by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart +leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely +eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and +masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and +tiptoed away. + +That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a +little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he +sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again +returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced +his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, +biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a +box of crackers. + +At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the +lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more +trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering +with weariness and cold, he went home. + +He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned +over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily. + +"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?" + +"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock +struck half-past ten and supported him. + +"Did you have a good time?" + +"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with +the boys now and then." + + + + +THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE + + +I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to +Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, +seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about +to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine. +He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of +laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, +labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young +visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising +verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost +inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as +one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the +bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a +swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way. + + +I + +That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with +energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters +for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's +verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of +an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that +Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too +some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has +heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but +there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful +tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how +engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is. + +[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce +Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.] + +Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of +his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his +grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother +was wounded at Waterloo. + +His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in +France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of +Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and +Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are +in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Père la +Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an +English wife. + +The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at +Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was +called--until 1914. + +Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to +live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling +have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, +became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque +villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts. + +In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas +Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of +biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period: + +"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in +'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a +clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his +instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and +this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, +he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of +him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the +old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was +calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which +he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I +understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it +would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In +those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a +certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His +rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series +of triumphs during his whole school career." + +In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field +artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic +heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, +and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he +starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil +is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that +book--everyone should have six copies. + +After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical +contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, +Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in +England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known +as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean +and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of +the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the +barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the +public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have +seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He +swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He +read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the +fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus +of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long +readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still +recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and +wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at +Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up. + +Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in +Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. +It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western +Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. +But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her +into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her +wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and +the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. +This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think +it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young +energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked +brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued +passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked +authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of +the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, +partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the +most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a +tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without +assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite +of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any +reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority. + +Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says: + +"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college +friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the +ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone +with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, +so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly +spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in +his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner +unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears." + +No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote +the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer +War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and +overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind. + + TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA + + Years ago when I was at Balliol, + Balliol men--and I was one-- + Swam together in winter rivers, + Wrestled together under the sun. + And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, + Loved already, but hardly known, + Welded us each of us into the others: + Called a levy and chose her own. + + Here is a House that armours a man + With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, + And a laughing way in the teeth of the world + And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again: + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + + I have said it before, and I say it again, + There was treason done, and a false word spoken, + And England under the dregs of men, + And bribes about, and a treaty broken: + But angry, lonely, hating it still, + I wished to be there in spite of the wrong. + My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill + And the hammer of galloping all day long. + + Galloping outward into the weather, + Hands a-ready and battle in all: + Words together and wine together + And song together in Balliol Hall. + Rare and single! Noble and few!... + Oh! they have wasted you over the sea! + The only brothers ever I knew, + The men that laughed and quarrelled with me. + + * * * * * + + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again; + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + +Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever +experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who +finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the +thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy +rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless +throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human +history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never +outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so +imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the +undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room +that did not shelve one or two of his volumes. + + +II + +There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage +to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); +his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary +France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing +essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly +from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was +very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and +humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 +he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent +spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams +of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here +was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor +startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary +stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not +soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the +early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly +administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign +against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the +very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must +look for leadership and inspiration." + +Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's +importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to +a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking +or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in +an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, +or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. +Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make +splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of +verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important +contribution? + +What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of +Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous +Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human +suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad +necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his +academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old +volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an +hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk +about this greatest figure of the Renaissance. + +Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of +Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, +physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own +justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what +you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a +perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The +gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too? + +Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in +which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands +Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing +is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His +extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity +and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list +of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are +included. + +Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that +he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find +the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights +in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then +look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us +"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its +literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of +'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels." + + +III + +In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. +Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of +English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, +politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, +nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities +of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work +he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) +It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of +anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. +His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, +biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His +passion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing +persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are +the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant. +Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe. + +Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and +whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite +tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing +earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little +volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some +of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, +companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and +inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills +at twilight--in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that +make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind": + + A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength + of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something + worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of + heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such + health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man + spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding + against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the + end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is + as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days + of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of + intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And + the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has + been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and + turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which + nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship + are at their noblest. + + +IV + +And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but +ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the +poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for +impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly +and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music: + + I never get between the pines + But I smell the Sussex air; + Nor I never come on a belt of sand + But my home is there. + And along the sky the line of the Downs + So noble and so bare. + + A lost thing could I never find, + Nor a broken thing mend: + And I fear I shall be all alone + When I get towards the end. + Who will there be to comfort me + Or who will be my friend? + + I will gather and carefully make my friends + Of the men of the Sussex Weald, + They watch the stars from silent folds, + They stiffly plough the field. + By them and the God of the South Country + My poor soul shall be healed. + + If I ever become a rich man, + Or if ever I grow to be old, + I will build a house with deep thatch + To shelter me from the cold, + And there shall the Sussex songs be sung + And the story of Sussex told. + + I will hold my house in the high wood + Within a walk of the sea, + And the men that were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + + + + +A CASUAL OF THE SEA + + He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea. + + --GEORGE HERBERT. + + +Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old +Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S. +_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the +second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same +novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him +working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one +more proof of the surprising power of the written word? + +For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print. +The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote +about him, brought (so he naïvely told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, +simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to +help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the +long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands +of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your +"round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes." + +"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His +father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the +support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with +their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships +and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle +for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more +bread for supper--that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top +of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His +grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little +family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to +school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window +because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only +slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands. + +Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils +given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He +chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his +great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the +Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came. + +After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, +and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his +grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the +docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running +to him. + +"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the _Queen +Eleanor_!" + +It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the _Queen Eleanor_, a British +tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the +chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly. + +"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away--we sail +at four o'clock." + +"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!) + +The chief roars with laughter. + +"Too small!" he says. + +Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward. + +"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and +come back again. Then we'll see how you look!" + +Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy +grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the +_Queen Eleanor_. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds +five a month. + +Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the +engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin +boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He +used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would +overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few +times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy. + +"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened +him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still. + +Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him +friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about +the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on +the _Fernfield_ in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. +This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and +Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired +a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster. + +One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer +had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be +the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, +before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, +Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And +what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even +then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important +rôle! + +The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, +as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the +world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New +York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht _Alvina._ He +was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral +in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across +the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there +still was one then!) + +Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when +his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the +window a picture of the Scotch engineer--his best friend, the only man +in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the +engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English +transport. He scanned the poster with amazement. + +Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical +seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and +bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the +book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for +years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how +the writer, who was the former second engineer of the _Fernfield_, had +done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at +sea. Then came another surprise. + +"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the +bookseller. + +It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee, +who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers +found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and +playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's +surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent +liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee +had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that +he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for +several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good +advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, +and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that +Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his +yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under +his arm. + +Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my +interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that +one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy +asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the _Alvina_ was to sail the +next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed. + +Then I saw in the papers that the _Alvina_ had been halted in the +Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected +that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on +her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of +Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, +pending an investigation. + +Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in the +very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I +overheard another member of the _Alvina's_ crew asking about "Casuals +of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, +too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends +walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired +hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began +explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor +who had been there a few days before. + +So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to +see Tommy and the _Alvina_. + +I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible +excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion in the breast +of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder +putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo +Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of +the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of +West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the +West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners, +and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met +Captain Claret of the _Minnehaha_, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape +of the _Orduña_, Mr. Jones of the _Lusitania_ and many another. They +knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the +officers' cabins on the _Lusitania_ when she went down, God rest her. I +know, because I put them there. + + * * * * * + +And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the +landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet +our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of +earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on +every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels--the _James L. Morgan_, dour +little tug, shoving two barges; _Themistocles_, at anchor, with the blue +and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the _Comanche_ +outward bound for Galveston (I think); the _Ascalon_, full-rigged ship, +with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit snugging the canvas. +And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate +indignities--and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy +Hook.... + +At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The _Alvina_ was not there. +One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly +taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came +to my aid. "There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his +gesture, and saw her--a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel +with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places +on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman +wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was +interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into +trouble with "39"--"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the +Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on +a dollar and a quarter. + +That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader! +Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a +"bight"--surrounded by ships and the men who sail them--I might almost +have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long Island commuters are nurtured +to a tough and perilous his, and I clambered the _Alvina's _side without +dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts. + +Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me +to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The +first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a +stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those _Dioscuri_ of seamen, had been at +work. The skipper was ashore. He owns a saloon. + +The _Alvina_ is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me, +and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the +staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached; +she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating +apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. +But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in +preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck +was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in +January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons. + +I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch +lad--round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me +all his treasures--his certificates of good conduct from all the ships +(both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother, +who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta--a very pretty +girl--who is also mentioned in _Casuals of the Sea._ The drunken fireman +in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the +same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of +letters from Mr. McFee. + +I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to this +Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they were. Tommy +is one of his own "casuals"-- + + --those frail craft upon the restless Sea + Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, + Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, + Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started-- + +and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of chance +are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put it +in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, libraries, and art +galleries; get to know something about this great America if you intend +to settle down there--that is the kind of word Tommy gets from his +friend. + +Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of +life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable +because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven +chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle +face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner +together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where +men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing +tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy +from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common +sense. + +When I left her that afternoon, the _Alvina_ was getting up steam, and +she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, and +for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and thoughts of the simple, +childlike men who live on ships. I realized for the first time the truth +of that background of aimless hazard that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a +book of more than passing merit. + +As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not. +When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in +the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to work oiling the +dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way +up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton correspondence course on steam +engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. +That lasted just two weeks. The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. +The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound. + +But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart +his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put him in +a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our +day, you will find him--a casual of the sea! + + + + +THE LAST PIPE + + The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a + clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most + polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe + every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his + back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly + inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced by + the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of + emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed. + + --LEIGH HUNT. + + +The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in +value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of +diminishing returns. I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the +fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. It is true +that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs, +inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a +morning pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread +in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if +possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a +lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, +and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot +bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is +overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot +Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds +hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a +second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, +let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a +sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of +breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the +invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae. + +After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf, +mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober +pacing: then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of +the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the +cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free--and then for your +_säckerhets tändstickor!_ A day so begun is well begun, and sin will +flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and +tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; +the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks +with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The +first pipe! + +But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the +after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in +mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure +sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins +to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for +thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. As the smoke drifts and +shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable +energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most +potent force in existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred +the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing +dottel in your briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down +the stem. The most precious things in the world are also vivid with +poison. + +Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he have +written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid of +science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his indigestion and +snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous use of the weed makes +the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to forgers, +second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, who had little enough +truck with churchmen, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop +of London. Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and +rightly, his first impulse was to decline. But before answering the +Bishop's letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. The latter +(the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in +the fold of the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and +hugely enjoyed himself. + +There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information for all +acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art +and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social History of Smoking," by +G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives somewhere +in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to +return it. If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and +relent. Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (_Canadian +journals please copy!_) + + * * * * * + +I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically with the +weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course the +incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his tongue and grows +callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best +not to smoke during office hours. This may be a hard saying to some, but +a proper respect for the art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast +can be at his devotions always. It is not those who are horny with +genuflection who are nearest the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak +in all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto now and then! + +This is the schedule I vouch for: + +After breakfast: 2 pipes + +At luncheon: 2 pipes + +Before dinner: 2 pipes + +Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes + +(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.) + +The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If your meal +is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from +the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food +into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left +in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs +at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such +times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes +automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your eyes +see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents, +or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below +hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien +and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like +stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however, +when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his +whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating +bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. +You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason, +emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this +desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little +fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. +Such a régime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a +continuance of intellect. + +Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the +choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted +by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in +pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a sovereign +consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the +fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any ginseng in the +herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort +virgins not to marry men who do not smoke. + +Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art +and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the +so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to +weariness. + +No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of +_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology. +Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define +life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of +consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, +interrupted by intervals of recuperation. + +Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates +being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve +ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the +recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of +saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is +the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe +ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just +before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef. + +The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my +eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school +poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after +piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some +hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and +slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, +invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General +Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of +learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a +repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, +that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland +for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by +which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that +afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober +research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous précis of +the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly +paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY: +by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price, +relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the +lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents +belabour one another! + +With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be +smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering +interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the +glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn +to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue. + +"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in the most +necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may +be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is annexed a Description of +the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes, +with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from +the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. +Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. _At the Clarendon +Press_." + +Or this: + +"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure. +Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii + +104. 5s. net." + +O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an +introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his +Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the +catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in +exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as +leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest +are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good +hands." + +One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and +curiosity are now both going strong. + +"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie +incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest +English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net." + +Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial +enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of +this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of +"Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of +Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of +Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum +Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. +Field. 1865. Two volumes £6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane +History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution +of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the +Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz +and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp +550. 10s. net." + +But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is +another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos +are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent +poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the +editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends. +He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial +products in the text of the magazine. + +But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us +call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony: + +"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone +man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's +cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for +stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, +there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven." + +And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General +Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and +kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The +window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars ... a +distant chime ... and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian +herb about me. + + + + +TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE + + +The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs. +Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until +Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires +courage. + +Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab commutes +by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, the +African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to tow him to the +office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered +soul, inured to privation and calamity. At seven-thirty in the morning +he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife +he is going to work. + +How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. and +Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And hoping +that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the furnace until +the last touchdown had been made. + +But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new cook, had +begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda came from the +West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the sophistries of the +employment agencies. She could boil an egg without cracking it, she +could open a tin can without maiming herself. She was neat, guileless, +and cheerful. But, she was accustomed to a warm climate. + +The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner, +Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how chilly the +evenings were growing. But across the table came one of those glances +familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with rebuke, +charged with the lightning of instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze +struck him dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze! + +Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich in +calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully what +Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of coal bills +danced in his mind. + + * * * * * + +After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and Mrs. +Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in +washing the dishes. + +"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't you +better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days +Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from +Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. She said she +couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've given her my old +fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One other remark like that +of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, Bob, use your skull!" + +Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating wisdom of +women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply. + +Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility. + +"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected by +chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the +thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If you +must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. Otherwise +we'll have to start the furnace at once." + +Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the +simple-minded race of husbands. + +"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on. +Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance remark!" + +The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, Mr. +Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for hot soup," +he said. "All the men at the office were talking about the unseasonable +hot weather. I think we'd better have a window open." To Mrs. +Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room windows, admitting +a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she was game, and presently +called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda was in the room they talked +pointedly of the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau +notes from the evening paper. + +After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force of +habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just as he was +setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other wistfully, for +the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully +took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirtsleeves until +Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire, +by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before retiring, so +that Belinda might suspect nothing in the morning. + +The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm Beach suit. +Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They both sneezed +vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town to-day, I think I +caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell. + +Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer with a +puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the attic. But +the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. Blackwell explained +that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a similar +psychological campaign. Belinda and Mrs. Chester's cook, +Tulip--jocularly known as the Black Tulip--were friends, and would +undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed not to start her +furnace without consultation with Mrs. Blackwell. + +October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather remained sunny, +but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic +bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but +sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late +at night. "I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm +sure it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She never opens the +windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning." + +"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. Blackwell +drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but +underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels. + + * * * * * + +Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in +psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train less +fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to +him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to +dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men loudly clamoured for +permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering +jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when +the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no, +Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream to-night. I don't +w--want to get chilled. Bring me some hot coffee." As she brought his +cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration. +"By George," he thought, "this mental suggestion business certainly +works." Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze +in an ulster. + +The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the +doctor in the hall. + +"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?" + +"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. "It's +the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is the +17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has all the +symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat." + + + + +MY FRIEND + + +To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time. + +Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will +not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many +of his kind. + +In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that +many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry +leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look +to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, +and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon +Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent. + +My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these +parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things, +but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and +distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his +person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his +own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great +literature. + +I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to +bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love +(I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for +beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry +considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him +his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die +than dishonour that chosen instrument. + +I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in +my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal +situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary +critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some +unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, +a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the +slipshod and insincere. + +Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his +daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit +what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling +ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than +comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or +fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a +publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to me, "because I am +convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling +books: what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called +literature." + +I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this devotion to +high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is +unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded +simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been +haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters +where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not +find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of +men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man. + +In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly +wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to +cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that +confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to +those who understand. + +Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort +and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding +English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine +prose. + +I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak +spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet; + + And the men who were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + +Indeed let us hope that they will. + + + + +A POET OF SAD VIGILS + + +There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably +the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of +tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss +Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary +remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary +of hers. + +I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn +"The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White? +But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump +volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place +near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal +Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of +several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's +remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire +that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was +the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! +Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even +Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a +parlous sport. + +The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane +Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little +time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are +grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and +overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was +still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read +because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are +so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so +indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that +Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on +plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived +to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter +of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's +College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a +poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and +honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As +Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to +him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so +soon have been removed from the world. + +He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents; +his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest +years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from +his books, even at mealtimes. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a +Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it +to his mother. Southey's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius +is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary +feeling." + +His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was +employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the +prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to +start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The +work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in +the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the +office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and +Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were +dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little +garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his +supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to +eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a +deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal +ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The Wealth +of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were +some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy +that I know. No one, after reading Southey's memoir, will overload his +brain again. + +At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother +Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at +this amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged to enter into this +resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading +romances." He is human enough to add, however, that "after long and +fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson +Crusoe' afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' +I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the +English language." + +The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in +London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. Henry permitted +himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the +benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem to have carried on a +mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville was inclined to belittle +the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his +brother's unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and +"instructive" topics. Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for +self-improvement. If our great-grandparents were all like that what an +age it had been for the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is +requisite to make one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, +_sound sense_." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural +abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but it +is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the trouble of +writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any art, however +trivial, that did not require some application at first." He begs the +astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he +reads. "You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself." Does +one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave? + +Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of prizes won +in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch +globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions to the _Monthly +Mirror_. He was also admitted a member of a famous literary society then +existing in Nottingham, and although the youngest of the sodality he +promptly announced that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With +mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering assembled at the appointed +time, and the inspired youth harangued them for two hours on the subject +of Genius. The devil, or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for +destruction. + +In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He published +a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as Consumption, +Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the Night Previous to +Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, The Eve +of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female Lunatic to a Lady, had been +warmly welcomed by the politest magazines of the time. To wish to +publish them in more permanent form was natural; but the unfortunate +young man conceived the thought that the venture might even be a +profitable one. He had found himself troubled with deafness, which +threatened to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was +canting seriously toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college +career and then the church were lively in his mind. + +The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his manuscript for +the printer. Probably never before or since, until the Rev. John +Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about garnering his +collected works into that volume which is the delight of the wicked, has +a human heart mulled over indifferent verses with so honest a pleasure +and such unabated certainty of immortality. The first two details to be +attended to were the printing of what were modestly termed +_Proposals_--i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for +pledges of subscription--and, still more important, securing the +permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. +The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and +saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it +might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the +manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine +brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of +Devonshire. A very humble letter from honest Henry accompanied it, +begging leave of her Grace to dedicate his "trifling effusions" to her. + +Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are very +entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such +circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would be +sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already got +twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready: + +"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at all, among +my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the +conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got abroad, and has been +received more favourably than I expected." + +But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind the +poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of +Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so feelingly calls a +weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's heels, but +no word arrived from the duchess. She was known to be assaulted from all +sides by such applications: indeed her mail seems to have been very +nearly as large as that of Mary Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his +unspeakable anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all +parcels sent to the duchess, unless marked with a password known only to +her particular correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter +to be reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried +Henry in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits +to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. Finally, +after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. Even then +undaunted, this long-suffering older brother made one more try in the +poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, and +called on her in person, wisely leaving the manuscript at home; and with +the complaisance of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's +modest request. Her name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the +little volume, and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy +reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises +that "Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it +is probable that she never opened the book." + +"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in 1803. + +It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more +seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see +what Henry's reading had been--Milton, Collins, and Gray, evidently. His +unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how +thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his mind and +became part of his own outpourings. _Il Penseroso_ gushes to the surface +of poor Henry's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of +Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we +may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of his +poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. +Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful +vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his +quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his +thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary +information, but in the more active business of life, must not be +expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a +Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace." + +The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an +unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came +home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He +nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies. +After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he +dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure +hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when the _Monthly +Review_ for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: +in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put _boy_ to rhyme +with _sky_, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course, +"If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, +produce better sense and better rhymes." + +The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested +opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent, +but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be +an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so +inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross +and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his +health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, +however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review +that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused +Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise himself above his +level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death +edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have +him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge +looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the +fervour of his industry and ambition. + +Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger. +The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination +for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he himself always felt +that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened +with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet--epilepsy--his frail and +uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of +1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where +he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday +to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He +had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university, +and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law. +Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie +down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six. +His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs +to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile +in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's +step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but +after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading. +Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of +extreme depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his +sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very +touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the +cliché and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight +musings at their highest pitch:-- + + TO CONSUMPTION + + Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head, + Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay, + Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, + And softly go to slumber with the dead. + And if 'tis true what holy men have said, + That strains angelic oft foretell the day + Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey, + O let the aerial music round my bed, + Dissolving sad in dying symphony, + Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; + That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye, + Ere I depart upon my journey drear: + And smiling faintly on the painful past, + Compose my decent head, and breathe my last. + +But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at +Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near +his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit +for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer +nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of +drenched and muddy clothes. + +Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after +all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who +promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St. +John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers, +who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman +in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a +year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters during this +period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while +boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. +He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The +proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters +weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic. + +In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St. +John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of +two very different undergraduates--William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler. +His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and +overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a pleasant +picture of his quiet rambles through the town, his solitary cups of tea +as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear +his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one +at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is +his account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the +bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). +Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the +traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for +his coal bin. + +But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the haven +of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill health, his +tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship examination in +December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded physical inability, +they dosed him with "strong medicines" to enable him to face the +examiners. After the ordeal he was so unstrung that he hurried off to +London to spend Christmas with his aunt. + +The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors were, +according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as far as +possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense enough to +restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he was always at +work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or what not. In a +memorandum found in his desk his life was thus planned: "Rise at +half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel and breakfast till +eight. Study and lectures till one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk +and dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. Nine to ten, +devotions. Bed at ten." + +In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of his year, +and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him the unusual +compliment of keeping him in college through the vacation with a special +mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics being +considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete +rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was +simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he +was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic +nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart +and lungs, and he died on October 19, 1806. + +Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. His +letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps +once a twelve-month he displays a sad little vein of pleasantry, but not +for long. Probably the light-hearted undergraduates about him found him +a very prosy, shabby, and mournful young man, but if one may judge by +the outburst of tributary verses published after his death he was +universally admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation +from a tribute paid him by a lady versifier: + + If worth, if genius, to the world are dear, + To Henry's shade devote no common tear. + His worth on no precarious tenure hung, + From genuine piety his virtues sprung: + If pure benevolence, if steady sense, + Can to the feeling heart delight dispense; + If all the highest efforts of the mind, + Exalted, noble, elegant, refined, + Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret, + Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful debt! + + + + +TRIVIA + + The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, + clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame. + + --HOBBES, _Leviathan_, Chap. VIII. + + +The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian +civilization demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family, +should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the +World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of +mature years who do not know the relative batting averages of the Red +Sox and the Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of from +thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what one means by bachelor) +must either marry and settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to +Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay +please notice. + +The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled the +shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous +sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without ruth. + +But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent +middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and +crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful born +bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. + +Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But that most +amiable of cities does not encourage detached and meditative +bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known as "a guarded +education in morals and manners" at Haverford College, our hero passed +to Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to Oxford. Literature and +liberalism became his pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself +engrossed in the task of proving to the British electorate that England +need not always remain the same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir +Henry Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful short stories +about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on +the history and habits of the English language. + +But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his mental +humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by incomprehensible +twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, leading the life of the +typical English bachelor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit, +evening clothes and tweeds; passing from country house to London club, +from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the +cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic +aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, +ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with +irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage. + +Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he +succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the +spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of +the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie +open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he +were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set +them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched +by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which +presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, +whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a +middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a +decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately +intellectual brainslide of our generation. + +This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith +is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, +tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness +which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds +of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our +home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a +flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as +disturbing as devilled crabs. + +Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from +mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I +know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty +little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful +inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. +A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so +far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare +not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm--all this is "Trivia." Where +are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of +old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy +elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of +that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences--the mind of a strolling +bachelor. + +Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all +hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away. +"These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a +Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom +which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet +bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." + +But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last +despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And +his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his +sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I +wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a +Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great +Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in +a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and +other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the +platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly +post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and +accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man, +with the thought of the meaningless creation crashing blindly through +frozen space. His other great consolation is his dear vice of +reading--"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, +this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication." + +It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just figment of +the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little +volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a radiant, dancing +spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we catch, now and then, a +flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, sudden, and +defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English lawns we follow that +gracious figure, down dusky London streets where he is peering in at +windows and laughing incommunicable jests. + +But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming pans and +the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again will he +tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes about +Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville +Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will +never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play +that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit +propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might +have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The +exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has +gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an +underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn +the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright? + +Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a +famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall +Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are +now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don +attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact +that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and +he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major +Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the +Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more +serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him +in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was +badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now +we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift, +and he will never write an American "Trivia." + + + + +PREFACES + + +It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of +authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than +dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary +months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions +of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during +composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given +gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth +who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary +men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that +topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition +should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely touch at +the end. + +How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is +over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, after +the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. Or it may be +a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without a preface. Better +a preface without a book.... + +Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have written +prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of the subtlest +pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet written; but the +prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort of +thing I mean. + + +PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL" + +How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in the +dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one +brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent--there came a rush up the +stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open. +Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; I never saw him look so +glorious. Tall and thin--he was always very thin, _see_ p. 219 and +_passim_--with his long, brown face and sparkling black eyes--I can see +him still rambling about the room in his flannels, his curly hair damp +on his forehead. "Buzzard," he said--he always called me Buzzard--"guess +what's happened?" + +"In love again?" I asked. + +He laughed. A bright, golden laugh--I can hear it still. His laughter +was always infectious. + +"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've won the +Sylvanus Stall fellowship." + +I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the college +garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls +deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant for me. I, too, in +my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling +him. Must I confess it? I had never dared mention the subject for fear +he, too, would compete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. O +petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now! + +"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't +congratulated!" + +I pulled myself together. + +"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname +sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed." + +It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him +again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the +Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before +commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came +back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with +the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article +in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost +every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters, +so full of _verve_ and _élan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was +always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a +Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, +dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I +have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p. +189). + +He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a +pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of +Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for +the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache +of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from +it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never +be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!" + +All the world knows how he died.... + + +PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK + +(In six volumes) + +The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length +finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by +those small bickerings over _minutiæ_ so dear to all scrupulous +writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments +on the functions of the historian. + +There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from +the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has +been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor +Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is +particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too +gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the +unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack +the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, +has observed this. + +Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very +good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of +learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too +witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said. + +I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this regard; +but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that most +dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a maxim that +contemporary history cannot be judicially written. + +Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the +controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge--of the Sorbonne--in the +matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to the Constituent +Assembly of 1848, will remark several hitherto unobserved errors in +Lamartine which I have been privileged to point out. For instance, +Lamartine (who is supported _in toto_ by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the +elections took place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am +able to demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew +Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rougegorge's +assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests upon a humorous +misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be looked +up by the curious in Annette User's "Années avec les Lamartines." Oser +was for many years the cook in Lamartine's household, and says some +illuminating things regarding L.'s dislike of onions.) + +It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually the +generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so many +scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names would be like +Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an ungracious mode of +returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention Professor +Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, _optimus maximus_ among modern +historians. Of him I may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet +aeternumque sedebit." + +My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my Slavic +orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. To her, and +to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often penetrated to my +study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the whole. _89, Decameron +Gardens._ + + +PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS + +This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title "Rari +Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have chosen from +my published works those poems which seemed to me most faithfully to +express my artistic message; and the title obviously implies that I +think them the ones most likely to weather the maëlstroms of Time. Be +that as it may. + +Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one +glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse +to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the +robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that I could agree; +but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial +taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes or +Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. +Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the +noise and rushings of winds--and what avails? _Parturiunt montes_ ...you +know the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary +floor. They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray +felines, are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the +Poetry Society see them not. + +It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel and I sail +to-morrow for Nova Zembla. + +_The Grotto, Yonkers._ + + +PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION + +A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have added +three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the +"Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his +express request. The success of the first edition has been very +gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to _Bleak +House, Nova Zembla_. + + +PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION + +The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to +production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include +several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe," +and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to +convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the +praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of +_Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review. + +Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore +I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf +Stream," which has great promise. + +The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to +hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked +off. + + + + +THE SKIPPER + + +I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, +"A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it +has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, +that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the +structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much +to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the +trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the +delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia +creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching +unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us +with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to +suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar +with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable +minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words +horizontally in parallel lines? + +The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this +continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous +indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the +pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list +of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hôte +white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in +1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever +heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one +day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small +club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at +the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of +R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked +him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same +passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he +thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir +Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of +loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I +know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a +new name to me. + +Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read +one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was +"Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon +of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a +very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad +would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had +ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon +carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an +ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway +just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head +through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down +into the 'tweendecks. + +But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated +here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative +tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a +grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at +midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now +living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face +of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" +one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the +Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well +acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set +this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is +Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and +the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of +his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, +and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would +omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal +confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of +autobiography as it is rarely written. + +One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled +complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as +lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words +that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror +of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself +which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to +the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says +that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a +hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and +that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the +surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be +carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is +the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the +creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears +that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are +complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the +great simplicity of life and death. + +Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the +synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where +the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood +and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A +statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise +from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was +all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive +biographical résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas +B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was +bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the +delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad +devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical +reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the +tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical +comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is +a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from +the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us +with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his +uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our +delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters +constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for +dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews +the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole +mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the +only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the +human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the +dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel +he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and +exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of +piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a +writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially +impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and +Glucose school! + +This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that +deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, +this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of +Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in +our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the +kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks +of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting +out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and +sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first +contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less +than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the +sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly +burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again +with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to +meet the Skipper face to face. + +Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to +invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so +closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes +is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own +noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And +how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, +the smile which is not a grin. + + + + +A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD + + Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on. + + --EDWARD FITZGERALD. + + +I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the +Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to +do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take +up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know +as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and +great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a +man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He +shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I +think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad +not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder +had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the +Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the +Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the +delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later +years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell +came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories. + +There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some +ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the +hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower +and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shabby +schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the +river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's +stories. In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port +and a town of thriving commerce. But now--well, it is little heard of in +the annals of the world. + +Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and +her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was +apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily +entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," a +versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships +with greater men. Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand, +came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters +now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. +They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb. Also I have always +thought it very much to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian +named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. +Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as +birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors +as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In +the years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some all +the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to gossip +about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club +of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge +(please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from seed +brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the +tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the +FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's father was (I believe) a +schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England's jewels just +missed being a Woodbridgian! + +Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool +Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the +Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally +set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from +the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your +nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong +tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old +Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your +bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling +Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. +(But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is +full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the +"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk +blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers +who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century +ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St. +Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!) +and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey +ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out +Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in +1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from +Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. +Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's +painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay +or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to +Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You +will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and +sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, +vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few +hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel +and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs +of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the +windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. +You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion +for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come from +one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of Armada that +Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a +bomb--"dud" it was--in John Loder's garden; the old man had to be +restrained from running out to seize it with his own hands. + +John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His grandfather, +Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and printing business, +which continues to-day at the old shop on the Thoroughfare under John +Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days before the railway came through, +Woodbridge was the commercial centre for a large section of East +Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the quays were crowded with shipping. +But when transportation by rail became swift and cheap and the provinces +began to deal with London merchants, the little town's prosperity +suffered a sad decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several +generations' standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great +London "stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its +best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers as +FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left school at +thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the traditional printer's +devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, +coming down the street from Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for +forty years) with a large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet +sat perched on a high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the +work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by +for a basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at +their work. + +Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little Friends' +burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's +half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother was buried there, one +snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember how old John Loder came +forward to the grave, bareheaded and leaning on his stick, to drop a +bunch of fresh violets on the coffin. + +Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt +House--that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly +commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old +Gardens"--and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I +remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his +little retreat with a well-stained pipestem: + + But walk'st about thine own dear bounds, + Not envying others' larger grounds: + For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent + Of land makes life, but sweet content. + +Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost fabulous now. +He had known quite well an English soldier who was on guard over Boney +at St. Helena--in fact, he once published in some newspaper this man's +observations upon the fallen emperor, but I have not been able to trace +the piece. He had been in Paris before the troubles of '48. I believe he +served some sort of bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at +any rate, he used to be in touch with the London book trade as a young +man, and made the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's +most famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had +not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter +instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were offered by +Quaritch for a penny apiece. + +I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner or +later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes of the +literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with him owing +to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait +of herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. Robert H. Groome, +the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome, +the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" and was said by Watts +Dunton to have known far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were among +his correspondents.[D] John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon +Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward Clodd, +Leon Vincent--such men as these wrote or came to John Loder when they +wanted special news about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a great +many curios and personal treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for +sale at any price (anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) +but if any one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he +would give them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old +musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This +scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful engravings, +prints, and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, and operatic +stars of whom Fitz was enivré as a young man. Among them are a great +many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an +enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there +are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook +was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in +London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights +of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous +Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many +nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, +whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House." + +[Footnote D: No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite +tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes +Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about +Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to +include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's modesty was always as +great as his generosity: he would not consent.] + +When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, the old +man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of +mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's too late!" And he +followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which +Ainger had given him. + +Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, eager and +merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when any one came in +who was qualified to discuss the literature which interested him. He and +FitzGerald had long cracks together and perhaps Loder may have +accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those trips down the Deben on +the _Scandal_ or the _Meum and Tuum_ (the _Mum and Tum_ as Posh, Fitz's +sailing master, called her). He played a prominent part in the life of +the town, became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench +until he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, +came a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing +business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left him a +handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from anxiety +and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet generosities +which had always been his secret delight. + +Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how pale and +mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him +before you as he was in those last days! I used to go up to Burkitt +House to see him: in summer we would sit in the little arbour in the +garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining room. He would talk and I +would ask him questions; now and then he would get up to pull down a +book, or to lead me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. He +used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very close to the fire, with his shoe +laces untied. In summer he would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, +with a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well +stained by much smoking, his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as +ever. Every warm morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping +over Market Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, +hailing every child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally +full of peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. +His long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always +to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No +recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a +hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk breed. +Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a man as the +"Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced. + +He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months and four +days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety--he went in +bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps +the sincerest tribute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from my +journal, dated July 16, 1913: + +"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled +Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. I +think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of +his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' he +said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner than his wont--and I +left with an armful of books which he had given me 'to keep me out of +mischief.' We had a good talk after tea--he told me about the adventures +of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most +delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and +wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his +smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He +took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some +which would be acceptable to me--'May as well give 'em away before it's +too late, ye know'--and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff +at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me--he has +such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his +cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He +chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard +(alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). He constantly +speaks of things he wants to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the +daisies.' He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the +Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered +here--this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was +greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning +mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for +the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats. + +"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at +writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who +cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a former +Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard to do him +justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a swift and +painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into +a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory and his pipe and +his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he +can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall--then may the +quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land." + + + + +A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM + + +I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for +our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of +that stuff into practice. + +"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep quiet of +your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must be +full of gladness and love for every person and every tiniest thing. +Great activity and worry is needless--it is poison to the soul. Learn to +reflect, and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the mystic who finds +all that is most precious in life. The flowers of meditation blossom in +his heart." I cut out these words and pasted them in my hat. I have +always felt that my real genius lies in the direction of philosophic +calm. I determined to override the brutal clamour of petty things. + +The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but lovely +thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight +o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see that Professor +Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am +brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her. + +She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed. + +I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will convince you +that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar, +and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's inquiries. + +At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My employer is +not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at +home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from mystical. "Get here +by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he said. + +I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the +senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of +gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the world. +"I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized me by the +shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting "Another nut!" + +When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred papers. +The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. "Here +he is now," I heard her say. + +It was Dennis & Company on the wire. + +"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have yesterday +without fail?" said Dennis. + +I took the 'phone. + +"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The matter is +purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune yourself--" + +He rang off. + +I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of +a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging +transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores, +proofs of the weekly ad. for the _Fishmongers' Journal_, a telegram from +the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery +trucks--how could I jeopardize my faculty of meditation by worrying over +these trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted myself to +meditation. After all, the harassing domination of material things can +easily be thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I +seemed to see the future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. +My soul was thrilled with a universal love of humanity. + +The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted to see +me. + +Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and +call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective +of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous +new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, +should I, bow to the force of impertinent trivialities? + +I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity. + +By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face convinced +me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to the +soul. Certainly his face was poisonous. + +"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? Dennis +just called me up about that herring order--" + +"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is a +strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...." + +A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay in my +pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for +the stairway from the office to the street is long and dusty; but I +recalled what Professor Tagore had said about vicissitudes being the +true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I remembered +the creed pasted in it. After pacing a block or so, my soul was once +more tranquil. + +I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was crowded +with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a +corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon the majestic vision of +the brotherhood of man. + +Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. Never +mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others do is +beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of endless vistas +of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for some time, but still +no corporeal and physical units of food reached me. + +The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. Full of +love for humanity I spoke to him. + +"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will +you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of +your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is +mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming +luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm. + +He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he +cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket." + +By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt +ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were +beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street, +walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people +trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I +reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of +infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my +hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers +in his teeth and nipped them vigorously. + +I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst +into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, +cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to +snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at +the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing +of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit +clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the +lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the +motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was +perfectly happy! + + + + +AN OXFORD LANDLADY + + +It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was +chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the +flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter +and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle +but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley. + +If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not +forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen +Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and +with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the +admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later +days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball +together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I +can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was +loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not +rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, +and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily +has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see +Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before +the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very +fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of +dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a +lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and +placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley. + +She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the +leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals. + +"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves +'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do." + +"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play +hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I +think her name must be Kathleen...." + +Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful +way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other +gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young +ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was +engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought +it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman." + +"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested: + + "Beauty must be scorned in none + Though but truly served in one." + +"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. +Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly +embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into +the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her. + +"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about +dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her +quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three +who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares +there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. +That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?" + +The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the +ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with +Mr. Williams," I said. + +"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the +table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A +pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the +cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit +and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about +that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind +gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I +think he wrote it 'imself." + +"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a +book. + +"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?" +asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he +knew." + +"We might send him a telegram," I said. + +"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic +thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning," +she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find +'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder +what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly. + +"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad +a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus +gentleman 'e was.) + +"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's +sign mean?' + +"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never +gets 'em back." + +Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away +chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey. + +_October, 1912._ + + + + +"PEACOCK PIE" + + +Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real +tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the +vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the +really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the +literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly +forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William +McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most +of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River +Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season +when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of +all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de +la Mare. + +"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable +to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of +present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over +here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in +England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all +shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He +has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" +is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden +of Verses." + +I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more +likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun +fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in +imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and +fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are +among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to +open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the +seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's +dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as +compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And +it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens +where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for +Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil +Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native +in our hearts, and we might as well admit it. + +To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests +perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly +burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the +subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering +blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin +is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is +the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without +offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the +Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order +of poets who do not wear rubbers. + +One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a +book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems +for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper +for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that +the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a +changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the +pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle +channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring +you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it +will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through +with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a +bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not +know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the +morning. + +One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter +simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the +memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can +read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his +head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is +young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection: + + Three jolly Farmers + Once bet a pound + Each dance the others would + Off the ground. + Out of their coats + They slipped right soon, + And neat and nicesome, + Put each his shoon. + One--Two--Three-- + And away they go, + Not too fast, + And not too slow; + Out from the elm-tree's + Noonday shadow, + Into the sun + And across the meadow. + Past the schoolroom, + With knees well bent + Fingers a-flicking, + They dancing went.... + +Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade? + +The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that +they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of +the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, +even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the +superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not +a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know +nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The +haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of +superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of +iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly +tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the +meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his +voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist +journals please copy. + +One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of +this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much +of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange +things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of +whim and Æsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you +one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry. + + THE LITTLE BIRD + + My dear Daddie bought a mansion + For to bring my Mammie to, + In a hat with a long feather, + And a trailing gown of blue; + And a company of fiddlers + And a rout of maids and men + Danced the clock round to the morning, + In a gay house-warming then. + And when all the guests were gone, and + All was still as still can be, + In from the dark ivy hopped a + Wee small bird: and that was Me. + +"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip +of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous. +It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of +outlets of sky. + +As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his +songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that +even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our +universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and +professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is +forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has +evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four +children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil +Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful +hardiness. + + + + +THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP + + +Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary +man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for +immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his +saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a +hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of +these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, +to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a +transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though +nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his +neck." + +As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) +puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with +life. + +Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a +ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these +will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet +the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it +sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence +collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along +Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it +for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing. + +This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained +by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous +writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days. +There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, +their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that +would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of +famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it +for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such +fictitious value as manuscript. + +Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in +Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His +early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping +paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar +Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits +of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for +funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would +offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts! + +Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an +appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even +though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken +somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have +been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our +pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will +be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the +first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true +talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely +bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later. + +The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) +letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable +Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue +saloons when he might have been fêted by the Authors' League had he +lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that +tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his +executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in +1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted +genius: + +"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed +my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic +has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of +'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was +too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to +tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the +other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and +inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as +a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him +downstairs. The stinking bounder! + +"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally +true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself +to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did +get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they +found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my +pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson +Street, waiting for the cafés to open (I was too done to walk half a +dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my +pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting +up a building. + +"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my +hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at +auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, +July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary +mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in +charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This +cancer is getting me surely. + +"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for +him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, +bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red +cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw +onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. +I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.' + +"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to +give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name, +so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my +heart, if I still have one...." + +It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and +Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter. + +Will not some literary agent think over this idea? + + + + +A MORNING IN MARATHON + + +One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past +four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early +rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the +steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping +down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly +awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back +steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are +leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel +Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the +moonshine without a qualm. + +There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless +suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls +on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little +bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace +needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may +warm the radiators upstairs. Then the big agate kettle must be set over +the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa. +Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut +Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are +ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and +shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train +waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station. + +But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine +mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock +being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day +in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the +ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is +an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 +and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in +the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four. + +I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before +the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in +"Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of +night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern +sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at +last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost +its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night +receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the +horizon. + +But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head +from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still +nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just +before departing. + +The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious. +Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep +blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air +was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very +cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and +read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco +and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The +exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea. + +I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun +came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As +we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light +shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the +basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the +thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination +for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross, +Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls +and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place +after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. +It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains? +No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke +of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue +English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run. + +In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its +high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of +commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting +by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch +counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to +stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and +garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I +was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or +six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that +the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was +reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth +book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to +translate "a litter of puppies." + +My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit +my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged +from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a +degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was +just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto +the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. +The day was begun. + + + + +THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS + + +I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do +not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the +thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords. +Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease +mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke +cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with +sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane. + +But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train +is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is +none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently +these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape, +condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in +leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven +to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they +smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end +than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear +shoes with fawn-coloured tops. + +Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am +faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading +poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver +gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto +sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the +brass veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. +And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I +left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me +at least a whiskey and soda to get them out. + +It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am cigarless +and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white margins inside my +vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in which I was married +(I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I +look up from Emily Dickinson's poems with a trembling thrill of painful +ecstasy, I am frightened by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes +opposite me. + +The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order a +bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that nauseates +me? At any rate, I want to get home--home to that star-sown meadow and +the two brown arms at the journey's end. + +_December, 1914._ + + + + +COTSWOLD WINDS + + +Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still sits +close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over the +sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an adventure. I +am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. Give me a two-mile +spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the muscles and sweep the +morning's books and tobacco from the brain--and then turn and at it! It +is like swimming against a great crystal river. Cap off, head up--no +crouching over the handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind +in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of +leg-drive straining on the pedals--three minutes of it intoxicates you. +You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and +exultation into the face of the blast. + +I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before "Schools." In +mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while +she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide we scatter. The +Prince to Germany--the dons to Devon--the reading parties to quiet +country inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are +in those glorious dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's +"Scènes de la Vie de Bohème" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips +in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and solitude. + +There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a green +valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There is a +well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But I am not +for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious business, these last +two months before Schools, and I and my books are camped in a "pensive +citadel" up on the hill, where the postman's wife cares for me and +worries because I do not eat more than two normal men. There is a +low-ceilinged sitting room with a blazing fire. From one corner a +winding stair climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes and tobacco, +pens and a pot of ink. There are books--all historical volumes, the only +evidence of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one +of Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three +hours' bicycling--that leaves four hours for eating and other +emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, and turn a +probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible Third. + +And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? The +valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in England, I +think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the stream, now and +then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from most of +the things one likes to leave behind. There are lambs, little black +fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing +with a flirt of white hindquarters into their wayside burrows; in +Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost +as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in +the upper blue--and these are all your company. Now and then a great +yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in corduroys--but no one else. That +is the kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the +Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted +better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the green water +dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the Houses of +Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth Woods if it +could--and so would I. + +But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting Shotover is +pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a +hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles +homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye. +Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old +village well; back to four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then +for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_ + +And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will +have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet +and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be +what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels, +and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now. +There are the Schools.... + +_Bibury, April, 1913_. + + + + +CLOUDS + + +Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell, +perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling +amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of +Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The +travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of +those piled-up mysteries of heaven! + +We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg. +That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the +English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!) +converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a +mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which +tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, +hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height +of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of +golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in +ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, +reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his +speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture +clothes itself! + +Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways +of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of +form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had +fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the +Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the +bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons. +Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes--now +scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage +way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what +abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of +the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale +and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish +moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a +sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of +our visible world? Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap +in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with +amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are +suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones +and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds? + +There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding +within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the rain, +chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as +the face of God--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the +viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the +bright mountains of the sky! + +At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County, +fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had +long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above +us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last +banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of +glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in +the shadow of dusk. + +We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had +reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play. +Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue +lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by +beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of +pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This +happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And +then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our +cloud drifted gently away. + +Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who +knows? + + + + +UNHEALTHY + + +On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. On +Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the obscure +creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post meridiem is +a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we list. + +The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as our +_stell-dich-ein_. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to say, I arrive +at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated reflection. There is +plenty to think about. One may stand between the outer and inner lines +of glass doors and watch the queer little creatures that come tumbling +out of the cloak and suit factory across the street. Or one may stand +inside the store, on a kind of terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc +lights, looking down upon the bustle of women on the main floor. Best of +all, one may stroll along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts +and conditions of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet +them at one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the +mahogany victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for +lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long morning +coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of this social +gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots that are suggestive +of corns. There is an information bureau there, where one may learn +everything except the time one may expect one's wife to arrive. But I +have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am waiting for Titania, and +beginning to despair of her arrival, I have only to go to a telephone to +call her up. As soon as I have put the nickel in, she is sure to appear. +Nowadays I save the nickel by going into a booth and _pretending_ to +telephone. Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots. + +We have a jargon of our own. + +"Eye-polishers?" say I. + +"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm _so_ +sorry, Grump." + +"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because riding +on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the word connotes +anything that produces that desirable result, such as bunches of +violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, spring millinery, +or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a rite suggested by the +old song: + + And though maids sweep their hearths no less + Than they were wont to do, + Yet who doth now for cleanliness + Find sixpence in her shoe? + +A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece. + +We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized beginning +of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a quarter to thirty +cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily compensated by the Grump +buying Sweet Caporals instead of something Turkish. A packet of +cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an adventure. On other days +publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on Saturdays cigarettes are +possible. + +"Antipasto?" + +"No, thanks." + +"Minestrone or consommé?" + +"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine, +please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable Moretti +lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, excellent +savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a pungent pourri of +smells, and the jangle of thick china, how diverting it is! The +franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches us complaisantly from his +counter where he sits flanked by flasks of Hoboken chianti and a case of +brittle cigars. + +How good Moretti's _minestrone_ tastes to the unsophisticated tongue. +What though it be only an azoic extract of intense potato, dimly tinct +with sargasso and macaroni--it has a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not +the prelude to an Adventure? + +Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over azimuth +and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude more earnestly +than Titania and I argue our possible courses. Generally, however, she +leaves it to me to chart the journey. That gives me the pride of +conductor and her the pleasure of being surprised. + +According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a +waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a +little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and +plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a +picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from +footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We laid a +romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming a little +snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused us: + + "My old man's a fireman + Now what do you think of that? + He wears goblimey breeches + And a little goblimey hat." + +She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too far on +the back of my head. + +The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one leaves +Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been very +fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, animal +shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old dismantled +Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: one of the +dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge four-pronged grinder as +big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. Oysters going out, the new +brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the saloons mark the vernal equinox. + +A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains rumbling +by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A cutting wind +blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid two nickels and +we got into the front car of the northbound train. + +Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an aeroplane, +or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything so thrilling as +soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. Rocking, racketing, +roaring over those crazy trestles, now a glimpse of the leaden river to +the east, now a peep of church spires and skyscrapers on the west, and +the dingy imitation lace curtains of the third-story windows flashing by +like a recurring pattern--it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand +at the front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far +ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping nearer +and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus a swaying, +jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the seat in front; but +the L swings you up and over the housetops, smooth and sheer and swift. + +We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. A broad, +dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton apartments, +led in a gentle descent toward the river. The neighbourhood was noisy, +quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, bitter March the thaw had come at +last: the street was viscous with slime, the melting snow lay in grayish +piles along the curbs. Small boys on each side of the Street were +pelting sodden snowballs which spattered around us as we walked down the +pavement. + +But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung round +at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th Street showed +the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat and respectable. A +little side street branching off to the left (not recorded by Mercator) +revealed some quaint cottages with gables and shuttered windows so +mid-Victorian that my literary heart leaped and I dreamed at once of +locating a novel in this fascinating spot. And then we rounded the +corner and saw the little park. + +It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her hands, +and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of little houses +of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy bay windows and +polished door knockers. In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut +up into irregular hills, where children were flying kites. And beyond +that, an embankment and the river in a dim wet mist. There was +Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge slipping by. In the distance we +could see the colossal span of the new Hell Gate bridge. With the +journalist's instinct for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest +single span in the world. I wonder if it is? + +As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On the +embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. It was as +picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A ferryboat, +crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. Tugs, puffing up +past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, replied with mellow +blasts. The pungent tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all +my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned. + +And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk our +landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this delicious +spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East End Avenue the +Cheyne Walk of New York--we might even import an English imagist poet to +lend cachet to the coterie--I saw by Titania's face that something was +wrong. + +I pressed her for the reason of her frown. + +She thought the region was unhealthy. + +Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further argument is +possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions I have never been +able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape of the houses, or the +lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect +from the front instead of from the back. But however she arrives at the +conclusion, it is immutable. + +Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or +picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy. + +Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry Bend, or +the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin to pucker. "Do +you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she +does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway +station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that bracing ether her spirits +revive. + +So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York, +outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the +bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on +the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park. +Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park--the +convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone. + +I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy. + + + + +CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER + + +True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather with his +snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first years I never +saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail +for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did not smoke until I was +twenty? By the time I was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an +acorn and a straw, and had experimented with excelsior as fuel. From +that time I passed through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod +cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true +Olympus) Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school +recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a +twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem. + +I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other heroes of +fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease--but +stay, there was a cunning mixture devised by some comrades at college +that harboured in its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of rubber +bands. That was sheer poison, I grant you. + +The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where Raleigh, +Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful Elia best +of all--where these have spoken so greatly, the feeble voice may well +shrink. But that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hierarchies are +lost, all are brothers in the mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich +Virginia the older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the new +freshman, be he never so humble. + +What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of +the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for +instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours +"quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of +Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where Carlyle and Emerson +counted the afternoon well spent, though neither one had said a hundred +words--had they not smoked together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they +trudged together to "prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill--did not the +reek of their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old +Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go sailing +with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry--what mixture did he fill and light? +Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be sworn. Or, to come down +to more recent days, think of Captain Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in +Bessborough Gardens, lighting that apocalyptic pipe that preceded the +first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the +privileged landlady's daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast +dishes that morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?[E] + +[Footnote E: The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A +Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly +obscure.--EDITOR.] + +It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine +friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for drummers, your +cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset +votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with meerschaum, calabash, +cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of +things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women's clubs; but when +Damon and Pythias meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in +order. Cigars are all right in fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel +Géraldine when they visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was +Leigh Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), +who uttered the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I +will wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it. + +The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a +usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried and hygienic age +has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let +you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke. +This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments. "Will +it please you to impart your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, +having savored his mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very +excellent leaf," offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and +many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book +"The Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and +breviary to every smoker con amore. + +But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and +companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender affection on +the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip, +some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some +remote alehouse. These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the +compass of halting words. Never again perhaps will we throw care over +the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, filling the +air with laughter and the fumes of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is +the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened +cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a +hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen +faltered in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. +Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe +will never fail you. + +How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot even +read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to +light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred +times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking +about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay. God bless him and +his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews"--he lights a +pipe on every page! + +I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be consummated +in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in +my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter. It is a +weakness, though not a shameful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and +fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" (do you know that English mixture?) +and I am yours to the last ash. + +I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I have a +tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I +had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield. We +weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr. +Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there were +those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17 +Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie +to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come +again! + +When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the +devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns. + +Not such bad advice. + + + + +HAY FEBRIFUGE + + +Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the +world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new +form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas +tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per +eye of any arondissement served by the R---- railway, and the most +bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the +editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the +author of one of the best selling books that ever was written. + +Not bad for one village. + +Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is +where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will +give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It +is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the +east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants. + +It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, +confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, +feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de +frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun +emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux +de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The +general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a +spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the château de +Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred +years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles. + +Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants +and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the +cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as +lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed +terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other +props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A. +Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile. + +There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a +drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It +would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush +herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes +notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy. + +Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent +parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, +asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N. +Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving +in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies. +Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day. + +Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or +drugstore. + +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's +journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot. + +But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say +Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such +extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their +ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the +classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of +self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a +superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the +intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by +the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like +gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it +not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to +the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to +sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second +century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere +nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin +filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted +from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. +Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. +I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their +essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts +in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.) + +I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities +between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of +literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature. Upon the +literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling, +Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch +of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals +were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm +ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River: + + Ed Grimes always did hate me + Because I wrote better poetry than he did. + In the hay fever season I used to walk + Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible + Away from pollen. + One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me + While I was writing a sonnet, + Tied my hands and feet, + And carried me into a hayfield and left me. + I sneezed myself to death. + At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod, + And I think it must have been Ed + Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave. + +The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great +credit for lending himself to the cult in this way. + +I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even +thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without +collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his +called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and +certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war. +Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most +eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed +anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a +honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them: +they leap from his eye, distil from his lean and waving hand. Good God, +not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one +human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables. +I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, +transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, +teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. +Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has +confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too +deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are +recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at +lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you +testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened, +clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. Lee, frown not: +I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this +country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a +coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with +dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a +whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad. + +But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the +stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of +Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets of sky my +yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions and +plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies of +all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a +new bosom for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But +alas, the recurring explosions of the loathsome and intellectual disease +keep my nose on the grindstone--or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on +upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief. + +The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a +constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering +voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set +him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his +thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a +locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has +shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment: +his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; words +assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne +and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound +down and tethered and stifled by their limousines and coupons and +factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire +and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging +words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely +impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine +sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph. + +All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who +has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost +control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a packet of Roman +candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the +north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by chickweed, +and on the west by a sleepless night. + +I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss it, but +that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of thought, those +grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind shimmering like a +poplar tree in sun and wind--jetting and spouting like plumbing after a +freeze-up--'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the +sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent +and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of +sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of +bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else +to do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever! + +And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what you +think you think, effervescence of that kind always results. + + + + +APPENDIX + +SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS + + +This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use by +teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is +recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds have +become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not hold +himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and reserves +the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual pressure. + +For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found valuable +for classroom consideration: + + 1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral + purpose in this book? + + 2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth Stockton + to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his income. + + 3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example. + + 4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward + + (a) vers libre poets + + (b) beefsteak and onions + + (c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail) + + (d) The Republican Party + + 5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he notable? + + 6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The Head + of the Firm"? + + 8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, 1911? + + 9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of? + + 10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why? + + 11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in Kings, + Long Island? + + 12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the + tourist? Explain + + (a) The Gin Palace + + (b) Kurdmeister + + (c) unedifying Zollverein + + 13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home? + + 14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three + examples. + + 15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do? + + 16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the ideal + conditions for a morning pipe. + + 17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace? + + 18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a credit + to the profession. 19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening + meal ascend the stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher? + Why "in vain"? + + 20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith + classify himself? + + 21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the + context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate? + + 22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying + about the floor? + + 28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel Lindsay? + + 24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against Mr. + Richard Le Gallienne? + + 25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous + carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their waistcoats? + + 26. What is _minestrone_? Name three ingredients. + + 27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke pipes? + + 28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox? + + 29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like this + book. + + 30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by + the hand? + + 31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on these + phrases: + + (a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables + + (b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles + + (c) Scawfell become Mount Tom + + +FINIS CORONAT OPUS + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF*** + + +******* This file should be named 13739-8.txt or 13739-8.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/7/3/13739 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at <a href = "https://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre> +<p>Title: Shandygaff</p> +<p>Author: Christopher Morley</p> +<p>Release Date: October 13, 2004 [eBook #13739]</p> +<p>Language: English</p> +<p>Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1</p> +<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF***</p> +<br><br><h3>E-text prepared by Stephen Schulze<br> + and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team</h3><br><br> +<hr class="full" noshade> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<h1>SHANDYGAFF</h1> +<h3>BY</h3> +<h2>CHRISTOPHER MORLEY</h2> +<p style='text-align: center;'>A number of most agreeable +<i>Inquirendoes</i> upon <i>Life & Letters</i>, interspersed +with <i>Short Stories & Skits</i>, the whole most Diverting to +the Reader</p> +<p style='text-align: center;'>1918</p> +<center><img src='images/shand.jpg' width='600' height='498' alt='' +title=''></center> +<p style='text-align: center;'><i>Photo by Charles H. Davis</i></p> +<h3>CHRISTOPHER MORLEY,<br> +AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS,<br> +THUNDER ON THE LEFT, ETC.</h3> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS' id= +"TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS"></a><br> +<h2>TITLES AND DEDICATIONS</h2> +<p>I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory +of the immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my +arbiter of elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, +homeless and penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the +lavatory of the Museum Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But +the flinty hearted trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for +bath-tub and laundry, were exceeding wroth, and set up the +notice</p> +<table align='center' border='1' cellpadding='10' cellspacing='0' +summary=''> +<tr> +<td align='center'>THESE BASINS ARE FOR<br> +CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY</td> +</tr> +</table> +<p>I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: +these fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of +letters, must not be too bitterly resented, even by their +publishers. To borrow O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than +Tasso.</p> +<p>The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of +dedicating them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many +dedications have occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them +all a chance.</p> +<div class='poem' style='margin-left: 35%;'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating the book +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>CLAYTON SEDGWICK +COOPER</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The Laird of +Westcolang</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating to +the</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE +WORLD</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Blackwell's in Oxford +and</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Leary's in +Philadelphia</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>THE 8:13 +TRAIN</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>EDWARD PAGE +ALLINSON</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>The Squire of Town's +End Farm</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>Better known as Mifflin +McGill</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>In affectionate memory +of</i><br></span> <span class='i8'><i>Many unseasonable +jests</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. +GUMMERE</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>From an erring +pupil</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>FRANCIS R. +BELLAMY</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Author of "The +Balance"</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>Whose Talent I +Revere,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But Whose Syntax I +Deplore</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>JOHN N. BEFFEL</i><br></span> +<span class='i4'><i>My First Editor</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Who insisted on taking me seriously</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>GUY S.K. +WHEELER</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The Lion +Cub</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>ROBERT CORTES +HOLLIDAY</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>The +Urbanolater</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I thought of dedicating +to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>SILAS ORRIN +HOWES</i><br></span> <span class='i6'><i>Faithful Servant of +Letters</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But my final and irrevocable decision +is to dedicate this book to</i><br></span> <span class='i4'><i>THE +MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>More +Sinned Against Than Sinning</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York <i>Evening +Post</i>, The Boston <i>Transcript</i>, The <i>Bellman</i>, The +<i>Smart Set</i>, The New York <i>Sun</i>, The New York <i>Evening +Sun</i>, The <i>American Oxonian</i>, <i>Collier's</i>, and The +<i>Ladies' Home Journal</i>.</p> +<p>Wyncote, Pa.</p> +<p>November. 1917.</p> +<br> +<a name='SHANDYGAFF' id="SHANDYGAFF"></a> +<p><i>SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of +bitter ale or beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower +classes in England, and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, +newspaper men, journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been +invented by Henry VIII as a solace for his matrimonial +difficulties. It is believed that a continual bibbing of shandygaff +saps the will, the nerves, the resolution, and the finer faculties, +but there are those who will abide no other tipple</i>.</p> +<p><i>John Mistletoe</i>: <i>Dictionary of Deplorable +Facts</i>.</p> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<br> +<h2>CONTENTS</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 35%'><a href='#SHANDYGAFF'><b>The Song of +Shandygaff</b></a><br> +<a href='#TITLES_AND_DEDICATIONS'><b>Titles and +Dedications</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE'><b>A Question of +Plumage</b></a><br> +<a href='#DON_MARQUIS'><b>Don Marquis</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_ART_OF_WALKING'><b>The Art of Walking</b></a><br> +<a href='#RUPERT_BROOKE'><b>Rupert Brooke</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_MAN'><b>The Man</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM'><b>The Head of the Firm</b></a><br> +<a href='#HERIOT_ROW'><b>17 Heriot Row</b></a><br> +<a href='#FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER'><b>Frank +Confessions of a Publisher's Reader</b></a><br> +<a href='#WILLIAM_McFEE'><b>William McFee</b></a><br> +<a href='#RHUBARB'><b>Rhubarb</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE'><b>The Haunting Beauty +of Strychnine</b></a><br> +<a href='#INGO'><b>Ingo</b></a><br> +<a href='#HOUSEBROKEN'><b>Housebroken</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE'><b>The Hilarity of +Hilaire</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA'><b>A Casual of the Sea</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_LAST_PIPE'><b>The Last Pipe</b></a><br> +<a href='#TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE'><b>Time to Light the +Furnace</b></a><br> +<a href='#MY_FRIEND'><b>My Friend</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS'><b>A Poet of Sad Vigils</b></a><br> +<a href='#TRIVIA'><b>Trivia</b></a><br> +<a href='#PREFACES'><b>Prefaces</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_SKIPPER'><b>The Skipper</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD'><b>A Friend of +FitzGerald</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM'><b>A Venture in +Mysticism</b></a><br> +<a href='#AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY'><b>An Oxford Landlady</b></a><br> +<a href='#PEACOCK_PIEquot'><b>"Peacock Pie"</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP'><b>The Literary +Pawnshop</b></a><br> +<a href='#A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON'><b>A Morning in +Marathon</b></a><br> +<a href='#THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS'><b>The American House of +Lords</b></a><br> +<a href='#COTSWOLD_WINDS'><b>Cotswold Winds</b></a><br> +<a href='#CLOUDS'><b>Clouds</b></a><br> +<a href='#UNHEALTHY'><b>Unhealthy</b></a><br> +<a href='#CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER'><b>Confessions of a +Smoker</b></a><br> +<a href='#HAY_FEBRIFUGE'><b>Hay Febrifuge</b></a><br> +<a href='#APPENDIX'><b>Appendix: Suggestions for +Teachers.</b></a><br></div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<h1><i>SHANDYGAFF</i></h1> +<a name='A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE' id="A_QUESTION_OF_PLUMAGE"></a><br> +<h2>A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE</h2> +<p>Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. +He was the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but +this job only netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to +get that much. The owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of +having the reviews done by the sporting editor, and confining them +to the books of those publishers who bought advertising space. This +simple and statesmanlike view the owner had frequently expressed in +Mr. Stockton's hearing, so the latter was never very sure how long +his job would continue.</p> +<p>But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New +Utrecht, that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the +problem out to a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the +average, eighty dollars a week, his household would cease to +revolve. It simply had to be done. The house was still being paid +for on the installment plan. There were plumbers' bills, servant's +wages, clothes and schooling for the children, clothes for the +wife, two suits a year for himself, and the dues of the Sheepshead +Golf Club—his only extravagance. A simple middle-class +routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a treadmill. +As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To +accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain +friends, Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he +fell below that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort +his fill," as the Elizabethan song naïvely puts it.</p> +<p>There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama.</p> +<p>Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn +his fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came +in, wrote painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his +literary page on Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the +proprietor ordered. Though he did so with reluctance, he was forced +now and then to approach the book publishers on the subject of +advertising. He gave earnest and honest thought to his literary +department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells in <i>Harper's +Magazine</i> for the honourable quality of his criticisms.</p> +<p>But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of +energy and enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used +up the first fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his +article on current poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading +imitation literary weekly. The preparation of this involved a +careful perusal of at least fifty journals, both American and +foreign, and I blush to say it brought him only fifteen dollars a +week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a Chicago paper of +bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of intimacy the +goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had time or +opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, +which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he +averaged about six dollars a week.</p> +<p>That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close +to the limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars +or so needed for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned +in various ways. Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary +typewriter clacking far into the night. He wrote short stories, of +only fair merit; and he wrote "Sunday stories," which is the lowest +depth to which a self-respecting lover of literature can fall. Once +in a while he gave a lecture on poetry, but he was a shy man, and +he never was asked to lecture twice in the same place. By almost +incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy he wrote a novel, +which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first year. His +royalties on this amounted to $348.30—not one-third as much, +he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short +story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving +the sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature.</p> +<p>It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, +were wrong when they wrote to him admiringly—as they did +twice a year—asking for loans, and praising the bold and +debonair life of a man of letters in the great city. They did not +know that for ten years Mr. Stockton had refused the offers of his +friends to put him up for membership at the literary club to which +his fancy turned so fondly and so often. He could not afford it. +When friends from out of town called on him, he took them to Peck's +for a French table d'hôte, with an apologetic murmur.</p> +<p>But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or +discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the +existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand +again, with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, +know that there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. +The characters in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have +thought Stockton rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he +was one of those estimable men who have sense enough to give all +their money to their wives and keep none in their trousers. And +though his life was arduous and perhaps dull to outward view, he +was a passionate lover of books, and in his little box at the back +of the newspaper office, smoking a corncob and thumping out his +reviews, he was one of the happiest men in New York. His thirst for +books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was when he found time +to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary essays, which +he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous sign in +the British Museum washroom.</p> +<p>It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the +Brooklyn bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on +Park Row. Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding +the rush of traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little +along the way, as becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry +would jell in his mind, and he would be at his desk a little after +eleven. There he would work until one o'clock with the happy +concentration of those who enjoy their tasks. At that time he would +go out for a bite of lunch, and would then be at his desk steadily +from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, and after that he +worked persistently in his little den under the roof until past +midnight.</p> +<p>One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of +perplexity, for to-day his even routine was in danger of +interruption. Halfway across the bridge Stockton paused in some +confusion of spirit to look down on the shining river and consider +his course.</p> +<p>A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry +articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an +English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to +time he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English +magazines, and at length he had ventured a graceful article of +appreciation. It happened that he was the first in this country to +recognize Verne's talent, and to his great delight he had one day +received a very charming letter from the poet himself, thanking him +for his understanding criticism.</p> +<p>Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest +nature in the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in +Verne's letter prompted him to warm response. Thus began a +correspondence which was a remarkable pleasure to the lonely +reviewer, who knew no literary men, although his life was passed +among books. Hardly dreaming that they would ever meet, he had +insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever visit the States he +would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on this very +morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying that +Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon.</p> +<p>The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive +nature it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could +offer but little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on +the way to Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; +the house was small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been +made into a workshop for the two boys, where they built steam +engines and pasted rotogravure pictures from the Sunday editions on +the walls. The servant was an enormous coloured mammy, with a heart +of ruddy gold, but in appearance she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom +plumbing was out of order, the drawing-room rug was fifteen years +old, even the little lawn in front of the house needed trimming, +and the gardener would not be round for several days. And Verne had +given them only a few hours' notice. How like a poet!</p> +<p>In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant +time they would have when the writer should come to visit. He had +spoken of evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours +of the things that interest literary men. What would Verne think +when he found the hearth only a gas log, and one that had a +peculiarly offensive odour? This sickly sweetish smell had become +in years of intimacy very dear to Stockton, but he could hardly +expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, Hampstead (O Shades of +Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary club, to +understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of Jules +Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings all +his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New +Utrecht!</p> +<p>Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to +none but the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment +of out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the +shabby, makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so +much explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna +Doone, the fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals +with the family and slept with the children at night. Verne was +probably used to staghounds or Zeppelin hounds or something of the +sort, he thought humorously. English poets wear an iris halo in the +eyes of humble American reviewers. Those godlike creatures have +walked on Fleet Street, have bought books on Paternoster Row, have +drunk half-and-half and eaten pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, +and have probably roared with laughter over some alehouse jest of +Mr. Chesterton.</p> +<p>Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a +lean, bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of +old folios. What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge +of New Utrecht, a mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to +pay for shag tobacco!</p> +<p>Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not +at all in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April +sun, they had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning +frantically to grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself +had stopped at the poultry market on his way to the trolley to +order two plump fowls for dinner, and had pinched them with his +nervous, ink-stained fingers, as ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test +their tenderness. They would send the three younger children to +their grandmother, to be interned there until the storm had blown +over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she could to take down +the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the boys fondly +called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had children of +his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by the +incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet +was aver here for a lecture tour—he would be entertained and +fêted everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation +which Stockton had started by his modest little essay had grown to +the dimension of a fad.</p> +<p>He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple +routine of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this +afternoon three o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, +as was his unconscious habit when nervous. In desperation he +stopped at a veterinary's office on Frankfort Street, and left +orders to have the doctor's assistant call for Lorna Doone and take +her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he called at a wine +merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a moderate +vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his +playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a +Frenchman, and undoubtedly he knew all about wines.</p> +<p>Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning +that all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday +editor, who had planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch +time, refrained from doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian +brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week +conductor of "The Electric Chair," the paper's humorous column, +came in to see what was up. Bob's "contribs" had been generous that +morning, and he was in unusually good humour for a humourist.</p> +<p>"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? +Or has George Moore sent in a new novel?"</p> +<p>Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How +could he confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who +wore life lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he +played tennis, with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the +author of a successful comedy, and a member of the smart literary +club which was over the reviewer's horizon, although in the great +ocean of letters the humourist was no more than a surf bather. +Stockton shook his head. No one but a married man and an +unsuccessful author could understand his trouble.</p> +<p>"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this +time of year."</p> +<p>"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the +club and have some ale. That'll put you on your feet."</p> +<p>"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it +to-day. Got to make up my page. I tell you what, though—"</p> +<p>He hesitated, and flushed a little.</p> +<p>"Say it," said Bolles kindly.</p> +<p>"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson +of old Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish +you'd take him around to the club for lunch some day while he's +here. He ought to meet some of the men there. I've been +corresponding with him for a long time, and I—I'm afraid I +rather promised to take him round there, as though I were a member, +you know."</p> +<p>"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle +Light'? And you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the +man's bigger than Masefield. Take him to lunch—I should say I +will; Why, I'll put him in the colyum. Both of you come round there +to-morrow and we'll have an orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and +convolvulus salad. I didn't know you knew him."</p> +<p>"I don't—yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his +steamer this afternoon."</p> +<p>"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he +ran downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but +had never read.</p> +<p>The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded +Stockton that he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had +done duty for three winters, and would hardly suffice for the +honours to come. Hastily he blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them +into the wire basket, and hurried outdoors to seek the nearest +tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to draw out fifty dollars for +emergencies. Then he entered the first clothier's shop he +encountered on Nassau Street.</p> +<p>Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when +he was compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for +usually Mrs. Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky +star was in the zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, +and he was afraid he might be late for the steamer, which docked +far uptown. In his haste, and governed perhaps by some subconscious +recollection of the humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he +allowed himself to be fitted with an ochre-coloured suit of some +fleecy checked material grotesquely improper for his unassuming +figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut that one sees only in the +windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was unaware of the enormity of +his offence against society, and rapidly transferring his +belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the purchase price and +fled to the subway.</p> +<p>When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw +that the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several +minutes before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the +steamship office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the +official admitted him to the pier, and he took his stand at the +first cabin gangway, trembling a little with nervousness, but with +a pleasant feeling of excitement no less. He gazed at the others +waiting for arriving travellers and wondered whether any of the +peers of American letters had come to meet the poet. A stoutish, +neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache looked like Mr. +Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible that he, the +obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of Verne's +arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring +outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight.</p> +<p>What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet +was to stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the +mustard-coloured trousers one more round—they were much too +long for him—and watched the great hull slide along the side +of the pier with a peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt +since the day of his wedding.</p> +<p>He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he +was very familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured +down the slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and +stamp of superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred +soil of England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. +To his surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as +Mr. Howells and the publisher greet people who had not the +slightest resemblance to the poet, and go with them to the customs +alcoves. Traveller after traveller hurried past him, followed by +stewards carrying luggage; gradually the flow of people thinned, +and then stopped altogether, save for one or two invalids who were +being helped down the incline by nurses. And still no sign of +Finsbury Verne.</p> +<p>Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that—the +second class? His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, +fifty yards farther down the pier, where the second-cabin +passengers were disembarking.</p> +<p>There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still +thronged. Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little +man in green ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little +woman and four children in single file, each holding fast to the +one in front like Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, +taking almost ludicrous care not to slip on the cleated boards. To +his amazement the reviewer recognized the dark beard and soulful +eyes of the poet.</p> +<p>Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but +a wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's +chin. The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung +steadfastly to the skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other +hand a large glass jar in which two agitated goldfish were +swimming, while the four children watched their parents with +anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. "Daddy, look out for +Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the poodle very +nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two smiling +stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. "Mother, +are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and +promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file.</p> +<p>Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making +himself known until the Vernes had recovered from the +embarrassments of leaving the ship. He followed them at a distance +to the "V" section where they waited for the customs examination. +With mingled feelings he saw that Finsbury Verne was no +cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, indifferently clad, +shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic cares of a family +man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood in his bulging +greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around him. He +shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home +with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and +introduced himself.</p> +<p>Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and +he presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys +and two girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately +uttered cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to +him.</p> +<p>"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow +suit.</p> +<p>"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath.</p> +<p>Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were +in the throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They +had created two imaginary countries, named in honour of the +goldfish, and it was now their whim to claim for their respective +countries any person or thing that struck their fancy. "Castoria +was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you must consider yourself a +citizen of that nation."</p> +<p>Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned +to the poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. +"I got your telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have +you."</p> +<p>"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of +fact we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My +wife has some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and +the children are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to +Harvard to give some lectures."</p> +<p>A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow.</p> +<p>"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. +"Mrs. Stockton and I were hoping—"</p> +<p>"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your +hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some +quiet hotel where we can stay the night."</p> +<p>Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of +any hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, +and then remembered that it had been demolished years before. At +last he recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once +stayed at the Obelisk.</p> +<p>After the customs formalities were over—not without +embarrassment, as Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several +pairs of bright red union suits and a half-empty bottle of +brandy—Stockton convoyed them to a taxi. Noticing the frayed +sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite ashamed of the aggressive +newness of his clothes. And when the visitors whirled away, after +renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the spring, he +stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward the +nearest telephone booth.</p> +<p>As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of +the Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been +delightful to spend a few days with the Stocktons."</p> +<p>"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans +see how shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in +rags, and your clothes—well, I don't know what they'll think +at Harvard. You know if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we +shall be simply bankrupt."</p> +<p>The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place +in the country near New York," he said.</p> +<p>"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such +clothes? He looked like a canary."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='DON_MARQUIS' id="DON_MARQUIS"></a><br> +<h2>DON MARQUIS</h2> +<br> +<p>There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who +is the victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the +hollow of your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he +wants to be considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol +his songs of war and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, +jovial merryandrew with never a care in the world save the cellar +plumbing. You may utterly misrepresent him, and hang some albatross +round his neck that will be offensive to him forever. You may say +that he hails from Brooklyn Heights when the fact is that he left +there two years ago and now lives in Port Washington. You may even +(for instance) call him stout....</p> +<p>Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, +'08—well, call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and +fond of corncob pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful +blend of Falstaff and Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial +in the New York <i>Evening Sun</i> since 1912. He stands out as one +of the most penetrating satirists and resonant scoffers at folderol +that this continent nourishes. He is far more than a colyumist: he +is a poet—a kind of Meredithian Prometheus chained to the +roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a novelist of Stocktonian +gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes the first half of a +novel easier than the second. And I think that in his secret heart +and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk he is a +dramatist.</p> +<p>He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers +Libre Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful +and cutting satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey +Arch, elicits only "a mild, mild smile." As he puts it:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the +other evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before +from time to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when +the chair broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but +it makes us sad.</p> +<p>The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his +soul into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative +grins in the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; +he is more than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a +cerebral chuckle—and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks +a chair or flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs +with, all its heart and soul.</p> +</div> +<p>Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the +slapstick as a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the +slapstick! it was well known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) +But he prefers the rapier. Probably his Savage Portraits, +splendidly truculent and slashing sonnets, are among the finest +pieces he has done.</p> +<p>The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small +thing to look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of +fine workmanship. The swamis and prophets of piffle, the +Bhandranaths and Fothergill Finches whom he detests, can only +create in an atmosphere specially warmed, purged and rose-watered +for their moods. Marquis has emerged from the underworld of +newspaper print just by his heroic ability to transform the +commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his best and +subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on an +upturned packing box. (When the <i>American Magazine</i> published +a picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the +<i>Sun</i> got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men +are a hardy race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a +newspaper office would dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was +born in the old <i>Sun</i> building, now demolished, once known as +Vermin Castle.</p> +<p>"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, +"is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to +hear the echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will +surely come. Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock +coats and reading their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don +Marquis has no taste for that sort of mummery. But little by little +his potent, yeasty verses, fashioned from the roaring loom of every +day, are winning their way into circulation. Any reader who went to +<i>Dreams and Dust</i> (poems, published October, 1915) expecting +to find light and waggish laughter, was on a blind quest. In that +book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this man, quick to see +beauty and grace in common things, quick to question the answerless +face of life—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Still mounts the dream on shining +pinion,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Still broods the dull +distrust;</i><br></span> <span><i>Which shall have ultimate +dominion,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Dream, or +dust?</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write +nimble verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has +something of Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, +austere music. He can turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as +a paying teller can roll Durham cigarettes.</p> +<p>How neat this is:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO A DANCING DOLL</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Formal, quaint, precise, and +trim,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>You begin your steps +demurely—</i><br></span> <span><i>There's a spirit almost +prim</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>In the feet that move so +surely.</i><br></span> <span><i>So discreetly, to the +chime</i><br></span> <span><i>Of the music that so +sweetly</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Marks the +time.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But the chords begin to +tinkle</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Quicker,</i><br></span> +<span><i>And your feet they flash and flicker—</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>Twinkle!—</i><br></span> <span><i>Flash +and flutter to a tricksy</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Fickle +meter;</i><br></span> <span><i>And you foot it like a +pixie—</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Only +fleeter!</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Not our current, dowdy</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>Things—</i><br></span> <span><i>"Turkey +trots" and rowdy</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Flings—</i><br></span> <span><i>For they made you +overseas</i><br></span> <span><i>In politer times than +these</i><br></span> <span><i>In an age when grace could +please,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Ere St. +Vitus</i><br></span> <span><i>Clutched and shook us, spine and +knees;</i><br></span> <span><i>Loosed a plague of jerks to smite +us!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in +rhyme: he sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle +upward from the slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The +evolutionary theme is a favourite with him: the grand pageant of +humanity groping from Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million +years two precarious inches of forehead. Much more often than +F.P.A., who used to be his brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares +to disclose the real earnestness that underlies his chaff.</p> +<p>I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands +in the hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber +and a submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled +long ago by Plato in the <i>Republic</i> (not the <i>New +Republic</i>) or by Samuel Butler in his Notebooks. Contribs come +valiantly to hand with a barrowful of letters every day—("The +ravings fed him" as Don captioned some contrib's quip about Simeon +Stylites living on a column); but nevertheless the direct and +alternating current must be turned on six times a week. His jocular +exposal of the colyumist's trade secret compares it to the +boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.)</p> +<p>TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious +idea. (COLD ROAST BEEF.)</p> +<p>WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF +STEW.)</p> +<p>THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of +Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.)</p> +<p>FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of +Monday's serious idea—there creeps into our copy a more +subdued, sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, +the main business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH +OR CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.)</p> +<p>SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing +ourself for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY +IN IT.)</p> +<p>SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where +we have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers.</p> +</div> +<p>But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with +barley always tastes as good as, or even better than, the original +roast. His dry battery has generated in the past few years a dozen +features with real voltage—the Savage Portraits, Hermione, +Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, the Aptronymic Scouts, French +Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular Song Writers, Our Own +Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an Almanac, a +Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of Fishhooks, +etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling has +been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them +between book-covers.</p> +<p>One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, +enclosing a number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to +examine the aphorisms and orisonswettmardenisms they had been +printing on their weekly envelopes, for the inspiration and +peptonizing of their employees. They had been using quotations from +Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, and had run out of +"sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where they could find +more.</p> +<p>I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know +whether they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would +adorn any pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on +whiskey would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than +a bushel of tracts.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before +he orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.</p> +<p>If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to +know you are loafing?</p> +<p>Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that +minorities are always right.</p> +<p>Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, +beware. The woman has already committed matrimony in her own +heart.</p> +<p>I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising +young man for twenty years.</p> +</div> +<p>In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in +the mirthquake:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.</p> +<p>If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not +come—the little ball will not settle upon the right number or +the proper colour—the girl will marry the other man—the +public will cry, Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!—the +cosmos will refuse its revelations of divinity—the Welsh +rabbit will be stringy—you will find there are not enough +rhymes in the language to finish your ballade—the primrose by +the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier—and your +fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best trousers.</p> +</div> +<p>But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his +favourite denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric +shadows, the gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and +then to register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and +heart. For instance this, just after the United States severed +diplomatic relations with Germany:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>This Beast we know, whom time brings +to his last rebirth</i><br></span> <span><i>Bull-thewed, +iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ...</i><br></span> +<span><i>As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him,</i><br></span> +<span><i>Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth,</i><br></span> +<span><i>Armoured the skull and braced the heavy +limb—</i><br></span> <span><i>Who frowned above him, proud +and grim,</i><br></span> <span><i>While he sucked from her salty +dugs the lore</i><br></span> <span><i>Of fire and steel and stone +and war:</i><br></span> <span><i>She taught brute facts, brute +might, but not the worth</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Of spirit, honour and clean mirth +...</i><br></span> <span><i>His shape is Man, his mood is +Dinosaur.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Tip from the wild red Welter of the +past</i><br></span> <span><i>Foaming he comes: let this rush, be +his last.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Too patient we have been, thou +knowest, God, thou knowest.</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been +slow as doom. Our dead</i><br></span> <span><i>Of yesteryear lie on +the ocean's bed—</i><br></span> <span><i>We have denied each +pleading ghost—</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been slow: +God, make us sure.</i><br></span> <span><i>We have been slow. Grant +we endure</i><br></span> <span><i>Unto the uttermost, the +uttermost.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Did our slow mood, O God, with thine +accord?</i><br></span> <span><i>Then weld our diverse millions, +Lord,</i><br></span> <span><i>Into one single swinging +sword.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is +disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this +sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing +archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance +about the press:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to +be disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it +has swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring +up again.</p> +</div> +<p>Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for +sapping all its author's time and calories. No writer in America +has greater of more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less +time stoking that furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your +novels!</p> +<p>There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial +than the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful +lyrics of the past few years have been printed there (I think +particularly of two or three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral +column of a daily newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest +wits of the time have been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay +of course. It would be impossible to give a complete list, but +among them are William Rose Benét, Clinton Scollard, Edith +M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, +Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood.</p> +<p>But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he +does it the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him +alone. All day long they drop into his office, or call him up on +the phone in the hope of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has +become an institution down on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the +day you call, you will find his queue there chivvying him. He is +too gracious to throw them out: his only expedient is to take them +over to the gin cathedral across the street and buy them a drink. +Lately the poor wretch has had to write his Dial out in the pampas +of Long Island, bringing it in with him in the afternoon, in order +to get it done undisturbed. How many times I have sworn never to +bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in that +neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben +Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don +and set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding +over a kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of +the tavernacular.</p> +<p>He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, +critic, and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country +whose praise is best worth having, and least easy to win, would be +Marquis, Strunsky, and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three +leading poets male in this country to-day are Marquis, William Rose +Benét, and (perhaps) Vachel Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis +has an immense advantage over Will Benét in his stoutness. +Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and mares' milk +for months before they would admit him to the army.</p> +<p>Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have +attained the dignity of book publication, and now stand on the +shelf beside "Danny's Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." +This satire on the azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has +perhaps received more publicity than any other of Marquis's +writings, but of all Don's drolleries I reserve my chief affection +for Archy. The cockroach, endowed by some freak of transmigration +with the shining soul of a vers libre poet, is a thoroughly +Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for quoting this prince of +blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, opening his evening +paper on the train, looks first of all to see if Archy is in the +Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something thoroughly +racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine him, for +instance, in <i>Punch</i>? His author has never told us which one +of the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, +but I feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated +eccentrics who lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. +Could it be Amy Lowell? Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's +carelessness as to punctuation and capitals is not mere +ostentation, but arises from the fact that he is not strong enough +to work the shift key of his typewriter. Ingenious readers of the +Sun Dial have suggested many devices to make this possible, but +none that seem feasible to the roach himself.</p> +<p>The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a +person with whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the +British Navy, ask a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, +replies the waiter. Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs +into the pork pie through an air hole, and prepares his soul for +parlous times. The naval butler takes the pie on board a launch, +and Archy, watching through one of the portholes of the pastry, +sees that they are picked up by a British cruiser "an inch or two +outside the three-mile line." (This was in neutral days, remember.) +Archy continues the narrative in lower case agate:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing +for said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie +the captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was +fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where +the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and +serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if +there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me +the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs +to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert +said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top +crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right +under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that +noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking +off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert +said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush +upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i +am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships +surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy +that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the +false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this +pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a +port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling +off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as +he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god +said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered +the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the +hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the +mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top +crust gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us +throw the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the +starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant +cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the +british navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the +time the strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the +clock would start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled +down my forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick +said the first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity +wait said the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful +east indian drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could +still see and hear for days and days a council of war was held +about me every afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save +the cockroach even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty +england must stand by the smaller nations and every hour the +surgeon gave me another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the +cabin boy who had been thinking deeply all the time suggested that +a plug of wood be inserted in my place which was done and i fell to +the deck well nigh exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the +captains gig and here i am.</p> +<p>archy</p> +</div> +<p>So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original +contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. +These are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline +and robust repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, +but it is compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, +joyously flavoured with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, +is a native product. Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented +it, it bears the image and superscription of America.</p> +<p>And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is +unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This +nation suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our +Great Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute +Struggle. But Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer +letters or fill out Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or +join the Poetry Society or attend community masques. And somehow +all these things seem to melt away, and you look round the map and +see Don Marquis taking up all the scenery.... He has such an +[oe]cumenical kind of humour. It's just as true in Brooklyn as it +is in the Bronx.</p> +<p>He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or +some quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, +Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the +idea spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, +offhand manner, he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the +rotation accelerates; faster and faster he twirls the thought +(sometimes losing a few spectators whose centripetal powers are not +starch enough) until, chuckling, he holds up the flashing, +shimmering conceit, whirling at top speed and ejaculating sparks. +What is so beautiful as a rapidly revolving idea? Marquis's mind is +like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, the steadier it is. There +are laws of dynamics in colyums just as anywhere else.</p> +<p>What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that +turns the young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied +ethers of literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo +Trine, Don Marquis—are there other Knox men in the game, too? +Marquis was studying at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish +War. He has worked on half a dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel +Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle Remus's Magazine." But let him +tell his biography in his own words:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the +Republican party.</p> +<p>My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the +time and place free of charge.</p> +<p>Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I +left the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to +defeat.</p> +<p>In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position +in the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled +for some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in +power. It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one +evening, after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, +the late President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I +passed through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He +had heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way +of showing me how greatly he appreciated it.</p> +<p>Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public +tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the +Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a +position as reporter on a Washington paper.</p> +<p>Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my +earlier years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the +contented, peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man +ever since.</p> +<p>There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the +Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of +voting against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I +left the Republican party again.</p> +<p>This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in +which I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to +more particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself.</p> +<p>It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third +person:</p> +<p>Height, 5 feet 10½ inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on +little finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly +into good hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; +weight, 200 pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely +criminal in type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and +onions; wears No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside +seam of trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard +animals for the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side +of upper jaw missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints +from possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying +with respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates +undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on +little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to +psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his +verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in +possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek +bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a +thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story +writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your +business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of +painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, +publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in +insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers +as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on +right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of +room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort +cheese, "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most +musical comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, +steam heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized +charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses +on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; +belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy +eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in +teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, +with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; +voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly +wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes +prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose +over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if +arrested.</p> +</div> +<p>I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not +insist that Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a +soapslide but rather as a cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. +He has something of the quick Stevensonian instinct for the moral +issue, and the Devil not infrequently winces about the time the +noon edition of the <i>Evening Sun</i> comes from the press. There +is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or drop the acid just where +it will disinfect. For instance, this comment on some bolshevictory +in Russia:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets +of Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip.</p> +</div> +<p>For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial +is a very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much +that is purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat +men is a ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, +deals texts and fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of +Canterbury he would have made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and +his congregation rarely miss the point of the sermon. We cannot +close better than by quoting part of his Colyumist's Prayer in +which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of the machine:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I pray Thee, make my colyum +read,</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me thus my daily +bread.</i><br></span> <span><i>Endow me, if Thou grant me +wit,</i><br></span> <span><i>Likewise with sense to mellow +it.</i><br></span> <span><i>Save me from feeling so much +hate</i><br></span> <span><i>My food will not +assimilate;</i><br></span> <span><i>Open mine eyes that I may +see</i><br></span> <span><i>Thy world with more of +charity,</i><br></span> <span><i>And lesson me in good +intents</i><br></span> <span><i>And make me friend of innocence +...</i><br></span> <span><i>Make me (sometimes at least) +discreet;</i><br></span> <span><i>Help me to hide my +self-conceit,</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me courage now and +then</i><br></span> <span><i>To be as dull as are most +men.</i><br></span> <span><i>And give me readers quick to +see</i><br></span> <span><i>When I am satirizing +Me....</i><br></span> <span><i>Grant that my virtues may +atone</i><br></span> <span><i>For some small vices of mine +own.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he +follows his prayer with this comment:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really +want—and intend to have if they can get it—but for what +they think the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain +attempt to be sincere in the above verses; but even at that no +doubt a lot of affectation crept in.</p> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_ART_OF_WALKING' id="THE_ART_OF_WALKING"></a><br> +<h2>THE ART OF WALKING</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Away with the stupid adage about a man +being as old as his arteries!</i><br></span> <span><i>He is as old +as his calves—his garteries....</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>—Meditations of Andrew +McGill</i>.<br></span></div> +</div> +</div> +<p>"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the +sea."</p> +<p>This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the +life of William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet +cottage near Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word +"walking" occurs in any description of Wordsworth's existence. De +Quincey assures us that the poet's props were very ill +shapen—"they were pointedly condemned by all female +connoisseurs in legs"—but none the less he was <i>princeps +arte ambulandi</i>. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads +are barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think +Wordsworth would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the +classic pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs +W. must have traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English +miles—a mode of exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of +alcohol and all other stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; +to which, indeed, he was indebted for a life of unclouded +happiness, and we for much of what is most excellent in his +writings."</p> +<p>A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to +my inmost heart. The best books are always those that set down with +"amorous precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How +one sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) +about a gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out +of Life":</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the +streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed +to go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he +was carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been +upon earth a man so little curious in the world as he is.</p> +</div> +<p>Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he +goes upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand +quaintnesses. When he writes a book he fills it full of food, +drink, tobacco, the scent of sawmills on sunny afternoons, and +arrivals at inns late at night. He writes what Mr. Mosher calls a +book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are often best of all because +they abound in these matters. And because walking can never again +be what it was—the motorcars will see to that—it is our +duty to pay it greater reverence and honour.</p> +<p>Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about +walking. The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped +from Nether Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and +full forty by road) to make the acquaintance of William and +Dorothy. That is practically from the Bristol Channel to the +English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was Wordsworth's pamphlet +describing a walk across France to the Alps that spurred Coleridge +on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, and William +and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy the +companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of +their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a +little walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The +Ancient Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses +of the adventure.</p> +<p>De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about +Wordsworth and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a +forty-mile all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the +evening after first meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the +intellectual excitement of the day, and through a summer night +"divinely calm" he busied himself with meditation on the sad +spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind hastening to decay.</p> +<p>I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much +practised before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador +Jusserand's famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the +fourteenth century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures +of moving meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's +"Coaching Days and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no +means safe for solitary travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph +Andrews" (1742) whenever any of the characters proceed afoot they +are almost certain to be held up. Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was +a considerable rambler a century earlier than this, and in his +Derbyshire hills must have passed many lonely gullies; but footpads +were more likely to ambush the main roads. It would be a +hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of his +basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped +it over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more +baggage than a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for +Beggars" long before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is +true that cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically +placing one foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I +always think of him as one of the first to employ his legs as an +instrument of philosophy.</p> +<p>After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of +course—have you paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who +have not read Hazlitt's "On Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was +there more fruitful walk than the early morning stroll from +Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, 1816, that produced "Much +have I travelled in the realms of gold." He must have set out early +enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on Cowden Clarke's +table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know that the copy +of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the financial +editor of the <i>Times</i>? Never did financial editor live to +better purpose!</p> +<p>There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the +walker: get these by rote in some membrane of memory:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open +sky sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown—the Air is our +robe of state—the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty +minstrel playing before it.</p> +</div> +<p>The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; +inns were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's +Hall of Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, +Kingsley, Meredith, Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget +the day when he first read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it +was the 24th of August, 1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. +Then there were George Borrow, Emily Brontë on her Yorkshire +moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of the princes of the clan and +founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom Meredith was one. Walt +Whitman would have made a notable addition to that posse of +philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous half-baked old +barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not dominate +the conversation.</p> +<p>There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies +(the Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas +who died on the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis +Ledwidge, who was killed in Flanders. Who can forget his noble +words, "I have taken up arms for the fields along the Boyne, for +the birds and the blue sky over them." There is Walter Prichard +Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One could extend the +list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though literature +were a co-product of legs and head.</p> +<p>Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed +in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, +and Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in +Town" will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities. But +urban wanderings, delicious as they are, are not quite what we mean +by walking. On pavements one goes by fit and start, halting to see, +to hear, and to speculate. In the country one captures the true +ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the harmonious glow of mind +and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and muscle exercised +alike.</p> +<p>Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country +walkers: no soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the +stiffer breed who salute frost and lashing rain and roaring +southwest wind, who leap to grapple with the dissolving riddles of +destiny. February and March are his months:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>For love we Earth then serve we +all;<br></span> <span class='i2'>Her mystic secret then is +ours:<br></span> <span>We fall, or view our treasures +fall,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Unclouded, as beholds her +flowers.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>Earth, from a night of frosty +wreck,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Enrobed in morning's mounted +fire,<br></span> <span>When lowly, with a broken neck,<br></span> +<span class='i2'>The crocus lays her cheek to +mire.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form +the bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's +Breviary of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. +Trevelyan's "Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," +shards and crystals from all the others I have mentioned. Michael +Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On +my private shelf stands "Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, +who has good pleasantry to utter on this topic; and a manly little +volume, "Walking as Education," by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the +walking parson," published in England in 1910. On that same shelf +there will soon stand a volume of delicious essays by one of the +most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, +the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has beckoned to +the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who has +bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate +in walking tours:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), +should ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one +walks arm in arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let +us suppose) of men's given names, agrees that if either should have +a son he shall be named after the other. Walking in the gathering +dusk, two and two, since the world began, there have always been +young men who have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one +is not still one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys +are over for him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not +journeys. Mention should be made in passing that some have been +found so ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they +might be taken in company with members, or a member, of the other +sex. Now, one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at +the stake before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it +must be confessed that it is another season in the life of man that +they fill.</p> +<p>They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. +They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with +them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these +matters; and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you +could they would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about +them or yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They +cannot rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very +marrow of going a journey. One reason for this is that they can +never escape from the idea of society: You are in their society, +they are in yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which +connect you all to that great order called society that you have +for a period got away from physically are present. Like the +business man who goes on a vacation from his business and takes his +business habits along with him, so on a journey they would bring +society along, and all sort of etiquette.</p> +<p>He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he +has fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the +moment, to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in +that which he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia +for this on earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey +escapes, for a breath of air, from all conventions; without which, +though, of course, society would go to pot; and which are the very +natural instinct of women.</p> +</div> +<p>Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art +of locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may +be admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and +now make memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be +published.</p> +<p>Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will +bring an itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a +knobbed stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and +pettifogging spirit: he proceeds as an army with banners: he +intends that the world shall know he is afoot: the Great Elian of +Springfield is unleashed—let alewives and deacons +tremble!</p> +<p>Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite +his poems at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting +on with their eating; but despite the naïveté of his +eagerness to sing, there is a plain and manly simplicity about +Vachel that delights us all. We like to know that here is a poet +who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote a Class Day poem at +Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at all, and who lets +the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know that he has +tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been fumigated in +New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a year he +lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but he +is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as +the local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive +it will be a Ford. Here is <i>homo americanus</i>, one of +ourselves, who never wore spats in his life.</p> +<p>But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city +streets at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, +peanut carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with +crackers and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with +the Saturday night marketing—he feels the thrill of being +one, or at least two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, +pathetic, and surprising humanity. The sense of fellowship with +every other walking biped, the full-blooded understanding that +Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming measure, comes by gulps and +twinges to almost all. That is the essence of Lindsay's feeling +about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty of sirloin and +onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and celebrates the +great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream soda, +electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark +Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic +humanity he finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, +reverence, love, and beauty.</p> +<p>This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel +has scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening +larders and puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his +technique—"stopping when he had a mind to, singing when he +felt inclined to"—and begging his meals and bed. I suppose he +has had as many free meals as any American citizen; and, this is +how he does it, copied from his little pamphlet used on many a +road:</p> +<br> +<p>RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD</p> +<p>Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, +Illinois, June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for +money.</p> +<p>This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life +on a tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West +and back, during which he will observe the following rules:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>(1) Keep away from the cities.</p> +<p>(2) Keep away from the railroads.</p> +<p>(3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage.</p> +<p>(4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven.</p> +<p>(5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of +five.</p> +<p>(6) Travel alone.</p> +<p>(7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square.</p> +<p>(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.</p> +<p>In order to carry out the last rule there will be three +exceptions to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a +brief printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will +carry this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry +a small portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of +his view of the history of art, especially as it applies to +America.</p> +</div> +<p>Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down +his theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them +interesting. "The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore +but better for the exercise. And when the fascinating story of +American literature in this decade (1910-20) is finally written, +there will be a happy and well-merited corner in it for a dusty but +"neat, truthful, and civil" figure from Springfield, Illinois.</p> +<p>A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset +on a lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be +found in "The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one +of the best friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget +it!</p> +<p>The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have +made the highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the +mystic and private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us +the byways, the footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and +sweet. Thank heaven there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the +victrola and the limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, +with pipe and stick, we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and +dinner, and glorify the ways of God to man.</p> +<p>And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells +come most often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of +peregrination lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a +season afoot. When a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs +this angel is most vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel +where I am pretending to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The +filing case, thermostat, card index, typewriter, automatic +telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail me not. Even the visits +of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, who rustle in and +out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, even these +lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the +endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon +the wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is +scouring the hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along +the Great North Road to walk to Royston in the rain....</p> +<p>Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that +comes of a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine +walking on the hills in the direction of the sea"; or a winding +road that tumbles down to some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour +lie behind red curtains, and a table be drawn toward the fire. Let +there be a loin of cold beef, an elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard +of dog's nose. Then may we prop our Bacon's Essays against the +pewter and study those mellow words: "Certainly it is heaven upon +earth to have a man's mind move in charity, rest in providence, and +turn upon the poles of truth." <i>Haec studio, pernoctant nobiscum, +peregrinantur, rusticantur</i>.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='RUPERT_BROOKE' id="RUPERT_BROOKE"></a><br> +<h2>RUPERT BROOKE</h2> +<br> +<p>Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He +was born of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy +skin, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. +Walsingham, in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was +a master at Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church.</p> +<p>In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of +Cambridge, England, issued a little anthology called <i>Cambridge +Poems 1900-1913</i>. This volume was my first introduction to +Brooke. As an undergraduate at Oxford during the years 1910-13 I +had heard of his work from time to time; but I think we youngsters +at Oxford were too absorbed in our own small versemakings to watch +very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. His poem <i>The Old +Vicarage, Grantchester</i>, reprinted in Heffer's <i>Cambridge +Poems</i>, first fell under my eye during the winter of +1913-14.</p> +<p>Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the +meadows along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door +to the Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that +Cambridge country is flat and comparatively uninteresting; +patchworked with chalky fields bright with poppies; slow, shallow +streams drifting between pollard willows; it is the beginning of +the fen district, and from the brow of the Royston downs (thirteen +miles away) it lies as level as a table-top with the great chapel +of King's clear against the sky. It is the favourite lament of +Cambridge men that their "<i>Umgebung</i>" is so dull and +monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire.</p> +<p>But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Café +des Westens in Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and +fair indeed. Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green +pools of the Cam, and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the +outlying villages, Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably +when the fleeting pang of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in +Berlin hugely. But the verses are more than of merely passing +interest. To one who knows that neighbourhood the picture is +cannily vivid. To me it brings back with painful intensity the +white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which I have bicycled +hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the way—the +<i>Waggon and Horses</i>, the <i>Plough</i>, the <i>King's +Arms</i>—and the recurring blue signboard <i>Fine Royston +Ales</i> (the Royston brewery being famous in those parts). Behind +the fun there shines Brooke's passionate devotion to the soil and +soul of England which was to reach its final expression so +tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal questions of +youth which have no country and no clime—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Say, is there Beauty yet to +find?<br></span> <span>And Certainty? and Quiet +kind?<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely +to forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, +one may perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of +the score of young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had +graduated in the past decade and who are all doing fine and +promising work. Even though he tarried here in the United States +("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily observed) and many hold precious +the memory of his vivid mind and flashing face, to most of us he +was totally unknown. Then came the War; he took part in the +unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in training for the +Ægean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled "1914". I +do not know exactly when they were written or where first +published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's +quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them +as the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had +called forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from +the London <i>Times</i>. No one could read the matchless +sonnet:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>"If I should die, think only this of +me:<br></span> <span class='i2'>That there's some corner of a +foreign field<br></span> <span>That is for ever +England."<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to +whom I sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without +tears." This was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, +we kent it by the biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must +have done as I did: wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the +perfect words. But he had sailed for the Mediterranean long before. +Presently came a letter from London saying that he had died on the +very day of my letter—April 23, 1915. He died on board the +French hospital ship <i>Duguay-Trouin</i>, on Shakespeare's +birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of the +hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, +due to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a +previous touch of sunstroke.</p> +<p>A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old +Rugbeians Who Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls +Stevenson's last journey to the Samoan mountain top which Brooke +himself had so recently visited. The account was written by one of +Brooke's comrades, who has since been killed in action:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the +valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, +but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, +and Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most +lovely grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about +a dozen trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head +droops an olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all +undergrowth.</p> +<p>About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made +their way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the +grave. The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men +with lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by +petty officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that +it was not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave.</p> +<p>We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on +the coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We +lined the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an +olive wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the +afternoon read the service very simply. The firing party fired +three volleys and the bugles sounded the "Last Post."</p> +<p>And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head +towards those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his +feet towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would +like to be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one +than Skyros, and no quieter resting place.</p> +<p>On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of +his company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name +upon it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back +of the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies +the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died +for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks."</p> +<p>The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his +grave.</p> +</div> +<p>It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert +Brooke. The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses +and a handful of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift +translation in the golden cloudland of English letters. There will +never, can never, be any laggard note in the praise of his work. +And of a young poet dead one may say things that would be too +fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray is quoted:</p> +<p>"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to +think of one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal +radiance of youth and poetry."</p> +<p>In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, +Brooke found at least one Certainty—that of being "among the +English poets." He would probably be the last to ask a more +high-sounding epitaph.</p> +<p>His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, +fifty of which were published in his first book, issued (in England +only) in 1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written +before the age of 24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These +last are thoroughly youthful in formula. We all go through the old +familiar cycle, and Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. +Socialism, vegetarianism, bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping +out of doors, walking barefoot on the crisp English turf, channel +crossings and what not—it is all a part of the grand game. We +can only ask that the man really see what he says he sees, and +report it with what grace he can muster.</p> +<p>And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome +praise. Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even +Brooke's undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the +usual grooves of sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor +Woodberry (his introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good +that lesser hands may well pause) finds in them "more of the +intoxication of the god" than in the later rounder work. They +include the dreaming tenderness of <i>Day That I Have Loved</i>; +they include such neat little pictures of the gross and sordid as +the two poems <i>Wagner</i> and <i>Dawn</i>, written on a trip in +Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in +Brooke's poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it +again, wittily put, in <i>Grantchester</i>.)</p> +<p>This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here +and there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. +Like all young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy +basis of our humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. +There was never a young poet worth bread and salt who did not +scrawl ribald verses in his day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers +at King's would recall many vigorous stanzas that are not included +in the volume at hand. The few touches that we have in this vein +show a masculine fear on Brooke's part of being merely pretty in +his verse. In his young thirst for reality he did not boggle at +coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his poems of 1905-08 +are of the cliché period where all lips are "scarlet," and +lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in +the <i>Shropshire Lad</i> stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex +images, and yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet +<i>The Hill</i>:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Breathless, we flung us on the windy +hill,<br></span> <span class='i2'>Laughed in the sun, and kissed +the lovely grass,<br></span> <span class='i2'>You said, "Through +glory and ecstasy we pass;<br></span> <span>Wind, sun, and earth +remain, the birds sing still,<br></span> <span>When we are old, are +old...." "And when we die<br></span> <span class='i2'>All's over +that is ours; and life burns on<br></span> <span>Through other +lovers, other lips," said I,<br></span> <span>—"Heart of my +heart, our heaven is now, is won!"<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>"We are Earth's best, that learnt her +lesson here.<br></span> <span class='i2'>Life is our cry. We have +kept the faith!" we said:<br></span> <span class='i2'>"We shall go +down with unreluctant tread<br></span> <span>Rose-crowned into the +darkness!" ... Proud we were<br></span> <span>And laughed, that had +such brave true things to say.<br></span> <span>—And then you +suddenly cried, and turned away.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that +the "1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been +separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of +consummate beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 +and Other Poems," containing the thirty-two later poems, which was +published in England and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page +& Company in July, 1915, to save the American copy right, will +always be more precious than the complete edition. As there were +only twenty-five copies of this first American edition, it is +extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought after by collectors. +But for one who is interested to trace the growth of Brooke's +power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting flame of +his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. +From the perfected brutality of <i>Jealousy</i> or <i>Menelaus and +Helen</i> or <i>A Channel Passage</i> (these bite like Meredith) we +see him passing to sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell +his utter mastery of the form. What could better the wit and beauty +of this song:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>"Oh! Love," they said, "is King of +Kings,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Triumph is his +crown.<br></span> <span>Earth fades in flame before his +wings,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Sun and Moon bow +down."<br></span> <span>But that, I knew, would never +do;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And Heaven is all too +high.<br></span> <span>So whenever I meet a Queen, I +said,<br></span> <span class='i2'>I will not catch her +eye.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>"Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they +said,<br></span> <span class='i2'>"The Gift of Love is +this;<br></span> <span>A crown of thorns about thy head,<br></span> +<span class='i2'>And vinegar to thy kiss!"—<br></span> +<span>But Tragedy is not for me;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And +I'm content to be gay.<br></span> <span>So whenever I spied a +Tragic Lady,<br></span> <span class='i2'>I went another +way.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>And so I never feared to see<br></span> +<span class='i2'>You wander down the street,<br></span> <span>Or +come across the fields to me<br></span> <span class='i2'>On +ordinary feet.<br></span> <span>For what they'd never told me +of,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And what I never knew;<br></span> +<span>It was that all the time, my love,<br></span> <span class= +'i2'>Love would be merely you.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be +sparing of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young +England; the throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from +its happy quest of Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the +absurdities of War, and yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an +answer to all its pangs of doubt. All the hot yearnings of +"1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here is no Shropshire Lad +enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to England of all that +she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of the swimmer) +recur—what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on the +Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those +white Greek bodies against the green!</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Now, God be thanked who has matched us +with His hour,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And caught our youth, +and wakened us from sleeping,<br></span> <span>With hand made sure, +clear eye, and sharpened power,<br></span> <span class='i2'>To +turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, +there is the answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has +sung, but the farewell of those who, loving life with infinite +zest, have yet found in surrendering it to her the Beauty, the +Certainty, yes and the Quiet, which they had sought. On those five +pages are packed in simple words all the love of life, the love of +woman, the love of England that make Brooke's memory sweet. Never +did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In his hands the thing +became a trumpet"—</p> +<br> +<div style='margin-left: 14em;'>THE DEAD</div> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>Blow out, you bugles, over the rich +Dead!<br></span> <span class='i2'>There's none of these so lonely +and poor of old,<br></span> <span class='i2'>But, dying, has made +us rarer gifts than gold.<br></span> <span>These laid the world +away; poured out the red<br></span> <span>Sweet wine of youth; gave +up the years to be<br></span> <span class='i2'>Of work and joy, and +that unhoped serene,<br></span> <span class='i2'>That men call age; +and those who would have been,<br></span> <span>Their sons, they +gave, their immortality.<br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span>Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for +our dearth<br></span> <span class='i2'>Holiness, lacked so long, +and Love, and Pain.<br></span> <span>Honour has come back, as a +King, to earth,<br></span> <span class='i2'>And paid his subjects +with a royal wage;<br></span> <span>And Nobleness walks in our ways +again;<br></span> <span class='i2'>And we have come into our +heritage.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with +the echo of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be +complete without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he +found in all the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers +of the precious details of existence must be his poem <i>The Great +Lover</i> where he catalogues a sort of trade order list of his +stock in life. The lines speak with the very accent of Keats. These +are some of the things he holds dear—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span class='i6'>White plates and cups, +clean-gleaming,<br></span> <span>Ringed with blue lines; and +feathery, faery dust;<br></span> <span>Wet roofs, beneath the +lamp-light; the strong crust<br></span> <span>Of friendly bread; +and many tasting food;<br></span> <span>Rainbows; and the blue +bitter smoke of wood;<br></span> <span>And radiant raindrops +couching in cool flowers;<br></span> <span>And flowers themselves, +that sway through sunny hours,<br></span> <span>Dreaming of moths +that drink them under the moon;<br></span> <span>Then, the cool +kindliness of sheets, that soon<br></span> <span>Smoothe away +trouble; and the rough male kiss<br></span> <span>Of blankets; +grainy wood; live hair that is<br></span> <span>Shining and free; +blue-massing clouds; the keen<br></span> <span>Unpassioned beauty +of a great machine;<br></span> <span>The benison of hot water; furs +to touch;<br></span> <span>The good smell of old clothes; and other +such—<br></span> <span class='i6'>...All these have been my +loves.<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to +speak; but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire +than <i>Heaven</i> where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering +the problem of a future life.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span>This life cannot be All, they +swear,<br></span> <span>For how unpleasant, if it were!<br></span> +<span>One may not doubt that, somehow, Good<br></span> <span>Shall +come of Water and of Mud;<br></span> <span>And, sure, the reverent +eye must see<br></span> <span>A Purpose in Liquidity.<br></span> +<span>We darkly know, by Faith we cry<br></span> <span>The future +is not Wholly Dry....<br></span> <span>But somewhere, beyond Space +and Time,<br></span> <span>Is wetter water, slimier +slime!<br></span></div> +</div> +<p>No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that +exquisite bit of fooling.</p> +<p>Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner +Brooke, "the latest and greatest of young Englishmen."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_MAN' id="THE_MAN"></a><br> +<h2>THE MAN</h2> +<br> +<p>The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold +drizzle, the first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The +crocuses were beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden +mold. One of the long French windows stood ajar, and in the air +that slipped through was a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It +was the end of March.</p> +<p>In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His +chin was on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, +spare shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes +were gray—a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was +gray; his gray-blue eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he +seemed only a darker shadow in the padded chair. His right +hand—the long, firm, nervous hand of a scholar—rested +on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his fingers as +he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he was +revising.</p> +<p>Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the +past two and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure +showed some trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the +greatest crisis of modern times he had steadfastly pursued an +ideal, regardless of the bitterness of criticism and the sting of +ridicule. The difficulties had been tremendous. Every kind of +influence had been brought upon him to do certain things, none of +which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a lifelong student of +history, he had surprised his associates by the clearness of his +vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in the history of +the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than he—save +one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney piece, +hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for his +ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the +picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, +pain-wrenched mouth.</p> +<p>This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of +a poor student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning +visions of great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of +positions to guide his country in the difficult path of a higher +patriotism. Philosopher, idealist, keen student of men, he had been +able to keep his eyes steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable +cloud of unjust criticism that had rolled round him. Venomous and +shameful attacks had hurt him, but had never abated his purpose. In +a world reeling and smoking with the insane fury of war, one nation +should stand unshaken for the message of the spirit, for the glory +of humanity; for the settlement of disputes by other means than +gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To that he had +clung.</p> +<p>He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen.</p> +<p>What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went +back to the golden August day when the telegram was laid on his +desk announcing that the old civilization of Europe had fallen into +fragments. He remembered the first meeting thereafter, when his +associates, with grave, anxious faces, debated the proper stand for +them to take. He remembered how, in the swinging relaxation of an +afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully planned the wording of his +first neutrality proclamation.</p> +<p>In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who +could have believed that great nations would discard without +compunction all the carefully built-up conventions of international +law? That murder in the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, +would be rewarded by the highest military honours? That a +supposedly friendly nation would fill another land with +spies—even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy?</p> +<p>Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to +keep one nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. +Giving due honour to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his +own course was still different. That his country, disregarding the +old fetishes of honour and insult, should stand solidly for +humanity; should endure all things, suffer all things, for +humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the wounds and fill the +starving mouths. That one nation—not because she was weak, +but because she was strong—should, with God's help, make a +firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never +conquer force.</p> +<p>"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." +Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in +history as the utterance of a man years in advance of his +time—but what rolling thunders of vituperation they had cost +him! <i>Too proud to fight</i>!... If only it had been possible to +carry through to the end this message from Judea!</p> +<p>But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen +that the nation must take another step. Little by little, as the +inhuman frenzies of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting +unspeakable horror on non-combatants, women and children, he had +realized that his cherished dream must be laid aside. For the first +time in human history a great nation had dared to waive pride, +honour, and—with bleeding heart—even the lives of its +own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With face buried in +his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on the seas. +He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. <i>Arabic</i>, +<i>Lusitania</i>, <i>Persia</i>, <i>Laconia</i>, <i>Falaba</i>, +<i>Gulflight</i>, <i>Sussex</i>, <i>California</i>—the names +were etched in his brain in letters of grief. And now, since the +"barred-zone" decree ...</p> +<p>He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish +slipped from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to +his personal typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a +phrase flashed into his mind—the words of Martin Luther, the +Thuringian peasant and university professor, who four hundred years +before had nailed his theses on the church door at Wittenberg:</p> +<p>"<i>Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders</i>."</p> +<p>They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh +sheet of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing....</p> +<p>"<i>With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical +character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities +which it involves</i>.... <i>I advise that the Congress declare the +recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact +nothing less than war against the Government and people of the +United States</i>...."</p> +<p>The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently +over the keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before +him some of his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his +country, no longer divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material +pursuits, but massed in one by the force and fury of a valiant +ideal, came into his mind.</p> +<p>"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "<i>Ich kann +nicht anders</i>...."</p> +<p>"<i>We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no +feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not +upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this +war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval</i>.... +<i>Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour states with +spies, or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical +posture of affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike +and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for peace can never be +maintained except by a partnership of democratic +nations</i>....</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p><i>"Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour +steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any +narrow interest of their own</i>."</p> +</div> +<p>With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose +from his chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in +the west shone a faint band of clear apple green in which burned +one lucent star. Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city +like the pulsing heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of +tension, he seemed to feel the whole vast stretch of the continent +throbbing; the yearning breast of the land trembling with energy; +the great arch of sky, spanning from coast to coast, quiver with +power unused. The murmur of little children in their cradles, the +tender words of mothers, the footbeat of men on the pavements of +ten thousand cities, the flags leaping in air from high buildings, +ships putting out to sea with gunners at their sterns—in one +aching synthesis the vastness and dearness and might of his land +came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of various and clashing +breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold!</p> +<p>Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and +he returned quietly to the typewriter:</p> +<p>"<i>We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the +world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples +included.... The world must be made safe for democracy</i>."</p> +<p><i>The world must be made safe for democracy</i>! As the wires +leaped and the little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his +strong fingers, scenes passed in his mind of the happy, happy +Europe he had known in old wander days, years before.</p> +<p>He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black +Forest; the German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, +cordial friendliness of that lovely land. He remembered French +villages beside slow-moving rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of +sun; apple orchards of the Moselle. And England—dear green +England, fairest of all—the rich blue line of the Chiltern +Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and yellow in the +autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had bicycled for +tea, and the naïve rustic folk who had made him welcome.</p> +<p>What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them +and maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of +children, millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in +the richness of life—where were they now? Life, innocent +human life—the most precious thing we know or dream of, +freedom to work for a living and win our own joys of home and love +and food—what Black Death had maddened the world with its +damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be free and sweet +again?</p> +<p>The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a +tide of anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the +lives of men now living. But for the sake of the generations to +come—he thought of his own tiny grandchildren—for the +love of God and the mercy of mankind, let this madness be crushed. +If his country must enter the war let it be only for the love and +service of humanity. "It is a fearful thing," he thought, "but the +right is more precious than peace."</p> +<p>Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys +clicked off the closing words:</p> +<p>"<i>To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, +everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride +of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged +to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her +birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured</i>."</p> +<p>He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached +hotly. With elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes +with his hands. All the agony, the bitterness, the burden of +preceding days swept over him, but behind it was a cool and +cleansing current of peace. "<i>Ich kann nicht anders</i>," he +whispered.</p> +<p>Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly:</p> +<p>"<i>God helping her, she can do no other</i>."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM' id="THE_HEAD_OF_THE_FIRM"></a><br> +<h2>THE HEAD OF THE FIRM</h2> +<br> +<p>He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting +in his private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where +bright red and yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, +parallelograms, and other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance +hastily through the papers and magazines. He was familiar with +several foreign languages, and would skim through the text. Then he +would pound the table with his fist, walk angrily about the floor, +and tear the offensive journals into strips. For very often he +found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons that were +most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of his +firm.</p> +<p>His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, +but he was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. +Always the same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the +seam-worn forehead would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb +nervously. His gray eyes would flash—and the fist come down +heavily on the mahogany desk.</p> +<p>When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is +not well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he +had always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes +remembered what a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, +forty-five years before: "He who loses his temper will lose +everything."</p> +<p>But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had +difficulties to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he +himself was puny in childhood; infantile paralysis withered his +left arm when he was an infant; but in spite of these handicaps he +had made himself a vigorous swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could +shoot better with one arm than most sportsmen with two. After +leaving the university he served in the army, but at his father's +death the management of the vast family business came into his +hands. He was then twenty-eight.</p> +<p>No one can question the energy with which he set himself to +carry on the affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, +stubborn, pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the +elements of a successful man of business. His first act was to +dismiss the confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both +his father and grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's +growth. But the new executive was determined to run the business +his own way. Disregarding criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he +declared it his mission to spread the influence of the business to +the ends of the earth. "We must have our place in the sun," he +said; and announced himself as the divine instrument through whom +this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly plain that no +man's opposition would balk him in the management of the firm's +affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself as +the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions +of the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for +this, but he paid little heed.</p> +<p>The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had +been seen in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all +over the globe. Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were +seen on every ocean. He himself with his accustomed energy +travelled everywhere to advance the interests of trade. In England, +Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, the Holy Land, he made +personal visits to the firm's best customers. He sent his brother +to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and other +members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram +after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed +congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to +foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He +employed famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of +his factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after +him.</p> +<p>This is no place to record minutely the million activities of +thirty years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. +It is all written down in history. Suffice it to say that those +years did not go by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an +incurable disease. His temperament, like high tension steel, was of +a brittle quality; it had the tendency to snap under great strains, +living always at fever pitch, sparing himself no fatigue of body or +soul, the whirring dynamo of energy in him often showed signs of +overstress.</p> +<p>It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those +last months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his +line of business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived +to see his old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for +decades, some of them the foreign representatives of his own firm, +out of a job and hunted from their homes by creditors. He had lived +to realize that the commodity he and his family had been +manufacturing for generations was out of date, a thing no longer +needed or wanted by the modern world. The strain which his mind was +enduring is shown by the febrile and unbalanced tone of one of his +letters, sent to a member of his own family who ran one of the +company's branch offices but was forced to resign by +bankruptcy:</p> +<p>"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by +our common enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you +that your deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with +further aid from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of +which no man by right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance +on those who have dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands +on you. We hope to welcome you at the earliest opportunity."</p> +<p>The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; +and it is worth while to remember what it was that killed +it—and him. While the struggle was still on there were many +arguments as to what would bring matters to an end; some cunning +invention, some new patent that would outwit the methods of his +firm. But after all it was nothing more startling than the printing +press and the moral of the whole matter may be put in those fine +old words, "But above all things, truth beareth away the victory." +Little by little, the immense power of the printed word became too +strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer the mahogany +desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him cracked +even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted into +the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge +organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, +in Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that +had cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, +or had them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, +the right of free communities to live their own lives.</p> +<p>Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but +that perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep +within him. He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, +obstinate, proud, was still not an evil face. He broke down while +there was still some of the business to save and some of the +goodwill intact.</p> +<p>It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine +in the world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are +but wasteful toys. For when the printing presses are united the +planet may buck and yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million +inky cylinders, roaring in chorus, were telling him the truth. When +his assistants found him, on his desk lay a half-ripped magazine +where he had tried to tear up a mocking cartoon.</p> +<p>I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring +with embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to +him from over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the +shadowy might of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public +opinion, that hung like dark wings above his head. For little by +little the printed word incarnates itself in power, and in ways +undreamed of makes itself felt. Little by little the wills of +common men, coalescing, running together like beads of mercury on a +plate, quivering into rhythm and concord, become a mighty force +that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires to powder. +Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when once +the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, +it moves onward like the tide up a harbour.</p> +<p>The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with +such colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every +energy known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull +through. His managers had foreseen every phase of this +unprecedented competition, and his warehouses were stocked. But +slowly the forces of his opponents began to focus themselves.</p> +<p>Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents, +solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized +that one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the +huge fabric of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in +the hands of the executors, pending a reorganization.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HERIOT_ROW' id="HERIOT_ROW"></a><br> +<h2>17 HERIOT ROW</h2> +<br> +<p>There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice +a year to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to +Edinburgh, made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in +the summer of 1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, +savoury with the unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand +literary passion. Would that one might again steer <i>Shotover</i> +(dearest of pushbikes) along the Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's +lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way to Stratford! Never was +more innocent merriment spread upon English landscape. When I die, +bury the black notebook with me.</p> +<p>That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and +perchance may serve future historians as a document proving the +moderate cost of wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. +Pepys' diary is more interesting than his meticulous record of what +his amusements cost him. Mayhap some future economist will pore +upon these guileless confessions. For in the black memorandum book +I succeeded, for almost the only time in my life, in keeping an +accurate record of the lapse of coin during nine whole days. I +shall deposit the document with the Congressional Library in +Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no excuse +for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one take +amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot +month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please +reckon exchange at two cents per penny.</p> +<table align='center' border='0' cellpadding='2' cellspacing='0' +summary=''> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 16</td> +<td align='center'>£</td> +<td align='center'>s.</td> +<td align='center'>d</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pint cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>½ pint cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lunch at Banbury</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pint cider at Ettington</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>supper at Stratford</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>stamp and postcard</td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +<td align='center'>3½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 17</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Postcards and stamps</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>9</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>pencil</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Warwick Castle</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider at the <i>Bear and Baculus</i><br> +(which Mifflin <i>would</i> call<br> +the <i>Bear and Bacillus)</i></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'><i>Bowling Green Inn,</i>bed and<br> +breakfast</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Puncture</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Lunch, Kenilworth</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>6</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Kenilworth Castle</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>6</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Postcards</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Lemonade, Coventry</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Supper, Tamworth,<br> +<i>The Castle Hotel</i></td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>2</td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>16</td> +<td align='center'>5½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>July 18</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>Johnson house, Lichfield</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider at <i>The Three Crowns</i></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>postcard and shave</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>4</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'><i>The King's Head</i>, bed and breakfast</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +<td align='center'>7</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider</td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>2</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>tip on road<a name='FNanchor_A_1' id= +"FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href='#Footnote_A_1'><sup>[A]</sup></a></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1½</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lunch, Uttoxeter</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>cider, Ashbourne,<i>The Green Man</i></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>landlord's drink, Ashbourne<a name='FNanchor_B_2' +id="FNanchor_B_2"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_B_2'><sup>[B]</sup></a></td> +<td></td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>supper, <i>Newhaven House</i>,</td> +<td></td> +<td align='center'>1</td> +<td align='center'>-</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='left'>lemonade, Buxton</td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb'> </td> +<td class='bb' align='center'>3</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td align='center'>TOTAL</td> +<td align='center'>£1</td> +<td align='center'>s.4</td> +<td align='center'>d.1</td> +</tr> +<tr> +<td></td> +<td align='center' colspan='3'>($5.78)</td> +</tr> +</table> +<a name='Footnote_A_1' id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_A_1'>[A]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather +tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a +railway crossing.</p> +</div> +<a name='Footnote_B_2' id="Footnote_B_2"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_B_2'>[B]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a +ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us +excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in +that neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great +writer," and he agreed.</p> +</div> +<p>That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to +reckon that ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring +luxuries and emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in +reckoning shillings and pence, and our fervour in posting our +ledgers would have gladdened a firm of auditors. I remember lying +on the coping of a stone bridge over the water of Teviot near +Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the swift stream bickering +over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in his notebook on the +other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, "Bless the lad, he's +jotting down some picturesque notes of something that has struck +his romantic eye." And just then he spoke—"Four and eleven +pence half-penny so far to-day!"</p> +<p>Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting +itinerary. The McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 +miles; it was the afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping +hearts we saw Arthur's Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was +in sight!</p> +<p>There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since +the days when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud +to one another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of +the north. A score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of +the master. We knew them better than any other syllables in the +world. Heriot Row, Princes Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston +Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the +Pentland Hills—O my friends, do those names mean to you what +they did to us? Then you are one of the brotherhood—what was +to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world!</p> +<p>In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent +lodging, in a large chamber which was really the smoking room of +the house. The city was crowded with tourists on account of an +expected visit of the King and Queen; every other room in the hotel +was occupied. Greatly to our satisfaction we were known as "the +smoking-room gentlemen" throughout our stay. Our windows opened +upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the Caledonian Railway +sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and coupling irons were +heard all night long. I seem to remember that somewhere in his +letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew Rutland Square +well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. Writing +from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out above +all others of his youth—Rutland Square. And while that was of +course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad +to know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway +terminal we were on ground well loved by Tusitala.</p> +<p>The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in +Auld Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row—famous +address, which had long been as familiar to us as our own. I think +we expected to find a tablet on the house commemorating the beloved +occupant; but no; to our surprise it was dark, dusty, and +tenantless. A sign TO SELL was prominent. To take the name of the +agent was easy. A great thought struck us. Could we not go over the +house in the character of prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I +went back to our smoking room and concocted a genteel letter to +Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the Signet.</p> +<p>Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once).</p> +<table align='center' border='0' width='500' summary=''> +<tr> +<td> +<div class='blkquot'> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>16 Charlotte +Square,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>Edinburgh.</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 3em;'>26th July, +1911</div> +<br> +<p>DEAR SIR,</p> +<p>17 HERIOT ROW</p> +<p>We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can +be seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to +view it we shall arrange to have it opened.</p> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 12em;'>We are,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 8em;'>Yours +faithfully,</div> +<div style='text-align: right; margin-right: 1em;'>GUILD AND +SHEPHERD.</div> +</div> +</td> +</tr> +</table> +<p>Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed +as to the figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You +must remember that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest +twenties, travelling with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a +fortnight on the road. I was in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; +Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and subfusc Norfolk. Our only +claims to gentility were our monocles. Always take a monocle on a +vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of amusement and +passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if you can +screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the +tradesman.</p> +<p>The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless +show that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young +attachés, appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was +met by two eccentric young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel +hats, waterproof capes, each with an impressive monocle. Let it be +said to the honour of the attaché in question that he showed +no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We explained, I think, that we +were scouting for my father, who (it was alleged) greatly desired +to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had presence of mind enough to +enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, and the condition of +the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was quoted.</p> +<p>He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we +stepped softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very +track of the Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely +rooms. We imagined R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the +windows at dusk to see Leerie light the street-lamps +outside—a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining brown eyes; +or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn heralded +by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street gardens. +We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, +returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or +sparkling mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, +large dining room facing the street—and we imagined Louis and +his parents at breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored +with parquet oak, a spacious and attractive chamber. Above this +again, the nursery, and opening off it the little room where +faithful Cummie slept. But in vain we looked for some sign or +souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room that echoed to his +childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the endless nights +of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded and burst +into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and +forlorn.</p> +<p>With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, +seeing everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the +courteous young agent. And what was it he said?—"This was the +house of Lord So-and-so" (I forget the name)—"and +incidentally, Robert Louis Stevenson lived here once. His signature +occurs once or twice in the deeds."</p> +<p><i>Incidentally</i>!...</p> +<p>Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a +steep slant of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or +more higher than the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, +store-rooms, and other "offices" with care, imagining that little +"Smoutie" may have run here and there in search of tid-bits from +the cook. Visions of that childhood, fifty years before, were +almost as real as our own. We seemed to hear the young treble of +his voice. That house was the home of the Stevensons for thirty +years (1857-1887)—surely even the thirty years that have gone +by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those dear +ghosts we conjured up!</p> +<p>We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild +and Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our +innocent deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one +has yet put a tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do +so, some day.</p> +<p>In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long +Northern dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for +Leerie to come and light the famous lamp which still stands on the +pavement in front of the dining-room windows:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>For we are very lucky, with a lamp +before the door,</i><br></span> <span><i>And Leerie stops to light +it as he lights so many more;</i><br></span> <span><i>And O! before +you hurry by with ladder and with light,</i><br></span> <span><i>O +Leerie, see a little child and nod to him +to-night!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come +posting up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a +flame cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 +("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all +lamplighters in Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, +and we used to have a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We +told him of R.L.S., of whom he had vaguely heard, and explained the +sanctity of that particular lamp. He in turn talked freely of his +craft, and learning that we were Americans he told us of his two +sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn Street." He seemed to think +Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned that the Misses Leerie +lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, and sending back +money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you still light +the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder beacons on +Flanders fields?</p> +<p>One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the +lamp-post was still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were +down on hands and knees on the pavement, examining the base of the +pillar by match-light in search of possible dates. A very seedy and +disreputable looking man passed, evidently regarding us with +apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, never at a loss, remarked +loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as the ragged one passed +hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we followed him. At +the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy shuffle, and +Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze.</p> +<p>Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces +prom No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, +and Mifflin and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where +took place the adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once +described when setting down some recollections of childhood.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a +lame boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much +shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, +like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and +<i>goody</i> story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after +many days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally +accosted him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would +you like to play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds +exactly like a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved +me to the venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, +for it was a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This +incident was the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a +desperate aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had +got into talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last +particular may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my +lame lad, and knew him again at once. He was then a man of great +strength, rolling along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a +butcher's basket on his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, +but it was a great affair to me.</p> +</div> +<p>We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in +Ramsay's Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the +valley between the Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist +rises at night like an exhalation from the old gray stones. The +lamps shining through it blend in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot +here and there with brighter flares. As the sky darkens the castle +looms in silhouette, with one yellow square below the Half Moon +Battery. "There are no stars like the Edinburgh street lamps," says +R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all shines on Heriot Row.</p> +<p>The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down +from the dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his +boyish wish to go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit +many and more enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never +saw him.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER' id= +"FRANK_CONFESSIONS_OF_A_PUBLISHERS_READER"></a><br> +<h2>FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<p>[<i>Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet +and the extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for +many years the head reader for a large publishing house. It was my +good fortune to know him intimately, and when he could be severed +from his innumerable manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, +even in bed, he was very good company. His premature death from +reader's cramp and mental hernia was a sad loss to the world of +polite letters. Thousands of mediocre books would have been loaded +upon the public but for his incisive and unerring judgment. When he +lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read MSS., he sent for me, +and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet in my hand. It +contained the following confession, and it was his last wish that +it should be published without alteration. I include it here in +memory of my very dear friend</i>.]</p> +</div> +<br> +<p>In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for +myself. Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild +animal trainer—such were the visions with which I put myself +to sleep. Never did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into +my ken. But here I am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of +a commercial democracy. My only excuse for setting down these +paragraphs is the hope that other more worthy members of the +ancient and honorable craft may be induced to speak out in meeting. +In these days when every type of man is interviewed, his modes of +thinking conned and commented upon, why not a symposium of +manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while reading a +manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. My +old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. +Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to +utter my message without fear or favour.</p> +<p>As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their +days and nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over +mediocre stuff, poking and poring in the unending hope of finding +something rich and strange. A gradual <i>stultitia</i> seizes them. +They take to drink; they beat their wives; they despair of +literature. Worst, and most preposterous, they one and all nourish +secret hopes of successful authorship. You might think that the +interminable flow of turgid blockish fiction that passes beneath +their weary eyes would justly sicken them of the abominable +gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is in the blood.</p> +<p>Great men have graced the job—and got out of it as soon as +possible. George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; +also E.V. Lucas and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's +comments on a manuscript is still preserved. Writing of a novel by +a lady who was the author of many unpublished stories, all marked +by perseverance rather than talent, he said, "Age cannot wither nor +custom stale her infinite lack of variety." But alas, we hear too +little of these gentlemen in their capacity as publishers' +pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did they not +bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich garniture +of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and younger +men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on into +the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing.</p> +<p>But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. +Your true specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old +percheron who is content to go on, year after year, sorting over +the literary pemmican that comes before him, inexhaustible in his +love for the delicacies of good writing, happy if once or twice a +twelve-month he chance upon some winged thing. He is not the +pettifogging pilgarlic of popular conception: he is a devoted +servant of letters, willing to take his thirty or forty dollars a +week, willing to suffer the <i>peine forte et dure</i> of his +profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing terse and +marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the +publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I +believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh +wistfully when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their +own to devote an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book +manuscripts a day, thirty a week, close to fifteen hundred a +year—that is a fair showing for the head reader of a large +publishing house.</p> +<p>One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid +about the profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned +in there will rarely be more than three or four that merit any +serious consideration; only about one in a hundred will be +acceptable for publication. And the others—alas that human +beings should have invented ink to steal away their brains! "Only a +Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript which I read the +other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it betrayed an +ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable to a +polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere in +Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into +her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice +his ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read +almost a score every week. Often I think of a poem which was +submitted to me once, containing this immortal couplet:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>She damped a pen in the ooze of her +brain and wrote a verse on the air,</i><br></span> <span><i>A verse +that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen to set it +there.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your +cerebral ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year +or so, when one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned +into pigs' trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la +Mare, some Rupert Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's +sanity.</p> +<p>Or else—what is indeed more frequent—the reader's +fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the +manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a +kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so +complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the +sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in many +cantos, beginning</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Our heart is but a bundle of +muscle</i><br></span> <span><i>In which our passions tumble and +tussle.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Another lady begins her novel with the following +psychanalysis:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>"Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual +circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause +being a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had +done the day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own +ailment, a paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a +pronounced case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, +aggravated by a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities +which had been bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, +modern foibles and follies peculiar to the human species, both male +and female, under favorable social conditions, found in provincial +towns as well as in large cities and fashionable watering +places.</p> +</div> +<p>But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul +malnutrition, let me append a description of a robuster female, +taken verbatim from a manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which +became a by-word in one publisher's office.</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant +figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. +Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured +like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre +and combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a +flowing tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a +graceful crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic +rubies and tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully +concealed its own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to +the azure of the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and +her tapering strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a +time-keeper of the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded +bosom that was destined to be pushed forward by sighs.</p> +</div> +<p>Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire +such plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of +the hero in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk +recently:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah +Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of +the appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many +phases. His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and +close together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a +point in many lines, and from the point back to where it joined +above his lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. +His upper lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth +ran across his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to +the smiles and expressions he employed. Below those features was a +chin of fine proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in +his jaw hinges there was a device that worked splendidly, when he +wished to show unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such +occasions in the kindest advances one would wish to see.</p> +<p>It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley.</p> +</div> +<p>I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and +join the A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: +I have read too many of them. If their forming a trade union will +better the output of American literature I am keen for it. I know +that the professional reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he +acquires a parallax which distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, +now fiction, now history, poetry, essays, philosophy, science, +exegetics, and what not, he becomes a kind of pantechnicon of +slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of things that aren't so. +Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is fired at him +first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable treatise on +the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on using +moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And with +it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of +writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg.</p> +<p>Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. +There is all too little clannishness among us. We who are the +helpless target for the slings and arrows of every writer who +chooses to put pen on foolscap—might we not meet now and then +for the humour of exchanging anecdotes? No class of beings is more +in need of the consolations of intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let +us order a tierce of malmsey and talk it over! Perchance, too, a +trade union among readers might be of substantial advantage. Is it +not sad that a man should read manuscripts all the sweet years of +his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? Let us make sixty +the minimum—or let there be a pogrom among the authors!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='WILLIAM_McFEE' id="WILLIAM_McFEE"></a><br> +<h2>WILLIAM McFEE</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a +cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows +it, and half the ship has to clean up the mess.</p> +<p>—RUDYARD KIPLING.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish +they would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as +purser, and William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don +Marquis as deck steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I +would like to be at Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks +booking passages!</p> +<p>William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch +engineer in Mr. Kipling's <i>Brugglesmith</i>, but I feel sure that +his attitude toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. +Unhappily I do not know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but +I know and respect his feelings as a writer, his love of honourable +and honest work, his disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's +attitude toward the purveyors of publicity, you may know him.</p> +<p>One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting +by the open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively +inoffensive young man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The +Golden Journey to Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker +in London. Mr. Secker, like many other wise publishers, inserts in +the back of his books the titles of other volumes issued by him. +Little did I think, as I turned to look over Mr. Secker's +announcements, that a train of events was about to begin which +would render me, during the succeeding twelve months, a monomaniac +in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when I was blessed +with a son and heir just a year later I received a telegram signed +by a dozen of them: "<i>Congratulations. Name him Casuals</i>!"</p> +<p>It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of +1915-16 that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon +the not-to-be-forgotten words.</p> +<p>MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA.</p> +<p>Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I +wrote for a copy.</p> +<p>My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains +this note:</p> +<p>"Finished reading <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, a good book. +H—— still laid up with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat +and read Bible aloud to Celia before the open fire."</p> +<p>My first impressions of "<i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, a good book" +are interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid +from Pike County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house +by nightly readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick +(that was her first voyage away from home) and in spite of +persistent Bible readings she fled after two weeks, back to her +home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was our first servant, and we had +prepared a beautiful room in the attic for her. However, that has +nothing to do with Mr. McFee.</p> +<p><i>Casuals of the Sea</i> is a novel whose sale of ten thousand +copies in America is more important as a forecast of literary +weather than many a popular distribution of a quarter million. Be +it known by these presents that there are at least ten thousand +librivora in this country who regard literature not merely as an +emulsion. This remarkable novel, the seven years' study of a busy +engineer occupied with boiler inspections, indicator cards and +other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the first really +public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened to with +respect.</p> +<p>Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, +but at that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. +They were <i>Letters from an Ocean Tramp</i> (1908) and +<i>Aliens</i> (1914); the latter has been rewritten since then and +issued in a revised edition. It is a very singular experiment in +the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on human folly by a man +who has made it his hobby to think things out for himself. And the +new version is headlighted by a preface which may well take its +place among the most interesting literary confessions of this +generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, +the artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the +whittling of a paragraph:—</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I +suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the +sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes—genuine +artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live +like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the +artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with +irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my +living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their +ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my +theme, the problem of human folly.</p> +</div> +<p>Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer +because he has never had to write for a living. He has been writing +for the fun of it ever since he was an apprentice in a big +engineering shop in London twenty years ago. His profession deals +with exacting and beautiful machinery, and he could no more do hack +writing than hack engineering. And unlike the other English +realists of his generation who have cultivated a cheap flippancy, +McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers at middle-class +morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how +delightfully he flays it in <i>Aliens</i>) but he loves the middle +classes for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. +His attitude toward his creations is that of a "benevolent +marbleheart" (his own phrase). He has seen some of the seams of +life, and like McAndrew he has hammered his own philosophy. It is a +manly, just, and gentle creed, but not a soft one. Since the war +began he has been on sea service, first on a beef-ship and +transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in the +British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the +desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast +and a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the +dumb-waiter shaft to make room for him. It is a disconcerting +figure in Grub Street, the man who really has something to say.</p> +<p>Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new +finds. How the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves +when Harold Bell Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar +mage, Elsbury W. Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on +publishers' press sheets does not dig very deep in the iron soil of +time. We are all only raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in +his little parable; even the raft that Homer made for Helen must +break up some day. Who in these States knows the works of Nat +Gould? Twelve million of his dashing paddock novels have been sold +in England, but he is as unknown here as is Preacher Wright in +England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? Sometimes it is the +worst sellers that come to life, roll away the stone, and an angel +is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me quote Mr. McFee +once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot refuse +facts."</p> +<p>William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an +English skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast +after a long voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They +settled in New Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, +and here McFee was educated in the city schools of which the first +pages of <i>Casuals of the Sea</i> give a pleasant description. +Then he went to a well-known grammar school at Bury St. Edmunds in +Suffolk—what we would call over here a high school. He was a +quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer.</p> +<p>At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in +Aldersgate. This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the +Charterhouse, Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. +In fact, the office of the firm was built over one of the old +plague pits of 1665. His father had died several years before; and +for the boy to become an apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. +McFee had to pay three hundred pounds sterling. McFee has often +wondered just what he got for the money. However, the privilege of +paying to be better than someone else is an established way of +working out one's destiny in England, and at the time the mother +and son knew no better than to conform. You will find this problem, +and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out in +<i>Aliens</i>.</p> +<p>After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the +firm on various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping +installation at Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very +creditable juvenile verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's +mantle. This was at the time of the Boer War, when everybody in +trousers who wrote verses was either imitating Kipling or reacting +from him.</p> +<p>His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the +lives and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly +influenced by socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with +books. He came to live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had +already tasted life at first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere +of that literary and artistic Utopia made him uneasy. His +afternoons were spent at the British Museum reading room, his +evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he attended classes, +and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent engineer as +he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As early as +1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them.</p> +<p>In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the +engine room of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at +the chance. Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save +for one year (1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, +to write. The reader of <i>Aliens</i> will be pretty familiar with +Nutley by the time he reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin +disguise. I suspect a certain liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. +Did not Frank Stockton write some of his best tales there? Some day +some literary meteorologist will explain how these intellectual +anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley (N.J.), Galesburg +(Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.)</p> +<p>The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a +fair prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the +same time monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home +ties are (I speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the +coveted chief's certificate is won, ambition has little further to +look forward to. A small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship +is not an inviting study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. +Haig and Haig are the only diversions of most of the profession. +Art, literature, and politics do not interest them. Picture +postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies of the port are the +glamour of his that they delight to honour.</p> +<p>I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in +<i>Aliens</i>) of his induction into the profession of marine +engineering has no faint colour of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's +mind. The filth, the intolerable weariness, the instant necessity +of the tasks, stagger the easygoing suburban reader. And only the +other day, speaking of his work on a seaplane ship in the British +Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating things about the life of an +engineer:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty +of work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot +help wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the +stick. Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of +the R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't +mean, when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work +such as my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, +nor my friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying +men, or the officers of the watch. I mean <i>work</i>, hard, +sweating, nasty toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. +Most ships of the naval auxiliary are the same.</p> +<p>I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular +fragment of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other +profession have the officers responsible for the carrying out of +the work to toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, +in fleet auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the +waste-pipe of his regimental latrines. You do not expect the +surgeon to superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not +expect the navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not +expect an architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You +do not expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law +courts door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. +Yet you do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine +engineer has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work +corresponding precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, +which are in other professions relegated to the humblest and +roughest of mankind. I blame no one. It is tradition, a most +terrible windmill at which to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to +set down once at least the peculiar nature of an engineer's +destiny. I have had some years of it, and I know what I am talking +about.</p> +<p><i>The</i> point to distinguish is that the engineer not only +has the responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do +it. He, the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours +of rest and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available +twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. +Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge +instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. +When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described.</p> +</div> +<p>The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon +these laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of +intellect as well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, +purposeful. His years at sea have been to him a more fruitful +curriculum than that of any university. The patient sarcasm with +which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his acquaintance does +not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. He has stood +as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting <i>viva +voce</i>—the University of the Seven Seas.</p> +<p>If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I +would deem that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege +of getting a man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of +course! But how he has worked for his mastery of the art of life +and the theory thereof! When his colleagues at sea were dozing in +their deck chairs or rattling the bones along the mahogany, he was +sweating in his bunk, writing or reading. He has always been deeply +interested in painting, and no gallery in any port he visited ever +escaped him. These extracts from some of his letters will show +whether his avocations were those of most engineers:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston +(Liverpool) the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted +against the pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague +Cheshire shores dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an +indulgent genie were to appear and make me an offer I would +cheerfully give up writing for painting. As it is, I see things in +pictures and I spend more time in the Walker Gallery than in the +library next door.</p> +<p>I've got about all I <i>can</i> get out of books, and now I +don't relish them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I +suppose, is that character, not incident, is my <i>metier</i>. And +you can <i>draw</i> character, <i>paint</i> character, but you +can't very well blat about it, can you?</p> +<p>I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The +worst of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how +people live, of ordinary human possibilities.</p> +<p>A——. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas +about "cheap stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a +failure if I don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a +blue curse what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never +made a big name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, +to do it as well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility +ended.... To hell with writing, I want <i>to feel</i> and +<i>see</i>!</p> +<p>I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to +the amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some +sort who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are +alter him!</p> +</div> +<p>His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the +hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, +ranging from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. +Happening to be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in +this country of "futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the +current discussion in the newspaper correspondence columns. He +wrote for a leading London journal an article on "The Conditions of +Labour at Sea." He finds time to contribute to the <i>Atlantic +Monthly</i> pieces of styptic prose that make zigzags on the +sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written weekly to the +artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a humorous and +ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern cultivated men. +I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor on Russian +fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines.</p> +<p>When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common +with his engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a +prig. He was interested in everything that they were, but in a +great deal more, too. And after obtaining his extra chief's +certificate from the London Board of Trade, with a grade of +ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to rest on his +gauges.</p> +<p>In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather +local colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship +for the United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. +Neither <i>Aliens</i> nor <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>, which he had +been at work on for years, met with the favour of New York +publishers. He carried his manuscripts around the town until weary +of that amusement; and when the United Fruit Company asked him to +do some engineering work for them he was not loath to get back into +the old harness. And then came the war.</p> +<p>Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever +officer a vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these +remarks. But I made my proposal not wholly at random, for in +Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all three, there is something of the +same artistic creed. In those two magnificent prefaces—to +<i>A Personal Record</i> and to <i>The Nigger of the +Narcissus</i>—Conrad has set down, in words that should be +memorable to every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of +the man of letters. They can never be quoted too often:</p> +<p>"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the +miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs +deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays +them the undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and +of a smile which is not a grin."</p> +<p>That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the +Gooderich family in <i>Casuals of the Sea</i>. Somewhere in that +book he has uttered the immortal remark that "The world belongs to +the Enthusiast who keeps cool." I think there is much of himself in +that aphorism, and that the cool enthusiast, the benevolent +marbleheart, has many fine things in store for us.</p> +<p>And there is one other sentence in <i>Casuals of the Sea</i> +that lingers with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. +It is worth remembering, and I leave it with you:</p> +<p>"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as +such, instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God +and dealing murderous blows."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='RHUBARB' id="RHUBARB"></a><br> +<h2>RHUBARB</h2> +<br> +<p>We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, +which we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded +them, imparting a special potency. He was a little German +druggist—<i>Deutsche Apotheker</i>—and his real name +was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz.</p> +<p>The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the +Debatable Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags +in a sporting way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It +is the most rustic corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as +remote as Helgoland and as little known. It has no movie theatre, +no news-stand, no cigar store, no village atheist. The railroad +station, where one hundred and fifty trains a day do not stop, +might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, so steeped in +discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of an old +hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the +Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the +weather-beaten Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a +year. People who find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to +Kings to cool off. The only way one can keep servants out there is +by having the works of Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the +cook to read.</p> +<p>Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite +a little German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side +of him and a man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly +at all expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent +<i>Rheingold</i>, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would +sit by the stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber +on the table and dream of Stuttgart.</p> +<p>It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was +an educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of +which he was very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart +Oberrealschule; the other his license to practise homicidal +pharmacy in the German Empire, dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik +der reinen Vernunft", and found it more interesting than Henry +James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop into his shop of an +evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell into talk. His +Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her shoulders, would +come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their pet +dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she +so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive.</p> +<p>It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German +University that he really showed me the life that lay behind his +shopman activity. We sometimes talked German together, and he took +me into their little sitting room to see his photographs of home +scenes at Stuttgart. It was over thirty years since he had seen +German soil, but still his eyes would sparkle at the thought. He +and Minna, being childless, dreamed of a return to the Fatherland +as their great end in life.</p> +<p>What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was +fascinated by the rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with +mysterious Latin abbreviations. There were cases of patent +remedies—Mexican Mustang Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, +Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish +Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, marshmallows, tobacco, jars of +rock candy, what a medley of paternostrums! And old Rhubarb +himself, in his enormous baggy trousers—infinite breeches in +a little room, as Julia used to say.</p> +<p>I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The +first impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He +was always in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his +broad back; his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served +as cravat. He had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep +gurgling gutturals and a decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and +farther down into his larynx. Once, when we got to know each other +fairly well, I ventured some harmless jest about Barbarossa. He +chuckled; then his face grew grave. "I wish Minna could have the +beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. It would be a fine +breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong like a horse, +I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his broad, thick +hand.</p> +<p>Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the +Deutsche Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had +installed a soda fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him +sorely, and if he was asked for anything more complex than +chocolate ice cream soda he would shake his head solemnly and say: +"That I have not got." Motorists sometimes turned off the Jericho +turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for banana splits or grape +juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But they had to take +chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit of +absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged +water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag +his beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling +again when the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the +spilt soda and rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue.</p> +<p>At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, +piling it high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver +oil. Then Minna entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot +chocolate which seethed and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue +gas burner underneath. This she served in thick china mugs with a +clot of whipped cream swimming on top. Julia would buy a box of the +cheese crackers that Schulz kept in stock specially for her, and +give several to the sleek little black bitch that stood pleading +with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on Julia's slippers. +Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense carnation" +bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics of his +pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with +naïve pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the +little dog "he," which amused us.</p> +<p>On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, +and during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by +the dog which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. +Sometimes we met him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a +cudgel and humming to himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he +halted, the little black dachshund would look up at him, and he +would stoop ponderously down, pick her up and carry her in his arms +until all danger was past.</p> +<p>As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the +war. Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, +keeping the shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would +argue without heat upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no +zeal for converting the old fellow from his views; I understood his +sympathies and respected them. Reports of atrocities troubled him +as much as they did me; but the spine of his contention was that +the German army was unbeatable. He got out his faded discharge +ticket from the Würtemberger Landsturm to show the perfect +system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at the +back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and +over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his +beard aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other +customers came in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and +the topic was dropped. But often the glass top of the perfume +counter was requisitioned as a large-scale battleground, and the +pink bottle of rose water set to represent Von Hindenburg while the +green phial of smelling salts was Joffre or Brussilov. We fought +out the battle of the Marne pretty completely on the perfume +counter. "<i>Warte doch</i>!" he would cry. "Just wait! You will +see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!"</p> +<p>Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. +She knew well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not +understand that our arguments were wholly lacking in personal +animus. When I told him of the Allies' growing superiority in +aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing me clippings about the +German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" made of solid +cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the British; he +would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his +conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" +And he would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to +cry in a panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb +and I would grin at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and +we would say good night.</p> +<p>How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him +in a true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to +typify all that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the +frugal simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He +and I felt for each other, I think, something of the humorous +friendliness of the men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast +us on different sides of the matter. But when I felt tempted to see +red, to condemn the Germans <i>en masse</i>, to chant litanies of +hate, I used to go down to the drugstore for tobacco or a mug of +chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue it out.</p> +<p>But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German +sentiment in the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. +Then he was worried over Minna. Often she did not appear in the +evenings, and he would explain that she had gone to bed. I was all +the more surprised to meet her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, +sloshing along the road in the liquid mire, the little dog +squattering sadly behind, her small black paws sliding on the +ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing outdoors on a day +like this?" I said.</p> +<p>"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if +Lischen didn't get her airing."</p> +<p>"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," +I said severely.</p> +<p>Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was +snowbound in Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to +Montreal on urgent business. Julia went to the city to visit her +mother while I was away, so we had no news from Kings.</p> +<p>We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in +our absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and +for an hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle +with a pipe and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next +morning I stopped at the drugstore on my way to the train to get +some iodine.</p> +<p>Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone +of white powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from +well. There were great pouches under his eyes; his beard was +unkempt; his waistcoat spotted with food stains. The lady waiting +received her package, and went out. Rhubarb and I grasped +hands.</p> +<p>"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you +see that the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards +deep last week? Do you still think Germany will win?" To my +surprise he turned on his heel and began apparently rummaging along +a row of glass jars. His gaze seemed to be fastened upon a tall +bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At last he turned round. His +broad, naïve face was quivering like blanc-mange.</p> +<p>"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me +any more? Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia."</p> +<p>As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along +the floor. The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and +frisked about my feet.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE' id= +"THE_HAUNTING_BEAUTY_OF_STRYCHNINE"></a><br> +<h2>THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE</h2> +<h3>A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY</h3> +<br> +<p>Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a <i>vers libre</i> poem) the +quaint little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform +each of the <i>fiacre</i> drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and +tries to outring the others. You step from the railway +carriage—and instantly the hellish din of those droschky +bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your eye has caught the +superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. Over the +sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above the +rugged scarp where the blue-bloused <i>ouvriers</i> are quarrying +the famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the +Palazzio Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo +eddies down your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At +last you are in Strychnine.</p> +<p>Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press +agents—there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far +and untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an +unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous +among physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The +sorrowful ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. <i>Chemise de +fer</i> (with innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has +kept out the contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly +interdicted, has also kept away the rich and garrulous tourist. But +he who will endure to the end that tortuous journey among flat +fields of rye and parsimony, will find himself well rewarded. The +long tunnel through Mondragone ends at length, and you find +yourself on the platform with the droschky bells clanging in your +ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag soaring +behind the jade canal.</p> +<p>The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I +stepped into the curious seven-wheeled <i>sforza</i> lettered +<i>Hôtel Decameron</i>. We rumbled <i>andante espressivo</i> +over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussée d'Arsenic, +crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of the +cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of +lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what +quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes +in a strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the +<i>markt-platz</i> where a man in a white coat was busily selling +hot icons. They are delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande +(the great cheese cathedral) on the cliff.</p> +<p>The Hôtel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once +a bartender there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place +Nouveau Riche overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by +Edward VII in memory of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine +baths the merry monarch is said to have called for a corncob pipe +and a plate of onions, after which he made his escape by walking +over the forest track to the French frontier, although previous to +this he had not walked a kilometer without a cane since John Bull +won the Cowes regatta. The <i>haut ton</i> of the section in which +the Hôtel Decameron finds itself can readily be seen by the +fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on the rue +Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hôtel. The +antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the +two.</p> +<p>The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a +weak heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger +on the terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band +and eat a bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a +great deal of my time exploring the chief glory of the town, the +Casa Grande, which stands on the colossal crag honeycombed +underneath with the shafts and vaults of the cheese mine. There is +nothing in the world more entrancing than to stand (with a +vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the Casa, looking down +over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts of the workmen +as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some particularly +rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will some day +make Strychnine a place of <i>pélérinage</i> for all +the world. <i>Pay homage to the fromage</i> is a rough translation +of the motto of the town, which is carved in old Gothic letters on +the apse of the Casa itself. Limberg, Gruyère, Alkmaar, +Neufchâtel, Camembert and Hoboken—all these famous +cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the +Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation +of the burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' +Guild at the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by +the town council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese +industry, and a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of +the ceremonial cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all +those present donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the +English to combat the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen +helmets are worn by the workmen in the quarries to prevent +prostration.</p> +<p>It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I +would gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin +Palace, and sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the +terrace sipping my <i>verre</i> of native wine. But duties recalled +me to the beaten paths of travel, and once more I drove in the +old-fashioned ambulance to catch my even more old-fashioned train. +The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine when there is a stern wind, +as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese carried in the luggage +van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some day some American +efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them to couple +their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then +Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may +chance that way, a fragrant memory.</p> +<p>And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx +canal and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='INGO' id="INGO"></a><br> +<h2>INGO</h2> +<h3>"ZUM ANDENKEN"</h3> +<br> +<p>The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost +my heart to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little +sailor suit of blue and white striped linen; his short trousers +showed chubby brown calves above his white socks; his round golden +head cropped close in the German fashion. His blue eyes were grave +and thoughtful. By great good fortune we sat next each other at +table, and in my rather grotesque German I began a conversation. +How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the absurdities of my syntax! +How very courteous he was!</p> +<p>Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we +call memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in +the Black Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of +nowhere and asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who +had ever been seen in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur +Krone ("the Crown Inn") found them very amusing. Perhaps you have +never seen a country tavern in the Schwarzwald? Then you have +something to live for. A long, low building with a moss-grown roof +and tremendous broad eaves sheltering little galleries; and the +barn under the same roof for greater warmth in winter. One side of +the house was always strong with an excellent homely aroma of cow +and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a door +that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the +haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the +summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery +under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the +yellow coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long +vista of the valley, the women with bright red jackets working in +the fields, and the dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. +There was much rain that summer; the mountains were often veiled +all day long in misty shreds of cloud, and the two Americans sat +with pipes and books at the long dining table, greeted by gales of +laughter on the part of the robust landlord's niece when they +essayed the native idiom. "<i>Sie arbeiten immer</i>!" she used to +say; "<i>Sie werden krank</i>!" ("You're always working; you'll be +ill!")</p> +<p>There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those +happy days two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I +suppose, are there more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people +than the South Germans. On the front of the inn there was a big +yellow metal sign, giving the military number of the district, and +the mobilization points for the Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we +realized that even here the careful organization of the military +power had numbered and ticketed every village. But what did it mean +to us? War was a thing unthinkable in those days. We bicycled +everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in waterfalls, chatted +fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, and played games +with Ingo.</p> +<p>Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, +impudent, self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest +little creature. His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find +him sitting quietly in a corner with a book about the stars. On +clear evenings we would walk along the road together, in the +mountain hush that was only broken by the brook tumbling down the +valley, and he would name the constellations for me. His little +round head was thrilled through and through by the immense +mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a +muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner +what he was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes +and flashing smile: "<i>Von den Sternen</i>!" ("Of the stars.")</p> +<p>The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, +Ingo's smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite +pastimes were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found +enormous amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of +"Hangman," a simple pastime which had sometimes entertained my own +small brother on rainy days; apparently it was new in Germany. One +player thinks of a word, and sets down on paper a dash for each +letter in this word. It is the task of the other to guess the word, +and he names the letters of the alphabet one by one. Every time he +mentions a letter that is contained in the word you must set it +down in its proper place in the word, but every time he mentions a +letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of a person +depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to +guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the +game entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little +face bent over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and +happy little brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish +his grim task. "Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself +hung!" and he would laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a +jollier way of learning a foreign language than by playing games +with Ingo.</p> +<p>The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, +labyrinths of winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil +point. The task was to construct a maze so complicated that the +other could not find his way out, starting at the middle. We would +sit down at opposite ends of the room to construct our mysteries of +blind alleys and misleading passages, then each one would be turned +loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the other. Ingo would stand at my +side while I tried in obstinate stupidity to find my way through +his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his sailor blouse would +pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous places where an +exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, and his +blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to +make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless +despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom.</p> +<p>After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come +trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little +balcony under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite +book <i>Till Eulenspiegel</i>, and we sped joyously through the +adventures of that immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took +turns reading aloud: every paragraph or so I would appeal for an +explanation of something. Generally I understood well enough, but +it was such a delight to hear Ingo strive to make the meaning +plain. What a puckering of his bright boyish forehead, what a grave +determination to elucidate the fable! What a mingling of ecstatic +pride in having a grown man as pupil, with deference due to an +elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest transports of +glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely +ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent +mirth. His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a +digestive stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in +the German way, "<i>Gott! wie er freut sich</i>!" The progress of +our reading was held up by these interludes, but I could never +resist the temptation to start Ingo explaining.</p> +<p>Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair +to reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, +and there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of +'Treasure Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! +I read the tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the +shining of Ingo's eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered +with the little lad's sleep, and his mother was a good deal +disturbed about this violent yarn we were reading together. How +close he used to sit beside me as we read of the dark doings at the +<i>Admiral Benbow</i>: and how his face would fall when, clear and +hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the quick +<i>clop, clop</i> of the mail-man's horses.</p> +<p>I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory +than those hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I +took the misty, sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and +left the Gasthaus zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed +little lad stands up erect and stiff in the formal German way, and +I can see his blue eyes alight with friendliness, and a little bit +unhappy because his eccentric American comrade was gomg away and +there would be no more afternoons with <i>Till Eulenspiegel</i> on +the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as often as I do of him? +He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a child's heart +that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, and I +pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me +my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present +to me was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully +all one afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook.</p> +<p>And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's +Märchen" that I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the +English words that he was to learn how to translate when he should +grow older! As I remember them, they ran like this:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>For Ingo to learn English will very +easy be</i><br></span> <span><i>If someone is as kind to him as he +has been to me;</i><br></span> <span><i>Plays games with him, reads +fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes,</i><br></span> <span><i>And +never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he +makes—</i><br></span> <span><i>Then he will find, as I did, +how well two pleasures blend:</i><br></span> <span><i>To learn a +foreign language, and to make a foreign +friend.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I +cannot get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HOUSEBROKEN' id="HOUSEBROKEN"></a><br> +<h2>HOUSEBROKEN</h2> +<br> +<p>After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as +though he needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, +for he knew his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream +of an evening spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. +However, there were no two ways about it: the old unregenerate male +in Simmons yearned for something more exciting than the fireside +armchair, the slippers and smoking jacket, and the quiet game of +cards. Visions of the old riotous evenings with the boys ran +through his mind; a billiard table and the click of balls; the +jolly conversation at the club, and glass after glass of that cold +amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at night, the +warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their pyramids of +bottles flashing in the gaslight—these were the things that +made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little +cage in the suburbs like a tame cat!</p> +<p>Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and +at last he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet +a sharp retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer +garden to his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his +amazement Ethel took it quite calmly.</p> +<p>"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to +have an evening with your friends."</p> +<p>A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he +didn't go.</p> +<p>"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be +lonely."</p> +<p>This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, +meeting the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would +spend the evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went +about in a glow of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an +offhand way of the pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and +pitied the prosaic beggars who never stir from the house at +night.</p> +<p>On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long +enough to shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress +and seemed very cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw +the familiar room shining with firelight and the shabby +armchair.</p> +<p>"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked.</p> +<p>"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has +a steak in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait +up for you."</p> +<p>He kissed her and went off.</p> +<p>When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was +tired and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a +lot of drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching +Ethel's face bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her +anyway.</p> +<p>At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was +laughing, shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned +and ran.</p> +<p>He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible +force seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, +wondering how all the other men could read their papers so +contentedly.</p> +<p>At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along +the street and had almost entered his gate when he paused.</p> +<p>Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting +comfortably by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her +lap. His heart leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in +now? It was barely eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's +need of relaxation and masculine comradeship—why, she would +never stop laughing! He turned and tiptoed away.</p> +<p>That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was +a little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long +while he sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, +and again returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little +the chill pierced his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the +little park he tramped, biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as +the drugstore and bought a box of crackers.</p> +<p>At last—it seemed years—the church chimes struck ten +and he saw the lights go out in his house. He forced himself to +make twenty-five more trips around the gravel walk and then he +could wait no longer. Shivering with weariness and cold, he went +home.</p> +<p>He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He +leaned over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily.</p> +<p>"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't +you?"</p> +<p>"One o'clock," he lied bravely—and just then the +dining-room clock struck half-past ten and supported him.</p> +<p>"Did you have a good time?"</p> +<p>"Bully—perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a +night with the boys now and then."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE' id= +"THE_HILARITY_OF_HILAIRE"></a><br> +<h2>THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE</h2> +<br> +<p>I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to +Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the +cellar, seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from +France, about to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of +bottling the wine. He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with +competitive shouts of laughter the fun went forward. The wine was +strained, bottled, sealed, labelled, and binned, the master of the +vintage initiating his young visitors into the rite with bubbling +and infectious gaiety—improvising verses, shouting with +merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost inconceivable to +Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as one of the +most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the bottling +was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a swinging +tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way.</p> +<br> +<h3>I</h3> +<p>That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, +bursting with energy, hospitality, and wit: the <i>enfant +terrible</i> of English letters for the past fifteen years. Mr. +Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's verses is very welcome.<a name= +'FNanchor_C_3' id="FNanchor_C_3"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_C_3'><sup>[C]</sup></a> His introduction is charming: +the tribute of an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little +in proving that Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master +of prose; perhaps too some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, +and others of whom one has heard, are precipitate and smack a +little of the lecture circuit: but there is much to be grateful for +in his affectionate and thoughtful tribute. Perhaps we do not +enough realize how outstanding and how engaging a figure Mr. Belloc +is.</p> +<a name='Footnote_C_3' id="Footnote_C_3"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_C_3'>[C]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce Kilmer. +New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.</p> +</div> +<p>Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. +Four of his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father +of his grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his +grandmother was wounded at Waterloo.</p> +<p>His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived +both in France and England, and was famous as the translator into +French of Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works +by Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, +whose pictures are in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb +may be seen in Père la Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton +Belloc, a lawyer, who married an English wife.</p> +<p>The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born +at Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870—the "Terrible Year" it +was called—until 1914.</p> +<p>Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire +went to live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and +Rudyard Kipling have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. +Slindon, near Arundel, became his home, the rolling hills, clean +little rivers, and picturesque villages of the South Downs moulded +his boyish thoughts.</p> +<p>In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. +Thomas Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a +number of biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this +period:</p> +<p>"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory +School—some time in '83, I suppose. He was a small, squat +person, of the shaggy kind, with a clever face and sharp, bright +eyes. Being amongst English boys, his instinctive combativeness +made him assume a decidedly French pose, and this no doubt brought +on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, he was well able +to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of him. But I +recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the old +Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was +calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process +which he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell +him that I understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or +deductions; it would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be +taught by a 'brat.' In those days the boys used to act Latin plays +of Terence, which enjoyed a certain celebrity, and from his first +year Belloc was remarkable. His rendering of the impudent servant +maid was the inauguration of a series of triumphs during his whole +school career."</p> +<p>In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French +field artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived +the Gallic heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk +continually in French, and to drink wine. You will remember that in +"The Path to Rome" he starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the +passage; someone (who the devil is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is +the perpetual fate of that book—everyone should have six +copies.</p> +<p>After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a +comical contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol +College, Oxford—admittedly the most rarefied and +azure-pedalled precinct in England. He matriculated at Balliol in +January, 1895, and was soon known as one of the "characters" of the +college. There was little of the lean and pallid clerk of Oxenford +in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of the Junior Common Room, +where the vivacious and robust humour of the barracks at Toul at +first horrified and then captivated the men from the public +schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have seemed +to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He +swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. +Seccombe. He read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed +his tutors by the fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms +were a continual focus of noise: troops of friends, song, loud +laughter, and night-long readings from Rabelais. And probably his +battels, if they are still recorded in the Balliol buttery, would +show a larger quantity of ale and wine consumed than by any other +man who ever made drinking a fine art at Balliol. Some day perhaps +some scholar will look the matter up.</p> +<p>Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older +colleges in Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the +70's and 80's. It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her +with the Great Western Railway Station, which never fails to bring +a flush to a Balliol cheek. But whatever the merciless hand of the +architect has done to turn her into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes +and corners, no one can doubt her wholesome democracy of intellect, +her passion for sound scholarship, and the unsurpassable gift of +her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. This may be the wake +of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think it goes farther +back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young energumen found +himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked brilliantly, was a +notable figure in the Union debates, argued passionately against +every conventional English tradition, and attacked authority, +complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of the +donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, +partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship +(the most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has +retained a tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read +without assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was +the favourite of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He +has never had any reverence for a man merely because he held a post +of authority.</p> +<p>Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says:</p> +<p>"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his +college friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the +contagion and the ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled +and infected everyone with his mockery and his laughter. There +never was such an undergraduate, so merry, so learned in medieval +trifling and terminology, so perfectly spontaneous in rhapsody and +extravaganza, so positive and final in his judgments—who +spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner unintelligible to +our public-school-French-attuned ears."</p> +<p>No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to +quote the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of +the Boer War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life +and overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the +mind.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN +AFRICA</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Years ago when I was at +Balliol,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Balliol men—and I +was one—</i><br></span> <span><i>Swam together in winter +rivers,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Wrestled together under +the sun.</i><br></span> <span><i>And still in the heart of us, +Balliol, Balliol,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Loved already, +but hardly known,</i><br></span> <span><i>Welded us each of us into +the others:</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Called a levy and +chose her own.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Here is a House that armours a +man</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>With the eyes of a boy and +the heart of a ranger,</i><br></span> <span><i>And a laughing way +in the teeth of the world</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a +holy hunger and thirst for danger:</i><br></span> <span><i>Balliol +made me, Balliol fed me,</i><br></span> <span class= +'i2'><i>Whatever I had she gave me again:</i><br></span> +<span><i>And the best of Balliol loved and led me,</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>God be with you, Balliol +men.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I have said it before, and I say it +again,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>There was treason done, +and a false word spoken,</i><br></span> <span><i>And England under +the dregs of men,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And bribes +about, and a treaty broken:</i><br></span> <span><i>But angry, +lonely, hating it still,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>I +wished to be there in spite of the wrong.</i><br></span> +<span><i>My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill</i><br></span> +<span class='i2'><i>And the hammer of galloping all day +long.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Galloping outward into the +weather,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Hands a-ready and +battle in all:</i><br></span> <span><i>Words together and wine +together</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And song together in +Balliol Hall.</i><br></span> <span><i>Rare and single! Noble and +few!...</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Oh! they have wasted you +over the sea!</i><br></span> <span><i>The only brothers ever I +knew,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>The men that laughed and +quarrelled with me.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span class= +'i6'><i>* * * * *</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Balliol made me, Balliol fed +me,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Whatever I had she gave me +again;</i><br></span> <span><i>And the best of Balliol loved and +led me,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>God be with you, Balliol +men.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one +ever experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager +student who finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant +life: the thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of +acute and worthy rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and +debate; the endless throb of passionate speculation into all the +crowding problems of human history. The zest and fervour of those +younger days he has never outgrown, and there are few writers of +our time who have appealed so imperiously to the young. In the +Oxford before the war all the undergraduates were reading Belloc: +you would hardly find a college room that did not shelve one or two +of his volumes.</p> +<br> +<h3>II</h3> +<p>There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic +voyage to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died +in 1914); his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on +Revolutionary France, on military history, biography and +topography; the flashing essays, political satires, and whimsical +burlesques that ran so swiftly from his pen—it did not take +England long to learn that this man was very much alive. In 1903 he +was naturalized as a British subject, and humorously contemplated +changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 he joined the +Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent spirit +that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams +of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. +Here was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful +tenor startling the House with its acid arraignment of +parliamentary stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British +politicians will not soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc +introduced one day in the early Spring of 1908, that the Party +funds, hitherto secretly administered, be publicly audited. His +vigorous and persistent campaign against the party system has +placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the very front ranks of those +to whom the democrats of Great Britain must look for leadership and +inspiration."</p> +<p>Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of +Belloc's importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his +heart rises to a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and +his legs to walking or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as +every honest man should: in an imperative necessity to express a +passing squall of laughter, anger, or reverence; and in earnest +hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. Braithwaite, which happens to +so few. His "The South Country" will make splendid many an +anthology. But who shall say that his handful of verses, witty, +debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important +contribution?</p> +<p>What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child +gotten of Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give +in the famous Examination Schools at Oxford—that noble +building consecrated to human suffering, formerly housing the pangs +of students and now by sad necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of +cheek, a burly figure in his academic gown, without a scrap of +notes and armed only with an old volume of Rabelais in the medieval +French, he held us spellbound for an hour and a half—or was +it three hours?—with flashing extempore talk about this +greatest figure of the Renaissance.</p> +<p>Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming +tide of Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the +priest, physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that +life is its own justification, and need not be lived in doleful +self-abasement. Do what you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a +thousand things, feel a perpetual inquisitive delight in all the +details of human affairs! <i>The gospel of +exuberance</i>—that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too?</p> +<p>Rabelais came from Touraine—the heart of Gaul, the island +of light in which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. +One understands Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, +Belloc added. His writing is married to the soil and landscape from +which he sprang. His extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind +packed full of curiosity and speculation. For an instance of his +exuberance see his famous list of fools, in which all fools +whatsoever that ever walked on earth are included.</p> +<p>Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without +seeing that he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: +there you will find the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues +that Belloc daily delights in; the infectious droll patter of +speech, piling quip on quip. Then look again into "The Path to +Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us "literature is not born +spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, +and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of 'begats.' +Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels."</p> +<br> +<h3>III</h3> +<p>In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English +minds. Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he +is also of English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex +weald. History, politics, economics, military topography, poetry, +novels, satires, nonsense rhymes—all these we may set aside +as the hundred curiosities of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, +say that in his historical work he generalizes too hastily; but was +ever history more crisply written?) It is in the essays, the +thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of anything, +everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. His +prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, +biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. +His passion for places—roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his +dancing persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of +vagabondage—these are the glories of a style that is quick, +close-knit, virile, and vibrant. Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, +Swift, and Defoe.</p> +<p>Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, +pathos, and whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with +an exquisite tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited +on this dancing earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure +for yourself a little volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. +E.V. Lucas has gathered some of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. +Therein will you find love of food, companionship, cider and light +wines; love of children, artillery, and inns in the outlands; love +of salt water, great winds, and brown hills at twilight—in +short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that make life +so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind":</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the +strength of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is +something worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be +full of heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we +have such health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. +No man spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, +riding against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but +at the end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. +It is as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds +are days of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone +and of intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in +man. And the days of high wind are days in which a physical +compulsion has been about us and we have met pressure and blows, +resisted and turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war +by which nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in +companionship are at their noblest.</p> +</div> +<br> +<h3>IV</h3> +<p>And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but +ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of +the poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him +for impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write +as nobly and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken +music:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I never get between the +pines</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But I smell the Sussex +air;</i><br></span> <span><i>Nor I never come on a belt of +sand</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>But my home is +there.</i><br></span> <span><i>And along the sky the line of the +Downs</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>So noble and so +bare.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>A lost thing could I never +find,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Nor a broken thing +mend:</i><br></span> <span><i>And I fear I shall be all +alone</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>When I get towards the +end.</i><br></span> <span><i>Who will there be to comfort +me</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Or who will be my +friend?</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I will gather and carefully make my +friends</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Of the men of the Sussex +Weald,</i><br></span> <span><i>They watch the stars from silent +folds,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>They stiffly plough the +field.</i><br></span> <span><i>By them and the God of the South +Country</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>My poor soul shall be +healed.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>If I ever become a rich +man,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Or if ever I grow to be +old,</i><br></span> <span><i>I will build a house with deep +thatch</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>To shelter me from the +cold,</i><br></span> <span><i>And there shall the Sussex songs be +sung</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And the story of Sussex +told.</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>I will hold my house in the high +wood</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Within a walk of the +sea,</i><br></span> <span><i>And the men that were boys when I was +a boy</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Shall sit and drink with +me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA' id="A_CASUAL_OF_THE_SEA"></a><br> +<h2>A CASUAL OF THE SEA</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 30%; margin-right: 30%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.</p> +<p>—GEORGE HERBERT.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. +Fifteen-year-old Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) +on the S.S. <i>Fernfield</i> in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have +suspected that the second engineer would write a novel and put him +in it; or that that same novel would one day lift him out of focsle +and galley and set him working for a publishing house on far-away +Long Island. Is it not one more proof of the surprising power of +the written word?</p> +<p>For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in +print. The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an +article I wrote about him, brought (so he naïvely told me) +tears to his eyes. Excellent, simple-hearted Tommy! How little did +you think, when you signed on to help the <i>Fernfield</i> carry +coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the long arm of the Miehle +press was already waiting for you; that thousands of good people +reading a certain novel would be familiar with your "round rosy +face and clear sea-blue eyes."</p> +<p>"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in +1896. His father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to +nothing to the support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. +They lived with their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, +where the masts of ships and the smell of tar interfered with their +lessons. Bread and treacle for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a +fine thick stew and plenty more bread for supper—that and the +Dutch school where he stood near the top of his class are what +Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His grandmother took in +washing, and had a hard time keeping the little family going. She +was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to school in the +mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window because +his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only slouchy +good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands.</p> +<p>Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star +pupils given the privilege of learning an extra language in the +evenings. He chose English because most of the sailors he met +talked English, and his great ambition was to be a seaman. His +uncle was a quartermaster in the Dutch navy, and his father was at +sea; and Tommy's chance soon came.</p> +<p>After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, +chocolates, and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little +cash to help his grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 +he was down on the docks with his little packet of wares, when a +school friend came running to him.</p> +<p>"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the +<i>Queen Eleanor</i>!"</p> +<p>It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the <i>Queen +Eleanor</i>, a British tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and +Vladivostok. He accosted the chief engineer, his blue eyes shining +eagerly.</p> +<p>"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right +away—we sail at four o'clock."</p> +<p>"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely +thirteen!)</p> +<p>The chief roars with laughter.</p> +<p>"Too small!" he says.</p> +<p>Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room +steward.</p> +<p>"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants +and come back again. Then we'll see how you look!"</p> +<p>Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, +and Tommy grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he +hastened back to the <i>Queen Eleanor</i>. The chief cackled, but +he took him on at two pounds five a month.</p> +<p>Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups +the engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to +cabin boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant +success. He used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the +water would overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea +boot not a few times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp +steamer's cabin boy.</p> +<p>"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they +christened him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still.</p> +<p>Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper +kept him friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him +scudding about the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first +voyage as A.B. was on the <i>Fernfield</i> in 1911, and there he +met a certain Scotch engineer. This engineer had a habit of being +interested in human problems, and Tommy's guileless phiz attracted +him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired a thirst for promotion, and +soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster.</p> +<p>One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the +engineer had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The +Duchess" would be the largest library Tommy would have found in the +other bunks; but here, before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, +Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, +Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And what would Master Tommy have said +had he known that his friend, even then, was working on a novel in +which he, Tommy, would play an important rôle!</p> +<p>The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private +yachts, as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy +drifted about the world. One day when he was twenty years old he +was rambling about New York just before sailing for Liverpool on +the steam yacht <i>Alvina.</i> He was one of a strictly neutral +crew (the United States was still neutral in those days) signed on +to take a millionaire's pet plaything across the wintry ocean. She +had been sold to the Russian Government (there still was one +then!)</p> +<p>Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station +when his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see +in the window a picture of the Scotch engineer—his best +friend, the only man in the world who had ever been like a father +to him. He knew that the engineer was far away in the +Mediterranean, working on an English transport. He scanned the +poster with amazement.</p> +<p>Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a +practical seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the +shop and bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, +who had read the book. He told the bookseller that he had known the +author, and that for years they had served together on the same +vessels at sea. He told how the writer, who was the former second +engineer of the <i>Fernfield</i>, had done many things for the +little Dutch lad whose own father had died at sea. Then came +another surprise.</p> +<p>"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the +bookseller.</p> +<p>It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, +William McFee, who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; +and Drevis Jonkers found himself described in full in the novel as +"Drevis Noordhof," and playing a leading part in the story. Can you +imagine the simple sailor's surprise and delight? Pleased beyond +measure, in his soft Dutch accent liberally flavoured with cockney +he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee had befriended him, had urged +him to go on studying navigation so that he might become an +officer; and that though they had not met for several years he +still receives letters from his friend, full of good advice about +saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, and not +to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that Hoboken +and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his +yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" +under his arm.</p> +<p>Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing +my interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw +him that one of the characters in the story was in New York. I +wrote to Tommy asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the +<i>Alvina</i> was to sail the next day, and he could not get away. +I supposed the incident was closed.</p> +<p>Then I saw in the papers that the <i>Alvina</i> had been halted +in the Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having +suspected that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it +that she was on her way to the Azores, there to take on armament +for the house of Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station +at Staten Island, pending an investigation.</p> +<p>Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in +the very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I +overheard another member of the <i>Alvina's</i> crew asking about +"Casuals of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his +adventure, and he, too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does +one meet one's friends walking in a 500-page novel!) By the +never-to-be-sufficiently-admired hand of chance I was standing at +Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began explaining to the book clerk +that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor who had been there a few +days before.</p> +<p>So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my +way to see Tommy and the <i>Alvina</i>.</p> +<p>I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a +plausible excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion +in the breast of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A +tall Cunarder putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than +anything the Polo Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of +what avail a meeting of the Authors' League when one can know the +sights, sounds, and smells of West or South Street? I used to lug +volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the West-Street piers to give them +to captains and first mates of liners, and get them to talk about +the ways of the sea. That was how I met Captain Claret of the +<i>Minnehaha</i>, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape of the +<i>Orduña</i>, Mr. Jones of the <i>Lusitania</i> and many +another. They knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes +of Conrad in the officers' cabins on the <i>Lusitania</i> when she +went down, God rest her. I know, because I put them there.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for +the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps +to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem +the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of +ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of +vessels—the <i>James L. Morgan</i>, dour little tug, shoving +two barges; <i>Themistocles</i>, at anchor, with the blue and white +Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the <i>Comanche</i> +outward bound for Galveston (I think); the <i>Ascalon</i>, +full-rigged ship, with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit +snugging the canvas. And who is so true a lover of the sea as one +who can suffer the ultimate indignities—and love her still! I +am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy Hook....</p> +<p>At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The <i>Alvina</i> +was not there. One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone +to sea. I was duly taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for +nothing? Then another came to my aid. "There she is, up in the +bight," he said. I followed his gesture, and saw her—a long, +slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel with a graceful rake; the +Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places on her shining side. +I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman wanted three +dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was +interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get +into trouble with "39"—"39" being a United States destroyer +lying in the Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering +we compromised on a dollar and a quarter.</p> +<p>That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's +reader! Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water +of a "bight"—surrounded by ships and the men who sail +them—I might almost have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long +Island commuters are nurtured to a tough and perilous his, and I +clambered the <i>Alvina's</i> side without dropping hat, stick, or +any of my pocketful of manuscripts.</p> +<p>Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He +introduced me to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, +and the "second." The first officer was too heavy with liquor to +notice the arrival of a stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those +<i>Dioscuri</i> of seamen, had been at work. The skipper was +ashore. He owns a saloon.</p> +<p>The <i>Alvina</i> is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they +told me, and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany +throughout; the staterooms all have brass double beds and private +bathrooms attached; she has her own wireless telegraph and +telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything to make the +owner and his guests comfortable. But her beautiful furnishings +were tumbled this way and that in preparation for the sterner +duties that lay before her. The lower deck was cumbered with sacks +of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in January is likely to +be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons.</p> +<p>I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical +Dutch lad—round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue +eyes. He showed me all his treasures—his certificates of good +conduct from all the ships (both sail and steam) on which he has +served; a picture of his mother, who died when he was six; and of +his sister Greta—a very pretty girl—who is also +mentioned in <i>Casuals of the Sea.</i> The drunken fireman in the +story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the +same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet +of letters from Mr. McFee.</p> +<p>I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to +this Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they +were. Tommy is one of his own "casuals"—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>—those frail craft upon the +restless Sea</i><br></span> <span><i>Of Human Life, who strike the +rocks uncharted,</i><br></span> <span><i>Who loom, sad phantoms, +near us, drearily,</i><br></span> <span><i>Storm-driven, +rudderless, with timbers started—</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of +chance are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your +money; put it in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, +libraries, and art galleries; get to know something about this +great America if you intend to settle down there—that is the +kind of word Tommy gets from his friend.</p> +<p>Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the +laboratory of life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book +is valuable because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, +strangely woven chances that govern the lives of the humble. In +Tommy's honest, gentle face, and in the talk of his shipmates when +we sat down to dinner together, I saw a microcosm of the strange +barren life of the sea where men float about for years like +driftwood. And out of all this ebbing tide of aimless, +happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy from +Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common +sense.</p> +<p>When I left her that afternoon, the <i>Alvina</i> was getting up +steam, and she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked +with her crew, and for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and +thoughts of the simple, childlike men who live on ships. I realized +for the first time the truth of that background of aimless hazard +that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a book of more than passing +merit.</p> +<p>As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew +it not. When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found +him a job in the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to +work oiling the dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine +chance to work his way up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton +correspondence course on steam engineering and enchanted his +Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. That lasted just two weeks. +The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. The last I heard he was +on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound.</p> +<p>But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in +his heart his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer +has put him in a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most +honest novels of our day, you will find him—a casual of the +sea!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_LAST_PIPE' id="THE_LAST_PIPE"></a><br> +<h2>THE LAST PIPE</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a +clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most +polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe +every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his +back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly +inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced +by the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the +purpose of emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to +bed.</p> +<p>—LEIGH HUNT.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all +differ in value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank +heaven, no law of diminishing returns. I may puff all day long +until I nigresce with the fumes and soot, but the joy loses no +savour by repetition. It is true that there is a peculiar blithe +rich taste in the first morning puffs, inhaled after breakfast. +(Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a morning pipe as I +know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread in a chamber +of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if +possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a +lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted +butter, and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a +platter of hot bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point +where softness is overlaid with the faintest crepitation of +crackle, of crispyness. If hot Virginia corn pone is handy, so much +the better. And coffee, two-thirds hot milk, also with brown sugar. +It must be permissible to call for a second serving of the +scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, let there be a +round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a sprinkle of +mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of breakfast they +used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the invention of +innkeepers with their crass formulae.</p> +<p>After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of +plain turf, mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime +trees for sober pacing: then and there is the fit time and place +for the first pipe of the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press +it lovingly down with the cushion of the thumb; see that the +draught is free—and then for your <i>säckerhets +tändstickor!</i> A day so begun is well begun, and sin will +flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and +tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the +fume; the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill +your cheeks with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists +and twirls. The first pipe!</p> +<p>But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the +after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow +in mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of +pure sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain +quickens, begins to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to +welcome problems for thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. +As the smoke drifts and shreds about your neb, your mind is +surcharged with that imponderable energy of thought, which cannot +be seen or measured, yet is the most potent force in existence. All +the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred the growing leaf in its +odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing dottel in your +briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down the stem. +The most precious things in the world are also vivid with +poison.</p> +<p>Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he +have written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid +of science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his +indigestion and snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous +use of the weed makes the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less +irksome to forgers, second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, +who had little enough truck with churchmen, was once invited to +stay a week-end by the Bishop of London. Distrusting the +entertaining qualities of bishops, and rightly, his first impulse +was to decline. But before answering the Bishop's letter he passed +it to his manservant for advice. The latter (the immortal Alfred +Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in the fold of the +paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and hugely enjoyed +himself.</p> +<p>There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information +for all acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom +upon the art and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social +History of Smoking," by G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John +Marshall (he lives somewhere in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it +from me, and obstinately declines to return it. If he should ever +see this, may his heart be loosened and relent. Dear John, I wish +you would return that book. (<i>Canadian journals please +copy!</i>)</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically +with the weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of +course the incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his +tongue and grows callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For +that reason it is best not to smoke during office hours. This may +be a hard saying to some, but a proper respect for the art impels +it. Not even the highest ecclesiast can be at his devotions always. +It is not those who are horny with genuflection who are nearest the +Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak in all reverence) must play +billiards or trip a coranto now and then!</p> +<p>This is the schedule I vouch for:</p> +<p>After breakfast: 2 pipes</p> +<p>At luncheon: 2 pipes</p> +<p>Before dinner: 2 pipes</p> +<p>Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes</p> +<p>(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.)</p> +<p>The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If +your meal is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane +energies from the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell +a plethora of food into subjection and assimilation, there is no +power of speculation left in the top storeys. You sink brutishly +into an armchair, warm your legs at the fire, and let the +leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such times smoking +becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes +automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your +eyes see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous +currents, or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are +down below hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into +submission the alien and distracting mass of food that you have +taken on board. They are like stevedores, stowing the cargo for +portability. A little later, however, when this excellent work is +accomplished, the bosun may trill his whistle, and the deck hands +can be summoned back to the navigating bridge. The mind casts off +its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. You begin once more to +live as a rational composition of reason, emotion, and will. The +heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this desirable state. Let it +then be said that light dining is best: a little fish or cutlets, +white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. Such a +régime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for +a continuance of intellect.</p> +<p>Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the +choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly +conducted by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those +who are in pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a +sovereign consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it +calms the fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any +ginseng in the herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did +Stevenson exhort virgins not to marry men who do not smoke.</p> +<p>Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into +the art and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of +all before the so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the +body succumbs to weariness.</p> +<p>No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory +definition of <i>living</i>. An alternating systole and diastole, +says physiology. Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These +stir me not. I define life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: +recurring periods of consciousness in which the enjoyability of +smoking is manifest, interrupted by intervals of recuperation.</p> +<p>Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the +co-ordinates being Time and the +Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve ascends from +its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the +recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode +of saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at +night. It is the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. +The sweetest pipe ever enjoyed by the skipper of the +<i>Hesperus</i> was the one he whiffed just before he was tirpitzed +by the poet on that angry reef.</p> +<p>The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just +before "my eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your +primary school poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations +of the day, after piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or +<i>schreibmaschine</i> for some hours, a drowsy languor begins to +numb the sense. In dressing gown and slippers I seek my couch; Ho, +Lucius, a taper! and some solid, invigorating book for +consideration. My favourite is the General Catalogue of the Oxford +University Press: a work so excellently full of learning; printed +and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a repository or +Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, that it +sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland for +the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by +which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as +that afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and +sober research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous +précis of the works of the human spirit. And here and there, +buried in a scholarly paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE +OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY: by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, +offered at an insignificant price, relieves English scholarship of +the necessity of recourse to the lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do +even professors and privat-docents belabour one another!</p> +<p>With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, +to be smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand +brain-murdering interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air +drawn through the glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With +reposeful heart I turn to some favourite entry in my well-loved +catalogue.</p> +<p>"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in +the most necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or +Body, that may be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is +annexed a Description of the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched +Field, eight severall wayes, with the Art of Limming and other +Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from the edition of 1634; first +edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv ++ 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. <i>At the Clarendon +Press</i>."</p> +<p>Or this:</p> +<p>"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends +pleasure. Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. +1906. Pp xviii + 104. 5s. net."</p> +<p>O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an +introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving +his Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler +of the catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride +"strongly bound in exceptionally tough paper and more than once +described by reviewers as leather. Some of the books are here +printed for the first time, the rest are reproductions of the +original editions, many having prefaces by good hands."</p> +<p>One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my +pipe and curiosity are now both going strong.</p> +<p>"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing +Mortalitie incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. +1598. The earliest English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. +6d. net."</p> +<p>Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial +enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys +of this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown +delights of "Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's +Ayenbite of Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the +"Backbite of Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt +sive Veterum Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum +Fragmenta, edidit F. Field. 1865. Two volumes £6 6s. net" or +"Shuckford's Sacred and Profane History of the World, from the +Creation of the World to the Dissolution of the Assyrian Empire at +the death of Sardanapalus, and to the Declension of The Kingdom of +Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz and Pekah, with the +Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp 550. 10s. +net."</p> +<p>But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat +is another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite +tobaccos are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy +and excellent poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I +delight to honour, the editor made me substitute fictitious names +for my dearly loved blends. He said that sound editorial policy +forbids mentioning commercial products in the text of the +magazine.</p> +<p>But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." +Let us call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony:</p> +<p>"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be +a lone man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a +sad man's cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, +sir; while for stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling +of the stomach, there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of +heaven."</p> +<p>And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear +General Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the +pillow; gently and kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow +out the flame. The window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see +a glimpse of stars ... a distant chime ... and fall asleep with the +faint pungence of the Indian herb about me.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE' id= +"TIME_TO_LIGHT_THE_FURNACE"></a><br> +<h2>TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE</h2> +<br> +<p>The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and +Mrs. Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until +Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires +courage.</p> +<p>Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab +commutes by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by +elephant, the African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to +tow him to the office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a +tough and tempered soul, inured to privation and calamity. At +seven-thirty in the morning he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, +palace, or kraal, and tells his wife he is going to work.</p> +<p>How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. +and Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And +hoping that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the +furnace until the last touchdown had been made.</p> +<p>But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new +cook, had begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda +came from the West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the +sophistries of the employment agencies. She could boil an egg +without cracking it, she could open a tin can without maiming +herself. She was neat, guileless, and cheerful. But, she was +accustomed to a warm climate.</p> +<p>The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at +dinner, Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about +how chilly the evenings were growing. But across the table came one +of those glances familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion +distorted, vibrant with rebuke, charged with the lightning of +instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze struck him dumb with +alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze!</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich +in calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully +what Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of +coal bills danced in his mind.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and +Mrs. Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily +engaged in washing the dishes.</p> +<p>"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't +you better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last +few days Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She +comes from Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. +She said she couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've +given her my old fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One +other remark like that of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's +sake, Bob, use your skull!"</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating +wisdom of women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply.</p> +<p>Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility.</p> +<p>"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected +by chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the +thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If +you must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. +Otherwise we'll have to start the furnace at once."</p> +<p>Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the +simple-minded race of husbands.</p> +<p>"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now +on. Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance +remark!"</p> +<p>The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, +Mr. Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for +hot soup," he said. "All the men at the office were talking about +the unseasonable hot weather. I think we'd better have a window +open." To Mrs. Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room +windows, admitting a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she +was game, and presently called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda +was in the room they talked pointedly of the heat, and Mr. +Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau notes from the evening +paper.</p> +<p>After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force +of habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just +as he was setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other +wistfully, for the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. +Blackwell manfully took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his +shirtsleeves until Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless +and lit a roaring fire, by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt +the fire before retiring, so that Belinda might suspect nothing in +the morning.</p> +<p>The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm +Beach suit. Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They +both sneezed vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town +to-day, I think I caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell.</p> +<p>Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer +with a puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the +attic. But the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. +Blackwell explained that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had +promised to carry on a similar psychological campaign. Belinda and +Mrs. Chester's cook, Tulip—jocularly known as the Black +Tulip—were friends, and would undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. +Chester had agreed not to start her furnace without consultation +with Mrs. Blackwell.</p> +<p>October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather +remained sunny, but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an +oil-stove for her attic bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more +complaints of the cold, but sometimes she and her husband could +hear uneasy creakings upstairs late at night. "I wonder if Barbados +really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm sure it can't be warmer +than Belinda's room. She never opens the windows, and the oil-stove +has to be filled every morning."</p> +<p>"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. +Blackwell drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for +dinner, but underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels.</p> +<hr style='width: 45%;'> +<p>Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in +psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train +less fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, +referred to him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and +Mrs. Chester came to dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men +loudly clamoured for permission to remove their coats, and sat with +blanched and chattering jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence +at mopping his brow, but when the dessert proved to be ice-cream +his nerve forsook him. "N-no, Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for +ice-cream to-night. I don't w—want to get chilled. Bring me +some hot coffee." As she brought his cup he noticed that her honest +brown brow was beaded with perspiration. "By George," he thought, +"this mental suggestion business certainly works." Late that +evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze in an +ulster.</p> +<p>The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he +met the doctor in the hall.</p> +<p>"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?"</p> +<p>"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. +"It's the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here +it is the 17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has +all the symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='MY_FRIEND' id="MY_FRIEND"></a><br> +<h2>MY FRIEND</h2> +<br> +<p>To-day we called each other by our given names for the first +time.</p> +<p>Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps +it will not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There +are not many of his kind.</p> +<p>In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed +that many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the +sorry leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no +Bellocs. I look to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, +to Clayton Hamilton, and to my friend here portraited, to remedy +this. If only Mr. Simeon Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but +not yet properly corpulent.</p> +<p>My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in +these parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of +trivial things, but it would be impossible for him not to write +with beauty and distinction far above his theme. His style is a +perfect echo of his person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To +plunder a phrase of his own, it is drenched with the sounds, the +scents, the colours, of great literature.</p> +<p>I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and +try to bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But +what I love (I use this great word with care) in my friend is that +his zeal for beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh +utterly the paltry considerations of expediency and comfort which +sway most of us. To him his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the +surgeon. He would rather die than dishonour that chosen +instrument.</p> +<p>I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has +taken in my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of +his personal situation. I see in him personified the rising +generation of literary critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a +deliterated democracy. By some unknowable miracle of birth or +training he has come by a love of beauty, a reverence for what is +fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the slipshod and +insincere.</p> +<p>Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of +his daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to +exploit what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of +quibbling ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, +because more than comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more +than wife or fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. +"I cannot write a publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to +me, "because I am convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not +interested in selling books: what I have to do with is that strange +and esoteric thing called literature."</p> +<p>I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this +devotion to high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to +work with. He is unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in +absent-minded simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only +half-clad, and been haled back to his boudoir by indignant +bluecoats; but in all matters where absolute devotion to truth and +honour are concerned I would not find him lacking. Wherever a love +of beauty and a ripened judgment of men and books are a business +asset, he is a successful business man.</p> +<p>In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His +shyly wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant +devotion to cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on +topics that confound the unlettered—these are amiable trifles +that endear him to those who understand.</p> +<p>Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of +comfort and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in +resounding English, and to spread a little wider his love of the +niceties of fine prose.</p> +<p>I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a +weak spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite +couplet;</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>And the men who were boys when I was a +boy</i><br></span> <span><i>Shall sit and drink with +me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Indeed let us hope that they will.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS' id="A_POET_OF_SAD_VIGILS"></a><br> +<h2>A POET OF SAD VIGILS</h2> +<br> +<p>There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. +Unquestionably the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of +tea, plenty of tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if +the adorable Miss Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps +would be the literary remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young +man who was a contemporary of hers.</p> +<p>I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his +beautiful hymn "The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of +Henry Kirke White? But on the drawing-room tables of our +grandmothers' girlhood the plump volume, edited with a fulsome +memoir by Southey, held honourable place near the conch shell from +the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal Palace. Mr. Southey, +in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of several young +versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's remains to +the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire that +would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was +the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! +Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even +Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis +is a parlous sport.</p> +<p>The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, +Jane Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves +us little time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. +His verses are grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of +biliousness and overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when +the word female was still used as a substantive. But they are +highly entertaining to read because they so faithfully mirror the +backwash of romanticism. They are so thoroughly unhealthy, so +morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so indentured by the ayenbite of +inwit, that it is hard to believe that Henry's father was a butcher +and should presumably have reared him on plenty of sound beefsteak +and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or Dr. Anna Howard Shaw +could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived to write poems +on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter of fact, he +was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's College, +Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a +poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and +honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight +hours. As Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is +honourable to him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for +heaven should so soon have been removed from the world.</p> +<p>He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman +parents; his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From +his earliest years he was studious in temper, and could with +difficulty be drawn from his books, even at mealtimes. At the age +of seven he wrote a story of a Swiss emigrant and gave it to the +servant, being too bashful to show it to his mother. Southey's +comment on this is "The consciousness of genius is always +accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary +feeling."</p> +<p>His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's +time was employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and +rumps to the prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made +an effort to start him in line for business by placing him in a +stocking factory. The work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly +afterward he was employed in the office of a busy firm of lawyers. +He spent twelve hours a day in the office and then an hour more in +the evening was put upon Latin and Greek. Even such recreation +hours as the miserable youth found were dismally employed in +declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little garret at the +top of the house he began to collect his books; even his supper of +bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to eat +with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a +deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal +ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The +Wealth of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held +him, there were some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest +indictment of overstudy that I know. No one, after reading +Southey's memoir, will overload his brain again.</p> +<p>At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older +brother Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend +above one hour at this amusement [novel reading]. I have been +obliged to enter into this resolution in consequence of a vitiated +taste acquired by reading romances." He is human enough to add, +however, that "after long and fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' +or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson Crusoe' afford a pleasing and +necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' I shall observe that it +is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the English +language."</p> +<p>The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was +living in London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. +Henry permitted himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial +instincts for the benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem +to have carried on a mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville +was inclined to belittle the divine calling of poets in their +teens; while Henry deplored his brother's unwillingness to write at +length and upon serious and "instructive" topics. Alas, the +ill-starred young man had a mania for self-improvement. If our +great-grandparents were all like that what an age it had been for +the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is requisite to make +one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, <i>sound +sense</i>." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural +abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, +"but it is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the +trouble of writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any +art, however trivial, that did not require some application at +first." He begs the astounded Neville to fill his letters with his +opinions of the books he reads. "You have no idea how beneficial +this would be to yourself." Does one not know immediately that +Henry is destined to an early grave?</p> +<p>Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of +prizes won in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of +twelve-inch globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions +to the <i>Monthly Mirror</i>. He was also admitted a member of a +famous literary society then existing in Nottingham, and although +the youngest of the sodality he promptly announced that he proposed +to deliver them a lecture. With mingled curiosity and dismay the +gathering assembled at the appointed time, and the inspired youth +harangued them for two hours on the subject of Genius. The devil, +or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for destruction.</p> +<p>In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He +published a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as +Consumption, Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the +Night Previous to Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave +of His Mistress, The Eve of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female +Lunatic to a Lady, had been warmly welcomed by the politest +magazines of the time. To wish to publish them in more permanent +form was natural; but the unfortunate young man conceived the +thought that the venture might even be a profitable one. He had +found himself troubled with deafness, which threatened to annul his +industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was canting seriously +toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college career and +then the church were lively in his mind.</p> +<p>The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his +manuscript for the printer. Probably never before or since, until +the Rev. John Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about +garnering his collected works into that volume which is the delight +of the wicked, has a human heart mulled over indifferent verses +with so honest a pleasure and such unabated certainty of +immortality. The first two details to be attended to were the +printing of what were modestly termed <i>Proposals</i>—i.e., +advertisements of the projected volume, calling for pledges of +subscription—and, still more important, securing the +permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the +book. The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the +sere and saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a +volume if it might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. +Accordingly the manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, +the philistine brother, was called upon to leave it at the +residence of the Duchess of Devonshire. A very humble letter from +honest Henry accompanied it, begging leave of her Grace to dedicate +his "trifling effusions" to her.</p> +<p>Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are +very entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such +circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would +be sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already +got twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready:</p> +<p>"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at +all, among my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit +nor draw the conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got +abroad, and has been received more favourably than I expected."</p> +<p>But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind +the poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her +Grace of Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so +feelingly calls a weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon +the postman's heels, but no word arrived from the duchess. She was +known to be assaulted from all sides by such applications: indeed +her mail seems to have been very nearly as large as that of Mary +Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his unspeakable anxiety, the +miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all parcels sent to the +duchess, unless marked with a password known only to her particular +correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter to be +reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried Henry +in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits +to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. +Finally, after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he +succeeded. Even then undaunted, this long-suffering older brother +made one more try in the poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of +introduction to the duchess, and called on her in person, wisely +leaving the manuscript at home; and with the complaisance of the +great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's modest request. Her +name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the little volume, +and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy reached her. +Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises that +"Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it +is probable that she never opened the book."</p> +<p>"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in +1803.</p> +<p>It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more +seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to +see what Henry's reading had been—Milton, Collins, and Gray, +evidently. His unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great +credit, as showing how thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It +seeped into his mind and became part of his own outpourings. <i>Il +Penseroso</i> gushes to the surface of poor Henry's song every few +lines; precious twigs and shreds of Milton flow merrily down the +current of his thought. And yet smile as we may, every now and then +friend Henry puts something over. One of his poems is a curious +foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. Every now and +then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful vapours +were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his +quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from +his thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary +information, but in the more active business of life, must not be +expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of +a Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace."</p> +<p>The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows +found an unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little +book came home from the printer he was prostrated to find several +misprints. He nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully +corrected all the copies. After writing earnest and very polite +letters to all the reviewers he dispatched copies to the leading +periodicals, and sat down in the sure hope of rapid fame. How +bitter was his chagrin when the <i>Monthly Review</i> for February, +1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: in particular the +critic took umbrage at his having put <i>boy</i> to rhyme with +<i>sky</i>, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college +course, "If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, +doubtless, produce better sense and better rhymes."</p> +<p>The review was by no means unjust: it said what any +disinterested opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's +ambitions were excellent, but that neither he, nor indeed any +two-footed singer, is likely to be an immortal poet by seventeen. +But Henry's sensitive soul had been so inflated by the honest pride +of his friends that he could only see gross and callous malignity +and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his health, his +peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, however +(as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review +that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance +aroused Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise +himself above his level in the world and it was the laureate who +after Henry's death edited his letters and literary remains, and +gave him to us as we have him. Southey tells us that after the +young man's death he and Coleridge looked over his papers with +great emotion, and were amazed at the fervour of his industry and +ambition.</p> +<p>Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly +linger. The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong +fascination for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he +himself always felt that he had not a long span before him. +Hindered by deafness, threatened with consumption, and a deadlier +enemy yet—epilepsy—his frail and uneasy spirit had full +right to distrust its tenement. The summer of 1804 he spent partly +at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where he took +lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday to +recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He +had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the +university, and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do +well at the law. Night after night he would read till two or three +in the morning, lie down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again +to work at five or six. His mother, who was living with him in his +retreat, used to go upstairs to put out his candle and see that he +went to bed; but Henry, so docile in other matters, in this was +unconquerable. When he heard his mother's step on the stair he +would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but after she had +retired he would light it again and resume his reading. Perhaps the +best things he wrote were composed in this period of extreme +depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his sonnets, +breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very +touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the +cliché and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his +midnight musings at their highest pitch:—</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>TO CONSUMPTION</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Gently, most gently, on thy victim's +head,</i><br></span> <span><i>Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me +decay,</i><br></span> <span><i>Like the expiring lamp, unseen, +away,</i><br></span> <span><i>And softly go to slumber with the +dead.</i><br></span> <span><i>And if 'tis true what holy men have +said,</i><br></span> <span><i>That strains angelic oft foretell the +day</i><br></span> <span><i>Of death, to those good men who fall +thy prey,</i><br></span> <span><i>O let the aerial music round my +bed,</i><br></span> <span><i>Dissolving sad in dying +symphony,</i><br></span> <span><i>Whisper the solemn warning in +mine ear;</i><br></span> <span><i>That I may bid my weeping friends +good-bye,</i><br></span> <span><i>Ere I depart upon my journey +drear:</i><br></span> <span><i>And smiling faintly on the painful +past,</i><br></span> <span><i>Compose my decent head, and breathe +my last.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy +at Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, +and near his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream +he would sit for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the +trees on summer nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the +lightning, and heedless of drenched and muddy clothes.</p> +<p>Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to +college after all; and by the generosity of a number of friends +(including Neville who promised twenty pounds annually) he was able +to enter himself for St. John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn +he left his legal employers, who were very sorry to lose him, and +took up quarters with a clergyman in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) +under whom he pursued his studies for a year, to prepare himself +thoroughly for college. His letters during this period are mostly +of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while boating on +the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. He +had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The +proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and +sisters weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this +topic.</p> +<p>In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at +St. John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic +home of two very different undergraduates—William Wordsworth +and Samuel Butler. His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the +cloisters, and overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters +give us a pleasant picture of his quiet rambles through the town, +his solitary cups of tea as he sat by the fire, and his +disappointment in not being able to hear his lecturers on account +of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one at all familiar with +the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is his account of the +thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the bed, cares for +the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). Poor Henry's +tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the traditional +way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for his +coal bin.</p> +<p>But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the +haven of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill +health, his tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship +examination in December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded +physical inability, they dosed him with "strong medicines" to +enable him to face the examiners. After the ordeal he was so +unstrung that he hurried off to London to spend Christmas with his +aunt.</p> +<p>The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors +were, according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as +far as possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense +enough to restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he +was always at work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, +or what not. In a memorandum found in his desk his life was thus +planned: "Rise at half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. +Chapel and breakfast till eight. Study and lectures till one. Four +and a half clear reading. Walk and dinner, and chapel to six. Six +to nine reading. Nine to ten, devotions. Bed at ten."</p> +<p>In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of +his year, and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him +the unusual compliment of keeping him in college through the +vacation with a special mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with +him, mathematics being considered his weakness. As his only chance +of health lay in complete rest during the holiday, this plan of +spending the summer in study was simply a death sentence. In July, +while at work on logarithm tables, he was overtaken by a sudden +fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic nature. The malady gained +strength, aided by the weakness of his heart and lungs, and he died +on October 19, 1806.</p> +<p>Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. +His letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn +speculation. Perhaps once a twelve-month he displays a sad little +vein of pleasantry, but not for long. Probably the light-hearted +undergraduates about him found him a very prosy, shabby, and +mournful young man, but if one may judge by the outburst of +tributary verses published after his death he was universally +admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation from a +tribute paid him by a lady versifier:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>If worth, if genius, to the world are +dear,</i><br></span> <span><i>To Henry's shade devote no common +tear.</i><br></span> <span><i>His worth on no precarious tenure +hung,</i><br></span> <span><i>From genuine piety his virtues +sprung:</i><br></span> <span><i>If pure benevolence, if steady +sense,</i><br></span> <span><i>Can to the feeling heart delight +dispense;</i><br></span> <span><i>If all the highest efforts of the +mind,</i><br></span> <span><i>Exalted, noble, elegant, +refined,</i><br></span> <span><i>Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt +regret,</i><br></span> <span><i>Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful +debt!</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='TRIVIA' id="TRIVIA"></a><br> +<h2>TRIVIA</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, +clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.</p> +<p>—HOBBES, <i>Leviathan</i>, Chap. VIII.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly +utilitarian civilization demands that a man of forty should be +rearing a family, should go to an office five times a week, and +pretend an interest in the World's Series. It is unthinkable to us +that there should be men of mature years who do not know the +relative batting averages of the Red Sox and the Pirates. The +intellectual and strolling male of from thirty-five to fifty-five +years (which is what one means by bachelor) must either marry and +settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to Europe or the +MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay please +notice.</p> +<p>The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled +the shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the +bonbonniverous sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without +ruth.</p> +<p>But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent +middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and +crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful +born bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan +Pearsall Smith.</p> +<p>Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But +that most amiable of cities does not encourage detached and +meditative bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known +as "a guarded education in morals and manners" at Haverford +College, our hero passed to Harvard, and thence by a swifter +decline to Oxford. Literature and liberalism became his pursuits; +on the one hand, he found himself engrossed in the task of proving +to the British electorate that England need not always remain the +same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir Henry Wotton, a volume +of very graceful and beautiful short stories about Oxford ("The +Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on the history and +habits of the English language.</p> +<p>But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his +mental humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by +incomprehensible twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, +leading the life of the typical English bachelor, equipped with +gladstone bag, shaving kit, evening clothes and tweeds; passing +from country house to London club, from Oxford common room to +Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the cultivated classes now +and then burst upon him in its truly comic aspect. The tinder and +steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, ignited a shower +of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with irreverent +laughter in some lonely railway carriage.</p> +<p>Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he +succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then +the spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the +gravity of the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and +sanctuaries lie open to the scourge. Menaced by serious +intellectual disorders unless he were to give vent to these +disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set them down under the +title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched by the +spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which +presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, +whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of +a middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve +a decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately +intellectual brainslide of our generation.</p> +<p>This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. +Smith is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated +social life, tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by +an aura of shyness which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes +to us trailing clouds of glory from the heaven of pure and +unfettered speculation which is our home. He is an elf of utter +simplicity and infinite candour. He is a flicker of absolute Mind. +His little book is as precious and as disturbing as devilled +crabs.</p> +<p>Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver +from mind to mind, leaping—a shy and shining spark—from +brain to brain! I know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these +ineffably dainty little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow +nuggets of wistful inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these +pointed sparklers of wit. A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! +Irony so demure, so quaint, so far away; pathos so void of regret, +merriment so delicate that one dare not laugh for fear of +dispelling the charm—all this is "Trivia." Where are Marcus +Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of old +time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy +elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given +scenario of that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences—the +mind of a strolling bachelor.</p> +<p>Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought +of all hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare +us away. "These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear +Reader, by a Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the +Animal Kingdom which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue +and scarlet bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee."</p> +<p>But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last +despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. +And his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his +sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, +"I wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows +and a Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great +Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom +in a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants +and other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against +the platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can +hardly post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the +excellence and accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles +himself, good man, with the thought of the meaningless creation +crashing blindly through frozen space. His other great consolation +is his dear vice of reading—"This joy not dulled by Age, this +polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene, life-long +intoxication."</p> +<p>It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just +figment of the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, +cathartic little volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a +radiant, dancing spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we +catch, now and then, a flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy +within, shy, sudden, and defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English +lawns we follow that gracious figure, down dusky London streets +where he is peering in at windows and laughing incommunicable +jests.</p> +<p>But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming +pans and the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again +will he tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes +about Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the +Toonerville Trolley and the Prince Albert ads—these mean +nothing to him. He will never compile an anthology of New York +theatrical notices: "The play that makes the dimples to catch the +tears." Careful and adroit propaganda, begun twenty years ago by +the Department of State, might have won him back, but now it is +impossible to repatriate him. The exquisite humours of our American +life are faded from his mind. He has gone across the great divide +that separates a subway from an underground and an elevator from a +lift. I wonder does he ever mourn the scrapple and buckwheat cakes +that were his birthright?</p> +<p>Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" +describes a famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he +and Pearsall Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two +gentlemen who are now Master of Balliol and British Minister of +Education. The Balliol don attributed the British defeat in this +international tourney to the fact that his tennis shoes (shall we +say his "sneakers?") came to grief and he had to play the crucial +games in stocking feet. But though Major Putnam and his young ally +won the set of <i>patters</i> (let us use the Wykehamist word), the +Major allowed the other side to gain a far more serious victory. +They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him in England +until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was badly +done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now we +shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a +lift, and he will never write an American "Trivia."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='PREFACES' id="PREFACES"></a><br> +<h2>PREFACES</h2> +<br> +<p>It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function +of authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant +than dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all +the dreary months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to +the intentions of the book; allusions to the unexpected +difficulties encountered during composition; neatly phrased +gratitude to eminent friends who have given gracious assistance; +and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth who has done +the indexing—one of the trials of the wives of literary men +not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that +topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition +should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely +touch at the end.</p> +<p>How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil +is over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, +after the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. +Or it may be a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without +a preface. Better a preface without a book....</p> +<p>Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have +written prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of +the subtlest pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet +written; but the prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me +show you the sort of thing I mean.</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL"</p> +<p>How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in +the dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a +book one brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent—there +came a rush up the stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his +voice, and hurried to open. Poor, dear fellow, he was just back +from tennis; I never saw him look so glorious. Tall and +thin—he was always very thin, <i>see</i> p. 219 and +<i>passim</i>—with his long, brown face and sparkling black +eyes—I can see him still rambling about the room in his +flannels, his curly hair damp on his forehead. "Buzzard," he +said—he always called me Buzzard—"guess what's +happened?"</p> +<p>"In love again?" I asked.</p> +<p>He laughed. A bright, golden laugh—I can hear it still. +His laughter was always infectious.</p> +<p>"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've +won the Sylvanus Stall fellowship."</p> +<p>I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the +college garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of +Canadian girls deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant +for me. I, too, in my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the +prize, but without telling him. Must I confess it? I had never +dared mention the subject for fear he, too, would compete. I knew +that if he did he was sure to win. O petty jealousies, that seem so +bitter now!</p> +<p>"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't +congratulated!"</p> +<p>I pulled myself together.</p> +<p>"Brindle," I said—I always called him Brindle; how sad the +nickname sounds now—"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm +overjoyed."</p> +<p>It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never +saw him again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset +from the Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for +the week before commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my +health. I never came back to New York; and he remained there. But I +followed his career with the closest attention. Every newspaper +cutting, every magazine article in which his name was mentioned, +went into my scrapbook. And almost every week for twenty years he +wrote to me—those long, radiant letters, so full of +<i>verve</i> and <i>élan</i> and ringing, ruthless wit. +There was always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to +be born a Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman +instead of a dour, dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of +Montmartre! Stead of which I have the mess of pottage—stodgy, +porridgy Scots pottage" (<i>see</i> p. 189).</p> +<p>He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when +in a pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles +of Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. +"Oh, for the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, +marrowy soul-ache of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of +tragedy. Tragedy springs from it, tall and white and stately like +the lily from the dung. I will never be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of +Arbroath!"</p> +<p>All the world knows how he died....</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK</p> +<p>(In six volumes)</p> +<p>The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at +length finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened +only by those small bickerings over <i>minutiæ</i> so dear to +all scrupulous writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize +for a few moments on the functions of the historian.</p> +<p>There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite +apart from the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, +I might add, has been singularly neglected by modern historians. My +old friend, Professor Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent +in his chosen lot, is particularly open to criticism on this +ground. I cannot emphasize too gravely the importance of +preliminary calm—what Hobbes calls "the unprejudicated mind." +But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack the problem with +the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, has observed +this.</p> +<p>Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to +my very good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned +seat of learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply +was witty—too witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he +said.</p> +<p>I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this +regard; but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that +most dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a +maxim that contemporary history cannot be judicially written.</p> +<p>Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the +controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge—of the +Sorbonne—in the matter of Lamartine's account of the +elections to the Constituent Assembly of 1848, will remark several +hitherto unobserved errors in Lamartine which I have been +privileged to point out. For instance, Lamartine (who is supported +<i>in toto</i> by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the elections took +place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am able to +demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew +Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. +Rougegorge's assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests +upon a humorous misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The +matter may be looked up by the curious in Annette User's +"Années avec les Lamartines." Oser was for many years the +cook in Lamartine's household, and says some illuminating things +regarding L.'s dislike of onions.)</p> +<p>It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually +the generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so +many scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names +would be like Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an +ungracious mode of returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to +mention Professor Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, <i>optimus +maximus</i> among modern historians. Of him I may say, in the fine +words of Virgil, "Sedet aeternumque sedebit."</p> +<p>My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my +Slavic orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. +To her, and to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often +penetrated to my study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the +whole. <i>89, Decameron Gardens.</i></p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS</p> +<p>This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title +"Rari Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have +chosen from my published works those poems which seemed to me most +faithfully to express my artistic message; and the title obviously +implies that I think them the ones most likely to weather the +maëlstroms of Time. Be that as it may.</p> +<p>Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port +(one glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of +the Muse to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to +dwell on the robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that +I could agree; but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down +to menial taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes +or Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. +Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, +the noise and rushings of winds—and what avails? +<i>Parturiunt montes</i> ...you know the rest. The ridiculous mice +squeak and scamper on the granary floor. They may play undisturbed, +for the real poets, those great gray felines, are sifting loam +under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the Poetry Society see them +not.</p> +<p>It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel +and I sail to-morrow for Nova Zembla.</p> +<p><i>The Grotto, Yonkers.</i></p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION</p> +<p>A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have +added three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. +Also the "Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, +at his express request. The success of the first edition has been +very gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to +<i>Bleak House, Nova Zembla</i>.</p> +<br> +<p>PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION</p> +<p>The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to +production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include +several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice +Floe," and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have +been able to convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova +Zembla <i>locale</i> the praise is due to my friendly and +suggestive critic, the editor of <i>Gooseflesh</i>, the leading +Nova Zemblan review.</p> +<p>Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, +therefore I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode +to the Gulf Stream," which has great promise.</p> +<p>The success of this little book has been such that I am +encouraged to hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will +soon be worked off.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_SKIPPER' id="THE_SKIPPER"></a><br> +<h2>THE SKIPPER</h2> +<br> +<p>I have been reading again that most delightful of all +autobiographies, "A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. +Conrad's mind is so rich, it has been so well mulched by years of +vigorous life and sober thinking, that it pushes tendrils of +radiant speculation into every crevice of the structure upon which +it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much to be desired +and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the trellis +growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the +delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or +Virginia creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on +itself, branching unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and +repeatedly enchanting us with some delicate criss-cross of mental +fibres. One hesitates even to suggest that there may be admirers of +Mr. Conrad who are not familiar with this picture of his +mind—may we call it one of the most remarkable minds that has +ever concerned itself with the setting of English words +horizontally in parallel lines?</p> +<p>The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on +this continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad +grows numerous indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. +Henry and the pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to +enumerate the list of those who have assured me (over the sworn +secrecy of a table d'hôte white wine) that they read the +proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in 1895, etc., etc. For my own +part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever heard of Mr. Conrad +before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one day short of +the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small club of +earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at the +Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of +R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone +asked him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt +the same passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living +whose work he thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English +literature. Sir Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, +and a sworn enemy of loose statement; let me not then pretend to +quote him exactly; but I know that the name he mentioned was that +of Joseph Conrad, and it was a new name to me.</p> +<p>Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I +read one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it +was "Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class +dining saloon of the <i>Celtic</i>, crossing from New York in +January, 1913. There was a very violent westerly gale at the +time—a famous shove, Captain Conrad would call it—and I +remember that the barometer went lower than had ever been recorded +before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon carried away, +and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an ideal +stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway +just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my +head through a window I could see excellent combers of green +sloshing down into the 'tweendecks.</p> +<p>But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be +imitated here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the +undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a +smile which is not a grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But +sometimes, when one sits at midnight by the fainting embers and +thinks that of all novelists now living one would most ardently +yearn to hear the voice and see the face of Mr. Conrad, then it is +happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" one comes as close as +typography permits to a fireside chat with the Skipper himself. He +tells us that he has never been very well acquainted with the art +of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set this down as +polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is Marlowe ipse, +pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and the famous +preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of his +genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, +and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who +would omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in +these informal confessions there are pieces that are destined to be +classics of autobiography as it is rarely written.</p> +<p>One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally +labelled complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as +simple as lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, +sincerity—those are the words that stand again and again +across his pages. "I have a positive horror of losing even for one +moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first +condition of good service." He has carried over to the world of +desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says that he has +been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a +hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he +sees, and that the attempt to move others to the extremities of +emotion means the surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing +one's self to be carried away beyond the bounds of normal +sensibility. Self-restraint is the duty, the dignity, the decency +of the artist. This, indeed, is the creed of the simple man in +every calling; and from this angle it appears that it is the +Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are complicated and +subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the great +simplicity of life and death.</p> +<p>Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since +the synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts +as where the writer was born, and when, and the customary +demonology of boyhood and courtship and the first pay envelope, are +gloriously ignored. A statistician, an efficiency pundit, a +literary accountant, would rise from the volume nervously shattered +from an attempt to grasp what it was all about. The only person in +the book who is accorded any comprehensive biographical +résumé is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. +Nicholas B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to +Moscow, and was bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of +Lithuania. To the delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of +his youth, Mr. Conrad devotes his most affectionate and tender +power of whimsical reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of +family history make the tragedies of Poland clearer to me than +several volumes of historical comment. In his prose of that +superbly rich simplicity of texture—it is a commonplace that +it seems always like some notable translation from the +French—he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes +us with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him +to his uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And +to our delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long +chapters constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is +waiting for dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable +tenderness he reviews the formative contours of boyish memories, +telling us the whole mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, +sometimes I think that this is the only true autobiography ever +written: true to the inner secrets of the human soul. It is the +passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the dear creations of +his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel he has +written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and +exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that +spirit of piety toward all things human which sanctions the +conceptions of a writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, +how essentially impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels +of the Slop and Glucose school!</p> +<p>This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything +that deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of +probability, this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad +from the heart of Europe was integrated into the greatest living +master of those who in our tongue strive to portray the riddles of +the human heart—such is the kind of calculus that makes "A +Personal Record" unique among textbooks of the soul. It is as +impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting out only with +the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and sensations +connected with the writing of my first book and with my first +contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing +less than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. +And the sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler +would gladly burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and +start all over again with truer ideals for his craft, could he by +so doing have chance to meet the Skipper face to face.</p> +<p>Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been +necessary to invent him, the indescribable improbability of his +career speaks so closely to the heart of every lover of literary +truth. Who of his heroes is so fascinating to us as he himself? How +imperiously, by his own noble example, he recalls us to the service +of honourable sincerity. And how poignantly these memories of his +evoke the sigh which is not a sob, the smile which is not a +grin.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD' id= +"A_FRIEND_OF_FITZGERALD"></a><br> +<h2>A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD</h2> +<div style='margin-left: 25%; margin-right: 25%;'> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on.</p> +<p>—EDWARD FITZGERALD.</p> +</div> +</div> +<br> +<p>I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the +Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill +equipped to do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a +duty that I take up gladly. It is not often that a young man has +the good fortune to know as a friend one who has been a crony of +his own grandfather and great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in +the case of John Loder, a man whose life was all sturdy simplicity +and generous friendship. He shines in no merely reflected light, +but in his own native nobility. I think there are a few lovers of +England and of books who will be glad not to forget his unobtrusive +services to literature. If only John Loder had kept a journal it +would be one of the minor treasures of the Victorian Age. He had a +racy, original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo that so +delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the delicacies of +rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later years that +he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell came +too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories.</p> +<p>There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the +Deben, some ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are +clustered on the hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a +massive, gray church tower and a great windmill are conspicuous +landmarks. Broad barges and shabby schooners, with ruddy and amber +sails, lie at anchor or drop down the river with the tide, bearing +the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's stories. In the old days +before the railway it was a considerable port and a town of +thriving commerce. But now—well, it is little heard of in the +annals of the world.</p> +<p>Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, +too, and her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of +Aldeburgh was apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first +poem, unhappily entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, +"the Quaker poet," a versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by +reason of his friendships with greater men. Addressed to Bernard +Barton, in a plain, neat hand, came scores of letters to Woodbridge +in the eighteen-twenties, letters now famous, which found their way +up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. They were from no less a man +than Charles Lamb. Also I have always thought it very much to +Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian named Pulham was a +fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. Perhaps Mr. Pulham +introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as birthplace and +home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors as Carlyle +and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In the +years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some +all the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to +gossip about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar +Khayyam Club of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the +grave at Boulge (please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had +been raised from seed brought from the bush that sheds its petals +over the dust of the tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge +and Ipswich celebrated the FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert +Brooke's father was (I believe) a schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas +that another of England's jewels just missed being a +Woodbridgian!</p> +<p>Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at +Liverpool Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue +locomotives of the Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester +and Ipswich and finally set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at +Woodbridge. As you step from the stuffy compartment the keen salt +Deben air will tingle in your nostrils; and you may discover in it +a faint under-whiff of strong tobacco—the undying scent of +pipes smoked on the river wall by old Fitz, and in recent years by +John Loder himself. If you have your bicycle with you, or are +content to hire one, you will find that rolling Suffolk country the +most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. (But carry a +repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is full of +memories—of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the +"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of +Suffolk blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the +four brothers who founded the great publishing house of Harper and +Brothers a century ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You +will bike to Bury St. Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our +beloved William McFee also!) and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear +the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey ringing under the waves. If you +are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out Cockfield Rectory, near +Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in 1872. (Colvin +himself came from Bealings, only two miles from Woodbridge.) You +may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. Britling; +and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's +painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln +Quay or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop +down to Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the +shingle. You will pace the river walk to Kyson—perhaps the +tide will be out and sunset tints shimmer over those glossy +stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, vivid green samphire, purple flats +of slime where the river ran a few hours before, a steel-gray +trickle of water in the scour of the channel and a group of stately +swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs of the town with +the stately church tower and the waving arms of the windmill +looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. You +may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion +for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come +from one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of +Armada that Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One +dropped a bomb—"dud" it was—in John Loder's garden; the +old man had to be restrained from running out to seize it with his +own hands.</p> +<p>John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His +grandfather, Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and +printing business, which continues to-day at the old shop on the +Thoroughfare under John Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days +before the railway came through, Woodbridge was the commercial +centre for a large section of East Suffolk; it was a busy port, and +the quays were crowded with shipping. But when transportation by +rail became swift and cheap and the provinces began to deal with +London merchants, the little town's prosperity suffered a sad +decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several generations' +standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great London +"stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its +best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers +as FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left +school at thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the +traditional printer's devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the +quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, coming down the street from +Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for forty years) with a +large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet sat perched on a +high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the work. And +at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by for a +basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at +their work.</p> +<p>Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little +Friends' burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay +the visitor's half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother +was buried there, one snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember +how old John Loder came forward to the grave, bareheaded and +leaning on his stick, to drop a bunch of fresh violets on the +coffin.</p> +<p>Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt +House—that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly +commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old +Gardens"—and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his +youth. I remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing +round his little retreat with a well-stained pipestem:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>But walk'st about thine own dear +bounds,</i><br></span> <span><i>Not envying others' larger +grounds:</i><br></span> <span><i>For well thou know'st, 'tis not +th' extent</i><br></span> <span><i>Of land makes life, but sweet +content.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost +fabulous now. He had known quite well an English soldier who was on +guard over Boney at St. Helena—in fact, he once published in +some newspaper this man's observations upon the fallen emperor, but +I have not been able to trace the piece. He had been in Paris +before the troubles of '48. I believe he served some sort of +bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at any rate, he used +to be in touch with the London book trade as a young man, and made +the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's most +famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had +not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter +instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were +offered by Quaritch for a penny apiece.</p> +<p>I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner +or later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes +of the literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with +him owing to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a +beautiful portrait of herself in return for some courtesy he showed +her. Robert H. Groome, the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant +son, Francis Hindes Groome, the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk +Friends" and was said by Watts Dunton to have known far more about +the gipsies than Borrow) were among his correspondents.<a name= +'FNanchor_D_4' id="FNanchor_D_4"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_D_4'><sup>[D]</sup></a> John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis +Wright, Canon Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt +Miller, Edward Clodd, Leon Vincent—such men as these wrote or +came to John Loder when they wanted special news about FitzGerald. +FitzGerald had given him a great many curios and personal +treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for sale at any price +(anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) but if any +one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he would give +them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old musical +scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This +scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful +engravings, prints, and drawings of the famous composers, +musicians, and operatic stars of whom Fitz was enivré as a +young man. Among them are a great many drawings of Handel; +FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an enthusiastic Handelian. The +pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there are also two drawings of +Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook was compiled by +FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in London, +visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights of +young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous +Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many +nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, +whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House."</p> +<a name='Footnote_D_4' id="Footnote_D_4"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_D_4'>[D]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite +tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis +Hindes Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great +deal about Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher +was eager to include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's +modesty was always as great as his generosity: he would not +consent.</p> +</div> +<p>When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, +the old man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to +keep you out of mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's +too late!" And he followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of +Lamb's letters, which Ainger had given him.</p> +<p>Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, +eager and merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when +any one came in who was qualified to discuss the literature which +interested him. He and FitzGerald had long cracks together and +perhaps Loder may have accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of +those trips down the Deben on the <i>Scandal</i> or the <i>Meum and +Tuum</i> (the <i>Mum and Tum</i> as Posh, Fitz's sailing master, +called her). He played a prominent part in the life of the town, +became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench until +he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, came +a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing +business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left +him a handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from +anxiety and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet +generosities which had always been his secret delight.</p> +<p>Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how +pale and mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I +but put him before you as he was in those last days! I used to go +up to Burkitt House to see him: in summer we would sit in the +little arbour in the garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining +room. He would talk and I would ask him questions; now and then he +would get up to pull down a book, or to lead me into his bedroom to +see some special treasure. He used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very +close to the fire, with his shoe laces untied. In summer he would +toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, with a tweed cap over one +ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well stained by much smoking, +his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as ever. Every warm +morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping over Market +Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, hailing every +child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally full of +peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. His +long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always +to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No +recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a +hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk +breed. Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a +man as the "Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced.</p> +<p>He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months +and four days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly +ninety—he went in bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his +eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps the sincerest tribute I can pay him +is these lines which I copy from my journal, dated July 16, +1913:</p> +<p>"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly +veiled Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear +old man. I think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with +me, instead of his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed +the parting guest,' he said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober +manner than his wont—and I left with an armful of books which +he had given me 'to keep me out of mischief.' We had a good talk +after tea—he told me about the adventures of his brothers, +one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most delightful +brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and wrinkling up +his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his smooth bald +pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He took me +into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some which +would be acceptable to me—'May as well give 'em away before +it's too late, ye know'—and then he settled back in his easy +chair to puff at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which +tickled me—he has such a knack for the proverbial and the +epigrammatic. 'He's cut his cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he +said of a certain scapegrace. He chuckled over the Suffolk phrase +'a chance child,' for a bastard (alluding to one such of his +acquaintance in old days). He constantly speaks of things he wants +to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the daisies.' He told me old +tales of Woodbridge in the time of the Napoleonic wars when there +was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered here—this was one +of the regions in which an attack by Boney was greatly feared. He +says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning mist or fog) +originates from that time, as being weather suitable for the French +to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats.</p> +<p>"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand +at writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for +him who cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a +former Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard +to do him justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a +swift and painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not +linger on into a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory +and his pipe and his books begin to fail him, when those keen old +eyes grow dim and he can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the +river-wall—then may the quick and quiet ferryman take dear +old John Loder to the shadow land."</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM' id= +"A_VENTURE_IN_MYSTICISM"></a><br> +<h2>A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM</h2> +<br> +<p>I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of +calm for our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to +put some of that stuff into practice.</p> +<p>"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep +quiet of your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite +peace. You must be full of gladness and love for every person and +every tiniest thing. Great activity and worry is needless—it +is poison to the soul. Learn to reflect, and to brood upon eternal +beauty. It is the mystic who finds all that is most precious in +life. The flowers of meditation blossom in his heart." I cut out +these words and pasted them in my hat. I have always felt that my +real genius lies in the direction of philosophic calm. I determined +to override the brutal clamour of petty things.</p> +<p>The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but +lovely thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay +until eight o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see +that Professor Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to +the office. "I am brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her.</p> +<p>She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed.</p> +<p>I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will +convince you that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a +beard. I lit a cigar, and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's +inquiries.</p> +<p>At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My +employer is not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained +that I was at home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from +mystical. "Get here by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he +said.</p> +<p>I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the +senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of +gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the +world. "I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized +me by the shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting +"Another nut!"</p> +<p>When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred +papers. The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify +someone. "Here he is now," I heard her say.</p> +<p>It was Dennis & Company on the wire.</p> +<p>"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have +yesterday without fail?" said Dennis.</p> +<p>I took the 'phone.</p> +<p>"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The +matter is purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune +yourself—"</p> +<p>He rang off.</p> +<p>I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the +unclouded eye of a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these +pettifogging transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the +Cameron Stores, proofs of the weekly ad. for the <i>Fishmongers' +Journal</i>, a telegram from the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires +needed for one of the delivery trucks—how could I jeopardize +my faculty of meditation by worrying over these trifles? I leaned +back in my chair and devoted myself to meditation. After all, the +harassing domination of material things can easily be thrown off by +a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I seemed to see the +future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. My soul was +thrilled with a universal love of humanity.</p> +<p>The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted +to see me.</p> +<p>Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the +beck and call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long +perspective of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? +In this luminous new vision of my importance as a fragment of +immortal mind, could I, should I, bow to the force of impertinent +trivialities?</p> +<p>I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity.</p> +<p>By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face +convinced me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is +poison to the soul. Certainly his face was poisonous.</p> +<p>"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? +Dennis just called me up about that herring order—"</p> +<p>"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is +a strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...."</p> +<p>A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay +in my pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and +unpleasant, for the stairway from the office to the street is long +and dusty; but I recalled what Professor Tagore had said about +vicissitudes being the true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not +with me, but I remembered the creed pasted in it. After pacing a +block or so, my soul was once more tranquil.</p> +<p>I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was +crowded with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a +vacant seat in a corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon +the majestic vision of the brotherhood of man.</p> +<p>Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. +Never mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others +do is beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of +endless vistas of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for +some time, but still no corporeal and physical units of food +reached me.</p> +<p>The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. +Full of love for humanity I spoke to him.</p> +<p>"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws +nigh, will you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your +rolls and one of your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of +humanity, all that is mine is yours; and <i>per contra</i>, all +that is yours is mine." Beaming luminously upon him, I laid a +friendly hand on his arm.</p> +<p>He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for +rent!" he cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket."</p> +<p>By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and +I felt ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty +were beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded +street, walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, +three people trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a +passport to eternity. I reflected that men were perhaps not yet +ready for these doctrines of infinite peace. How much more wise +were the animals—and I raised my hand to stroke a huge +dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers in his teeth and +nipped them vigorously.</p> +<p>I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. +I burst into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and +fought, shoved, cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old +ladies to one side to snatch my ticket before they could get +theirs. I leaped into the car at the head of a flying wedge of +sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing of infinite beauty and +peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit clergyman outside, +and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the lurching, +trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the +motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?—I +was perfectly happy!</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY' id="AN_OXFORD_LANDLADY"></a><br> +<h2>AN OXFORD LANDLADY</h2> +<br> +<p>It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind +was chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching +the flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet +tam-o'-shanter and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap +at the door, gentle but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley.</p> +<p>If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have +not forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike +Queen Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance +featly and with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness +was the admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in +Oxford—and even in later days when she and Dr. Warren always +opened the Magdalen servants' ball together. She and the courtly +President were always the star couple. I can see her doing the Sir +Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was loosed long ago, and she +has expanded with the British Empire. Not rotund, but rather +imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, and when you +come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily has gone +off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see Mrs. +Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before +the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, +very fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and +full of dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, +bold as a lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles +humorous and placable—such is our Mrs. Beesley.</p> +<p>She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching +the leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals.</p> +<p>"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the +leaves 'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen +do."</p> +<p>"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers +play hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating +creature. I think her name must be Kathleen...."</p> +<p>Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that +delightful way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all +the other gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for +the young ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, +an' he was engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he +did. I thought it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit +gentleman."</p> +<p>"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I +suggested:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>"Beauty must be scorned in +none</i><br></span> <span><i>Though but truly served in +one."</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. +Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly +embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther +into the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind +her.</p> +<p>"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to +see about dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em +all." (That is her quaint way of saying that she thinks me the +leading spirit of the three who dig with her.) "How about a little +jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares there are in Cowley Road now. I +thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' +tea?"</p> +<p>The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all +the ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare +agrees with Mr. Williams," I said.</p> +<p>"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner +of the table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. +"A pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well +with the cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a +Welsh rabbit and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw +me, ''Ow about that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, +dear, 'e <i>is</i> a kind gentleman! 'E gave us a book +once—''Istory of Magdalen College,' I think he wrote it +'imself."</p> +<p>"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began +looking for a book.</p> +<p>"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for +dinner?" asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd +come if he knew."</p> +<p>"We might send him a telegram," I said.</p> +<p>"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a +fantastic thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened +this morning," she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. +But we didn't find 'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e +usually does. 'I wonder what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' +said Em'ly.</p> +<p>"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You +know we 'ad a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is +things—a Jesus gentleman 'e was.)</p> +<p>"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a +pawnbroker's sign mean?'</p> +<p>"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one +you never gets 'em back."</p> +<p>Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled +away chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play +hockey.</p> +<p><i>October, 1912.</i></p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='PEACOCK_PIEquot' id="PEACOCK_PIEquot"></a><br> +<h2>"PEACOCK PIE"</h2> +<br> +<p>Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which +brings a real tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which +responds to the vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar +the years is by the really good books they bring one. Each twelve +month the gnomon on the literary sundial is likely to cast some +shadow one will not willingly forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year +that introduced me to William McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and +Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most of us remember as Rupert +Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River Anthology, if you +prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season when I first +got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of all, in +1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de la +Mare.</p> +<p>"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is +seasonable to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and +delightful of present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so +little known over here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," +was published in England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written +novels and essays, all shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle +of imagination and charm. He has the knack of "words set in +delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" is the most authentic +knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden of Verses."</p> +<p>I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet +more likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and +fine-spun fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and +haunting in imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life +where rewards and fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson +and Vachel Lindsay are among our contributors to the songs of +gramarye: but one has only to open "The Congo" side by side with +"Peacock Pie" to see how the seductions of ragtime and the clashing +crockery of the Poetry Society's dinners are coarsening the fibres +of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as compared with the dainty +horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And it is a long +Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens where De la +Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for Barrie +or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil +Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not +native in our hearts, and we might as well admit it.</p> +<p>To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland +suggests perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in +the hurly burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his +rubbers in the subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is +found wandering blithely in Central Park while the Women's +Athenaeum of the Tenderloin is waiting four hundred strong for him +to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is the more modern figure who might +readily (I hope I speak without offense) be mistaken for a New York +stock broker, or a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce. +Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order of poets who do not wear +rubbers.</p> +<p>One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who +reads a book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a +collection of poems for children. But it is not that, any more than +"The Masses" is a paper for the proletariat. Before you have gone +very far you will find that the imaginary child you set out with +has been magicked into a changeling. The wee folk have been at work +and bewitched the pudding—the pie rather. The fire dies on +the hearth, the candle channels in its socket, but still you read +on. Some of the poems bring you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. +When at last you go up to bed, it will be with the shuddering sigh +of one thrilled through and through with the sad little beauties of +the world. You will want to put out a bowl of fresh milk on the +doorstep to appease the banshee—did you not know that the +janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the morning.</p> +<p>One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his +utter simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that +intrigues the memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever +after. Who can read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig +over and over in his head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he +shaves, whenever the moon is young? I challenge you to resist the +jolly madness of its infection:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Three jolly Farmers</i><br></span> +<span><i>Once bet a pound</i><br></span> <span><i>Each dance the +others would</i><br></span> <span><i>Off the ground.</i><br></span> +<span><i>Out of their coats</i><br></span> <span><i>They slipped +right soon,</i><br></span> <span><i>And neat and +nicesome,</i><br></span> <span><i>Put each his +shoon.</i><br></span> +<span><i>One—Two—Three—</i><br></span> +<span><i>And away they go,</i><br></span> <span><i>Not too +fast,</i><br></span> <span><i>And not too slow;</i><br></span> +<span><i>Out from the elm-tree's</i><br></span> <span><i>Noonday +shadow,</i><br></span> <span><i>Into the sun</i><br></span> +<span><i>And across the meadow.</i><br></span> <span><i>Past the +schoolroom,</i><br></span> <span><i>With knees well +bent</i><br></span> <span><i>Fingers a-flicking,</i><br></span> +<span><i>They dancing went....</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade?</p> +<p>The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is +not that they write such good prose; not that they espouse the +natural rhythms of the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this +is all to the best, even if as old as Solomon. It is that they +affect to disdain the superlative harmonies of artificed and +ordered rhythms; that knowing not a spondee from a tribrach they +vapour about prosody, of which they know nothing, and imagine to be +new what antedates the Upanishads. The haunting beauty of Mr. de la +Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of superlative tenderness +and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of iambus and trochee +is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly tripping dactyls. +Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the meed of the +trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his voice +before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist +journals please copy.</p> +<p>One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the +gist of this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something +fey about much of the book: it peers behind the curtains of +twilight and sees strange things. In its love of children, its +inspired simplicity, its sparkle of whim and Æsopian brevity, +I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you one more slice of +this rarely seasoned pastry.</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>THE LITTLE BIRD</i><br></span></div> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>My dear Daddie bought a +mansion</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>For to bring my Mammie +to,</i><br></span> <span><i>In a hat with a long +feather,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a trailing gown of +blue;</i><br></span> <span><i>And a company of +fiddlers</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>And a rout of maids and +men</i><br></span> <span><i>Danced the clock round to the +morning,</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>In a gay house-warming +then.</i><br></span> <span><i>And when all the guests were gone, +and</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>All was still as still can +be,</i><br></span> <span><i>In from the dark ivy hopped +a</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Wee small bird: and that was +Me.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his +scrip of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the +most callous. It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, +It is full of outlets of sky.</p> +<p>As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps +behind his songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and +we may hope that even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He +lectured at some of our universities and endured the grotesque +plaudits of dowagers and professors who doubtless pretended to have +read his work. Although he is forty-four, and has been publishing +for nearly sixteen years, he has evaded "Who's Who." He lives in +London, is married, and has four children. For a number of years he +worked for the Anglo-American Oil Company. Truly the Muse sometimes +lends to her favourites a merciful hardiness.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP' id="THE_LITERARY_PAWNSHOP"></a><br> +<h2>THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP</h2> +<br> +<p>Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only +literary man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a +manuscript for immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams +had in his saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as +well worth a hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." +Offering one of these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. +Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, to lend him three guineas but the latter +had so little stomach for a transaction of this sort that "he cried +out, 'Coming, sir,' though nobody called; and ran downstairs +without any fear of breaking his neck."</p> +<p>As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these +matters) puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly +coordinated with life.</p> +<p>Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A +watch, a ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, +all these will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which +happens not to meet the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle +in your drawer though it sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and +five or ten years hence collectors may list it in their catalogues. +No mount of piety along Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no +Hartford Lunch will exchange it for corned beef hash and dropped +egg. This is a dismal thing.</p> +<p>This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be +gained by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the +most famous writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in +their early days. There were times when they would have sold their +epics, their novels, their essays, for the price of a square meal. +Think of the booty that would accumulate in the shop of a literary +pawnbroker. The early work of famous men would fill his safe to +bursting. Later on he might sell it for a thousand times what he +gave. There is nothing that grows to such fictitious value as +manuscript.</p> +<p>Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant +in Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. +His early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and +wrapping paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few +shillings. Or Edgar Poe in the despairing days of his wife's +illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits of depression caused by his helpless +dependence upon his father for funds. What a splendid opportunity +these crises in writers' lives would offer to the enterprising +buyer of manuscripts!</p> +<p>Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself +an appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor +stuff, even though the author of it be starving. Richard Le +Gallienne has spoken somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books +that should never have been written to the customers who should +never have been born." Our pawnbroker must guard himself against +buying this kind of stuff. He will be besieged with it. Very likely +Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the first to offer him some. But +his task will be to discover new and true talent beneath its rags, +and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely bite will mean more +than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later.</p> +<p>The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the +(unpublished) letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary +of Deplorable Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered +the Third Avenue saloons when he might have been fêted by the +Authors' League had he lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, +the full story of that tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts +still cherished by his executor made public. In the meantime, this +letter, which he wrote in 1908, gives a sad and vivid little +picture of the straits of unadmitted genius:</p> +<p>"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my +best—indeed my only—friend in this city, when every +editor, publisher, and critic has given me the frozen mitt. Of +course I know why ... the author of 'Vermin' deserves not, nor +wants, their hypocritical help. The book was too true to life to +please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to tickle the +prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the other +day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and +inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with +it—as a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he +meant. I kicked him downstairs. The stinking bounder!</p> +<p>"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is +literally true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not +bring myself to come back to the saloon where he would willingly +have fed me. I did get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie +ferryboat, but they found out I did not belong to the union. I had +two dollars in my pocket—a fortune—but while I was +dozing on a doorstep on Hudson Street, waiting for the cafés +to open (I was too done to walk half a dozen blocks to an all-night +restaurant), some snapper picked my pocket. That night I slept in a +big drain pipe where they were putting up a building.</p> +<p>"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for +cash? In my hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that +will be bid for at auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know +it), but at this moment, July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents +on it. If there were a literary mount of piety—a sort of +Parnassus of piety as it were—the uncle in charge might bless +the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This cancer is +getting me surely.</p> +<p>"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's +bar for him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps +upstairs, bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real +breakfast: boiled red cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the +inspector), rye bread, raw onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and +two big schooners of the amber. I'm working on my Third Avenue +novel called 'The L.'</p> +<p>"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down +here to give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't +the real name, so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third +Avenue written on my heart, if I still have one...."</p> +<p>It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems +"Pavements, and Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for +$250 last winter.</p> +<p>Will not some literary agent think over this idea?</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON' id="A_MORNING_IN_MARATHON"></a><br> +<h2>A MORNING IN MARATHON</h2> +<br> +<p>One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at +half-past four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden +moonlight. Early rising in order to quicken the furnace and start +the matinsong in the steampipes becomes its own reward when such an +orange moon is dropping down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile +Irish terrier) was plainly awed by the blaze of pale light, and +hopped gingerly down the rimy back steps. But the cat was +unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are leagued with the +powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel Lindsay (he +is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the +moonshine without a qualm.</p> +<p>There are certain little routine joys known only to the +servantless suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of +crisp French rolls on the front porch. Every morning the milkman +deposits his little bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. +Every morning the furnace needs a little grooming, that the cheery +thump of rising pressure may warm the radiators upstairs. Then the +big agate kettle must be set over the blue gas flame, for hot water +is needed both for shaving and cocoa. Our light breakfast takes +only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut Brown Maid comes +singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are ready in the +sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and shaved and +telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train waits +for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station.</p> +<p>But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine +mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm +clock being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy +head. The day in question was early February when snow lay white +and powdery on the ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon +had to be caught. There is an express for Philadelphia that leaves +the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 and this the Tamperer had to take, +to make a 10 o'clock appointment in the Quaker City. That was why +the alarm clock rang at half-past four.</p> +<p>I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight +before the dawn. No description that I have ever read—not +even the daybreak in "Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure +gold over the rim of night—would be just to that exquisite +growth of colour in the eastern sky. The violet star faded to +forget-me-not and then to silver and at last closed his weary eye; +the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost its fairy-tale air of +mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night receded into +infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the +horizon.</p> +<p>But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise +his head from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown +Maid was still nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some +tea and toast just before departing.</p> +<p>The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was +delicious. Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which +were casting deep blue shadows in the strange light—waning +moon and waxing day. The air was very chill—only just above +zero—and the smoking car seemed very cold and dismal. I +huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and read the paper. +But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco and this +morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The +exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering +nausea.</p> +<p>I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then +the sun came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the +snow afire. As we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could +see the morning light shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when +we glided into the basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart +was already attuned to the thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps +it can never have the fascination for me that the old dingy London +terminals have—King's Cross, Paddington, or Saint Pancras, +with their delicious English bookstalls and those porters in +corduroy—but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place after all, +a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. It +seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the +trains? No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to +watch the Duke of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of +those green or blue English locomotives with lordly names, being +groomed for the run.</p> +<p>In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its +high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood +of commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally +sitting by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the +marble lunch counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes +and coffee to stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are +being swept and garnished. As I passed through on my way to the +Philadelphia train I was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch +terrier puppies—five or six of them tumbling over one another +in their play and yelping so that the station rang. "Every little +bit yelps" as someone has said. I was reminded of the last words I +ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth book of the +Aeneid)—<i>stant litore puppes</i>, which I always yearned to +translate "a litter of puppies."</p> +<p>My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City +as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. +When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge +(which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a +crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another +moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the +fully minted gold of superb morning. The day was begun.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS' id= +"THE_AMERICAN_HOUSE_OF_LORDS"></a><br> +<h2>THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS</h2> +<br> +<p>I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) +so I do not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, +irresistibly the thought comes that I have strayed into the +American House of Lords. Unworthily I sit among our sovereign +legislators, a trifle ill at ease mayhap. In the day coach I am at +home with my peers—those who smoke cheap tobacco; who nurse +fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with sandwich crumbs and +lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.</p> +<p>But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a +limited train is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary +chamber, but it is none the less the camera stellata of our +prosperous carnivora. Patently these men are Lords. In two facing +rows, averted from the landscape, condemned to an uneasy scrutiny +of their mutual prosperity, they sit in leather chairs. They curve +roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven to the raw, soberly +clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they smoke cigars, +those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end than at the +other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear shoes with +fawn-coloured tops.</p> +<p>Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking +traveller, am faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget +myself while reading poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, +missing the little silver gourd that rests by my left foot. +Straight the white-jacketed mulatto sucks them up with a vacuum +cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the brass veranda at the +end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. And returning, +the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I left +under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me +at least a whiskey and soda to get them out.</p> +<p>It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am +cigarless and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white +margins inside my vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one +in which I was married (I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall +never forget it) and when I look up from Emily Dickinson's poems +with a trembling thrill of painful ecstasy, I am frightened by the +long row of hard faces and cynic eyes opposite me.</p> +<p>The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order +a bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that +nauseates me? At any rate, I want to get home—home to that +star-sown meadow and the two brown arms at the journey's end.</p> +<p><i>December, 1914.</i></p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='COTSWOLD_WINDS' id="COTSWOLD_WINDS"></a><br> +<h2>COTSWOLD WINDS</h2> +<br> +<p>Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still +sits close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over +the sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an +adventure. I am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. +Give me a two-mile spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the +muscles and sweep the morning's books and tobacco from the +brain—and then turn and at it! It is like swimming against a +great crystal river. Cap off, head up—no crouching over the +handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind in your hair, +the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of leg-drive +straining on the pedals—three minutes of it intoxicates you. +You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and +exultation into the face of the blast.</p> +<p>I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before +"Schools." In mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away +for six weeks while she decks herself against the spring. Far and +wide we scatter. The Prince to Germany—the dons to +Devon—the reading parties to quiet country inns here and +there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are in those glorious +dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's "Scènes de +la Vie de Bohème" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips +in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and +solitude.</p> +<p>There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a +green valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There +is a well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But +I am not for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious +business, these last two months before Schools, and I and my books +are camped in a "pensive citadel" up on the hill, where the +postman's wife cares for me and worries because I do not eat more +than two normal men. There is a low-ceilinged sitting room with a +blazing fire. From one corner a winding stair climbs to the bedroom +above. There are pipes and tobacco, pens and a pot of ink. There +are books—all historical volumes, the only evidence of +relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one of +Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, +three hours' bicycling—that leaves four hours for eating and +other emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, +and turn a probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible +Third.</p> +<p>And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? +The valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in +England, I think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the +stream, now and then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you +far away from most of the things one likes to leave behind. There +are lambs, little black fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are +scores of rabbits disappearing with a flirt of white hindquarters +into their wayside burrows; in Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, +gold and blue and scarlet, almost as tame as barnyard fowls; +everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in the upper blue—and +these are all your company. Now and then a great yellow farm-wagon +and a few farmers in corduroys—but no one else. That is the +kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the +Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever +tasted better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the +green water dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the +Houses of Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth +Woods if it could—and so would I.</p> +<p>But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting +Shotover is pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees—and +we come out onto a hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from +there it is eight miles homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad +blue horizon to meet the eye. Back to the tiny cottage looking out +onto the village green and the old village well; back to four cups +of tea and hot buttered toast; and then for Metternich and the +Vienna Congress. <i>Solvitur bicyclando!</i></p> +<p>And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford +will have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud +and sleet and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however +cold, it will be what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will +be white flannels, and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But +that is not for us now. There are the Schools....</p> +<p><i>Bibury, April, 1913</i>.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='CLOUDS' id="CLOUDS"></a><br> +<h2>CLOUDS</h2> +<br> +<p>Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice +Meynell, perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty +with tumbling amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The +heavenly hills of Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. +said it better—"The travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how +much is still to be said of those piled-up mysteries of heaven!</p> +<p>We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to +Stroudsburg. That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is +just as lovely as the English Avon, but how much more likely we are +to praise the latter!) converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, +drawing the foam of many a mountain creek down through that +matchless passway. Over the hills which tumble steeply on either +side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, hanging palpable in the +sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height of craggy softness +on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of golden +vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in +ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, +reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce +or his speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating +moisture clothes itself!</p> +<p>Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the +highways of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their +miracles of form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the +stockades of earth had fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant +cliff, the spires of the Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood +one has dreamed of scaling the bulwarks of the clouds, of riding +the ether on those strange galleons. Unconscious of their own +beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes—now scudding on that +waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage way. If one +could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what abysses +would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of the +sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in +pale and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the +greenish moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming +solidness on a sunny morning—are they not the most superbly +heart-easing miracles of our visible world? Watch them as they +shimmer down toward the Water Gap in every shade of silver and rose +and opal; or delicately tinged with amber when they have caught +some jewelled chain of lightning and are suffused with its lurid +sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones and stars: has he +never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds?</p> +<p>There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. +Holding within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the +rain, chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and +unbearable as the face of God—dissolving into a crystal +nothing, reborn from the viewless caverns of air—here let us +erect one enraptured altar to the bright mountains of the sky!</p> +<p>At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike +County, fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of +clouds that had long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible +airy summit far above us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and +pallid. And then one last banner of rosy light beaconed over its +highest turret—a final flare of glory to signal curfew to all +the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in the shadow of dusk.</p> +<p>We thought that was the end. But no—a little later, after +we had reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were +still at play. Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden +gush of pale blue lightning. And while we watched, with hearts +almost painfully sated by beauty, through some leak the precious +fire ran out; a great stalk of pure and unspeakable brightness fled +passionately to earth. This happened again and again until the +artery of fire was discharged. And then, slowly, slowly, the stars +began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our cloud drifted gently +away.</p> +<p>Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of +dawn? Who knows?</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='UNHEALTHY' id="UNHEALTHY"></a><br> +<h2>UNHEALTHY</h2> +<br> +<p>On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. +On Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the +obscure creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post +meridiem is a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we +list.</p> +<p>The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as +our <i>stell-dich-ein</i>. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to +say, I arrive at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated +reflection. There is plenty to think about. One may stand between +the outer and inner lines of glass doors and watch the queer little +creatures that come tumbling out of the cloak and suit factory +across the street. Or one may stand inside the store, on a kind of +terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc lights, looking down upon the +bustle of women on the main floor. Best of all, one may stroll +along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts and conditions +of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet them at +one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the mahogany +victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for +lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long +morning coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of +this social gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots +that are suggestive of corns. There is an information bureau there, +where one may learn everything except the time one may expect one's +wife to arrive. But I have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am +waiting for Titania, and beginning to despair of her arrival, I +have only to go to a telephone to call her up. As soon as I have +put the nickel in, she is sure to appear. Nowadays I save the +nickel by going into a booth and <i>pretending</i> to telephone. +Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots.</p> +<p>We have a jargon of our own.</p> +<p>"Eye-polishers?" say I.</p> +<p>"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm +<i>so</i> sorry, Grump."</p> +<p>"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because +riding on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the +word connotes anything that produces that desirable result, such as +bunches of violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, +spring millinery, or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a +rite suggested by the old song:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>And though maids sweep their hearths +no less</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Than they were wont to +do,</i><br></span> <span><i>Yet who doth now for +cleanliness</i><br></span> <span class='i2'><i>Find sixpence in her +shoe?</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece.</p> +<p>We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized +beginning of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a +quarter to thirty cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily +compensated by the Grump buying Sweet Caporals instead of something +Turkish. A packet of cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an +adventure. On other days publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on +Saturdays cigarettes are possible.</p> +<p>"Antipasto?"</p> +<p>"No, thanks."</p> +<p>"Minestrone or consommé?"</p> +<p>"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine, +please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable +Moretti lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, +excellent savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a +pungent pourri of smells, and the jangle of thick china, how +diverting it is! The franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches +us complaisantly from his counter where he sits flanked by flasks +of Hoboken chianti and a case of brittle cigars.</p> +<p>How good Moretti's <i>minestrone</i> tastes to the +unsophisticated tongue. What though it be only an azoic extract of +intense potato, dimly tinct with sargasso and macaroni—it has +a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not the prelude to an +Adventure?</p> +<p>Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over +azimuth and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude +more earnestly than Titania and I argue our possible courses. +Generally, however, she leaves it to me to chart the journey. That +gives me the pride of conductor and her the pleasure of being +surprised.</p> +<p>According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a +waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a +little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and +plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a +picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from +footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We +laid a romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming +a little snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused +us:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>"My old man's a fireman</i><br></span> +<span><i>Now what do you think of that?</i><br></span> <span><i>He +wears goblimey breeches</i><br></span> <span><i>And a little +goblimey hat."</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too +far on the back of my head.</p> +<p>The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one +leaves Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been +very fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, +animal shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old +dismantled Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: +one of the dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge +four-pronged grinder as big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. +Oysters going out, the new brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the +saloons mark the vernal equinox.</p> +<p>A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains +rumbling by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A +cutting wind blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid +two nickels and we got into the front car of the northbound +train.</p> +<p>Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an +aeroplane, or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything +so thrilling as soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. +Rocking, racketing, roaring over those crazy trestles, now a +glimpse of the leaden river to the east, now a peep of church +spires and skyscrapers on the west, and the dingy imitation lace +curtains of the third-story windows flashing by like a recurring +pattern—it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand at the +front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far +ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping +nearer and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus +a swaying, jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the +seat in front; but the L swings you up and over the housetops, +smooth and sheer and swift.</p> +<p>We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. +A broad, dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton +apartments, led in a gentle descent toward the river. The +neighbourhood was noisy, quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, +bitter March the thaw had come at last: the street was viscous with +slime, the melting snow lay in grayish piles along the curbs. Small +boys on each side of the Street were pelting sodden snowballs which +spattered around us as we walked down the pavement.</p> +<p>But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung +round at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th +Street showed the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat +and respectable. A little side street branching off to the left +(not recorded by Mercator) revealed some quaint cottages with +gables and shuttered windows so mid-Victorian that my literary +heart leaped and I dreamed at once of locating a novel in this +fascinating spot. And then we rounded the corner and saw the little +park.</p> +<p>It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her +hands, and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of +little houses of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy +bay windows and polished door knockers. In front of them was the +lumpy little park, cut up into irregular hills, where children were +flying kites. And beyond that, an embankment and the river in a dim +wet mist. There was Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge +slipping by. In the distance we could see the colossal span of the +new Hell Gate bridge. With the journalist's instinct for +superlatives I told Titania it was the largest single span in the +world. I wonder if it is?</p> +<p>As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On +the embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. +It was as picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A +ferryboat, crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. +Tugs, puffing up past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, +replied with mellow blasts. The pungent tang of the East River +tickled our nostrils, and all my old ambition to be a tugboat +captain returned.</p> +<p>And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk +our landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this +delicious spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East +End Avenue the Cheyne Walk of New York—we might even import +an English imagist poet to lend cachet to the coterie—I saw +by Titania's face that something was wrong.</p> +<p>I pressed her for the reason of her frown.</p> +<p>She thought the region was unhealthy.</p> +<p>Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further +argument is possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions +I have never been able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape +of the houses, or the lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that +the garbage men collect from the front instead of from the back. +But however she arrives at the conclusion, it is immutable.</p> +<p>Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or +picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy.</p> +<p>Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry +Bend, or the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin +to pucker. "Do you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I +ask anxiously. If she does, there is nothing for it but to clutch +at the nearest subway station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that +bracing ether her spirits revive.</p> +<p>So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in +New York, outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in +splinters at the bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old +Carl Schurz mansion on the hill, and we departed for the airy +plateaus of Central Park. Desperately I pointed to the fading +charms of East River Park—the convent round the corner, the +hokey pokey cart by the curbstone.</p> +<p>I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER' id= +"CONFESSIONS_OF_A_SMOKER"></a><br> +<h2>CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER</h2> +<br> +<p>True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather +with his snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first +years I never saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when +asleep. Of what avail for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I +did not smoke until I was twenty? By the time I was eight years old +I had constructed a pipe of an acorn and a straw, and had +experimented with excelsior as fuel. From that time I passed +through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod cigars, hayseed, +corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true Olympus) +Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school recess. +Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a +twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem.</p> +<p>I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other +heroes of fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a +moment's unease—but stay, there was a cunning mixture devised +by some comrades at college that harboured in its fragrant shreds +neatly chopped sections of rubber bands. That was sheer poison, I +grant you.</p> +<p>The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where +Raleigh, Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the +whimful Elia best of all—where these have spoken so greatly, +the feeble voice may well shrink. But that is the joy of true +worship: ranks and hierarchies are lost, all are brothers in the +mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich Virginia the older saints +of the mellow leaf genially greet the new freshman, be he never so +humble.</p> +<p>What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great +ones of the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation +and Cat, for instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into +the small hours "quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and +smoking pipes of Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where +Carlyle and Emerson counted the afternoon well spent, though +neither one had said a hundred words—had they not smoked +together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they trudged together to +"prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill—did not the reek of +their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old +Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go +sailing with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry—what mixture did he +fill and light? Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be +sworn. Or, to come down to more recent days, think of Captain +Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in Bessborough Gardens, lighting that +apocalyptic pipe that preceded the first manuscript page of +"Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the privileged landlady's +daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast dishes that +morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?<a name= +'FNanchor_E_5' id="FNanchor_E_5"></a><a href= +'#Footnote_E_5'><sup>[E]</sup></a></p> +<a name='Footnote_E_5' id="Footnote_E_5"></a><a href= +'#FNanchor_E_5'>[E]</a> +<div class='note'> +<p>The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A +Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly +obscure.—EDITOR.</p> +</div> +<p>It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of +masculine friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for +drummers, your cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the +ripened, boneset votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with +meerschaum, calabash, cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the +inscrutable order of things, like crossing sweepers and presidents +of women's clubs; but when Damon and Pythias meet to talk things +over, well-caked briars are in order. Cigars are all right in +fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel Géraldine when they +visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was Leigh Hunt, in the +immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), who uttered +the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I will +wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it.</p> +<p>The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an +etiquette, a usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried +and hygienic age has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to +ask your friend to let you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three +or four mouthfuls of smoke. This afforded opportunity for a +gracious exchange of compliments. "Will it please you to impart +your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, having savored his +mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very excellent leaf," +offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and many other +excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book "The +Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and +breviary to every smoker con amore.</p> +<p>But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace +and companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender +affection on the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some +walking trip, some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained +counters of some remote alehouse. These are the memories that are +bittersweet beyond the compass of halting words. Never again +perhaps will we throw care over the hedge and stride with Mifflin +down the Banbury Road, filling the air with laughter and the fumes +of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is the tribute we pay to the +sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened cutty that has been +with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a hundred weary +dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen faltered +in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. +Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your +pipe will never fail you.</p> +<p>How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot +even read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers +itching to light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and +baked a hundred times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply +can't help talking about tobacco, and I strike a match for every +essay. God bless him and his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in +"Joseph Andrews"—he lights a pipe on every page!</p> +<p>I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be +consummated in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or +bury my head in my coat. People see me in the street, vainly +seeking shelter. It is a weakness, though not a shameful one. But +set me in a tavern corner, and fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" +(do you know that English mixture?) and I am yours to the last +ash.</p> +<p>I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I +have a tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that +Mifflin and I had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn +at Lichfield. We weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there +in honour of Dr. Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his +bust. Then there were those pipes we used to smoke at twilight +sitting on the steps of 17 Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in +Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie to come by and light the lamps. +Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come again!</p> +<p>When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of +the devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns.</p> +<p>Not such bad advice.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='HAY_FEBRIFUGE' id="HAY_FEBRIFUGE"></a><br> +<h2>HAY FEBRIFUGE</h2> +<br> +<p>Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in +the world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of +that new form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the +most fragrant gas tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest +number of cinders per eye of any arondissement served by the +R—— railway, and the most bitterly afflicted hay fever +sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the editor of the most +widely circulated magazine in the world, and the author of one of +the best selling books that ever was written.</p> +<p>Not bad for one village.</p> +<p>Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. +That is where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed +envelope I will give you the name of our village, and instructions +for avoiding it. It is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the +south by ragweed, on the east by asthma and the pollen of +anemophylous plants.</p> +<p>It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor +Castle, confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, +repartees, feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, +chevaux de frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, +machine-gun emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all +the other travaux de fantaisie that make life worth living for +retired manufacturers. The general effect is emetic in the extreme. +Hard by the castle is a spurious and richly gabled stable in the +general style of the château de Chantilly. One brief strip of +lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred years in architecture, and +restrains Runnymede from Versailles.</p> +<p>Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock +merchants and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, +remove the cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The +countryside is as lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, +rolling terrain, stewed terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, +spare tires, and other props. But we are equally infamous for +hideous houses, of the Chester A. Arthur era. Every prospect +pleases, and man alone is vile.</p> +<p>There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and +a drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. +It would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to +ambush herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, +and takes notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy.</p> +<p>Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an +eminent parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to +N. Romanoff, asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. +And now N. Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no +knouting or giving in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other +check on the ladies. Knitting instead of knouting is the order of +the day.</p> +<p>Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy +or drugstore.</p> +<p>Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a +day's journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot.</p> +<p>But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to +life," say Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at +certain times such extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to +unfit them for their ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that +it is a disease of the classes rather than the masses we may take +the viewpoint of self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as +indicating a superiority in culture and civilization of the +favoured few. When the intimate connection of pollinosis and +culture has been firmly grasped by the public mind, the complaint +will perhaps come to be looked upon like gout, as a sign of +breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it not.... As +civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to the +one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to +sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or +twenty-second century may be a being of pure intellect whose +organization of mere nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong +emotion, like a pumpkin filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen +Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted from the Medical Record, March +18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. Mencken, fellow sufferer, for +sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. I hope to live to grasp +Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their essay is marked by +a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts in this +hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.)</p> +<p>I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the +affinities between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the +debased form of literary parody) to those of great intellectual +stature. Upon the literary vehicles of expression habitually +employed by Rudyard Kipling, Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and +Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch of ragweed and goldenrod; with +surprising results. These intellectuals were not more immune than +myself. For instance, this is the spasm ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee +Masters, of Spoon River:</p> +<div class='poem'> +<div class='stanza'><span><i>Ed Grimes always did hate +me</i><br></span> <span><i>Because I wrote better poetry than he +did.</i><br></span> <span><i>In the hay fever season I used to +walk</i><br></span> <span><i>Along the river bank, to keep as far +as possible</i><br></span> <span><i>Away from +pollen.</i><br></span> <span><i>One day Ed and his brother crept up +behind me</i><br></span> <span><i>While I was writing a +sonnet,</i><br></span> <span><i>Tied my hands and +feet,</i><br></span> <span><i>And carried me into a hayfield and +left me.</i><br></span> <span><i>I sneezed myself to +death.</i><br></span> <span><i>At the funeral the church was full +of goldenrod,</i><br></span> <span><i>And I think it must have been +Ed</i><br></span> <span><i>Who sowed that ragweed all round my +grave.</i><br></span></div> +</div> +<p>The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves +great credit for lending himself to the cult in this way.</p> +<p>I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have +even thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and +without collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable +book of his called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most +original, and certainly the most verbose, book that has been +written about the war. Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get +this right) is the most eminent victim of words that ever lived in +New England (or indeed anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd +upon him like flies upon a honey-pot: he is helpless to resist +them. His brain buzzes with them: they leap from his eye, distil +from his lean and waving hand. Good God, not since Rabelais and +Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one human being been so +beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables. I adore him for +it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, transcendent vocables +swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, teasing him with +visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. Wordsworth's were. +The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has confessed it himself) +can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too deep for +publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are +recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat +at lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can +give you testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I +listened, clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. +Lee, frown not: I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man +and one book this country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and +"WE." Set me upon a coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate +the world with dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a +breeding-ground for a whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the +New Haven Railroad.</p> +<p>But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I +the stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of +obesity) of Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets +of sky my yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by +prismatic omissions and plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster +spirals and eddies of all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, +weaving a new economics and a new bosom for advertisiarchs in the +mere act of brushing his teeth. But alas, the recurring explosions +of the loathsome and intellectual disease keep my nose on the +grindstone—or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on upward +pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief.</p> +<p>The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a +constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering +voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to +set him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over +his thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a +locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his +mind has shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, +and Nourishment: his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract +thought; words assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down +among them, overborne and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that +millionaires are bound down and tethered and stifled by their +limousines and coupons and factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee +himself, who is a millionaire and landed proprietor of ideas, is +equally the slave of his thronging words. They cluster about him +like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely impeding his progress. He +is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine sentences. He ought to be +confined to an eight-hour paragraph.</p> +<p>All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is +one who has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer +has lost control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a +packet of Roman candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our +village is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by +ragweed, on the east by chickweed, and on the west by a sleepless +night.</p> +<p>I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss +it, but that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of +thought, those grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind +shimmering like a poplar tree in sun and wind—jetting and +spouting like plumbing after a freeze-up—'tis beyond me. I +fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the sheets were untucked at +his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent and dove-throated and +opaline a philosophy of the desirability of sleeping with cold +feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of bed to +rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else to +do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever!</p> +<p>And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what +you think you think, effervescence of that kind always results.</p> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<a name='APPENDIX' id="APPENDIX"></a><br> +<h2>APPENDIX</h2> +<h3>SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS</h3> +<br> +<p>This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use +by teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is +recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds +have become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not +hold himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and +reserves the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual +pressure.</p> +<p>For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found +valuable for classroom consideration:</p> +<div class='blkquot'> +<p>1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral +purpose in this book?</p> +<p>2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth +Stockton to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his +income.</p> +<p>3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example.</p> +<p>4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) vers libre poets</li> +<li>(b) beefsteak and onions</li> +<li>(c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail)</li> +<li>(d) The Republican Party</li> +</ul> +<p>5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he +notable?</p> +<p>6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The +Head of the Firm"?</p> +<p>8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, +1911?</p> +<p>9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of?</p> +<p>10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why?</p> +<p>11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in +Kings, Long Island?</p> +<p>12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the +tourist? Explain</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) The Gin Palace</li> +<li>(b) Kurdmeister</li> +<li>(c) unedifying Zollverein</li> +</ul> +<p>13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home?</p> +<p>14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three +examples.</p> +<p>15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do?</p> +<p>16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the +ideal conditions for a morning pipe.</p> +<p>17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace?</p> +<p>18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a +credit to the profession.</p> +<p>19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal ascend the +stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher? Why "in +vain"?</p> +<p>20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith +classify himself?</p> +<p>21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the +context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate?</p> +<p>22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying +about the floor?</p> +<p>28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel +Lindsay?</p> +<p>24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against +Mr. Richard Le Gallienne?</p> +<p>25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous +carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their +waistcoats?</p> +<p>26. What is <i>minestrone</i>? Name three ingredients.</p> +<p>27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke +pipes?</p> +<p>28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox?</p> +<p>29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like +this book.</p> +<p>30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb +by the hand?</p> +<p>31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on +these phrases:</p> +<ul style='list-style: none;'> +<li>(a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables</li> +<li>(b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles</li> +<li>(c) Scawfell become Mount Tom</li> +</ul> +</div> +<hr style='width: 65%;'> +<br> +<h2>FINIS CORONAT OPUS</h2> +<br> +<br> +<br> +<hr class="full" noshade> +<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF***</p> +<p>******* This file should be named 13739-h.txt or 13739-h.zip *******</p> +<p>This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:<br /> +<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/7/3/13739">https://www.gutenberg.org/1/3/7/3/13739</a></p> +<p>Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed.</p> + +<p>Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + + + + +Title: Shandygaff + +Author: Christopher Morley + +Release Date: October 13, 2004 [eBook #13739] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) + + +***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF*** + + +E-text prepared by Stephen Schulze and the Project Gutenberg Online +Distributed Proofreading Team + + + +SHANDYGAFF + +by + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY + +1918 + + + + + + + +A number of most agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life & Letters, +interspersed with Short Stories & Skits, the whole most Diverting to +the Reader + + + +[Illustration: Photo by Charles H. Davis + +CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AUTHOR OF SHANDYGAFF, WHERE THE BLUE BEGINS, THUNDER +ON THE LEFT, ETC.] + + + + +TITLES AND DEDICATIONS + +I wanted to call these exercises "Casual Ablutions," in memory of the +immortal sign in the washroom of the British Museum, but my arbiter of +elegance forbade it. You remember that George Gissing, homeless and +penniless on London streets, used to enjoy the lavatory of the Museum +Reading Room as a fountain and a shrine. But the flinty hearted +trustees, finding him using the wash-stand for bath-tub and laundry, +were exceeding wroth, and set up the notice + + +----------------------------+ + | | + | THESE BASINS ARE FOR | + | CASUAL ABLUTIONS ONLY | + | | + +----------------------------+ + +I would like to issue the same warning to the implacable reader: these +fugitive pieces, very casual rinsings in the great basin of letters, +must not be too bitterly resented, even by their publishers. To borrow +O. Henry's joke, they are more demitasso than Tasso. + +The real purpose in writing books is to have the pleasure of dedicating +them to someone, and here I am in a quandary. So many dedications have +occurred to me, it seems only fair to give them all a chance. + + I thought of dedicating the book to + CLAYTON SEDGWICK COOPER + The Laird of Westcolang + + I thought of dedicating to the + TWO BEST BOOK SHOPS IN THE WORLD + Blackwell's in Oxford and + Leary's in Philadelphia + + I thought of dedicating to + THE 8:13 TRAIN + + I thought of dedicating to + EDWARD PAGE ALLINSON + The Squire of Town's End Farm + Better known as Mifflin McGill + In affectionate memory of + Many unseasonable jests + + I thought of dedicating to + PROFESSOR FRANCIS B. GUMMERE + From an erring pupil + + I thought of dedicating to + FRANCIS R. BELLAMY + Author of "The Balance" + Whose Talent I Revere, + But Whose Syntax I Deplore + + I thought of dedicating to + JOHN N. BEFFEL + My First Editor + Who insisted on taking me seriously + + I thought of dedicating to + GUY S.K. WHEELER + The Lion Cub + + I thought of dedicating to + ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY + The Urbanolater + + I thought of dedicating to + SILAS ORRIN HOWES + Faithful Servant of Letters + + But my final and irrevocable decision is to dedicate this book to + THE MIEHLE PRINTING PRESS + More Sinned Against Than Sinning + + * * * * * + +For permission to reprint, I denounce The New York _Evening Post_, The +Boston _Transcript_, The _Bellman_, The _Smart Set_, The New York _Sun_, +The New York _Evening Sun_, The _American Oxonian_, _Collier's_, and The +_Ladies' Home Journal_. + +Wyncote, Pa. + +November. 1917. + + + +SHANDYGAFF: a very refreshing drink, being a mixture of bitter ale or +beer and ginger-beer, commonly drunk by the lower classes in England, +and by strolling tinkers, low church parsons, newspaper men, +journalists, and prizefighters. Said to have been invented by Henry VIII +as a solace for his matrimonial difficulties. It is believed that a +continual bibbing of shandygaff saps the will, the nerves, the +resolution, and the finer faculties, but there are those who will abide +no other tipple. + +John Mistletoe: _Dictionary of Deplorable Facts_. + + + + +CONTENTS + +The Song of Shandygaff +Titles and Dedications +A Question of Plumage +Don Marquis +The Art of Walking +Rupert Brooke +The Man +The Head of the Firm +17 Heriot Row +Frank Confessions of a Publisher's Reader +William McFee +Rhubarb +The Haunting Beauty of Strychnine +Ingo +Housebroken +The Hilarity of Hilaire +A Casual of the Sea +The Last Pipe +Time to Light the Furnace +My Friend +A Poet of Sad Vigils +Trivia +Prefaces +The Skipper +A Friend of FitzGerald +A Venture in Mysticism +An Oxford Landlady +"Peacock Pie" +The Literary Pawnshop +A Morning in Marathon +The American House of Lords +Cotswold Winds +Clouds +Unhealthy +Confessions of a Smoker +Hay Febrifuge +Appendix: Suggestions for Teachers. + + + + +A QUESTION OF PLUMAGE + +Kenneth Stockton was a man of letters, and correspondingly poor. He was +the literary editor of a leading metropolitan daily; but this job only +netted him fifty dollars a week, and he was lucky to get that much. The +owner of the paper was powerfully in favour of having the reviews done +by the sporting editor, and confining them to the books of those +publishers who bought advertising space. This simple and statesmanlike +view the owner had frequently expressed in Mr. Stockton's hearing, so +the latter was never very sure how long his job would continue. + +But Mr. Stockton had a house, a wife, and four children in New Utrecht, +that very ingenious suburb of Brooklyn. He had worked the problem out to +a nicety long ago. If he did not bring home, on the average, eighty +dollars a week, his household would cease to revolve. It simply had to +be done. The house was still being paid for on the installment plan. +There were plumbers' bills, servant's wages, clothes and schooling for +the children, clothes for the wife, two suits a year for himself, and +the dues of the Sheepshead Golf Club--his only extravagance. A simple +middle-class routine, but one that, once embarked upon, turns into a +treadmill. As I say, eighty dollars a week would just cover expenses. To +accumulate any savings, pay for life insurance, and entertain friends, +Stockton had to rise above that minimum. If in any week he fell below +that figure he could not lie abed at night and "snort his fill," as the +Elizabethan song naively puts it. + +There you have the groundwork of many a domestic drama. + +Mr. Stockton worked pretty hard at the newspaper office to earn his +fifty dollars. He skimmed faithfully all the books that came in, wrote +painstaking reviews, and took care to run cuts on his literary page on +Saturdays "to give the stuff kick," as the proprietor ordered. Though he +did so with reluctance, he was forced now and then to approach the book +publishers on the subject of advertising. He gave earnest and honest +thought to his literary department, and was once praised by Mr. Howells +in _Harper's Magazine_ for the honourable quality of his criticisms. + +But Mr. Stockton, like most men, had only a certain fund of energy and +enthusiasm at his disposal. His work on the paper used up the first +fruits of his zeal and strength. After that came his article on current +poetry, written (unsigned) for a leading imitation literary weekly. The +preparation of this involved a careful perusal of at least fifty +journals, both American and foreign, and I blush to say it brought him +only fifteen dollars a week. He wrote a weekly "New York Letter" for a +Chicago paper of bookish tendencies, in which he told with a flavour of +intimacy the goings on of literary men in Manhattan whom he never had +time or opportunity to meet. This article was paid for at space rates, +which are less in Chicago than in New York. On this count he averaged +about six dollars a week. + +That brings us up to seventy-one dollars, and also pretty close to the +limit of our friend's endurance. The additional ten dollars or so needed +for the stability of the Stockton exchequer he earned in various ways. +Neighbours in New Utrecht would hear his weary typewriter clacking far +into the night. He wrote short stories, of only fair merit; and he wrote +"Sunday stories," which is the lowest depth to which a self-respecting +lover of literature can fall. Once in a while he gave a lecture on +poetry, but he was a shy man, and he never was asked to lecture twice in +the same place. By almost incredible exertions of courage and obstinacy +he wrote a novel, which was published, and sold 2,580 copies the first +year. His royalties on this amounted to $348.30--not one-third as much, +he reflected sadly, as Irvin Cobb would receive for a single short +story. He even did a little private tutoring at his home, giving the +sons of some of his friends lessons in English literature. + +It is to be seen that Mr. Stockton's relatives, back in Indiana, were +wrong when they wrote to him admiringly--as they did twice a +year--asking for loans, and praising the bold and debonair life of a man +of letters in the great city. They did not know that for ten years Mr. +Stockton had refused the offers of his friends to put him up for +membership at the literary club to which his fancy turned so fondly and +so often. He could not afford it. When friends from out of town called +on him, he took them to Peck's for a French table d'hote, with an +apologetic murmur. + +But it is not to be thought that Mr. Stockton was unhappy or +discontented. Those who have experienced the excitements of the +existence where one lives from hand to mouth and back to hand again, +with rarely more than fifty cents of loose change in pocket, know that +there is even a kind of pleasurable exhilaration in it. The characters +in George Gissing's Grub Street stories would have thought Stockton +rich indeed with his fifty-dollar salary. But he was one of those +estimable men who have sense enough to give all their money to their +wives and keep none in their trousers. And though his life was arduous +and perhaps dull to outward view, he was a passionate lover of books, +and in his little box at the back of the newspaper office, smoking a +corncob and thumping out his reviews, he was one of the happiest men in +New York. His thirst for books was a positive bulimia; how joyful he was +when he found time to do a little work on his growing sheaf of literary +essays, which he intended to call "Casual Ablutions," after the famous +sign in the British Museum washroom. + +It was Mr. Stockton's custom to take a trolley as far as the Brooklyn +bridge, and thence it was a pleasant walk to the office on Park Row. +Generally he left home about ten o'clock, thus avoiding the rush of +traffic in the earlier hours; and loitering a little along the way, as +becomes a man of ideas, his article on poetry would jell in his mind, +and he would be at his desk a little after eleven. There he would work +until one o'clock with the happy concentration of those who enjoy their +tasks. At that time he would go out for a bite of lunch, and would then +be at his desk steadily from two until six. Dinner at home was at seven, +and after that he worked persistently in his little den under the roof +until past midnight. + +One morning in spring he left New Utrecht in a mood of perplexity, for +to-day his even routine was in danger of interruption. Halfway across +the bridge Stockton paused in some confusion of spirit to look down on +the shining river and consider his course. + +A year or so before this time, in gathering copy for his poetry +articles, he had first come across the name of Finsbury Verne in an +English journal at the head of some exquisite verses. From time to time +he found more of this writer's lyrics in the English magazines, and at +length he had ventured a graceful article of appreciation. It happened +that he was the first in this country to recognize Verne's talent, and +to his great delight he had one day received a very charming letter from +the poet himself, thanking him for his understanding criticism. + +Stockton, though a shy and reticent man, had the friendliest nature in +the world, and some underlying spirit of kinship in Verne's letter +prompted him to warm response. Thus began a correspondence which was a +remarkable pleasure to the lonely reviewer, who knew no literary men, +although his life was passed among books. Hardly dreaming that they +would ever meet, he had insisted on a promise that if Verne should ever +visit the States he would make New Utrecht his headquarters. And now, on +this very morning, there had come a wireless message via Seagate, saying +that Verne was on a ship which would dock that afternoon. + +The dilemma may seem a trifling one, but to Stockton's sensitive nature +it was gross indeed. He and his wife knew that they could offer but +little to make the poet's visit charming. New Utrecht, on the way to +Coney Island, is not a likely perching ground for poets; the house was +small, shabby, and the spare room had long ago been made into a workshop +for the two boys, where they built steam engines and pasted rotogravure +pictures from the Sunday editions on the walls. The servant was an +enormous coloured mammy, with a heart of ruddy gold, but in appearance +she was pure Dahomey. The bathroom plumbing was out of order, the +drawing-room rug was fifteen years old, even the little lawn in front of +the house needed trimming, and the gardener would not be round for +several days. And Verne had given them only a few hours' notice. How +like a poet! + +In his letters Stockton had innocently boasted of the pleasant time they +would have when the writer should come to visit. He had spoken of +evenings beside the fire when they would talk for hours of the things +that interest literary men. What would Verne think when he found the +hearth only a gas log, and one that had a peculiarly offensive odour? +This sickly sweetish smell had become in years of intimacy very dear to +Stockton, but he could hardly expect a poet who lived in Well Walk, +Hampstead (O Shades of Keats!), and wrote letters from a London literary +club, to understand that sort of thing. Why, the man was a grandson of +Jules Verne, and probably had been accustomed to refined surroundings +all his life. And now he was doomed to plumb the sub-fuse depths of New +Utrecht! + +Stockton could not even put him up at a club, as he belonged to none but +the golf club, which had no quarters for the entertainment of +out-of-town guests. Every detail of his home life was of the shabby, +makeshift sort which is so dear to one's self but needs so much +explaining to outsiders. He even thought with a pang of Lorna Doone, the +fat, plebeian little mongrel terrier which had meals with the family and +slept with the children at night. Verne was probably used to staghounds +or Zeppelin hounds or something of the sort, he thought humorously. +English poets wear an iris halo in the eyes of humble American +reviewers. Those godlike creatures have walked on Fleet Street, have +bought books on Paternoster Row, have drunk half-and-half and eaten +pigeon pie at the Salutation and Cat, and have probably roared with +laughter over some alehouse jest of Mr. Chesterton. + +Stockton remembered the photograph Verne had sent him, showing a lean, +bearded face with wistful dark eyes against a background of old folios. +What would that Olympian creature think of the drudge of New Utrecht, a +mere reviewer who sold his editorial copies to pay for shag tobacco! + +Well, thought Stockton, as he crossed the bridge, rejoicing not at all +in the splendid towers of Manhattan, candescent in the April sun, they +had done all they could. He had left his wife telephoning frantically to +grocers, cleaning women, and florists. He himself had stopped at the +poultry market on his way to the trolley to order two plump fowls for +dinner, and had pinched them with his nervous, ink-stained fingers, as +ordered by Mrs. Stockton, to test their tenderness. They would send the +three younger children to their grandmother, to be interned there until +the storm had blown over; and Mrs. Stockton was going to do what she +could to take down the rotogravure pictures from the walls of what the +boys fondly called the Stockton Art Gallery. He knew that Verne had +children of his own: perhaps he would be amused rather than dismayed by +the incongruities of their dismantled guestroom. Presumably, the poet +was aver here for a lecture tour--he would be entertained and feted +everywhere by the cultured rich, for the appreciation which Stockton had +started by his modest little essay had grown to the dimension of a fad. + +He looked again at the telegram which had shattered the simple routine +of his unassuming life. "On board Celtic dock this afternoon three +o'clock hope see you. Verne." He sneezed sharply, as was his unconscious +habit when nervous. In desperation he stopped at a veterinary's office +on Frankfort Street, and left orders to have the doctor's assistant call +for Lorna Doone and take her away, to be kept until sent for. Then he +called at a wine merchant's and bought three bottles of claret of a +moderate vintage. Verne had said something about claret in one of his +playful letters. Unfortunately, the man's grandfather was a Frenchman, +and undoubtedly he knew all about wines. + +Stockton sneezed so loudly and so often at his desk that morning that +all his associates knew something was amiss. The Sunday editor, who had +planned to borrow fifty cents from him at lunch time, refrained from +doing so, in a spirit of pure Christian brotherhood. Even Bob Bolles, +the hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-week conductor of "The Electric Chair," +the paper's humorous column, came in to see what was up. Bob's +"contribs" had been generous that morning, and he was in unusually good +humour for a humourist. + +"What's the matter, Stock," he inquired genially, "Got a cold? Or has +George Moore sent in a new novel?" + +Stockton looked up sadly from the proofs he was correcting. How could he +confess his paltry problem to this debonair creature who wore life +lightly, like a flower, and played at literature as he played tennis, +with swerve and speed? Bolles was a bachelor, the author of a successful +comedy, and a member of the smart literary club which was over the +reviewer's horizon, although in the great ocean of letters the humourist +was no more than a surf bather. Stockton shook his head. No one but a +married man and an unsuccessful author could understand his trouble. + +"A touch of asthma," he fibbed shyly. "I always have it at this time of +year." + +"Come and have some lunch," said the other. "We'll go up to the club and +have some ale. That'll put you on your feet." + +"Thanks, ever so much," said Stockton, "but I can't do it to-day. Got to +make up my page. I tell you what, though--" + +He hesitated, and flushed a little. + +"Say it," said Bolles kindly. + +"Verne is in town to-day; the English poet, you know. Grandson of old +Jules Verne. I'm going to put him up at my house. I wish you'd take him +around to the club for lunch some day while he's here. He ought to meet +some of the men there. I've been corresponding with him for a long time, +and I--I'm afraid I rather promised to take him round there, as though I +were a member, you know." + +"Great snakes!" cried Bolles. "Verne? the author of 'Candle Light'? And +you're going to put him up? You lucky devil. Why, the man's bigger than +Masefield. Take him to lunch--I should say I will; Why, I'll put him in +the colyum. Both of you come round there to-morrow and we'll have an +orgy. I'll order larks' tongues and convolvulus salad. I didn't know you +knew him." + +"I don't--yet," said Stockton. "I'm going down to meet his steamer this +afternoon." + +"Well, that's great news," said the volatile humourist. And he ran +downstairs to buy the book of which he had so often heard but had never +read. + +The sight of Bolles' well-cut suit of tweeds had reminded Stockton that +he was still wearing the threadbare serge that had done duty for three +winters, and would hardly suffice for the honours to come. Hastily he +blue-pencilled his proofs, threw them into the wire basket, and hurried +outdoors to seek the nearest tailor. He stopped at the bank first, to +draw out fifty dollars for emergencies. Then he entered the first +clothier's shop he encountered on Nassau Street. + +Mr. Stockton was a nervous man, especially so in the crises when he was +compelled to buy anything so important as a suit, for usually Mrs. +Stockton supervised the selection. To-day his Unlucky star was in the +zenith. His watch pointed to close on two o'clock, and he was afraid he +might be late for the steamer, which docked far uptown. In his haste, +and governed perhaps by some subconscious recollection of the +humourist's attractive shaggy tweeds, he allowed himself to be fitted +with an ochre-coloured suit of some fleecy checked material grotesquely +improper for his unassuming figure. It was the kind of cloth and cut +that one sees only in the windows of Nassau Street. Happily he was +unaware of the enormity of his offence against society, and rapidly +transferring his belongings to the new pockets, he paid down the +purchase price and fled to the subway. + +When he reached the pier at the foot of Fourteenth Street he saw that +the steamer was still in midstream and it would be several minutes +before she warped in to the dock. He had no pass from the steamship +office, but on showing his newspaperman's card the official admitted him +to the pier, and he took his stand at the first cabin gangway, trembling +a little with nervousness, but with a pleasant feeling of excitement no +less. He gazed at the others waiting for arriving travellers and +wondered whether any of the peers of American letters had come to meet +the poet. A stoutish, neatly dressed gentleman with a gray moustache +looked like Mr. Howells, and he thrilled again. It was hardly possible +that he, the obscure reviewer, was the only one who had been notified of +Verne's arrival. That tall, hawk-faced man whose limousine was purring +outside must be a certain publisher he knew by sight. + +What would these gentlemen say when they learned that the poet was to +stay with Kenneth Stockton, in New Utrecht? He rolled up the +mustard-coloured trousers one more round--they were much too long for +him--and watched the great hull slide along the side of the pier with a +peculiar tingling shudder that he had not felt since the day of his +wedding. + +He expected no difficulty in recognizing Finsbury Verne, for he was very +familiar with his photograph. As the passengers poured down the +slanting gangway, all bearing the unmistakable air and stamp of +superiority that marks those who have just left the sacred soil of +England, he scanned the faces with an eye of keen regard. To his +surprise he saw the gentlemen he had marked respectively as Mr. Howells +and the publisher greet people who had not the slightest resemblance to +the poet, and go with them to the customs alcoves. Traveller after +traveller hurried past him, followed by stewards carrying luggage; +gradually the flow of people thinned, and then stopped altogether, save +for one or two invalids who were being helped down the incline by +nurses. And still no sign of Finsbury Verne. + +Suddenly a thought struck him. Was it possible that--the second class? +His eye brightened and he hurried to the gangway, fifty yards farther +down the pier, where the second-cabin passengers were disembarking. + +There were more of the latter, and the passageway was still thronged. +Just as Stockton reached the foot of the plank a little man in green +ulster and deerstalker cap, followed by a plump little woman and four +children in single file, each holding fast to the one in front like +Alpine climbers, came down the narrow bridge, taking almost ludicrous +care not to slip on the cleated boards. To his amazement the reviewer +recognized the dark beard and soulful eyes of the poet. + +Mr. Verne clutched in rigid arms, not a roll of manuscripts, but a +wriggling French poodle, whose tufted tail waved under the poet's chin. +The lady behind him, evidently his wife, as she clung steadfastly to the +skirt of his ulster, held tightly in the other hand a large glass jar in +which two agitated goldfish were swimming, while the four children +watched their parents with anxious eyes for the safety of their pets. +"Daddy, look out for Ink!" shrilled one of them, as the struggles of the +poodle very nearly sent him into the water under the ship's side. Two +smiling stewards with mountainous portmanteaux followed the party. +"Mother, are Castor and Pollux all right?" cried the smallest child, and +promptly fell on his nose on the gangway, disrupting the file. + +Stockton, with characteristic delicacy, refrained from making himself +known until the Vernes had recovered from the embarrassments of leaving +the ship. He followed them at a distance to the "V" section where they +waited for the customs examination. With mingled feelings he saw that +Finsbury Verne was no cloud-walking deity, but one even as himself, +indifferently clad, shy and perplexed of eye, worried with the comic +cares of a family man. All his heart warmed toward the poet, who stood +in his bulging greatcoat, perspiring and aghast at the uproar around +him. He shrank from imagining what might happen when he appeared at home +with the whole family, but without hesitation he approached and +introduced himself. + +Verne's eyes shone with unaffected pleasure at the meeting, and he +presented the reviewer to his wife and the children, two boys and two +girls. The two boys, aged about ten and eight, immediately uttered +cryptic remarks which Stockton judged were addressed to him. + +"Castorian!" cried the larger boy, looking at the yellow suit. + +"Polluxite!" piped the other in the same breath. + +Mrs. Verne, in some embarrassment, explained that the boys were in the +throes of a new game they had invented on the voyage. They had created +two imaginary countries, named in honour of the goldfish, and it was now +their whim to claim for their respective countries any person or thing +that struck their fancy. "Castoria was first," said Mrs. Verne, "so you +must consider yourself a citizen of that nation." + +Somewhat shamefaced at this sudden honour, Mr. Stockton turned to the +poet. "You're all coming home with me, aren't you?" he said. "I got your +telegram this morning. We'd be delighted to have you." + +"It's awfully good of you," said the poet, "but as a matter of fact +we're going straight on to the country to-morrow morning. My wife has +some relatives in Yonkers, wherever they are, and she and the children +are going to stay with them. I've got to go up to Harvard to give some +lectures." + +A rush of cool, sweet relief bathed Stockton's brow. + +"Why, I'm disappointed you're going right on," he stammered. "Mrs. +Stockton and I were hoping--" + +"My dear fellow, we could never impose such a party on your +hospitality," said Verne. "Perhaps you can recommend us to some quiet +hotel where we can stay the night." + +Like all New Yorkers, Stockton could hardly think of the name of any +hotel when asked suddenly. At first he said the Astor House, and then +remembered that it had been demolished years before. At last he +recollected that a brother of his from Indiana had once stayed at the +Obelisk. + +After the customs formalities were over--not without embarrassment, as +Mr. Verne's valise when opened displayed several pairs of bright red +union suits and a half-empty bottle of brandy--Stockton convoyed them to +a taxi. Noticing the frayed sleeve of the poet's ulster he felt quite +ashamed of the aggressive newness of his clothes. And when the visitors +whirled away, after renewed promises for a meeting a little later in the +spring, he stood for a moment in a kind of daze. Then he hurried toward +the nearest telephone booth. + +As the Vernes sat at dinner that night in the Abyssinian Room of the +Obelisk Hotel, the poet said to his wife: "It would have been delightful +to spend a few days with the Stocktons." + +"My dear," said she, "I wouldn't have these wealthy Americans see how +shabby we are for anything. The children are positively in rags, and +your clothes--well, I don't know what they'll think at Harvard. You know +if this lecture trip doesn't turn out well we shall be simply bankrupt." + +The poet sighed. "I believe Stockton has quite a charming place in the +country near New York," he said. + +"That may be so," said Mrs. Verne. "But did you ever see such clothes? +He looked like a canary." + + + + +DON MARQUIS + + +There is nothing more pathetic than the case of the author who is the +victim of a supposedly critical essay. You hold him in the hollow of +your hand. You may praise him for his humour when he wants to be +considered a serious and saturnine dog. You may extol his songs of war +and passion when he yearns to be esteemed a light, jovial merryandrew +with never a care in the world save the cellar plumbing. You may utterly +misrepresent him, and hang some albatross round his neck that will be +offensive to him forever. You may say that he hails from Brooklyn +Heights when the fact is that he left there two years ago and now lives +in Port Washington. You may even (for instance) call him stout.... + +Don Marquis was born in 1878; reckoning by tens, '88, '98, '08--well, +call it forty. He is burly, ruddy, gray-haired, and fond of corncob +pipes, dark beer, and sausages. He looks a careful blend of Falstaff and +Napoleon III. He has conducted the Sun Dial in the New York _Evening +Sun_ since 1912. He stands out as one of the most penetrating satirists +and resonant scoffers at folderol that this continent nourishes. He is +far more than a colyumist: he is a poet--a kind of Meredithian +Prometheus chained to the roar and clank of a Hoe press. He is a +novelist of Stocktonian gifts, although unfortunately for us he writes +the first half of a novel easier than the second. And I think that in +his secret heart and at the bottom of the old haircloth round-top trunk +he is a dramatist. + +He good-naturedly deprecates that people praise "Archy the Vers Libre +Cockroach" and clamour for more; while "Hermione," a careful and cutting +satire on the follies of pseudokultur near the Dewey Arch, elicits only +"a mild, mild smile." As he puts it: + + A chair broke down in the midst of a Bernard Shaw comedy the other + evening. Everybody laughed. They had been laughing before from time + to time. That was because it was a Shaw comedy. But when the chair + broke they roared. We don't blame them for roaring, but it makes us + sad. + + The purveyor of intellectual highbrow wit and humour pours his soul + into the business of capturing a few refined, appreciative grins in + the course of a lifetime, grins that come from the brain; he is more + than happy if once or twice in a generation he can get a cerebral + chuckle--and then Old Boob Nature steps in and breaks a chair or + flings a fat man down on the ice and the world laughs with, all its + heart and soul. + +Don Marquis recognizes as well as any one the value of the slapstick as +a mirth-provoking instrument. (All hail to the slapstick! it was well +known at the Mermaid Tavern, we'll warrant.) But he prefers the rapier. +Probably his Savage Portraits, splendidly truculent and slashing +sonnets, are among the finest pieces he has done. + +The most honourable feature of Marquis's writing, the "small thing to +look for but the big thing to find," is its quality of fine workmanship. +The swamis and prophets of piffle, the Bhandranaths and Fothergill +Finches whom he detests, can only create in an atmosphere specially +warmed, purged and rose-watered for their moods. Marquis has emerged +from the underworld of newspaper print just by his heroic ability to +transform the commonest things into tools for his craft. Much of his +best and subtlest work has been clacked out on a typewriter standing on +an upturned packing box. (When the _American Magazine_ published a +picture of him at work on his packing case the supply man of the _Sun_ +got worried, and gave him a regular desk.) Newspaper men are a hardy +race. Who but a man inured to the squalour of a newspaper office would +dream of a cockroach as a hero? Archy was born in the old _Sun_ +building, now demolished, once known as Vermin Castle. + +"Publishing a volume of verse," Don has plaintively observed, "is like +dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting to hear the +echo." Yet if the petal be authentic rose, the answer will surely come. +Some poets seek to raft oblivion by putting on frock coats and reading +their works aloud to the women's clubs. Don Marquis has no taste for +that sort of mummery. But little by little his potent, yeasty verses, +fashioned from the roaring loom of every day, are winning their way into +circulation. Any reader who went to _Dreams and Dust_ (poems, published +October, 1915) expecting to find light and waggish laughter, was on a +blind quest. In that book speaks the hungry and visionary soul of this +man, quick to see beauty and grace in common things, quick to question +the answerless face of life-- + + Still mounts the dream on shining pinion, + Still broods the dull distrust; + Which shall have ultimate dominion, + Dream, or dust? + +Heavy men are light on their feet: it takes stout poets to write nimble +verses (Mr. Chesterton, for instance). Don Marquis has something of +Dobsonian cunning to set his musings to delicate, austere music. He can +turn a rondeau or a triolet as gracefully as a paying teller can roll +Durham cigarettes. + +How neat this is: + + TO A DANCING DOLL + + Formal, quaint, precise, and trim, + You begin your steps demurely-- + There's a spirit almost prim + In the feet that move so surely. + So discreetly, to the chime + Of the music that so sweetly + Marks the time. + + But the chords begin to tinkle + Quicker, + And your feet they flash and flicker-- + Twinkle!-- + Flash and flutter to a tricksy + Fickle meter; + And you foot it like a pixie-- + Only fleeter! + + Not our current, dowdy + Things-- + "Turkey trots" and rowdy + Flings-- + For they made you overseas + In politer times than these + In an age when grace could please, + Ere St. Vitus + Clutched and shook us, spine and knees; + Loosed a plague of jerks to smite us! + +But Marquis is more than the arbiter of dainty elegances in rhyme: he +sings and celebrates a robust world where men struggle upward from the +slime and discontent leaps from star to star. The evolutionary theme is +a favourite with him: the grand pageant of humanity groping from +Piltdown to Beacon Hill, winning in a million years two precarious +inches of forehead. Much more often than F.P.A., who used to be his +brother colyumist in Manhattan, he dares to disclose the real +earnestness that underlies his chaff. + +I suppose that the conductor of a daily humorous column stands in the +hierarchy of unthanked labourers somewhere between a plumber and a +submarine trawler. Most of the available wheezes were pulled long ago by +Plato in the _Republic_ (not the _New Republic_) or by Samuel Butler in +his Notebooks. Contribs come valiantly to hand with a barrowful of +letters every day--("The ravings fed him" as Don captioned some +contrib's quip about Simeon Stylites living on a column); but +nevertheless the direct and alternating current must be turned on six +times a week. His jocular exposal of the colyumist's trade secret +compares it to the boarding-house keeper's rotation of crops: + + MONDAY. Take up an idea in a serious way. (ROAST BEEF.) + + TUESDAY. Some one writes us a letter about Monday's serious idea. + (COLD ROAST BEEF.) + + WEDNESDAY. Josh the idea we took up seriously on Monday. (BEEF + STEW.) + + THURSDAY. Some one takes issue with us for Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea. (BEEFSTEAK PIE.) + + FRIDAY. We become a little pensive about our Wednesday's josh of + Monday's serious idea--there creeps into our copy a more subdued, + sensible note, as if we were acknowledging that after all, the main + business of life is not mere harebrained word-play. (HASH OR + CROQUETTES WITH GREEN PEPPERS.) + + SATURDAY. Spoof the whole thing again, especially spoofing ourself + for having ever taken it seriously. (BEEF SOUP WITH BARLEY IN IT.) + + SUNDAY. There isn't any evening paper on Sunday. That is where we + have the advantage of the boarding-house keepers. + +But the beauty of Don's cuisine is that the beef soup with barley always +tastes as good as, or even better than, the original roast. His dry +battery has generated in the past few years a dozen features with real +voltage--the Savage Portraits, Hermione, Archy the Vers Libre Cockroach, +the Aptronymic Scouts, French Without a Struggle, Suggestions to Popular +Song Writers, Our Own Wall Mottoes, and the sequence of Prefaces (to an +Almanac, a Mileage Book, The Plays of Euripides, a Diary, a Book of +Fishhooks, etc.). Some of Marquis's most admirable and delicious fooling +has been poured into these Prefaces: I hope that he will put them +between book-covers. + +One day I got a letter from a big engineering firm in Ohio, enclosing a +number of pay-envelopes (empty). They wanted me to examine the aphorisms +and orisonswettmardenisms they had been printing on their weekly +envelopes, for the inspiration and peptonizing of their employees. They +had been using quotations from Emerson, McAdoo, and other panhellenists, +and had run out of "sentiments." They wanted suggestions as to where +they could find more. + +I advised them to get in touch with Don Marquis. I don't know whether +they did so or not; but Don's epigrams and bon mots would adorn any +pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey would do +more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel of tracts. + + By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he + orders, there is little else about him worth knowing. + + If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know + you are loafing? + + Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that + minorities are always right. + + Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. + The woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart. + + I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising + young man for twenty years. + +In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the +mirthquake: + + If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it. + + If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the + little ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper + colour--the girl will marry the other man--the public will cry, + Bedamned to him! he can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its + revelations of divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will + find there are not enough rhymes in the language to finish your + ballade--the primrose by the river's brim will be only a hayfever + carrier--and your fountain pen will dribble ink upon your best + trousers. + +But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite +denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the +gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to register a +clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance this, +just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with Germany: + + This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth + Bull-thewed, iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... + As Earth, who spawned and lessoned him, + Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, + Armoured the skull and braced the heavy limb-- + Who frowned above him, proud and grim, + While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore + Of fire and steel and stone and war: + She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the worth + + Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... + His shape is Man, his mood is Dinosaur. + + Tip from the wild red Welter of the past + Foaming he comes: let this rush, be his last. + + Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. + We have been slow as doom. Our dead + Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed-- + We have denied each pleading ghost-- + We have been slow: God, make us sure. + We have been slow. Grant we endure + Unto the uttermost, the uttermost. + + Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? + Then weld our diverse millions, Lord, + Into one single swinging sword. + +I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is +disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this +sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives +of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the +press: + + Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be + disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has + swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up + again. + +Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all +its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of +more meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that +furnace out in Port Washington, and more on your novels! + +There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than +the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the +past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or +three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily newspaper +some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have been glad +to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be impossible to +give a complete list, but among them are William Rose Benet, Clinton +Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres, Gelett Burgess, Georgia +Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement Wood. + +But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it +the harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day +long they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope +of getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down +on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his +queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his +only expedient is to take them over to the gin cathedral across the +street and buy them a drink. Lately the poor wretch has had to write +his Dial out in the pampas of Long Island, bringing it in with him in +the afternoon, in order to get it done undisturbed. How many times I +have sworn never to bother him again! And yet, when one is passing in +that neighbourhood, the temptation is irresistible.... I dare say Ben +Jonson had the same trouble. Of course someone ought to endow Don and +set him permanently at the head of a chophouse table, presiding over a +kind of Mermaid coterie of robust wits. He is a master of the +tavernacular. + +He is a versatile cove. Philosopher, satirist, burlesquer, poet, critic, +and novelist. Perhaps the three critics in this country whose praise is +best worth having, and least easy to win, would be Marquis, Strunsky, +and O.W. Firkins. And I think that the three leading poets male in this +country to-day are Marquis, William Rose Benet, and (perhaps) Vachel +Lindsay. Of course Don Marquis has an immense advantage over Will Benet +in his stoutness. Will had to feed up on honey and candied apricocks and +mares' milk for months before they would admit him to the army. + +Hermione and her little group of "Serious Thinkers" have attained the +dignity of book publication, and now stand on the shelf beside "Danny's +Own Story" and "The Cruise of the Jasper B." This satire on the +azure-pedalled coteries of Washington Square has perhaps received more +publicity than any other of Marquis's writings, but of all Don's +drolleries I reserve my chief affection for Archy. The cockroach, +endowed by some freak of transmigration with the shining soul of a vers +libre poet, is a thoroughly Marquisian whimsy. I make no apology for +quoting this prince of blattidae at some length. Many a commuter, +opening his evening paper on the train, looks first of all to see if +Archy is in the Dial. I love Archy because there seems to me something +thoroughly racial and native and American about him. Can you imagine +him, for instance, in _Punch_? His author has never told us which one of +the vers libre poets it is whose soul has emigrated into Archy, but I +feel sure it is not Ezra Pound or any of the expatriated eccentrics who +lisp in odd numbers in the King's Road, Chelsea. Could it be Amy Lowell? +Perhaps it should be explained that Archy's carelessness as to +punctuation and capitals is not mere ostentation, but arises from the +fact that he is not strong enough to work the shift key of his +typewriter. Ingenious readers of the Sun Dial have suggested many +devices to make this possible, but none that seem feasible to the roach +himself. + +The Argument: Archy, the vers libre cockroach, overhears a person with +whiskers and dressed in the uniform of a butler in the British Navy, ask +a German waiter if the pork pie is built. Ja, Ja, replies the waiter. +Archy's suspicions are awakened, and he climbs into the pork pie through +an air hole, and prepares his soul for parlous times. The naval butler +takes the pie on board a launch, and Archy, watching through one of the +portholes of the pastry, sees that they are picked up by a British +cruiser "an inch or two outside the three-mile line." (This was in +neutral days, remember.) Archy continues the narrative in lower case +agate: + + it is cuthbert with the pork pie the captain has been longing for + said a voice and on every side rang shouts of the pie the pie the + captains pie has come at last and a salute of nineteen guns was + fired the pie was carried at once to the captains mess room where + the captain a grizzled veteran sat with knife and fork in hand and + serviette tucked under his chin i knew cried the captain that if + there was a pork pie in america my faithful cuthbert find it for me + the butler bowed and all the ships officers pulled up their chairs + to the table with a rasping sound you may serve it honest cuthbert + said the captain impatiently and the butler broke a hole in the top + crust he touched a hidden mechanism for immediately something right + under me began to go tick tock tick tock tick tock what is that + noise captain said the larboard mate only the patent log clicking + off the knots said the butler it needs oiling again but cuthbert + said the captain why are you so nervous and what means that flush + upon your face that flush your honor is chicken pox said cuthbert i + am subject to sudden attacks of it unhand that pie cried the ships + surgeon leaping to his feet arrest that butler he is a teuton spy + that is not chicken pox at all it is german measles ha ha cried the + false butler the ship is doomed there is a clock work bomb in this + pie my name is not cuthbert it is friedrich and he leaped through a + port into the sea his blonde side whiskers which were false falling + off as he did so ha ha rang his mocking laughter from the ocean as + he pulled shoreward with long strokes your ship is doomed my god + said the senior boatswain what shall we do stop the clock ordered + the captain but i had already done so i braced my head against the + hour hand and my feet against the minute hand and stopped the + mechanism the captain drew his sword and pried off all the top crust + gentlemen he said yonder cockroach has saved the ship let us throw + the pie overboard and steam rapidly away from it advised the + starboard ensign not so not so cried the captain yon gallant + cockroach must not perish so gratitude is a tradition of the british + navy i would sooner perish with him than desert him all the time the + strain was getting worse on me if my feet slipped the clock would + start again and all would be lost beads of sweat rolled down my + forehead and almost blinded me something must be done quick said the + first assistant captain the insect is losing his rigidity wait said + the surgeon and gave me a hypodermic of some powerful east indian + drug which stiffened me like a cataleptic but i could still see and + hear for days and days a council of war was held about me every + afternoon and wireless reports sent to london save the cockroach + even if you lose the ship wirelessed the admiralty england must + stand by the smaller nations and every hour the surgeon gave me + another hypodermic at the end of four weeks the cabin boy who had + been thinking deeply all the time suggested that a plug of wood be + inserted in my place which was done and i fell to the deck well nigh + exhausted the next day i was set on shore in the captains gig and + here i am. + + archy + +So far as I know, America has made just two entirely original +contributions to the world's types of literary and dramatic art. These +are the humorous colyum and the burlesque show. The saline and robust +repartee of the burlicue is ancient enough in essence, but it is +compounded into a new and uniquely American mode, joyously flavoured +with Broadway garlic. The newspaper colyum, too, is a native product. +Whether Ben Franklin or Eugene Field invented it, it bears the image and +superscription of America. + +And using the word ephemeral in its strict sense, Don Marquis is +unquestionably the cleverest of our ephemeral philosophers. This nation +suffers a good deal from lack of humour in high places: our Great +Pachyderms have all Won their Way to the Top by a Resolute Struggle. But +Don has just chuckled and gone on refusing to answer letters or fill out +Mr. Purinton's blasphemous efficiency charts or join the Poetry Society +or attend community masques. And somehow all these things seem to melt +away, and you look round the map and see Don Marquis taking up all the +scenery.... He has such an oecumenical kind of humour. It's just as true +in Brooklyn as it is in the Bronx. + +He is at his best when he takes up some philosophic dilemma, or some +quaint abstraction (viz., Certainty, Predestination, Idleness, +Uxoricide, Prohibition, Compromise, or Cornutation) and sets the idea +spinning. Beginning slowly, carelessly, in a deceptive, offhand manner, +he lets the toy revolve as it will. Gradually the rotation accelerates; +faster and faster he twirls the thought (sometimes losing a few +spectators whose centripetal powers are not starch enough) until, +chuckling, he holds up the flashing, shimmering conceit, whirling at top +speed and ejaculating sparks. What is so beautiful as a rapidly +revolving idea? Marquis's mind is like a gyroscope: the faster it spins, +the steadier it is. There are laws of dynamics in colyums just as +anywhere else. + +What is there in the nipping air of Galesburg, Illinois, that turns the +young sciolists of Knox College toward the rarefied ethers of +literature? S.S. McClure, John Phillips, Ralph Waldo Trine, Don +Marquis--are there other Knox men in the game, too? Marquis was studying +at Galesburg about the time of the Spanish War. He has worked on half a +dozen newspapers, and assisted Joel Chandler Harris in editing "Uncle +Remus's Magazine." But let him tell his biography in his own words: + + Born July 29, 1878, at Walnut, Bureau Co., Ill., a member of the + Republican party. + + My father was a physician, and I had all the diseases of the time + and place free of charge. + + Nothing further happened to me until, in the summer of 1896, I left + the Republican party to follow the Peerless Leader to defeat. + + In 1900 I returned to the Republican party to accept a position in + the Census Bureau, at Washington, D.C. This position I filled for + some months in a way highly satisfactory to the Government in power. + It is particularly gratifying to me to remember that one evening, + after I had worked unusually hard at the Census Office, the late + President McKinley himself nodded and smiled to me as I passed + through the White House grounds on my way home from toil. He had + heard of my work that day, I had no doubt, and this was his way of + showing me how greatly he appreciated it. + + Nevertheless, shortly after President McKinley paid this public + tribute to the honesty, efficiency and importance of my work in the + Census Office, I left the Republican party again, and accepted a + position as reporter on a Washington paper. + + Upon entering the newspaper business all the troubles of my earlier + years disappeared as if by magic, and I have lived the contented, + peaceful, unworried life of the average newspaper man ever since. + + There is little more to tell. In 1916 I again returned to the + Republican party. This time it was for the express purpose of voting + against Mr. Wilson. Then Mr. Hughes was nominated, and I left the + Republican party again. + + This is the outline of my life in its relation to the times in which + I live. For the benefit of those whose curiosity extends to more + particular details, I add a careful pen-picture of myself. + + It seems more modest, somehow, to put it in the third person: + + Height, 5 feet 101/2 inches; hair, dove-coloured; scar on little + finger of left hand; has assured carriage, walking boldly into good + hotels and mixing with patrons on terms of equality; weight, 200 + pounds; face slightly asymmetrical, but not definitely criminal in + type; loathes Japanese art, but likes beefsteak and onions; wears + No. 8 shoe; fond of Francis Thompson's poems; inside seam of + trousers, 32 inches; imitates cats, dogs and barnyard animals for + the amusement of young children; eyetooth in right side of upper jaw + missing; has always been careful to keep thumb prints from + possession of police; chest measurement, 42 inches, varying with + respiration; sometimes wears glasses, but usually operates + undisguised; dislikes the works of Rabindranath Tagore; corn on + little toe of right foot; superstitious, especially with regard to + psychic phenomena; eyes, blue; does not use drugs nor read his + verses to women's clubs; ruddy complexion; no photograph in + possession of police; garrulous and argumentative; prominent cheek + bones; avoids Bohemian society, so-called, and has never been in a + thieves' kitchen, a broker's office nor a class of short-story + writing; wears 17-inch collar; waist measurement none of your + business; favourite disease, hypochondria; prefers the society of + painters, actors, writers, architects, preachers, sculptors, + publishers, editors, musicians, among whom he often succeeds in + insinuating himself, avoiding association with crooks and reformers + as much as possible; walks with rapid gait; mark of old fracture on + right shin; cuffs on trousers, and coat cut loose, with plenty of + room under the arm pits; two hip pockets; dislikes Rochefort cheese, + "Tom Jones," Wordsworth's poetry, absinthe cocktails, most musical + comedy, public banquets, physical exercise, Billy Sunday, steam + heat, toy dogs, poets who wear their souls outside, organized + charity, magazine covers, and the gas company; prominent callouses + on two fingers of right hand prevent him being expert pistol shot; + belt straps on trousers; long upper lip; clean shaven; shaggy + eyebrows; affects soft hats; smile, one-sided; no gold fillings in + teeth; has served six years of indeterminate sentence in Brooklyn, + with no attempt to escape, but is reported to have friends outside; + voice, husky; scar above the forehead concealed by hair; commonly + wears plain gold ring on little finger of left hand; dislikes + prunes, tramp poets and imitations of Kipling; trousers cut loose + over hips and seat; would likely come along quietly if arrested. + +I would fail utterly in this rambling anatomy if I did not insist that +Don Marquis regards his column not merely as a soapslide but rather as a +cudgelling ground for sham and hypocrisy. He has something of the quick +Stevensonian instinct for the moral issue, and the Devil not +infrequently winces about the time the noon edition of the _Evening Sun_ +comes from the press. There is no man quicker to bonnet a fallacy or +drop the acid just where it will disinfect. For instance, this comment +on some bolshevictory in Russia: + + A kind word was recently seen, on one of the principal streets of + Petrograd, attempting to butter a parsnip. + +For the plain man who shies at surplice and stole, the Sun Dial is a +very real pulpit, whence, amid excellent banter, he hears much that is +purging and cathartic in a high degree. The laughter of fat men is a +ringing noble music, and Don Marquis, like Friar Tuck, deals texts and +fisticuffs impartially. What an archbishop of Canterbury he would have +made! He is a burly and bonny dominie, and his congregation rarely miss +the point of the sermon. We cannot close better than by quoting part of +his Colyumist's Prayer in which he admits us somewhere near the pulse of +the machine: + + I pray Thee, make my colyum read, + And give me thus my daily bread. + Endow me, if Thou grant me wit, + Likewise with sense to mellow it. + Save me from feeling so much hate + My food will not assimilate; + Open mine eyes that I may see + Thy world with more of charity, + And lesson me in good intents + And make me friend of innocence ... + Make me (sometimes at least) discreet; + Help me to hide my self-conceit, + And give me courage now and then + To be as dull as are most men. + And give me readers quick to see + When I am satirizing Me.... + Grant that my virtues may atone + For some small vices of mine own. + +And it is thoroughly characteristic of Don Marquis that he follows his +prayer with this comment: + + People, when they pray, usually pray not for what they really + want--and intend to have if they can get it--but for what they think + the Creator wants them to want. We made a certain attempt to be + sincere in the above verses; but even at that no doubt a lot of + affectation crept in. + + + + +THE ART OF WALKING + + Away with the stupid adage about a man being as old as his arteries! + He is as old as his calves--his garteries.... + + --_Meditations of Andrew McGill_. + +"There was fine walking on the hills in the direction of the sea." + +This heart-stirring statement, which I find in an account of the life of +William and Dorothy Wordsworth when they inhabited a quiet cottage near +Crewkerne in Dorset, reminds me how often the word "walking" occurs in +any description of Wordsworth's existence. De Quincey assures us that +the poet's props were very ill shapen--"they were pointedly condemned by +all female connoisseurs in legs"--but none the less he was _princeps +arte ambulandi_. Even had he lived to-day, when all our roads are +barbarized by exploding gasoline vapours, I do not think Wordsworth +would have flivvered. Of him the Opium Eater made the classic +pronouncement: "I calculate that with these identical legs W. must have +traversed a distance of 175,000 to 180,000 English miles--a mode of +exertion which, to him, stood in the stead of alcohol and all other +stimulants whatsoever to the animal spirits; to which, indeed, he was +indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we for much of what is +most excellent in his writings." + +A book that says anything about walking has a ready passage to my inmost +heart. The best books are always those that set down with "amorous +precision" the satisfying details of human pilgrimage. How one +sympathizes with poor Pepys in his outburst (April 30, 1663) about a +gentleman who seems to have been "Always Taking the Joy Out of Life": + + Lord! what a stir Stankes makes, with his being crowded in the + streets, and wearied in walking in London, and would not be wooed to + go to a play, nor to Whitehall, or to see the lions, though he was + carried in a coach. I never could have thought there had been upon + earth a man so little curious in the world as he is. + +Now your true walker is mightily "curious in the world," and he goes +upon his way zealous to sate himself with a thousand quaintnesses. When +he writes a book he fills it full of food, drink, tobacco, the scent of +sawmills on sunny afternoons, and arrivals at inns late at night. He +writes what Mr. Mosher calls a book-a-bosom. Diaries and letters are +often best of all because they abound in these matters. And because +walking can never again be what it was--the motorcars will see to +that--it is our duty to pay it greater reverence and honour. + +Wordsworth and Coleridge come first to mind in any talk about walking. +The first time they met was in 1797 when Coleridge tramped from Nether +Stowey to Racedown (thirty miles in an air-line, and full forty by road) +to make the acquaintance of William and Dorothy. That is practically +from the Bristol Channel to the English ditto, a rousing stretch. It was +Wordsworth's pamphlet describing a walk across France to the Alps that +spurred Coleridge on to this expedition. The trio became fast friends, +and William and Dorothy moved to Alfoxden (near Nether Stowey) to enjoy +the companionship. What one would give for some adequate account of +their walks and talks together over the Quantocks. They planned a little +walking trip into Devonshire that autumn (1797) and "The Ancient +Mariner" was written in the hope of defraying the expenses of the +adventure. + +De Quincey himself, who tells us so much jovial gossip about Wordsworth +and Coleridge, was no mean pedestrian. He describes a forty-mile +all-night walk from Bridgewater to Bristol, on the evening after first +meeting Coleridge. He could not sleep after the intellectual excitement +of the day, and through a summer night "divinely calm" he busied himself +with meditation on the sad spectacle he had witnessed: a great mind +hastening to decay. + +I have always fancied that walking as a fine art was not much practised +before the eighteenth century. We know from Ambassador Jusserand's +famous book how many wayfarers were on the roads in the fourteenth +century, but none of these were abroad for the pleasures of moving +meditation and scenery. We can gather from Mr. Tristram's "Coaching Days +and Coaching Ways" that the highroads were by no means safe for solitary +travellers even so late as 1750. In "Joseph Andrews" (1742) whenever any +of the characters proceed afoot they are almost certain to be held up. +Mr. Isaac Walton, it is true, was a considerable rambler a century +earlier than this, and in his Derbyshire hills must have passed many +lonely gullies; but footpads were more likely to ambush the main roads. +It would be a hardhearted bandit who would despoil the gentle angler of +his basket of trouts. Goldsmith, too, was a lusty walker, and tramped it +over the Continent for two years (1754-6) with little more baggage than +a flute: he might have written "The Handy Guide for Beggars" long +before Vachel Lindsay. But generally speaking, it is true that +cross-country walks for the pure delight of rhythmically placing one +foot before the other were rare before Wordsworth. I always think of him +as one of the first to employ his legs as an instrument of philosophy. + +After Wordsworth they come thick and fast. Hazlitt, of course--have you +paid the tax that R.L.S. imposes on all who have not read Hazlitt's "On +Going A Journey?" Then Keats: never was there more fruitful walk than +the early morning stroll from Clerkenwell to the Poultry in October, +1816, that produced "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold." He +must have set out early enough, for the manuscript of the sonnet was on +Cowden Clarke's table by breakfast time. And by the way, did you know +that the copy of Chapman's Homer which inspired it belonged to the +financial editor of the _Times_? Never did financial editor live to +better purpose! + +There are many words of Keats that are a joyful viaticum for the walker: +get these by rote in some membrane of memory: + + The great Elements we know of are no mean comforters: the open sky + sits upon our senses like a sapphire crown--the Air is our robe of + state--the Earth is our throne, and the sea a mighty minstrel + playing before it. + +The Victorians were great walkers. Railways were but striplings; inns +were at their prime. Hark to the great names in the walker's Hall of +Fame: Tennyson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Kingsley, Meredith, +Richard Jefferies. What walker can ever forget the day when he first +read "The Story of My Heart?" In my case it was the 24th of August, +1912, on a train from London to Cambridge. Then there were George +Borrow, Emily Bronte on her Yorkshire moors, and Leslie Stephen, one of +the princes of the clan and founder of the famous Sunday Tramps of whom +Meredith was one. Walt Whitman would have made a notable addition to +that posse of philosophic walkers, save that I fear the garrulous +half-baked old barbarian would have been disappointed that he could not +dominate the conversation. + +There have been stout walkers in our own day. Mr. W.H. Davies (the +Super-Tramp), G.M. Trevelyan, Hilaire Belloc, Edward Thomas who died on +the field of honour in April, 1917, and Francis Ledwidge, who was killed +in Flanders. Who can forget his noble words, "I have taken up arms for +the fields along the Boyne, for the birds and the blue sky over them." +There is Walter Prichard Eaton, the Jefferies of our own Berkshires. One +could extend the list almost without end. Sometimes it seems as though +literature were a co-product of legs and head. + +Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due +course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall +Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight +the lover of the greatest of all cities. But urban wanderings, delicious +as they are, are not quite what we mean by walking. On pavements one +goes by fit and start, halting to see, to hear, and to speculate. In the +country one captures the true ecstasy of the long, unbroken swing, the +harmonious glow of mind and body, eyes fed, soul feasted, brain and +muscle exercised alike. + +Meredith is perhaps the Supreme Pontiff of modern country walkers: no +soft lover of drowsy golden weather, but master of the stiffer breed who +salute frost and lashing rain and roaring southwest wind, who leap to +grapple with the dissolving riddles of destiny. February and March are +his months: + + For love we Earth then serve we all; + Her mystic secret then is ours: + We fall, or view our treasures fall, + Unclouded, as beholds her flowers. + + Earth, from a night of frosty wreck, + Enrobed in morning's mounted fire, + When lowly, with a broken neck, + The crocus lays her cheek to mire. + +I suppose every walker collects a few precious books which form the +bible of his chosen art. I have long been collecting a Walker's Breviary +of my own. It includes Stevenson's "Walking Tours," G.M. Trevelyan's +"Walking," Leslie Stephen's "In Praise of Walking," shards and crystals +from all the others I have mentioned. Michael Fairless, Vachel Lindsay, +and Frank Sidgwick have place in it. On my private shelf stands +"Journeys to Bagdad" by Mr. Charles Brooks, who has good pleasantry to +utter on this topic; and a manly little volume, "Walking as Education," +by the Rev. A.N. Cooper, "the walking parson," published in England in +1910. On that same shelf there will soon stand a volume of delicious +essays by one of the most accomplished of American walkers, Mr. Robert +Cortes Holliday, the American Belloc, whose "Walking Stick Papers" has +beckoned to the eye of a far-seeing publisher. Mr. Holliday it is who +has bravely stated why so few of the fair sex are able to participate in +walking tours: + + No one, though (this is the first article to be observed), should + ever go a journey with any other than him with whom one walks arm in + arm, in the evening, the twilight, and, talking (let us suppose) of + men's given names, agrees that if either should have a son he shall + be named after the other. Walking in the gathering dusk, two and + two, since the world began, there have always been young men who + have thus to one another plighted their troth. If one is not still + one of these, then, in the sense here used, journeys are over for + him. What is left to him of life he may enjoy, but not journeys. + Mention should be made in passing that some have been found so + ignorant of the nature of journeys as to suppose that they might be + taken in company with members, or a member, of the other sex. Now, + one who writes of journeys would cheerfully be burned at the stake + before he would knowingly underestimate women. But it must be + confessed that it is another season in the life of man that they + fill. + + They are too personal for the high enjoyment of going a journey. + They must forever be thinking about you or about themselves; with + them everything in the world is somehow tangled up in these matters; + and when you are with them (you cannot help it, or if you could they + would not allow it) you must forever be thinking about them or + yourself. Nothing on either side can be seen detached. They cannot + rise to that philosophic plane of mind which is the very marrow of + going a journey. One reason for this is that they can never escape + from the idea of society: You are in their society, they are in + yours; and the multitudinous personal ties which connect you all to + that great order called society that you have for a period got away + from physically are present. Like the business man who goes on a + vacation from his business and takes his business habits along with + him, so on a journey they would bring society along, and all sort of + etiquette. + + He that goes a journey shakes off the trammels of the world; he has + fled all impediments and inconveniences; he belongs, for the moment, + to no time or place. He is neither rich nor poor, but in that which + he thinks and sees. There is not such another Arcadia for this on + earth as in going a journey. He that goes a journey escapes, for a + breath of air, from all conventions; without which, though, of + course, society would go to pot; and which are the very natural + instinct of women. + +Mr. Holliday has other goodly matter upon the philosophy and art of +locomotion, and those who are wise and have a lively faith may be +admitted to great and surpassing delights if they will here and now make +memorandum to buy his book, which will soon be published. + +Speaking of Vachel Lindsay, his "Handy Guide for Beggars" will bring an +itch along the shanks of those who love shoe-leather and a knobbed +stick. Vachel sets out for a walk in no mean and pettifogging spirit: he +proceeds as an army with banners: he intends that the world shall know +he is afoot: the Great Elian of Springfield is unleashed--let alewives +and deacons tremble! + +Ungenerous hosts have cozened Vachel by begging him to recite his poems +at the beginning of each course, in the meantime getting on with their +eating; but despite the naivete of his eagerness to sing, there is a +plain and manly simplicity about Vachel that delights us all. We like to +know that here is a poet who has wrestled with poverty, who never wrote +a Class Day poem at Harvard, who has worn frayed collars or none at +all, and who lets the barber shave the back of his neck. We like to know +that he has tramped the ties in Georgia, harvested in Kansas, been +fumigated in New Jersey, and lives contented in Illinois. Four weeks a +year he lives as the darling of the cisalleghany Browning Societies, but +he is always glad to get back to Springfield and resume his robes as the +local Rabindranath. If he ever buys an automobile I am positive it will +be a Ford. Here is _homo americanus_, one of ourselves, who never wore +spats in his life. + +But even the plain man may see visions. Walking on crowded city streets +at night, watching the lighted windows, delicatessen shops, peanut +carts, bakeries, fish stalls, free lunch counters piled with crackers +and saloon cheese, and minor poets struggling home with the Saturday +night marketing--he feels the thrill of being one, or at least +two-thirds, with this various, grotesque, pathetic, and surprising +humanity. The sense of fellowship with every other walking biped, the +full-blooded understanding that Whitman and O. Henry knew in brimming +measure, comes by gulps and twinges to almost all. That is the essence +of Lindsay's feeling about life. He loves crowds, companionship, plenty +of sirloin and onions, and seeing his name in print. He sings and +celebrates the great symbols of our hodgepodge democracy: ice cream +soda, electrical sky-signs, Sunday School picnics, the movies, Mark +Twain. In the teeming ooze and ocean bottoms of our atlantic humanity he +finds rich corals and rainbow shells, hospitality, reverence, love, and +beauty. + +This is the sentiment that makes a merry pedestrian, and Vachel has +scrutineered and scuffled through a dozen states, lightening larders and +puzzling the worldly. Afoot and penniless is his technique--"stopping +when he had a mind to, singing when he felt inclined to"--and begging +his meals and bed. I suppose he has had as many free meals as any +American citizen; and, this is how he does it, copied from his little +pamphlet used on many a road: + + +RHYMES TO BE TRADED FOR BREAD + +Being new verses by Nicholas Vachel Lindsay, Springfield, Illinois, +June, 1912, printed expressly as a substitute for money. + +This book is to be used in exchange for the necessities of life on a +tramp-journey from the author's home town, through the West and back, +during which he will observe the following rules: + + (1) Keep away from the cities. + + (2) Keep away from the railroads. + + (3) Have nothing to do with money. Carry no baggage. + + (4) Ask for dinner about quarter after eleven. + + (5) Ask for supper, lodging, and breakfast about quarter of five. + + (6) Travel alone. + + (7) Be neat, truthful, civil, and on the square. + + (8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty. + + In order to carry out the last rule there will be three exceptions + to the rule against baggage. (1) The author will carry a brief + printed statement, called "The Gospel of Beauty." (2) He will carry + this book of rhymes for distribution. (3) Also he will carry a small + portfolio with pictures, etc., chosen to give an outline of his view + of the history of art, especially as it applies to America. + +Perhaps I have tarried too long over Vachel; but I have set down his +theories of vagabonding because many walkers will find them interesting. +"The Handy Guide for Beggars" will leave you footsore but better for the +exercise. And when the fascinating story of American literature in this +decade (1910-20) is finally written, there will be a happy and +well-merited corner in it for a dusty but "neat, truthful, and civil" +figure from Springfield, Illinois. + +A good pipeful of prose to solace yourself withal, about sunset on a +lonely road, is that passage on "Lying Awake at Night" to be found in +"The Forest," by Stewart Edward White. Major White is one of the best +friends the open-air walker has, and don't forget it! + +The motors have done this for us at least, that as they have made the +highways their own beyond dispute, walking will remain the mystic and +private pleasure of the secret and humble few. For us the byways, the +footpaths, and the pastures will be sanctified and sweet. Thank heaven +there are still gentle souls uncorrupted by the victrola and the +limousine. In our old trousers and our easy shoes, with pipe and stick, +we can do our fifteen miles between lunch and dinner, and glorify the +ways of God to man. + +And sometimes, about two o'clock of an afternoon (these spells come most +often about half an hour after lunch), the old angel of peregrination +lifts himself up in me, and I yearn and wamble for a season afoot. When +a blue air is moving keenly through bare boughs this angel is most +vociferous. I gape wanly round the lofty citadel where I am pretending +to earn the Monday afternoon envelope. The filing case, thermostat, card +index, typewriter, automatic telephone: these ingenious anodynes avail +me not. Even the visits of golden nymphs, sweet ambassadors of commerce, +who rustle in and out of my room with memoranda, mail, manuscripts, aye, +even these lightfoot figures fail to charm. And the mind goes out to the +endless vistas of streets, roads, fields, and rivers that summon the +wanderer with laughing voice. Somewhere a great wind is scouring the +hillsides; and once upon a time a man set out along the Great North Road +to walk to Royston in the rain.... + +Grant us, O Zeus! the tingling tremour of thigh and shank that comes of +a dozen sturdy miles laid underheel. Grant us "fine walking on the hills +in the direction of the sea"; or a winding road that tumbles down to +some Cotswold village. Let an inn parlour lie behind red curtains, and a +table be drawn toward the fire. Let there be a loin of cold beef, an +elbow of yellow cheese, a tankard of dog's nose. Then may we prop our +Bacon's Essays against the pewter and study those mellow words: +"Certainly it is heaven upon earth to have a man's mind move in charity, +rest in providence, and turn upon the poles of truth." _Haec studio, +pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur_. + + + + +RUPERT BROOKE + + +Rupert Brooke had the oldest pith of England in his fibre. He was born +of East Anglia, the original vein of English blood. Ruddy skin, +golden-brown hair, blue eyes, are the stamp of the Angles. Walsingham, +in Norfolk, was the home of the family. His father was a master at +Rugby; his grandfather a canon in the church. + +In 1913 Heffer, the well-known bookseller and publisher of Cambridge, +England, issued a little anthology called _Cambridge Poems 1900-1913_. +This volume was my first introduction to Brooke. As an undergraduate at +Oxford during the years 1910-13 I had heard of his work from time to +time; but I think we youngsters at Oxford were too absorbed in our own +small versemakings to watch very carefully what the "Tabs" were doing. +His poem _The Old Vicarage, Grantchester_, reprinted in Heffer's +_Cambridge Poems_, first fell under my eye during the winter of 1913-14. + +Grantchester is a tiny hamlet just outside Cambridge; set in the meadows +along the Cam or Granta (the earlier name), and next door to the +Trumpington of Chaucer's "The Reeve's Tale." All that Cambridge country +is flat and comparatively uninteresting; patchworked with chalky fields +bright with poppies; slow, shallow streams drifting between pollard +willows; it is the beginning of the fen district, and from the brow of +the Royston downs (thirteen miles away) it lies as level as a table-top +with the great chapel of King's clear against the sky. It is the +favourite lament of Cambridge men that their "_Umgebung_" is so dull and +monotonous compared with the rolling witchery of Oxfordshire. + +But to the young Cantab sitting over his beer at the Cafe des Westens in +Berlin, the Cambridge villages seemed precious and fair indeed. +Balancing between genuine homesickness for the green pools of the Cam, +and a humorous whim in his rhymed comment on the outlying villages, +Brooke wrote the Grantchester poem; and probably when the fleeting pang +of nostalgia was over enjoyed the evening in Berlin hugely. But the +verses are more than of merely passing interest. To one who knows that +neighbourhood the picture is cannily vivid. To me it brings back with +painful intensity the white winding road from Cambridge to Royston which +I have bicycled hundreds of tunes. One sees the little inns along the +way--the _Waggon and Horses_, the _Plough_, the _King's Arms_--and the +recurring blue signboard _Fine Royston Ales_ (the Royston brewery being +famous in those parts). Behind the fun there shines Brooke's passionate +devotion to the soil and soul of England which was to reach its final +expression so tragically soon. And even behind this the immortal +questions of youth which have no country and no clime-- + + Say, is there Beauty yet to find? + And Certainty? and Quiet kind? + +No lover of England, certainly no lover of Cambridge, is likely to +forget the Grantchester poem. But knowing Brooke only by that, one may +perhaps be excused for having merely ticketed him as one of the score of +young varsity poets whom Oxford and Cambridge had graduated in the past +decade and who are all doing fine and promising work. Even though he +tarried here in the United States ("El Cuspidorado," as he wittily +observed) and many hold precious the memory of his vivid mind and +flashing face, to most of us he was totally unknown. Then came the War; +he took part in the unsuccessful Antwerp Expedition; and while in +training for the AEgean campaign he wrote the five sonnets entitled +"1914". I do not know exactly when they were written or where first +published. Their great popularity began when the Dean of St. Paul's +quoted from them in a sermon on Easter Day, 1915, alluding to them as +the finest expression of the English spirit that the War had called +forth. They came to New York in the shape of clippings from the London +_Times_. No one could read the matchless sonnet: + + "If I should die, think only this of me: + That there's some corner of a foreign field + That is for ever England." + +and not be thrilled to the quick. A country doctor in Ohio to whom I +sent a copy of the sonnet wrote "I cannot read it without tears." This +was poetry indeed; like the Scotchman and his house, we kent it by the +biggin o't. I suppose many another stranger must have done as I did: +wrote to Brooke to express gratitude for the perfect words. But he had +sailed for the Mediterranean long before. Presently came a letter from +London saying that he had died on the very day of my letter--April 23, +1915. He died on board the French hospital ship _Duguay-Trouin_, on +Shakespeare's birthday, in his 28th year. One gathers from the log of +the hospital-ship that the cause of his death was a malignant ulcer, due +to the sting of some venomous fly. He had been weakened by a previous +touch of sunstroke. + +A description of the burial is given in "Memorials of Old Rugbeians Who +Fell in the Great War." It vividly recalls Stevenson's last journey to +the Samoan mountain top which Brooke himself had so recently visited. +The account was written by one of Brooke's comrades, who has since been +killed in action: + + We found a most lovely place for his grave, about a mile up the + valley from the sea, an olive grove above a watercourse, dry now, + but torrential in winter. Two mountains flank it on either side, and + Mount Khokilas is at its head. We chose a place in the most lovely + grove I have ever seen, or imagined, a little glade of about a dozen + trees, carpeted with mauve-flowering sage. Over its head droops an + olive tree, and round it is a little space clear of all undergrowth. + + About a quarter past nine the funeral party arrived and made their + way up the steep, narrow, and rocky path that leads to the grave. + The way was so rough and uncertain that we had to have men with + lamps every twenty yards to guide the bearers. He was borne by petty + officers of his own company, and so slowly did they go that it was + not till nearly eleven that they reached the grave. + + We buried him by cloudy moonlight. He wore his uniform, and on the + coffin were his helmet, belt, and pistol (he had no sword). We lined + the grave with flowers and olive, and Colonel Quilter laid an olive + wreath on the coffin. The chaplain who saw him in the afternoon read + the service very simply. The firing party fired three volleys and + the bugles sounded the "Last Post." + + And so we laid him to rest in that lovely valley, his head towards + those mountains that he would have loved to know, and his feet + towards the sea. He once said in chance talk that he would like to + be buried in a Greek island. He could have no lovelier one than + Skyros, and no quieter resting place. + + On his grave we heaped great blocks of white marble; the men of his + company made a great wooden cross for his head, with his name upon + it, and his platoon put a smaller one at his feet. On the back of + the large cross our interpreter wrote in Greek.... "Here lies the + servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English navy, who died for the + deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks." + + The next morning we sailed, and had no chance of revisiting his + grave. + +It is no mere flippancy to say that the War did much for Rupert Brooke. +The boy who had written many hot, morbid, immature verses and a handful +of perfect poetry, stands now by one swift translation in the golden +cloudland of English letters. There will never, can never, be any +laggard note in the praise of his work. And of a young poet dead one may +say things that would be too fulsome for life. Professor Gilbert Murray +is quoted: + +"Among all who have been poets and died young, it is hard to think of +one who, both in life and death, has so typified the ideal radiance of +youth and poetry." + +In the grave among the olive trees on the island of Skyros, Brooke found +at least one Certainty--that of being "among the English poets." He +would probably be the last to ask a more high-sounding epitaph. + +His "Collected Poems" as published consist of eighty-two pieces, fifty +of which were published in his first book, issued (in England only) in +1911. That is to say fifty of the poems were written before the age of +24, and seventeen of the fifty before 21. These last are thoroughly +youthful in formula. We all go through the old familiar cycle, and +Brooke did not take his youth at second hand. Socialism, vegetarianism, +bathing by moonlight in the Cam, sleeping out of doors, walking barefoot +on the crisp English turf, channel crossings and what not--it is all a +part of the grand game. We can only ask that the man really see what he +says he sees, and report it with what grace he can muster. + +And so of the seventeen earliest poems there need not be fulsome praise. +Few of us are immortal poets by twenty-one. But even Brooke's +undergraduate verses refused to fall entirely into the usual grooves of +sophomore song. So unerring a critic as Professor Woodberry (his +introduction to the "Collected Poems" is so good that lesser hands may +well pause) finds in them "more of the intoxication of the god" than in +the later rounder work. They include the dreaming tenderness of _Day +That I Have Loved_; they include such neat little pictures of the gross +and sordid as the two poems _Wagner_ and _Dawn_, written on a trip in +Germany. (It is curious that the only note of exasperation in Brooke's +poems occurs when he writes from Germany. One finds it again, wittily +put, in _Grantchester_.) + +This vein of brutality and resolute ugliness that one finds here and +there in Brooke's work is not wholly amiss nor unintelligible. Like all +young men of quick blood he seized gaily upon the earthy basis of our +humanity and found in it food for purging laughter. There was never a +young poet worth bread and salt who did not scrawl ribald verses in his +day; we may surmise that Brooke's peers at King's would recall many +vigorous stanzas that are not included in the volume at hand. The few +touches that we have in this vein show a masculine fear on Brooke's part +of being merely pretty in his verse. In his young thirst for reality he +did not boggle at coarse figures or loathsome metaphors. Just as his +poems of 1905-08 are of the cliche period where all lips are "scarlet," +and lamps are "relumed," so the section dated 1908-11 shows Brooke in +the _Shropshire Lad_ stage, at the mercy of extravagant sex images, and +yet developing into the dramatic felicity of his sonnet _The Hill_: + + Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill, + Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass, + You said, "Through glory and ecstasy we pass; + Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still, + When we are old, are old...." "And when we die + All's over that is ours; and life burns on + Through other lovers, other lips," said I, + --"Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!" + + "We are Earth's best, that learnt her lesson here. + Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!" we said: + "We shall go down with unreluctant tread + Rose-crowned into the darkness!" ... Proud we were + And laughed, that had such brave true things to say. + --And then you suddenly cried, and turned away. + +The true lover of poetry, it seems to me, cannot but wish that the +"1914" sonnets and the most perfect of the later poems had been +separately issued. The best of Brooke forms a thin sheaf of consummate +beauty, and I imagine that the little edition of "1914 and Other Poems," +containing the thirty-two later poems, which was published in England +and issued in Garden City by Doubleday, Page & Company in July, 1915, to +save the American copy right, will always be more precious than the +complete edition. As there were only twenty-five copies of this first +American edition, it is extremely rare and will undoubtedly be sought +after by collectors. But for one who is interested to trace the growth +of Brooke's power, the steadying of his poetic orbit and the mounting +flame of his joy in life, the poems of 1908-11 are an instructive study. +From the perfected brutality of _Jealousy_ or _Menelaus and Helen_ or +_A Channel Passage_ (these bite like Meredith) we see him passing to +sonnets that taste of Shakespeare and foretell his utter mastery of the +form. What could better the wit and beauty of this song: + + "Oh! Love," they said, "is King of Kings, + And Triumph is his crown. + Earth fades in flame before his wings, + And Sun and Moon bow down." + But that, I knew, would never do; + And Heaven is all too high. + So whenever I meet a Queen, I said, + I will not catch her eye. + + "Oh! Love," they said, and "Love," they said, + "The Gift of Love is this; + A crown of thorns about thy head, + And vinegar to thy kiss!"-- + But Tragedy is not for me; + And I'm content to be gay. + So whenever I spied a Tragic Lady, + I went another way. + + And so I never feared to see + You wander down the street, + Or come across the fields to me + On ordinary feet. + For what they'd never told me of, + And what I never knew; + It was that all the time, my love, + Love would be merely you. + +We come then to the five sonnets inspired by the War. Let us be sparing +of clumsy comment. They are the living heart of young England; the +throbbing soul of all that gracious manhood torn from its happy quest of +Beauty and Certainty, flung unheated into the absurdities of War, and +yet finding in this supreme sacrifice an answer to all its pangs of +doubt. All the hot yearnings of "1905-08" and "1908-11" are gone; here +is no Shropshire Lad enlisting for spite, but a joyous surrender to +England of all that she had given. See his favourite metaphor (that of +the swimmer) recur--what pictures it brings of "Parson's Pleasure" on +the Cher and the willowy bathing pool on the Cam. How one recalls those +white Greek bodies against the green! + + Now, God be thanked who has matched us with His hour, + And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, + With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, + To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping. + +To those who tell us England is grown old and fat and soft, there is the +answer. It is no hymn of hate that England's youth has sung, but the +farewell of those who, loving life with infinite zest, have yet found in +surrendering it to her the Beauty, the Certainty, yes and the Quiet, +which they had sought. On those five pages are packed in simple words +all the love of life, the love of woman, the love of England that make +Brooke's memory sweet. Never did the sonnet speak to finer purpose. "In +his hands the thing became a trumpet"-- + + +THE DEAD + + Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! + There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, + But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. + These laid the world away; poured out the red + Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be + Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, + That men call age; and those who would have been, + Their sons, they gave, their immortality. + + Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth + Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain. + Honour has come back, as a King, to earth, + And paid his subjects with a royal wage; + And Nobleness walks in our ways again; + And we have come into our heritage. + +It would be misleading, perhaps, to leave Brooke's poetry with the echo +of this solemn note. No understanding of the man would be complete +without mentioning the vehement gladness and merriment he found in all +the commonplaces of life. Poignant to all cherishers of the precious +details of existence must be his poem _The Great Lover_ where he +catalogues a sort of trade order list of his stock in life. The lines +speak with the very accent of Keats. These are some of the things he +holds dear-- + + White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, + Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; + Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust + Of friendly bread; and many tasting food; + Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood; + And radiant raindrops couching in cool flowers; + And flowers themselves, that sway through sunny hours, + Dreaming of moths that drink them under the moon; + Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon + Smoothe away trouble; and the rough male kiss + Of blankets; grainy wood; live hair that is + Shining and free; blue-massing clouds; the keen + Unpassioned beauty of a great machine; + The benison of hot water; furs to touch; + The good smell of old clothes; and other such-- + ...All these have been my loves. + +Of his humour only those who knew him personally have a right to speak; +but where does one find a more perfect bit of gentle satire than +_Heaven_ where he gives us a Tennysonian fish pondering the problem of a +future life. + + This life cannot be All, they swear, + For how unpleasant, if it were! + One may not doubt that, somehow, Good + Shall come of Water and of Mud; + And, sure, the reverent eye must see + A Purpose in Liquidity. + We darkly know, by Faith we cry + The future is not Wholly Dry.... + But somewhere, beyond Space and Time, + Is wetter water, slimier slime! + +No future anthology of English wit can be complete without that +exquisite bit of fooling. + +Of such a sort, to use Mr. Mosher's phrase, was Rupert Chawner Brooke, +"the latest and greatest of young Englishmen." + + + + +THE MAN + + +The big room was very still. Outside, beneath a thin, cold drizzle, the +first tinge of green showed on the broad lawn. The crocuses were +beginning to thrust their spears through the sodden mold. One of the +long French windows stood ajar, and in the air that slipped through was +a clean, moist whiff of coming spring. It was the end of March. + +In the leather armchair by the wide, flat desk sat a man. His chin was +on his chest; the lowered head and the droop of the broad, spare +shoulders showed the impact of some heavy burden. His clothes were +gray--a trim, neatly cut business suit; his hair was gray; his gray-blue +eyes were sombre. In the gathering dusk he seemed only a darker shadow +in the padded chair. His right hand--the long, firm, nervous hand of a +scholar--rested on the blotting pad. A silver pen had slipped from his +fingers as he sat in thought. On the desk lay some typed sheets which he +was revising. + +Sitting there, his mind had been traversing the memories of the past two +and a half years. Every line of his lean, strong figure showed some +trace of the responsibilities he had borne. In the greatest crisis of +modern times he had steadfastly pursued an ideal, regardless of the +bitterness of criticism and the sting of ridicule. The difficulties had +been tremendous. Every kind of influence had been brought upon him to do +certain things, none of which he had done. A scholar, a dreamer, a +lifelong student of history, he had surprised his associates by the +clearness of his vision, the tenacity of his will. Never, perhaps, in +the history of the nation had a man been more brutally reviled than +he--save one! And his eyes turned to the wall where, over the chimney +piece, hung the portrait of one of his predecessors who had stood for +his ideals in a time of fiery trial. It was too dark now to see the +picture but he knew well the rugged, homely face, the tender, +pain-wrenched mouth. + +This man had dreamed a dream. Climbing from the humble youth of a poor +student, nourished in classroom and library with the burning visions of +great teachers, he had hoped in this highest of positions to guide his +country in the difficult path of a higher patriotism. Philosopher, +idealist, keen student of men, he had been able to keep his eyes +steadfast on his goal despite the intolerable cloud of unjust criticism +that had rolled round him. Venomous and shameful attacks had hurt him, +but had never abated his purpose. In a world reeling and smoking with +the insane fury of war, one nation should stand unshaken for the message +of the spirit, for the glory of humanity; for the settlement of disputes +by other means than gunpowder and women's tears. That was his dream. To +that he had clung. + +He shifted grimly in his chair, and took up the pen. + +What a long, heart-rending strain it had been! His mind went back to the +golden August day when the telegram was laid on his desk announcing that +the old civilization of Europe had fallen into fragments. He remembered +the first meeting thereafter, when his associates, with grave, anxious +faces, debated the proper stand for them to take. He remembered how, in +the swinging relaxation of an afternoon of golf, he had thoughtfully +planned the wording of his first neutrality proclamation. + +In those dim, far-off days, who had dreamed what would come? Who could +have believed that great nations would discard without compunction all +the carefully built-up conventions of international law? That murder in +the air, on land, on the sea, under the sea, would be rewarded by the +highest military honours? That a supposedly friendly nation would fill +another land with spies--even among the accredited envoys of diplomacy? + +Sadly this man thought of the long painful fight he had made to keep one +nation at least out of the tragic, barbaric struggle. Giving due honour +to convinced militarist and sincere pacifist, his own course was still +different. That his country, disregarding the old fetishes of honour and +insult, should stand solidly for humanity; should endure all things, +suffer all things, for humanity's sake; should seek to bind up the +wounds and fill the starving mouths. That one nation--not because she +was weak, but because she was strong--should, with God's help, make a +firm stand for peace and show to all mankind that force can never +conquer force. + +"A nation can be so right that it should be too proud to fight." +Magnificent words, true words, which one day would re-echo in history as +the utterance of a man years in advance of his time--but what rolling +thunders of vituperation they had cost him! _Too proud to fight_!... If +only it had been possible to carry through to the end this message from +Judea! + +But, little by little, and with growing anguish, he had seen that the +nation must take another step. Little by little, as the inhuman frenzies +of warfare had grown in savagery, inflicting unspeakable horror on +non-combatants, women and children, he had realized that his cherished +dream must be laid aside. For the first time in human history a great +nation had dared to waive pride, honour, and--with bleeding heart--even +the lives of its own for the hope of humanity and civilization. With +face buried in his hands he reviewed the long catalogue of atrocities on +the seas. He could feel his cheeks grow hot against his palms. _Arabic_, +_Lusitania_, _Persia_, _Laconia_, _Falaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_, +_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief. +And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ... + +He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped +from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal +typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed +into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and +university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his +theses on the church door at Wittenberg: + +"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_." + +They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet +of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing.... + +"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the +step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it +involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of +the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war +against the Government and people of the United States_...." + +The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the +keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of +his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer +divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in +one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind. + +"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht +anders_...." + +"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward +them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse +that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their +previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill +their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to +bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an +opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for +peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic +nations_.... + + "_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to + a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow + interest of their own_." + +With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his +chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a +faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star. +Distantly he could hear the murmur of the city like the pulsing +heartbeat of the nation. As often, in moments of tension, he seemed to +feel the whole vast stretch of the continent throbbing; the yearning +breast of the land trembling with energy; the great arch of sky, +spanning from coast to coast, quiver with power unused. The murmur of +little children in their cradles, the tender words of mothers, the +footbeat of men on the pavements of ten thousand cities, the flags +leaping in air from high buildings, ships putting out to sea with +gunners at their sterns--in one aching synthesis the vastness and +dearness and might of his land came to him. A mingled nation, indeed, of +various and clashing breeds; but oh, with what a tradition to uphold! + +Words were forming in his mind as he watched the fading sky, and he +returned quietly to the typewriter: + +"_We are glad to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for +the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.... The world +must be made safe for democracy_." + +_The world must be made safe for democracy_! As the wires leaped and the +little typewriter spoke under the pressure of his strong fingers, scenes +passed in his mind of the happy, happy Europe he had known in old wander +days, years before. + +He could see the sun setting down dark aisles of the Black Forest; the +German peasants at work in the fields; the simple, cordial friendliness +of that lovely land. He remembered French villages beside slow-moving +rivers; white roads in a hot shimmer of sun; apple orchards of the +Moselle. And England--dear green England, fairest of all--the rich blue +line of the Chiltern Hills, and Buckinghamshire beech woods bronze and +yellow in the autumn. He remembered thatched cottages where he had +bicycled for tea, and the naive rustic folk who had made him welcome. + +What deviltry had taken all these peaceful people, gripped them and +maddened them, set them at one another's throats? Millions of children, +millions of mothers, millions of humble workers, happy in the richness +of life--where were they now? Life, innocent human life--the most +precious thing we know or dream of, freedom to work for a living and +win our own joys of home and love and food--what Black Death had +maddened the world with its damnable seeds of hate? Would life ever be +free and sweet again? + +The detestable sultry horror of it all broke upon him anew in a tide of +anguish. No, the world could never be the same again in the lives of men +now living. But for the sake of the generations to come--he thought of +his own tiny grandchildren--for the love of God and the mercy of +mankind, let this madness be crushed. If his country must enter the war +let it be only for the love and service of humanity. "It is a fearful +thing," he thought, "but the right is more precious than peace." + +Sad at heart he turned again to the typewriter, and the keys clicked off +the closing words: + +"_To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything +that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who +know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood +and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and +the peace which she has treasured_." + +He leaned back in his chair, stiff and weary. His head ached hotly. With +elbows on the desk he covered his forehead and eyes with his hands. All +the agony, the bitterness, the burden of preceding days swept over him, +but behind it was a cool and cleansing current of peace. "_Ich kann +nicht anders_," he whispered. + +Then, turning swiftly to the machine, he typed rapidly: + +"_God helping her, she can do no other_." + + + + +THE HEAD OF THE FIRM + + +He always lost his temper when the foreign mail came in. Sitting in his +private room, which overlooked a space of gardens where bright red and +yellow flowers were planted in rhomboids, triangles, parallelograms, and +other stiff and ugly figures, he would glance hastily through the papers +and magazines. He was familiar with several foreign languages, and would +skim through the text. Then he would pound the table with his fist, walk +angrily about the floor, and tear the offensive journals into strips. +For very often he found in these papers from abroad articles or cartoons +that were most annoying to him, and very detrimental to the business of +his firm. + +His assistants tried to keep foreign publications away from him, but he +was plucky in his own harsh way. He insisted on seeing them. Always the +same thing happened. His face would grow grim, the seam-worn forehead +would corrugate, the muscles of his jaw throb nervously. His gray eyes +would flash--and the fist come down heavily on the mahogany desk. + +When a man is nearly sixty and of a full-blooded physique, it is not +well for him to have these frequent pulsations of rage. But he had +always found it hard to control his temper. He sometimes remembered what +a schoolmaster had said to him at Cassel, forty-five years before: "He +who loses his temper will lose everything." + +But he must be granted great provocation. He had always had difficulties +to contend with. His father was an invalid, and he himself was puny in +childhood; infantile paralysis withered his left arm when he was an +infant; but in spite of these handicaps he had made himself a vigorous +swimmer, rider, and yachtsman; he could shoot better with one arm than +most sportsmen with two. After leaving the university he served in the +army, but at his father's death the management of the vast family +business came into his hands. He was then twenty-eight. + +No one can question the energy with which he set himself to carry on the +affairs of the firm. Generous, impetuous, indiscreet, stubborn, +pugnacious, his blend of qualities held many of the elements of a +successful man of business. His first act was to dismiss the +confidential and honoured assistant who had guided both his father and +grandfather in the difficult years of the firm's growth. But the new +executive was determined to run the business his own way. Disregarding +criticism, ridicule, or flattery, he declared it his mission to spread +the influence of the business to the ends of the earth. "We must have +our place in the sun," he said; and announced himself as the divine +instrument through whom this would be accomplished. He made it perfectly +plain that no man's opposition would balk him in the management of the +firm's affairs. One of his most famous remarks was: "Considering myself +as the instrument of the Lord, without heeding the views and opinions of +the day, I go my way." The board of directors censured him for this, but +he paid little heed. + +The growth of the business was enormous; nothing like it had been seen +in the world's history. Branch offices were opened all over the globe. +Vessels bearing the insignia of the company were seen on every ocean. He +himself with his accustomed energy travelled everywhere to advance the +interests of trade. In England, Russia, Denmark, Italy, Austria, Turkey, +the Holy Land, he made personal visits to the firm's best customers. He +sent his brother to America to spread the goodwill of the business; and +other members of the firm to France, Holland, China, and Japan. Telegram +after telegram kept the world's cables busy as he distributed +congratulations, condolences, messages of one kind and another to +foreign merchants. His publicity department never rested. He employed +famous scientists and inventors to improve the products of his +factories. He reared six sons to carry on the business after him. + +This is no place to record minutely the million activities of thirty +years that made his business one of the greatest on earth. It is all +written down in history. Suffice it to say that those years did not go +by without sorrows. He was afflicted with an incurable disease. His +temperament, like high tension steel, was of a brittle quality; it had +the tendency to snap under great strains, living always at fever pitch, +sparing himself no fatigue of body or soul, the whirring dynamo of +energy in him often showed signs of overstress. + +It is hard to conceive what he must have gone through in those last +months. You must remember the extraordinary conditions in his line of +business caused by the events of recent years. He had lived to see his +old friends, merchants with whom he had dealt for decades, some of them +the foreign representatives of his own firm, out of a job and hunted +from their homes by creditors. He had lived to realize that the +commodity he and his family had been manufacturing for generations was +out of date, a thing no longer needed or wanted by the modern world. The +strain which his mind was enduring is shown by the febrile and +unbalanced tone of one of his letters, sent to a member of his own +family who ran one of the company's branch offices but was forced to +resign by bankruptcy: + +"I have heard with wrath of the infamous outrage committed by our common +enemies upon you and upon your business. I assure you that your +deprivation can be only temporary. The mailed fist, with further aid +from Almighty God, will restore you to your office, of which no man by +right can rob you. The company will wreak vengeance on those who have +dared so insolently to lay their criminal hands on you. We hope to +welcome you at the earliest opportunity." + +The failure of his business was the great drama of the century; and it +is worth while to remember what it was that killed it--and him. While +the struggle was still on there were many arguments as to what would +bring matters to an end; some cunning invention, some new patent that +would outwit the methods of his firm. But after all it was nothing more +startling than the printing press and the moral of the whole matter may +be put in those fine old words, "But above all things, truth beareth +away the victory." Little by little, the immense power of the printed +word became too strong for him. Rave and fume as he might, and hammer +the mahogany desk, the rolling thunders of a world massed against him +cracked even his stiff will. Little by little the plain truth sifted +into the minds and hearts of the thousands working in his huge +organization. In Russia, in Greece, in Spain, in Austria, in China, in +Mexico, he saw men bursting the shells of age and custom that had +cramped them. One by one his competitors adopted the new ideas, or had +them forced upon them; profit-sharing, workmen's insurance, the right of +free communities to live their own lives. + +Deep in his heart he must have known he was doomed to fail, but that +perverse demon of strong-headed pugnacity was trenched deep within him. +He was always a fighter, but his face, though angry, obstinate, proud, +was still not an evil face. He broke down while there was still some of +the business to save and some of the goodwill intact. + +It was the printing press that decided it: the greatest engine in the +world, to which submarines and howitzers and airplanes are but wasteful +toys. For when the printing presses are united the planet may buck and +yaw, but she comes into line at last. A million inky cylinders, roaring +in chorus, were telling him the truth. When his assistants found him, on +his desk lay a half-ripped magazine where he had tried to tear up a +mocking cartoon. + +I think that as he sat at his table in those last days, staring with +embittered eyes at the savage words and pictures that came to him from +over the seven seas, he must have had some vision of the shadowy might +of the press, of the vast irresistible urge of public opinion, that hung +like dark wings above his head. For little by little the printed word +incarnates itself in power, and in ways undreamed of makes itself felt. +Little by little the wills of common men, coalescing, running together +like beads of mercury on a plate, quivering into rhythm and concord, +become a mighty force that may be ever so impalpable, but grinds empires +to powder. Mankind suffers hideous wrongs and cruel setbacks, but when +once the collective purpose of humanity is summoned to a righteous end, +it moves onward like the tide up a harbour. + +The struggle was long and bitter. His superb organization, with such +colossal resources for human good, lavished in the fight every energy +known to man. For a time it seemed as though he would pull through. His +managers had foreseen every phase of this unprecedented competition, and +his warehouses were stocked. But slowly the forces of his opponents +began to focus themselves. + +Then even his own employees suspected the truth. His agents, +solicitors, and salesmen, scattered all over the globe, realized that +one company cannot twist the destiny of mankind. He felt the huge fabric +of his power quiver and creak. The business is now in the hands of the +executors, pending a reorganization. + + + + +17 HERIOT ROW + + +There is a small black notebook into which I look once or twice a year +to refresh my memory of a carnal and spiritual pilgrimage to Edinburgh, +made with Mifflin McGill (upon whose head be peace) in the summer of +1911. It is a testament of light-hearted youth, savoury with the +unindentured joys of twenty-one and the grand literary passion. Would +that one might again steer _Shotover_ (dearest of pushbikes) along the +Banbury Road, and see Mifflin's lean shanks twirl up the dust on the way +to Stratford! Never was more innocent merriment spread upon English +landscape. When I die, bury the black notebook with me. + +That notebook is memorable also in a statistical way, and perchance may +serve future historians as a document proving the moderate cost of +wayfaring in those halcyon days. Nothing in Mr. Pepys' diary is more +interesting than his meticulous record of what his amusements cost him. +Mayhap some future economist will pore upon these guileless confessions. +For in the black memorandum book I succeeded, for almost the only time +in my life, in keeping an accurate record of the lapse of coin during +nine whole days. I shall deposit the document with the Congressional +Library in Washington for future annalists; in the meantime I make no +excuse for recounting the items of the first sixty hours. Let no one +take amiss the frequent entries marked "cider." July, 1911, was a hot +month and a dusty, and we were biking fifty miles the day. Please reckon +exchange at two cents per penny. + + L | s. | d + +July 16 pint cider | | 4 + 1/2 pint cider | | 11/2 + lunch at Banbury | 2 | 2 + pint cider at Ettington | | 3 + supper at Stratford | 1 | 3 + stamp and postcard | | 2 + ____ _____ _____ + | 4 | 31/2 + + +July 17 Postcards and stamps | | 9 + pencil | | 1 + Warwick Castle | 2 | - + cider at the _Bear and Baculus_ | | + (which Mifflin _would_ call the | | + _Bear and Bacillus) _ | | 21/2 + _Bowling Green Inn, _bed and | | + breakfast | 3 | 2 + Puncture | 1 | - + Lunch, Kenilworth | 1 | 6 + Kenilworth Castle | | 6 + Postcards | | 4 + Lemonade, Coventry | | 4 + Cider | | 21/2 + Supper, Tamworth, _The Castle Hotel_ | 2 | 1 + ____ _____ _____ + | 16 | 51/2 + + +July 18 Johnson house, Lichfield | | 3 + cider at _The Three Crowns_ | | 4 + postcard and shave | | 4 + _The King's Head_, bed and breakfast | 3 | 7 + cider | | 2 + tip on road[A] | | 11/2 + lunch, Uttoxeter | 1 | 3 + cider, Ashbourne, _The Green | | + Man_ | | 3 + landlord's drink, Ashbourne[B] | | 1 + supper, _Newhaven House_, | 1 | - + lemonade, Buxton | | 3 + ____ _____ _____ + + TOTAL L1 4 1 + ($5.78) + +[Footnote A: As far as I can remember, this was a gratuity to a rather +tarnished subject who directed us at a fork in the road, near a railway +crossing.] + +[Footnote B: This was a copper well lavished; for the publican, a +ventripotent person with a liquid and glamorous brown eye, told us +excellent gossip about Dr. Johnson and George Eliot, both heroes in that +neighbourhood. "Yes," we said, "that man Eliot was a great writer," and +he agreed.] + +That is to say, 24 bob for two and a half days. We used to reckon that +ten shillings a day would do us very nicely, barring luxuries and +emergencies. We attained a zealous proficiency in reckoning shillings +and pence, and our fervour in posting our ledgers would have gladdened a +firm of auditors. I remember lying on the coping of a stone bridge over +the water of Teviot near Hawick, admiring the green-brown tint of the +swift stream bickering over the stones. Mifflin was writing busily in +his notebook on the other side of the bridge. I thought to myself, +"Bless the lad, he's jotting down some picturesque notes of something +that has struck his romantic eye." And just then he spoke--"Four and +eleven pence half-penny so far to-day!" + +Would I could retrogress over the devious and enchanting itinerary. The +McGill route from Oxford to Auld Reekie is 417 miles; it was the +afternoon of the ninth day when with thumping hearts we saw Arthur's +Seat from a dozen miles away. Our goal was in sight! + +There was a reason for all this pedalling madness. Ever since the days +when we had wandered by Darby Creek, reading R.L.S. aloud to one +another, we had planned this trip to the gray metropolis of the north. A +score of sacred names had beckoned us, the haunts of the master. We knew +them better than any other syllables in the world. Heriot Row, Princes +Street, the Calton Hill, Duddingston Loch, Antigua Street, the Water of +Leith, Colinton, Swanston, the Pentland Hills--O my friends, do those +names mean to you what they did to us? Then you are one of the +brotherhood--what was to us then the sweetest brotherhood in the world! + +In a quiet little hotel in Rutland Square we found decent lodging, in a +large chamber which was really the smoking room of the house. The city +was crowded with tourists on account of an expected visit of the King +and Queen; every other room in the hotel was occupied. Greatly to our +satisfaction we were known as "the smoking-room gentlemen" throughout +our stay. Our windows opened upon ranks of corridor-cars tying on the +Caledonian Railway sidings, and the clink and jar of buffers and +coupling irons were heard all night long. I seem to remember that +somewhere in his letters R.L.S. speaks of that same sound. He knew +Rutland Square well, for his boyhood friend Charles Baxter lived there. +Writing from Samoa in later years he says that one memory stands out +above all others of his youth--Rutland Square. And while that was of +course only the imaginative fervour of the moment, yet we were glad to +know that in that quiet little cul de sac behind the railway terminal we +were on ground well loved by Tusitala. + +The first evening, and almost every twilight while we were in Auld +Reekie, we found our way to 17 Heriot Row--famous address, which had +long been as familiar to us as our own. I think we expected to find a +tablet on the house commemorating the beloved occupant; but no; to our +surprise it was dark, dusty, and tenantless. A sign TO SELL was +prominent. To take the name of the agent was easy. A great thought +struck us. Could we not go over the house in the character of +prospective purchasers? Mifflin and I went back to our smoking room and +concocted a genteel letter to Messrs. Guild and Shepherd, Writers to the +Signet. + +Promptly came a reply (Scots business men answer at once). + + + 16 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh. + + 26th July, 1911 + + + DEAR SIR, + + 17 HERIOT ROW + + We have received your letter regarding this house. The house can be + seen at any time, and if you will let us know when you wish to view + it we shall arrange to have it opened. + + We are, + + Yours faithfully, + + GUILD AND SHEPHERD. + +Our hearts were uplifted, but now we were mightily embarrassed as to the +figure we would cut before the Writers to the Signet. You must remember +that we were two young vagabonds in the earliest twenties, travelling +with slim knapsacks, and much soiled by a fortnight on the road. I was +in knickerbockers and khaki shirt; Mifflin in greasy gray flannels and +subfusc Norfolk. Our only claims to gentility were our monocles. Always +take a monocle on a vagabond tour: it is a never-failing source of +amusement and passport of gentility. No matter how ragged you are, if +you can screw a pane in your eye you can awe the yokel or the tradesman. + +The private records of the firm of Guild and Shepherd doubtless show +that on Friday, July 28, 1911, one of their polite young attaches, +appearing as per appointment at 17 Heriot Row, was met by two eccentric +young gentlemen, clad in dirty white flannel hats, waterproof capes, +each with an impressive monocle. Let it be said to the honour of the +attache in question that he showed no symptoms of surprise or alarm. We +explained, I think, that we were scouting for my father, who (it was +alleged) greatly desired to settle down in Edinburgh. And we had +presence of mind enough to enquire about plumbing, stationary wash-tubs, +and the condition of the flues. I wish I could remember what rent was +quoted. + +He showed us all through the house; and you may imagine that we stepped +softly and with beating hearts. Here we were on the very track of the +Magician himself: his spirit whispered in the lonely rooms. We imagined +R.L.S. as a little child, peering from the windows at dusk to see Leerie +light the street-lamps outside--a quaint, thin, elvish face with shining +brown eyes; or held up in illness by Cummie to see the gracious dawn +heralded by oblongs of light in the windows across the Queen Street +gardens. We saw the college lad, tall, with tweed coat and cigarette, +returning to Heriot Row with an armful of books, in sad or sparkling +mood. The house was dim and dusty: a fine entrance hall, large dining +room facing the street--and we imagined Louis and his parents at +breakfast. Above this, the drawing room, floored with parquet oak, a +spacious and attractive chamber. Above this again, the nursery, and +opening off it the little room where faithful Cummie slept. But in vain +we looked for some sign or souvenir of the entrancing spirit. The room +that echoed to his childish glee, that heard his smothered sobs in the +endless nights of childish pain, the room where he scribbled and brooded +and burst into gusts of youth's passionate outcry, is now silent and +forlorn. + +With what subtly mingled feelings we peered from room to room, seeing +everything, and yet not daring to give ourselves away to the courteous +young agent. And what was it he said?--"This was the house of Lord +So-and-so" (I forget the name)--"and incidentally, Robert Louis +Stevenson lived here once. His signature occurs once or twice in the +deeds." + +_Incidentally_!... + +Like many houses in Auld Reekie, 17 Heriot Row is built on a steep slant +of ground, so that the rear of the house is a storey or more higher than +the face. We explored the kitchens, laundries, store-rooms, and other +"offices" with care, imagining that little "Smoutie" may have run here +and there in search of tid-bits from the cook. Visions of that +childhood, fifty years before, were almost as real as our own. We seemed +to hear the young treble of his voice. That house was the home of the +Stevensons for thirty years (1857-1887)--surely even the thirty years +that have gone by since Thomas Stevenson died cannot have laid all those +dear ghosts we conjured up! + +We thanked our guide and took leave of him. If the firm of Guild and +Shepherd should ever see this, surely they will forgive our innocent +deception, for the honour of R.L.S. I wonder if any one has yet put a +tablet on the house? If not, Mifflin and I will do so, some day. + +In the evenings we used to wander up to Heriot Row in the long Northern +dusk, to sit on the front steps of number 17 waiting for Leerie to come +and light the famous lamp which still stands on the pavement in front of +the dining-room windows: + + For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door, + And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more; + And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light, + O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night! + +But no longer does Leerie "with lantern and with ladder come posting +up the street." Nowadays he carries a long pole bearing a flame +cunningly sheltered in a brass socket. But the Leerie of 1911 +("Leerie-light-the-lamps" is a generic nickname for all lamplighters in +Scotland) was a pleasant fellow even if ladderless, and we used to have +a cigar ready for him when he reached 17. We told him of R.L.S., of whom +he had vaguely heard, and explained the sanctity of that particular +lamp. He in turn talked freely of his craft, and learning that we were +Americans he told us of his two sisters "in Pennsylvania, at 21 Thorn +Street." He seemed to think Pennsylvania a town, but finally we learned +that the Misses Leerie lived in Sewickley where they were doing well, +and sending back money to the "kiddies." Good Leerie, I wonder do you +still light the lamps on Heriot Row, or have you too seen redder +beacons on Flanders fields? + +One evening I remember we fell into discussion whether the lamp-post was +still the same one that R.L.S. had known. We were down on hands and +knees on the pavement, examining the base of the pillar by match-light +in search of possible dates. A very seedy and disreputable looking man +passed, evidently regarding us with apprehension as detectives. Mifflin, +never at a loss, remarked loudly "No, I see no footprints here," and as +the ragged one passed hastily on with head twisted over his shoulder, we +followed him. At the corner of Howe Street he broke into an uneasy +shuffle, and Mifflin turned a great laugh into a Scotland Yard sneeze. + +Howe Street crosses Heriot Row at right angles, only a few paces prom +No. 17. It dips sharply downhill toward the Water of Leith, and Mifflin +and I used to stand at the corner and wonder just where took place the +adventure with the lame boy which R.L.S. once described when setting +down some recollections of childhood. + + In Howe street, round the corner from our house, I often saw a lame + boy of rather a rough and poor appearance. He had one leg much + shorter than the other, and wallowed in his walk, in consequence, + like a ship in a seaway. I had read more than enough, in tracts and + _goody_ story books, of the isolation of the infirm; and after many + days of bashfulness and hours of consideration, I finally accosted + him, sheepishly enough I daresay, in these words: "Would you like to + play with me?" I remember the expression, which sounds exactly like + a speech from one of the goody books that had nerved me to the + venture. But the answer was not one I had anticipated, for it was + a blast of oaths. I need not say how fast I fled. This incident was + the more to my credit as I had, when I was young, a desperate + aversion to addressing strangers, though when once we had got into + talk I was pretty certain to assume the lead. The last particular + may still be recognized. About four years ago I saw my lame lad, and + knew him again at once. He was then a man of great strength, rolling + along, with an inch of cutty in his mouth and a butcher's basket on + his arm. Our meeting had been nothing to him, but it was a great + affair to me. + +We strolled up the esplanade below the Castle, pausing in Ramsay's +Gardens to admire the lighted city from above. In the valley between the +Castle and Princes Street the pale blue mist rises at night like an +exhalation from the old gray stones. The lamps shining through it blend +in a delicate opalescent sheen, shot here and there with brighter +flares. As the sky darkens the castle looms in silhouette, with one +yellow square below the Half Moon Battery. "There are no stars like the +Edinburgh street lamps," says R.L.S. Aye, and the brightest of them all +shines on Heriot Row. + +The vision of that child face still comes to me, peering down from the +dining-room window. R.L.S. may never have gratified his boyish wish to +go round with Leerie and light the lamps, but he lit many and more +enduring flames even in the hearts of those who never saw him. + + + + +FRANK CONFESSIONS OF A PUBLISHER'S READER + +[_Denis Dulcet, brother of the well-known poet Dunraven Dulcet and the +extremely well-known literary agent Dove Dulcet, was for many years the +head reader for a large publishing house. It was my good fortune to know +him intimately, and when he could be severed from his innumerable +manuscripts, which accompanied him everywhere, even in bed, he was very +good company. His premature death from reader's cramp and mental hernia +was a sad loss to the world of polite letters. Thousands of mediocre +books would have been loaded upon the public but for his incisive and +unerring judgment. When he lay on his deathbed, surrounded by half-read +MSS., he sent for me, and with an air of extreme solemnity laid a packet +in my hand. It contained the following confession, and it was his last +wish that it should be published without alteration. I include it here +in memory of my very dear friend_.] + + +In my youth I was wont to forecast various occupations for myself. +Engine driver, tugboat captain, actor, statesman, and wild animal +trainer--such were the visions with which I put myself to sleep. Never +did the merry life of a manuscript reader swim into my ken. But here I +am, buried elbow deep in the literary output of a commercial democracy. +My only excuse for setting down these paragraphs is the hope that other +more worthy members of the ancient and honorable craft may be induced to +speak out in meeting. In these days when every type of man is +interviewed, his modes of thinking conned and commented upon, why not a +symposium of manuscript readers? Also I realized the other day, while +reading a manuscript by Harold Bell Wright, that my powers are failing. +My old trouble is gaining on me, and I may not be long for this world. +Before I go to face the greatest of all Rejection Slips, I want to utter +my message without fear or favour. + +As a class, publishers' readers are not vocal. They spend their days and +nights assiduously (in the literal sense) bent over mediocre stuff, +poking and poring in the unending hope of finding something rich and +strange. A gradual _stultitia_ seizes them. They take to drink; they +beat their wives; they despair of literature. Worst, and most +preposterous, they one and all nourish secret hopes of successful +authorship. You might think that the interminable flow of turgid +blockish fiction that passes beneath their weary eyes would justly +sicken them of the abominable gymnastic of writing. But no: the venom is +in the blood. + +Great men have graced the job--and got out of it as soon as possible. +George Meredith was a reader once; so was Frank Norris; also E.V. Lucas +and Gilbert Chesterton. One of the latter's comments on a manuscript is +still preserved. Writing of a novel by a lady who was the author of many +unpublished stories, all marked by perseverance rather than talent, he +said, "Age cannot wither nor custom stale her infinite lack of variety." +But alas, we hear too little of these gentlemen in their capacity as +publishers' pursuivants. Patrolling the porches of literature, why did +they not bequeath us some pandect of their experience, some rich +garniture of commentary on the adventures that befell? But they, and +younger men such as Coningsby Dawson and Sinclair Lewis, have gone on +into the sunny hayfields of popular authorship and said nothing. + +But these brilliant swallow-tailed migrants are not typical. Your true +specimen of manuscript reader is the faithful old percheron who is +content to go on, year after year, sorting over the literary pemmican +that comes before him, inexhaustible in his love for the delicacies of +good writing, happy if once or twice a twelve-month he chance upon some +winged thing. He is not the pettifogging pilgarlic of popular +conception: he is a devoted servant of letters, willing to take his +thirty or forty dollars a week, willing to suffer the _peine forte et +dure_ of his profession in the knowledge of honest duty done, writing +terse and marrowy little essays on manuscripts, which are buried in the +publishers' files. This man is an honour to the profession, and I +believe there are many such. Certainly there are many who sigh wistfully +when they must lay aside some cherished writing of their own to devote +an evening to illiterate twaddle. Five book manuscripts a day, thirty a +week, close to fifteen hundred a year--that is a fair showing for the +head reader of a large publishing house. + +One can hardly blame him if he sometimes grow skeptic or acid about the +profession of letters. Of each hundred manuscripts turned in there will +rarely be more than three or four that merit any serious consideration; +only about one in a hundred will be acceptable for publication. And the +others--alas that human beings should have invented ink to steal away +their brains! "Only a Lady Barber" is the title of a novel in manuscript +which I read the other day. Written in the most atrocious dialect, it +betrayed an ignorance of composition that would have been discreditable +to a polyp. It described the experiences of a female tonsor somewhere +in Idaho, and closed with her Machiavellian manoeuvres to entice into +her shaving chair a man who had bilked her, so that she might slice his +ear. No need to harrow you with more of the same kind. I read almost a +score every week. Often I think of a poem which was submitted to me +once, containing this immortal couplet: + + She damped a pen in the ooze of her brain and wrote a verse + on the air, + A verse that had shone on the disc of the sun, had she chosen + to set it there. + +Let me beg you, my dears, leave the pen undamped unless your cerebral +ooze really has something to impart. And then, once a year or so, when +one is thinking that the hooves of Pegasus have turned into pigs' +trotters, comes some Joseph Conrad, some Walter de la Mare, some Rupert +Brooke or Pearsall Smith, to restore one's sanity. + +Or else--what is indeed more frequent--the reader's fainting spirits are +repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its +absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack +of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords +to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in +many cantos, beginning + + Our heart is but a bundle of muscle + In which our passions tumble and tussle. + +Another lady begins her novel with the following psychanalysis: + + "Thus doth the ever-changing course of things run a perpetual + circle." ... She read the phrase and then reflected, the cause being + a continued prognostication, beginning and ending as it had done the + day before, to-morrow and forever, maybe, of her own ailment, a + paradoxical malady, being nothing more nor less than a pronounced + case of malnutrition of the soul, a broken heart-cord, aggravated by + a total collapse of that portion of the mentalities which had been + bolstered up by undue pride, fallacious arguments, modern foibles + and follies peculiar to the human species, both male and female, + under favorable social conditions, found in provincial towns as well + as in large cities and fashionable watering places. + +But as a fitting anodyne to this regrettable case of soul malnutrition, +let me append a description of a robuster female, taken verbatim from a +manuscript (penned by masculine hand) which became a by-word in one +publisher's office. + + She was a beautiful young lady. She was a medium, sized, elegant + figure, wearing a neatly-fitted travelling dress of black alpaca. + Her raven-black hair, copious both in length and volume and figured + like a deep river, rippled by the wind, was parted in the centre and + combed smoothly down, ornamenting her pink temples with a flowing + tracery that passed round to its modillion windings on a graceful + crown. Her mouth was set with pearls adorned with elastic rubies and + tuned with minstrel lays, while her nose gracefully concealed its + own umbrage, and her eyes imparted a radiant glow to the azure of + the sky. Jewels of plain gold were about her ears and her tapering + strawberry hands, and a golden chain, attached to a time-keeper of + the same material, sparkled on an elegantly-rounded bosom that was + destined to be pushed forward by sighs. + +Let it not be thought that only the gracious sex can inspire such +plenitude of meticulous portraiture! Here is a description of the hero +in a novel by a man which appeared on my desk recently: + + For some time past there had been appearing at the home of Sarah + Ellenton, a man not over fifty years of age, well groomed and of the + appearances of being on good terms with prosperity in many phases. + His complexion was reddish. His hazel eyes deepset and close + together were small and shifting. His nose ran down to a point in + many lines, and from the point back to where it joined above his + lip, the course was seen to swerve slightly to one side. His upper + lip assumed almost any form and at all times. His mouth ran across + his face in a thin line, curved by waves according to the smiles and + expressions he employed. Below those features was a chin of fine + proportions, showing nothing to require study, but in his jaw hinges + there was a device that worked splendidly, when he wished to show + unction and charity, by sending out his chin on such occasions in + the kindest advances one would wish to see. + + It was not long before Sarah became Mrs. John R. Quinley. + +I hear that the authors are going to unionize themselves and join the +A.F. of L. The word "author" carries no sanctity with me: I have read +too many of them. If their forming a trade union will better the output +of American literature I am keen for it. I know that the professional +reader has a jaundiced eye; insensibly he acquires a parallax which +distorts his vision. Reading incessantly, now fiction, now history, +poetry, essays, philosophy, science, exegetics, and what not, he becomes +a kind of pantechnicon of slovenly knowledge; a knower of thousands of +things that aren't so. Every crank's whim, every cretin's philosophy, is +fired at him first of all. Every six months comes in the inevitable +treatise on the fourth dimension or on making gold from sea-water, or on +using moonlight to run dynamos, or on Pope Joan or Prester John. And +with it all he must retain his simple-hearted faith in the great art of +writing and in the beneficence of Gutenberg. + +Manuscript readers need a trade union far worse than authors. There is +all too little clannishness among us. We who are the helpless target for +the slings and arrows of every writer who chooses to put pen on +foolscap--might we not meet now and then for the humour of exchanging +anecdotes? No class of beings is more in need of the consolations of +intercourse. Perpend, brothers! Let us order a tierce of malmsey and +talk it over! Perchance, too, a trade union among readers might be of +substantial advantage. Is it not sad that a man should read manuscripts +all the sweet years of his maturity, and be paid forty dollars a week? +Let us make sixty the minimum--or let there be a pogrom among the +authors! + + + + +WILLIAM McFEE + + M'Phee is the most tidy of chief engineers. If the leg of a + cockroach gets into one of his slide-valves the whole ship knows it, + and half the ship has to clean up the mess. + + --RUDYARD KIPLING. + + +The next time the Cunard Company commissions a new liner I wish they +would sign on Joseph Conrad as captain, Rudyard Kipling as purser, and +William McFee as chief engineer. They might add Don Marquis as deck +steward and Hall Caine as chief-stewardess. Then I would like to be at +Raymond and Whitcomb's and watch the clerks booking passages! + +William McFee does not spell his name quite as does the Scotch engineer +in Mr. Kipling's _Brugglesmith_, but I feel sure that his attitude +toward cockroaches in the slide-valve is the same. Unhappily I do not +know Mr. McFee in his capacity as engineer; but I know and respect his +feelings as a writer, his love of honourable and honest work, his +disdain for blurb and blat. And by an author's attitude toward the +purveyors of publicity, you may know him. + +One evening about the beginning of December, 1915, I was sitting by the +open fire in Hempstead, Long Island, a comparatively inoffensive young +man, reading the new edition of Flecker's "The Golden Journey to +Samarkand" issued that October by Martin Secker in London. Mr. Secker, +like many other wise publishers, inserts in the back of his books the +titles of other volumes issued by him. Little did I think, as I turned +to look over Mr. Secker's announcements, that a train of events was +about to begin which would render me, during the succeeding twelve +months, a monomaniac in the eyes of my associates; so much so that when +I was blessed with a son and heir just a year later I received a +telegram signed by a dozen of them: "_Congratulations. Name him +Casuals_!" + +It was in that list of Mr. Secker's titles for the winter of 1915-16 +that my eyes first rested, with a premonitory lust, upon the +not-to-be-forgotten words. + +MCFEE, WILLIAM: CASUALS OF THE SEA. + +Who could fail to be stirred by so brave a title? At once I wrote for a +copy. + +My pocket memorandum book for Sunday, January 9, 1916, contains this +note: + +"Finished reading _Casuals of the Sea_, a good book. H---- still laid up +with bad ankle. In the P.M. we sat and read Bible aloud to Celia before +the open fire." + +My first impressions of "_Casuals of the Sea_, a good book" are +interwoven with memories of Celia, a pious Polish serving maid from Pike +County, Pennsylvania, who could only be kept in the house by nightly +readings of another Good Book. She was horribly homesick (that was her +first voyage away from home) and in spite of persistent Bible readings +she fled after two weeks, back to her home in Parker's Glen, Pa. She was +our first servant, and we had prepared a beautiful room in the attic for +her. However, that has nothing to do with Mr. McFee. + +_Casuals of the Sea_ is a novel whose sale of ten thousand copies in +America is more important as a forecast of literary weather than many a +popular distribution of a quarter million. Be it known by these presents +that there are at least ten thousand librivora in this country who +regard literature not merely as an emulsion. This remarkable novel, the +seven years' study of a busy engineer occupied with boiler inspections, +indicator cards and other responsibilities of the Lord of Below, was the +first really public appearance of a pen that will henceforth be listened +to with respect. + +Mr. McFee had written two books before "Casuals" was published, but at +that time it was not easy to find any one who had read them. They were +_Letters from an Ocean Tramp_ (1908) and _Aliens_ (1914); the latter has +been rewritten since then and issued in a revised edition. It is a very +singular experiment in the art of narrative, and a rich commentary on +human folly by a man who has made it his hobby to think things out for +himself. And the new version is headlighted by a preface which may well +take its place among the most interesting literary confessions of this +generation, where Mr. McFee shows himself as that happiest of men, the +artist who also has other and more urgent concerns than the whittling of +a paragraph:-- + + Of art I never grow weary, but she calls me over the world. I + suspect the sedentary art worker. Most of all I suspect the + sedentary writer. I divide authors into two classes--genuine + artists, and educated men who wish to earn enough to let them live + like country gentlemen. With the latter I have no concern. But the + artist knows when his time has come. In the same way I turned with + irresistible longing to the sea, whereon I had been wont to earn my + living. It is a good life and I love it. I love the men and their + ships. I find in them a never-ending panorama which illustrates my + theme, the problem of human folly. + +Mr. McFee, you see, has some excuse for being a good writer because he +has never had to write for a living. He has been writing for the fun of +it ever since he was an apprentice in a big engineering shop in London +twenty years ago. His profession deals with exacting and beautiful +machinery, and he could no more do hack writing than hack engineering. +And unlike the other English realists of his generation who have +cultivated a cheap flippancy, McFee finds no exhilaration in easy sneers +at middle-class morality. He has a dirk up his sleeve for Gentility (how +delightfully he flays it in _Aliens_) but he loves the middle classes +for just what they are: the great fly-wheel of the world. His attitude +toward his creations is that of a "benevolent marbleheart" (his own +phrase). He has seen some of the seams of life, and like McAndrew he has +hammered his own philosophy. It is a manly, just, and gentle creed, but +not a soft one. Since the war began he has been on sea service, first on +a beef-ship and transport in the Mediterranean, now as sub-lieutenant in +the British Navy. When the war is over, and if he feels the call of the +desk, Mr. McFee's brawny shoulder will sit in at the literary feast and +a big handful of scribblers will have to drop down the dumb-waiter shaft +to make room for him. It is a disconcerting figure in Grub Street, the +man who really has something to say. + +Publishers are always busy casting horoscopes for their new finds. How +the benign planets must have twirled in happy curves when Harold Bell +Wright was born, if one may credit his familiar mage, Elsbury W. +Reynolds! But the fame that is built merely on publishers' press sheets +does not dig very deep in the iron soil of time. We are all only +raft-builders, as Lord Dunsany tells us in his little parable; even the +raft that Homer made for Helen must break up some day. Who in these +States knows the works of Nat Gould? Twelve million of his dashing +paddock novels have been sold in England, but he is as unknown here as +is Preacher Wright in England. What is so dead as a dead best seller? +Sometimes it is the worst sellers that come to life, roll away the +stone, and an angel is found sitting laughing in the sepulchre. Let me +quote Mr. McFee once more: "I have no taste for blurb, but I cannot +refuse facts." + +William M.P. McFee was born at sea in 1881. His father, an English +skipper, was bringing his vessel toward the English coast after a long +voyage. His mother was a native of Nova Scotia. They settled in New +Southgate, a northern middle-class suburb of London, and here McFee was +educated in the city schools of which the first pages of _Casuals of the +Sea_ give a pleasant description. Then he went to a well-known grammar +school at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk--what we would call over here a +high school. He was a quiet, sturdy boy, and a first-rate cricketer. + +At sixteen he was apprenticed to a big engineering firm in Aldersgate. +This is one of the oldest streets in London, near the Charterhouse, +Smithfield Market, and the famous "Bart's" Hospital. In fact, the office +of the firm was built over one of the old plague pits of 1665. His +father had died several years before; and for the boy to become an +apprentice in this well-known firm Mrs. McFee had to pay three hundred +pounds sterling. McFee has often wondered just what he got for the +money. However, the privilege of paying to be better than someone else +is an established way of working out one's destiny in England, and at +the time the mother and son knew no better than to conform. You will +find this problem, and the whole matter of gentility, cuttingly set out +in _Aliens_. + +After three years as an apprentice, McFee was sent out by the firm on +various important engineering jobs, notably a pumping installation at +Tring, which he celebrated in a pamphlet of very creditable juvenile +verses, for which he borrowed Mr. Kipling's mantle. This was at the time +of the Boer War, when everybody in trousers who wrote verses was either +imitating Kipling or reacting from him. + +His engineering work gave young McFee a powerful interest in the lives +and thoughts of the working classes. He was strongly influenced by +socialism, and all his spare moments were spent with books. He came to +live in Chelsea with an artist friend, but he had already tasted life at +first hand, and the rather hazy atmosphere of that literary and artistic +Utopia made him uneasy. His afternoons were spent at the British Museum +reading room, his evenings at the Northampton Institute, where he +attended classes, and even did a little lecturing of his own. Competent +engineer as he was, that was never sufficient to occupy his mind. As +early as 1902 he was writing short stories and trying to sell them. + +In 1905 his uncle, a shipmaster, offered him a berth in the engine room +of one of his steamers, bound for Trieste. He jumped at the chance. +Since then he has been at sea almost continuously, save for one year +(1912-13) when he settled down in Nutley, New Jersey, to write. The +reader of _Aliens_ will be pretty familiar with Nutley by the time he +reaches page 416. "Netley" is but a thin disguise. I suspect a certain +liveliness in the ozone of Nutley. Did not Frank Stockton write some of +his best tales there? Some day some literary meteorologist will explain +how these intellectual anticyclones originate in such places as Nutley +(N.J.), Galesburg (Ill.), Port Washington (N.Y.), and Bryn Mawr (Pa.) + +The life of a merchantman engineer would not seem, to open a fair +prospect into literature. The work is gruelling and at the same time +monotonous. Constant change of scene and absence of home ties are (I +speak subject to correction) demoralizing; after the coveted chief's +certificate is won, ambition has little further to look forward to. A +small and stuffy cabin in the belly of the ship is not an inviting +study. The works of Miss Corelli and Messrs. Haig and Haig are the only +diversions of most of the profession. Art, literature, and politics do +not interest them. Picture postcards, waterside saloons, and the ladies +of the port are the glamour of his that they delight to honour. + +I imagine that Mr. Carville's remarkable account (in _Aliens_) of his +induction into the profession of marine engineering has no faint colour +of reminiscence in Mr. McFee's mind. The filth, the intolerable +weariness, the instant necessity of the tasks, stagger the easygoing +suburban reader. And only the other day, speaking of his work on a +seaplane ship in the British Navy, Mr. McFee said some illuminating +things about the life of an engineer: + + It is Sunday, and I have been working. Oh, yes, there is plenty of + work to do in the world, I find, wherever I go. But I cannot help + wondering why Fate so often offers me the dirty end of the stick. + Here I am, awaiting my commission as an engineer-officer of the + R.N.R., and I am in the thick of it day after day. I don't mean, + when I say "work," what you mean by work. I don't mean work such as + my friend the Censor does, or my friend the N.E.O. does, nor my + friends and shipmates, the navigating officer, the flying men, or + the officers of the watch. I mean _work_, hard, sweating, nasty + toil, coupled with responsibility. I am not alone. Most ships of the + naval auxiliary are the same. + + I am anxious for you, a landsman, to grasp this particular fragment + of the sorry scheme of things entire, that in no other profession + have the officers responsible for the carrying out of the work to + toil as do the engineers in merchantmen, in transports, in fleet + auxiliaries. You do not expect the major to clear the waste-pipe of + his regimental latrines. You do not expect the surgeon to + superintend the purging of his bandages. You do not expect the + navigators of a ship to paint her hull. You do not expect an + architect to make bricks (sometimes without straw). You do not + expect the barrister to go and repair the lock on the law courts + door, or oil the fans that ventilate the halls of justice. Yet you + do, collectively, tolerate a tradition by which the marine engineer + has to assist, overlook, and very often perform work corresponding + precisely to the irrelevant chores mentioned above, which are in + other professions relegated to the humblest and roughest of mankind. + I blame no one. It is tradition, a most terrible windmill at which + to tilt; but I conceive it my duty to set down once at least the + peculiar nature of an engineer's destiny. I have had some years of + it, and I know what I am talking about. + + _The_ point to distinguish is that the engineer not only has the + responsibility, but he has, in nine cases out of ten, to do it. He, + the officer, must befoul his person and derange his hours of rest + and recreation, that others may enjoy. He must be available + twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at sea or in port. + Whether chief or the lowest junior, he must be ready to plunge + instantly to the succour of the vilest piece of mechanism on board. + When coaling, his lot is easier imagined than described. + +The remarkable thing to note is that Mr. McFee imposed upon these +laborious years of physical toil a strenuous discipline of intellect as +well. He is a born worker: patient, dogged, purposeful. His years at sea +have been to him a more fruitful curriculum than that of any university. +The patient sarcasm with which he speaks of certain Oxford youths of his +acquaintance does not escape me. His sarcasm is just and on the target. +He has stood as Senior Wrangler in a far more exacting _viva voce_--the +University of the Seven Seas. + +If I were a college president, out hunting for a faculty, I would deem +that no salary would be too big to pay for the privilege of getting a +man like McFee on my staff. He would not come, of course! But how he has +worked for his mastery of the art of life and the theory thereof! When +his colleagues at sea were dozing in their deck chairs or rattling the +bones along the mahogany, he was sweating in his bunk, writing or +reading. He has always been deeply interested in painting, and no +gallery in any port he visited ever escaped him. These extracts from +some of his letters will show whether his avocations were those of most +engineers: + + As I crossed the swing-bridge of the docks at Garston (Liverpool) + the other day, and saw the tapering spars silhouetted against the + pale sky, and the zinc-coloured river with its vague Cheshire shores + dissolving in mist, it occurred to me that if an indulgent genie + were to appear and make me an offer I would cheerfully give up + writing for painting. As it is, I see things in pictures and I spend + more time in the Walker Gallery than in the library next door. + + I've got about all I _can_ get out of books, and now I don't relish + them save as memories. The reason for my wish, I suppose, is that + character, not incident, is my _metier_. And you can _draw_ + character, _paint_ character, but you can't very well blat about it, + can you? + + I am afraid Balzac's job is too big for anybody nowadays. The worst + of writing men nowadays is their horrible ignorance of how people + live, of ordinary human possibilities. + + A----. is always pitching into me for my insane ideas about "cheap + stuff." He says I'm on the wrong tack and I'll be a failure if I + don't do what the public wants. I said I didn't care a blue curse + what the public wanted, nor did I worry much if I never made a big + name. All I want is to do some fine and honourable work, to do it as + well as I possibly could, and there my responsibility ended.... To + hell with writing, I want _to feel_ and _see_! + + I am laying in a gallon of ink and a couple of cwt. of paper, to the + amusement of the others, who imagine I am a merchant of some sort + who has to transact business at sea because Scotland yard are alter + him! + +His kit for every voyage, besides the gallon of ink and the +hundredweight of foolscap, always included a score of books, ranging +from Livy or Chaucer to Gorky and histories of Italian art. Happening to +be in New York at the time of the first exhibition in this country of +"futurist" pictures, he entered eagerly into the current discussion in +the newspaper correspondence columns. He wrote for a leading London +journal an article on "The Conditions of Labour at Sea." He finds time +to contribute to the _Atlantic Monthly_ pieces of styptic prose that +make zigzags on the sphygmograph of the editor. His letters written +weekly to the artist friend he once lived with in Chelsea show a +humorous and ironical mind ranging over all topics that concern +cultivated men. I fancy he could out-argue many a university professor +on Russian fiction, or Michelangelo, or steam turbines. + +When one says that McFee found little intellectually in common with his +engineering colleagues, that is not to say that he was a prig. He was +interested in everything that they were, but in a great deal more, too. +And after obtaining his extra chief's certificate from the London Board +of Trade, with a grade of ninety-eight per cent., he was not inclined to +rest on his gauges. + +In 1912 he took a walking trip from Glasgow to London, to gather local +colour for a book he had long meditated; then he took ship for the +United States, where he lived for over a year writing hard. Neither +_Aliens_ nor _Casuals of the Sea_, which he had been at work on for +years, met with the favour of New York publishers. He carried his +manuscripts around the town until weary of that amusement; and when the +United Fruit Company asked him to do some engineering work for them he +was not loath to get back into the old harness. And then came the war. + +Alas, it is too much to hope that the Cunard Company will ever officer a +vessel as I have suggested at the outset of these remarks. But I made my +proposal not wholly at random, for in Conrad, Kipling, and McFee, all +three, there is something of the same artistic creed. In those two +magnificent prefaces--to _A Personal Record_ and to _The Nigger of the +Narcissus_--Conrad has set down, in words that should be memorable to +every trafficker in ink, his conception of the duty of the man of +letters. They can never be quoted too often: + +"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the +miseries or credulities of mankind.... The sight of human affairs +deserves admiration and pity. And he is not insensible who pays them the +undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile +which is not a grin." + +That is the kind of tribute that Mr. McPee has paid to the Gooderich +family in _Casuals of the Sea_. Somewhere in that book he has uttered +the immortal remark that "The world belongs to the Enthusiast who keeps +cool." I think there is much of himself in that aphorism, and that the +cool enthusiast, the benevolent marbleheart, has many fine things in +store for us. + +And there is one other sentence in _Casuals of the Sea_ that lingers +with me, and gives a just trace of the author's mind. It is worth +remembering, and I leave it with you: + +"She considered a trouble was a trouble and to be treated as such, +instead of snatching the knotted cord from the hand of God and dealing +murderous blows." + + + + +RHUBARB + + +We used to call him Rhubarb, by reason of his long russet beard, which +we imagined trailing in the prescriptions as he compounded them, +imparting a special potency. He was a little German druggist--_Deutsche +Apotheker_--and his real name was Friedrich Wilhelm Maximilian Schulz. + +The village of Kings is tucked away in Long Island, in the Debatable +Land where the generous boundary of New York City zigzags in a sporting +way just to permit horse racing at Belmont Park. It is the most rustic +corner of the City. To most New Yorkers it is as remote as Helgoland and +as little known. It has no movie theatre, no news-stand, no cigar store, +no village atheist. The railroad station, where one hundred and fifty +trains a day do not stop, might well be mistaken for a Buddhist shrine, +so steeped in discreet melancholy is it. The Fire Department consists of +an old hose wagon first used to extinguish fires kindled by the +Republicans when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected. In the weather-beaten +Kings Lyceum "East Lynne" is still performed once a year. People who +find Quoguc and Cohasset too exciting, move to Kings to cool off. The +only way one can keep servants out there is by having the works of +Harold Bell Wright in the kitchen for the cook to read. + +Stout-hearted Mr. Schulz came to Kings long ago. There is quite a little +German colony there. With a delicatessen store on one side of him and a +man who played the flute on the other, he felt hardly at all +expatriated. The public house on the corner serves excellent +_Rheingold_, and on winter evenings Friedrich and Minna would sit by the +stove at the back of the drugstore with a jug of amber on the table and +dream of Stuttgart. + +It did not take me long to find out that apothecary Schulz was an +educated man. At the rear of the store hung two diplomas of which he was +very proud. One was a certificate from the Stuttgart Oberrealschule; the +other his license to practise homicidal pharmacy in the German Empire, +dated 1880. He had read the "Kritik der reinen Vernunft", and found it +more interesting than Henry James, he told me. Julia and I used to drop +into his shop of an evening for a mug of hot chocolate, and always fell +into talk. His Minna, a frail little woman with a shawl round her +shoulders, would come out into the store and talk to us, too, and their +pet dachshund would frolic at our feet. They were a quaint couple, she +so white and shy and fragile; he ruddy, sturdy, and positive. + +It was not till I told him of my years spent at a German University that +he really showed me the life that lay behind his shopman activity. We +sometimes talked German together, and he took me into their little +sitting room to see his photographs of home scenes at Stuttgart. It was +over thirty years since he had seen German soil, but still his eyes +would sparkle at the thought. He and Minna, being childless, dreamed of +a return to the Fatherland as their great end in life. + +What an alluring place the little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the +rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin +abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies--Mexican Mustang +Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's +Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, +marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of +paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in his enormous baggy +trousers--infinite breeches in a little room, as Julia used to say. + +I wish I could set him down in all his rich human flavour. The first +impression he gave was one of cleanness and good humour. He was always +in shirtsleeves, with suspenders forming an X across his broad back; +his shirt was fresh laundered, his glowing beard served as cravat. He +had a slow, rather ponderous speech, with deep gurgling gutturals and a +decrescendo laugh, slipping farther and farther down into his larynx. +Once, when we got to know each other fairly well, I ventured some +harmless jest about Barbarossa. He chuckled; then his face grew grave. +"I wish Minna could have the beard," he said. "Her chest is not strong. +It would be a fine breast-protector for her. But me, because I am strong +like a horse, I have it all!" He thumped his chest ruefully with his +broad, thick hand. + +Despite his thirty years in America, good Schulz was still the Deutsche +Apotheker and not at all the American druggist. He had installed a soda +fountain as a concession, but it puzzled him sorely, and if he was asked +for anything more complex than chocolate ice cream soda he would shake +his head solemnly and say: "That I have not got." Motorists sometimes +turned off the Jericho turnpike and stopped at his shop asking for +banana splits or grape juice highballs, or frosted pineapple fizz. But +they had to take chocolate ice cream soda or nothing. Sometimes in a fit +of absent-mindedness he would turn his taps too hard and the charged +water would spout across the imitation marble counter. He would wag his +beard deprecatingly and mutter a shamefaced apology, smiling again when +the little black dachshund came trotting to sniff at the spilt soda and +rasp the wet floor with her bright tongue. + +At the end of September he shut up the soda fountain gladly, piling it +high with bars of castile soap or cartons of cod liver oil. Then Minna +entered into her glory as the dispenser of hot chocolate which seethed +and sang in a tall silvery tank with a blue gas burner underneath. This +she served in thick china mugs with a clot of whipped cream swimming on +top. Julia would buy a box of the cheese crackers that Schulz kept in +stock specially for her, and give several to the sleek little black +bitch that stood pleading with her quaint turned-out fore-feet placed on +Julia's slippers. Schulz, beaming serenely behind a pyramid of "intense +carnation" bottles on his perfume counter, would chuckle at the antics +of his pet. "Ah, he is a wise little dog!" he would exclaim with naive +pride. "He knows who is friendly!" He always called the little dog "he," +which amused us. + +On Sunday afternoon the drugstore was closed from one to five, and +during those hours Schulz took his weekly walk, accompanied by the dog +which plodded desperately after him on her short legs. Sometimes we met +him swinging along the by-roads, flourishing a cudgel and humming to +himself. Whenever he saw a motor coming he halted, the little black +dachshund would look up at him, and he would stoop ponderously down, +pick her up and carry her in his arms until all danger was past. + +As the time went on he and I used to talk a good deal about the war. +Minna, pale and weary, would stand behind her steaming urn, keeping the +shawl tight round her shoulders; Rhubarb and I would argue without heat +upon the latest news from the war zone. I had no zeal for converting the +old fellow from his views; I understood his sympathies and respected +them. Reports of atrocities troubled him as much as they did me; but the +spine of his contention was that the German army was unbeatable. He got +out his faded discharge ticket from the Wuertemberger Landsturm to show +the perfect system of the Imperial military organization. In his desk at +the back of the shop he kept a war map cut from a Sunday supplement and +over this we would argue, Schulz breathing hard and holding his beard +aside in one hand as he bent over the paper. When other customers came +in, he would put the map away with a twinkle, and the topic was dropped. +But often the glass top of the perfume counter was requisitioned as a +large-scale battleground, and the pink bottle of rose water set to +represent Von Hindenburg while the green phial of smelling salts was +Joffre or Brussilov. We fought out the battle of the Marne pretty +completely on the perfume counter. "_Warte doch_!" he would cry. "Just +wait! You will see! All the world is against her, but Germany will win!" + +Poor Minna was always afraid her husband and I would quarrel. She knew +well how opposite our sympathies were; she could not understand that our +arguments were wholly lacking in personal animus. When I told him of the +Allies' growing superiority in aircraft Rhubarb would retort by showing +me clippings about the German trench fortifications, the "pill boxes" +made of solid cement. I would speak of the deadly curtain fire of the +British; he would counter with mysterious allusions to Krupp. And his +conclusions were always the same. "Just wait! Germany will win!" And he +would stroke his beard placidly. "But, Fritz!" Minna used to cry in a +panic, "The gentleman might think differently!" Rhubarb and I would grin +at each other, I would buy a tin of tobacco, and we would say good +night. + +How dear is the plain, unvarnished human being when one sees him in a +true light! Schulz's honest, kindly face seemed to me to typify all +that I knew of the finer qualities of the Germans; the frugal +simplicity, the tenderness, the proud, stiff rectitude. He and I felt +for each other, I think, something of the humorous friendliness of the +men in the opposing trenches. Chance had cast us on different sides of +the matter. But when I felt tempted to see red, to condemn the Germans +_en masse_, to chant litanies of hate, I used to go down to the +drugstore for tobacco or a mug of chocolate. Rhubarb and I would argue +it out. + +But that was a hard winter for him. The growing anti-German sentiment in +the neighbourhood reduced his business considerably. Then he was worried +over Minna. Often she did not appear in the evenings, and he would +explain that she had gone to bed. I was all the more surprised to meet +her one very snowy Sunday afternoon, sloshing along the road in the +liquid mire, the little dog squattering sadly behind, her small black +paws sliding on the ice-crusted paving. "What on earth are you doing +outdoors on a day like this?" I said. + +"Fritz had to go to Brooklyn, and I thought he would be angry if Lischen +didn't get her airing." + +"You take my advice and go home and get into some dry clothes," I said +severely. + +Soon after that I had to go away for three weeks. I was snowbound in +Massachusetts for several days; then I had to go to Montreal on urgent +business. Julia went to the city to visit her mother while I was away, +so we had no news from Kings. + +We got back late one Sunday evening. The plumbing had frozen in our +absence; when I lit the furnace again, pipes began to thaw and for an +hour or so we had a lively time. In the course of a battle with a pipe +and a monkey wrench I sprained a thumb, and the next morning I stopped +at the drugstore on my way to the train to get some iodine. + +Rhubarb was at his prescription counter weighing a little cone of white +powder in his apothecary's scales. He looked far from well. There were +great pouches under his eyes; his beard was unkempt; his waistcoat +spotted with food stains. The lady waiting received her package, and +went out. Rhubarb and I grasped hands. + +"Well," I said, "what do you think now about the war? Did you see that +the Canadians took a mile of trenches five hundred yards deep last week? +Do you still think Germany will win?" To my surprise he turned on his +heel and began apparently rummaging along a row of glass jars. His gaze +seemed to be fastened upon a tall bottle containing ethyl alcohol. At +last he turned round. His broad, naive face was quivering like +blanc-mange. + +"What do I care who wins?" he said. "What does it matter to me any more? +Minna is dead. She died two weeks ago of pneumonia." + +As I stood, not knowing what to say, there was a patter along the floor. +The little dachshund came scampering into the shop and frisked about my +feet. + + + + +THE HAUNTING BEAUTY OF STRYCHNINE + +A LITTLE-KNOWN TOWN OF UNEARTHLY BEAUTY + + + +Slowly, reluctantly (rather like a _vers libre_ poem) the quaint +little train comes to a stand. Along the station platform each of the +_fiacre_ drivers seizes a large dinner-bell and tries to outring the +others. You step from the railway carriage--and instantly the hellish +din of those droschky bells faints into a dim, far-away tolling. Your +eye has caught the superb sweep of the Casa Grande beetling on its crag. +Over the sapphire canal where the old men are fishing for sprats, above +the rugged scarp where the blue-bloused _ouvriers_ are quarrying the +famous champagne cheese, you see the Gothic transept of the Palazzio +Ginricci, dour against a nacre sky. An involuntary tremolo eddies down +your spinal marrow. The Gin Palace, you murmur.... At last you are in +Strychnine. + +Unnoted by Baedeker, unsung by poets, unrhapsodied by press +agents--there lurks the little town of Strychnine in that far and +untravelled corner where France, Russia, and Liberia meet in an +unedifying Zollverein. The strychnine baths have long been famous among +physicians, but the usual ruddy tourist knows them not. The sorrowful +ennui of a ten-hour journey on the B.V.D. _Chemise de fer_ (with +innumerable examinations of luggage), while it has kept out the +contraband Swiss cheese which is so strictly interdicted, has also kept +away the rich and garrulous tourist. But he who will endure to the end +that tortuous journey among flat fields of rye and parsimony, will find +himself well rewarded. The long tunnel through Mondragone ends at +length, and you find yourself on the platform with the droschky bells +clanging in your ears and the ineffable majesty of the Casa Grande crag +soaring behind the jade canal. + +The air was chill, and I buttoned my surtout tightly as I stepped into +the curious seven-wheeled _sforza_ lettered _Hotel Decameron_. We +rumbled _andante espressivo_ over the hexagonal cobbles of the Chaussee +d'Arsenic, crossed the mauve canal and bent under the hanging cliffs of +the cheese quarries. I could see the fishwives carrying great trays of +lampreys and lambrequins toward the fish market. It is curious what +quaintly assorted impressions one receives in the first few minutes in a +strange place. I remember noticing a sausage kiosk in the _markt-platz_ +where a man in a white coat was busily selling hot icons. They are +delivered fresh every hour from the Casa Grande (the great cheese +cathedral) on the cliff. + +The Hotel Decameron is named after Boccaccio, who was once a bartender +there. It stands in a commanding position on the Place Nouveau Riche +overlooking the Casino and the odalisk erected by Edward VII in memory +of his cure. After two weeks of the strychnine baths the merry monarch +is said to have called for a corncob pipe and a plate of onions, after +which he made his escape by walking over the forest track to the French +frontier, although previous to this he had not walked a kilometer +without a cane since John Bull won the Cowes regatta. The _haut ton_ of +the section in which the Hotel Decameron finds itself can readily be +seen by the fact that the campanile of the Duke of Marmalade fronts on +the rue Sauterne, just across from the barroom of the Hotel. The +antiquaries say there is an underground corridor between the two. + +The fascinations of a stay in Strychnine are manifold. I have a weak +heart, so I did not try the baths, although I used to linger on the +terrace of the Casino about sunset to hear Tinpanni's band and eat a +bronze bowl of Kerosini's gooseberry fool. I spent a great deal of my +time exploring the chief glory of the town, the Casa Grande, which +stands on the colossal crag honeycombed underneath with the shafts and +vaults of the cheese mine. There is nothing in the world more entrancing +than to stand (with a vinaigrette at one's nose) on the ramp of the +Casa, looking down over the ochre canal, listening to the hoarse shouts +of the workmen as they toil with pick and shovel, laying bare some +particularly rich lode of the pale, citron-coloured cheese which will +some day make Strychnine a place of _pelerinage_ for all the world. _Pay +homage to the fromage_ is a rough translation of the motto of the town, +which is carved in old Gothic letters on the apse of the Casa itself. +Limberg, Gruyere, Alkmaar, Neufchatel, Camembert and Hoboken--all these +famous cheeses will some day pale into whey before the puissance of the +Strychnine curd. I was signally honoured by an express invitation of the +burgomaster to be present at a meeting of the Cheesemongers' Guild at +the Rathaus. The Kurdmeister, who is elected annually by the town +council, spoke most eloquently on the future of the cheese industry, and +a curious rite was performed. Before the entrance of the ceremonial +cheese, which is cut by the Kurdmeister himself, all those present +donned oxygen masks similar to those devised by the English to combat +the German poison-gas. And I learned that oxygen helmets are worn by +the workmen in the quarries to prevent prostration. + +It was with unfeigned regret that I found my fortnight over. I would +gladly have lingered in the medieval cloisters of the Gin Palace, and +sat for many mornings under the pistachio trees on the terrace sipping +my _verre_ of native wine. But duties recalled me to the beaten paths of +travel, and once more I drove in the old-fashioned ambulance to catch my +even more old-fashioned train. The B.V.D. trains only leave Strychnine +when there is a stern wind, as otherwise the pungent fumes of the cheese +carried in the luggage van are very obnoxious to the passengers. Some +day some American efficiency expert will visit the town and teach them +to couple their luggage van on to the rear of the train. But till then +Strychnine will be to me, and to every other traveller who may chance +that way, a fragrant memory. + +And as you enter the tunnel, the last thing you see is the onyx canal +and the old women fishing for lambrequins and palfreys. + + + + +INGO + +"ZUM ANDENKEN" + + +The first night we sat down at the inn table for supper I lost my heart +to Ingo! Ingo was just ten years old. He wore a little sailor suit of +blue and white striped linen; his short trousers showed chubby brown +calves above his white socks; his round golden head cropped close in the +German fashion. His blue eyes were grave and thoughtful. By great good +fortune we sat next each other at table, and in my rather grotesque +German I began a conversation. How careful Ingo was not to laugh at the +absurdities of my syntax! How very courteous he was! + +Looking back into the mysterious panorama of pictures that we call +memory, I can see the long dining room of the old gasthaus in the Black +Forest, where two Americans on bicycles appeared out of nowhere and +asked for lodging. They were the first Americans who had ever been seen +in that remote valley, and the Gasthaus zur Krone ("the Crown Inn") +found them very amusing. Perhaps you have never seen a country tavern +in the Schwarzwald? Then you have something to live for. A long, low +building with a moss-grown roof and tremendous broad eaves sheltering +little galleries; and the barn under the same roof for greater warmth in +winter. One side of the house was always strong with an excellent homely +aroma of cow and horse; one had only to open a door in the upper hall, a +door that looked just like a bedroom entrance, to find oneself in the +haymow. There I used to lie for hours reading, and listening to the +summer rain thudding on the shingles. Sitting in the little gallery +under the eaves, looking happily down the white road where the yellow +coach brought the mail twice a day, one could see the long vista of the +valley, the women with bright red jackets working in the fields, and the +dark masses of forest on the hillside opposite. There was much rain that +summer; the mountains were often veiled all day long in misty shreds of +cloud, and the two Americans sat with pipes and books at the long dining +table, greeted by gales of laughter on the part of the robust landlord's +niece when they essayed the native idiom. "_Sie arbeiten immer_!" she +used to say; "_Sie werden krank_!" ("You're always working; you'll be +ill!") + +There is a particular poignance in looking back now on those happy days +two years before the war. Nowhere in all the world, I suppose, are there +more cordial, warmhearted, simple, human people than the South Germans. +On the front of the inn there was a big yellow metal sign, giving the +military number of the district, and the mobilization points for the +Landsturm and the Landwehr, and we realized that even here the careful +organization of the military power had numbered and ticketed every +village. But what did it mean to us? War was a thing unthinkable in +those days. We bicycled everywhere, climbed, mountains, bathed in +waterfalls, chatted fluent and unorthodox German with everyone we met, +and played games with Ingo. + +Dear little Ingo! At the age when so many small boys are pert, impudent, +self-conscious, he was the simplest, happiest, gravest little creature. +His hobby was astronomy, and often I would find him sitting quietly in a +corner with a book about the stars. On clear evenings we would walk +along the road together, in the mountain hush that was only broken by +the brook tumbling down the valley, and he would name the constellations +for me. His little round head was thrilled through and through by the +immense mysteries of space; sometimes at meal times he would fall into a +muse, forgetting his beef and gravy. Once I asked him at dinner what he +was thinking of. He looked up with his clear gray-blue eyes and flashing +smile: "_Von den Sternen_!" ("Of the stars.") + +The time after supper was reserved for games, in which Wolfgang, Ingo's +smaller brother (aged seven), also took part. Our favourite pastimes +were "Irrgarten" and "Galgenspiel," in which we found enormous +amusement. Galgenspiel was Ingo's translation of "Hangman," a simple +pastime which had sometimes entertained my own small brother on rainy +days; apparently it was new in Germany. One player thinks of a word, and +sets down on paper a dash for each letter in this word. It is the task +of the other to guess the word, and he names the letters of the alphabet +one by one. Every time he mentions a letter that is contained in the +word you must set it down in its proper place in the word, but every +time he mentions a letter that is not in the word you draw a portion of +a person depending from a gallows; the object of course being for him to +guess the word before you finish drawing the effigy. We played the game +entirely in German, and I can still see Ingo's intent little face bent +over my preposterous drawings, cudgelling his quick and happy little +brain to spot the word before the hangman could finish his grim task. +"Quick, Ingo!" I would cry. "You will get yourself hung!" and he would +laugh in his own lovable way. There was never a jollier way of learning +a foreign language than by playing games with Ingo. + +The other favourite pastime was drawing mazes on paper, labyrinths of +winding paths which must be traversed by a pencil point. The task was to +construct a maze so complicated that the other could not find his way +out, starting at the middle. We would sit down at opposite ends of the +room to construct our mysteries of blind alleys and misleading passages, +then each one would be turned loose in the "irrgarten" drawn by the +other. Ingo would stand at my side while I tried in obstinate stupidity +to find my way through his little puzzle; his eager heart inside his +sailor blouse would pound like a drum when I was nearing the dangerous +places where an exit might be won. He would hold his breath so audibly, +and his blue eyes would grow so anxious, that I always knew when not to +make the right turning, and my pencil would wander on in hopeless +despair until he had mercy on me and led me to freedom. + +After lunch every day, while waiting for the mail-coach to come +trundling up the valley, Ingo and I used to sit in the little balcony +under the eaves, reading. He introduced me to his favourite book _Till +Eulenspiegel_, and we sped joyously through the adventures of that +immortal buffoon of German folk-lore. We took turns reading aloud: every +paragraph or so I would appeal for an explanation of something. +Generally I understood well enough, but it was such a delight to hear +Ingo strive to make the meaning plain. What a puckering of his bright +boyish forehead, what a grave determination to elucidate the fable! What +a mingling of ecstatic pride in having a grown man as pupil, with +deference due to an elder. Ingo was a born gentleman and in his fiercest +transports of glee never forgot his manners! I would make some purposely +ludicrous shot at the sense, and he would double up with innocent mirth. +His clear laughter would ring out, and his mother, pacing a digestive +stroll on the highway below us, would look up crying in the German way, +"_Gott! wie er freut sich_!" The progress of our reading was held up by +these interludes, but I could never resist the temptation to start Ingo +explaining. + +Ingo having made me free of his dearest book, it was only fair to +reciprocate. So one day Lloyd and I bicycled down to Freiburg, and +there, at a heavenly "bookhandler's," I found a copy of 'Treasure +Island' in German. Then there was revelry in the balcony! I read the +tale aloud, and I wish R.L.S. might have seen the shining of Ingo's +eyes! Alas, the vividness of the story interfered with the little lad's +sleep, and his mother was a good deal disturbed about this violent yarn +we were reading together. How close he used to sit beside me as we read +of the dark doings at the _Admiral Benbow_: and how his face would fall +when, clear and hollow from the sounding-board of the hills, came the +quick _clop, clop_ of the mail-man's horses. + +I don't know anything that has ever gone deeper in my memory than those +hours spent with Ingo. I have a little snapshot of him I took the misty, +sorrowful morning when I bicycled away to Basel and left the Gasthaus +zur Krone in its mountain valley. The blessed little lad stands up erect +and stiff in the formal German way, and I can see his blue eyes alight +with friendliness, and a little bit unhappy because his eccentric +American comrade was gomg away and there would be no more afternoons +with _Till Eulenspiegel_ on the balcony. I wonder if he thinks of me as +often as I do of him? He gave me a glimpse into the innocent heaven of a +child's heart that I can never forget. By now he is approaching sixteen, +and I pray that whatever the war may take away from me it will spare me +my Ingo. It is strange and sad to recall that his parting present to me +was a drawing of a Zeppelin, upon which he toiled manfully all one +afternoon. I still have it in my scrapbook. + +And I wonder if he ever looks in the old copy of "Hauff's Maerchen" that +I bought for him in Freiburg, and sees the English words that he was to +learn how to translate when he should grow older! As I remember them, +they ran like this: + + For Ingo to learn English will very easy be + If someone is as kind to him as he has been to me; + Plays games with him, reads fairy tales, corrects all his mistakes, + And never laughs too loudly at the blunders that he makes-- + Then he will find, as I did, how well two pleasures blend: + To learn a foreign language, and to make a foreign friend. + +If I love anybody in the world, I love Ingo. And that is why I cannot +get up much enthusiasm for hymns of hate. + + + + +HOUSEBROKEN + + +After Simmons had been married two years he began to feel as though he +needed a night off. But he hesitated to mention the fact, for he knew +his wife would feel hurt to think that he could dream of an evening +spent elsewhere than in their cosy sitting room. However, there were no +two ways about it: the old unregenerate male in Simmons yearned for +something more exciting than the fireside armchair, the slippers and +smoking jacket, and the quiet game of cards. Visions of the old riotous +evenings with the boys ran through his mind; a billiard table and the +click of balls; the jolly conversation at the club, and glass after +glass of that cold amber beer. The large freedom of the city streets at +night, the warm saloons on every corner, the barrooms with their +pyramids of bottles flashing in the gaslight--these were the things that +made a man's life amusing. And here he was cooped up in a little cage in +the suburbs like a tame cat! + +Thoughts of this kind had agitated Simmons for a long time, and at last +he said something to Ethel. He had keyed himself up to meet a sharp +retort, some sarcastic comment about his preferring a beer garden to +his own home, even an outburst of tears. But to his amazement Ethel took +it quite calmly. + +"Why, yes, of course, dear," she said. "It'll do you good to have an +evening with your friends." + +A little taken aback, he asked whether she would rather he didn't go. + +"Why, no," she answered. "I shall have a lovely time. I won't be +lonely." + +This was on Monday. Simmons planned to go out on Friday night, meeting +the boys for dinner at the club, and after that they would spend the +evening at Boelke's bowling alley. All the week he went about in a glow +of anticipation. At the office he spoke in an offhand way of the +pleasant evenings a man can have in town, and pitied the prosaic beggars +who never stir from the house at night. + +On Friday evening he came home hurriedly, staying just long enough to +shave and change his collar. Ethel had on a pretty dress and seemed very +cheerful. A strange sinking came over him as he saw the familiar room +shining with firelight and the shabby armchair. + +"Would you rather I stayed at home?" he asked. + +"Not a bit," she said, quite as though she meant it. "Diana has a steak +in the oven, and I've got a new book to read. I won't wait up for you." + +He kissed her and went off. + +When he got on the trolley a sudden revulsion struck him. He was tired +and wanted to go home. Why on earth spend the evening with a lot of +drunken rowdies when he might be at his own hearth watching Ethel's face +bent over her sewing? He saw little enough of her anyway. + +At the door of the club he halted. Inside, the crowd was laughing, +shouting jests, dicing for cocktails. Suddenly he turned and ran. + +He cursed himself for a fool, but none the less an irresistible force +seemed to draw him home. On the car he sat glum and silent, wondering +how all the other men could read their papers so contentedly. + +At last he reached the modest little suburb. He hurried along the street +and had almost entered his gate when he paused. + +Through the half-drawn curtains he could see Ethel sitting comfortably +by the lamp. She was reading, and the cat was in her lap. His heart +leaped with a great throb. But how could he go in now? It was barely +eight o'clock. After all his talk about a man's need of relaxation and +masculine comradeship--why, she would never stop laughing! He turned and +tiptoed away. + +That evening was a nightmare for Simmons. Opposite his house was a +little suburban park, and thither he took himself. For a long while he +sat on a bench cursing. Twice he started for the trolley, and again +returned. It was a damp autumn night; little by little the chill pierced +his light coat and he sneezed. Up and down the little park he tramped, +biting a dead cigar. Once he went as far as the drugstore and bought a +box of crackers. + +At last--it seemed years--the church chimes struck ten and he saw the +lights go out in his house. He forced himself to make twenty-five more +trips around the gravel walk and then he could wait no longer. Shivering +with weariness and cold, he went home. + +He let himself in with his latch key and tiptoed upstairs. He leaned +over the bed and Ethel stirred sleepily. + +"What time is it, dear?" she murmured. "You're early, aren't you?" + +"One o'clock," he lied bravely--and just then the dining-room clock +struck half-past ten and supported him. + +"Did you have a good time?" + +"Bully--perfectly bully," he said. "There's nothing like a night with +the boys now and then." + + + + +THE HILARITY OF HILAIRE + + +I remember some friends of mine telling me how they went down to +Horsham, in Sussex, to see Hilaire Belloc. They found him in the cellar, +seated astraddle of a gigantic wine-cask just arrived from France, about +to proceed upon the delicate (and congenial) task of bottling the wine. +He greeted them like jovial Silenus, and with competitive shouts of +laughter the fun went forward. The wine was strained, bottled, sealed, +labelled, and binned, the master of the vintage initiating his young +visitors into the rite with bubbling and infectious gaiety--improvising +verses, shouting with merriment, full of an energy and vivacity almost +inconceivable to Saxon phlegm. My friends have always remembered it as +one of the most diverting afternoons of their lives; and after the +bottling was done and all hands thoroughly tired, he took them a +swinging tramp across the Sussex Downs, talking hard all the way. + + +I + +That is the Belloc we all know and love: vigorous, Gallic, bursting with +energy, hospitality, and wit: the _enfant terrible_ of English letters +for the past fifteen years. Mr. Joyce Kilmer's edition of Belloc's +verses is very welcome.[C] His introduction is charming: the tribute of +an understanding lover. Perhaps he labours a little in proving that +Belloc is essentially a poet rather than a master of prose; perhaps too +some of his judgments of Pater, Hardy, Scott, and others of whom one has +heard, are precipitate and smack a little of the lecture circuit: but +there is much to be grateful for in his affectionate and thoughtful +tribute. Perhaps we do not enough realize how outstanding and how +engaging a figure Mr. Belloc is. + +[Footnote C: Verses by Hilaire Belloc; with an introduction by Joyce +Kilmer. New York: Laurence J. Gomme, 1916.] + +Hilaire Belloc is of soldierly, artistic, and lettered blood. Four of +his great-uncles were generals under Napoleon. The father of his +grandmother fought under Soult at Corunna. A brother of his grandmother +was wounded at Waterloo. + +His grandmother, Louise Marie Swanton, who died in 1890, lived both in +France and England, and was famous as the translator into French of +Moore's "Life of Byron," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and works by Dickens and +Mrs. Gaskell. She married Hilaire Belloc, an artist, whose pictures are +in the Louvre and many French museums; his tomb may be seen in Pere la +Chaise. Their son was Louis Swanton Belloc, a lawyer, who married an +English wife. + +The only son of this couple was the present Hilaire Belloc, born at +Lacelle St. Cloud, July 27, 1870--the "Terrible Year" it was +called--until 1914. + +Louis Belloc died in 1872, and as a very small child Hilaire went to +live in Sussex, the gracious shire which both he and Rudyard Kipling +have so often and so thrillingly commemorated. Slindon, near Arundel, +became his home, the rolling hills, clean little rivers, and picturesque +villages of the South Downs moulded his boyish thoughts. + +In 1883 he went to the famous Catholic school at Edgbaston. Mr. Thomas +Seccombe, in a recent article on Belloc (from which I dip a number of +biographical facts), quotes a description of him at this period: + +"I remember very well Belloc coming to the Oratory School--some time in +'83, I suppose. He was a small, squat person, of the shaggy kind, with a +clever face and sharp, bright eyes. Being amongst English boys, his +instinctive combativeness made him assume a decidedly French pose, and +this no doubt brought on him many a gibe, which, we may be equally sure, +he was well able to return. I was amongst the older boys, saw little of +him. But I recollect finding him cine day studying a high wall (of the +old Oratory Church, since pulled down). It turned out that he was +calculating its exact height by some cryptic mathematical process which +he proceeded to explain. I concealed my awe, and did not tell him that I +understood nothing of his terms, his explanations, or deductions; it +would have been unsuitable for a big fellow to be taught by a 'brat.' In +those days the boys used to act Latin plays of Terence, which enjoyed a +certain celebrity, and from his first year Belloc was remarkable. His +rendering of the impudent servant maid was the inauguration of a series +of triumphs during his whole school career." + +In '89 Hilaire left school, and served for a year in the French field +artillery, in a regiment stationed at Toul. Here he revived the Gallic +heritage which was naturally his, learned to talk continually in French, +and to drink wine. You will remember that in "The Path to Rome" he +starts from Toul; but I cannot quote the passage; someone (who the devil +is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that +book--everyone should have six copies. + +After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical +contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College, +Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in +England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known +as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean +and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of +the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the +barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the +public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have +seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He +swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He +read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the +fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus +of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long +readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still +recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and +wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at +Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up. + +Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in +Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's. +It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western +Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek. +But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her +into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her +wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and +the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene. +This may be the wake of a tradition inaugurated by Belloc; but I think +it goes farther back than that. At any rate, in Oxford the young +energumen found himself happy and merry beyond words: he worked +brilliantly, was a notable figure in the Union debates, argued +passionately against every conventional English tradition, and attacked +authority, complacence, and fetichism of every kind. Never were dons of +the donnish sort more brilliantly twitted than by young Belloc. And, +partly because of his failure to capture an All Souls fellowship (the +most coveted prize of intellectual Oxford) the word "don" has retained a +tinge of acid in Belloc's mind ever since. (Who can read without +assentive chuckles his delicious "Lines to a Don!" It was the favourite +of all worthy dons at Oxford when I was there.) He has never had any +reverence for a man merely because he held a post of authority. + +Of the Balliol years Mr. Seccombe says: + +"He was a few years older and more experienced than most of his college +friends, but had lost little of the intoxication, the contagion and the +ringing laughter of earliest manhood. He dazzled and infected everyone +with his mockery and his laughter. There never was such an undergraduate, +so merry, so learned in medieval trifling and terminology, so perfectly +spontaneous in rhapsody and extravaganza, so positive and final in +his judgments--who spoke French, too, like a Frenchman, in a manner +unintelligible to our public-school-French-attuned ears." + +No one can leave those Balliol years behind without some hope to quote +the ringing song in which Belloc recalled them at the time of the Boer +War. It is the perfect expression of joyful masculine life and +overflowing fellowship. It echoes unforgettably in the mind. + + TO THE BALLIOL MEN STILL IN AFRICA + + Years ago when I was at Balliol, + Balliol men--and I was one-- + Swam together in winter rivers, + Wrestled together under the sun. + And still in the heart of us, Balliol, Balliol, + Loved already, but hardly known, + Welded us each of us into the others: + Called a levy and chose her own. + + Here is a House that armours a man + With the eyes of a boy and the heart of a ranger, + And a laughing way in the teeth of the world + And a holy hunger and thirst for danger: + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again: + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + + I have said it before, and I say it again, + There was treason done, and a false word spoken, + And England under the dregs of men, + And bribes about, and a treaty broken: + But angry, lonely, hating it still, + I wished to be there in spite of the wrong. + My heart was heavy for Cumnor Hill + And the hammer of galloping all day long. + + Galloping outward into the weather, + Hands a-ready and battle in all: + Words together and wine together + And song together in Balliol Hall. + Rare and single! Noble and few!... + Oh! they have wasted you over the sea! + The only brothers ever I knew, + The men that laughed and quarrelled with me. + + * * * * * + + Balliol made me, Balliol fed me, + Whatever I had she gave me again; + And the best of Balliol loved and led me, + God be with you, Balliol men. + +Belloc took a First in the Modern History School in 1895. No one ever +experienced more keenly the tingling thrill of the eager student who +finds himself cast into the heart of Oxford's abundant life: the +thousands of books so generously alive; the hundreds of acute and worthy +rivals crossing steel on steel in play, work, and debate; the endless +throb of passionate speculation into all the crowding problems of human +history. The zest and fervour of those younger days he has never +outgrown, and there are few writers of our time who have appealed so +imperiously to the young. In the Oxford before the war all the +undergraduates were reading Belloc: you would hardly find a college room +that did not shelve one or two of his volumes. + + +II + +There is no space to chronicle the life in detail. The romantic voyage +to California, and marriage at twenty-six (Mrs. Belloc died in 1914); +his life in Chelsea and then in Sussex; the books on Revolutionary +France, on military history, biography and topography; the flashing +essays, political satires, and whimsical burlesques that ran so swiftly +from his pen--it did not take England long to learn that this man was +very much alive. In 1903 he was naturalized as a British subject, and +humorously contemplated changing his name to "Hilary Bullock." In 1906 +he joined the Liberal benches in the House of Commons, but the insurgent +spirit that had cried out in college debates against the lumbering shams +of British political life was soon stabbing at the party system. Here +was a ringing voice indeed: one can hear that clear, scornful tenor +startling the House with its acid arraignment of parliamentary +stratagems and spoils. As Mr. Kilmer says, "British politicians will not +soon forget the motion which Hilaire Belloc introduced one day in the +early Spring of 1908, that the Party funds, hitherto secretly +administered, be publicly audited. His vigorous and persistent campaign +against the party system has placed him, with Cecil Chesterton, in the +very front ranks of those to whom the democrats of Great Britain must +look for leadership and inspiration." + +Perhaps we can take issue with Mr. Kilmer in his estimate of Belloc's +importance as a poet. He is a born singer, of course; his heart rises to +a lyric just as his tongue to wine and argument and his legs to walking +or saddle leather. But he writes poetry as every honest man should: in +an imperative necessity to express a passing squall of laughter, anger, +or reverence; and in earnest hope of being condemned by Mr. W.S. +Braithwaite, which happens to so few. His "The South Country" will make +splendid many an anthology. But who shall say that his handful of +verses, witty, debonair, bacchanalian, and tender, is his most important +contribution? + +What needs to be said is that Belloc is an authentic child gotten of +Rabelais. I can never forget a lecture I heard him give in the famous +Examination Schools at Oxford--that noble building consecrated to human +suffering, formerly housing the pangs of students and now by sad +necessity a military hospital. Ruddy of cheek, a burly figure in his +academic gown, without a scrap of notes and armed only with an old +volume of Rabelais in the medieval French, he held us spellbound for an +hour and a half--or was it three hours?--with flashing extempore talk +about this greatest figure of the Renaissance. + +Rabelais, he told us, was the symbolic figure of the incoming tide of +Europe's rebirth in the sixteenth century. Rabelais, the priest, +physician, and compounder of a new fish sauce, held that life is its own +justification, and need not be lived in doleful self-abasement. Do what +you wish, enjoy life, be interested in a thousand things, feel a +perpetual inquisitive delight in all the details of human affairs! _The +gospel of exuberance_--that is Rabelais. Is it not Belloc, too? + +Rabelais came from Touraine--the heart of Gaul, the island of light in +which the tradition of civilization remained unbroken. One understands +Rabelais better if one knows the Chinon wine, Belloc added. His writing +is married to the soil and landscape from which he sprang. His +extraordinary volatility proceeds from a mind packed full of curiosity +and speculation. For an instance of his exuberance see his famous list +of fools, in which all fools whatsoever that ever walked on earth are +included. + +Now no one who loves Belloc can paddle in Rabelais without seeing that +he, too, was sired from Chinon. Dip into Gargantua: there you will find +the oinolatrous and gastrolatrous catalogues that Belloc daily delights +in; the infectious droll patter of speech, piling quip on quip. Then +look again into "The Path to Rome." How well does Mr. John Macy tell us +"literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its +literary parentage, and criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of +'begats.' Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels." + + +III + +In Belloc we find the perfect union of the French and English minds. +Rabelaisian in fecundity, wit, and irrepressible sparkle, he is also of +English blood and sinew, wedded to the sweet Sussex weald. History, +politics, economics, military topography, poetry, novels, satires, +nonsense rhymes--all these we may set aside as the hundred curiosities +of an eager mind. (The dons, by the way, say that in his historical work +he generalizes too hastily; but was ever history more crisply written?) +It is in the essays, the thousand little inquirendoes into the nature of +anything, everything or nothing, that one comes closest to the real man. +His prose leaps and sparks from the pen. It is whimsical, tender, +biting, garrulous. It is familiar and unfettered as open-air talk. His +passion for places--roads, rivers, hills, and inns; his dancing +persiflage and buoyancy; his Borrovian love of vagabondage--these are +the glories of a style that is quick, close-knit, virile, and vibrant. +Here Belloc ranks with Bunyan, Swift, and Defoe. + +Whoso dotes upon fine prose, prose interlaced with humour, pathos, and +whim, orchestrated to a steady rhythm, coruscated with an exquisite +tenderness for all that is lovable and high spirited on this dancing +earth, go you now to some bookseller and procure for yourself a little +volume called "A Picked Company" where Mr. E.V. Lucas has gathered some +of the best of Mr. Belloc's pieces. Therein will you find love of food, +companionship, cider and light wines; love of children, artillery, and +inns in the outlands; love of salt water, great winds, and brown hills +at twilight--in short, passionate devotion to all the dear devices that +make life so sweet. Hear him on "A Great Wind": + + A great wind is every man's friend, and its strength is the strength + of good fellowship; and even doing battle with it is something + worthy and well chosen. It is health in us, I say, to be full of + heartiness and of the joy of the world, and of whether we have such + health our comfort in a great wind is a good test indeed. No man + spends his day upon the mountains when the wind is out, riding + against it or pushing forward on foot through the gale, but at the + end of his day feels that he has had a great host about him. It is + as though he had experienced armies. The days of high winds are days + of innumerable sounds, innumerable in variation of tone and of + intensity, playing upon and awakening innumerable powers in man. And + the days of high wind are days in which a physical compulsion has + been about us and we have met pressure and blows, resisted and + turned them; it enlivens us with the simulacrum of war by which + nations live, and in the just pursuit of which men in companionship + are at their noblest. + + +IV + +And lest all this disjointed talk about Belloc's prose seem but +ungracious recognition of Mr. Kilmer's service in reminding us of the +poems, let us thank him warmly for his essay. Let us thank him for +impressing upon us that there are living to-day men who write as nobly +and simply as Belloc on Sussex, with his sweet broken music: + + I never get between the pines + But I smell the Sussex air; + Nor I never come on a belt of sand + But my home is there. + And along the sky the line of the Downs + So noble and so bare. + + A lost thing could I never find, + Nor a broken thing mend: + And I fear I shall be all alone + When I get towards the end. + Who will there be to comfort me + Or who will be my friend? + + I will gather and carefully make my friends + Of the men of the Sussex Weald, + They watch the stars from silent folds, + They stiffly plough the field. + By them and the God of the South Country + My poor soul shall be healed. + + If I ever become a rich man, + Or if ever I grow to be old, + I will build a house with deep thatch + To shelter me from the cold, + And there shall the Sussex songs be sung + And the story of Sussex told. + + I will hold my house in the high wood + Within a walk of the sea, + And the men that were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + + + + +A CASUAL OF THE SEA + + He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea. + + --GEORGE HERBERT. + + +Books sometimes make surprising connections with life. Fifteen-year-old +Tommy Jonkers, shipping as O.S. (ordinary seaman) on the S.S. +_Fernfield_ in Glasgow in 1911, could hardly have suspected that the +second engineer would write a novel and put him in it; or that that same +novel would one day lift him out of focsle and galley and set him +working for a publishing house on far-away Long Island. Is it not one +more proof of the surprising power of the written word? + +For Tommy is not one of those who expect to find their names in print. +The mere sight of his name on a newspaper page, in an article I wrote +about him, brought (so he naively told me) tears to his eyes. Excellent, +simple-hearted Tommy! How little did you think, when you signed on to +help the _Fernfield_ carry coal from Glasgow to Alexandria, that the +long arm of the Miehle press was already waiting for you; that thousands +of good people reading a certain novel would be familiar with your +"round rosy face and clear sea-blue eyes." + +"Tommy" (whose real name is Drevis) was born in Amsterdam in 1896. His +father was a fireman at sea, and contributed next to nothing to the +support of Tommy and his pretty little sister Greta. They lived with +their grandmother, near the quays in Amsterdam, where the masts of ships +and the smell of tar interfered with their lessons. Bread and treacle +for breakfast, black beans for lunch, a fine thick stew and plenty more +bread for supper--that and the Dutch school where he stood near the top +of his class are what Tommy remembers best of his boyhood. His +grandmother took in washing, and had a hard time keeping the little +family going. She was a fine, brusque old lady and as Tommy went off to +school in the mornings she used to frown at him from the upstairs window +because his hands were in his pockets. For as everybody knows, only +slouchy good-for-nothings walk to school with pocketed hands. + +Tommy did so well in his lessons that he was one of the star pupils +given the privilege of learning an extra language in the evenings. He +chose English because most of the sailors he met talked English, and his +great ambition was to be a seaman. His uncle was a quartermaster in the +Dutch navy, and his father was at sea; and Tommy's chance soon came. + +After school hours he used to sell postcards, cologne, soap, chocolates, +and other knicknacks to the sailors, to earn a little cash to help his +grandmother. One afternoon in the spring of 1909 he was down on the +docks with his little packet of wares, when a school friend came running +to him. + +"Drevis, Drevis!" he shouted, "they want a mess-room boy on the _Queen +Eleanor_!" + +It didn't take Drevis long to get aboard the _Queen Eleanor_, a British +tramp out of Glasgow, bound for Hamburg and Vladivostok. He accosted the +chief engineer, his blue eyes shining eagerly. + +"Yes," says the chief, "I need a mess-room steward right away--we sail +at four o'clock." + +"Try me!" pipes Drevis. (Bless us, the boy was barely thirteen!) + +The chief roars with laughter. + +"Too small!" he says. + +Drevis insisted that he was just the boy for mess-room steward. + +"Well," says the chief, "go home and put on a pair of long pants and +come back again. Then we'll see how you look!" + +Tommy ran home rejoicing. His Uncle Hendrick was a small man, and Tommy +grabbed a pair of his trousers. Thus fortified, he hastened back to the +_Queen Eleanor_. The chief cackled, but he took him on at two pounds +five a month. + +Tommy didn't last long as mess-room boy. He broke so many cups the +engineers had to drink out of dippers, and they degraded him to cabin +boy at a pound a month. Even as cabin boy he was no instant success. He +used to forget to empty the chief's slop-pail, and the water would +overflow the cabin. He felt the force of a stout sea boot not a few +times in learning the golden rubric of the tramp steamer's cabin boy. + +"Drevis" was a strange name to the English seamen, and they christened +him "Tommy," and that handle turns him still. + +Tommy's blue eyes and honest Netherland grin and easy temper kept him +friendly with all the world. The winds of chance sent him scudding about +the globe, a true casual of the seas. His first voyage as A.B. was on +the _Fernfield_ in 1911, and there he met a certain Scotch engineer. +This engineer had a habit of being interested in human problems, and +Tommy's guileless phiz attracted him. Under his tutelage Tommy acquired +a thirst for promotion, and soon climbed to the rank of quartermaster. + +One thing that always struck Tommy was the number of books the engineer +had in his cabin. A volume of Nat Gould, Ouida or "The Duchess" would be +the largest library Tommy would have found in the other bunks; but here, +before his wondering gaze, were Macaulay, Gibbon, Gorki, Conrad, +Dickens, Zola, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Chaucer, Shaw, and what not. And +what would Master Tommy have said had he known that his friend, even +then, was working on a novel in which he, Tommy, would play an important +role! + +The years went by. On sailing ships, on steam tramps, on private yachts, +as seaman, as quartermaster, as cook's helper, Tommy drifted about the +world. One day when he was twenty years old he was rambling about New +York just before sailing for Liverpool on the steam yacht _Alvina._ He +was one of a strictly neutral crew (the United States was still neutral +in those days) signed on to take a millionaire's pet plaything across +the wintry ocean. She had been sold to the Russian Government (there +still was one then!) + +Tommy was passing through the arcade of the Pennsylvania Station when +his eye fell upon the book shop there. He was startled to see in the +window a picture of the Scotch engineer--his best friend, the only man +in the world who had ever been like a father to him. He knew that the +engineer was far away in the Mediterranean, working on an English +transport. He scanned the poster with amazement. + +Apparently his friend had written a book. Tommy, like a practical +seaman, went to the heart of the matter. He went into the shop and +bought the book. He fell into talk with the bookseller, who had read the +book. He told the bookseller that he had known the author, and that for +years they had served together on the same vessels at sea. He told how +the writer, who was the former second engineer of the _Fernfield_, had +done many things for the little Dutch lad whose own father had died at +sea. Then came another surprise. + +"I believe you're one of the characters in the story," said the +bookseller. + +It was so. The book was "Casuals of the Sea," the author, William McFee, +who had been a steamship engineer for a dozen years; and Drevis Jonkers +found himself described in full in the novel as "Drevis Noordhof," and +playing a leading part in the story. Can you imagine the simple sailor's +surprise and delight? Pleased beyond measure, in his soft Dutch accent +liberally flavoured with cockney he told the bookseller how Mr. McFee +had befriended him, had urged him to go on studying navigation so that +he might become an officer; and that though they had not met for +several years he still receives letters from his friend, full of good +advice about saving his money, where to get cheap lodgings in Brooklyn, +and not to fall into the common error of sailors in thinking that +Hoboken and Passyunk Avenue are all America. And Tommy went back to his +yacht chuckling with delight, with a copy of "Casuals of the Sea" under +his arm. + +Here my share in the adventure begins. The bookseller, knowing my +interest in the book, hastened to tell me the next time I saw him that +one of the characters in the story was in New York. I wrote to Tommy +asking him to come to see me. He wrote that the _Alvina_ was to sail the +next day, and he could not get away. I supposed the incident was closed. + +Then I saw in the papers that the _Alvina_ had been halted in the +Narrows by a United States destroyer, the Government having suspected +that her errand was not wholly neutral. Rumour had it that she was on +her way to the Azores, there to take on armament for the house of +Romanoff. She was halted at the Quarantine Station at Staten Island, +pending an investigation. + +Then enters the elbow of coincidence. Looking over some books in the +very same bookshop where Tommy had bought his friend's novel, I +overheard another member of the _Alvina's_ crew asking about "Casuals +of the Sea." His chum Tommy had told him about his adventure, and he, +too, was there to buy one. (Not every day does one meet one's friends +walking in a 500-page novel!) By the never-to-be-sufficiently-admired +hand of chance I was standing at Joe Hogan's very elbow when he began +explaining to the book clerk that he was a friend of the Dutch sailor +who had been there a few days before. + +So a few days later, behold me on the Staten Island ferry, on my way to +see Tommy and the _Alvina_. + +I'm afraid I would always desert the office if there's a plausible +excuse to bum about the waterfront. Is there any passion in the breast +of mankind more absorbing than the love of ships? A tall Cunarder +putting out to sea gives me a keener thrill than anything the Polo +Grounds or the Metropolitan Opera can show. Of what avail a meeting of +the Authors' League when one can know the sights, sounds, and smells of +West or South Street? I used to lug volumes of Joseph Conrad down to the +West-Street piers to give them to captains and first mates of liners, +and get them to talk about the ways of the sea. That was how I met +Captain Claret of the _Minnehaha_, that prince of seamen; and Mr. Pape +of the _Orduna_, Mr. Jones of the _Lusitania_ and many another. They +knew all about Conrad, too. There were five volumes of Conrad in the +officers' cabins on the _Lusitania_ when she went down, God rest her. I +know, because I put them there. + + * * * * * + +And the Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the +landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet +our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of +earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on +every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels--the _James L. Morgan_, dour +little tug, shoving two barges; _Themistocles_, at anchor, with the blue +and white Greek colours painted on her rusty flank; the _Comanche_ +outward bound for Galveston (I think); the _Ascalon_, full-rigged ship, +with blue-jerseyed sailormen out on her bowsprit snugging the canvas. +And who is so true a lover of the sea as one who can suffer the ultimate +indignities--and love her still! I am queasy as soon as I sight Sandy +Hook.... + +At the quarantine station I had a surprise. The _Alvina_ was not there. +One old roustabout told me he thought she had gone to sea. I was duly +taken aback. Had I made the two-hour trip for nothing? Then another came +to my aid. "There she is, up in the bight," he said. I followed his +gesture, and saw her--a long, slim white hull, a cream-coloured funnel +with a graceful rake; the Stars and Stripes fresh painted in two places +on her shining side. I hailed a motor boat to take me out. The boatman +wanted three dollars, and I offered one. He protested that the yacht was +interned and he had no right to take visitors out anyway. He'd get into +trouble with "39"--"39" being a United States destroyer lying in the +Narrows a few hundred yards away. After some bickering we compromised on +a dollar and a quarter. + +That was a startling adventure for the humble publisher's reader! +Wallowing in an ice-glazed motor boat, in the lumpy water of a +"bight"--surrounded by ships and the men who sail them--I might almost +have been a hardy newspaper man! But Long Island commuters are nurtured +to a tough and perilous his, and I clambered the _Alvina's _side without +dropping hat, stick, or any of my pocketful of manuscripts. + +Joe Hogan, the steward, was there in his white jacket. He introduced me +to the cook, the bosun, the "chief," the wireless, and the "second." The +first officer was too heavy with liquor to notice the arrival of a +stranger. Messrs. Haig and Haig, those _Dioscuri_ of seamen, had been at +work. The skipper was ashore. He owns a saloon. + +The _Alvina_ is a lovely little vessel, 215 feet long, they told me, +and about 525 tons. She is fitted with mahogany throughout; the +staterooms all have brass double beds and private bathrooms attached; +she has her own wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating +apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. +But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in +preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck +was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in +January is likely to be a lively one for a yacht of 500 tons. + +I found Tommy below in his bunk, cleaning up. He is a typical Dutch +lad--round, open face, fair hair, and guileless blue eyes. He showed me +all his treasures--his certificates of good conduct from all the ships +(both sail and steam) on which he has served; a picture of his mother, +who died when he was six; and of his sister Greta--a very pretty +girl--who is also mentioned in _Casuals of the Sea._ The drunken fireman +in the story who dies after a debauch was Tommy's father who died in the +same way. And with these other treasures Tommy showed me a packet of +letters from Mr. McFee. + +I do not want to offend Mr. McFee by describing his letters to this +Dutch sailor-boy as "sensible," but that is just what they were. Tommy +is one of his own "casuals"-- + + --those frail craft upon the restless Sea + Of Human Life, who strike the rocks uncharted, + Who loom, sad phantoms, near us, drearily, + Storm-driven, rudderless, with timbers started-- + +and these sailormen who drift from port to port on the winds of chance +are most in need of sound Ben Franklin advice. Save your money; put it +in the bank; read books; go to see the museums, libraries, and art +galleries; get to know something about this great America if you intend +to settle down there--that is the kind of word Tommy gets from his +friend. + +Gradually, as I talked with him, I began to see into the laboratory of +life where "Casuals of the Sea" originated. This book is valuable +because it is a triumphant expression of the haphazard, strangely woven +chances that govern the lives of the humble. In Tommy's honest, gentle +face, and in the talk of his shipmates when we sat down to dinner +together, I saw a microcosm of the strange barren life of the sea where +men float about for years like driftwood. And out of all this ebbing +tide of aimless, happy-go-lucky humanity McFee had chanced upon this boy +from Amsterdam and had tried to pound into him some good sound common +sense. + +When I left her that afternoon, the _Alvina_ was getting up steam, and +she sailed within a few hours. I had eaten and talked with her crew, and +for a short space had a glimpse of the lives and thoughts of the simple, +childlike men who live on ships. I realized for the first time the truth +of that background of aimless hazard that makes "Casuals of the Sea" a +book of more than passing merit. + +As for Tommy, the printed word had him in thrall though he knew it not. +When he got back from Liverpool, two months later, I found him a job in +the engine room of a big printing press. He was set to work oiling the +dynamos, and at ten dollars a week he had a fine chance to work his way +up. Indeed, he enrolled in a Scranton correspondence course on steam +engineering and enchanted his Hempstead landlady by his simple ways. +That lasted just two weeks. The level ground made Tommy's feet uneasy. +The last I heard he was on a steam yacht on Long Island Sound. + +But wherever steam and tide may carry him, Tommy cherishes in his heart +his own private badge of honour: his friend the engineer has put him in +a book! And there, in one of the noblest and most honest novels of our +day, you will find him--a casual of the sea! + + + + +THE LAST PIPE + + The last smoker I recollect among those of the old school was a + clergyman. He had seen the best society, and was a man of the most + polished behaviour. This did not hinder him from taking his pipe + every evening before he went to bed. He sat in his armchair, his + back gently bending, his knees a little apart, his eyes placidly + inclined toward the fire. The end of his recreation was announced by + the tapping of the bowl of his pipe upon the hob, for the purpose of + emptying it of its ashes. Ashes to ashes; head to bed. + + --LEIGH HUNT. + + +The sensible man smokes (say) sixteen pipefuls a day, and all differ in +value and satisfaction. In smoking there is, thank heaven, no law of +diminishing returns. I may puff all day long until I nigresce with the +fumes and soot, but the joy loses no savour by repetition. It is true +that there is a peculiar blithe rich taste in the first morning puffs, +inhaled after breakfast. (Let me posit here the ideal conditions for a +morning pipe as I know them.) After your bath, breakfast must be spread +in a chamber of eastern exposure; let there be hominy and cream, and if +possible, brown sugar. There follow scrambled eggs, shirred to a +lemon-yellow, with toast sliced in triangles, fresh, unsalted butter, +and Scotch bitter marmalade. Let there be without fail a platter of hot +bacon, curly, juicy, fried to the debatable point where softness is +overlaid with the faintest crepitation of crackle, of crispyness. If hot +Virginia corn pone is handy, so much the better. And coffee, two-thirds +hot milk, also with brown sugar. It must be permissible to call for a +second serving of the scrambled eggs; or, if this is beyond the budget, +let there be a round of judiciously grilled kidneys, with mayhap a +sprinkle of mushrooms, grown in chalky soil. That is the kind of +breakfast they used to serve in Eden before the fall of man and the +invention of innkeepers with their crass formulae. + +After such a breakfast, if one may descend into a garden of plain turf, +mured about by an occluding wall, with an alley of lime trees for sober +pacing: then and there is the fit time and place for the first pipe of +the day. Pack your mixture in the bowl; press it lovingly down with the +cushion of the thumb; see that the draught is free--and then for your +_saeckerhets taendstickor!_ A day so begun is well begun, and sin will +flee your precinct. Shog, vile care! The smoke is cool and blue and +tasty on the tongue; the arch of the palate is receptive to the fume; +the curling vapour ascends the chimneys of the nose. Fill your cheeks +with the excellent cloudy reek, blow it forth in twists and twirls. The +first pipe! + +But, as I was saying, joy ends not here. Granted that the +after-breakfast smoke excels in savour, succeeding fumations grow in +mental reaction. The first pipe is animal, physical, a matter of pure +sensation. With later kindlings of the weed the brain quickens, begins +to throw out tendrils of speculation, leaps to welcome problems for +thought, burrows tingling into the unknowable. As the smoke drifts and +shreds about your neb, your mind is surcharged with that imponderable +energy of thought, which cannot be seen or measured, yet is the most +potent force in existence. All the hot sunlight of Virginia that stirred +the growing leaf in its odorous plantation now crackles in that glowing +dottel in your briar bowl. The venomous juices of the stalk seep down +the stem. The most precious things in the world are also vivid with +poison. + +Was Kant a smoker? I think he must have been. How else could he have +written "The Critique of Pure Reason"? Tobacco is the handmaid of +science, philosophy, and literature. Carlyle eased his indigestion and +snappish temper by perpetual pipes. The generous use of the weed makes +the enforced retirement of Sing Sing less irksome to forgers, +second-story men, and fire bugs. Samuel Butler, who had little enough +truck with churchmen, was once invited to stay a week-end by the Bishop +of London. Distrusting the entertaining qualities of bishops, and +rightly, his first impulse was to decline. But before answering the +Bishop's letter he passed it to his manservant for advice. The latter +(the immortal Alfred Emery Cathie) said: "There is a crumb of tobacco in +the fold of the paper, sir: I think you may safely go." He went, and +hugely enjoyed himself. + +There is a Bible for smokers, a book of delightful information for all +acolytes of this genial ritual, crammed with wit and wisdom upon the art +and mystery we cherish. It is called "The Social History of Smoking," by +G.L. Apperson. Alas, a friend of mine, John Marshall (he lives somewhere +in Montreal or Quebec), borrowed it from me, and obstinately declines to +return it. If he should ever see this, may his heart be loosened and +relent. Dear John, I wish you would return that book. (_Canadian +journals please copy!_) + + * * * * * + +I was contending that the joy of smoking increases harmonically with the +weight of tobacco consumed, within reasonable limits. Of course the +incessant smoker who is puffing all day long sears his tongue and grows +callous to the true delicacy of the flavour. For that reason it is best +not to smoke during office hours. This may be a hard saying to some, but +a proper respect for the art impels it. Not even the highest ecclesiast +can be at his devotions always. It is not those who are horny with +genuflection who are nearest the Throne of Grace. Even the Pope (I speak +in all reverence) must play billiards or trip a coranto now and then! + +This is the schedule I vouch for: + +After breakfast: 2 pipes + +At luncheon: 2 pipes + +Before dinner: 2 pipes + +Between dinner and bed: 10 to 12 pipes + +(Cigars and cigarettes as occasion may require.) + +The matter of smoking after dinner requires consideration. If your meal +is a heavy, stupefying anodyne, retracting all the humane energies from +the skull in a forced abdominal mobilization to quell a plethora of food +into subjection and assimilation, there is no power of speculation left +in the top storeys. You sink brutishly into an armchair, warm your legs +at the fire, and let the leucocytes and phagocytes fight it out. At such +times smoking becomes purely mechanical. You imbibe and exhale the fumes +automatically. The choicest aromatic blends are mere fuel. Your eyes +see, but your brain responds not. The vital juices, generous currents, +or whatever they are that animate the intelligence, are down below +hatches fighting furiously to annex and drill into submission the alien +and distracting mass of food that you have taken on board. They are like +stevedores, stowing the cargo for portability. A little later, however, +when this excellent work is accomplished, the bosun may trill his +whistle, and the deck hands can be summoned back to the navigating +bridge. The mind casts off its corporeal hawsers and puts out to sea. +You begin once more to live as a rational composition of reason, +emotion, and will. The heavy dinner postpones and stultifies this +desirable state. Let it then be said that light dining is best: a little +fish or cutlets, white wine, macaroni and cheese, ice cream and coffee. +Such a regime restores the animal health, and puts you in vein for a +continuance of intellect. + +Smoking is properly an intellectual exercise. It calls forth the +choicest qualities of mind and soul. It can only be properly conducted +by a being in full possession of the five wits. For those who are in +pain, sorrow, or grievous perplexity it operates as a sovereign +consoler, a balm and balsam to the harassed spirit; it calms the +fretful, makes jovial the peevish. Better than any ginseng in the +herbal, does it combat fatigue and old age. Well did Stevenson exhort +virgins not to marry men who do not smoke. + +Now we approach the crux and pinnacle of this inquirendo into the art +and mystery of smoking. That is to say, the last pipe of all before the +so-long indomitable intellect abdicates, and the body succumbs to +weariness. + +No man of my acquaintance has ever given me a satisfactory definition of +_living_. An alternating systole and diastole, says physiology. +Chlorophyl becoming xanthophyl, says botany. These stir me not. I define +life as a process of the Will-to-Smoke: recurring periods of +consciousness in which the enjoyability of smoking is manifest, +interrupted by intervals of recuperation. + +Now if I represent the course of this process by a graph (the co-ordinates +being Time and the Sense-of-by-the-Smoker-enjoyed-Satisfaction) the curve +ascends from its origin in a steep slant, then drops away abruptly at the +recuperation interval. This is merely a teutonic and pedantic mode of +saying that the best pipe of all is the last one smoked at night. It is +the penultimate moment that is always the happiest. The sweetest pipe +ever enjoyed by the skipper of the _Hesperus_ was the one he whiffed just +before he was tirpitzed by the poet on that angry reef. + +The best smoking I ever do is about half past midnight, just before "my +eyelids drop their shade," to remind you again of your primary school +poets. After the toils, rebuffs, and exhilarations of the day, after +piaffing busily on the lethal typewriter or _schreibmaschine_ for some +hours, a drowsy languor begins to numb the sense. In dressing gown and +slippers I seek my couch; Ho, Lucius, a taper! and some solid, +invigorating book for consideration. My favourite is the General +Catalogue of the Oxford University Press: a work so excellently full of +learning; printed and bound with such eminence of skill; so noble a +repository or Thesaurus of the accumulated treasures of human learning, +that it sets the mind in a glow of wonder. This is the choicest garland +for the brain fatigued with the insignificant and trifling tricks by +which we earn our daily bread. There is no recreation so lovely as that +afforded by books rich in wisdom and ribbed with ripe and sober +research. This catalogue (nearly 600 pages) is a marvellous precis of +the works of the human spirit. And here and there, buried in a scholarly +paragraph, one meets a topical echo: "THE OXFORD SHAKESPEARE GLOSSARY: +by C.T. ONIONS: Mr. Onions' glossary, offered at an insignificant price, +relieves English scholarship of the necessity of recourse to the +lexicon of Schmidt." Lo, how do even professors and privat-docents +belabour one another! + +With due care I fill, pack, and light the last pipe of the day, to be +smoked reverently and solemnly in bed. The thousand brain-murdering +interruptions are over. The gentle sibilance of air drawn through the +glowing nest of tobacco is the only sound. With reposeful heart I turn +to some favourite entry in my well-loved catalogue. + +"HENRY PEACHAM'S COMPLEAT GENTLEMAN. Fashioning him absolut in the most +necessary and Commendable Qualities concerning Minde, or Body, that may +be required in a Noble Gentleman. Wherunto is annexed a Description of +the order of a Maine Battaile or Pitched Field, eight severall wayes, +with the Art of Limming and other Additions newly Enlarged. Printed from +the edition of 1634; first edition, 1622, with an introduction by G. S. +Gordon. 1906. Pp xxiv + 16 unpaged + 262. 7s. 6d. net. _At the Clarendon +Press_." + +Or this: + +"H. HIS DEVISES, for his owne exercise, and his Friends pleasure. +Printed from the edition of 1581, with an introduction. 1906. Pp xviii + +104. 5s. net." + +O excellent H! Little did he dream that his devises (with an +introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his +Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the +catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in +exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as +leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest +are reproductions of the original editions, many having prefaces by good +hands." + +One o'clock is about to chime in the near-by steeple, but my pipe and +curiosity are now both going strong. + +"THE CURES OF THE DISEASED in remote Regions, preventing Mortalitie +incident in Forraine Attempts of the English Nation. 1598. The earliest +English treatise on tropical diseases. 1915. 1s. 6d. net." + +Is that not the most interesting comment on the English colonial +enterprises in Elizabeth's reign? And there is no limit to the joys of +this marvellous catalogue. How one dreams of the unknown delights of +"Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books," or "Dan Michel's Ayenbite of +Inwyt, 1340" (which means, as I figure it, the "Backbite of +Conscience"), or "Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive Veterum +Interpretum Graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum Fragmenta, edidit F. +Field. 1865. Two volumes L6 6s. net" or "Shuckford's Sacred and Profane +History of the World, from the Creation of the World to the Dissolution +of the Assyrian Empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the +Declension of The Kingdom of Judah and Israel under the Reigns of Ahaz +and Pekah, with the Creation and Fall of Man. 1728, reprinted 1848. Pp +550. 10s. net." + +But I dare not force my hobbies on you further. One man's meat is +another's caviar. I dare not even tell you what my favourite tobaccos +are, for recently when I sold to a magazine a very worthy and excellent +poem entitled "My Pipe," mentioning the brands I delight to honour, the +editor made me substitute fictitious names for my dearly loved blends. +He said that sound editorial policy forbids mentioning commercial +products in the text of the magazine. + +But tobacco, thank heaven, is not merely a "commercial product." Let us +call on Salvation Yeo for his immortal testimony: + +"When all things were made none was made better than this; to be a lone +man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's +cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire, sir; while for +stanching of wounds, purging of rheum, and settling of the stomach, +there's no herb like unto it under the canopy of heaven." + +And by this time the bowl is naught but ash. Even my dear General +Catalogue begins to blur before me. Slip it under the pillow; gently and +kindly lay the pipe in the candlestick, and blow out the flame. The +window is open wide: the night rushes in. I see a glimpse of stars ... a +distant chime ... and fall asleep with the faint pungence of the Indian +herb about me. + + + + +TIME TO LIGHT THE FURNACE + + +The twenty-eighth of October. Coal nine dollars a ton. Mr. and Mrs. +Blackwell had made a resolution not to start the furnace until +Thanksgiving. And in the biting winds of Long Island that requires +courage. + +Commuters the world over are a hardy, valorous race. The Arab commutes +by dromedary, the Malay by raft, the Indian rajah by elephant, the +African chief gets a team of his mothers-in-law to tow him to the +office. But wherever you find him, the commuter is a tough and tempered +soul, inured to privation and calamity. At seven-thirty in the morning +he leaves his bungalow, tent, hut, palace, or kraal, and tells his wife +he is going to work. + +How the winds whistle and moan over those Long Island flats! Mr. and +Mrs. Blackwell had laid in fifteen tons of black diamonds. And hoping +that would be enough, they were zealous not to start the furnace until +the last touchdown had been made. + +But every problem has more than one aspect. Belinda, the new cook, had +begun to work for them on the fifth of October. Belinda came from the +West Indies, a brown maiden still unspoiled by the sophistries of the +employment agencies. She could boil an egg without cracking it, she +could open a tin can without maiming herself. She was neat, guileless, +and cheerful. But, she was accustomed to a warm climate. + +The twenty-eighth of October. As Mr. and Mrs. Blackwell sat at dinner, +Mr. Blackwell buttoned his coat, and began a remark about how chilly the +evenings were growing. But across the table came one of those glances +familiar to indiscreet husbands. Passion distorted, vibrant with rebuke, +charged with the lightning of instant dissolution, Mrs. Blackwell's gaze +struck him dumb with alarm. Husbands, husbands, you know that gaze! + +Mr. Blackwell kept silence. He ate heartily, choosing foods rich in +calories. He talked of other matters, and accepted thankfully what +Belinda brought to him. But he was chilly, and a vision of coal bills +danced in his mind. + + * * * * * + +After dinner he lit the open fire in the living room, and he and Mrs. +Blackwell talked in discreet tones. Belinda was merrily engaged in +washing the dishes. + +"Bob, you consummate blockhead!" said Mrs. Blackwell, "haven't you +better sense than to talk about its being chilly? These last few days +Belinda has done nothing but complain about the cold. She comes from +Barbados, where the thermometer never goes below sixty. She said she +couldn't sleep last night, her room was so cold. I've given her my old +fur coat and the steamer rug from your den. One other remark like that +of yours and she'll leave. For heaven's sake, Bob, use your skull!" + +Mr. Blackwell gazed at her in concern. The deep, calculating wisdom of +women was made plain to him. He ventured no reply. + +Mrs. Blackwell was somewhat softened by his docility. + +"You don't realize, dear," she added, "how servants are affected by +chance remarks they overhear. The other day you mentioned the +thermometer, and the next morning I found Belinda looking at it. If you +must say anything about the temperature, complain of the heat. Otherwise +we'll have to start the furnace at once." + +Mr. Blackwell's face was full of the admiration common to the +simple-minded race of husbands. + +"Jumbo," he said, "you're right. I was crazy. Watch me from now on. +Mental suggestion is the dope. The power of the chance remark!" + +The next evening at dinner, while Belinda was passing the soup, Mr. +Blackwell fired his first gun. "It seems almost too warm for hot soup," +he said. "All the men at the office were talking about the unseasonable +hot weather. I think we'd better have a window open." To Mrs. +Blackwell's dismay, he raised one of the dining-room windows, admitting +a pungent frostiness of October evening. But she was game, and presently +called for a palm-leaf fan. When Belinda was in the room they talked +pointedly of the heat, and Mr. Blackwell quoted imaginary Weather Bureau +notes from the evening paper. + +After dinner, as he was about to light the log fire, from force of +habit, Mrs. Blackwell snatched the burning match from him just as he was +setting it to the kindling. They grinned at each other wistfully, for +the ruddy evening blaze was their chief delight. Mr. Blackwell manfully +took off his coat and waistcoat and sat in his shirtsleeves until +Belinda had gone to bed. Then he grew reckless and lit a roaring fire, +by which they huddled in glee. He rebuilt the fire before retiring, so +that Belinda might suspect nothing in the morning. + +The next evening Mr. Blackwell appeared at dinner in a Palm Beach suit. +Mrs. Blackwell countered by ordering iced tea. They both sneezed +vigorously during the meal. "It was so warm in town to-day, I think I +caught a cold," said Mr. Blackwell. + +Later Mrs. Blackwell found Belinda examining the thermometer with a +puzzled air. That night they took it down and hid it in the attic. But +the great stroke of the day was revealed when Mrs. Blackwell explained +that Mr. and Mrs. Chester, next door, had promised to carry on a similar +psychological campaign. Belinda and Mrs. Chester's cook, +Tulip--jocularly known as the Black Tulip--were friends, and would +undoubtedly compare notes. Mrs. Chester had agreed not to start her +furnace without consultation with Mrs. Blackwell. + +October yielded to November. By good fortune the weather remained sunny, +but the nights were crisp. Belinda was given an oil-stove for her attic +bedroom. Mrs. Blackwell heard no more complaints of the cold, but +sometimes she and her husband could hear uneasy creakings upstairs late +at night. "I wonder if Barbados really is so warm?" she asked Bob. "I'm +sure it can't be warmer than Belinda's room. She never opens the +windows, and the oil-stove has to be filled every morning." + +"Perhaps some day we can get an Eskimo maid," suggested Mr. Blackwell +drowsily. He wore his Palm Beach suit every night for dinner, but +underneath it he was panoplied in heavy flannels. + + * * * * * + +Through Mr. Chester the rumour of the Blackwells' experiment in +psychology spread far among suburban husbands. On the morning train less +fortunate commuters, who had already started their fires, referred to +him as "the little brother of the iceberg." Mr. and Mrs. Chester came to +dinner on the 16th of November. Both the men loudly clamoured for +permission to remove their coats, and sat with blanched and chattering +jaws. Mr. Blackwell made a feeble pretence at mopping his brow, but when +the dessert proved to be ice-cream his nerve forsook him. "N-no, +Belinda," he said. "It's too warm for ice-cream to-night. I don't +w--want to get chilled. Bring me some hot coffee." As she brought his +cup he noticed that her honest brown brow was beaded with perspiration. +"By George," he thought, "this mental suggestion business certainly +works." Late that evening he lit the log fire and revelled by the blaze +in an ulster. + +The next evening when Mr. Blackwell came home from business he met the +doctor in the hall. + +"Hello, doc," he said, "what's up?" + +"Mrs. Blackwell called me in to see your maid," said the doctor. "It's +the queerest thing I've met in twenty years' practice. Here it is the +17th of November, and cold enough for snow. That girl has all the +symptoms of sunstroke and prickly heat." + + + + +MY FRIEND + + +To-day we called each other by our given names for the first time. + +Making a new friend is so exhilarating an adventure that perhaps it will +not be out of place if I tell you a little about him. There are not many +of his kind. + +In the first place, he is stout, like myself. We are both agreed that +many of the defects of American letters to-day are due to the sorry +leanness of our writing men. We have no Chestertons, no Bellocs. I look +to Don Marquis, to H.L. Mencken, to Heywood Broun, to Clayton Hamilton, +and to my friend here portraited, to remedy this. If only Mr. Simeon +Strunsky were stouter! He is plump, but not yet properly corpulent. + +My friend is a literary journalist. There are but few of them in these +parts. Force of circumstances may compel him to write of trivial things, +but it would be impossible for him not to write with beauty and +distinction far above his theme. His style is a perfect echo of his +person, mellow, quaint, and richly original. To plunder a phrase of his +own, it is drenched with the sounds, the scents, the colours, of great +literature. + +I, too, am employed in a bypath of the publishing business, and try to +bring to my tasks some small measure of honest idealism. But what I love +(I use this great word with care) in my friend is that his zeal for +beauty and for truth is great enough to outweigh utterly the paltry +considerations of expediency and comfort which sway most of us. To him +his pen is as sacred as the scalpel to the surgeon. He would rather die +than dishonour that chosen instrument. + +I hope I am not merely fanciful: but the case of my friend has taken in +my mind a large importance quite beyond the exigencies of his personal +situation. I see in him personified the rising generation of literary +critics, who have a hard row to hoe in a deliterated democracy. By some +unknowable miracle of birth or training he has come by a love of beauty, +a reverence for what is fine and true, an absolute intolerance of the +slipshod and insincere. + +Such a man is not happy, can never be happy, when the course of his +daily routine wishes him to praise what he does not admire, to exploit +what he does not respect. The most of us have some way of quibbling +ourselves out of this dilemma. But he cannot do so, because more than +comfort, more than clothes and shoe leather, more than wife or +fireside, he must preserve the critic's self-respect. "I cannot write a +publicity story about A.B," he said woefully to me, "because I am +convinced he is a bogus philosopher. I am not interested in selling +books: what I have to do with is that strange and esoteric thing called +literature." + +I would be sorry to have it thought that because of this devotion to +high things my friend is stubborn, dogmatic, or hard to work with. He is +unpractical as dogs, children, or Dr. Johnson; in absent-minded +simplicity he has issued forth upon the highway only half-clad, and been +haled back to his boudoir by indignant bluecoats; but in all matters +where absolute devotion to truth and honour are concerned I would not +find him lacking. Wherever a love of beauty and a ripened judgment of +men and books are a business asset, he is a successful business man. + +In person, he has the charm of a monstrously overgrown elf. His shyly +wandering gaze behind thick spectacle panes, his incessant devotion to +cigarettes and domestic lager, his whimsical talk on topics that +confound the unlettered--these are amiable trifles that endear him to +those who understand. + +Actually, in a hemisphere bestridden by the crass worship of comfort +and ease, here is a man whose ideal is to write essays in resounding +English, and to spread a little wider his love of the niceties of fine +prose. + +I have anatomized him but crudely. If you want to catch him in a weak +spot, try him on Belloc. Hear him rumble his favourite couplet; + + And the men who were boys when I was a boy + Shall sit and drink with me. + +Indeed let us hope that they will. + + + + +A POET OF SAD VIGILS + + +There are many ways of sitting down to an evening vigil. Unquestionably +the pleasantest is to fortify the soul with a pot of tea, plenty of +tobacco, and a few chapters of Jane Austen. And if the adorable Miss +Austen is not to hand, my second choice perhaps would be the literary +remains of a sad, poor, and forgotten young man who was a contemporary +of hers. + +I say "forgotten," and I think it is just; save for his beautiful hymn +"The Star of Bethlehem," who nowadays ever hears of Henry Kirke White? +But on the drawing-room tables of our grandmothers' girlhood the plump +volume, edited with a fulsome memoir by Southey, held honourable place +near the conch shell from the Pacific and the souvenirs of the Crystal +Palace. Mr. Southey, in his thirty years' laureateship, made the fame of +several young versifiers, and deemed that in introducing poor White's +remains to the polite world he was laying the first lucifer to a bonfire +that would gloriously crackle for posterity. No less than Chatterton was +the worthy laureate's estimate of his young foundling; but alas! +Chatterton and Kirke White both seem thinnish gruel to us; and even +Southey himself is down among the pinch hitters. Literary prognosis is a +parlous sport. + +The generation that gave us Wordsworth, Scott, Coleridge, Lamb, Jane +Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, leaves us little +time for Kirke White considered purely as a literary man. His verses are +grotesquely stilted, the obvious conjunction of biliousness and +overstudy, and adapted to the taste of an era when the word female was +still used as a substantive. But they are highly entertaining to read +because they so faithfully mirror the backwash of romanticism. They are +so thoroughly unhealthy, so morbid, so pallid with moonlight, so +indentured by the ayenbite of inwit, that it is hard to believe that +Henry's father was a butcher and should presumably have reared him on +plenty of sound beefsteak and blood gravy. If only Miss Julia Lathrop or +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw could have been Henry's mother, he might have lived +to write poems on the abolition of slavery in America. But as a matter +of fact, he was done to death by the brutal tutors of St. John's +College, Cambridge, and perished at the age of twenty-one, in 1806. As a +poet, let him pass; but the story of his life breathes a sweet and +honourable fragrance, and is comely to ponder in the midnight hours. As +Southey said, there is nothing to be recorded but what is honourable to +him; nothing to be regretted but that one so ripe for heaven should so +soon have been removed from the world. + +He was born in Nottingham, March 21, 1785, of honest tradesman parents; +his origin reminds one inevitably of that of Keats. From his earliest +years he was studious in temper, and could with difficulty be drawn from +his books, even at mealtimes. At the age of seven he wrote a story of a +Swiss emigrant and gave it to the servant, being too bashful to show it +to his mother. Southey's comment on this is "The consciousness of genius +is always accompanied with this diffidence; it is a sacred, solitary +feeling." + +His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry's time was +employed in carrying his father's deliveries of chops and rumps to the +prosperous of Nottingham. At fourteen his parents made an effort to +start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory. The +work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in +the office of a busy firm of lawyers. He spent twelve hours a day in the +office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and +Greek. Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were +dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs. In a little +garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his +supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to +eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies. It is a +deplorable picture: the fumes of the hearty butcher's evening meal +ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading "Blackstone" and "The Wealth +of Nations." If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were +some excuse. The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy +that I know. No one, after reading Southey's memoir, will overload his +brain again. + +At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother +Neville: "I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at +this amusement [novel reading]. I have been obliged to enter into this +resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading +romances." He is human enough to add, however, that "after long and +fatiguing researches in 'Blackstone' or 'Coke,' 'Tom Jones' or 'Robinson +Crusoe' afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation. Of 'Robinson Crusoe' +I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the +English language." + +The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in +London, apparently a fairly successful man of business. Henry permitted +himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the +benefit and improvement of his kinsman. They seem to have carried on a +mutual recrimination in their letters: Neville was inclined to belittle +the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his +brother's unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and +"instructive" topics. Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for +self-improvement. If our great-grandparents were all like that what an +age it had been for the Scranton correspondence courses! "What is +requisite to make one's correspondence valuable?" asks Henry. "I answer, +_sound sense_." (The italics are his own.) "You have better natural +abilities than many youth," he tells his light-hearted brother, "but it +is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the trouble of +writing a good letter. My friend, you never found any art, however +trivial, that did not require some application at first." He begs the +astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he +reads. "You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself." Does +one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave? + +Henry's native sweetness was further impaired by a number of prizes won +in magazine competitions. A silver medal and a pair of twelve-inch +globes shortly became his for meritorious contributions to the _Monthly +Mirror_. He was also admitted a member of a famous literary society then +existing in Nottingham, and although the youngest of the sodality he +promptly announced that he proposed to deliver them a lecture. With +mingled curiosity and dismay the gathering assembled at the appointed +time, and the inspired youth harangued them for two hours on the subject +of Genius. The devil, or his agent in Nottingham, had marked Henry for +destruction. + +In such a career there can be no doubt as to the next step. He published +a book of poems. His verses, dealing with such topics as Consumption, +Despair, Lullaby of a Female Convict to Her Child the Night Previous to +Execution, Lines Spoken by a Lover at the Grave of His Mistress, The Eve +of Death, and Sonnet Addressed by a Female Lunatic to a Lady, had been +warmly welcomed by the politest magazines of the time. To wish to +publish them in more permanent form was natural; but the unfortunate +young man conceived the thought that the venture might even be a +profitable one. He had found himself troubled with deafness, which +threatened to annul his industry in the law; moreover, his spirit was +canting seriously toward devotional matters, and thoughts of a college +career and then the church were lively in his mind. + +The winter of 1802-3 was busily passed in preparing his manuscript for +the printer. Probably never before or since, until the Rev. John +Franklin Bair of Greensburg, Pennsylvania, set about garnering his +collected works into that volume which is the delight of the wicked, has +a human heart mulled over indifferent verses with so honest a pleasure +and such unabated certainty of immortality. The first two details to be +attended to were the printing of what were modestly termed +_Proposals_--i.e., advertisements of the projected volume, calling for +pledges of subscription--and, still more important, securing the +permission of some prominent person to accept a dedication of the book. +The jolly old days of literary patronage were then in the sere and +saffron, but it was still esteemed an aid to the sale of a volume if it +might be dedicated to some marquis of Carabas. Accordingly the +manuscript was despatched to London, and Neville, the philistine +brother, was called upon to leave it at the residence of the Duchess of +Devonshire. A very humble letter from honest Henry accompanied it, +begging leave of her Grace to dedicate his "trifling effusions" to her. + +Henry's letters to Neville while his book was in preparation are very +entertaining, as those of minor poets always are under such +circumstances. Henry was convinced that at least 350 copies would be +sold in Nottingham. He writes in exultation that he has already got +twenty-three orders even before his "proposals" are ready: + +"I have got twenty-three, without making the affair public at all, among +my immediate acquaintance: and mind, I neither solicit nor draw the +conversation to the subject, but a rumour has got abroad, and has been +received more favourably than I expected." + +But the matter of the dedication unfortunately lagged far behind the +poet's hopes. After the manuscript was left at the house of her Grace of +Devonshire there followed what the Ancient Mariner so feelingly calls a +weary time. Poor Henry in Nottingham hung upon the postman's heels, but +no word arrived from the duchess. She was known to be assaulted from all +sides by such applications: indeed her mail seems to have been very +nearly as large as that of Mary Pickford or Theda Bara. Then, to his +unspeakable anxiety, the miserable and fermenting Henry learned that all +parcels sent to the duchess, unless marked with a password known only to +her particular correspondents, were thrown into a closet by her porter +to be reclaimed at convenience, or not at all. "I am ruined," cried +Henry in agony; and the worthy Neville paid several unsuccessful visits +to Devonshire House in the attempt to retrieve the manuscript. Finally, +after waiting four hours in the servants' hall, he succeeded. Even then +undaunted, this long-suffering older brother made one more try in the +poet's behalf: he obtained a letter of introduction to the duchess, and +called on her in person, wisely leaving the manuscript at home; and with +the complaisance of the great the lady readily acquiesced in Henry's +modest request. Her name was duly inscribed on the proper page of the +little volume, and in course of time the customary morocco-bound copy +reached her. Alas, she took no notice of it, and Mr. Southey surmises +that "Involved as she was in an endless round of miserable follies, it +is probable that she never opened the book." + +"Clifton Grove" was the title Henry gave the book, published in 1803. + +It is not necessary to take the poems in this little volume more +seriously than any seventeen-year-old ejaculations. It is easy to see +what Henry's reading had been--Milton, Collins, and Gray, evidently. His +unconscious borrowings from Milton do him great credit, as showing how +thoroughly he appreciated good poetry. It seeped into his mind and +became part of his own outpourings. _Il Penseroso_ gushes to the surface +of poor Henry's song every few lines; precious twigs and shreds of +Milton flow merrily down the current of his thought. And yet smile as we +may, every now and then friend Henry puts something over. One of his +poems is a curious foretaste of what Keats was doing ten years later. +Every now and then one pauses to think that this lad, once his youthful +vapours were over, might have done great things. And as he says in his +quaint little preface, "the unpremeditated effusions of a boy, from his +thirteenth year, employed, not in the acquisition of literary +information, but in the more active business of life, must not be +expected to exhibit any considerable portion of the correctness of a +Virgil, or the vigorous compression of a Horace." + +The publishing game was new to Henry, and the slings and arrows found an +unshielded heart. When the first copies of his poor little book came +home from the printer he was prostrated to find several misprints. He +nearly swooned, but seizing a pen he carefully corrected all the copies. +After writing earnest and very polite letters to all the reviewers he +dispatched copies to the leading periodicals, and sat down in the sure +hope of rapid fame. How bitter was his chagrin when the _Monthly +Review_ for February, 1804, came out with a rather disparaging comment: +in particular the critic took umbrage at his having put _boy_ to rhyme +with _sky_, and added, referring to Henry's hopes of a college course, +"If Mr. White should be instructed by alma mater, he will, doubtless, +produce better sense and better rhymes." + +The review was by no means unjust: it said what any disinterested +opinion must have confirmed, that the youth's ambitions were excellent, +but that neither he, nor indeed any two-footed singer, is likely to be +an immortal poet by seventeen. But Henry's sensitive soul had been so +inflated by the honest pride of his friends that he could only see gross +and callous malignity and conspiracy in the criticism. His theology, his +health, his peace of mind, were all overthrown. As a matter of fact, +however (as Southey remarks), it was the very brusqueness of this review +that laid the foundation of his reputation. The circumstance aroused +Southey's interest in the young man's efforts to raise himself above his +level in the world and it was the laureate who after Henry's death +edited his letters and literary remains, and gave him to us as we have +him. Southey tells us that after the young man's death he and Coleridge +looked over his papers with great emotion, and were amazed at the +fervour of his industry and ambition. + +Alas, we must hurry the narrative, on which one would gladly linger. +The life of this sad and high-minded anchorite has a strong fascination +for me. Melancholy had marked him for her own: he himself always felt +that he had not a long span before him. Hindered by deafness, threatened +with consumption, and a deadlier enemy yet--epilepsy--his frail and +uneasy spirit had full right to distrust its tenement. The summer of +1804 he spent partly at Wilford, a little village near Nottingham where +he took lodgings. His employers very kindly gave him a generous holiday +to recruit; but his old habits of excessive study seized him again. He +had, for the time, given up hope of being able to attend the university, +and accordingly thought it all the more necessary to do well at the law. +Night after night he would read till two or three in the morning, lie +down fully dressed on his bed, and rise again to work at five or six. +His mother, who was living with him in his retreat, used to go upstairs +to put out his candle and see that he went to bed; but Henry, so docile +in other matters, in this was unconquerable. When he heard his mother's +step on the stair he would extinguish the taper and feign sleep; but +after she had retired he would light it again and resume his reading. +Perhaps the best things he wrote were composed in this period of +extreme depression. The "Ode on Disappointment," and some of his +sonnets, breathe a quiet dignity of resignation to sorrow that is very +touching and even worthy of respect as poetry. He never escaped the +cliche and the bathetic, but this is a fair example of his midnight +musings at their highest pitch:-- + + TO CONSUMPTION + + Gently, most gently, on thy victim's head, + Consumption, lay thine hand. Let me decay, + Like the expiring lamp, unseen, away, + And softly go to slumber with the dead. + And if 'tis true what holy men have said, + That strains angelic oft foretell the day + Of death, to those good men who fall thy prey, + O let the aerial music round my bed, + Dissolving sad in dying symphony, + Whisper the solemn warning in mine ear; + That I may bid my weeping friends good-bye, + Ere I depart upon my journey drear: + And smiling faintly on the painful past, + Compose my decent head, and breathe my last. + +But in spite of depression and ill health, he was really happy at +Wilford, a village in the elbow of a deep gully on the Trent, and near +his well-beloved Clifton Woods. On the banks of the stream he would sit +for hours in a maze of dreams, or wander among the trees on summer +nights, awed by the sublime beauty of the lightning, and heedless of +drenched and muddy clothes. + +Later in the summer it was determined that he should go to college after +all; and by the generosity of a number of friends (including Neville who +promised twenty pounds annually) he was able to enter himself for St. +John's College, Cambridge. In the autumn he left his legal employers, +who were very sorry to lose him, and took up quarters with a clergyman +in Lincolnshire (Winteringham) under whom he pursued his studies for a +year, to prepare himself thoroughly for college. His letters during this +period are mostly of a religious tinge, enlivened only by a mishap while +boating on the Humber when he was stranded for six hours on a sand-bank. +He had become quite convinced that his calling was the ministry. The +proper observance of the Sabbath by his younger brothers and sisters +weighed on his mind, and he frequently wrote home on this topic. + +In October, 1805, we find him settled at last in his rooms at St. +John's, the college that is always dear to us as the academic home of +two very different undergraduates--William Wordsworth and Samuel Butler. +His rooms were in the rearmost court, near the cloisters, and +overlooking the famous Bridge of Sighs. His letters give us a pleasant +picture of his quiet rambles through the town, his solitary cups of tea +as he sat by the fire, and his disappointment in not being able to hear +his lecturers on account of his deafness. Most entertaining to any one +at all familiar with the life of the Oxford and Cambridge colleges is +his account of the thievery of his "gyp" (the manservant who makes the +bed, cares for the rooms, and attends to the wants of the students). +Poor Henry's tea, sugar, and handkerchiefs began to vanish in the +traditional way; but he was practical enough to buy a large padlock for +his coal bin. + +But Henry's innocent satisfaction in having at last attained the haven +of his desires was not long of duration. In spite of ill health, his +tutors constrained him to enter for a scholarship examination in +December, and when the unfortunate fellow pleaded physical inability, +they dosed him with "strong medicines" to enable him to face the +examiners. After the ordeal he was so unstrung that he hurried off to +London to spend Christmas with his aunt. + +The account of his year at college is very pitiful. His tutors were, +according to their lights, very kind; they relieved him as far as +possible from financial worries, but they did not have sense enough to +restrain him from incessant study. Even on his rambles he was always at +work memorizing Greek plays, mathematical theorems, or what not. In a +memorandum found in his desk his life was thus planned: "Rise at +half-past five. Devotions and walk till seven. Chapel and breakfast till +eight. Study and lectures till one. Four and a half clear reading. Walk +and dinner, and chapel to six. Six to nine reading. Nine to ten, +devotions. Bed at ten." + +In the summer of 1806 his examiners ranked him the best man of his year, +and in mistaken kindness the college decided to grant him the unusual +compliment of keeping him in college through the vacation with a special +mathematical tutor, gratis, to work with him, mathematics being +considered his weakness. As his only chance of health lay in complete +rest during the holiday, this plan of spending the summer in study was +simply a death sentence. In July, while at work on logarithm tables, he +was overtaken by a sudden fainting fit, evidently of an epileptic +nature. The malady gained strength, aided by the weakness of his heart +and lungs, and he died on October 19, 1806. + +Poor Henry! Surely no gentler, more innocent soul ever lived. His +letters are a golden treasury of earnest and solemn speculation. Perhaps +once a twelve-month he displays a sad little vein of pleasantry, but not +for long. Probably the light-hearted undergraduates about him found him +a very prosy, shabby, and mournful young man, but if one may judge by +the outburst of tributary verses published after his death he was +universally admired and respected. Let us close the story by a quotation +from a tribute paid him by a lady versifier: + + If worth, if genius, to the world are dear, + To Henry's shade devote no common tear. + His worth on no precarious tenure hung, + From genuine piety his virtues sprung: + If pure benevolence, if steady sense, + Can to the feeling heart delight dispense; + If all the highest efforts of the mind, + Exalted, noble, elegant, refined, + Call for fond sympathy's heartfelt regret, + Ye sons of genius, pay the mournful debt! + + + + +TRIVIA + + The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, + clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame. + + --HOBBES, _Leviathan_, Chap. VIII. + + +The bachelor is almost extinct in America. Our hopelessly utilitarian +civilization demands that a man of forty should be rearing a family, +should go to an office five times a week, and pretend an interest in the +World's Series. It is unthinkable to us that there should be men of +mature years who do not know the relative batting averages of the Red +Sox and the Pirates. The intellectual and strolling male of from +thirty-five to fifty-five years (which is what one means by bachelor) +must either marry and settle down in the Oranges, or he must flee to +Europe or the MacDowell Colony. There is no alternative. Vachel Lindsay +please notice. + +The fate of Henry James is a case in point. Undoubtedly he fled the +shores of his native land to escape the barrage of the bonbonniverous +sub-deb, who would else have mown him down without ruth. + +But in England they still linger, these quaint, phosphorescent +middle-aged creatures, lurking behind a screenage of muffins and +crumpets and hip baths. And thither fled one of the most delightful born +bachelors this hemisphere has ever unearthed, Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith. + +Mr. Smith was a Philadelphian, born about fifty years ago. But that most +amiable of cities does not encourage detached and meditative +bachelorhood, and after sampling what is quaintly known as "a guarded +education in morals and manners" at Haverford College, our hero passed +to Harvard, and thence by a swifter decline to Oxford. Literature and +liberalism became his pursuits; on the one hand, he found himself +engrossed in the task of proving to the British electorate that England +need not always remain the same; on the other, he wrote a Life of Sir +Henry Wotton, a volume of very graceful and beautiful short stories +about Oxford ("The Youth of Parnassus") and a valuable little book on +the history and habits of the English language. + +But in spite of his best endeavours to quench and subdue his mental +humours, Mr. Smith found his serious moments invaded by incomprehensible +twinges of esprit. Travelling about England, leading the life of the +typical English bachelor, equipped with gladstone bag, shaving kit, +evening clothes and tweeds; passing from country house to London club, +from Oxford common room to Sussex gardens, the solemn pageantry of the +cultivated classes now and then burst upon him in its truly comic +aspect. The tinder and steel of his wit, too uncontrollably frictioned, +ignited a shower of roman candles, and we conceive him prostrated with +irreverent laughter in some lonely railway carriage. + +Mr. Smith did his best to take life seriously, and I believe he +succeeded passably well until after forty years of age. But then the +spectacle of the English vicar toppled him over, and once the gravity of +the Church of England is invaded, all lesser Alps and sanctuaries lie +open to the scourge. Menaced by serious intellectual disorders unless he +were to give vent to these disturbing levities, Mr. Smith began to set +them down under the title of "Trivia," and now at length we are enriched +by the spectacle of this iridescent and puckish little book, which +presents as it were a series of lantern slides of an ironical, +whimsical, and merciless sense of humour. It is a motion picture of a +middle-aged, phosphorescent mind that has long tried to preserve a +decent melancholy but at last capitulates in the most delicately +intellectual brainslide of our generation. + +This is no Ring Lardner, no Irvin Cobb, no Casey at the bat. Mr. Smith +is an infinitely close and acute observer of sophisticated social life, +tinged with a faint and agreeable refined sadness, by an aura of shyness +which amounts to a spiritual virginity. He comes to us trailing clouds +of glory from the heaven of pure and unfettered speculation which is our +home. He is an elf of utter simplicity and infinite candour. He is a +flicker of absolute Mind. His little book is as precious and as +disturbing as devilled crabs. + +Blessed, blessed little book, how you will run like quicksilver from +mind to mind, leaping--a shy and shining spark--from brain to brain! I +know of nothing since Lord Bacon quite like these ineffably dainty +little paragraphs of gilded whim, these rainbow nuggets of wistful +inquiry, these butterfly wings of fancy, these pointed sparklers of wit. +A purge, by Zeus, a purge for the wicked! Irony so demure, so quaint, so +far away; pathos so void of regret, merriment so delicate that one dare +not laugh for fear of dispelling the charm--all this is "Trivia." Where +are Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or all the other Harold Bell Wrights of +old time? Baron Verulam himself treads a heavy gait beside this airy +elfin scamper. It is Atalanta's heels. It is a heaven-given scenario of +that shyest, dearest, remotest of essences--the mind of a strolling +bachelor. + +Bless his heart, in a momentary panic of modesty at the thought of all +hi sacred plots laid bare, the heavenly man tries to scare us away. +"These pieces of moral prose have been written, dear Reader, by a +Carnivorous Mammal, belonging to that suborder of the Animal Kingdom +which includes also the Baboon, with his bright blue and scarlet +bottom, and the gentle Chimpanzee." + +But this whimsical brother to the chimpanzee, despite this last +despairing attempt at modest evasion, denudes himself before us. And +his heart, we find is strangely like our own. His reveries, his +sadnesses, his exhilarations, are all ours, too. Like us he cries, "I +wish I were unflinching and emphatic, and had big bushy eyebrows and a +Message for the Age. I wish I were a deep Thinker, or a great +Ventriloquist." Like us he has only a ghost, a thin, unreal phantom in +a world of bank cashiers and duchesses and prosperous merchants and +other Real Persons. Like us he fights a losing battle against the +platitudes and moral generalizations that hem us round. "I can hardly +post a letter," he laments, "without marvelling at the excellence and +accuracy of the Postal System." And he consoles himself, good man, +with the thought of the meaningless creation crashing blindly through +frozen space. His other great consolation is his dear vice of +reading--"This joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished vice, +this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication." + +It is impossible by a few random snippets to give any just figment of +the delicious mental intoxication of this piercing, cathartic little +volume. It is a bright tissue of thought robing a radiant, dancing +spirit. Through the shimmering veil of words we catch, now and then, a +flashing glimpse of the Immortal Whimsy within, shy, sudden, and +defiant. Across blue bird-haunted English lawns we follow that +gracious figure, down dusky London streets where he is peering in at +windows and laughing incommunicable jests. + +But alas, Mr. Pearsall Smith is lost to America. The warming pans and +the twopenny tube have lured him away from us. Never again will he +tread on peanut shells in the smoking car or read the runes about +Phoebe Snow. Chiclets and Spearmint and Walt Mason and the Toonerville +Trolley and the Prince Albert ads--these mean nothing to him. He will +never compile an anthology of New York theatrical notices: "The play +that makes the dimples to catch the tears." Careful and adroit +propaganda, begun twenty years ago by the Department of State, might +have won him back, but now it is impossible to repatriate him. The +exquisite humours of our American life are faded from his mind. He has +gone across the great divide that separates a subway from an +underground and an elevator from a lift. I wonder does he ever mourn +the scrapple and buckwheat cakes that were his birthright? + +Major George Haven Putnam in his "Memories of a Publisher" describes a +famous tennis match played at Oxford years ago, when he and Pearsall +Smith defeated A.L. Smith and Herbert Fisher, the two gentlemen who are +now Master of Balliol and British Minister of Education. The Balliol don +attributed the British defeat in this international tourney to the fact +that his tennis shoes (shall we say his "sneakers?") came to grief and +he had to play the crucial games in stocking feet. But though Major +Putnam and his young ally won the set of _patters_ (let us use the +Wykehamist word), the Major allowed the other side to gain a far more +serious victory. They carried off the young Philadelphian and kept him +in England until he was spoiled for all good American uses. That was +badly done, Major! Because we needed Pearsall Smith over here, and now +we shall never recapture him. He will go on calling an elevator a lift, +and he will never write an American "Trivia." + + + + +PREFACES + + +It has long been my conviction that the most graceful function of +authorship is the writing of prefaces. What is more pleasant than +dashing off those few pages of genial introduction after all the dreary +months of spading at the text? A paragraph or two as to the intentions +of the book; allusions to the unexpected difficulties encountered during +composition; neatly phrased gratitude to eminent friends who have given +gracious assistance; and a touching allusion to the Critic on the Hearth +who has done the indexing--one of the trials of the wives of literary +men not mentioned by Mrs. Andrew Lang in her pleasant essay on that +topic. A pious wish to receive criticisms "in case a second edition +should be called for"; your address, and the date, add a homely touch at +the end. + +How delightful this bit of pleasant intimacy after the real toil is +over! It is like paterfamilias coming out of his house at dusk, after +the hard day's work, to read his newspaper on the doorstep. Or it may be +a bit of superb gesturing. No book is complete without a preface. Better +a preface without a book.... + +Many men have written books without prefaces. But not many have written +prefaces without books. And yet I am convinced it is one of the subtlest +pleasures. I have planned several books, not yet written; but the +prefaces are all ready this many a day. Let me show you the sort of +thing I mean. + + +PREFACE TO "THE LETTERS OF ANDREW MCGILL" + +How well I remember the last time I saw Andrew McGill! It was in the +dear old days at Rutgers, my last term. I was sitting over a book one +brilliant May afternoon, rather despondent--there came a rush up the +stairs and a thunder at the door. I knew his voice, and hurried to open. +Poor, dear fellow, he was just back from tennis; I never saw him look so +glorious. Tall and thin--he was always very thin, _see_ p. 219 and +_passim_--with his long, brown face and sparkling black eyes--I can see +him still rambling about the room in his flannels, his curly hair damp +on his forehead. "Buzzard," he said--he always called me Buzzard--"guess +what's happened?" + +"In love again?" I asked. + +He laughed. A bright, golden laugh--I can hear it still. His laughter +was always infectious. + +"No," he said. "Dear silly old Buzzard, what do you think? I've won the +Sylvanus Stall fellowship." + +I shall never forget that moment. It was very still, and in the college +garden, just under my window, I could hear a party of Canadian girls +deliciously admiring things. It was a cruel instant for me. I, too, in +my plodding way, had sent in an essay for the prize, but without telling +him. Must I confess it? I had never dared mention the subject for fear +he, too, would compete. I knew that if he did he was sure to win. O +petty jealousies, that seem so bitter now! + +"Rude old Buzzard," he said in his bantering way, "you haven't +congratulated!" + +I pulled myself together. + +"Brindle," I said--I always called him Brindle; how sad the nickname +sounds now--"you took my breath away. Dear lad, I'm overjoyed." + +It is four and twenty years since that May afternoon. I never saw him +again. Never even heard him read the brilliant poem "Sunset from the +Mons Veneris" that was the beginning of his career, for the week before +commencement I was taken ill and sent abroad for my health. I never came +back to New York; and he remained there. But I followed his career with +the closest attention. Every newspaper cutting, every magazine article +in which his name was mentioned, went into my scrapbook. And almost +every week for twenty years he wrote to me--those long, radiant letters, +so full of _verve_ and _elan_ and ringing, ruthless wit. There was +always something very Gallic about his saltiness. "Oh, to be born a +Frenchman!" he writes. "Why wasn't I born a Frenchman instead of a dour, +dingy Scotsman? Oh, for the birthright of Montmartre! Stead of which I +have the mess of pottage--stodgy, porridgy Scots pottage" (_see_ p. +189). + +He had his sombre moods, too. It was characteristic of him, when in a +pet, to wish he had been born other-where than by the pebbles of +Arbroath. "Oh, to have been born a Norseman!" he wrote once. "Oh, for +the deep Scandinavian scourge of pain, the inbrooding, marrowy soul-ache +of Ibsen! That is the fertilizing soil of tragedy. Tragedy springs from +it, tall and white and stately like the lily from the dung. I will never +be a tragedian. Oh, pebbles of Arbroath!" + +All the world knows how he died.... + + +PREFACE TO AN HISTORICAL WORK + +(In six volumes) + +The work upon which I have spent the best years of my life is at length +finished. After two decades of uninterrupted toil, enlivened only by +those small bickerings over _minutiae_ so dear to all scrupulous +writers, I may perhaps be pardoned if I philosophize for a few moments +on the functions of the historian. + +There are, of course, two technical modes of approach, quite apart from +the preparatory contemplation of the field. (This last, I might add, has +been singularly neglected by modern historians. My old friend, Professor +Spondee, of Halle, though deservedly eminent in his chosen lot, is +particularly open to criticism on this ground. I cannot emphasize too +gravely the importance of preliminary calm--what Hobbes calls "the +unprejudicated mind." But this by way of parenthesis.) One may attack +the problem with the mortar trowel, or with the axe. Sismondi, I think, +has observed this. + +Some such observations as these I was privileged to address to my very +good friend, Professor Fish, of Yale, that justly renowned seat of +learning, when lecturing in New Haven recently. His reply was witty--too +witty to be apt, "Piscem natare doces," he said. + +I will admit that Professor Fish may be free from taint in this regard; +but many historians of to-day are, I fear, imbued with that most +dangerous tincture of historical cant which lays it down as a maxim that +contemporary history cannot be judicially written. + +Those who have been kind enough to display some interest in the +controversy between myself and M. Rougegorge--of the Sorbonne--in the +matter of Lamartine's account of the elections to the Constituent +Assembly of 1848, will remark several hitherto unobserved errors in +Lamartine which I have been privileged to point out. For instance, +Lamartine (who is supported _in toto_ by M. Rougegorge) asserts that the +elections took place on Easter Sunday, April 27, 1848. Whereas, I am +able to demonstrate, by reference to the astronomical tables at Kew +Observatory, that in 1848 Easter Day fell upon April 23. M. Rougegorge's +assertion that Lamartine was a slave to opium rests upon a humorous +misinterpretation of Mme. Lamartine's diary. (The matter may be looked +up by the curious in Annette User's "Annees avec les Lamartines." Oser +was for many years the cook in Lamartine's household, and says some +illuminating things regarding L.'s dislike of onions.) + +It is, of course, impossible for me to acknowledge individually the +generous and stimulating assistance I have received from so many +scholars in all parts of the world. The mere list of names would be like +Southey's "Cataract of Lodore," and would be but an ungracious mode of +returning thanks. I cannot, however, forbear to mention Professor +Mandrake, of the Oxford Chair, _optimus maximus_ among modern +historians. Of him I may say, in the fine words of Virgil, "Sedet +aeternumque sedebit." + +My dear wife, fortunately a Serb by birth, has regularized my Slavic +orthography, and has grown gray in the service of the index. To her, and +to my little ones, whose merry laughter has so often penetrated to my +study and cheered me at my travail, I dedicate the whole. _89, Decameron +Gardens._ + + +PREFACE TO A BOOK OF POEMS + +This little selection of verses, to which I have given the title "Rari +Nantes," was made at the instance of several friends. I have chosen from +my published works those poems which seemed to me most faithfully to +express my artistic message; and the title obviously implies that I +think them the ones most likely to weather the maelstroms of Time. Be +that as it may. + +Vachel Lindsay and I have often discussed over a glass of port (one +glass only: alas, that Vachel should abstain!) the state of the Muse +to-day. He deems that she now has fled from cities to dwell on the +robuster champaigns of Illinois and Kansas. Would that I could agree; +but I see her in the cities and everywhere, set down to menial +taskwork. She were better in exile, on Ibsen's sand dunes or +Maeterlinck's bee farm. But in America the times are very evil. +Prodigious convulsion of production, the grinding of mighty forces, the +noise and rushings of winds--and what avails? _Parturiunt montes_ ...you +know the rest. The ridiculous mice squeak and scamper on the granary +floor. They may play undisturbed, for the real poets, those great gray +felines, are sifting loam under Westminster. Gramercy Park and the +Poetry Society see them not. + +It matters not. With this little book my task is done. Vachel and I sail +to-morrow for Nova Zembla. + +_The Grotto, Yonkers._ + + +PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION + +A second edition of "Rari Nantes" having been called for, I have added +three more poems, Esquimodes written since arriving here. Also the +"Prayer for Warm Weather," by Vachel Lindsay, is included, at his +express request. The success of the first edition has been very +gratifying to me. My publishers will please send reviews to _Bleak +House, Nova Zembla_. + + +PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION + +The rigorous climate of Nova Zembla I find most stimulating to +production, and therefore in this new edition I am able to include +several new poems. "The Ode to a Seamew," the "Fracas on an Ice Floe," +and the sequence of triolimericks are all new. If I have been able to +convey anything of the bracing vigour of the Nova Zembla _locale_ the +praise is due to my friendly and suggestive critic, the editor of +_Gooseflesh_, the leading Nova Zemblan review. + +Vachel Lindsay's new book, "The Tango," has not yet appeared, therefore +I may perhaps say here that he is hard at work on an "Ode to the Gulf +Stream," which has great promise. + +The success of this little book has been such that I am encouraged to +hope that the publisher's exemption of royalties will soon be worked +off. + + + + +THE SKIPPER + + +I have been reading again that most delightful of all autobiographies, +"A Personal Record," by Joseph Conrad. Mr. Conrad's mind is so rich, it +has been so well mulched by years of vigorous life and sober thinking, +that it pushes tendrils of radiant speculation into every crevice of the +structure upon which it busies itself. This figure of speech leaves much +to be desired and calls for apology, but in perversity and profusion the +trellis growth of Mr. Conrad's memories, here blossoming before the +delighted reader's eyes, runs like some ardent trumpet vine or Virginia +creeper, spreading hither and thither, redoubling on itself, branching +unexpectedly upon spandrel and espalier, and repeatedly enchanting us +with some delicate criss-cross of mental fibres. One hesitates even to +suggest that there may be admirers of Mr. Conrad who are not familiar +with this picture of his mind--may we call it one of the most remarkable +minds that has ever concerned itself with the setting of English words +horizontally in parallel lines? + +The fraternity of gentlemen claiming to have been the first on this +continent to appreciate the vaulting genius of Mr. Conrad grows numerous +indeed; almost as many as the discoverers of O. Henry and the +pallbearers of Ambrose Bierce. It would be amusing to enumerate the list +of those who have assured me (over the sworn secrecy of a table d'hote +white wine) that they read the proof-sheets of "Almayer's Folly" in +1895, etc., etc. For my own part, let me be frank. I do not think I ever +heard of Mr. Conrad before December 2, 1911. On that date, which was one +day short of the seventeenth anniversary of Stevenson's death, a small +club of earnest young men was giving a dinner to Sir Sidney Colvin at +the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. Sir Sidney told us many anecdotes of +R.L.S., and when the evening was far spent I remember that someone asked +him whether there was any writer of to-day in whom he felt the same +passionate interest as in Stevenson, any man now living whose work he +thought would prove a permanent enrichment of English literature. Sir +Sidney Colvin is a scrupulous and sensitive critic, and a sworn enemy of +loose statement; let me not then pretend to quote him exactly; but I +know that the name he mentioned was that of Joseph Conrad, and it was a +new name to me. + +Even so, I think it was not until over a year later that first I read +one of Mr. Conrad's books; and I am happy to remember that it was +"Typhoon," which I read at one sitting in the second-class dining saloon +of the _Celtic_, crossing from New York in January, 1913. There was a +very violent westerly gale at the time--a famous shove, Captain Conrad +would call it--and I remember that the barometer went lower than had +ever been recorded before on the western ocean. The piano in the saloon +carried away, and frolicked down the aisle between the tables: it was an +ideal stage set for "Typhoon." The saloon was far aft, and a hatchway +just astern of where I sat was stove in by the seas. By sticking my head +through a window I could see excellent combers of green sloshing down +into the 'tweendecks. + +But the inspired discursiveness of Mr. Conrad is not to be imitated +here. The great pen which has paid to human life "the undemonstrative +tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a +grin," needs no limping praise of mine. But sometimes, when one sits at +midnight by the fainting embers and thinks that of all novelists now +living one would most ardently yearn to hear the voice and see the face +of Mr. Conrad, then it is happy to recall that in "A Personal Record" +one comes as close as typography permits to a fireside chat with the +Skipper himself. He tells us that he has never been very well +acquainted with the art of conversation, but remembering Marlowe, we set +this down as polite modesty only. Here in the "Personal Record" is +Marlowe ipse, pipe in mouth, and in retrospective mood. This book and +the famous preface to the "Nigger" give us the essence, the bouillon, of +his genius. Greatly we esteem what Mr. Walpole, Mr. Powys, Mr. James, +and (optimus maximus) Mr. Follett, have said about him; but who would +omit the chance to hear him from his proper mouth? And in these informal +confessions there are pieces that are destined to be classics of +autobiography as it is rarely written. + +One cannot resist the conviction that Mr. Conrad, traditionally labelled +complex and tortuous by the librarians, is in reality as simple as +lightning or dawn. Fidelity, service, sincerity--those are the words +that stand again and again across his pages. "I have a positive horror +of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself +which is the first condition of good service." He has carried over to +the world of desk and pen the rigorous tradition of the sea. He says +that he has been attributed an unemotional, grim acceptance of facts, a +hardness of heart. To which he answers that he must tell as he sees, and +that the attempt to move others to the extremities of emotion means the +surrendering one's self to exaggeration, allowing one's self to be +carried away beyond the bounds of normal sensibility. Self-restraint is +the duty, the dignity, the decency of the artist. This, indeed, is the +creed of the simple man in every calling; and from this angle it appears +that it is the Pollyananiases and the Harold Bell Wrights who are +complicated and subtle; it is Mr. Conrad, indeed, who is simple with the +great simplicity of life and death. + +Truly in utter candour and simplicity no book of memoirs since the +synoptic gospels exceeds "A Personal Record." Such minor facts as where +the writer was born, and when, and the customary demonology of boyhood +and courtship and the first pay envelope, are gloriously ignored. A +statistician, an efficiency pundit, a literary accountant, would rise +from the volume nervously shattered from an attempt to grasp what it was +all about. The only person in the book who is accorded any comprehensive +biographical resume is a certain great-uncle of Mr. Conrad, Mr. Nicholas +B., who accompanied Bonaparte on his midwinter junket to Moscow, and was +bitterly constrained to eat a dog in the forests of Lithuania. To the +delineation of this warrior, who was a legend of his youth, Mr. Conrad +devotes his most affectionate and tender power of whimsical +reminiscence; and in truth his sketches of family history make the +tragedies of Poland clearer to me than several volumes of historical +comment. In his prose of that superbly rich simplicity of texture--it is +a commonplace that it seems always like some notable translation from +the French--he looks back across the plains of Ukraine, and takes us +with him so unquestionably that even the servant who drives him to his +uncle's house becomes a figure in our own daily lives. And to our +delicious surprise we find that the whole of two long chapters +constitutes merely his musings in half an hour while he is waiting for +dinner at his uncle's house. With what adorable tenderness he reviews +the formative contours of boyish memories, telling us the whole +mythology of his youth! Upon my soul, sometimes I think that this is the +only true autobiography ever written: true to the inner secrets of the +human soul. It is the passkey to the Master's attitude toward all the +dear creations of his brain; it is the spiritual scenario of every novel +he has written. What self-revealing words are these: "An imaginative and +exact rendering of authentic memories may serve worthily that spirit of +piety toward all things human which sanctions the conceptions of a +writer of tales." And when one stops to consider, how essentially +impious and irreverent to humanity are the novels of the Slop and +Glucose school! + +This marvellous life, austere, glowing, faithful to everything that +deserves fidelity, contradictory to all the logarithms of probability, +this tissue of unlikelihoods by which a Polish lad from the heart of +Europe was integrated into the greatest living master of those who in +our tongue strive to portray the riddles of the human heart--such is the +kind of calculus that makes "A Personal Record" unique among textbooks +of the soul. It is as impossible to describe as any dear friend. Setting +out only with the intention to "present faithfully the feelings and +sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first +contact with the sea," Mr. Conrad set down what is really nothing less +than a Testament of all that is most precious in human life. And the +sentiment with which one lays it by is that the scribbler would gladly +burn every shred of foolscap he had blackened and start all over again +with truer ideals for his craft, could he by so doing have chance to +meet the Skipper face to face. + +Indeed, if Mr. Conrad had never existed it would have been necessary to +invent him, the indescribable improbability of his career speaks so +closely to the heart of every lover of literary truth. Who of his heroes +is so fascinating to us as he himself? How imperiously, by his own +noble example, he recalls us to the service of honourable sincerity. And +how poignantly these memories of his evoke the sigh which is not a sob, +the smile which is not a grin. + + + + +A FRIEND OF FITZGERALD + + Loder is a Rock of Ages to rely on. + + --EDWARD FITZGERALD. + + +I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the +Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two. Though ill equipped to +do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take +up gladly. It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know +as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and +great-grandfather. Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a +man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship. He +shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility. I +think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad +not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature. If only John Loder +had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the +Victorian Age. He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the +Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the +delicacies of rich thought and feeling. He used to lament in his later +years that he had not kept a diary as a young man. Alas that his Boswell +came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories. + +There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some +ten miles from the sea. Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the +hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower +and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks. Broad barges and shabby +schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the +river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W. Jacobs's +stories. In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port +and a town of thriving commerce. But now--well, it is little heard of in +the annals of the world. + +Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and +her nook in literature. It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was +apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily +entitled "Inebriety." There lived Bernard Barton, "the Quaker poet," a +versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships +with greater men. Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand, +came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters +now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander's Bank. +They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb. Also I have always +thought it very much to Woodbridge's credit that a certain Woodbridgian +named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb's at the East India House. +Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other. And as +birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors +as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse. In +the years following FitzGerald's death many a student of books, some all +the way from America, found his way into John Loder's shop to gossip +about "Old Fitz." In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club +of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge +(please pronounce "Bowidge") a rosetree that had been raised from seed +brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the +tent-maker at Naishapur. In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the +FitzGerald centennial. And Rupert Brooke's father was (I believe) a +schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England's jewels just +missed being a Woodbridgian! + +Some day, if you are wise, you, too, will take a train at Liverpool +Street, and drawn by one of those delightful blue locomotives of the +Great Eastern Railway speed through Colchester and Ipswich and finally +set foot on the yellow-pebbled platform at Woodbridge. As you step from +the stuffy compartment the keen salt Deben air will tingle in your +nostrils; and you may discover in it a faint under-whiff of strong +tobacco--the undying scent of pipes smoked on the river wall by old +Fitz, and in recent years by John Loder himself. If you have your +bicycle with you, or are content to hire one, you will find that rolling +Suffolk country the most delightful in the world for quiet spinning. +(But carry a repair kit, for there are many flints!) Ipswich itself is +full of memories--of Chaucer, and Wolsey, and Dickens (it is the +"Eatanswill" of Pickwick), and it is much pleasure to one of Suffolk +blood to recall that James Harper, the grandfather of the four brothers +who founded the great publishing house of Harper and Brothers a century +ago, was an Ipswich man, born there in 1740. You will bike to Bury St. +Edmunds (where Fitz went to school and our beloved William McFee also!) +and Aldeburgh, and Dunwich, to hear the chimes of the sea-drowned abbey +ringing under the waves. If you are a Stevensonian, you will hunt out +Cockfield Rectory, near Sudbury, where R.L.S. first met Sidney Colvin in +1872. (Colvin himself came from Bealings, only two miles from +Woodbridge.) You may ride to Dunmow in Essex, to see the country of Mr. +Britling; and to Wigborough, near Colchester, the haunt of Mr. McFee's +painter-cousin in "Aliens." You will hire a sailboat at Lime Kiln Quay +or the Jetty and bide a moving air and a going tide to drop down to +Bawdsey ferry to hunt shark's teeth and amber among the shingle. You +will pace the river walk to Kyson--perhaps the tide will be out and +sunset tints shimmer over those glossy stretches of mud. Brown seaweed, +vivid green samphire, purple flats of slime where the river ran a few +hours before, a steel-gray trickle of water in the scour of the channel +and a group of stately swans ruffling there; and the huddled red roofs +of the town with the stately church tower and the waving arms of the +windmill looking down from the hill. It is a scene to ravish an artist. +You may walk back by way of Martlesham Heath, stopping at the Red Lion +for a quencher (the Red Lion figurehead is supposed to have come from +one of the ships of the Armada). It is a different kind of Armada that +Woodbridge has to reckon with nowadays. Zeppelins. One dropped a +bomb--"dud" it was--in John Loder's garden; the old man had to be +restrained from running out to seize it with his own hands. + +John Loder was born in Woodbridge, August 3, 1825. His grandfather, +Robert Loder, founded the family bookselling and printing business, +which continues to-day at the old shop on the Thoroughfare under John +Loder's son, Morton Loder. In the days before the railway came through, +Woodbridge was the commercial centre for a large section of East +Suffolk; it was a busy port, and the quays were crowded with shipping. +But when transportation by rail became swift and cheap and the provinces +began to deal with London merchants, the little town's prosperity +suffered a sad decline. Many of the old Woodbridge shops, of several +generations' standing, have had to yield to local branches of the great +London "stores." In John Loder's boyhood the book business was at its +best. Woodbridgians were great readers, and such prodigal customers as +FitzGerald did much to keep the ledgers healthy. John left school at +thirteen or so, to learn the trade, and became the traditional printer's +devil. He remembered Bernard Barton, the quiet, genial, brown-eyed poet, +coming down the street from Alexander's Bank (where he was employed for +forty years) with a large pile of banknotes to be renumbered. The poet +sat perched on a high stool watching young Loder and his superior do the +work. And at noon Mr. Barton sent out to the Royal Oak Tavern near by +for a basket of buns and a jug of stout to refresh printer and devil at +their work. + +Bernard Barton died in 1849, and was kid to rest in the little Friends' +burying ground in Turn Lane. That quiet acre will repay the visitor's +half-hour tribute to old mortality. My grandmother was buried there, one +snowy day in January, 1912, and I remember how old John Loder came +forward to the grave, bareheaded and leaning on his stick, to drop a +bunch of fresh violets on the coffin. + +Many a time I have sat in the quiet, walled-in garden of Burkitt +House--that sweet plot of colour and fragrance so pleasantly +commemorated by Mr. Mosher in his preface to "In Praise of Old +Gardens"--and heard dear old John Loder tell stories of his youth. I +remember the verse of Herrick he used to repeat, pointing round his +little retreat with a well-stained pipestem: + + But walk'st about thine own dear bounds, + Not envying others' larger grounds: + For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent + Of land makes life, but sweet content. + +Loder's memory used to go back to times that seem almost fabulous now. +He had known quite well an English soldier who was on guard over Boney +at St. Helena--in fact, he once published in some newspaper this man's +observations upon the fallen emperor, but I have not been able to trace +the piece. He had been in Paris before the troubles of '48. I believe he +served some sort of bookselling apprenticeship on Paternoster Row; at +any rate, he used to be in touch with the London book trade as a young +man, and made the acquaintance of Bernard Quaritch, one of the world's +most famous booksellers. I remember his lamenting that FitzGerald had +not dumped the two hundred unsold booklets of Omar upon his counter +instead of Quaritch's in 1859. The story goes that they were offered by +Quaritch for a penny apiece. + +I always used to steer him onto the subject of FitzGerald sooner or +later, and it was interesting to hear him tell how many princes of the +literary world had come to his shop or had corresponded with him owing +to his knowledge of E.F.G. Arme Thackeray gave him a beautiful portrait +of herself in return for some courtesy he showed her. Robert H. Groome, +the archdeacon of Suffolk, and his brilliant son, Francis Hindes Groome, +the "Tarno Rye" (who wrote "Two Suffolk Friends" and was said by Watts +Dunton to have known far more about the gipsies than Borrow) were among +his correspondents.[D] John Hay, Elihu Vedder, Aldis Wright, Canon +Ainger, Thomas B. Mosher, Clement Shorter, Dewitt Miller, Edward Clodd, +Leon Vincent--such men as these wrote or came to John Loder when they +wanted special news about FitzGerald. FitzGerald had given him a great +many curios and personal treasures: Mr. Loder never offered these for +sale at any price (anything connected with FitzGerald was sacred to him) +but if any one happened along who seemed able to appreciate them he +would give them away with delight. He gave to me FitzGerald's old +musical scrapbook, which he had treasured for over thirty years. This +scrapbook, in perfect condition, contains very beautiful engravings, +prints, and drawings of the famous composers, musicians, and operatic +stars of whom Fitz was enivre as a young man. Among them are a great +many drawings of Handel; FitzGerald, like Samuel Butler, was an +enthusiastic Handelian. The pictures are annotated by E.F.G. and there +are also two drawings of Beethoven traced by Thackeray. This scrapbook +was compiled by FitzGerald when he and Thackeray were living together in +London, visiting the Cave of Harmony and revelling in the dear delights +of young intellectual companionship. Under a drawing of the famous +Braham, dated 1831, Fitz has written: "As I saw and heard him many +nights in the Pit of Covent Garden, in company with W.M. Thackeray, +whom I was staying with at the Bedford Coffee House." + +[Footnote D: No lover of FitzGerald can afford not to own that exquisite +tributary volume "Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath," by Francis Hindes +Groome, which Mr. Mosher published in 1902. It tells a great deal about +Woodbridge, and is annotated by John Loder. Mr. Mosher was eager to +include Loder's portrait in it, but the old man's modesty was always as +great as his generosity: he would not consent.] + +When I tried, haltingly, to express my thanks for such a gift, the old +man said "That's nothing! That's nothing! It'll help to keep you out of +mischief. Much better to give 'em away before it's too late!" And he +followed it with Canon Ainger's two volumes of Lamb's letters, which +Ainger had given him. + +Through his long life John Loder lived quietly in Woodbridge, eager and +merry in his shop, a great reader, always delighted when any one came in +who was qualified to discuss the literature which interested him. He and +FitzGerald had long cracks together and perhaps Loder may have +accompanied the Woodbridge Omar on some of those trips down the Deben on +the _Scandal_ or the _Meum and Tuum_ (the _Mum and Tum_ as Posh, Fitz's +sailing master, called her). He played a prominent part in the life of +the town, became a Justice of the Peace, and sat regularly on the bench +until he was nearly ninety. As he entered upon the years of old age, +came a delightful surprise. An old friend of his in the publishing +business, whom he had known long before in London, died and left him a +handsome legacy by will. Thus his last years were spared from anxiety +and he was able to continue his unobtrusive and quiet generosities +which had always been his secret delight. + +Looking over the preceding paragraphs I am ashamed to see how pale and +mumbling a tribute they are to this fine spirit. Could I but put him +before you as he was in those last days! I used to go up to Burkitt +House to see him: in summer we would sit in the little arbour in the +garden, or in winter by the fire in his dining room. He would talk and I +would ask him questions; now and then he would get up to pull down a +book, or to lead me into his bedroom to see some special treasure. He +used to sit in his shirtsleeves, very close to the fire, with his shoe +laces untied. In summer he would toddle about in his shaggy blue suit, +with a tweed cap over one ear, his grizzled beard and moustache well +stained by much smoking, his eyes as bright and his tongue as brisk as +ever. Every warm morning would see him down on the river wall; stumping +over Market Hill and down Church Street with his stout oak stick, +hailing every child he met on the pavement. His pocket was generally +full of peppermints, and the youngsters knew well which pocket it was. +His long life was a series of original and graceful kindnesses, always +to those who needed them most and had no reason to expect them. No +recluse he, no fine scholar, no polished litterateur, but a +hard-headed, soft-hearted human man of the sturdy old Suffolk breed. +Sometimes I think he was, in his own way, just as great a man as the +"Old Fitz," whom he loved and reverenced. + +He died on November 7, 1917, aged ninety-two years three months and four +days. He was extraordinarily sturdy until nearly ninety--he went in +bathing in the surf at Felixstowe on his eighty-sixth birthday. Perhaps +the sincerest tribute I can pay him is these lines which I copy from my +journal, dated July 16, 1913: + +"Went up to have tea with old John Loder, and said a cunningly veiled +Good-bye to him. I doubt if I shall see him again, the dear old man. I +think he felt so, too, for when he came to the door with me, instead of +his usual remark about 'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest,' he +said, 'Farewell to thee' in a more sober manner than his wont--and I +left with an armful of books which he had given me 'to keep me out of +mischief.' We had a good talk after tea--he told me about the adventures +of his brothers, one of whom went out to New Zealand. He uses the most +delightful brisk phrases in his talk, smiling away to himself and +wrinkling up his forehead, which can only be distinguished from his +smooth bald pate by its charming corrugation of parallel furrows. He +took me into his den while he rummaged through his books to find some +which would be acceptable to me--'May as well give 'em away before it's +too late, ye know'--and then he settled back in his easy chair to puff +at a pipe. I must note down one of his phrases which tickled me--he has +such a knack for the proverbial and the epigrammatic. 'He's cut his +cloth, he can wear his breeches,' he said of a certain scapegrace. He +chuckled over the Suffolk phrase 'a chance child,' for a bastard +(alluding to one such of his acquaintance in old days). He constantly +speaks of things he wants to do 'before I tarn my toes up to the +daisies.' He told me old tales of Woodbridge in the time of the +Napoleonic wars when there was a garrison of 5,000 soldiers quartered +here--this was one of the regions in which an attack by Boney was +greatly feared. He says that the Suffolk phrase 'rafty weather' (meaning +mist or fog) originates from that time, as being weather suitable for +the French to make a surprise attack by rafts or flat-boats. + +"He chuckled over the reminiscence that he was once a great hand at +writing obituary notices for the local paper. 'Weep, weep for him who +cried for us,' was the first line of his epitaph upon a former +Woodbridge town crier! I was thinking that it would be hard to do him +justice when the time comes to write his. May he have a swift and +painless end such as his genial spirit deserves, and not linger on into +a twilight life with failing senses. When his memory and his pipe and +his books begin to fail him, when those keen old eyes grow dim and he +can no longer go to sniff the salt air on the river-wall--then may the +quick and quiet ferryman take dear old John Loder to the shadow land." + + + + +A VENTURE IN MYSTICISM + + +I had heard so much about this Rabbi Tagore and his message of calm for +our hustling, feverish life, that I thought I would try to put some of +that stuff into practice. + +"Shut out the clamour of small things. Withdraw into the deep quiet of +your soul, commune with infinite beauty and infinite peace. You must be +full of gladness and love for every person and every tiniest thing. +Great activity and worry is needless--it is poison to the soul. Learn to +reflect, and to brood upon eternal beauty. It is the mystic who finds +all that is most precious in life. The flowers of meditation blossom in +his heart." I cut out these words and pasted them in my hat. I have +always felt that my real genius lies in the direction of philosophic +calm. I determined to override the brutal clamour of petty things. + +The alarm clock rang as usual at 6.30. Calmly, with nothing but lovely +thoughts in my mind, I threw it out of the window. I lay until eight +o'clock, communing with infinite peace. I began to see that Professor +Tagore was right. My wife asked me if I was going to the office. "I am +brooding upon eternal beauty," I told her. + +She thought I was ill, and made me take breakfast in bed. + +I usually shave every morning, but a moment's thought will convince you +that mystics do not do so. I determined to grow a beard. I lit a cigar, +and replied "I am a mystic" to all my wife's inquiries. + +At nine o'clock came a telephone call from the office. My employer is +not a devotee of eternal calm, I fear. When I explained that I was at +home reading "Gitanjali," his language was far from mystical. "Get here +by ten o'clock or you lose your job," he said. + +I was dismayed to see the same old throng in the subway, all the +senseless scuffle and the unphilosophic crowd. But I felt full of +gladness in my new way of life, full of brotherhood for all the world. +"I love you," I said to the guard on the platform. He seized me by the +shoulders and rammed me into the crowded car, shouting "Another nut!" + +When I reached the office my desk was littered with a hundred papers. +The stenographer was at the telephone, trying to pacify someone. "Here +he is now," I heard her say. + +It was Dennis & Company on the wire. + +"How about that carload of Bavarian herrings we were to have yesterday +without fail?" said Dennis. + +I took the 'phone. + +"In God's good time," I said, "the shipment will arrive. The matter is +purely ephemeral, after all. If you will attune yourself--" + +He rang off. + +I turned over the papers on my desk. Looked at with the unclouded eye of +a mystic, how mundane and unnecessary all these pettifogging +transactions seemed. Two kegs of salt halibut for the Cameron Stores, +proofs of the weekly ad. for the _Fishmongers' Journal_, a telegram from +the Uptown Fish Morgue, new tires needed for one of the delivery +trucks--how could I jeopardize my faculty of meditation by worrying over +these trifles? I leaned back in my chair and devoted myself to +meditation. After all, the harassing domination of material things can +easily be thrown off by a resolute soul. I was full of infinite peace. I +seemed to see the future as an ever-widening vista of sublime visions. +My soul was thrilled with a universal love of humanity. + +The buzzer on my desk sounded. That meant that the boss wanted to see +me. + +Now, it has always seemed to me that to put one's self at the beck and +call of another man is essentially degrading. In the long perspective +of eternity, was his soul any more majestic than mine? In this luminous +new vision of my importance as a fragment of immortal mind, could I, +should I, bow to the force of impertinent trivialities? + +I sat back in my chair, full of love of humanity. + +By and by the boss appeared at my desk. One look at his face convinced +me of the truth of Tagore's saying that great activity is poison to the +soul. Certainly his face was poisonous. + +"Say," he shouted, "what the devil's the matter with you to-day? Dennis +just called me up about that herring order--" + +"Master," I said mildly, "be not overwrought. Great activity is a +strychnine to the soul. I am a mystic...." + +A little later I found myself on the street with two weeks' pay in my +pocket. It is true that my departure had been hasty and unpleasant, for +the stairway from the office to the street is long and dusty; but I +recalled what Professor Tagore had said about vicissitudes being the +true revealers of the spirit. My hat was not with me, but I remembered +the creed pasted in it. After pacing a block or so, my soul was once +more tranquil. + +I entered a restaurant. It was the noon hour, and the room was crowded +with hurrying waiters and impatient people. I found a vacant seat in a +corner and sat down. I concentrated my mind upon the majestic vision of +the brotherhood of man. + +Gradually I began to feel hungry, but no waiter came near me. Never +mind, I thought: to shout and hammer the table as the others do is +beneath the dignity of a philosopher. I began to dream of endless vistas +of mystical ham and eggs. I brooded upon these for some time, but still +no corporeal and physical units of food reached me. + +The man next me gradually materialized into my consciousness. Full of +love for humanity I spoke to him. + +"Brother," I said, "until one of these priestly waiters draws nigh, will +you not permit me to sustain myself with one of your rolls and one of +your butter-balls? In the great brotherhood of humanity, all that is +mine is yours; and _per contra_, all that is yours is mine." Beaming +luminously upon him, I laid a friendly hand on his arm. + +He leaped up and called the head waiter. "Here's an attic for rent!" he +cried coarsely. "He wants to pick my pocket." + +By the time I got away from the police station it was dusk, and I felt +ready for home. I must say my broodings upon eternal beauty were +beginning to be a little forced. As I passed along the crowded street, +walking slowly and withdrawn into the quiet of my soul, three people +trod upon my heels and a taxi nearly gave me a passport to eternity. I +reflected that men were perhaps not yet ready for these doctrines of +infinite peace. How much more wise were the animals--and I raised my +hand to stroke a huge dray-horse by the pavement. He seized my fingers +in his teeth and nipped them vigorously. + +I gave a yell and ran full tilt to the nearest subway entrance. I burst +into the mass of struggling, unphilosophic humanity and fought, shoved, +cursed, and buffeted with them. I pushed three old ladies to one side to +snatch my ticket before they could get theirs. I leaped into the car at +the head of a flying wedge of sinful, unmystical men, who knew nothing +of infinite beauty and peace. As the door closed I pushed a decrepit +clergyman outside, and I hope he fell on the third rail. As I felt the +lurching, trampling, throttling jam of humanity sway to and fro with the +motion of the car, I drew a long breath. Dare I confess it?--I was +perfectly happy! + + + + +AN OXFORD LANDLADY + + +It was a crisp October afternoon, and along Iffley Road the wind was +chivvying the yellow leaves. We stood at the window watching the +flappers opposite play hockey. One of them had a scarlet tam-o'-shanter +and glorious dark hair underneath it.... A quiet tap at the door, gentle +but definite, and in came Mrs. Beesley. + +If you have been at our digs, you know her by sight, and have not +forgotten. Hewn of the real imperial marble is she, not unlike Queen +Victoria in shape and stature. She tells us she used to dance featly and +with abandon in days gone by, when her girlish slimness was the +admiration of every greengrocer's assistant in Oxford--and even in later +days when she and Dr. Warren always opened the Magdalen servants' ball +together. She and the courtly President were always the star couple. I +can see her doing the Sir Roger de Coverley. But the virgin zone was +loosed long ago, and she has expanded with the British Empire. Not +rotund, but rather imposingly cubic. Our hallway is a very narrow one, +and when you come to visit us of an evening, after red-cheeked Emily +has gone off to better tilting grounds, it is a prime delight to see +Mrs. Beesley backing down the passage (like a stately canal boat) before +the advancing guest. Very large of head and very pink of cheek, very +fond of a brisk conversation, some skill at cooking, slow and full of +dignity on the stairs, much reminiscent of former lodgers, bold as a +lion when she thinks she is imposed upon, but otherwhiles humorous and +placable--such is our Mrs. Beesley. + +She saw us standing by the window, and thought we were watching the +leaves twisting up the roadway in golden spirals. + +"Watching the wind?" she said pleasantly. "I loves to see the leaves +'avin' a frolic. They enjoys it, same as young gentlemen do." + +"Or young ladies?" I suggested. "We were watching the flappers play +hockey, Mrs. Beesley. One of them is a most fascinating creature. I +think her name must be Kathleen...." + +Mrs. Beesley chuckled merrily and threw up her head in that delightful +way of hers. "Oh, dear, Oh, dear, you're just like all the other +gentlemen," she said. "Always awatchin' and awaitin' for the young +ladies. Mr. Bye that used to be 'ere was just the same, an' he was +engaged to be marrit. 'Ad some of 'em in to tea once, he did. I thought +it was scandalous, and 'im almost a marrit gentleman." + +"Don't you remember what the poet says, Mrs. Beesley?" I suggested: + + "Beauty must be scorned in none + Though but truly served in one." + +"Not much danger of you gentlemen bein' too scornful," said Mrs. +Beesley. Her eyes began to sparkle now that she saw herself fairly +embarked upon a promising conversation. She sidled a little farther into +the room. Lloyd winked at me and quietly escaped behind her. + +"Seeing as we're alone," said Mrs. Beesley, "I come to you to see about +dinner to-night. I knows as you're the father of 'em all." (That is her +quaint way of saying that she thinks me the leading spirit of the three +who dig with her.) "How about a little jugged 'are? Nice little 'ares +there are in Cowley Road now. I thinks 'are is very tender an' tasty. +That, an' a nice 'ot cup o' tea?" + +The last 'are had been, in Tennyson's phrase, "the heir of all the +ages," so I deprecated the suggestion. "I don't think hare agrees with +Mr. Williams," I said. + +"'Ow about a pheasant?" said Mrs. Beesley, stroking the corner of the +table with her hand as she always does when in deep thought. "A +pheasant and a Welsh rabbit, not too peppery. That goes well with the +cider. Dr. Warren came 'ere to dinner once, an' he had a Welsh rabbit +and never forgot it. 'E allus used to say when 'e saw me, ''Ow about +that Welsh rabbit, Mrs. Beesley?' Oh, dear, Oh, dear, 'e _is_ a kind +gentleman! 'E gave us a book once--''Istory of Magdalen College,' I +think he wrote it 'imself." + +"I think a pheasant would be very nice," I said, and began looking for a +book. + +"Do you think Mr. Loomis will be back from town in time for dinner?" +asked Mrs. Beesley. "I know 'e's fond o' pheasant. He'd come if he +knew." + +"We might send him a telegram," I said. + +"Oh, dear, Oh, dear!" sighed Mrs. Beesley, overcome by such a fantastic +thought. "You know, Mr. Morley, a funny thing 'appened this morning," +she said. "Em'ly and I were making Mr. Loomis's bed. But we didn't find +'is clothes all lyin' about the floor same as 'e usually does. 'I wonder +what's 'appened to Mr. Loomis's clothes?' said Em'ly. + +"'P'raps 'e's took 'em up to town to pawn 'em.' I said. (You know we 'ad +a gent'man 'ere once that pawned nearly all 'is things--a Jesus +gentleman 'e was.) + +"Em'ly says to me, 'I wonder what the three balls on a pawnbroker's +sign mean?' + +"'Why don't you know, Em'ly?' I says. It means it's two to one you never +gets 'em back." + +Just then there was a ring at the bell and Mrs. Beesley rolled away +chuckling. And I returned to the window to watch Kathleen play hockey. + +_October, 1912._ + + + + +"PEACOCK PIE" + + +Once a year or so one is permitted to find some book which brings a real +tingle to that ribbon of the spinal marrow which responds to the +vibrations of literature. Not a bad way to calendar the years is by the +really good books they bring one. Each twelve month the gnomon on the +literary sundial is likely to cast some shadow one will not willingly +forget. Thus I mark 1916 as the year that introduced me to William +McFee's "Casuals of the Sea" and Butler's "Way of All Flesh"; 1915 most +of us remember as Rupert Brooke's year, or the year of the Spoon River +Anthology, if you prefer that kind of thing; 1914 I notch as the season +when I first got the hang of Bourget and Conrad. But perhaps best of +all, in 1913 I read "Peacock Pie" and "Songs of Childhood," by Walter de +la Mare. + +"Peacock Pie" having now been published in this country it is seasonable +to kindle an altar fire for this most fanciful and delightful of +present-day poets. It is curious that his work is so little known over +here, for his first book, "Songs of Childhood," was published in +England in 1902. Besides, poetry he has written novels and essays, all +shot through with a phosphorescent sparkle of imagination and charm. He +has the knack of "words set in delightful proportion"; and "Peacock Pie" +is the most authentic knapsack of fairy gold since the "Child's Garden +of Verses." + +I am tempted to think that Mr. de la Mare is the kind of poet more +likely to grow in England than America. The gracious and fine-spun +fabric of his verse, so delicate in music, so quaint and haunting in +imaginative simplicity, is the gift of a land and life where rewards and +fames are not wholly passed away. Emily Dickinson and Vachel Lindsay are +among our contributors to the songs of gramarye: but one has only to +open "The Congo" side by side with "Peacock Pie" to see how the +seductions of ragtime and the clashing crockery of the Poetry Society's +dinners are coarsening the fibres of Mr. Lindsay's marvellous talent as +compared with the dainty horns of elfin that echo in Mr. de la Mare. And +it is a long Pullman ride from Spoon River to the bee-droned gardens +where De la Mare's old women sit and sew. Over here we have to wait for +Barrie or Yeats or Padraic Colum to tell us about the fairies, and Cecil +Sharp to drill us in their dances and songs. The gentry are not native +in our hearts, and we might as well admit it. + +To say that Mr. de la Mare's verse is distilled in fairyland suggests +perhaps a delicate and absent-minded figure, at a loss in the hurly +burly of this world; the kind of poet who loses his rubbers in the +subway, drops his glasses in the trolley car, and is found wandering +blithely in Central Park while the Women's Athenaeum of the Tenderloin +is waiting four hundred strong for him to lecture. But Mr. de la Mare is +the more modern figure who might readily (I hope I speak without +offense) be mistaken for a New York stock broker, or a member of the +Boston Chamber of Commerce. Perhaps he even belongs to the newer order +of poets who do not wear rubbers. + +One's first thought (if one begins at the beginning, but who reads a +book of poetry that way?) is that "Peacock Pie" is a collection of poems +for children. But it is not that, any more than "The Masses" is a paper +for the proletariat. Before you have gone very far you will find that +the imaginary child you set out with has been magicked into a +changeling. The wee folk have been at work and bewitched the +pudding--the pie rather. The fire dies on the hearth, the candle +channels in its socket, but still you read on. Some of the poems bring +you the cauld grue of Thrawn Janet. When at last you go up to bed, it +will be with the shuddering sigh of one thrilled through and through +with the sad little beauties of the world. You will want to put out a +bowl of fresh milk on the doorstep to appease the banshee--did you not +know that the janitor of your Belshazzar Court would get it in the +morning. + +One of the secrets of Mr. de la Mare's singular charm is his utter +simplicity, linked with a delicately tripping music that intrigues the +memory unawares and plays high jinks with you forever after. Who can +read "Off the Ground" and not strum the dainty jig over and over in his +head whenever he takes a bath, whenever he shaves, whenever the moon is +young? I challenge you to resist the jolly madness of its infection: + + Three jolly Farmers + Once bet a pound + Each dance the others would + Off the ground. + Out of their coats + They slipped right soon, + And neat and nicesome, + Put each his shoon. + One--Two--Three-- + And away they go, + Not too fast, + And not too slow; + Out from the elm-tree's + Noonday shadow, + Into the sun + And across the meadow. + Past the schoolroom, + With knees well bent + Fingers a-flicking, + They dancing went.... + +Are you not already out of breath in the hilarious escapade? + +The sensible map's quarrel with the proponents of free verse is not that +they write such good prose; not that they espouse the natural rhythms of +the rain, the brook, the wind-grieved tree; this is all to the best, +even if as old as Solomon. It is that they affect to disdain the +superlative harmonies of artificed and ordered rhythms; that knowing not +a spondee from a tribrach they vapour about prosody, of which they know +nothing, and imagine to be new what antedates the Upanishads. The +haunting beauty of Mr. de la Mare's delicate art springs from an ear of +superlative tenderness and sophistication. The daintiest alternation of +iambus and trochee is joined to the serpent's cunning in swiftly +tripping dactyls. Probably this artifice is greatly unconscious, the +meed of the trained musician; but let no singer think to upraise his +voice before the Lord ere he master the axioms of prosody. Imagist +journals please copy. + +One may well despair of conveying in a few rough paragraphs the gist of +this quaint, fanciful, brooding charm. There is something fey about much +of the book: it peers behind the curtains of twilight and sees strange +things. In its love of children, its inspired simplicity, its sparkle of +whim and AEsopian brevity, I know nothing finer. Let me just cut for you +one more slice of this rarely seasoned pastry. + + THE LITTLE BIRD + + My dear Daddie bought a mansion + For to bring my Mammie to, + In a hat with a long feather, + And a trailing gown of blue; + And a company of fiddlers + And a rout of maids and men + Danced the clock round to the morning, + In a gay house-warming then. + And when all the guests were gone, and + All was still as still can be, + In from the dark ivy hopped a + Wee small bird: and that was Me. + +"Peacock Pie" is immortal diet indeed, as Sir Walter said of his scrip +of joy. Annealed as we are, I think it will discompose the most callous. +It is a sweet feverfew for the heats of the spirit, It is full of +outlets of sky. + +As for Mr. de la Mare himself, he is a modest man and keeps behind his +songs. Recently he paid his first visit to America, and we may hope that +even on Fifth Avenue he saw some fairies. He lectured at some of our +universities and endured the grotesque plaudits of dowagers and +professors who doubtless pretended to have read his work. Although he is +forty-four, and has been publishing for nearly sixteen years, he has +evaded "Who's Who." He lives in London, is married, and has four +children. For a number of years he worked for the Anglo-American Oil +Company. Truly the Muse sometimes lends to her favourites a merciful +hardiness. + + + + +THE LITERARY PAWNSHOP + + +Excellent Parson Adams, in "Joseph Andrews," is not the only literary +man who has lamented the difficulty of ransoming a manuscript for +immediate cash. It will be remembered that Mr. Adams had in his +saddlebag nine volumes of sermons in manuscript, "as well worth a +hundred pounds as a shilling was worth twelve pence." Offering one of +these as a pledge, Parson Adams besought Mr. Tow-Wouse, the innkeeper, +to lend him three guineas but the latter had so little stomach for a +transaction of this sort that "he cried out, 'Coming, sir,' though +nobody called; and ran downstairs without any fear of breaking his +neck." + +As a whimsical essayist (with whom I have talked over these matters) +puts it, the business of literature is imperfectly coordinated with +life. + +Almost any other kind of property is hockable for ready cash. A watch, a +ring, an outworn suit of clothes, a chair, a set of books, all these +will find willing purchasers. But a manuscript which happens not to meet +the fancy of the editors must perforce lie idle in your drawer though it +sparkle with the brilliants of wit, and five or ten years hence +collectors may list it in their catalogues. No mount of piety along +Sixth Avenue will accept it in pawn, no Hartford Lunch will exchange it +for corned beef hash and dropped egg. This is a dismal thing. + +This means that there is an amusing and a competent living to be gained +by a literary agent of a new kind. Think how many of the most famous +writers have trod the streets ragged and hungry in their early days. +There were times when they would have sold their epics, their novels, +their essays, for the price of a square meal. Think of the booty that +would accumulate in the shop of a literary pawnbroker. The early work of +famous men would fill his safe to bursting. Later on he might sell it +for a thousand times what he gave. There is nothing that grows to such +fictitious value as manuscript. + +Think of Francis Thompson, when he was a bootmaker's assistant in +Leicester Square. He was even too poor to buy writing materials. His +early poems were scribbled on scraps of old account books and wrapping +paper. How readily he would have sold them for a few shillings. Or Edgar +Poe in the despairing days of his wife's illness. Or R.L.S. in the fits +of depression caused by his helpless dependence upon his father for +funds. What a splendid opportunity these crises in writers' lives would +offer to the enterprising buyer of manuscripts! + +Be it understood, of course, that the pawnbroker must be himself an +appreciator of good things. No reason why he should buy poor stuff, even +though the author of it be starving. Richard Le Gallienne has spoken +somewhere of the bookstores which sell "books that should never have +been written to the customers who should never have been born." Our +pawnbroker must guard himself against buying this kind of stuff. He will +be besieged with it. Very likely Mr. Le Gallienne himself will be the +first to offer him some. But his task will be to discover new and true +talent beneath its rags, and stake it to a ham sandwich when that homely +bite will mean more than a dinner at the Ritz ten years later. + +The idea of the literary pawnbroker comes to me from the (unpublished) +letters of John Mistletoe, author of the "Dictionary of Deplorable +Facts," that wayward and perverse genius who wandered the Third Avenue +saloons when he might have been feted by the Authors' League had he +lived a few years longer. Some day, I hope, the full story of that +tragic life may be told, and the manuscripts still cherished by his +executor made public. In the meantime, this letter, which he wrote in +1908, gives a sad and vivid little picture of the straits of unadmitted +genius: + +"I write from Connor's saloon. Paunchy Connor has been my best--indeed +my only--friend in this city, when every editor, publisher, and critic +has given me the frozen mitt. Of course I know why ... the author of +'Vermin' deserves not, nor wants, their hypocritical help. The book was +too true to life to please the bourgeois and yet not ribald enough to +tickle the prurient. I had a vile pornographic publisher after me the +other day; he said if I would rub up some of the earlier chapters and +inject a little more spice he thought he could do something with it--as +a paper-covered erotic for shop-girls, I suppose he meant. I kicked him +downstairs. The stinking bounder! + +"Until to-day I had been without grub for sixty hours. That is literally +true. I was ashamed of sponging on Paunchy, and could not bring myself +to come back to the saloon where he would willingly have fed me. I did +get a job for two days as a deckhand on an Erie ferryboat, but they +found out I did not belong to the union. I had two dollars in my +pocket--a fortune--but while I was dozing on a doorstep on Hudson +Street, waiting for the cafes to open (I was too done to walk half a +dozen blocks to an all-night restaurant), some snapper picked my +pocket. That night I slept in a big drain pipe where they were putting +up a building. + +"Why isn't there a pawnshop where one could hang up MSS. for cash? In my +hallroom over Connor's saloon I have got stuff that will be bid for at +auctions some day (that isn't conceit, I know it), but at this moment, +July 17, 1908, I couldn't raise 50 cents on it. If there were a literary +mount of piety--a sort of Parnassus of piety as it were--the uncle in +charge might bless the day he met me. Well, it won't be for long. This +cancer is getting me surely. + +"This morning I'm cheerful. I've scrubbed and swept Paunchy's bar for +him, and the dirty, patchouli-smelling hop-joint he keeps upstairs, +bless his pimping old heart. And I've had a real breakfast: boiled red +cabbage, stewed beef (condemned by the inspector), rye bread, raw +onions, a glass of Tom and Jerry, and two big schooners of the amber. +I'm working on my Third Avenue novel called 'The L.' + +"I shan't give you my right address, or you'd send someone down here to +give me money, you damned philanthropist.... Connor ain't the real name, +so there. When I die (soon) they'll find Third Avenue written on my +heart, if I still have one...." + +It is interesting to recall that the MS. of his poems "Pavements, and +Other Verses" was bought by a private collector for $250 last winter. + +Will not some literary agent think over this idea? + + + + +A MORNING IN MARATHON + + +One violet throbbing star was climbing in the southeast at half-past +four, and the whole flat plain was rich with golden moonlight. Early +rising in order to quicken the furnace and start the matinsong in the +steampipes becomes its own reward when such an orange moon is dropping +down the sky. Even Peg (our most volatile Irish terrier) was plainly +awed by the blaze of pale light, and hopped gingerly down the rimy back +steps. But the cat was unabashed. Cats are born by moonlight and are +leagued with the powers of darkness and mystery. And so Nicholas Vachel +Lindsay (he is named for the daring poet of Illinois) stepped into the +moonshine without a qualm. + +There are certain little routine joys known only to the servantless +suburbanite. Every morning the baker leaves a bag of crisp French rolls +on the front porch. Every morning the milkman deposits his little +bottles of milk and cream on the back steps. Every morning the furnace +needs a little grooming, that the cheery thump of rising pressure may +warm the radiators upstairs. Then the big agate kettle must be set over +the blue gas flame, for hot water is needed both for shaving and cocoa. +Our light breakfast takes only a moment to prepare. By the time the Nut +Brown Maid comes singing downstairs, cocoa, rolls, and boiled eggs are +ready in the sunny little dining room, and the Tamperer is bathed and +shaved and telephoning to Central for "the exact time." The 8:13 train +waits for no man, and it is nearly a mile to the station. + +But the morning I think of was not a routine morning. On routine +mornings the Tamperer rises at ten minutes to seven, the alarm clock +being set for 6:45: which allows five minutes for drowsy head. The day +in question was early February when snow lay white and powdery on the +ground, and the 6 o'clock train from Marathon had to be caught. There is +an express for Philadelphia that leaves the Pennsylvania Station at 7:30 +and this the Tamperer had to take, to make a 10 o'clock appointment in +the Quaker City. That was why the alarm clock rang at half-past four. + +I cannot recall a more virginal morning than that snowy twilight before +the dawn. No description that I have ever read--not even the daybreak in +"Prince Otto," or Pippa's dawn boiling in pure gold over the rim of +night--would be just to that exquisite growth of colour in the eastern +sky. The violet star faded to forget-me-not and then to silver and at +last closed his weary eye; the flat Long Island prairie gradually lost +its fairy-tale air of mystery and dream; the close ceiling of the night +receded into infinite space as the sun waved his radiant arms over the +horizon. + +But this was after I had left the house. The sun did not raise his head +from the pillow until I was in the train. The Nut Brown Maid was still +nested in her warm white bed as I took her up some tea and toast just +before departing. + +The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious. +Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep +blue shadows in the strange light--waning moon and waxing day. The air +was very chill--only just above zero--and the smoking car seemed very +cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and +read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco +and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The +exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea. + +I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun +came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As +we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light +shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the +basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the +thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination +for me that the old dingy London terminals have--King's Cross, +Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls +and those porters in corduroy--but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place +after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. +It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains? +No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke +of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue +English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run. + +In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its +high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of +commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting +by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch +counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to +stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and +garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I +was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies--five or +six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that +the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was +reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth +book of the Aeneid)--_stant litore puppes_, which I always yearned to +translate "a litter of puppies." + +My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit +my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged +from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a +degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was +just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto +the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. +The day was begun. + + + + +THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS + + +I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do +not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the +thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords. +Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease +mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers--those who smoke +cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with +sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane. + +But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train +is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is +none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently +these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape, +condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in +leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven +to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they +smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end +than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear +shoes with fawn-coloured tops. + +Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am +faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading +poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver +gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto +sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the +brass veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. +And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I +left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me +at least a whiskey and soda to get them out. + +It means, I suppose, that I am not marked for success. I am cigarless +and derbyless; I do not wear those funny little white margins inside my +vest. My scarf is still the dear old shabby one in which I was married +(I bought it at Rogers Peet's, and I shall never forget it) and when I +look up from Emily Dickinson's poems with a trembling thrill of painful +ecstasy, I am frightened by the long row of hard faces and cynic eyes +opposite me. + +The House of Lords disquiets me. Even if I ring a bell and order a +bottle I am not happy. Is it only the swing of the car that nauseates +me? At any rate, I want to get home--home to that star-sown meadow and +the two brown arms at the journey's end. + +_December, 1914._ + + + + +COTSWOLD WINDS + + +Spring comes late on these windy uplands, and indoors one still sits +close to the fire. These are the days of booming gales over the +sheepwolds, and the afternoon ride with Shotover becomes an adventure. I +am not one of those who shirk bicycling in a wind. Give me a two-mile +spin with the gust astern, just to loosen the muscles and sweep the +morning's books and tobacco from the brain--and then turn and at it! It +is like swimming against a great crystal river. Cap off, head up--no +crouching over the handle-bars like the Saturday afternoon shopmen! Wind +in your hair, the broad blue Cotswold slopes about you, every ounce of +leg-drive straining on the pedals--three minutes of it intoxicates you. +You crawl up-wind roaring the most glorious nonsense, ribaldry, and +exultation into the face of the blast. + +I am all for the Cotswolds in the last vacation before "Schools." In +mid-March our dear gray Mother Oxford sends us away for six weeks while +she decks herself against the spring. Far and wide we scatter. The +Prince to Germany--the dons to Devon--the reading parties to quiet +country inns here and there. Some blithe spirits of my acquaintance are +in those glorious dingy garrets of the Latin Quarter with Murger's +"Scenes de la Vie de Boheme" as a viaticum. Others are among the tulips +in Holland. But this time I vote for the Cotswolds and solitude. + +There is a straggling gray village which lies in the elbow of a green +valley, with a clear trout-stream bubbling through it. There is a +well-known inn by the bridge, the resort of many anglers. But I am not +for inns nor for anglers this time. It is a serious business, these last +two months before Schools, and I and my books are camped in a "pensive +citadel" up on the hill, where the postman's wife cares for me and +worries because I do not eat more than two normal men. There is a +low-ceilinged sitting room with a blazing fire. From one corner a +winding stair climbs to the bedroom above. There are pipes and tobacco, +pens and a pot of ink. There are books--all historical volumes, the only +evidence of relaxation being Arthur Gibbs' "A Cotswold Village" and one +of Bartholomew's survey maps. Ten hours' work, seven hours' sleep, three +hours' bicycling--that leaves four hours for eating and other +emergencies. That is how we live on twenty-four hours a day, and turn a +probable Fourth in the Schools into a possible Third. + +And what could better those lonely afternoon rides on Shotover? The +valley of the Colne is one of the most entrancing bits in England, I +think. A lonely road, winding up the green trough of the stream, now and +then crossing the shoulder of the hills, takes you far away from most of +the things one likes to leave behind. There are lambs, little black +fuzzy fellows, on the uplands; there are scores of rabbits disappearing +with a flirt of white hindquarters into their wayside burrows; in +Chedworth Woods there are pheasants, gold and blue and scarlet, almost +as tame as barnyard fowls; everywhere there are skylarks throbbing in +the upper blue--and these are all your company. Now and then a great +yellow farm-wagon and a few farmers in corduroys--but no one else. That +is the kind of country to bicycle into. Up and up the valley, past the +Roman villa, until you come to the smoking-place. No pipeful ever tasted +better than this, stretched on the warm grass watching the green water +dimpling over the stones. That same water passes the Houses of +Parliament by and by. I think it would stay by Chedworth Woods if it +could--and so would I. + +But it is four o'clock, and tea will be waiting. Protesting Shotover is +pushed up a swampy hillside through the trees--and we come out onto a +hilltop some 800 feet above the sea. And from there it is eight miles +homeward, mostly downhill, with a broad blue horizon to meet the eye. +Back to the tiny cottage looking out onto the village green and the old +village well; back to four cups of tea and hot buttered toast; and then +for Metternich and the Vienna Congress. _Solvitur bicyclando!_ + +And when we clatter down the High again, two weeks hence, Oxford will +have made her great transformation. We left her in winter, mud and sleet +and stormy sunsets. But a fortnight from now, however cold, it will be +what we hopefully call the Summer Term. There will be white flannels, +and Freshmen learning to punt on the Cher. But that is not for us now. +There are the Schools.... + +_Bibury, April, 1913_. + + + + +CLOUDS + + +Who has ever done justice to the majesty of the clouds? Alice Meynell, +perhaps? George Meredith? Shelley, who was "gold-dusty with tumbling +amongst the stars?" Henry Van Dyke has sung of "The heavenly hills of +Holland," but in a somewhat treble pipe; R.L.S. said it better--"The +travelling mountains of the sky." Ah, how much is still to be said of +those piled-up mysteries of heaven! + +We rode to-day down the Delaware Valley from Milford to Stroudsburg. +That wonderful meadowland between the hills (it is just as lovely as the +English Avon, but how much more likely we are to praise the latter!) +converges in a huge V toward the Water Gap, drawing the foam of many a +mountain creek down through that matchless passway. Over the hills which +tumble steeply on either side soared the vast Andes of the clouds, +hanging palpable in the sapphire of a summer sky. What height on height +of craggy softness on those silver steeps! What rounded bosomy curves of +golden vapour; what sharpened pinnacles of nothingness, spiring in +ever-changing contour into the intangible blue! Man the finite, +reveller in the explainable and the exact, how can his eye pierce or his +speech describe the rolling robes of glory in which floating moisture +clothes itself! + +Mile on mile, those peaks of midsummer snow were marching the highways +of the air. Fascinated, almost stupefied, we watched their miracles of +form and unfathomable glory. It was as though the stockades of earth had +fallen away. Palisaded, cliff on radiant cliff, the spires of the +Unseeable lay bare. Ever since childhood one has dreamed of scaling the +bulwarks of the clouds, of riding the ether on those strange galleons. +Unconscious of their own beauty, they pass in dissolving shapes--now +scudding on that waveless azure sea; now drifting with scant steerage +way. If one could lie upon their opal summits what depths and what +abysses would meet the eye! What glowing chasms to catch the ardour of +the sun, what chill and empty hollows of creaming mist, dropping in pale +and awful spirals. Floating flat like ice floes beneath the greenish +moon, or beetling up in prodigious ledges of seeming solidness on a +sunny morning--are they not the most superbly heart-easing miracles of +our visible world? Watch them as they shimmer down toward the Water Gap +in every shade of silver and rose and opal; or delicately tinged with +amber when they have caught some jewelled chain of lightning and are +suffused with its lurid sparkle. Man has worshipped sticks and stones +and stars: has he never bent a knee to the high gods of the clouds? + +There they wander, the unfettered spirits of bliss or doom. Holding +within their billowed masses the healing punishments of the rain, +chaliced beakers of golden flame, lightnings instant and unbearable as +the face of God--dissolving into a crystal nothing, reborn from the +viewless caverns of air--here let us erect one enraptured altar to the +bright mountains of the sky! + +At sunset we were climbing back among the wooded hills of Pike County, +fifteen hundred feet above the salt. One great castle of clouds that had +long drawn our eyes was crowning some invisible airy summit far above +us. As the sun dipped it grew gray, soft, and pallid. And then one last +banner of rosy light beaconed over its highest turret--a final flare of +glory to signal curfew to all the other silver hills. Slowly it faded in +the shadow of dusk. + +We thought that was the end. But no--a little later, after we had +reached the farm, we saw that the elfs of cloudland were still at play. +Every few minutes the castle glowed with a sudden gush of pale blue +lightning. And while we watched, with hearts almost painfully sated by +beauty, through some leak the precious fire ran out; a great stalk of +pure and unspeakable brightness fled passionately to earth. This +happened again and again until the artery of fire was discharged. And +then, slowly, slowly, the stars began to pipe up the evening breeze. Our +cloud drifted gently away. + +Where and in what strange new form did it greet the flush of dawn? Who +knows? + + + + +UNHEALTHY + + +On Saturday afternoons Titania and I always have an adventure. On +Sundays we stay at home and dutifully read manuscripts (I am the obscure +creature known as a "publisher's reader") but Saturday post meridiem is +a golden tract of time wherein we wander as we list. + +The 35th Street entrance to McQueery's has long been hallowed as our +_stell-dich-ein_. We meet there at one o'clock. That is to say, I arrive +at 12:59 and spend fifteen minutes in most animated reflection. There is +plenty to think about. One may stand between the outer and inner lines +of glass doors and watch the queer little creatures that come tumbling +out of the cloak and suit factory across the street. Or one may stand +inside the store, on a kind of terrace, beneath pineapple shaped arc +lights, looking down upon the bustle of women on the main floor. Best of +all, one may stroll along the ornate gallery to one side where all sorts +and conditions of ladies wait for other ladies who have promised to meet +them at one o'clock. They divide their time between examining the +mahogany victrolae and deciding what kind of sundae they will have for +lunch. A very genteel old gentleman with white hair and a long morning +coat and an air of perpetual irritation is in charge of this social +gallery. He wears the queer, soft, flat-soled boots that are suggestive +of corns. There is an information bureau there, where one may learn +everything except the time one may expect one's wife to arrive. But I +have learned a valuable subterfuge. If I am waiting for Titania, and +beginning to despair of her arrival, I have only to go to a telephone to +call her up. As soon as I have put the nickel in, she is sure to appear. +Nowadays I save the nickel by going into a booth and _pretending_ to +telephone. Sure enough, at 1:14, Ingersoll time, in she trots. + +We have a jargon of our own. + +"Eye-polishers?" say I. + +"Yes," says Titania, "but there was a block at 42nd Street. I'm _so_ +sorry, Grump." + +"Eye-polishers" is our term for the Fifth Avenue busses, because riding +on them makes Titania's eyes so bright. More widely, the word connotes +anything that produces that desirable result, such as bunches of +violets, lavender peddlers, tea at Mary Elizabeth's, spring millinery, +or finding sixpence in her shoe. This last is a rite suggested by the +old song: + + And though maids sweep their hearths no less + Than they were wont to do, + Yet who doth now for cleanliness + Find sixpence in her shoe? + +A bright dune does very well as a sixpenny piece. + +We always lunch at Moretti's on Saturday: it is the recognized beginning +of an adventure. The Moretti lunch has advanced from a quarter to thirty +cents, I am sorry to say, but this is readily compensated by the Grump +buying Sweet Caporals instead of something Turkish. A packet of +cigarettes is another curtain-raiser for an adventure. On other days +publishers' readers smoke pipes, but on Saturdays cigarettes are +possible. + +"Antipasto?" + +"No, thanks." + +"Minestrone or consomme?" + +"Two minestrone, two prime ribs, ice cream and coffee. Red wine, +please." That is the formula. We have eaten the "old reliable Moretti +lunch" so often that the routine has become a ritual. Oh, excellent +savor of the Moretti basement! Compounded of warmth, a pungent pourri of +smells, and the jangle of thick china, how diverting it is! The +franc-tireur in charge of the wine-bin watches us complaisantly from his +counter where he sits flanked by flasks of Hoboken chianti and a case of +brittle cigars. + +How good Moretti's _minestrone_ tastes to the unsophisticated tongue. +What though it be only an azoic extract of intense potato, dimly tinct +with sargasso and macaroni--it has a pleasing warmth and bulk. Is it not +the prelude to an Adventure? + +Well, where shall we go to-day? No two explorers dickering over azimuth +and dead reckoning could discuss latitude and longitude more earnestly +than Titania and I argue our possible courses. Generally, however, she +leaves it to me to chart the journey. That gives me the pride of +conductor and her the pleasure of being surprised. + +According to our Mercator's projection (which, duly wrapped in a +waterproof envelope, we always carry on our adventures) there was a +little known region lying nor' nor'west of Blackwell's Island and +plotted on the map as East River Park. I had heard of this as a +picturesque and old-fashioned territory, comparatively free from +footpads and lying near such places as Astoria and Hell Gate. We laid a +romantic course due east along 35th Street, Titania humming a little +snatch from an English music-hall song that once amused us: + + "My old man's a fireman + Now what do you think of that? + He wears goblimey breeches + And a little goblimey hat." + +She always quotes this to me when (she says) I wear my hat too far on +the back of my head. + +The cross slope of Murray Hill drops steeply downward after one leaves +Madison Avenue. We dipped into a region that has always been very +fascinating to me. Under the roaring L, past dingy saloons, animal +shops, tinsmiths, and painless dentists, past the old dismantled +Manhattan hospital. The taste of spring was in the air: one of the +dentists was having his sign regilded, a huge four-pronged grinder as +big as McTeague's in Frank Norris's story. Oysters going out, the new +brew of Bock beer coming in: so do the saloons mark the vernal equinox. + +A huge green chalet built on stilts, with two tiers of trains rumbling +by, is the L station at 34th Street and Second Avenue. A cutting wind +blew from the East River, only two blocks away. I paid two nickels and +we got into the front car of the northbound train. + +Until Titania and I attain the final glory of riding in an aeroplane, +or ascend Jacob's ladder, there never will be anything so thrilling as +soaring over the housetops in the Second Avenue L. Rocking, racketing, +roaring over those crazy trestles, now a glimpse of the leaden river to +the east, now a peep of church spires and skyscrapers on the west, and +the dingy imitation lace curtains of the third-story windows flashing by +like a recurring pattern--it is a voyage of romance! Did you ever stand +at the front door of an Elevated train, watching the track stretch far +ahead toward the Bronx, and the little green stations slipping nearer +and nearer? The Subway is a black, bellowing horror; the bus a swaying, +jolty start-and-stop, bruising your knees against the seat in front; but +the L swings you up and over the housetops, smooth and sheer and swift. + +We descended at 86th Street and found ourselves in a new world. A broad, +dingy street, lined by shabby brown houses and pushbutton apartments, +led in a gentle descent toward the river. The neighbourhood was noisy, +quarrelsome, and dirty. After a long, bitter March the thaw had come at +last: the street was viscous with slime, the melting snow lay in grayish +piles along the curbs. Small boys on each side of the Street were +pelting sodden snowballs which spattered around us as we walked down the +pavement. + +But after two blocks things changed suddenly. The trolley swung round +at a right angle (up Avenue A) and the last block of 86th Street showed +the benefit of this manoeuvre. The houses grew neat and respectable. A +little side street branching off to the left (not recorded by Mercator) +revealed some quaint cottages with gables and shuttered windows so +mid-Victorian that my literary heart leaped and I dreamed at once of +locating a novel in this fascinating spot. And then we rounded the +corner and saw the little park. + +It was a bit of old Chelsea, nothing less. Titania clapped her hands, +and I lit my pipe in gratification. Beside us was a row of little houses +of warm red brick with peaked mansard roofs and cozy bay windows and +polished door knockers. In front of them was the lumpy little park, cut +up into irregular hills, where children were flying kites. And beyond +that, an embankment and the river in a dim wet mist. There was +Blackwell's Island, and a sailing barge slipping by. In the distance we +could see the colossal span of the new Hell Gate bridge. With the +journalist's instinct for superlatives I told Titania it was the largest +single span in the world. I wonder if it is? + +As to that I know not. But it was the river that lured us. On the +embankment we found benches and sat down to admire the scene. It was as +picturesque as Battersea in Whistler's mistiest days. A ferryboat, +crossing to Astoria, hooted musically through the haze. Tugs, puffing up +past Blackwell's Island into the Harlem River, replied with mellow +blasts. The pungent tang of the East River tickled our nostrils, and all +my old ambition to be a tugboat captain returned. + +And then trouble began. Just as I was planning how we might bilk our +landlord on Long Island and move all our belongings to this delicious +spot, gradually draw our friends around us, and make East End Avenue the +Cheyne Walk of New York--we might even import an English imagist poet to +lend cachet to the coterie--I saw by Titania's face that something was +wrong. + +I pressed her for the reason of her frown. + +She thought the region was unhealthy. + +Now when Titania thinks that a place is unhealthy no further argument is +possible. Just on what data she bases these deductions I have never been +able to learn. I think she can tell by the shape of the houses, or the +lush quality of the foliage, or the fact that the garbage men collect +from the front instead of from the back. But however she arrives at the +conclusion, it is immutable. + +Any place that I think is peculiarly amusing, or quaint, or +picturesque, Titania thinks is unhealthy. + +Sometimes I can see it coming. We are on our way to Mulberry Bend, or +the Bowery, or Farrish's Chop House. I see her brow begin to pucker. "Do +you feel as though it is going to be unhealthy?" I ask anxiously. If she +does, there is nothing for it but to clutch at the nearest subway +station and hurry up to Grant's Tomb. In that bracing ether her spirits +revive. + +So it was on this afternoon. My Utopian vision of a Chelsea in New York, +outdoing the grimy salons of Greenwich Village, fell in splinters at the +bottom of my mind. Sadly I looked upon the old Carl Schurz mansion on +the hill, and we departed for the airy plateaus of Central Park. +Desperately I pointed to the fading charms of East River Park--the +convent round the corner, the hokey pokey cart by the curbstone. + +I shall never be a tugboat captain. It isn't healthy. + + + + +CONFESSIONS OF A SMOKER + + +True smokers are born and not made. I remember my grandfather with his +snowy beard gloriously stained by nicotine; from my first years I never +saw my father out of reach of his pipe, save when asleep. Of what avail +for my mother to promise unheard bonuses if I did not smoke until I was +twenty? By the time I was eight years old I had constructed a pipe of an +acorn and a straw, and had experimented with excelsior as fuel. From +that time I passed through the well-known stages of dried bean-pod +cigars, hayseed, corn silk, tea leaves, and (first ascent of the true +Olympus) Recruits Little Cigars smoked in a lumberyard during school +recess. Thence it was but a step to the first bag of Bull Durham and a +twenty-five-cent pipe with a curved bone stem. + +I never knew the traditional pangs of Huck Finn and the other heroes of +fiction. I never yet found a tobacco that cost me a moment's unease--but +stay, there was a cunning mixture devised by some comrades at college +that harboured in its fragrant shreds neatly chopped sections of rubber +bands. That was sheer poison, I grant you. + +The weed needs no new acolyte to hymn her sanctities. Where Raleigh, +Pepys, Tennyson, Kingsley, Calverley, Barrie, and the whimful Elia best +of all--where these have spoken so greatly, the feeble voice may well +shrink. But that is the joy of true worship: ranks and hierarchies are +lost, all are brothers in the mystery, and amid approving puffs of rich +Virginia the older saints of the mellow leaf genially greet the new +freshman, be he never so humble. + +What would one not have given to smoke a pipe out with the great ones of +the empire! That wainscoted back parlour at the Salutation and Cat, for +instance, where Lamb and Coleridge used to talk into the small hours +"quaffing egg flip, devouring Welsh rabbits, and smoking pipes of +Orinooko." Or the back garden in Chelsea where Carlyle and Emerson +counted the afternoon well spent, though neither one had said a hundred +words--had they not smoked together? Or Piscator and Viator, as they +trudged together to "prevent the sunrise" on Amwell Hill--did not the +reek of their tobacco trail most bluely on the sweet morning air? Or old +Fitz, walking on the Deben wall at Woodbridge, on his way to go sailing +with Posh down to Bawdsey Ferry--what mixture did he fill and light? +Something recommended by Will Thackeray, I'll be sworn. Or, to come down +to more recent days, think of Captain Joseph Conrad at his lodgings in +Bessborough Gardens, lighting that apocalyptic pipe that preceded the +first manuscript page of "Almayer's Folly." Could I only have been the +privileged landlady's daughter who cleared away the Captain's breakfast +dishes that morning! I wonder if she remembers the incident?[E] + +[Footnote E: The reference here is to Chapter IV of Joseph Conrad's "A +Personal Record." The author's allusions are often sadly +obscure.--EDITOR.] + +It is the heart of fellowship, the core and pith and symbol of masculine +friendship and good talk. Your cigar will do for drummers, your +cigarettes for the dilettante smoker, but for the ripened, boneset +votary nothing but a briar will suffice. Away with meerschaum, calabash, +cob, and clay: they have their purpose in the inscrutable order of +things, like crossing sweepers and presidents of women's clubs; but when +Damon and Pythias meet to talk things over, well-caked briars are in +order. Cigars are all right in fiction: for Prince Florizel and Colonel +Geraldine when they visit the famous Divan in Rupert Street. It was +Leigh Hunt, in the immortal Wishing Cap Papers (so little read, alas!), +who uttered the finest plea for cigars that this language affords, but I +will wager not a director of the United Cigar Stores ever read it. + +The fine art of smoking used, in older days, to have an etiquette, a +usage, and traditions of its own, which a more hurried and hygienic age +has discarded. It was the height of courtesy to ask your friend to let +you taste his pipe, and draw therefrom three or four mouthfuls of smoke. +This afforded opportunity for a gracious exchange of compliments. "Will +it please you to impart your whiff?" was the accepted phrase. And then, +having savored his mixture, you would have said: "In truth, a very +excellent leaf," offering your own with proper deprecations. This, and +many other excellent things, we learn from Mr. Apperson's noble book +"The Social History of Smoking," which should be prayer book and +breviary to every smoker con amore. + +But the pipe rises perhaps to its highest function as the solace and +companion of lonely vigils. We all look back with tender affection on +the joys of tobacco shared with a boon comrade on some walking trip, +some high-hearted adventure, over the malt-stained counters of some +remote alehouse. These are the memories that are bittersweet beyond the +compass of halting words. Never again perhaps will we throw care over +the hedge and stride with Mifflin down the Banbury Road, filling the +air with laughter and the fumes of Murray's Mellow. But even deeper is +the tribute we pay to the sour old elbow of briar, the dented, blackened +cutty that has been with us through a thousand soundless midnights and a +hundred weary dawns when cocks were crowing in the bleak air and the pen +faltered in the hand. Then is the pipe an angel and minister of grace. +Clocks run down and pens grow rusty, but if your pouch be full your pipe +will never fail you. + +How great is the witching power of this sovereign rite! I cannot even +read in a book of someone enjoying a pipe without my fingers itching to +light up and puff with him. My mouth has been sore and baked a hundred +times after an evening with Elia. The rogue simply can't help talking +about tobacco, and I strike a match for every essay. God bless him and +his dear "Orinooko!" Or Parson Adams in "Joseph Andrews"--he lights a +pipe on every page! + +I cannot light up in a wind. It is too precious a rite to be consummated +in a draught. I hide behind a tree, a wall, a hedge, or bury my head in +my coat. People see me in the street, vainly seeking shelter. It is a +weakness, though not a shameful one. But set me in a tavern corner, and +fill the pouch with "Quiet Moments" (do you know that English mixture?) +and I am yours to the last ash. + +I wonder after all what was the sweetest pipe I ever smoked? I have a +tender spot in memory for a fill of Murray's Mellow that Mifflin and I +had in the old smoking room of the Three Crowns Inn at Lichfield. We +weren't really thirsty, but we drank cider there in honour of Dr. +Johnson, sitting in his chair and beneath his bust. Then there were +those pipes we used to smoke at twilight sitting on the steps of 17 +Heriot Row, the old home of R.L.S. in Edinburgh, as we waited for Leerie +to come by and light the lamps. Oh, pipes of youth, that can never come +again! + +When George Fox was a young man, sorely troubled by visions of the +devil, a preacher told him to smoke tobacco and sing hymns. + +Not such bad advice. + + + + +HAY FEBRIFUGE + + +Our village is remarkable. It contains the greatest publisher in the +world, the most notable department store baron (and inventor of that new +form of literary essay, the department store ad.), the most fragrant gas +tanks in the Department of the East, the greatest number of cinders per +eye of any arondissement served by the R---- railway, and the most +bitterly afflicted hay fever sufferer on this sneezing sphere. Also the +editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the world, and the +author of one of the best selling books that ever was written. + +Not bad for one village. + +Your first thought is Northampton, Mass., but you are wrong. That is +where Gerald Stanley Lee lives. For a stamped, addressed envelope I will +give you the name of our village, and instructions for avoiding it. It +is bounded on the north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the +east by asthma and the pollen of anemophylous plants. + +It is bounded on the west by a gray stone facsimile of Windsor Castle, +confirmed with butlers, buttresses, bastions, ramparts, repartees, +feudal tenures, moats, drawbridges, posterns, pasterns, chevaux de +frise, machicolated battlements, donjons, loopholes, machine-gun +emplacements, caltrops, portcullises, glacis, and all the other travaux +de fantaisie that make life worth living for retired manufacturers. The +general effect is emetic in the extreme. Hard by the castle is a +spurious and richly gabled stable in the general style of the chateau de +Chantilly. One brief strip of lawn constitutes a gulf of five hundred +years in architecture, and restrains Runnymede from Versailles. + +Our village is famous for beautiful gardens. At five o'clock merchants +and gens de lettres return home from office and tannery, remove the +cinders, and commune with vervain and bergamot. The countryside is as +lovely as Devonshire, equipped with sky, trees, rolling terrain, stewed +terrapin, golf meads, nut sundaes, beagles, spare tires, and other +props. But we are equally infamous for hideous houses, of the Chester A. +Arthur era. Every prospect pleases, and man alone is vile. + +There is a large, expensive school for flappers, on a hill; and a +drugstore or pharmacy where the flappers come to blow off steam. It +would be worth ten thousand dollars to Beatrice Herford to ambush +herself behind the Welch's grape juice life-size cut-out, and takes +notes on flapperiana. Pond Lyceum Bureau please copy. + +Our village was once famous also as the dwelling place of an eminent +parson, who obtained a million signatures for a petition to N. Romanoff, +asking the abolition of knouting of women in Siberia. And now N. +Romanoff himself is gone to Siberia, and there is no knouting or giving +in knoutage; no pogroms or ukases or any other check on the ladies. +Knitting instead of knouting is the order of the day. + +Knoutings for flappers, say I, after returning from the pharmacy or +drugstore. + +Dr. Anna Howard Shaw does not live here, but she is within a day's +journey on the Cinder and Bloodshot. + +But I was speaking of hay fever. "Although not dangerous to life," say +Drs. S. Oppenheimer and Mark Gottlieb, "it causes at certain times such +extreme discomfort to some of its victims as to unfit them for their +ordinary pursuits. If we accept the view that it is a disease of the +classes rather than the masses we may take the viewpoint of +self-congratulation rather than of humiliation as indicating a +superiority in culture and civilization of the favoured few. When the +intimate connection of pollinosis and culture has been firmly grasped by +the public mind, the complaint will perhaps come to be looked upon like +gout, as a sign of breeding. It will be assumed by those who have it +not.... As civilization and culture advance, other diseases analogous to +the one under consideration may be developed from oversensitiveness to +sound, colour, or form, and the man of the twenty-first or twenty-second +century may be a being of pure intellect whose organization of mere +nervous pulp would be shattered by a strong emotion, like a pumpkin +filled with dynamite." (vide "Pollen Therapy in Pollinosis," reprinted +from the Medical Record, March 18, 1916; and many thanks to Mr. H.L. +Mencken, fellow sufferer, for sending me a copy of this noble pamphlet. +I hope to live to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by the hand. Their +essay is marked by a wit and learning that proves them fellow-orgiasts +in this hypercultivated affliction of the cognoscenti.) + +I myself have sometimes attempted to intimate some of the affinities +between hay fever and genius by attributing it (in the debased form of +literary parody) to those of great intellectual stature. Upon the +literary vehicles of expression habitually employed by Rudyard Kipling, +Amy Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, and Hilaire Belloc I have wafted a pinch +of ragweed and goldenrod; with surprising results. These intellectuals +were not more immune than myself. For instance, this is the spasm +ejaculated by Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, of Spoon River: + + Ed Grimes always did hate me + Because I wrote better poetry than he did. + In the hay fever season I used to walk + Along the river bank, to keep as far as possible + Away from pollen. + One day Ed and his brother crept up behind me + While I was writing a sonnet, + Tied my hands and feet, + And carried me into a hayfield and left me. + I sneezed myself to death. + At the funeral the church was full of goldenrod, + And I think it must have been Ed + Who sowed that ragweed all round my grave. + +The Lord loveth a cheerful sneezer, and Mr. Masters deserves great +credit for lending himself to the cult in this way. + +I am a fanatical admirer of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, and have even +thought of spending fifty of my own dollars, privily and without +collusion with his publisher, to advertise that remarkable book of his +called "WE" which is probably the ablest and most original, and +certainly the most verbose, book that has been written about the war. +Now Mr. Lee (let me light my pipe and get this right) is the most +eminent victim of words that ever lived in New England (or indeed +anywhere east of East Aurora). Words crowd upon him like flies upon a +honey-pot: he is helpless to resist them. His brain buzzes with them: +they leap from his eye, distil from his lean and waving hand. Good God, +not since Rabelais and Lawrence Sterne, miscalled Reverend, has one +human being been so beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables. +I adore him for it, but equally I tremble. Glowing, radiant, +transcendent vocables swim and dissolve in the porches of his brain, +teasing him with visions far more deeply confused than ever Mr. +Wordsworth's were. The meanest toothbrush that bristles (he has +confessed it himself) can fill him with thoughts that do often lie too +deep for publishers. Perhaps the orotund soul-wamblings of Coleridge are +recarnate in him, Scawfell become Mount Tom. Who knows? Once I sat at +lunch with him, and though I am Trencherman Fortissimus (I can give you +testimonials) my hamburg steak fell from my hand as I listened, +clutching perilously at the hem of his thought. Nay. Mr. Lee, frown not: +I say it in sincere devotion. If there is one man and one book this +country needs, now, it is Gerald Stanley Lee and "WE." Set me upon a +coral atoll with that volume, I will repopulate the world with +dictionaries, and beget lusty tomes. It is a breeding-ground for a +whole new philosophy of heaven, hell, and the New Haven Railroad. + +But what I was going to say when I lit my pipe was this: had I the +stature (not the leanness, God forbid: sweet are the uses of obesity) of +Mr. Lee, I could find in any clodded trifle the outlets of sky my +yearning mind covets: hay fever would lead me by prismatic omissions and +plunging ellipses of thought to the vaster spirals and eddies of +all-viewing Mind. So does Mr. Lee proceed, weaving a new economics and a +new bosom for advertisiarchs in the mere act of brushing his teeth. But +alas, the recurring explosions of the loathsome and intellectual disease +keep my nose on the grindstone--or handkerchief. Do I begin to soar on +upward pinion, nose tweaks me back to sealpackerchief. + +The trouble with Mr. Lee is that he is a kind of Emerson; a +constitutional ascete or Brahmin, battling with the staggering +voluptuosities of his word-sense; a De Quincey needing no opium to set +him swooning. In fact, he is a poet, and has no control over his +thoughts. A poet may begin by thinking about a tortoise, or a +locomotive, or a piece of sirloin, and in one whisk of Time his mind has +shot up to the conceptions of Eternity, Transportation, and Nourishment: +his cortex coruscates and suppurates with abstract thought; words +assail him in hordes, and in a flash he is down among them, overborne +and fighting for his life. Mr. Lee finds that millionaires are bound +down and tethered and stifled by their limousines and coupons and +factories and vast estates. But Mr. Lee himself, who is a millionaire +and landed proprietor of ideas, is equally the slave of his thronging +words. They cluster about him like barnacles, nobly and picturesquely +impeding his progress. He is a Laocoon wrestling with serpentine +sentences. He ought to be confined to an eight-hour paragraph. + +All this is not so by the way as you think. For if the poet is one who +has lost control of his thoughts, the hay fever sufferer has lost +control of his nose. His mucous membrane acts like a packet of Roman +candles, and who is he to say it nay? And our village is bounded on the +north by goldenrod, on the south by ragweed, on the east by chickweed, +and on the west by a sleepless night. + +I would fain treat pollinosis in the way Mr. Lee might discuss it, but +that is impossible. Those prolate, sagging spirals of thought, those +grapevine twists of irremediable whim, that mind shimmering like a +poplar tree in sun and wind--jetting and spouting like plumbing after a +freeze-up--'tis beyond me. I fancy that if Mr. Lee were in bed, and the +sheets were untucked at his feet, he could spin himself so iridescent +and dove-throated and opaline a philosophy of the desirability of +sleeping with cold feet, that either (1) he would not need to get out of +bed to rearrange the bedclothes, or (2) he could persuade someone else +to do it for him. Think, then, what he could do for hay fever! + +And as Dr. Crothers said, when you mix what you think with what you +think you think, effervescence of that kind always results. + + + + +APPENDIX + +SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHERS + + +This book will be found exceedingly valuable for classroom use by +teachers of theology, hydraulics, and applied engineering. It is +recommended that it be introduced to students before their minds have +become hardened, clotted, and skeptical. The author does not hold +himself responsible for any of the statements in the book, and reserves +the right to disavow any or all of them under intellectual pressure. + +For a rapid quiz, the following suggested topics will be found valuable +for classroom consideration: + + 1. Do you discern any evidences of sincerity and serious moral + purpose in this book? + + 2. Why was fifty dollars a week not enough for Mr. Kenneth Stockton + to live on? Explain three ways in which he augmented his income. + + 3. What is a "colyumist"? Give one notorious example. + + 4. Comment on Don Marquis's attitude toward + + (a) vers libre poets + + (b) beefsteak and onions + + (c) the cut of his trousers (Explain in detail) + + (d) The Republican Party + + 5. Who is Robert Cortes Holliday, and for what is he notable? + + 6. Where was Vachel Lindsay fumigated, and why? 7. Who is "The Head + of the Firm"? + + 8. How much money did the author spend on cider in July, 1911? + + 9. Who was Denis Dulcet, and what did he die of? + + 10. When did William McFee live in Nutley, and why? + + 11. How are the works of Harold Bell Wright most useful in Kings, + Long Island? + + 12. Where is Strychnine, and what makes it so fascinating to the + tourist? Explain + + (a) The Gin Palace + + (b) Kurdmeister + + (c) unedifying Zollverein + + 13. What time did Mr. Simmons get home? + + 14. What is a "rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct?" Give three + examples. + + 15. Who are the Dioscuri of Seamen, and what do they do? + + 16. How many pipes a day do sensible men smoke? Describe the ideal + conditions for a morning pipe. + + 17. When did Mr. Blackwell light the furnace? + + 18. Name four American writers who are stout enough to be a credit + to the profession. 19. "The fumes of the hearty butcher's evening + meal ascend the stair in vain." Explain this. Who was the butcher? + Why "in vain"? + + 20. In what order of the Animal Kingdom does Mr. Pearsall Smith + classify himself? + + 21. "I hope he fell on the third rail." Explain, and give the + context. Who was "he," and why did he deserve this fate? + + 22. Who was "Mr. Loomis," and why did he leave his clothes lying + about the floor? + + 28. What are the Poetry Society dinners doing to Vachel Lindsay? + + 24. Why should the Literary Pawnbroker be on his guard against Mr. + Richard Le Gallienne? + + 25. What is the American House of Lords? Who are "our prosperous + carnivora"? Why do they wear white margins inside their waistcoats? + + 26. What is _minestrone_? Name three ingredients. + + 27. What are "publisher's readers," and why do they smoke pipes? + + 28. What was the preacher's advice to George Fox? + + 29. Give three reasons why Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee will not like this + book. + + 30. Why should one wish to grasp Drs. Oppenheimer and Gottlieb by + the hand? + + 31. In respect of Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, comment briefly on these + phrases: + + (a) beclotted, bedazzled, and bedrunken with syllables + + (b) the meanest toothbrush that bristles + + (c) Scawfell become Mount Tom + + +FINIS CORONAT OPUS + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHANDYGAFF*** + + +******* This file should be named 13739.txt or 13739.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/3/7/3/13739 + + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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