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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Imaginary Interviews, by W. D. Howells
+
+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: Imaginary Interviews
+
+Author: W. D. Howells
+
+Release Date: May 12, 2009 [EBook #28763]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Graeme Mackreth and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from scans of public domain material
+produced by Microsoft for their Live Search Books site.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Imaginary Interviews
+
+W.D. Howells
+
+[Illustration: See page 130
+
+AT THE OPERA]
+
+
+
+
+IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
+
+
+W.D. HOWELLS
+
+ILLUSTRATED
+
+HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+
+NEW YORK AND LONDON
+
+1910
+
+Copyright, 1910, by HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+Published October, 1910
+
+_Printed in the United States of America_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
+
+CHAP.                                                                PAGE
+
+I. THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF
+INTRODUCTION                                                           1
+
+II. A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH                              13
+
+III. SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES                                          22
+
+IV. THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE                          32
+
+V. INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA                                       44
+
+VI. THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS                                  57
+
+VII. UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS                               67
+
+VIII. HAVING JUST GOT HOME                                            77
+
+IX. NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE                                  87
+
+X. CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH                           97
+
+XI. WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK                             107
+
+XII. THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW
+YORK                                                                 117
+
+XIII. THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES                         127
+
+XIV. THE MAGAZINE MUSE                                               137
+
+XV. COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL                                   146
+
+XVI. QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS                                       156
+
+XVII. A WASTED OPPORTUNITY                                           166
+
+XVIII. A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE                        176
+
+XIX. A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY                                          184
+
+XX. PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH                                   194
+
+XXI. AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE                                         204
+
+XXII. THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM                        216
+
+XXIII. READING FOR A GRANDFATHER                                     226
+
+XXIV. SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE                                     236
+
+XXV. A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK                           244
+
+
+OTHER ESSAYS
+
+CHAP.                                                                PAGE
+
+I. AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY                                    255
+
+II. PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES                                264
+
+III. DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER                                       274
+
+IV. THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH                    283
+
+V. THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM                    296
+
+VI. THE FICKLENESS OF AGE                                            306
+
+VII. THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION                                      316
+
+VIII. THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA                     326
+
+IX. TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING                                     338
+
+X. A DAY AT BRONX PARK                                               350
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+AT THE OPERA                                               _Frontispiece_
+
+FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET                       _Facing_ p. 88
+
+FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS                      "        94
+
+CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE                      "       120
+
+THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK                                        "       156
+
+BROADWAY AT NIGHT                                             "       256
+
+ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS                                         "       260
+
+ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK                                "       352
+
+
+
+
+IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
+
+
+It is not generally known that after forty-two years of constant use the
+aged and honored movable which now again finds itself put back in its
+old place in the rear of _Harper's Magazine_ was stored in the warehouse
+of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event
+which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a
+pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be
+lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of
+for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial
+robes--for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair,
+except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought and
+deep-felt tribute to its last occupant--stood with bowed face and
+uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it
+abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis.
+
+It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses that
+the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal editor
+went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in one of
+those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and bric-à-brac are
+guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not taught him, he would
+have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had
+suggested when he described it as an "old red-backed Easy Chair that has
+long been an ornament of our dingy office." That unreality was Mr.
+Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old
+hearts that are still young for his _Dream Life_ and his _Reveries of a
+Bachelor_, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the
+real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had "a
+way of throwing" himself back in the Easy Chair, "and indulging in an
+easy and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in
+such chit-chat with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift of
+the town talk, while it relieved greatly the monotony of his office
+hours." Not "bent on choosing mere gossip," he promised to be "on the
+watch for such topics or incidents as" seemed really important and
+suggestive, and to set them "down with all that gloss, and that happy
+lack of sequence, which make every-day talk so much better than
+every-day writing."
+
+While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory and
+practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast
+in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his
+pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call
+the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody
+fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and
+which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters
+itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound
+can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he
+confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence.
+
+"How long have I been here?" it asked, like one wakened from a deep
+sleep.
+
+"About eight years," said the unreal editor.
+
+"Ah, I remember," the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor
+bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its
+old red back, it demanded, "What is that?"
+
+"Some bits of holly and mistletoe."
+
+"Yes," the Easy Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in
+me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it
+began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the
+year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to
+ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which
+already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a
+day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a
+little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest couple make themselves
+miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner
+to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them....
+Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they
+must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You
+cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs
+little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest
+man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the
+extravagance?' There!" the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, "that was
+Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate
+in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the
+unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy--
+
+                              'not too good
+   For human nature's daily food'--
+
+the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience
+and the undying hopefulness! Do you think," the Easy Chair said, with a
+searching severity one would not have expected of it, "that you are fit
+to take his place?"
+
+In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with the
+effect of not having heard it. "I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were
+the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?"
+
+The Easy Chair responded, dryly, "You forget Aldrich."
+
+"If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or will,"
+retorted the unreal editor. "But he wrote you for only two months. I
+well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to make his
+readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who invented you,
+and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the rest."
+
+"For a while," said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, "they
+wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and
+Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me.
+He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in a
+time
+
+   'When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
+   And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,'
+
+and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers, the
+famous paper on Brook Farm, 'Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see
+that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will
+substitute co-operation for competition.' He expected the world to be
+made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to
+help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found it. He
+was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil
+on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting
+a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the
+Bottomless Pit--"
+
+"And I also believe in alleviations," the unreal editor interrupted. "I
+love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would be
+abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do everything.
+Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the compromises, _en
+attendant_ the millennium. Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift.
+He who came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every Christmas Day
+comes to remind us, was the brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of
+men, did not He warn us against hastily putting new wine into old
+bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle
+must grow; it cannot be made; and in the mean time let us keep our
+latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their
+fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked
+as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism,
+or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish
+itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism.
+That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why
+that should be changed. The conditions are not changed."
+
+There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal editor
+broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, "I suppose that there is
+not much change in Christmas, at any rate?"
+
+"No," said the unreal editor; "it goes on pretty much as it used. The
+Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to
+dull people who don't want them, are still alive and miserably bent on
+heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the
+simple 'pleasure of the time' with the activities of their fatuous
+vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the
+Timminses?"
+
+"I don't see why not," said the Easy Chair. "They are not the architects
+of their own personalities."
+
+"Ah, take care, take care!" cried the unreal editor. "You will be saying
+next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses
+would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and
+pernicious; and you know what _that_ comes to!"
+
+"No, I am in no danger of that," the Easy Chair retorted. "The Timminses
+are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately
+moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will.
+Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful."
+
+"And just now you were making excuses for them!"
+
+"I said they were not the architects of their own personalities; but,
+nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free to
+leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be the
+moralist's business to teach them to think so."
+
+"And that was what Curtis gladly made his business," the unreal editor
+somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own
+difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that
+rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the
+right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all,
+but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted
+into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that
+beautiful tribute to the high soul they were praising came to the unreal
+editor's lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: "'His love of
+goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair and
+good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he strove
+to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that fell upon
+his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social
+shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was
+the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer,
+without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never
+parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could
+be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,' and I may
+add," the unreal editor broke off, "that he did not hurry the unripe
+grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to
+the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would
+first have waited till there were automobiles enough to supply their
+place."
+
+The Easy Chair caught at the word. "Automobiles?" it echoed.
+
+"Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored," said the unreal editor,
+and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion, and how
+already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere
+stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city avenues.
+
+He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the
+intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject.
+
+"Well," it said at last, "this isn't such a bad time to live in, after
+all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now, what good
+can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you preach on that
+hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden the heart of
+the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make your first
+appearance in the Easy Chair?"
+
+To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In his
+heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the
+greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but
+the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased
+in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the
+Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of
+all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the
+Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation
+of the divine law which renders all things sensible by their opposites,
+he thought of the other kinds of Christmas which can never weary or
+disgust: the Christmas of the little children and the simple-hearted and
+the poor; and suddenly he addressed himself to the Easy Chair with
+unexpected and surprising courage.
+
+"Why should that be so very difficult?" he demanded. "If you look at it
+rightly, Christmas is always full of inspiration; and songs as well as
+sermons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The trouble with
+us is that we think it is for the pleasure of opulent and elderly
+people, for whom there can be no pleasures, but only habits. They are
+used to having everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased to
+be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all manner of Christmas
+conventions. But for the young to whom these things are new, and for the
+poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of
+perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from
+growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is
+yours forever. It is not difficult; it is very simple; for even if years
+and riches come upon you in a literal way, you can by a little trying
+keep yourself young and poor in spirit. Then you can always rejoice with
+the innocent and riot with the destitute.
+
+"I once knew a father," the unreal editor continued, "a most doting and
+devoted father, who, when he bent over the beds of his children to bid
+them good-night, and found them 'high sorrowful and cloyed,' as the
+little ones are apt to be after a hard day's pleasure, used to bid them
+'Think about Christmas.' If he offered this counsel on the night, say,
+of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year
+before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had
+(as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of
+mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had
+been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had
+never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly
+assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following Thanksgiving
+that they succeeded in thinking about Christmas with anything like the
+entire cheerfulness expected of them."
+
+"I don't see any application in this homily," said the Easy Chair, "or
+only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that
+Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor in our lives."
+
+"That is because you have not allowed me to conclude," the unreal editor
+protested, when the Easy Chair cut in with,
+
+"There is nothing I would so willingly allow you to do," and "laughed
+and shook" as if it had been "Rabelais's easy chair."
+
+The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the untimely attempt at wit.
+"The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children was
+largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in their
+way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by no
+means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking
+about Christmas with reference to one's self instead of others."
+
+"Isn't that rather banal?" the Easy Chair asked.
+
+"Not at all banal," said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to do
+the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his
+reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces
+there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave
+himself a few moments to recover his temper, and then he went on: "If
+Christmas means anything at all, it means anything but one's own
+pleasure. Up to the first Christmas Day the whole world had supposed
+that it could be happy selfishly, and its children still suppose so. But
+there is really no such thing as selfish, as personal happiness."
+
+"Tolstoy," the Easy Chair noted.
+
+"Yes, Tolstoy," the unreal editor retorted. "He more than any other has
+brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world
+with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to
+think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth
+into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the
+possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is
+suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on
+taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and body in
+the world.
+
+"It is well to realize this at all times, but it is peculiarly fit to do
+so at Christmas-time, for it is in this truth that the worship of Christ
+begins. Now, too, is the best time to give the Divine Word form in deed,
+to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the material charity
+that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but
+also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the
+sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the
+antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less.
+
+   'Now is the time, now is the time,
+   Now is the hour of golden prime'
+
+for asking one's self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys
+during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to
+remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider
+what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly beyond
+the need of help.
+
+"To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the light
+of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a
+failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we
+must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest
+mercy."
+
+The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having made
+his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are also
+editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly,
+unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward
+until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent
+over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent
+asked in whisper,
+
+"What do you want done with it, sir?"
+
+"Oh," said the unreal editor, "send it back to Franklin Square"; and
+then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, "Don't
+wake it."
+
+There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear of
+the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff of
+dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its
+reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on
+with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed
+to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with
+it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple personality
+in which his several selves conversed with one another, and came and
+went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether his
+imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in the
+flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which haunted
+him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he became
+satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the
+subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly
+treated them.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH
+
+
+On one of those fine days which the April of the other year meanly
+grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by
+the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where the
+Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the vision
+of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. "Era la stagione nella quale la rivestita
+terra, più che tutto l' altro anno, si mostra bella," he said, without
+other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of magazines and
+newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could for himself on
+the window-sill.
+
+"What is that?" he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew perfectly
+well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature's joy by a
+show of savage ignorance.
+
+"It's the divine beginning of Boccaccio's 'Fiammetta,' it is the very
+soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio's own time and
+tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of
+another period or climate. What would you find to thrill you in, 'It was
+the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other
+year, shows herself fair'? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the
+first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens
+into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated
+with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product."
+
+As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly. "I
+understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in
+here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a
+poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring?
+What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the
+most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly,
+slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without
+decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest
+raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes.
+If it did not come at the end of winter, when people are glad of any
+change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out
+of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of summer! It would not
+be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of its crude, formless
+beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of
+happiness, secure and established, would be insulted by its haphazard
+promises made only to be broken. 'Rather,' the outraged mortal would
+say, 'the last tender hours of autumn, the first deathful-thrilling
+snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering flake-like through the
+dim air--rather these than the recurrence of those impulses and pauses,
+those kisses frozen on the lips, those tender rays turning to the lash
+of sleet across the face of nature. No, the only advantage spring can
+claim over her sister seasons is her novelty, the only reason she can
+offer for being the spoiled child of the poets is that nobody but the
+poets could keep on fancying that there was any longer the least
+originality in her novelty."
+
+The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of the Easy Chair
+made for taking breath, but he was not suffered to do so.
+
+"Every atom of originality has been drained from the novelty of spring
+'in the process of the suns,' and science is rapidly depriving her even
+of novelty. What was once supposed to be the spring grass has been found
+to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing back into the
+withered blades. As for the spring lamb which used to crop the spring
+grass, it is now out of the cold-storage where the spring chicken and
+the new-laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is said that there are no
+birds in last year's nests, but probably a careful examination would
+discover a plentiful hatch of nestlings which have hibernated in the
+habitations popularly supposed to be deserted the June before this.
+Early spring vegetables are in market throughout the twelvemonth, and
+spring flowers abound at the florists' in December and January. There is
+no reason why spring should not be absorbed into winter and summer by
+some such partition as took place politically in the case of Poland.
+Like that unhappy kingdom, she has abused her independence and become a
+molestation and discomfort to the annual meteorology. As a season she is
+distinctly a failure, being neither one thing nor the other, neither hot
+nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her winds were once supposed to be very
+siccative, and peculiarly useful in drying the plaster in new houses;
+but now the contractors put in radiators as soon as the walls are up,
+and the work is done much better. As for the germinative force of her
+suns, in these days of intensive farming, when electricity is applied to
+the work once done by them, they can claim to have no virtue beyond the
+suns of July or August, which most seeds find effective enough. If
+spring were absorbed into summer, the heat of that season would be
+qualified, and its gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, which
+would be prolonged into the winter. The rigors of winter would be much
+abated, and the partition of spring among the other seasons would
+perform the mystic office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our
+climate, besides ridding us of a time of most tedious and annoying
+suspense. And what should we lose by it?"
+
+The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair directly, but only to
+be murmuring to himself, "Youth."
+
+"Youth! Youth!" the Easy Chair repeated in exasperation. "And what is
+youth?"
+
+"The best thing in the world."
+
+"For whom is it the best thing?"
+
+This question seemed to give the poet pause. "Well," he said, finally,
+with a not very forcible smile, "for itself."
+
+"Ah, there you are!" he of the Easy Chair exclaimed; but he could not
+help a forgiving laugh. "In a way you are right. The world belongs to
+youth, and so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth is a
+very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, especially like the
+spring we have just been having, to our cost. It is the only period of
+life, as spring is the only season of the year, that has too much time
+on its hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age does, as winter
+does; it keeps doing something all the while. The things it does are
+apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the end
+something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns and
+snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May, at
+least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers, which
+the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in the
+park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden out
+of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the
+young girls are wearing, drips from the trees. You can say it is all
+very painty, the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the picture
+because of this little mannerism of the painter. To be sure, you miss
+the sheeted snows and the dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the
+hard, blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring
+is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are
+charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the
+worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her
+hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors,
+flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with
+which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of
+feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to
+which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning?" In making this
+appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that
+remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing
+very little of what you have been saying.
+
+"Yes," the poet replied with a long breath, "you are right about that
+dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder
+if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when
+we are so glad to have the spring come."
+
+"I don't know about winter," he of the Easy Chair said, "but in an opera
+which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of
+tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the
+advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the
+decline of life, where he sings,
+
+   'There is beauty in extreme old age;
+     There's a fascination frantic
+     In a ruin that's romantic'
+
+Or, at least no one else has said so much for 'that time of life,' which
+another librettist has stigmatized as
+
+   'Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.'"
+
+"Yes, I know," the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on
+which he had cast himself loose. "But I believe a great deal more could
+be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of
+Mr. Gilbert's earnestness in the passage you quote from the 'Mikado,'
+and I prefer Shakespeare's 'bare, ruined choirs.' I don't know but I
+prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws for
+Polonius, and there is something almost caressing in the notion of 'the
+lean and slippered pantaloon.' The worst of it is that we old fellows
+look so plain to one another; I dare say young people don't find us so
+bad. I can remember from my own youth that I thought old men, and
+especially old women, rather attractive. I am not sure that we elders
+realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to the
+eye of youth. Yet, an infant's head is often quite bald."
+
+"Yes, and so is an egg," the Easy Chair retorted, "but there is not the
+same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which has
+evolved from it--eagle or nightingale, parrot or
+
+   Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.
+
+Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of
+
+       'the Ionian father of the rest:
+   A million wrinkles carved his silver skin,
+     A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.'
+
+But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a
+thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion--fairer than the
+evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a
+thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man,
+even of Methuselah?"
+
+"Yes," the poet sighed. "I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology
+certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make
+much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned
+into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!"
+
+"No, I would rather not!" he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply.
+"Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a
+desirable thing."
+
+"But I have given it up," the poet meekly replied. "The great thing
+would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a year
+we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. Not
+merely younger, but _young_--the genuine article. A tree can do that,
+and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three hundred,
+or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more importantly,
+a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that respect."
+
+"My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there will be
+no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can walk
+about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. And
+other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way.
+Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and
+blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never
+being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be
+such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back
+their gift, and you know very well they cannot."
+
+"Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not temperature,"
+the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea. "I have noticed
+this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on the
+map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since I saw you, and I
+found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there as here in New
+York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, but quite as far
+as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth there were bits of
+railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every
+now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that
+hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying
+landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north.
+At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I
+could not make out the slightest difference."
+
+"With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?"
+
+"I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly."
+
+"Then," the Easy Chair said, "I would rather my winter were turned into
+summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any change
+of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of that time
+of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the passions
+burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that they do not
+bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you have
+some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me tired."
+
+"Yes, I see what you mean," the poet assented. "But you cannot have the
+seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal
+conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you can
+have autumn."
+
+"Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad enough,
+but I would not go through spring again for any--In winter you can get
+away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture, or a
+cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape the
+rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace? No,
+my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year. The
+trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of time,
+but the men could not. Even the women----"
+
+At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the Easy
+Chair recognized the poet's Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the
+question to her. "Young?" she said. "Why, you and I are _always_ young,
+silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and
+see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are
+beginning to sing in the ditches already."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES
+
+
+The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair, who
+
+   "Change and pass and come again,"
+
+looked in upon it, after some months' absence, with the effect of having
+aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest avatar;
+he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh
+character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having, at former
+interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a reformer, a
+moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer, of a
+psychologist grown gray in divining the character of others from his own
+consciousness.
+
+"Have you ever noticed," he began, "that the first things we get stiff
+in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our
+joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer
+wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the
+earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body
+grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature,
+through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly
+upright."
+
+"Well, isn't that so?" the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly.
+
+"It may be so, or it may not be so," the veteran observer replied.
+"Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the
+fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening
+joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence
+which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think
+we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which
+must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which
+that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight off
+physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this, but
+I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against
+stiffening tastes."
+
+"I don't see how," the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to
+explanation than to express dissent.
+
+"I will teach you how," he said, "if you will allow me to make it a
+personal matter, and use you in illustration."
+
+"Why not use yourself?"
+
+"Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my
+specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace
+which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a
+certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating
+our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too
+strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the
+catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In
+æsthetic matters--and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing
+with these--the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites.
+All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier
+of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its
+appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of
+that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius,
+because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this
+flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless
+search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their
+continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of
+youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long
+ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast
+and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which
+bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed
+the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this
+moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The
+conceit of having recognized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial
+of its existence save in the instances recognized. This conceit does not
+admit the possibility of error or omission in the search, and it does
+not allow that the diseased oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing
+qualities and its peculiar flavors; so that the attitude of aging youth,
+in the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward all new
+bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, books."
+
+The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair
+seized the occasion to remark: "Yes, there is something in what you say.
+But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly
+an infectious disease----"
+
+"Ah, but it _is_ infectious," the veteran observer exclaimed, rousing
+himself, "infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it so. He
+wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigidity
+to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance----"
+
+"No, we would rather not," the Easy Chair interposed.
+
+"But you must make the sacrifice," the veteran observer persisted. "You
+will allow that you are extremely opinionated?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of your
+æsthetic beliefs?"
+
+"Something like that, yes."
+
+"And you cannot deny that in times past you have tried your best to make
+others think with you?"
+
+"It was our duty."
+
+"Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your
+mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you,
+the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than
+preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your favorite
+authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was a fad for
+making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that you
+didn't put forth some such schedule."
+
+"We had the notion of doing something of the kind," the Easy Chair
+confessed, "but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really
+first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best
+authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all
+the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have
+made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly
+have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man.
+Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser's poetry is
+generally duller than the Presidents' messages before Mr. Roosevelt's
+time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse;
+Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse;
+Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be
+Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante's science and politics
+outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole
+catalogue. Among the novelists----"
+
+"No, don't begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies there,
+and would like to burn you along with the romances which I've no doubt
+you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of
+criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why don't
+you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account, and
+give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?"
+
+"Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the
+sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we
+are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our
+minds are not turned to it by examples."
+
+"Ah," our visitor said, "I see that you are afraid to confess yourself
+the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid that if
+you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes to
+buying them in the most expensive binding, and the masses to taking them
+out of all the public libraries."
+
+"There is something in what you say," the Easy Chair confessed. "Our
+popular failure as a critic is notorious; it cannot be denied. The stamp
+of our disapproval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a currency
+that was not less than torrential. The flood of romantic novels which
+passed over the land, and which is still to be traced in the tatters of
+the rag-doll heroes and heroines caught in the memories of readers along
+its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our adverse criticism. No, we
+could not in conscience compile and publish a list of The Hundred Worst
+Books; it would be contrary, for the reasons you give, to public
+morals."
+
+"And don't you think," the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety that
+betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his
+victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for him,
+"and don't you think that it would also bring to you the unpleasant
+consciousness of having stiffened in your tastes?"
+
+"It might up to a certain point," we consented. "But we should prefer to
+call it confirmed in our convictions. Wherever we have liked or disliked
+in literature it has been upon grounds hardly distinguishable from moral
+grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth to nature is the eighth of the seven
+deadly sins; a false school in literature is a seminary of crime. We are
+speaking largely, of course----"
+
+"It certainly sounds rather tall," our friend sarcastically noted, "and
+it sounds very familiar."
+
+"Yes," we went on, "all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One
+holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble
+tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of
+remote origin. In their safety one indulges one's self in expectations,
+in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We
+should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to
+the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the
+tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their
+forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is
+aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one
+would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of
+Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time
+one hesitates, and possibly ends by asking the stranger in, especially
+if he is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the
+cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: 'You know I don't
+think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground
+you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night's lodging at least, and
+if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right direction,
+there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week. But you
+must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of
+fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.' Ten to one
+the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his way--the
+wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal
+spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one's tastes; that
+one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases."
+
+"Such as?" the observer insinuated.
+
+"Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely the case may be that
+of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that
+we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save
+in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle
+Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that
+we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty
+years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our
+half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal
+equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence
+surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of
+the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or
+even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes
+had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the
+naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A
+signal proof of their continued suppleness came but the other day when
+we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English novelist, Mr. Percy
+White, and it was the more signal because we perceived that he had
+formed himself upon a method of Thackeray's, which recalled that master,
+as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trollope recall a manner of
+him. But it is Thackeray's most artistic method which Mr. White recalls
+in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows
+Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their
+unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen
+and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English
+world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to
+return to Thackeray's vision of his own contemporaneous English world at
+the first opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we have
+fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and Dickens, we are confident
+of being able to bear up under the heaviest-handed satire of _Vanity
+Fair_. As for _The Luck of Barry Lyndon_ and _The Yellowplush Papers_,
+and such like, they have never ceased to have their prime delight for
+us. But their proportion is quite large enough to survive from any
+author for any reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that
+authors survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here
+and there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes
+are of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes.
+We could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in
+that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not
+necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still read,
+and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no longer read
+the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth of the truly
+great upon his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel
+excellences in them. It was only the other day that we picked up
+Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_, and realized in it, from a chance page or
+two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This was
+something quite new to us in it. We had known the terrible pathos of the
+story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless,
+freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and
+losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a
+revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the
+tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new."
+
+Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. "And what is all this you have been
+saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of what may
+be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after the end
+of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such danger? Or
+was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied
+something like that."
+
+We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. "No, not exactly that. The
+truth is we have been very much interested by your notion--if it was
+yours, which is not altogether probable--and we have been turning its
+light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call
+self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one's self as the stuff
+for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem. There
+is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions."
+
+"And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine?" the
+veteran observer asked, with superiority.
+
+"That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never so
+tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that time of
+life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden,
+to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste--or taken a
+new lease of an old one--for reading history, which had been dormant all
+through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we
+shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not
+improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in
+them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology----"
+
+At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and that we
+were talking to ourselves.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE
+
+
+A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from the
+magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and
+was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the rejected
+from a function involving neither power nor responsibility.
+
+"Ah!" we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the
+hands of our friend. "What is it he won't take _now_?"
+
+"Wait till I get my second wind," the victim of unrequited literature
+answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the occupant had
+risen; and he sighed, pensively, "I felt so sure I had got him this
+time." He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the
+uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure
+to find rest in it that restored him to animation. "It is a little
+thing," he murmured, "on the decline of the vaudeville."
+
+"The decline of the vaudeville?" we repeated, wrinkling our forehead in
+grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, "Do you
+think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?"
+
+"Why, bless my soul!" the rejected one cried, starting somewhat
+violently forward, "what is your magazine itself but vaudeville, with
+your contributors all doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or
+travel, or sketches of life, or articles of popular science and
+sociological interest, and I don't know what all! What are your
+illustrations but the moving pictures of the kalatechnoscope! Why," he
+said, with inspiration, "what are you yourself but a species of Chaser
+that comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground for the
+next month's performance by tiring out the lingering readers?"
+
+"You don't think," we suggested, "you're being rather unpleasant?"
+
+Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to see him restored to so
+much cheerfulness, at any rate. "I think the notion is a pretty good
+fit, though if you don't like to wear it I don't insist. Why should you
+object to being likened to those poor fellows who come last on the
+programme at the vaudeville? Very often they are as good as the others,
+and sometimes, when I have determined to get my five hours' enjoyment to
+the last moment before six o'clock, I have had my reward in something
+unexpectedly delightful in the work of the Chasers. I have got into
+close human relations with them, I and the half-dozen brave spirits who
+have stuck it out with me, while the ushers went impatiently about,
+clacking the seats back, and picking up the programmes and lost articles
+under them. I have had the same sense of kindly comradery with you, and
+now and then my patience has been rewarded by you, just as it has been
+by the Chasers at the vaudeville, and I've said so to people. I've said:
+'You're wrong to put down the magazine the way most of you do before you
+get to those departments at the end. Sometimes there are quite good
+things in them.'"
+
+"Really," said the unreal editor, "you seem to have had these remarks
+left over from your visit to the real editor. We advise you to go back
+and repeat them. They may cause him to revise his opinion of your
+contribution."
+
+"It's no use my going back. I read finality in his eye before I left
+him, and I feel that no compliment, the most fulsome, would move him.
+Don't turn me out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. You are
+the first act on the bill for me. I read the magazine like a Chinese
+book--from the back. I always begin with the Easy Chair."
+
+"Ah, now you are talking," we said, and we thought it no more than human
+to ask, "What is it you have been saying about the vaudeville, anyway?"
+
+The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. "I will just read--"
+
+"No, no!" we interposed. "Tell us about it--give us the general drift.
+We never can follow anything read to us."
+
+The other looked incredulous, but he was not master of the situation,
+and he resigned himself to the secondary pleasure of sketching the paper
+he would so much rather have read.
+
+"Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville-goer I have always been?"
+
+We nodded. "We know how you are always trying to get us to neglect the
+masterpieces of our undying modern dramatists, on the legitimate stage,
+and go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you delight in."
+
+"Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an inveterate vaudeville-goer,
+for the simple reason that I find better acting in the vaudeville, and
+better drama, on the whole, than you ever get, or you generally get, on
+your legitimate stage. I don't know why it is so very legitimate. I have
+no doubt but the vaudeville, or continuous variety performance, is the
+older, the more authentic form of histrionic art. Before the Greek
+dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit playwrights, or the
+exquisitely conventionalized Chinese and Japanese and Javanese were
+heard of, it is probable that there were companies of vaudeville artists
+going about the country and doing the turns that they had invented
+themselves, and getting and giving the joy that comes of voluntary and
+original work, just as they are now. And in the palmiest days of the
+Greek tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course, variety shows
+all over Athens and Rome where you could have got twice the amusement
+for half the money that you would at the regular theatres. While the
+openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom Euripides and
+Terence had cast for their parts were going through rôles they would
+never have chosen themselves, the wilding heirs of art at the vaudeville
+were giving things of their own imagination, which they had worked up
+from some vague inspiration into a sketch of artistic effect. No manager
+had foisted upon them his ideals of 'what the people wanted,' none had
+shaped their performance according to his own notion of histrionics.
+They had each come to him with his or her little specialty, that would
+play fifteen or twenty minutes, and had, after trying it before him, had
+it rejected or accepted in its entirety. Then, author and actor in one,
+they had each made his or her appeal to the public."
+
+"There were no hers on the stage in those days," we interposed.
+
+"No matter," the rejected contributor retorted. "There are now, and that
+is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality,
+to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my
+paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath,
+and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming
+unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to
+a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door,
+and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat in the best place I can get,
+away from interposing posts and persons, and settle down to a long
+afternoon's delight, I like to fancy myself a far-fetched phantom of the
+past, who used to do the same thing at Thebes or Nineveh as many
+thousand years ago as you please. I like to think that I too am an
+unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will be such as shaped smiles
+immemorially gone to dust."
+
+We made our reflection that this passage was probably out of the
+rejected contribution, but we did not say anything, and our visitor went
+on.
+
+"And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for my fifty cents!
+There were twelve stunts on the bill, not counting the kalatechnoscope,
+and I got in before the first was over, so that I had the immediate
+advantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly swinging himself
+between two chairs which had their outer legs balanced on the tops of
+caraffes full of water, and making no more of the feat than if it were a
+walk in the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I respected that man! What
+study had gone to the perfection of that act, and the others that he
+equally made nothing of! He was simply billed as 'Equilibrist,' when his
+name ought to have been blazoned in letters a foot high if they were in
+any wise to match his merit. He was followed by 'Twin Sisters,' who, as
+'Refined Singers and Dancers,' appeared in sweeping confections of white
+silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading white hats, and
+long-fringed white parasols heaped with artificial roses, and sang a
+little tropical romance, whose burden was
+
+   'Under the bámboo-trée,'
+
+brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced this romance with
+languid undulations, and before you could tell how or why, they had
+disappeared and reappeared in short green skirts, and then shorter white
+skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their costumes, but always,
+I am bound to say, of the refinement promised. I can't tell you in what
+their refinement consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as I am
+sure of the humor of the two brothers who next appeared as 'Singing and
+Dancing Comedians' of the coon type. I know that they sang and they
+danced, and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with the help of
+the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue of the stage in
+vaudeville. They were not so good as the next people, a jealous husband
+and a pretty wife, who seized every occasion in the slight drama of 'The
+Singing Lesson,' and turned it to account in giving their favorite airs.
+I like to have a husband disguise himself as a German maestro, and
+musically make out why his wife is so zealous in studying with him, and
+I do not mind in the least having the sketch close without reason: it
+leaves something to my imagination. Two of 'America's Leading Banjoists'
+charmed me next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. If one
+does not one's self rejoice in its plunking, there are others who do,
+and that is enough for my altruistic spirit. Besides, it is America's
+leading instrument, and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism
+which is never really dormant in us. Its close association with color in
+our civilization seemed to render it the fitting prelude of the next
+act, which consisted of 'Monologue and Songs' by a divine creature in
+lampblack, a shirt-waist worn outside his trousers, and an exaggerated
+development of stomach. What did he say, what did he sing? I don't know;
+I only know that it rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the
+conscience, and appeased the hungerings of ambition. Just to sit there
+and listen to that unalloyed nonsense was better than to 'sport with
+Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra's hair,' or to be
+the object of a votive dinner, or to be forgiven one's sins; there is no
+such complete purgation of care as one gets from the real Afro-American
+when he is unreal, and lures one completely away from life, while
+professing to give his impressions of it. You, with your brute
+preferences for literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you
+would say I ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little
+passage of drama, which followed, and I don't know but I did. It was
+nothing but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away
+from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of
+an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at
+once sings, one doesn't know why, 'Oh, dear, what can the matter be,'
+and she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it
+to sleep with 'By low, baby,' and the old codger puts the other dolls to
+sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends
+by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I do
+not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat with
+pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple
+instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words
+of his to Guildenstern: 'You would play upon me; you would seem to know
+my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound
+me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... 'S blood, do you
+think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' Guildenstern ought to
+have said: 'Much, my lord! Here is an actor who has been summering in
+the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than the
+dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of drama as artless as a
+child would fancy, and yet it swells your heart and makes you cry. Your
+mystery? You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only fakes and
+frauds who do not understand the soul. The simplest willow whistle is an
+instrument more complex than man.' That is what I should have said in
+Guildenstern's place if I had had Hamlet with me there at the vaudeville
+show.
+
+"In the pretty language of the playbill," the contributor went on, "this
+piece was called 'A Pastoral Playlet,' and I should have been willing to
+see 'Mandy Hawkins' over again, instead of the 'Seals and Sea Lions,'
+next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately lifted on them.
+Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their
+accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar
+too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of
+a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in
+extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large
+and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the
+difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself
+holding my breath, and helping them along too strenuously for my
+comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; their mere
+flumping about the stage makes me unhappy; but they are not so bad,
+after all, as trained dogs. They were followed by three 'Artistic
+European Acrobats,' who compensated and consoled me for the seals, by
+the exquisite ease with which they wrought the impossibilities of their
+art, in the familiar sack-coats and top-coats of every day. I really
+prefer tights and spangles, but I will not refuse impossibilities simply
+because they are performed, as our diplomats are instructed to appear at
+European courts, in the ordinary dress of a gentleman; it may even add a
+poignancy to the pleasure I own so reluctantly.
+
+"There came another pair of 'Singers and Dancers,' and then a 'Trick
+Cyclist,' but really I cannot stand trick cycling, now that plain
+cycling, glory be! has so nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began
+to make his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round the stage
+in that posture, I went away. But I had had enough without counting him,
+though I left the kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and shimmering
+unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, such as I could
+have got at no legitimate theatre in town, and I came away opulently
+content."
+
+We reflected awhile before we remarked: "Then I don't see what you have
+to complain of or to write of. Where does the decline of the vaudeville
+come in?"
+
+"Oh," the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, "I forgot that. It's
+still so good, when compared with the mechanical drama of the legitimate
+theatre, that I don't know whether I can make out a case against it now.
+But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. I think the change
+began insidiously to steal upon the variety show with the increasing
+predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have
+minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out,
+when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic
+musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of
+reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days'
+beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the
+'playlets' began following one another in unbroken succession, I did not
+know what to do. Almost before I was aware of their purpose three of the
+leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave plays that took
+up the whole afternoon; and though they professed to intersperse the
+acts with what they called 'big vaudeville,' I could not be deceived,
+and I simply stopped going. When I want to see a four-act play, I will
+go to the legitimate theatre, and see something that I can smell, too.
+The influence of the vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and
+refining that its audiences cannot stand either the impurity or the
+imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now the vaudeville itself is
+beginning to decline in quality as well as quantity."
+
+"Not toward immodesty?"
+
+"No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual superiority of the
+continuous performance is beginning to suffer contamination from the
+plays where there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now of the
+tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the variety houses. The comic
+musician is of the rarest occurrence; during the whole season I have as
+yet heard no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The most
+dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. The acrobats still
+abound, but it is three long years since I looked upon a coon act with
+real Afro-Americans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur
+overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a small wad of paper
+in the air with one hand. It is true that the conquest of the vaudeville
+houses by the full-fledged drama has revived the old-fashioned stock
+companies in many cases, and has so far worked for good, but it is a
+doubtful advantage when compared with the loss of the direct inspiration
+of the artists who created and performed their stunts."
+
+"Delightful word!" we dreamily noted. "How did it originate?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. It's probably a perversion of stint, a task or part,
+which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does it
+matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are
+charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist's
+own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves it. He seems never to be
+tired of it, even when it is bad, and when nobody in the house lends him
+a hand with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to go, and he
+with it. It has to go when it is good, after it has had its day, though
+I don't see why it should go; for my part there are stunts I could see
+endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as much of any
+play?"
+
+"Gilbert and Sullivan's operas," we suggested.
+
+"That is true. But without the music? And even with the music, the
+public won't have them any longer. I would like to see the stunt fully
+developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately
+nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no
+allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on
+to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and
+dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but
+never-ending as the race itself."
+
+"You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get," we
+said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book
+again. "But about the decline of vaudeville?"
+
+"Well, it isn't grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it
+is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or
+at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville
+must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet
+unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments, but the
+enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to the whims
+and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of men; for it
+appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of art, but
+instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is lost upon
+the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow
+of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the legitimate
+theatres--"
+
+"Then what you wish," we concluded, "is to elevate the vaudeville."
+
+The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something between a
+groan and a growl. "You mean to kill it."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA
+
+
+Whether pleasure of the first experience is more truly pleasure than
+that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a
+doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We
+should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be
+without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the
+forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion.
+When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him
+he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed
+in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the
+latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than
+the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will
+have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case,
+the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to count
+with, and in the other, the case of age, there will be the personal
+disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial
+disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat
+untranslatably, _Weltschmerz_. This was peculiarly the appanage of
+youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding,
+distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed
+with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle
+poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical
+excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which
+commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and
+transmitted his inherited burden of _Weltschmerz_ to his posterity. The
+old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies they have
+personally committed and know they will commit again, but for pure
+gloom--gloom positive, absolute, all but palpable--you must go to youth.
+That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself
+disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing
+which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision.
+The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence
+or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see
+them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are
+the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never be the true
+measures.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same
+quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime
+things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against
+expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced
+reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal
+importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through
+thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we
+were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few
+emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by
+hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than
+commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered
+public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with
+us the night we saw "L'Elisir d'Amore," and that it was in his
+personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have
+fancied personal only to ourselves.
+
+He began to take the affair out of our keeping from the first moment,
+when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy street, we
+found our way through the distracted vestibule of the opera-house into
+the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the presence of the
+glowing spectacle of the stage. "Ah, this is the real thing," he
+whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we could have
+done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the introduction of
+Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian village piazza. "It
+is a village at the foot of the Alps probably," he said, "and if not, no
+matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: as the chorus of
+peasants and soldiers, of men and women who impartially accompany the
+orchestra in the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals who
+vie with one another in recitative and aria; as the heroine who holds
+them both in a passion of suspense while she weaves the enchantment of
+her trills and runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the
+divinely impossible thing which defies nature and triumphs over
+prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss Gothic matter? The thing
+is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded
+in there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, through all
+those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs and sidewalk
+ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was in Venice,
+forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping
+to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier's oar that was both
+impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy, slippery steps
+by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for
+supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness of the tide
+was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps, and it gurgled and
+chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to another; and when I
+got to my box--a box was two florins, but I could afford it--I looked
+down on just this scene, over a pit full of Austrian officers and
+soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling in the other boxes and
+half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of the
+Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with its oppression and
+tobacco, for the officers smoked between the acts. It was only the more
+intensely Italian for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and
+when I see those impossible people on the stage, and hear them sing, I
+breathe an atmosphere that is like the ether beyond the pull of our
+planet, and is as far from all its laws and limitations."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval
+between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt
+him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking
+for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of his phrase.
+
+"It's astonishing," he said, "how little art needs in order to give the
+effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so
+conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged
+to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no
+sense of life. The realists," he went on, "were only half right."
+
+"Isn't it better to be half right than wrong altogether?" we
+interposed.
+
+"I'm not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I
+find in very defective art of all kinds that mere _look_ of the real
+thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body
+of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive
+carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of
+sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in
+the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and
+which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all
+defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the other year,
+about the vaudeville shows--?
+
+"Hush!" we entreated. "Don't bring those low associations into this high
+presence."
+
+"Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the region
+of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which were graced
+with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I might have
+believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the
+street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from life
+had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them out
+of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less precious would
+have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened the soul. I
+realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had required any
+'stunt' which embodied them to be altogether composed of touches of
+truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little radium; the
+captured sunshine burns with the fires that heat the summers of the
+farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous substance as if it
+were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need, but
+all we can endure in any one example of art."
+
+"You are lucky if you get so much," we said, "even at a vaudeville
+show."
+
+"Or at an opera," he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second
+act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in
+the middle of a sentence. "What should you say was the supreme moment of
+this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course,
+it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed
+from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and gives
+that delightful caper
+
+   'Which signifies indifference, indifference,
+   Which signifies indifference,'
+
+and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of
+claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks
+into the lyrical lament
+
+   'Neppur mi guarda!'
+
+she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love
+by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The
+rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions
+the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the
+interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as
+there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other
+souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I
+should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt
+itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of
+release which Nemorino's caper conveys. Till then it must have been
+rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old,
+worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?"
+
+"We never bet," we virtuously replied. "We are principled against it in
+all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could
+never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead."
+
+"Yes, isn't it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that
+needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so
+indiscriminate," the reader thoughtfully observed.
+
+"But aren't you," we asked, "getting rather far away from the question
+whether the pleasure of experience isn't greater than the pleasure of
+inexperience--whether later operas don't give more joy than the first?"
+
+"Was that the question?" he returned. "I thought it was whether Italian
+opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land."
+
+"Well, make it that," we responded, tolerantly.
+
+"Oh no," he met us half-way. "But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They
+have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly
+in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and Naples,
+or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so
+little. It's the most universal form of art."
+
+"Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?"
+
+Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: "I think it is more
+immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time
+to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first
+authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for
+them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas.
+'Cavalleria Rusticana' was as much at home with us in its first year as
+'L'Elisir d'Amore' is now in its sixtieth or seventieth."
+
+"But it isn't," we protested, "denationalized. What can be more
+intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?"
+
+"You're right," the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest,
+in dealing with the writer. "It is the operatic audience, not the opera,
+which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all
+Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land,
+listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and murmured
+and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the
+conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found
+voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there
+could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own
+almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease to
+depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority to
+our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these is
+the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of
+fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill its
+mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one another
+in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely
+realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively the scene is
+intensely responsive to the New York spirit, and objectively it is most
+expressive of the American character in that certain surface effect of
+thin brilliancy which remains with the spectator the most memorable
+expression of its physiognomy.
+
+No doubt something like this was in the reader's mind when he resumed,
+with a sigh: "It's rather pathetic how much more magnificently Italian
+opera has always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It had to
+emigrate in order to better its fortunes; it could soon be better seen
+if not heard outside of Italy than in its native country. It was only
+where it could be purely conventional as well as ideal that it could
+achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard fight for its
+primacy among the amusements that flatter the pride as well as charm the
+sense. You remember how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator wrote to him
+in scorn of the affected taste of 'the town' when the town in London
+first began to forsake the theatre and to go to the opera?"
+
+"Yes, they were very severe on the town for pretending to a pleasure
+imparted in a language it could not understand a word of. They had all
+the reason on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is
+independent of reason, and the town felt that for its own part it could
+dispense with reason, too. The town can always do that. It would not go
+seriously or constantly to English opera, though ever so much invited to
+do so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. Isn't it
+strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a fashion, while Italian opera
+remains a passion? We had it at its best, didn't we, in the Gilbert and
+Sullivan operas, which were the most charming things in the world; but
+they charmed only for a while, and it may be doubted whether they ever
+greatly charmed the town. The manager of the Metropolitan replaces
+German with Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but could he
+find his account in it if he put on 'The Mikado' instead of 'L'Elisir
+d'Amore'? If he did so, the town would not be here. Why?"
+
+The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, but
+perhaps he was not; other readers may judge from his reply, which, when
+it came, was this: "There seems to be something eternally as well as
+universally pleasing in Italian opera; but what the thing is, or how
+much of a thing it is, I wouldn't undertake to say. Possibly the fault
+of English opera is its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous mood
+or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest deals
+with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it needn't
+be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn't
+obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more than it is
+obliged to convince. It's the most absolute thing in the world; and from
+its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing
+naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn't that delightful where
+Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a shrug and a waft of
+his left hand to the house, went off in order to come back and give his
+aria with more effect? That was a touch of naturalness not in the scheme
+of the opera."
+
+"Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was
+delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it."
+
+"Ah, in Italian opera you're not asked to approve; you're only desired
+to enjoy!"
+
+"Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of
+actuality, and it jarred."
+
+"Perhaps you're right," the reader sighed, but he added: "It was
+charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have
+done just as Caruso did."
+
+At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in
+unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels
+out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry.
+They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken
+evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best
+society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these
+waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the
+interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with
+difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the
+quality of "the town" which had gone to Italian opera from the first.
+
+In Mr. Spectator's time the town would have been lighted by the smoky
+torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its electric
+autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the difference
+was not enough to break the tradition. There was something in the aspect
+of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each, which struck
+the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any American crowd,
+but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, for
+the general reader is much more than generally a woman, and she may not
+like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending by supposing that the
+fact can be true only of the most elect socially, but in any case the
+fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than the women. They were
+not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we may use a comparative
+hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress.
+
+How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted as
+ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which
+must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast
+average of woman's loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the
+very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and perhaps,
+in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or perhaps
+the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value of those
+rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups.
+
+The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true level,
+when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked
+home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who
+was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him,
+made himself heard in a musing suspiration: "There was something
+missing. Can you think what it was?"
+
+"Yes, certainly; there was no ballet."
+
+"Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You
+remember," the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the
+minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage,
+and have the great planetary splendor of the _prima ballerina_ come
+swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right
+and left? Ah, there's nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But
+even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the
+scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing
+vertical in the act. Why couldn't we have had that to-night? Yes, we
+have been cruelly wronged."
+
+"But you don't give the true measure of our injury. You forget that
+supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping
+suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a
+shimmer of kisses, and catches the _prima ballerina_ at the waist, and
+tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this
+way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house.
+Think of our having been defrauded of that!"
+
+"Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded." The reader was silent for a
+while, and then he said: "I wonder if anybody except the choreographic
+composer ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were you ever able
+to follow it?"
+
+"Certainly not. It is bad enough following the opera. All that one
+wishes to do in one case is to look, just as in the other case all one
+wishes to do is to listen. We would as lief try to think out the full
+meaning of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as to mix our joy
+in the opera or the ballet with any severe question of their purport."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS
+
+
+The satirical reader introduced himself with a gleam in his eye which
+kindled apprehension in the unreal editor's breast, and perhaps roused
+in him a certain guilty self-consciousness.
+
+"I didn't know," the reader said, "that you were such a well-appointed
+_arbiter elegantiarum_."
+
+"Meaning our little discourse last month on the proper form of
+addressing letters?" the editor boldly grappled with the insinuation.
+"Oh yes; etiquette is part of our function. We merely hadn't got round
+to the matter before. You liked our remarks?"
+
+"Very much," our visitor said, with the fine irony characteristic of
+him. "All the more because I hadn't expected that sort of thing of you.
+What I have expected of you hitherto was something more of the major
+morality."
+
+"But the large-sized morals did not enter into that scheme. We deal at
+times with the minor morality, too, if the occasion demands, as we have
+suggested. You should not have been surprised to find politeness, as
+well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. Naturally, of
+course, we prefer the larger-sized morals as questions for discussion.
+Had you one of the larger-sized questions of morality to present?"
+
+"I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of manners."
+
+"For example."
+
+"The experience of one of those transatlantic celebrities who seem to be
+rather multiplying upon us of late, and who come here with a
+proclamation of their worship of American women ready to present, as if
+in print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and who then proceed
+to find fault with our civilization on every other point, almost before
+they drive up to their hotels."
+
+"But isn't that rather an old story?"
+
+"I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests us; we are never
+free from that longing for a flattered appearance in the eyes of others
+which we so seldom achieve. This last, or next to last, celebrity--in
+the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succession--seems
+to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some dairymaids in the
+milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I
+didn't understand the situation very clearly. The lady must have been a
+lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with dairymaids in it; but in
+any case the fact is that when the lady entered with the celebrity the
+maids remained seated, where they were grouped together, instead of
+rising and standing in the presence of their superiors, as they would
+have done in the hemisphere that the celebrity came from."
+
+"Well, what came of it?"
+
+"Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did not
+rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her
+guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that this
+was the American ideal."
+
+"In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or
+Bohemian dairymaids," we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused
+us from our muse with a sharp "What?" we explained, "Of course they
+were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were
+dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not
+be dairymaids."
+
+"True," our friend assented, "but all the same you admit that they were
+behaving from an American ideal?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity
+doesn't like it--on very high grounds."
+
+"The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work to
+those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the
+inferiors?"
+
+"No, the politeness due from one class to another."
+
+"Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is very
+interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going into
+the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed or
+nodded to them or said, 'Good-day, young ladies'?"
+
+"No, that is not of record."
+
+"Their human quality, their human equality, being altogether out of the
+question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should they
+have recognized the human quality of their visitors?" Our satirical
+reader was silent, and we went on. "There is something very droll in all
+that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even outraged, by the
+ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, over and
+above the extortionate charge of the house, and who gathered up your
+quarter or half-dollar and slipped it into his pocket without a word, or
+even an inarticulate murmur, of thanks?"
+
+"Often. Outraged is no word for it."
+
+"Yes," we assented, feeling our way delicately. "Has it ever happened
+that in the exceptional case where the waiter has said, 'Thank you very
+much,' or the like, you have responded with a cordial, 'You're welcome,'
+or, 'Not at all'?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because--because--those are terms of politeness between--"
+
+Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively supplied the word, "Equals?
+There are always difficulties between unequals. But try this, some day,
+and see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter. It isn't
+infallible, but the chances are he will feel that you have treated him
+like a man, and will do or say something to show his feeling: he will
+give a twitch to your under-coat when he has helped you on with your
+top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We have even tried saying
+'You are welcome' to a beggar. It's astonishing how they like it.
+By-the-way, have you the habit of looking at your waiter when he comes
+to take your order; or do you let him stand facing you, without giving
+him a glance above the lower button of his poor, greasy waistcoat?"
+
+"No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism of the
+establishment."
+
+"That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. We ourselves used to
+act upon it, but often, when we found him long in bringing our order, we
+were at a loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready some time
+during the evening; and occasionally we have blown up the wrong waiter,
+who did not fail to bring us to shame for our error."
+
+"They do look so confoundedly alike," our visitor said, thoughtfully.
+
+"We others look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they studied us
+as little as we study them, if they ignored us as contemptuously as we
+do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, the
+next man would be as likely as we to get our dinner."
+
+"They are paid to study us," our visitor urged.
+
+"Ah, _paid_! The intercourse of unequals is a commercial transaction,
+but when the inferiors propose to make it purely so the superiors
+object: they want something to boot, something thrown in, some show of
+respect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those dairymaids did not
+consider that they were paid to stand up when their employer and the
+visiting celebrity came into the milk-room, and so, unless they were
+civilly recognized--we don't say they weren't in this case--they thought
+they would do some of the ignoring, too. It is surprising how much the
+superiors think they ought to get for their money from the inferiors in
+that commercial transaction. For instance, they think they buy the right
+to call their inferiors by their first names, but they don't think they
+sell a similar right with regard to themselves. They call them Mary and
+John, but they would be surprised and hurt if the butler and waitress
+addressed them as Mary and John. Yet there is no _reason_ for their
+surprise. Do you remember in that entrancing and edifying comedy of
+'Arms and the Man'--Mr. Bernard Shaw's very best, as we think--the wild
+Bulgarian maid calls the daughter of the house by her Christian name?
+'But you mustn't do that,' the mother of the house instructs her. 'Why
+not?' the girl demands. '_She calls me Louka._'"
+
+"Capital!" our friend agreed. "But, of course, Shaw doesn't mean it."
+
+"You never can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant
+in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall look where you
+stand."
+
+Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. "Aren't you
+taking the matter a little too seriously?"
+
+"Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to be more serious than we were
+about addressing letters properly. This is the larger-sized morality,
+the real No. 11 sort, and you don't like it, though you said you
+expected it of us."
+
+"Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn't expected it. But
+if you're in earnest you must admit that the lower classes with us are
+abominably rude. Now, I have the fancy--perhaps from living on the
+Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the habit--of saying
+good-morning to the maid or the butler when I come down. But they never
+seem to like it, and I can't get a good-morning back unless I dig it out
+of them. I don't want them to treat me as a superior; I only ask to be
+treated as an equal."
+
+"We have heard something like that before, but we doubt it. What you
+really want is to have your condescension recognized; they _feel_ that,
+if they don't _know_ it. Besides, their manners have been formed by
+people who don't ask good-morning from them; they are so used to being
+treated as if they were not there that they cannot realize they _are_
+there. We have heard city people complain of the wane of civility among
+country people when they went to them in the summer to get the good of
+their country air. They say that the natives no longer salute them in
+meeting, but we never heard that this happened when they first saluted
+the natives. Try passing the time of day with the next farmer you meet
+on a load of wood, and you will find that the old-fashioned civility is
+still to be had for the asking. But it won't be offered without the
+asking; the American who thinks from your dress and address that you
+don't regard him as an equal will not treat you as one at the risk of a
+snub; and he is right. As for domestics--or servants, as we insolently
+call them--their manners are formed on their masters', and are often
+very bad. But they are not always bad. We, too, have had that fancy of
+yours for saying good-morning when we come down; it doesn't always work,
+but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours has tried some such
+civility at others' houses: at his host's house when the door was opened
+to him, arriving for dinner, and he was gloomily offered a tiny envelope
+with the name of the lady he was to take out. At first it surprised, but
+when it was imagined to be well meant it was apparently liked; in
+extreme cases it led to note of the weather; the second or third time at
+the same house it established something that would have passed, with the
+hopeful spectator, for a human relation. Of course, you can't carry this
+sort of thing too far. You can be kind, but you must not give the notion
+that you do not know your place."
+
+"Ah! You draw the line," our friend exulted. "I thought so. But where?"
+
+"At the point where you might have the impression that you respected
+butlers, when you merely loved your fellow-men. You see the difference?"
+
+"But isn't loving your fellow-men enough? Why should you respect
+butlers?"
+
+"To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn't you? What is it in
+domestic employ that degrades, that makes us stigmatize it as 'service'?
+As soon as you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must often have
+seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for chauffeurs,
+who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental attitude of
+the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject deference.
+But there have been some really heroic, some almost seraphic, efforts to
+readjust the terms of a relation that seems to have something
+essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life
+now passed forever, when the daughter of one family 'lived out' in
+another, she ate with the family and shared alike with them. She was
+their help, but she became their hindrance when she insisted upon the
+primitive custom after 'waiting at table' had passed the stage when the
+dishes were all set down, and the commensals 'did their own stretching.'
+Heroes and seraphs did their utmost to sweeten and soften the situation,
+but the unkind tendency could not be stayed. The daughter of the
+neighbor who 'lived out' became 'the hired girl,' and then she became
+the waitress, especially when she was of neighbors beyond seas; and then
+the game was up. Those who thought humanely of the predicament and
+wished to live humanely in it tried one thing and tried another. That
+great soul of H.D.L., one of the noblest and wisest of our economic
+reformers, now gone to the account which any might envy him, had a usage
+which he practised with all guests who came to his table. Before they
+sat down he or his wife said, looking at the maid who was to serve the
+dinner, 'This is our friend, Miss Murphy'; and then the guests were
+obliged in some sort to join the host and hostess in recognizing the
+human quality of the attendant. It was going rather far, but we never
+heard that any harm came of it. Some thought it rather odd, but most
+people thought it rather nice."
+
+"And you advocate the general adoption of such a custom?" our friend
+asked, getting back to the sarcasm of his opening note. "Suppose a
+larger dinner, a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters?
+That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, which only the
+more advanced were invited to; but it wouldn't work with the average
+retarded society woman or clubman."
+
+"What good thing works with _them_?" we retorted, spiritedly. "But no,
+the custom would not be readily adopted even among enlightened thinkers.
+We do not insist upon it; the men and the maids might object; they might
+not like knowing the kind of people who are sometimes asked to quite
+good houses. To be sure, they are not obliged to recognize them out of
+the house."
+
+"But what," our friend asked, "has all this got to do with the question
+of 'the decent respect' due from domestics, as you prefer to call them,
+to their employers?"
+
+"As in that case of the dairymaids which we began with? But why was any
+show of respect due from them? Was it nominated in the bond that for
+their four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when their
+'mistress' and her 'company' entered the room? Why, in fine, should any
+human being respect another, seeing what human beings generally are? We
+may love one another, but _respect_! No, those maids might, and probably
+did, love their mistress; but they felt that they could show their love
+as well sitting down as standing up. They would not stand up to show
+their love for one another."
+
+"Then you think there is some love lost between the master and man or
+mistress and maid nowadays," our beaten antagonist feebly sneered.
+
+"The masters and mistresses may not, but the men and maids may, have
+whole treasures of affection ready to lavish at the first sign of a
+desire for it; they do not say so, for they are not very articulate. In
+the mean time the masters and mistresses want more than they have paid
+for. They want honor as well as obedience, respect as well as love, the
+sort of thing that money used to buy when it was worth more than it is
+now. Well, they won't get it. They will get it less and less as time
+goes on. Whatever the good new times may bring, they won't bring back
+the hypocritical servility of the good old times. They--"
+
+We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had faded back into the
+millions of readers whom we are always addressing in print.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS
+
+
+A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no conception of his
+frequency, and who was able to supply from his imagination the welcome
+which his host did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for
+himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. sent in the delusion
+that the editor of the Chair was the editor of the magazine.
+
+"I have got a subject for you," he said.
+
+"Have you ever heard," we retorted, "of carrying coals to Newcastle?
+What made you think we wanted a subject?"
+
+"Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your disquisitions. I should
+think you would feel the want yourself. Your readers all feel it for
+you."
+
+"Well, we can tell you," we said, "that there could be no greater
+mistake. We are turning away subjects from these premises every day.
+They come here, hat in hand, from morning till night, asking to be
+treated; and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, begging for
+the merest pittance of a notice, for the slightest allusion, for the
+most cursory mention. Do you know that there are at least two hundred
+thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a
+subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York
+magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers,
+morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are
+turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room
+in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of
+the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one
+lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of monarchies
+because they always gave women more recognition, more honor, than
+republics?"
+
+"No, I haven't," our visitor said.
+
+"Well, it happened," we affirmed. "But every nook and cranny of our
+brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a
+moment's consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New
+York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must have
+felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance."
+
+From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to nurse
+one of his knees between his clasped hands. "But if," he asked, "you had
+been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?"
+
+"There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that," we
+replied. "We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far
+the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American
+marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with
+monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such
+marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of
+the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American
+motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the
+point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and
+titles and the splendor of court life."
+
+"Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your metaphors?" our visitor
+asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country.
+
+"In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded mixing
+his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to keep his
+motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would have
+remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same time
+this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position taken by
+that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly acknowledged that
+there was a great deal to be said for it, and that republics had
+hitherto been remiss in not officially acknowledging the social primacy
+of woman, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a back seat in public
+affairs. We should then have appealed to our thoughtful readers to give
+the matter their most earnest attention, and with the conservatism of
+all serious inquirers we should have urged them to beware of bestowing
+the suffrage on a class of the community disposed so boldly to own its
+love of the splendors of the state. Would it be sage, would it be safe,
+to indulge with democratic equality a sex which already had its eyes on
+the flattering inequality of monarchy? Perhaps at this point we should
+digress a little and mention Montesquieu, whose delightful _Spirit of
+Laws_ we have lately been reading. We should remind the reader, who
+would like to think he had read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes
+between the principles on which the three sorts of government are
+founded: civic virtue being the base of a republic, honor the ruling
+motive in the subjects of a monarchy, and fear the dominant passion in
+the slaves of a despotism. Then we should ask whether men were prepared
+to intrust the reins of government to women when they had received this
+timely intimation that women were more eager to arrive splendidly than
+to bring the car of state in safety to the goal. How long would it be,
+we should poignantly demand, before in passing from the love of civic
+virtue to the ambition of honor, we should sink in the dread of power?"
+
+Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed by the treatment of
+the subject here outlined as we had been intending and expecting he
+should be. He asked, after a moment, "Don't you think that would be
+rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter?"
+
+"Oh," we returned, "we have light methods of treating the weightiest
+questions. There is the semi-ironical vein, for instance, which you must
+have noticed a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better suited to
+the occasion."
+
+"Yes?" our visitor suggested.
+
+"Yes," we repeated. "In that vein we should question at the start
+whether any such praise of monarchy had been spoken, and then we should
+suppose it had, and begin playfully to consider what the honors and
+distinctions were that women had enjoyed under monarchy. We should make
+a merit at the start of throwing up the sponge for republics. We should
+own they had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women justice. We
+should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of woman
+in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican
+disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in
+the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the Athenian
+women were not only not in politics, but were not even in society,
+except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and we should
+freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspiration of the
+men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well as in the field. We
+should recognize the sort of middle station women held in the Roman
+republic, where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental seclusion
+of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in competitive athletics like
+the Spartan daughters. We should note that if a Spartan mother had the
+habit of bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Roman mother
+expressed a finer sense of her importance in the state when she
+intimated that it was enough for her to be the parent of the Gracchi.
+But we should not insist upon our point, which, after all, would not
+prove that the decorative quality of women in public life was recognized
+in Rome as it always has been in monarchies, and we should recur to the
+fact that this was the point which had been made against all republics.
+Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have to own that Venice,
+with her ducal figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone
+as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established
+themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than
+in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such
+distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace
+annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female
+name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with
+the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes
+Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de
+Pompadour, following one another in brilliant succession, and sharing
+not only the glory but the authority of the line of princes whose
+affections they ruled. Of course, we should have to use an ironical
+gravity in concealing their real quality and the character of the courts
+where they flourished; and in comparing the womanless obscurity of the
+English Commonwealth with the feminine effulgence of the Restoration,
+we should seek a greater effect in our true aim by concealing the name
+and nature of the ladies who illustrated the court of Charles II."
+
+"And what would your true aim be?" our visitor pressed, with an unseemly
+eagerness which we chose to snub by ignoring it.
+
+"As for the position of women in despotisms," we continued, "we should
+confess that it seemed to be as ignobly subordinate as that of women in
+republics. They were scarcely more conspicuous than the Citizenesses who
+succeeded in the twilight of the One and Indivisible the marquises and
+comtesses and duchesses of the Ancien Régime, unless they happened, as
+they sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without going back to
+the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at the characters of
+Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with a look askance at
+the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial majesty
+of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would concern us no more than
+the great, good Victoria of England, for they were the heads of
+monarchies and not of despotisms; but we should subtly insinuate that
+the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere adorned by ladies of the
+distinction so common as hardly to be distinction in the annals of kings
+and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or
+either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and
+her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew.
+
+"At this point we should digress a little, but we should pursue our
+inquiry in the same satirical tenor. We hope we are not of those
+moralists who assume a merit in denouncing the international marriages
+which have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and some to
+think favorably of a monarchy as affording greater scope for their
+social genius. But we should ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting
+such a psychological study, how it was that, while American girls
+married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, almost none, if any,
+of their brothers married the sisters or daughters of such noblemen. It
+could not be that they were not equally rich and therefore equally
+acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter of conscience not
+to marry ladies of title? Were our men, then, more patriotic than our
+women? Were men naturally more republican than women?
+
+"This question would bring us to the pass where we should more or less
+drop the mocking mask. We should picture a state of things in which we
+had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real sovereign and
+a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition. With a sudden
+severity we should ask where, since they could not all be of the highest
+rank, our women would consent to strike the procession of precedence?
+How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the deference due their
+sex, with that pride of womanhood which our republican chivalry has
+cherished in them, they would like, when they went to court, to stand,
+for hours perhaps, while a strong young man, or a fat old man, or a
+robust man in the prime of life, remained seated in the midst of them?
+Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst scenes of
+trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the highest social function in
+the land, with not even a hanging-strap to support their weariness,
+their weakness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? Would the
+glory of being part of a spectacle testifying in our time to the
+meanness and rudeness of the past be a compensation for the aching legs
+and breaking backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes of a
+court dress?"
+
+"That would be a telling stroke," our visitor said, "but wouldn't it be
+a stroke retold? It doesn't seem to me very new."
+
+"No matter," we said. "The question is not what a thing is, but how it
+is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have
+answered."
+
+"And is that all you could make of it?"
+
+"By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, so no subject is ever
+exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out
+that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little;
+that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not
+the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that
+it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now
+greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a
+republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it; but
+we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the
+first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very
+earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair
+readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We
+should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its
+responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of
+their husbands and fathers, or the brothers of one another, toward the
+state. We should make them observe that the actual citizen was not
+immediately concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; that
+parties and constituencies were not made up of one's fellow-aristocrats,
+but were mostly composed of plebeians very jealous of any show of
+distinction, and that, in spite of the displeasures of political
+association with them, there was no present disposition in American men
+to escape to monarchy from them. We cannot, we should remind them, all
+be of good family; that takes time, or has taken it; and without good
+family the chances of social eminence, or even prominence, are small at
+courts. Distinction is more evenly distributed in a democracy like ours;
+everybody has a chance at it. To be sure, it is not the shining honor
+bestowed by kings, but when we remember how often the royal hand needs
+washing we must feel that the honor from it may have the shimmer of
+putrescence. This is, of course, the extreme view of the case; and the
+condition of the royal hand is seldom scrutinized by those who receive
+or those who witness the honor bestowed. But the honor won from one's
+fellow-citizens is something worth having, though it is not expressed in
+a ribbon or a title. Such honor, it seems probable, will soon be the
+reward of civic virtue in women as well as men, and we hope women will
+not misprize it. The great end to be achieved for them by the suffrage
+is self-government, but with this goes the government of others, and
+that is very pleasant. The head of our state may be a woman, chosen at
+no far-distant election; and though it now seems droll to think of a
+woman being president, it will come in due time to seem no more so than
+for a woman to be a queen or an empress. At any rate, we must habituate
+our minds to the idea; we must realize it with the hope it implies that
+no woman will then care socially to outshine her sister; at the most she
+will be emulous of her in civic virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of
+republics. We understand that this is already the case in New Zealand
+and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the
+effect of suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed,
+because there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which
+may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving
+principle in a monarchy. And now," we turned lightly to our visitor,
+"what is the topic you wish us to treat?"
+
+"Oh," he said, rising, "you have put it quite out of my head; I've been
+so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in your
+treatment of the theme your irony ends?"
+
+"Where yours begins," we neatly responded.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+HAVING JUST GOT HOME
+
+
+The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the
+friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not,
+of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less
+transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent
+him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority, so
+involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself
+in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top-hat, which
+was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost the whiteness of
+its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves appeared most in a
+certain consciousness of novel impressions, which presently escaped from
+him in the critical tone of his remarks.
+
+"Well," we said, with our accustomed subtlety, "how do you find your
+fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months' absence?"
+
+"Don't ask me yet," he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of
+rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. "I am
+trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in time.
+But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions."
+
+"You find some relief from the summer's accumulation of sky-scrapers
+amid the aching void of our manners?" we suggested.
+
+"Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won't find the English
+objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But you are
+all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the bottomless
+pit with us."
+
+"You think we get worse?"
+
+"I don't say that, exactly. How could we?"
+
+"It might be difficult."
+
+"I will tell you what," he said, after a moment's muse. "There does not
+seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a
+diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil
+hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the
+best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people,
+Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities
+now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their home
+civility; but their children, their grandchildren, pick up our
+impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which
+they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it
+is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than
+language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the
+impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their
+morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry pistols
+instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing."
+
+"Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since your
+return?" we inquired, caustically.
+
+"I have been careful not to give offence."
+
+"Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the
+minors of foreign extraction?"
+
+"I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I am
+only saying that I have found our manners merely worse quantitatively,
+or in the proportion of our increasing population. But this prompt
+succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old Americans is
+truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to
+one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in
+geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed--"
+
+"Oh, you landed at Boston!" we exclaimed, as if this accounted for
+everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. "If you had
+landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered
+in the same degree?" We added, inconsequently enough, "We always
+supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining
+of."
+
+"And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no doubt
+national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I found much
+alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had forgotten. I
+moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the most
+characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be no
+doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race-suicidal
+stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our expression of our most
+national mood has acquired a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of
+all degrees, unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you remember
+_The House with the Green Shutters_--I can never think of the book
+without a pang of personal grief for the too-early death of the
+author--how the bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is
+realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis of that. It
+is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin as that of those terrible
+villagers: it comes from that perfect, that familiar understanding,
+that penetrating reciprocal intelligence, of people who have lived
+intimately in one another's lives, as people in small communities do. We
+are a small community thrown up large, as they say of photographs; we
+are not so much a nation as a family; we each of us know just what any
+other, or all others, of us intend to the finest shade of meaning, by
+the lightest hint."
+
+"Ah!" we breathed, quite as if we were a character in a novel which had
+inspired the author with a new phrase. "Now you are becoming
+interesting. Should you mind giving a few instances?"
+
+"Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the friendly ironies
+began for us as soon as we were out of the more single-minded keeping of
+the ship's stewards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and, after
+extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had delivered us over to
+the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of
+the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great
+value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering
+us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of
+burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the
+gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They
+indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the
+Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they
+touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times carried
+the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they helped
+put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government. I do not
+suppose that an exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly
+fulfilled."
+
+"Aren't you rather straining to make out a case? We have heard of
+travellers who had a very different experience."
+
+"At New York, yes, where we are infected with the foreign singleness
+more than at Boston. Perhaps a still livelier illustration of our
+ironical temperament was given me once before when I brought some things
+into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which the officers joined me
+for a moment in trying to make out were more than two hundred years old;
+but failing, jocosely levied thirty per cent. ad valorem on them; and
+then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per cent. on a medallion of
+myself done by an American sculptor, who had forgotten to verify an
+invoice of it before the American consul at the port of shipment."
+
+"It seems to us," we suggested, "that this was a piece of dead earnest."
+
+"The fact was earnest," our friend maintained, "but the spirit in which
+it was realized was that of a brotherly persuasion that I would see the
+affair in its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a joke that
+cost me thirty dollars."
+
+"Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction."
+
+"Possibly," our friend said, after a moment's muse, "I am letting my
+sense of another incident color the general event too widely. But before
+I come to that I wish to allege some proofs of the national irony which
+I received on two occasions when landing in New York. On the first of
+these occasions the commissioner who came aboard the steamer, to take
+the sworn declaration of the passengers that they were not smugglers,
+recognized my name as that of a well-known financier who had been abroad
+for a much-needed rest, and personally welcomed me home in such terms
+that I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties levied on others.
+When we landed I found that this good friend had looked out for me to
+the extent of getting me the first inspector, and he had guarded my
+integrity to the extent of committing me to a statement in severalty of
+the things my family had bought abroad, so that I had to pay
+twenty-eight dollars on my daughter's excess of the hundred dollars
+allowed free, although my wife was bringing in only seventy-five
+dollars' value, and I less than fifty."
+
+"You mean that you had meant to lump the imports and escape the tax
+altogether?" we asked.
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"And the officer's idea of caressing irony was to let you think you
+could escape equally well by being perfectly candid?"
+
+"Something like that."
+
+"And what was the other occasion?"
+
+"Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs officer, and he said it
+would be all right, and then furnished me an inspector who opened every
+piece of my baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked."
+
+We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned appreciatively. "And
+what was that supreme instance of caressing irony which you experienced
+in Boston?" we pursued.
+
+"Ah, _there_ is something I don't think you can question. But I didn't
+experience it; I merely observed it. We were coming down the stairs to
+take our hack at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady who was
+coming down with us found the footing a little insecure. The man in
+charge bade her be careful, and then she turned upon him in severe
+reproof, and scolded him well. She told him that he ought to have those
+stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be killed one of these
+days. 'Well, ma'am,' he said, 'I shouldn't like that. I was in a
+railroad accident once. But I tell you what you do. The next time you
+come over here, you just telephone me, and I'll have these steps fixed.
+Or, I'll tell you: you just write me a letter and let me know exactly
+how you want 'em fixed, and I'll see to it myself.'"
+
+"That was charming," we had to own, "and it was of an irony truly
+caressing, as you say. Do you think it was exactly respectful?"
+
+"It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as much as any of
+us, or as the humorist himself."
+
+"Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked her," we assented.
+"But tell us, Croesus," we continued, in the form of Socratic dialogue,
+"did you find at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say is
+apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens? We have been in
+the habit of going to Boston when we wished to refresh our impression
+that we had a native country; when we wished to find ourselves in the
+midst of the good old American faces, which were sometimes rather
+arraigning in their expression, but not too severe for the welfare of a
+person imaginably demoralized by a New York sojourn."
+
+Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. "I don't think you could
+do that now with any great hope of success. I should say that the
+predominant face in Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know
+that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands of the Irish. And
+with reason, if the Irish are in the majority."
+
+"In New York it has long been the same without the reason," we dreamily
+suggested.
+
+"In Boston," our friend went on, without regarding us, "the Catholics
+outvote the Protestants, and not because they vote oftener, but because
+there are more of them."
+
+"And the heavens do not fall?"
+
+"It is not a question of that; it is a question of whether the Irish are
+as amiable and civil as the Americans, now they are on top."
+
+"We always supposed they were one of the most amiable and civil of the
+human races. Surely you found them so?"
+
+"I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the courage to test the
+fact. I would not have liked to try a joke with one of them as I would
+at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces did
+not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and I may have
+misread them."
+
+"Oh, probably not," we lightly mocked. "They were taking it out of you
+for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the Black
+Cromwell."
+
+"Oh, very likely," our friend said, in acceptance of our irony, because
+he liked irony so much. "But, all the same, I thought it a pity, as I
+think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be
+so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have spoiled them
+by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude as the
+Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty."
+
+"There is something in what you say," we agreed, "if you will allow us
+to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the
+parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We
+must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not
+destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional
+evil."
+
+"Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers, with
+the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free
+themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and
+honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact,
+so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of
+mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we
+should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at
+least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a
+curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a
+great stir in its day. Do you know it?--_Home as Found?_"
+
+"We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty
+nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His
+fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly
+to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat
+on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like
+so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general censure?"
+
+"Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home
+after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them,
+and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for
+vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans who have not
+been away. The author's unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his
+exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive
+for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat
+somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was
+in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly
+delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit.
+Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere
+provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now: I
+mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They
+revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or
+travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George
+William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his _Howadji in Syria_
+and his _Nile Notes of a Howadji_."
+
+"We must read it," we said, with the readiness of one who never intends
+to read the book referred to. "What you say of it is certainly very
+suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence and
+deference in which the Hajii were once held?"
+
+"Well, they may have overworked their superiority."
+
+"Or?" we prompted.
+
+"The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point where
+we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously."
+
+"And that is?"
+
+"There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European
+atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went
+away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter to
+criticise than to be criticised."
+
+"And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your
+countrymen in the present interview?"
+
+Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the crown,
+and blew a speck of dust from it. "One reasons to a conclusion," he
+said, "not from it."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE
+
+
+Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had
+passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to
+require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived
+her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got it.
+
+"Well," he said, "have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to 'pour
+the day' on mine? Or hadn't you any meaning in what you said? I've
+sometimes suspected it."
+
+The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that you
+stand and deliver, though we were aware of a large, vague wisdom in our
+words. But we perceived that our friend had no intention of helping us
+out, and on the whole we thought it best to temporize.
+
+"In the first place," we said, "we should like to know what impression
+New York made on you when you arrived here, if there was any room left
+on your soul-surface after the image of Boston had been imprinted
+there."
+
+No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, even when he is
+trying to corner a fellow-man. This principle of human nature perhaps
+accounts for the frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite
+of the proverb; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleasures of
+autobiography, and while they are reminded of this and that the suspects
+escape the detectives. Our friend gladly paused to reply:
+
+"I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it was
+wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like it? On
+some accounts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is enough;
+but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after arriving
+from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for something
+suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no question
+of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first glimpse of
+Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central Station.
+But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, and
+found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and found it
+sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London only in
+not being like any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude.
+So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New York is
+oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to Londoners.
+Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might
+call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and in New York one
+might call it--"
+
+He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the greater
+convenience of mentally visioning.
+
+"What?" we impatiently prompted.
+
+"I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?"
+
+"We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?"
+
+"I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth
+Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the
+brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which
+has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best
+from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced
+the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more
+sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the
+other measures of the city's extent."
+
+[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET]
+
+"This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out
+of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the
+spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West
+Side?"
+
+"I don't, altogether," our friend replied. "Especially I don't leave out
+the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But there
+is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about the
+fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all soaring
+beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness
+which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the summit of a
+very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself arrested before a
+shop-window by a large photograph labelled 'The Heart of New York.' It
+was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not
+justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it
+set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron--heaps, heights,
+pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don't ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at
+that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs
+the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms,
+gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the
+houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the
+nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire which remains among the ruins
+after a great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of
+scrap-iron--heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity
+there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but
+the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal."
+
+"You strain for a phrase," we said, "as if you felt the essential
+unreality of your censure. Aren't you aware that mediæval Florence,
+mediæval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like
+our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it."
+
+"And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to
+party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were levelled,
+that Florence became fair and Siena superb. I should not object to a New
+York of demolished sky-scrapers. They would make fine ruins; I would
+like to see them as ruins. In fact, now I think of it, 'The Heart of New
+York' reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder I didn't think of that
+before. But if you want sublimity, the distinguishing quality of New
+York, as I feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must take that
+stretch of Fifth Avenue from a motor-bus top."
+
+"But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky-scrapers!" we lamented
+the man's inconsistency.
+
+"Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other block.
+There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the
+Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with
+men's umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and 'tempestuous
+petticoats' of the women, has sunk back into a measurable inconspicuity,
+so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with
+the prospect and no longer form the barbarous architectural chaos of
+lower New York. I don't object to their being mainly business houses and
+hotels; I think that it is much more respectable than being palaces or
+war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my
+motor-bus, I thrill with their grandeur and glow with their
+condescension. Yes, they condescend; and although their tall white
+flanks climb in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, and
+amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, or to dwarf the
+adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of New York, poor old Trinity
+looks driven into the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but
+along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does
+not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by
+the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently.
+But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy
+insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and
+Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like
+mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded back from them."
+
+"Come!" we said. "This is beginning to be something like."
+
+"In November," our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of
+praise, "there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent
+themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you
+mounted to your place on top, about three o'clock, you looked up or down
+the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point
+under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness
+at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made
+me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical
+lines of Keats:
+
+   'His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
+   And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'"
+
+We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. "Explain, O
+Howadji!"
+
+"I would rather not, as you say when you can't," he replied. "But I will
+come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary
+distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I
+differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs,
+moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the
+street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand
+at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming
+and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the
+continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater
+quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London 'block,' but
+there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New
+York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don't ask me to
+explain! I would rather not!" he said, and we submitted.
+
+He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point.
+"Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year's absence, in this
+novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on
+the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population,
+and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in
+response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet." Our friend
+laughed in self-derision, as he went on. "I remember when we first
+began to have the electric trolleys--"
+
+"Trams, we believe you call them," we insinuated.
+
+"Not when I'm on this side," he retorted, and he resumed: "I used to be
+afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I
+particularly took my life in my hand, and my 'courage in both hands.'
+Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue
+and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man's Curve (he has long been
+resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over
+alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and
+Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard
+these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so
+many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from
+the wet: they are like gentle eddies--soft, clear, slow tides--where one
+may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of
+Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth
+asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman
+to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of
+vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private
+automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my
+chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no
+policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait
+for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the
+cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As
+for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray's Frenchmen
+were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really
+did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is
+astonishing how they have multiplied--they have multiplied even beyond
+the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many
+already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a
+horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used
+to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the
+norm, and the horse-cab is the--the--the----"
+
+He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed "Abnorm?"
+
+"_Say_ abnorm! It is hideous, but I don't know that it is wrong. Where
+was I?"
+
+"You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the
+whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue.
+We should like you to explain again why, if 'The Heart of New York,'
+with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron
+soothed your lacerated sensibilities?"
+
+[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS]
+
+"The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of
+the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer
+nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done
+attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say
+as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east
+side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the
+Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this
+pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos
+which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from
+Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and
+resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of
+the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and
+characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not
+reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a
+provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when
+Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the
+party-colored 'buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy
+some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors
+and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at
+every crossing--I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at
+the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous
+Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to
+Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of
+electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and
+actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief
+that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark
+in its pristine--I think pristine is the word; it used to be--glory. But
+even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of
+Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. _I_ knew
+Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it
+had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and
+the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never
+get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from
+Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was
+dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull.
+There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall
+shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some
+capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always
+holiday--"
+
+"Enough of streets!" we cried, impatiently. "Now, what of men? What of
+that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You
+noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of
+them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the
+'sledded Polack,' the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic
+and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent
+to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely
+outnumber us?"
+
+Our friend smiled thoughtfully. "Why, that is very curious! Do you know
+that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its old
+supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that sublimity!
+I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by the courts
+amenable to our wise State law against _felo de se_, but in the modern
+Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed its old-time
+sovereignty. I don't say that there are not other faces, other tongues
+than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from it! But I do say it is a
+sense of the American face, the American tongue, which prevails. Once
+more, after long exile in the streets of our own metropolis, you find
+yourself in an American city. Your native features, your native accents,
+have returned in such force from abroad, or have thronged here in such
+multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St.
+Louises, and San Franciscos of the West, that you feel as much at home
+in Fifth Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysées, or
+on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very curious."
+
+"Perhaps," we suggested, after a moment's reflection, "it isn't true."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH
+
+
+"One of my surprises on Getting Back," the more or less imaginary
+interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to
+the Easy Chair, "is the cheapness of the means of living in New York."
+
+At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. "Stay not a moment, Howadji,"
+we exclaimed, "in removing our deep-seated prepossession that New York
+is the most expensive place on the planet."
+
+But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse,
+from which he broke at last to say: "I have long been touched by the
+pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know
+yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in
+your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make
+this town their summer resort?" We intimated that want of penetrating
+statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. "They
+put up at our hotels which in the 'anguish of the solstice' they find
+invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes
+them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no
+amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and
+there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon
+mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the
+Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to
+the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice
+recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their
+life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks
+and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or
+four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe,
+or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take
+furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency
+than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the
+rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that
+they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to
+stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as
+reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London
+season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that
+I have fled from."
+
+"Very well," we said, dryly, "you have established the fact that the
+Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what
+has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began
+by boasting?"
+
+"Ah, I was coming back to that," the Howadji said, with a glow of
+inspiration. "I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not
+see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children
+as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If
+I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I
+shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I'm not sure
+they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and
+fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as
+there. Except for the 'monuments,' in which we include all ancient and
+modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to
+Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so
+increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the
+monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so
+accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may
+know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The
+education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to
+sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer
+avails. The daughters know the far better time they will have at home,
+and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and in our civilization this,
+you know, is very far. But it was always held a prime reason and
+convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and even London,
+were so much cheaper than New York that it was a waste of money to stay
+at home."
+
+"Well, wasn't it?" we impatiently demanded.
+
+"I will not say, for I needn't, as yet. There were always at the same
+time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals as we
+lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is really
+relevant is the question whether New York isn't cheaper now."
+
+"We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you began by
+saying that New York _is_ cheaper."
+
+"I can't believe I was so crude," the Howadji returned, with a fine
+annoyance. "That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped to
+without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact much
+more delicately, and I don't know but what by your haste you have
+shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I'll own that the great
+stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are
+cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are
+so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and
+say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer
+than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter,
+with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and
+sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of
+rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house is
+more expensive and more difficult to 'run,' but even with the cost of
+the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach that
+of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to be
+said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor of
+it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be
+safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it
+desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be;
+it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It
+hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it
+were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it
+is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a
+matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York
+to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than
+those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke
+the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on
+the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier
+nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send
+them up. I won't prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork,
+poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer's on demand; and they
+will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris,
+less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our
+large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices
+in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston's favor
+for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked
+New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous
+Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here
+I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live
+near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give
+thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the
+Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their
+great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts
+and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of
+Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford.
+Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage
+of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with
+the refuse of the mills--the Mills of the Gods--abounding in our city
+and its dependencies.
+
+"I don't know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices in
+their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather
+like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don't mean
+the restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but those modester
+places which consult the means of the careful middle class to which I
+belong. As you know, I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I have a
+room there, and that is my address----"
+
+"We know," we derisively murmured. "So few of our visitors can afford
+it."
+
+"I can't afford it myself," our friend said. "But I save a little by
+breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till
+the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I
+get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the
+extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week's
+product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from
+Europe think first class, I get a 'combination' breakfast of fresh eggs,
+fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong or
+Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked
+apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris or
+Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?"
+
+"A franc fifty," we remembered.
+
+"And in London for the same with eggs you paid one and six, didn't you?"
+
+"Very likely," we assented.
+
+"Well, then, you begin to see. There are several good restaurants quite
+near that good hotel where I get the same combination breakfast for the
+same price; and if I go to one of those shining halls which you find in
+a score of places, up and down Broadway and the side streets, I get it
+for twenty-five cents. But though those shining halls glare at you with
+roofs and walls of stainless tile and glass, and tables of polished
+marble, their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the general
+demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea for any money; I can
+only get Oolong; otherwise I must take a cup of their excellent coffee.
+If I wander from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything in the
+old American range of dishes for five or ten cents a portion, and the
+quality and quantity are both all I can ask. As I have learned upon
+inquiry, the great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and good
+butter: I like to cut from the thick slice of butter under the perfect
+cube of ice, better than to have my butter pawed into balls or cut into
+shavings, as they serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer having a
+small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-à-vis on the chair
+opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. In those shining halls I am
+elbowed by three others at my polished marble table; but if there were
+more room I should never object to the company. It is the good, kind,
+cleanly, comely American average, which is the best company in the
+world, with a more than occasional fine head, and faces delicately
+sculptured by thought and study. I address myself fearlessly to the old
+and young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I might get from
+the self-respectful maids or matrons who resort to the shining halls,
+severally or collectively, if I ventured upon the same freedom with
+them. I must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely as I do for
+the most part, but sometimes I have had to make my tacit criticisms; and
+I am glad that I forbore one night with a friendly young man at my
+elbow, who had just got his order of butter-cakes--"
+
+"Butter-cakes?" we queried.
+
+"That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product of the griddle,
+which they serve very hot, and open to close again upon a large lump of
+butter. For two of those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid
+fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should not have needed
+to break my fast the next morning. But he fearlessly consumed it, and
+while he ate he confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one
+of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our shining hall and its
+guests he laughed and said he came regularly, and he always saw people
+there who were registered at his hotel: they found it good and they
+found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York abounds in tables
+d'hôte of a cheapness unapproached in the European capitals?"
+
+We said we had heard so; at the same time we tried to look as if we
+always dined somewhere in society, but Heaven knows whether we
+succeeded.
+
+"The combination breakfast is a form of table d'hôte; and at a very
+attractive restaurant in a good place I have seen such a
+breakfast--fruit, cereal, eggs, rolls, and coffee--offered for fifteen
+cents. I have never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but
+because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those who do not I should
+still hold worthy of esteem if they ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I
+have also seen placarded a 'business men's lunch' for fifteen cents,
+which also I have not tried; I am not a business man. I make bold to
+say, however, that I often go for my lunch or my dinner to a certain
+Italian place on a good avenue, which I will not locate more definitely
+lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and
+sixty cents, '_vino compreso_.' The material is excellent, and the
+treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful
+domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers
+of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not deny a Merry
+Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though often fair and
+young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look as kind and
+harmless as the circle which I used to frequent farther down-town at a
+fifty-cent French table d'hôte, but with a _bouillabaisse_ added which I
+should not, but for my actual experiences, have expected to buy for any
+money. But there are plenty of Italian and French tables d'hôte for the
+same price all over town. If you venture outside of the Latin race, you
+pay dearer and you fare worse, unless you go to those shining halls
+which I have been praising. If you go to a German place, you get grosser
+dishes and uncouth manners for more money; I do not know why that
+amiable race should be so dear and rude in its feeding-places, but that
+is my experience."
+
+"You wander, you wander!" we exclaimed. "Why should we care for your
+impressions of German cooking and waiting, unless they go to prove or
+disprove that living in New York is cheaper than in the European
+capitals?"
+
+"Perhaps I was going to say that even those Germans are not so dear as
+they are in the fatherland, though rude. They do not tend much if at all
+to tables d'hôte, but the Italians and the French who do, serve you a
+better meal for a lower price than you would get in Paris, or Rome, or
+Naples. There the prevalent ideal is five francs, with neither wine nor
+coffee included. I'll allow that the cheap table d'hôte is mainly the
+affair of single men and women, and does not merit the consideration
+I've given it. If it helps a young couple to do with one maid, or with
+none, instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living. Service is
+costly and it is greedy, and except in large households its diet is the
+same as the family's, so that anything which reduces it is a great
+saving. But the table d'hôte which is cheap for one or two is not cheap
+for more, and it is not available if there are children. Housing and
+raw-provisioning and serving are the main questions, and in Europe the
+first and last are apparently much less expensive. Marketing is
+undoubtedly cheaper with us, and if you count in what you get with the
+newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the rent
+is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its elementary
+bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the apartment
+to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be supplied with
+hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the
+rest of it."
+
+"But," we said, "you are showing that we are more comfortably housed
+than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative
+cheapness."
+
+"I was coming to that even in the matter of housing--"
+
+"It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three
+thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least
+another month."
+
+"But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not
+care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to
+Europe by that time?"
+
+"Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this
+place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The
+wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK
+
+
+The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of
+_Home as Found_, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was up,
+and he began without a moment's delay: "But of course the lion in the
+way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the
+rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle
+tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap;
+furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly
+or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work
+of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she
+can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is
+ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in
+housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for
+more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist."
+
+"Don't be so breathless," we interposed. "You will only be allowed to
+talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might
+as well take your ease."
+
+"That is true," the Howadji reflected. "But I am full of my subject, and
+I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get more
+in, by talking fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on, "has
+been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative
+housing which you may have heard of."
+
+We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of
+more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.
+
+"The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined
+putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of land
+was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful
+plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every
+modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The
+characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and
+lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so
+gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may
+have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and
+the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which would
+carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or no
+cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted plan
+worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being
+near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving studio
+which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward division,
+and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of
+one æsthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and now there are
+eight or ten of these co-operative studio apartment-houses in different
+parts of the town."
+
+"With the same fortunate experience for the owners?" we queried, with
+suppressed sarcasm.
+
+"Not exactly," our friend assented to our intention. "The successive
+groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more
+fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for
+that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods,
+with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has
+been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it
+is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is
+what happens with other beautiful things that the æsthetic invent. It
+has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer
+places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves
+cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without
+invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those
+joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly
+enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius of
+the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some
+humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial villas
+equipped with men and maid servants, horses, carriages, motors, yachts;
+and if the original settlers remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a
+broken spirit, and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the
+same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, and at Bar Harbor;
+even at Newport itself; the co-operative housing of New York is making a
+like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and
+dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but
+they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the
+æsthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter
+sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already
+eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the
+sole occupancy of the owners. But the cost of their housing then is such
+that it puts them out of the range of our inquiry as their riches has
+already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. It still remains for
+any impecunious group to buy the cheaper lots, and build simpler houses
+on the old studio principle, with rents enough to pay the cost of
+operation, and leave the owners merely the interest and taxes, with the
+eventual payment of these also by the tenants. Some of the studio
+apartments are equipped with restaurants, and the dwellers need only do
+such light housekeeping as ladies may attempt without disgrace, or too
+much fatigue."
+
+"Or distraction from their duties to society," we suggested.
+
+"It depends upon what you mean by society; it's a very general and
+inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions,
+and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties
+to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in
+the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light
+housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of
+society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one
+older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight
+of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most
+gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen
+says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated,
+travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting
+themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in
+others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is
+such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if
+there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something
+attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The
+sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence
+in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general
+health. They employ æsthetically the beautiful alleviations with which
+science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse;
+it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming,
+that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself."
+
+"But you do forbear," we interposed; "and do you imagine that their
+example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious
+American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?"
+
+"No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to the
+performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing
+themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them
+the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of
+the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things
+fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with
+home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every
+detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which
+pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the
+one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because
+it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the
+rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of
+Europe."
+
+We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend,
+and we objected: "But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives
+to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?"
+
+"In the first place, they don't; and, if they do, what do the one-girl
+or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the matter of
+that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom I speak
+have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen the
+picture which people worth while are talking of; they know through that
+best society which likes a cup of their tea all the æsthetic gossip of
+the day; they are part of the intellectual movement, that part which
+neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; they help to make
+up the polite public whose opinions are the court of final appeal."
+
+"They strike us," we said, stubbornly, "as rather romantic."
+
+"Ah, there you are! Well, they _are_ romantic--romantic like a gentle
+poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic.
+Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as
+the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life
+costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare
+fictions which never had any color of truth in this country. They are
+trying to imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of the
+European ideal which form the society-page's contribution to the history
+of our contemporary civilization."
+
+We were so far moved as to say, "We think we see what you mean," and our
+friend went on.
+
+"Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial change the tea-room
+is working in our morals and manners? There are many interesting phases
+of its progress among us, and not the least interesting of these is its
+being so largely the enterprise of ladies who must not only save money,
+but must earn money, in order to live, not cheaply, but at all. Their
+fearlessness in going to work has often the charm of a patrician past,
+for many of them are Southern women who have come to New York to repair
+their broken fortunes. The tea-room has offered itself as a graceful
+means to this end, and they have accepted its conditions, which are
+mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery, with those personal and
+racial touches in which Southern women are so expert. But there are
+tea-rooms managed by Western women, if I may judge from the accents
+involuntarily overheard in their talk at the telephone. The tea of the
+tea-room means lunch, too, and in some places breakfast and dinner, or
+rather supper, on much the plan of the several Women's Exchanges; but
+these are mostly of New England inspiration and operation, and their
+cooking has a Northern quality. They, as well as the tea-rooms, leave
+something to be desired in cheapness, though they might be dearer; in
+some you get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no better brew for
+twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and when at the noon
+hour they overflow with conversation, still there is a prevailing sense
+of quiet, finely qualified by the feminine invention and influence. Mere
+men are allowed to frequent these places, not only under the protection
+of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and when one sees them gently
+sipping their Souchong or Oolong, and respectfully munching their
+toasted muffins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with tender
+gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking their elbows at
+deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls of cheese and shredded fish and
+crackers to which their drink freed them, while it enslaved them to the
+witchery of those lurid ladies contributed by art to the evil
+attractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies depicted with so
+little on, except in the Paris salon. The New York tea-rooms are not yet
+nearly so frequent as in London, but I think they are on the average
+cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are dearer. They really
+cheapen the midday meal to many who would otherwise make it at hotels
+and restaurants, and, so far as they contribute to the spread of the
+afternoon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of living: many
+guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must once have been asked to
+lunch."
+
+"But," we suggested, "isn't that cheapness at the cost of shabbiness,
+which no one can really afford?"
+
+"No, I don't think so. Whatever lightens hospitality of its cumbrousness
+makes for civilization, which is really more compatible with a refined
+frugality than with an unbridled luxury. If every à-la-carte restaurant,
+in the hotels and out of them, could be replaced by tea-rooms, and for
+the elaborate lunches and dinners of private life the informality and
+simplicity of the afternoon tea were substituted, we should all be
+healthier, wealthier, and wiser; and I should not be obliged to protract
+this contention for the superior cheapness of New York."
+
+"But, wait!" we said. "There is something just occurs to us. If you
+proved New York the cheapest great city in the world, wouldn't it tend
+to increase our population even beyond the present figure, which you
+once found so deplorable?"
+
+"No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only
+those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We should
+increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as now in
+spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same for
+civilization as if we shrank to the size of Boston."
+
+"You will have to explain a little, Howadji," we said, "if you expect us
+to understand your very interesting position."
+
+"Why, you know," he answered, with easy superiority, "that now our
+great influx is of opulent strangers who have made a good deal of money,
+and of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. The last we
+needn't take account of; they are common to all cities in all ages; but
+the first are as new as any phenomenon can be in a world of such
+tiresome tautologies as ours. They come up from our industrial
+provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the commercial metropolis;
+they throw down their purses as the heroes of old threw down their
+gantlets for a gage of battle, and they challenge the local champions of
+extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not want a seasonable
+or a beautiful thing; they want a costly thing. If, for instance, they
+are offered a house or an apartment at a rental of ten or fifteen
+thousand, they will not have it; they require a rental of fifteen or
+twenty thousand, so that it may be known, 'back home,' that they are
+spending that much for rent in New York, and the provincial imagination
+taxed to proportion the cost of their living otherwise to such a sum.
+You may say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny that it is
+also stupid."
+
+"Stupid, no; but barbaric, yes," we formulated the case. "It is
+splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are splendid."
+
+"But you must allow that nothing could be more mischievous. When next we
+go with our modest incomes against these landlords, they suppose that we
+too want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would easily be
+satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a thousand. The poor fellows'
+fancy is crazed by those prodigals, and we must all suffer for their
+madness. The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the price of
+provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole population demands food and
+raiment within the general means, however much it must exceed its means
+in the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set the pace for such
+expenditures, no matter how much they lavish on their backs and--"
+
+"Forbear!" we cried. "Turning from the danger we have saved you from,
+you will say, we suppose, that New York would be the cheapest of the
+great cities if it were not for the cost of shelter."
+
+"Something like that," he assented.
+
+"But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved by co-operative,
+or composite, housing?"
+
+"Something like that," he said again, but there was a note of misgiving
+in his voice.
+
+"What is the 'out'?" we asked.
+
+"There is no 'out,'" he said, with a deep, evasive sigh.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK
+
+
+Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him newly
+returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will recall as
+having so brashly offered his impressions of the national complexion and
+temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair.
+
+"Well," we said, "do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract? People
+usually do after they have been at home as long as you."
+
+"But I do not," he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on the
+heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised
+there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy curves
+and hollows. "I wish to modify by adding the effect of further
+observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I saw you I
+have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from there."
+
+We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could
+better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice.
+
+"To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the
+typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic."
+
+"You call that adding?" we satirized.
+
+He ignored the poor sneer.
+
+"My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of that
+custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister continent in
+summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to
+those New-Englanders of the future dominantly represented by the Irish.
+At the time of my second visit the exiles had returned, and there were
+the faces again that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me and
+held me guilty till I had proved myself innocent."
+
+"Do you think," we suggested, "that you would find this sort of
+indictment in them if you had a better conscience?"
+
+"Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I
+could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject
+than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly
+offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last
+seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong
+faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially in England; but I
+have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of
+a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as
+far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely
+visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple
+portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at
+Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of
+tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now
+express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence, at
+Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent
+parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism
+absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their
+limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical."
+
+"Then why," we asked, not very relevantly, "don't you go and live in
+Boston?"
+
+"It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a
+half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my
+shortcomings less in New York."
+
+"You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy here,
+instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind which
+you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our inferiority, since
+you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being continually
+reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can we reduce
+ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one, and by
+narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian verticality,
+and go as deep and as high?"
+
+"No," our friend said. "Good as they are, we can only be better by being
+different. We have our own message to the future, which we must deliver
+as soon as we understand it."
+
+"Is it in Esperanto?"
+
+"It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished
+merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston
+by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is
+wonderful how that strongly persistent past still characterizes the
+present in every development. Even those Irish faces which I wouldn't
+have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it; and when the
+Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be with no laughing
+Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that first challenged
+the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble
+to their foundations."
+
+"It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren't you?"
+we suggested.
+
+"Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain
+further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will
+rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to
+rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in
+the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly into
+the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind thing."
+
+"Could you be a little more explicit?"
+
+"I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you
+observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from the
+newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more
+heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming
+natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the
+artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans
+should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of truth,
+and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well as good
+works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of turning
+out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is little
+doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of Boston has
+had almost the felicity of Goldsmith--it has touched nothing which it
+has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature has
+purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the made land in
+Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows what the
+universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the
+confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only the
+suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston without
+some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming union of
+pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks is a garden
+of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no doubt at the
+city's suggestion, and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a
+restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since the moon
+entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed through the channel
+of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean
+no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water from the
+springs in the deep bosom of the country. The Beacon Street houses back
+upon a steadfast expanse as fresh as the constant floods of the Great
+Lakes."
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE]
+
+"And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake Superior to Boston eyes.
+What do they call their dam? The Charlesea?"
+
+"You may be sure they will call it something tasteful and fit," our
+friend responded, in rejection of our feeble mockery. "Charlesea would
+not be bad. But what I wish to make you observe is that all which has
+yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done from the unexhausted
+instinct of it in the cold heart of Puritanism, where it 'burns frore
+and does the effect of fire.' As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies
+have had no part in advancing the city. The first have been content with
+voting themselves into office, and the last with owning their masters
+out-of-doors; for the Irish are the lords, and the Italians are the
+landlords. But when these two gifted races, with their divinely
+implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply conscienced
+taste of the Puritans, what mayn't we expect Boston to be?"
+
+"And what mayn't we expect New York to be on the same terms, or, say,
+when the Celtic and Pelasgic and Hebraic and Slavic elements join with
+the old Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right also
+native? Come! Why shouldn't we have a larger Boston here?"
+
+"Because we are _too_ large," our friend retorted, undauntedly. "When
+graft subtly crept among the nobler motives which created the park
+system of Boston the city could turn for help to the State and get it;
+but could our city get help from our State? Our city is too big to
+profit by that help; our State too small to render it. The commonwealth
+of Massachusetts is creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the
+Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing to emparadise the
+shores of the Hudson?"
+
+"All the better for us, perhaps," we stubbornly, but not very sincerely,
+contended, "if we have to do our good works ourselves."
+
+"Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain undone if we don't do them?
+The city of New York is so great that it swings the State of New York.
+The virtues that are in each do not complement one another, as the
+virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where shall you find, in our
+house or in our grounds, the city and the State joining to an effect of
+beauty? When you come to New York, what you see of grandeur is the work
+of commercialism; what you see of grandeur in Boston is the work of
+civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the homes of
+business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity to
+the public pleasure and use. No," our friend concluded with irritating
+triumph, "we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of the civic
+spirit. Athens could be beautiful--Florence, Venice, Genoa were--but
+Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful palaces,
+temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could only huddle
+the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose
+their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses and Greek
+chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads of violet
+hair, in one monstrous visage. No," he exulted, in this mortifying image
+of our future ugliness, "when a city passes a certain limit of space and
+population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the most lovable of the
+mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one cannot
+quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth and grace which lend
+themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is fast becoming of the
+size of Paris, but if I have not misread her future she will be careful
+not to pass it, and become as New York is."
+
+We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable
+dismay: "But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we
+wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the
+fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds
+itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are
+means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for
+municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which
+a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair
+loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to
+rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless,
+starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston
+manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or
+use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend
+continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: "Do you think
+that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole
+affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its
+cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of
+Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost opportunity? We
+should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but
+the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the female form." He was silent
+still, and we gathered courage to press on. "As it is, we are not
+altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are not more beautiful
+buildings in New York now than there are in Boston; and as for statues,
+where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of our Saint-Gaudens
+Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?"
+
+"The Shaw monument blots them all out," our friend relentlessly
+answered. "But these are merely details. Our civic good things are
+accidental. Boston's are intentional. That is the great, the vital
+difference."
+
+It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under
+foot. But, with the trodden worm's endeavor to turn, we made a last
+appeal. "And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do
+something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our
+sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness,
+when we have got a sky-scraper-line?"
+
+It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and, in
+fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, "I would rather not
+think."
+
+We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence invited
+us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the image we
+had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another point.
+
+"Well," we said, "in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we suppose
+that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in authors as
+well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet Emerson
+or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier
+about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive and in the
+flesh?"
+
+"No," our friend admitted, "not at every corner. But what I did meet was
+the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the earth.
+The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists are
+worse--they have come to New York; they have not even waited to die. But
+whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York, they have
+left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that has known
+them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never
+ceased to know them. I can't say how it is, exactly, but though you
+don't see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York--our dear,
+immense, slattern mother--who feels anything of the character of her
+great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock
+or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in
+them? Who remembers even such great editors as Greeley or James Gordon
+Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant magic, what black art, is it
+that reduces us all to one level of forgottenness when we are gone, and
+even before we are gone? Have those high souls left their inspiration
+here, for common men to breathe the breath of finer and nobler life
+from? I won't abuse the millionaires who are now our only great figures;
+even the millionaires are gone when they go. They die, and they leave no
+sign, quite as if they were so many painters and poets. You can recall
+some of their names, but not easily. No, if New York has any hold upon
+the present from the past, it isn't in the mystical persistence of such
+spirits among us."
+
+"Well," we retorted, hardily, "we have no need of them. It is the high
+souls of the future which influence us."
+
+Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might be something in
+what we said. "Will you explain?" he asked.
+
+"Some other time," we consented.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES
+
+
+One of those recurrent selves who frequent the habitat of the Easy
+Chair, with every effect of exterior identities, looked in and said,
+before he sat down, and much before he was asked to sit down, "Are you
+one of those critics of smart or swell society (or whatever it's called
+now) who despise it because they can't get into it, or one of those
+censors who won't go into it because they despise it?"
+
+"Your question," we replied, "seems to be rather offensive, but we don't
+know that it's voluntarily so, and it's certainly interesting. On your
+part, will you say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to accost
+us with this inquiry?" Before he could answer, we hastened to add:
+"By-the-way, what a fine, old-fashioned, gentlemanly word _accost_ is!
+People used to accost one another a great deal in polite literature.
+'Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigorous stare, he thus
+accosted her.' Or, 'Embarrassed by his fixed and penetrating regard, she
+timidly accosted him.' It seems to us that we remember a great many
+passages like these. Why has the word gone out? It was admirably fitted
+for such junctures, and it was so polished by use that it slipped from
+the pen without any effort of the brain, and--"
+
+"I have no time for idle discussions of a mere literary nature," our
+other self returned. "I am very full of the subject which I have sprung
+upon you, and which I see you are trying to shirk."
+
+"Not at all," we smilingly retorted. "We will answer you according to
+your folly without the least reluctance. We are not in smart or swell
+society because we cannot get in; but at the same time we would not get
+in if we could, because we despise it too much. We wonder," we
+continued, speculatively, "why we always suspect the society satirist of
+suffering from a social snub? It doesn't in the least follow. Was Pope,
+when he invited his S'in' John to
+
+                     'leave all meaner things
+   To low ambition and the pride of kings'
+
+goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? Was Mr. Benson when he
+came over here from London excluded from the shining first circles of
+New York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with such brilliant
+fidelity in _The Relentless City_, and was he wreaking an unworthy
+resentment in portraying our richly moneyed, blue-blooded society to the
+life? How are manners ever to be corrected with a smile if the smile is
+always suspected of being an agonized grin, the contortion of the
+features by the throes of a mortified spirit? Was George William Curtis
+in his amusing but unsparing _Potiphar Papers_--"
+
+"Ah, now you are shouting!" our other self exclaimed.
+
+"Your slang is rather antiquated," we returned, with grave severity.
+"But just what do you mean by it in this instance?"
+
+"I mean that manners are never corrected with a smile, whether of
+compassion or of derision. The manners that are bad, that are silly,
+that are vulgar, that are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to
+generation. Even the good manners don't seem to decay: simplicity,
+sincerity, kindness, don't really go out, any more than the other
+things, and fortunately the other things are confined only to a small
+group in every civilization, to the black sheep of the great,
+whity-brown or golden-fleeced human family."
+
+"What has all this vague optimism to do with the _Potiphar Papers_ and
+smart society and George William Curtis?" we brought the intruder
+sharply to book.
+
+"A great deal, especially the part relating to the continuity of bad
+manners. I've just been reading an extremely clever little book by a new
+writer, called _New York Society on Parade_, which so far as its basal
+facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of 'Our Best
+Society' and the other _Potiphar Papers_. The temperament varies from
+book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than
+George William Curtis; his book is more compact, more directly and
+distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the hopes of society
+reform which could be more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do
+you remember when 'Our Best Society' came out in the eldest _Putnam's
+Magazine_, that phoenix of monthlies which has since twice risen from
+its ashes? Don't pretend that our common memory doesn't run back to the
+year 1853! We have so many things in common that I can't let you
+disgrace the firm by any such vain assumption of extreme youth!"
+
+"Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years
+firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great spirits,
+now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature
+flesh. We remember that paper on 'Our Best Society' vividly, and we
+recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten Thousand of New
+York imparted to the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty
+Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do you mean to say
+that the Four Hundred of this day are no better than the Ten Thousand of
+that? Has nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious reduction
+in quantity?"
+
+"On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the
+heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and concentrated,
+if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don't see why we should doubt
+him. Did you say you hadn't seen his very shapely little study? It
+takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the likeness of our
+best society in its three most characteristic aspects; full-face at
+dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where
+proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty commercial or
+financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in whatever symbolizes
+the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt
+at dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a
+longing for fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret
+heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid
+Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for
+him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while
+ritually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly
+yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society.
+Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the
+Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats
+itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The
+motives, the _personnel_, almost the _matériel_, the incidents, are the
+same. I should think it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from
+his actual observation, to find how essentially his study is the same
+with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is
+more of nature in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr.
+Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish
+face is the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian
+satirist all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning
+the 'gay' New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist
+cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if
+we had really gone from bad to worse, not qualitatively--we
+couldn't--but quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men,
+more women, but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853."
+
+"You keep saying the same thing with 'damnable iterance,'" we remarked.
+"Don't you suppose that outside of New York there is now a vast society,
+as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, harmlessly? Is
+there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no
+sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia,
+where 'the heart that is humble may look for' disinterested pleasure in
+the high-society functions of the day or night? Does New York set the
+pace for all these places, and are dinners given there as here, not for
+the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of the hostesses? Do the
+inhabitants of those simple sojourns go to the opera to be seen and not
+to hear? Do they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to
+bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the german's leaders,
+or to see their elders and fatters getting all the beautiful and costly
+favors while their own young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted
+by because they give no balls where those cruel captains can hope to
+shine in the van? It seems to us that in our own far prime--now
+well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity--life was ordered kindlier;
+that dinners and opera-parties and dances were given
+
+   'To bless and never to ban.'"
+
+"Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life moved,"
+our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. "You know we were a
+country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the
+distant epoch painted in the _Potiphar Papers_ the motives of New York
+society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth and rank
+and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent innocence
+played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior. If Curtis
+once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked,
+greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it."
+
+"And yet," we mused aloud, "this is the sort of thing which the
+'unthinking multitude' who criticise, or at least review, books are
+always lamenting that our fiction doesn't deal with. Why, in its
+emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the
+death of our poor fiction!"
+
+"Well, I don't know," our counterpart responded. "If our fiction took it
+on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real
+lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and
+society girls and _grandes dames_. But that remains to be seen. In the
+mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr.
+Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is 'satire with no pity in
+it,' but there's here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the
+more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a
+pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at
+the ball, his few words wring the heart. 'These poor victims of their
+sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can do
+is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home in
+humiliation for the present and despair for the future.'"
+
+"Do such cruel things really happen in our best society?" we palpitated,
+in an anguish of sympathy.
+
+"Such things and worse," our other self responded, "as when in the
+german the fair débutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a
+splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow
+it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr.
+Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of the
+sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the _Potiphar Papers_.
+It's the difference between the Mid-Victorian and the Early Edwardian
+point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the page of
+Curtis there is
+
+   'The tender grace of a day that is dead'
+
+and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of
+Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are
+enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the
+distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed,
+well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers'
+offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances
+of fashion. 'The girls and women are of a higher average of beauty than
+any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are generally well
+built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,' Mr.
+Pulitzer assures us."
+
+"Well, oughtn't that to console?" we defied our other self. "Come! It's
+a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when the
+waiters are so often disappointed 'remittance men' of good English
+family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn't ask
+everything."
+
+"No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in Curtis's
+less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke and booze
+throughout the night with the host in his 'library,' but the dancing
+youth don't get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar's supper, and
+people don't throw things from their plates under the table."
+
+"Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change for the better in
+our best society, that there is no hope for it?"
+
+"Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best
+society be as it now imagines itself. I don't suppose that in all that
+gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people
+there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or
+spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant
+toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much
+outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for
+custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society."
+
+"Very well, then," we said, with considerable resolution, "we must change
+the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four hundred made up
+of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, scientists,
+musicians, actors, and ministers, with their wives, daughters, and
+sisters, who will walk to one another's dinners, or at worst go by
+trolley, and occupy the cheaper seats at the opera, and dance in small
+and early assemblages, and live in seven-room-with-bath flats. Money must
+not count at all in the choice of these elect and beautiful natures. The
+question is, how shall we get the dense, unenlightened masses to regard
+them as the best society; how teach the reporters to run after them, and
+the press to chronicle their entertainments, engagements, marriages,
+divorces, voyages to and from Europe, and the other facts which now so
+dazzle the common fancy when it finds them recorded in the society
+intelligence of the newspapers?"
+
+"Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once advocated the restriction
+of the suffrage and had been asked how he was going to get the consent
+of the majority whose votes he meant to take away--'yes, that is the
+devil of it.'"
+
+We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, "Don't you think that
+a beginning could be made by those real élite we have decided on
+refusing to let associate with what now calls itself our best society?"
+
+"But hasn't our _soi-disant_ best society already made that beginning
+for its betters by excluding them?" our other self responded.
+
+"There is something in what you say," we reluctantly assented, "but by
+no means everything. The beginning you speak of has been made at the
+wrong end. The true beginning of society reform must be made by the
+moral, æsthetic, and intellectual superiors of fashionable society as we
+now have it. The _grandes dames_ must be somehow persuaded that to be
+really swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the thing is,
+they must search _Who's Who in New York_ for men and women of the most
+brilliant promise and performance and invite them. They must not search
+the banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices for their
+dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms, the dramatic
+agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted young artists, assignment
+men, interviewers, actors, and preachers, and apply to the labor-unions
+for the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must look up the most
+beautiful and intelligent girl-students of all the arts and sciences,
+and department stores for cultivated and attractive salesladies. Then,
+when all such people have received cards to dinners or dances, it will
+only remain for them to have previous engagements, and the true
+beginning is made. Come! You can't say the thing is impossible."
+
+"Not impossible, no," our complementary self replied. "But difficult."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+THE MAGAZINE MUSE
+
+
+Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than the
+other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the Muse
+as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was a far
+more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the elder
+and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces of
+verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude of
+the magazines, which in those times would have won general recognition
+if not reputation for the authors; they would have been remembered from
+month to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers from the two
+or three periodicals then published, and, if they were not enabled to
+retire upon their incomes, they would have been in the enjoyment of a
+general attention beyond anything money can buy at the present day. This
+conclusion was the handsomer in the two poets, because they had nothing
+to gain and something to lose by it if their opinion should ever become
+known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, and perhaps even
+inferiority, which people do not make, unless they are obliged to it, in
+any case. But these poets were generous even beyond their unenvious
+tribe, and the younger, with a rashness which his years measurably
+excused, set about verifying his conviction in a practical way, perhaps
+the only practical way.
+
+He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines published;
+and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness of the sea on
+which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration? His publishers
+sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals in all kinds,
+which, when he had begged them to confine it to the literary kind, the
+æsthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater number of
+these, he found, were published in New York, but two were from
+Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and one even from
+Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That is to say, in
+this city there are issued every month about forty-five magazines
+devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence, not always
+connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent
+variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few cases
+twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such sums
+for themselves. The cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether, as
+they lie closed on the dealer's counter, though when you open them you
+find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp, wood-pulpy sort,
+and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest present their
+literature on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest; and as it
+is not always money which buys literary value, especially from the
+beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope
+that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In
+his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the
+wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved
+by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees.
+
+He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification of
+the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his
+delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it
+could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, the
+friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young poets on
+their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and from himself
+as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. All the
+magazines before him were for the month of January, and though it was
+possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion from their
+extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there was a
+chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which would trim the
+balance and give them at least the average poetic value. At this point,
+however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, was never so
+willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, and it cannot be denied
+that there was some girding up of the loins for him before the grapple
+with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at their
+weakest point, might they not be too much for him?
+
+He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, _clarum et
+venerabile nomen_, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest
+surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither
+seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would
+himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at
+the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among
+five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did
+much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of two stanzas, the author
+had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap
+magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a
+breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift's
+versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent
+magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces
+of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for
+happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later
+have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater,
+or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent
+landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat
+strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it
+is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced
+magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other
+as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two
+Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and
+the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals
+devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three
+poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found
+simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the
+joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a
+third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind's eye, with some
+straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A
+Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who
+failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a
+periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were
+two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing
+certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh
+talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a
+magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three
+pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well
+turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had
+one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with
+imaginative observation.
+
+The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at least
+hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he finally
+pursued them he was more interested in certain psychological conditions
+of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a mounting aversion
+to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He could dispatch a
+dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; but
+he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of trying to cheat himself
+in it, of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of
+contents, which naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a
+short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over an index, and seek
+to miss rather than find the word "poem" repeated after a title, and
+when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped
+with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was sinful, he was duly
+punished for it, in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward
+midnight, rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. But
+his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at
+the bottom of the page, and he perceived, on close inspection, that
+these were all poems, and that there were eighteen of them.
+
+He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred
+poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take accurate count
+as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his
+guess was reasonably correct. From this review it appeared that the
+greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month, while
+several published but one, and several five or seven or four. Another
+remarkable fact was that the one or two in the more self-denying were as
+bad as the whole five or seven or nine or eighteen of those which had
+more freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another singular feature
+of the inquiry was that one woman had a poem in five or six of the
+magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good poem, so that no editor
+would have been justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent
+recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these names were a
+warrant of quality, but not always of the author's best quality. The
+authorship was rather equally divided between the sexes, and the poets
+were both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be.
+
+When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered apparently
+a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his notes and went
+with them to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm had
+prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and discussed the
+points evolved. "Then what is your conclusion?" the elder of the two
+demanded. "Do you still think I was right, or have you come to a
+different opinion?"
+
+"Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a different opinion? You
+would easily forgive me, but what would all those hundred poets whom I
+thought not so promising as you believed do to my next book? Especially
+what would the poetesses?"
+
+"There is something in that. But you need not be explicit. If you differ
+with me, you can generalize. What, on the whole, was the impression you
+got? Had none of the pieces what we call distinction, for want of a
+better word or a clearer idea?"
+
+"I understand. No, I should say, not one; though here and there one
+nearly had it--so nearly that I held my breath from not being quite
+sure. But, on the other hand, I should say that there was a good deal of
+excellence, if you know what that means."
+
+"I can imagine," the elder poet said. "It is another subterfuge. What do
+you really intend?"
+
+"Why, that the level was pretty high. Never so high as the sky, but
+sometimes as high as the sky-scraper. There was an occasional tallness,
+the effect, I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or the
+feeling warranted. And some of the things had a great deal of
+naturalness."
+
+"Come! That isn't so bad."
+
+"But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes affectation.
+This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to have some
+pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity was a
+pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being untrammelled. But there
+is such a thing as being informal, and there is such a thing as being
+unmannerly."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I think that in the endeavor to escape from convention our poets have
+lost the wish for elegance, which was a prime charm of the Golden Age.
+Technically, as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too much,
+and the people of the Golden Age never let themselves loose. There is
+too much Nature in them, which is to say, not enough; for, after all, in
+her little æsthetic attempts, Nature is very modest."
+
+The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. "Now you are
+wandering. Explain again."
+
+"Why, when you and I were young--you were always and always will be
+young--"
+
+"None of that!"
+
+"It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful of the form as the most
+formal of our poetic forebears, and that we would not let the smallest
+irregularity escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We cut out
+the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep the wording
+within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty in our work so
+much that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; the grain we
+left was where we had used the file to produce it."
+
+"Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn't so?"
+
+"Well, what do you say to such a word as 'dankening,' which occurred in
+a very good landscape?"
+
+"One such word in a hundred poems?"
+
+"One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel
+that they would all have liked to say 'dankening,' or something of the
+sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty
+syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that,
+when it happens. The editor who printed 'dankening' was more to blame
+than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his
+other vocables." The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh
+courage. "Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present
+magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing
+poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard
+Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry,
+of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the
+Piatts, of Fitz James O'Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom
+the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and
+devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the
+later generation any good to equal them with ours."
+
+"There is something in what you say." The elder poet was silent for a
+time. Then he asked, "Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty
+magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?"
+
+His junior counted up, and reported, "About twenty-four."
+
+"Well, don't you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that
+these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there
+will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year.
+That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907.
+Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had
+eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as
+many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the
+first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name as many yourself?"
+
+"Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and
+nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present
+decade."
+
+"Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?"
+
+The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a
+cross-examined witness, "Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer."
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL
+
+
+On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy
+Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking
+wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if
+the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did
+come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity
+to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he
+had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there are certain things
+that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of
+the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in
+one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would
+have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his
+boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential
+passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at the notion of his
+being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was
+arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the
+platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for
+reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the
+day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility of the
+elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect
+not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently not so
+rustic as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls
+villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed
+villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and
+thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the
+eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by
+consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except
+perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot with the rest of
+some express train that never stopped there.
+
+"It _is_ splendid, John," the woman said, holding by the man's arm while
+she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach with her
+eager eyes.
+
+"I guess it's all of that," the man consented, sadly.
+
+"I presume we sha'n't ever go in one," she suggested.
+
+"Not likely," he owned, in the same discouraged tone.
+
+They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep,
+hopeless aspiration, "Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!"
+
+The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no
+sign.
+
+The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, wishing for something
+more from them which should give their souls away, but they remained
+silently standing there, and he did not somehow feel authorized to make
+them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it must be open, and that
+the friendly porter somewhere within would not mind letting them look
+through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, and the woman was
+trying to embolden the man to the hardy venture. In the end they did not
+attempt it, but they turned away with another sigh from the woman which
+found its echo in the eavesdropper's heart. Doubtless if they had
+penetrated that splendid interior without having paid for seats, it
+would, in some fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would have
+corrupted them; they would have wished after that always to travel in
+such cars, when clearly they could not afford it; very possibly it might
+have led to their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still his
+bosom's ache, but he could never quite forget that gentle pair with
+their unrequited longing, and the other day they came almost the first
+thing into his mind when he read that a great German steamship company
+had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman cars from the port of
+arrival to the mercantile metropolis which was the real end of their
+ships' voyages. He thought, whimsically, perversely, how little
+difference it would make to that pair, how little to those measureless
+most whose journeys shall end in heaven, where Pullman passengers, or
+even passengers by the ordinary European first-class cars, may be only
+too glad to meet them. He gave a looser rein to his thoughts and
+considered how very little the ordinary necessities of life, such as
+Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric radiators and non-storage
+chickens and unsalted butter concern the great mass of the saints, who
+would find them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined
+coveting them; and then from this wild revery he fell to asking himself
+whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over
+the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so
+long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on
+this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a
+German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman
+if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a
+pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when
+he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better.
+To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class
+fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment of
+two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money
+buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime
+minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is
+different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you
+are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and
+doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are
+wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to
+telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from
+Calais to Paris.
+
+It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable precaution
+spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as first-class
+passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for
+Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, every soul
+in his first-class compartment had telegraphed ahead, and when they
+arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran
+ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so
+that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream,
+and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for
+his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and
+civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble servant of the
+Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag.
+
+At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in
+European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not,
+for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a
+French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an
+augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a
+first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you
+must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night
+long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in
+France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they
+may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company
+cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal
+land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the
+first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars;
+or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers?
+
+No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for
+decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third
+the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and
+muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers
+behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to
+round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow
+gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but
+so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you
+could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it
+privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money
+cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars
+to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be
+disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even
+second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in
+Germany, and in Italy--poor, dear Italy!--they are worse still. That is
+because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or
+because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have
+dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear
+the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will
+not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad
+as heart could wish--the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the
+memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one
+still went by diligence or _vettura_. The only absolutely _good_
+railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the
+Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any
+class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained
+perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in
+simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner
+than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant
+sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from
+the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark
+antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to
+Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express--
+
+"But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than
+last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend
+exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:
+
+Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering
+afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of
+souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But
+starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since
+leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is
+truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for
+our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty
+minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was
+the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been
+left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our
+train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and
+bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there
+are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when
+one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics as
+one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton
+kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's
+chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at
+home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and
+all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops.
+But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in
+the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which
+the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be
+caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the
+spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's
+steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as
+if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations
+in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only
+casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it
+did pitch about a bit, sir.
+
+No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of
+your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the
+comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the
+happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer
+train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the
+English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie
+with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft
+endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of
+the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for
+his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn,
+where his baggage remains in the porter's charge till it is put back
+into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows, with their
+high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like
+receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the English
+cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and assemblies of the
+past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something
+of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper
+classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent over
+trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors
+of flowers that withered a hundred years ago.
+
+But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a
+condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle pair
+with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To
+such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not
+put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the
+vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority
+who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the
+heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point
+of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native
+who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of
+trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line
+of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn
+from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep
+our hunger for the table d'hôte of the dining-car; when we buy a room in
+the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our ticket; when
+we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler
+steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or
+thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the
+saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit
+for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter
+away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing
+for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of
+public land in northwestern Canada.
+
+There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely own,
+has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life for
+the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains
+between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the
+Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the
+fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our
+first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class
+German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches
+at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for
+whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer
+ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class
+vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and
+would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for
+them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon
+not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of
+European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to
+the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would
+now want to take a bicycle, or even a "bicycle built for two." These
+things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate
+in the luxuries, the splendors of life. Soon the last word in them takes
+on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them "with sick and
+scornful looks averse," and listens for the
+
+          "airy tongues that syllable men's names
+   On sands and shores and desert wildernesses."
+
+Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be
+the next word--the word that follows the last, the woman's word.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS
+
+
+They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might
+be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a
+bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man
+feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of
+the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was
+holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious
+not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had
+been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man
+could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who
+pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their
+native independence to something like the condition of those pauper
+wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image
+of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the
+Government's dole of beef-cattle.
+
+The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his
+thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the
+squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've
+been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the
+'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood
+of man?"
+
+[Illustration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK]
+
+"I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other
+friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part
+of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began
+to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and
+the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and
+remembered those in bonds as bound with them."
+
+"Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb
+creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century.
+There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds,
+didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And
+several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good
+deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a
+pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They
+were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have
+come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of
+broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman, before the extension of
+the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly
+unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian."
+
+"I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the second friend mused
+aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very
+likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. "They had so
+many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste
+something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in
+our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not
+to
+
+                    'enter on my list of friends the man
+   Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,'
+
+and
+
+   'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride
+   With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'"
+
+"Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to
+their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last
+generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see that
+the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be
+proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are
+always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good."
+
+"What do you mean," the second of the friends demanded, "by coming back
+to their ground?"
+
+"Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped
+at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they
+were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as
+ignore Him----"
+
+"I see," the second answered, sadly. "But aren't you throwing up the
+sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a
+tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend,
+'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And
+inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous
+power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age
+of belief is rather certain to follow."
+
+"Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should
+be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other
+reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good
+to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same
+barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed.
+But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still
+care to do my duty? And I certainly always do."
+
+"What, always?"
+
+"Well, nearly always."
+
+The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the
+Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any
+longer without the risk of not being followed."
+
+The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went
+out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."
+
+"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is
+anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from
+
+   'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'
+
+it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined
+as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology."
+
+"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything
+else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D.
+C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both
+owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of
+another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she
+stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have
+wished to do and tried to do.'"
+
+The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first
+said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or
+don't try hard enough."
+
+The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength;
+wickedness is weakness."
+
+"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many
+cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."
+
+"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"
+
+"Well, your Stoics--"
+
+"_My_ Stoics?"
+
+"_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure
+coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and
+let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a
+duty coming they stepped out and did it."
+
+"It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?"
+
+"That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But
+perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't
+have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in
+some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented
+the Christian ideal of duty."
+
+"And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity
+in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear
+of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the
+beginning."
+
+The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go
+so far as that."
+
+The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't
+know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed
+together again.
+
+The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock
+of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came
+toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady,
+greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last
+where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with
+his paws.
+
+"No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the
+way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues.
+You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any."
+
+"There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the
+boat-house with a basketful."
+
+"But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel
+all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get.
+That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call
+character-building. Get along!"
+
+The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a
+moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the
+feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.
+
+"I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity
+included kindness to animals."
+
+"I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the
+peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my
+natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He
+seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged."
+
+The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered
+foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they
+sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent
+so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had
+to ask, "Where were we?"
+
+"Cultivating force of character in squirrels."
+
+"I thought we had got by that."
+
+"Then we had come round to ourselves again."
+
+"Something like that," the first friend reluctantly allowed.
+
+"What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that's
+what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves."
+
+"Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn't pamper their egotism
+in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our
+duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals,
+if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study
+ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear
+down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the
+health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to
+overgrow."
+
+"That is true. Isn't it doing something of the same sort in other ways
+for all of us? If I hadn't lost my teeth so long ago, I'm sure I should
+feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate
+development. It's duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury
+incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this
+beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?"
+
+"Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect,
+a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man
+on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote
+for him."
+
+"But you voted for him?"
+
+The first friend nodded.
+
+"Which man was it?"
+
+"What's the use? He was beaten--
+
+   'That is all you know or need to know.'"
+
+"Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him," the
+second friend mused. "How patient the Creator must be with the result of
+His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we
+are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate
+Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does
+not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate
+sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It's enough to make one go
+in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice
+which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?"
+
+"And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with
+other interests and obligations?"
+
+"Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice
+does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way."
+
+"And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we
+promptly and explicitly obey it; we don't palter with it in the
+slightest; 'we don't bandy words with our sovereign,' as Doctor Johnson
+said. I wonder," the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a
+vivid thought suddenly occurs, "how it would work if one went and did
+exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?"
+
+"That's not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or,
+rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered."
+
+"You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?"
+
+"No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to
+hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. 'Thou
+shalt kill,' they hear it say, 'thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false
+witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and
+thy mother,' and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown
+off or put on, as the case may be."
+
+"How very hideous!" the second friend exclaimed. "It's like an emanation
+from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It's been abolished."
+
+"And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice
+of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what
+the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil,
+we know what to do with them."
+
+"And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the
+same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?"
+
+"Ah, it's hard to say. We haven't got to the bottom of such things yet.
+Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a
+satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic
+consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official
+interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it
+literally."
+
+"That's very interesting," the second friend said. "Then it's your idea
+that no one really prefers to do wrong?"
+
+"Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority.
+No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn't any purely
+voluntary evil among the sane. When the 'wicked,' as we call them, do
+wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and
+make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he
+means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or
+until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the
+last state of sinners was insanity."
+
+"Dreadful!"
+
+"But I've always thought very few reached that state. There's this
+curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that
+inner voice, we are æsthetically prompted; it's a matter of taste as
+well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so
+repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so
+shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out
+of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them."
+
+The second friend drew a long breath. "Then I don't see why there are so
+many."
+
+"Well," the first friend suggested, "there seems to be a difficulty.
+Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can't get on
+without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we
+shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or
+accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good."
+
+"I don't see how you make that out."
+
+"Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does
+not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in
+the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not
+need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very
+imperfect."
+
+"And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing
+our duty?"
+
+"Well, we sha'n't by not doing it."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+A WASTED OPPORTUNITY
+
+
+The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving
+conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay
+him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to
+greater circumstance in him. He said:
+
+"It was Christmas Eve, and I don't know whether he arrived by chance or
+design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind
+openest. It's a time when, unless you look out, you will believe
+anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was
+prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked
+about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not
+deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary
+of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years' sentence,
+I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he
+had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother,
+and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname
+was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued
+my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered
+menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was
+Brown, Jones, or Robinson."
+
+"We dare say you have your self-justification," we put in at this point,
+"but you must own that it doesn't appear in what you are saying. As a
+good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you would
+certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door. His
+being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with his
+merit or want of it."
+
+"Oh, I acknowledge that, and I'll own that there was something in his
+case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his
+community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a
+Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a
+cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer
+would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question
+which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should
+not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday."
+
+"He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have done if
+he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered into it
+with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite new
+two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in
+fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe the
+dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go
+round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being
+fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to
+cases of dire need, you know."
+
+"No, we don't know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to give
+copper."
+
+"Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very
+pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But
+here was an instance which involved a more extended application of
+alms. 'You know,' I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental
+arithmetic, 'there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for
+twenty-five cents; I don't remember whether they throw in breakfast or
+not.' I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved by
+the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake, if
+not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only
+gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the
+effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed
+to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, 'I
+think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.' I can't say whether
+he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it
+quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were
+three nights' lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar
+and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch,
+including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn't have liked making it
+pay for three days' board. But I didn't say so; I left the question
+entirely to him, and he said nothing.
+
+"In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in
+one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a
+pawn-ticket, which he offered me. 'What's this?' I asked. 'My overcoat,'
+he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I
+did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage
+of me, and I said, 'Oh, I think you can get along without your
+overcoat.' I'm glad to think now that it hadn't begun to snow yet, and
+that I had no prescience of the blizzard--what the papers fondly called
+the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!)--which was to begin
+the next afternoon, wasn't making the faintest threat from the moonlit
+sky then. He said, 'It's rather cold,' but I ignored his position. At
+the same time, I gave him a quarter."
+
+"That was magnificent, but it was not political economy," we commented.
+"You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get
+along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not
+need it on shipboard."
+
+"Well, do you know," our friend said, "I really did tell him something
+like that, and it didn't seem to convince him, though it made me
+ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the
+reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be
+asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the
+cattle."
+
+"It would have been an idle compliment, anyway," we said. "You can't
+draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they're riveted down."
+
+"I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his
+overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back
+his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had
+noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I
+said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the
+euphemism of many who didn't wish to identify themselves with their
+poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, 'Here!' and I pulled
+open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full of English
+coins, which I had been left stranded with on several returns from
+Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of them; and as I
+always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I will never go to
+Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do with those coins. I
+now took out the largest and handsomest of them: 'Do you know what that
+is?' 'Yes,' he said; 'it's two shillings and sixpence--what we call a
+half-crown.' His promptness restored my faith in him; I saw that he must
+be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary; very
+likely our name was the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart.
+'Here!' I said, and I handed him the coin; it did not seem so bad as
+giving him more American money. 'They can change that on the ship for
+you. I guess you can manage now till Monday,' and my confidence in
+Providence diffused such a genial warmth through my steam-heated
+apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat. I wish I could forget
+about it now."
+
+We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned his
+excess of beneficence. "Oh, you mustn't mind giving him so much money.
+We can't always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as close as we
+ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!"
+
+Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In fact, he
+seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming: "He
+appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for he
+got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to make
+him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him
+to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested me somehow
+beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality; in fact, his
+personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that asserted any
+claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my
+door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as
+delicately as I could, to appease. 'Was your trouble something about
+the'--I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I
+boldly outed with--'women?' 'Oh no,' he said, meekly; 'it was just
+cloth, a piece of cloth,' 'Breaking and entering?' I led on. 'Well, not
+exactly, but--it came to grand larceny,' and I might have fancied a
+touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable
+offence.
+
+"I didn't know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little
+philosophy: 'Well, you see, it didn't pay, exactly,' 'Oh no,' he said,
+sadly enough, and he went out."
+
+Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to
+improve the occasion in his behalf. "Well, there you lost a great
+opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him
+reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him
+realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five
+dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not
+only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary
+after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even
+the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great
+opportunity."
+
+Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting,
+and blazed out--we have no milder word for it--blazed out in a sort of
+fiery torrent which made us recoil: "Yes, I lost that great opportunity,
+and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that
+miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State
+which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again
+without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that
+dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to
+have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the
+law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of
+barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was
+sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard
+without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself
+by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State
+which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years' labor
+it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor,
+it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for
+board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that
+sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because
+it had defrauded him of the money he had earned."
+
+"But, our dear friend!" we entreated, "don't you realize that this
+theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the
+sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?"
+
+"And you don't think two years' prison, two years' slavery, was sanative
+enough without the denial of his just compensation?"
+
+We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this
+truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of
+destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand
+in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison
+gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe,
+or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future
+crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the
+ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly
+avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:
+
+"Suppose he had a wife and children--he may have had several of both,
+for all I know--dependent on him, would it have been particularly
+sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?"
+
+"We cannot answer these sophistries," we were exasperated into replying.
+"All that we can say is that anything else--anything like what you call
+justice to the criminal, the prisoner--would disrupt society," and we
+felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest
+understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend
+went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we
+mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for
+the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in
+this way the ideas of rejected contributors.
+
+A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the
+maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic
+communion, we said, "Well, have you met your namesake since you came to
+his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the
+cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?"
+
+Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. "He didn't sail, exactly, at
+least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted
+from him at my own door--the outside of it. It appears that the
+authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by
+requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith,
+and that he refused to do so--not having the money, for one reason. I
+did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to
+his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant
+discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State in the
+practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the place where he
+went to have his half-crown changed into American money they would only
+give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured by an
+acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In fact, a
+half-crown is worth a little more."
+
+"Well, what can you expect of money-changers?" we returned, consolingly.
+"And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary now?"
+
+"Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled, as
+the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of
+cattle-steamers, where they don't require a deposit as a guarantee of
+good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he
+is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the
+herdsmen; I'm not sure that herdsmen is what they call them."
+
+We laughed sardonically. "And do you believe he is really going?"
+
+Our friend sighed heavily. "Well, I don't believe he's coming back. I
+only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don't think it
+will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will wish
+to call upon me for more."
+
+We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the
+author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, "And you
+still think he had been in the penitentiary?"
+
+"I don't see why he should have said so if he wasn't."
+
+"Well, then," we retorted bitterly, again like a character in fiction,
+"you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this
+time, but an æsthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you
+all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to
+it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have
+written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway."
+
+Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, "It was rather a break."
+
+"You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in
+jail don't turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would
+have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think
+of the material you have lost."
+
+We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we
+reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when we
+reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay, we
+could not endure it. "Well, good-day," we said, coldly; "we are going
+down this way."
+
+Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself
+with a mocking laugh. "Well, perhaps he wasn't, after all, what he
+said."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+A NIECE'S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE
+
+
+A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair's,
+sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand
+while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least,
+fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a
+contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was
+nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.
+
+"Do I disturb you, uncle?" she asked; she did not call him great-uncle,
+because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the
+informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, "Because,
+you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story;
+and I've just read it."
+
+"Oh yes!" the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to
+recall which story it was. "Well?"
+
+"Well," she said, firmly but kindly, "you want me to be frank with you,
+don't you?"
+
+"By all means, my dear. It's very good of you to read my story." By this
+time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his
+publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held
+intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.
+
+"Not at all!" she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on
+the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her
+emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. "In the first place," she
+said, with the effect of coming directly to business, "I suppose you
+know yourself that it couldn't be called virile."
+
+"No?" he returned. "What is virile?"
+
+"Well, I can't explain, precisely; but it's something that all the
+critics say of a book that is very strong, don't you know; and
+masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken
+you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you
+into the air, and trample you under foot."
+
+"Good heavens, my dear!" the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. "I hope I'm a
+gentleman, even when I'm writing a novel."
+
+"Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!" she said,
+severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran
+Novelist to shuffle. "You can't be virile and at the same time remember
+that you are a gentleman. Lots of _women_ write virile books."
+
+"Ladies?" the novelist asked.
+
+"Don't I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the
+reader's attention you must let yourself go, whether you're a gentleman
+or a lady. Of course," she relented, "your book's very idyllic, and
+delightful, and all that; but," she resumed, severely, "do you think an
+honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to
+cover?"
+
+The novelist sighed. "I'm sure I don't know. They seem to say it--in the
+passages quoted in the advertisements--of all the books published.
+Except mine," he added, sadly.
+
+"Well, we will pass that point," his great-niece relented again. "I
+didn't intend to wound your feelings, uncle."
+
+"Oh, you haven't. I suppose I _am_ a little too easy-going at times."
+
+"Yes, that is it. One can't say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful
+critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: 'Have
+you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don't wait to
+find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It's going like the wind, and
+you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!'
+Now that," his great-niece ended, fondly, "is what I should like every
+critic to say of your book, uncle."
+
+The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more
+spiritedly, "I don't believe _I_ should, my dear."
+
+"Then you _must_; that's all. But that's a small thing. What I really
+wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a
+stylist."
+
+"Stylist?"
+
+"Yes. I don't believe there's an epigram in your book from beginning to
+end. That's the reason the critics don't quote any brilliant sentences
+from it, and the publishers can't advertise it properly. It makes me mad
+to find the girls repeating other authors' sayings, and I never catch a
+word from a book of yours, though you've been writing more than a
+century."
+
+"Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just
+what do you mean by style?"
+
+"Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way;
+and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things
+in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not
+vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have
+virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are
+writing fiction. But you _can_ have _passion_. Why don't you?"
+
+"Don't I? I thought--"
+
+"Not a speck of it--not a single speck! It's rather a delicate point,
+and I don't exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank,
+I must." She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. "I
+don't believe there's a single place where he crushes her to his heart,
+or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once,
+but I don't call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the
+girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their
+mouths tenderly to theirs--Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting,
+but in your own earlier books, I'm sure there's more of it--of passion.
+Isn't there? Think!"
+
+The Veteran Novelist tried to think. "To tell you the truth, my dear, I
+can't remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and
+true love, in my novels--the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage,
+but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses
+of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than
+brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing--"
+
+"Uncle!"
+
+"--How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that
+make you ashamed as you pass them?"
+
+"The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!"
+
+"And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It's not only
+indecent, but it's highly insanitary. Nice people don't want you to kiss
+their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply
+them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among
+the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is
+quite unknown in real life. I don't know the Japanese fiction very well,
+but I doubt whether there's a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe
+that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help
+of one embrace from beginning to end."
+
+"Uncle!" the girl vividly exclaimed, "why don't you _do_ it? It would be
+the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the
+start--just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on
+all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be
+raving about it. Why _don't_ you do it, uncle? You know I do so want
+you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!"
+
+"I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of
+suppressed passion, that's a story in itself."
+
+"Tell it!" she entreated.
+
+"The Easy Chair wouldn't give me room for it. But I'll tell you
+something else. When I was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came
+rather in anticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring
+and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the whole range of mythological
+topics, and then I had my knack lying idle. I observed that there was
+one subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but somehow I felt
+myself disqualified for treating it. How could I sing of Love when I had
+never been in love? For I didn't count those youthful affairs when I was
+only in the Third Reader and the first part of the Arithmetic. I went
+about trying to be in love, as a matter of business; but I couldn't
+manage it. Suddenly it managed itself; and then I found myself worse
+disqualified than ever. I didn't want to mention it; either to myself
+or to her, much less to the world at large. It seemed a little too
+personal."
+
+"Oh, uncle! How funny you are!"
+
+"Do you think so? I didn't think it much fun then, and I don't now. Once
+I didn't know what love was, and now I've forgotten!"
+
+"No such thing, uncle! You write about it beautifully, even if you're
+not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won't let you say so."
+
+"Well, then, my dear, if I haven't forgotten, I'm not interested. You
+see, I know so much more about it than my lovers do. I can't take their
+point of view any longer. To tell you the truth, I don't care a rap
+whether they get married or not. In that story there, that you've been
+reading, I got awfully tired of the girl. She was such a fool, and the
+fellow was a perfect donkey."
+
+"But he was the dearest donkey in the world! I wanted to h--shake hands
+with him, and I wanted to kiss--yes, kiss!--_her_, she was such a
+lovable fool."
+
+"You're very kind to say so, my dear, but you can't keep on making
+delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking
+when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the
+middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was
+poking fun at my lovers."
+
+"And here I," the girl lamented, "didn't take the slightest notice, but
+began on you with the harshest criticisms!"
+
+"I didn't mind. I dare say it was for my good."
+
+"I'm sure I meant it so, uncle. And what are you going to do about it?"
+
+"Well, I must get a new point of view."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I must change my ground altogether. I can't pretend any longer to be
+the contemporary of my lovers, or to have the least sympathy with their
+hopes and fears. If I were to be perfectly honest with them, I should
+tell them, perhaps, that disappointed love was the best thing that could
+happen to either of them, but, if they insisted on happiness, that a
+good broken engagement promised more of it than anything else I could
+think of."
+
+"That is true," the girl sighed. "There are a great many unhappy
+marriages. Of course, people would say it was _rather_ pessimistic,
+wouldn't they?"
+
+"People will say anything. One mustn't mind them. But now I'll tell you
+what I've been thinking all the time we've been talking."
+
+"Well? I knew you were not thinking of _my_ nonsense!"
+
+"It was very good nonsense, as nonsense goes, my dear. What I've been
+thinking is that I must still have the love interest in my books, and
+have it the main interest, but I must treat it from the vantage-ground
+of age; it must be something I look back upon, and a little down upon."
+
+"I see what you mean," the girl dissentingly assented.
+
+"I must be in the whole secret--the secret, not merely of my lovers'
+love, but the secret of love itself. I must know, and I must subtly
+intimate, that it doesn't really matter to anybody how their affair
+turns out; for in a few years, twenty or thirty years, it's a thousand
+to one that they won't care anything about it themselves. I must
+maintain the attitude of the sage, dealing not unkindly but truthfully
+with the situation."
+
+"It would be rather sad," the girl murmured. "But one likes sad things."
+
+"When one is young, one does; when one is old, one likes true things.
+But, of course, my love-stories would be only for those who have
+outlived love. I ought to be fair with my readers, and forewarn them
+that my story was not for the young, the hopeful, the happy."
+
+The girl jumped to her feet and stood magnificent. "Uncle! It's grand!"
+
+He rose, too. "What is?" he faltered.
+
+"The idea! Don't you see? You can have the publisher announce it as a
+story for the disillusioned, the wretched, and the despairing, and that
+would make every girl want it, for that's what every girl thinks she is,
+and they would talk to the men about it, and then _they_ would want it,
+and it would be the book of the month! Don't say another word. Oh, you
+dear!" In spite of the insanitary nature of the action, she caught her
+uncle round the neck, and kissed him on his bald spot, and ran out of
+the room. She opened the door to call back: "Don't lose a single minute.
+Begin it _now_!"
+
+But the Veteran Novelist sank again into his chair in the posture in
+which she had surprised him.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY
+
+
+We lately received a publication which has interested us somewhat out of
+proportion to its size. It is called _The Way into Print_, but it does
+not treat, as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best method of
+getting your name into the newspapers, either as a lady who is giving a
+dinner to thirteen otherwise unknown persons, or is making a coming-out
+tea for her débutante daughter, or had a box full of expensively
+confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or is going to read
+a paper at a woman's club, or is in any sort figuring in the thousand
+and one modern phases of publicity; it does not even advise her guests
+or hearers how to appear among those present, or those who were invited
+and did not come, or those who would not have come if they had been
+invited. Its scope is far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely
+higher, its reach incomparably further. The Print which it proposes to
+lead the Way into is that print where the elect, who were once few and
+are now many, are making the corridors of time resound to their
+footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of
+immortality. Their procession, which from the point of the impartial
+spectator has been looking more and more like a cake-walk in these later
+years, is so increasingly the attraction of young-eyed ambition that
+nothing interests a very large class of people more than advice for the
+means of joining it, and it is this advice which the publication in
+point supplies: supplies, we must say, with as much good sense and good
+feeling as is consistent with an office which does not seem so dignified
+as we could wish.
+
+Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to the folly of the
+aspirant, inevitably he must use that folly from time to time with
+wholesome severity, but he does not feel himself equal to the work
+unaided. Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible force
+of our imaginative work, into an intellectual world-power has thrust a
+responsibility upon the veterans of a simpler time which they may not
+shirk, and the author of _The Way into Print_ calls upon them to share
+his task. He is not satisfied with the interesting chapters contributed
+by younger authors who are in the act of winning their spurs, but he
+appeals to those established in the public recognition to do their part
+in aiding us to hold our conquest through the instruction and discipline
+of those who must take their places when they put their armor off. He
+does this by means of a letter, almost an open letter, addressed
+personally to each veteran by means of the substitution of his
+typewritten name for that of some other veteran, but not differenced in
+the terms of the ensuing appeal to his kindness or his conscience. He
+puts himself upon a broad humanitarian ground, and asks that the
+typewritten author, who, he assumes, is "prominently before the public,"
+shall answer certain questions to which the appellant owns that he has
+already received hundreds of replies.
+
+By an odd mischance one of his half-open letters found its way to the
+Easy Chair, and, although that judgment-seat felt relieved from the
+sense of anything like a lonely prominence before the public by the
+very multitude of those similarly consulted, it did not remain as Easy
+as it would have liked under the erring attribution of prominence. Yet
+to have refused to help in so good a work would not have been in its
+nature, and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a real
+author of prominence to consider the problems so baffling to a mere
+editorial effigy; for, as we ought to explain, the _de facto_ editor is
+to be found in the Study next door, and never in the Easy Chair. The
+author prominently before the public came at once, for that kind of
+author has very little to do, and is only too happy to respond to calls
+like that of the friend of rising authorship. Most of his time is spent
+at symposiums, imagined by the Sunday editions of the newspapers, to
+consider, decide the question whether fig-paste is truly a health-food;
+or whether, in view of a recent colossal gift for educational purposes,
+the product of the Standard Oil Company was the midnight oil which
+Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of the scholar wasting it; or
+something of that kind. His mind is whetted to the sharpest edge by its
+employment with these problems, and is in prime condition for such
+simple practical inquiries as those proposed by the letter we had
+received. But, of course, he put on an air of great hurry, and spoke of
+the different poems, novels, essays, and sketches which he had laid
+aside to oblige us, and begged us to get down to business at once.
+
+"We wish nothing better than to do so," we said, to humor him, "for we
+know you are a very busy man, and we will not keep you a moment longer
+than is absolutely necessary. Would you like to have all the questions
+at once, or would you rather study them one after another?"
+
+He said he thought he could better give an undivided mind to each if he
+had them one at a time, and so we began with the first:
+
+"'1. Would you advise the young story-writer to study the old masters in
+literature or the stories in the current magazines, in order to meet the
+demands of the current editors?'"
+
+"Will you read that again?" the author prominently before the public
+demanded, but when we had read it a second time it seemed only to plunge
+him deeper into despair. He clutched his revered head with both hands,
+and but for an opportune baldness would probably have torn his hair. He
+murmured, huskily, "Do you think you have got it right?"
+
+We avoided the response "Sure thing" by an appropriate circumlocution,
+and then he thundered back: "How in--nature--is a young writer to
+forecast the demands of current editors? If an editor is worth his
+salt--his Attic salt--he does not know himself what he wants, except by
+the eternal yearning of the editorial soul for something new and good.
+If he has any other demands, he is not a current editor, he is a
+stagnant editor. Is it possible that there is a superstition to the
+contrary?"
+
+"Apparently."
+
+"Then that would account for many things. But go on."
+
+"Go on yourself. You have not answered the question."
+
+"Oh, by all means," the author sardonically answered; "if the current
+editor has demands beyond freshness and goodness, let the young writer
+avoid the masters in literature and study the stories in the current
+magazines."
+
+"You are not treating the matter seriously," we expostulated.
+
+"Yes, I am--seriously, sadly, even tragically. I could not have imagined
+a condition of things so bad, even with the results all round us. Let us
+have the second question of your correspondent."
+
+"Here it is: '2. Has the unknown writer an equal chance with the
+well-known author, provided his work is up to the standard of the
+latter's?'"
+
+"Of the latter's?--of the latter's?--of the latter's?" Our friend
+whispered the phrase to himself before he groaned out: "What a frightful
+locution! Really, really, it is more than I can bear!"
+
+"For the cause you ought to bear anything. What do you really think?"
+
+"Why, if the former's work is as good as the latter's, why isn't the
+former's chance as good if the current editor's demands are for the same
+kind in the former's case as in the latter's? If the latter's aim is to
+meet the imaginary demands of the stagnant editor, then the former's
+work ought to be as attractive as the latter's. Ha, ha, ha!"
+
+He laughed wildly, and in order to recall him to himself we read the
+third question: "'3. Which is the more acceptable--a well-told story
+with a weak plot, or a poorly told story with a strong plot?'"
+
+"Oh, but that is a conundrum, pure and simple!" the author protested.
+"It is a poor parody on the old End-man pleasantry, 'Would you rather be
+as foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?' You are making
+it up!"
+
+"We assure you we are not. It is no more a conundrum than the others.
+Come: question!"
+
+"Well, in the first place, I should like to know what a plot is.
+Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your
+experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the
+old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally
+dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?"
+
+"You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. Do you confess
+yourself posed by this plain problem? Do you give it up?"
+
+"For the present. Perhaps I may gather light from the next question."
+
+"Then here it is: '4. What do you consider the primary weakness in the
+average stories or verses of the old writers?"
+
+"Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average stories and verses of the
+younger writers--absence of mind."
+
+"Are you sure you are not shirking? Cannot you give a categorical
+answer--something that will really help some younger writer to take the
+place which you are now more or less fraudulently holding? The younger
+writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble is absence of mind, but
+what line of reading would you suggest which would turn this into
+presence of mind?"
+
+"There is none, except to have themselves newly ancestored. Presence of
+mind as well as absence of mind is something derived; you cannot acquire
+it."
+
+"We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now here is the next
+problem: '5. What are the successful author's necessary qualifications
+in the matters of natural ability, education, life as he sees it and
+lives it, technical training, etc?'"
+
+"This will be the death of me!" the prominent author lamented. "Couldn't
+I skip that one?"
+
+"It seems to cover some of the most important points. We do not think
+your self-respect will allow you to skip it. At any rate, make an effort
+to answer it."
+
+Thus challenged, the prominent author pulled himself together. "Oh," he
+said, sadly, "which of us knows whether he has natural ability or not,
+and what is education, and what is life as one sees it, and what is
+technical training? Do these poor young fellows think that one is tall
+or short by taking thought? It is the same as that, it seems to me; or
+if you prefer a mystical solution, I should say, if you have a longing,
+from your earliest consciousness, to write poetry or fiction, and cannot
+keep from doing it for any long time together, you are possibly born
+with a gift for it. But this may be altogether a mistake; it may be the
+effect of your early and incessant scribblings on the minds of
+spectators wholly incompetent to judge of your abilities, such as your
+fond parents. This must rather often happen if we can judge from what
+nine-tenths of what is called literature is composed of. If your longing
+to write is the real thing, or is not, still education will not help or
+hinder you in doing it. No man was ever yet taught any art. He may be
+taught a trade, and that is what most of the versing and prosing is, I
+suppose. If you have the gift, you will technically train yourself: that
+is, you will learn how to be simple and clear and honest. Charm you will
+have got from your great-grandfather or great-grandmother; and life,
+which is only another sort of school, will not qualify you to depict
+life; but if you do not want to depict life, you will perhaps be able to
+meet the demands of what our friend calls the current editors."
+
+Here the prominent author rose, but we stayed him with a gesture. "There
+is another question, the last: '6. Do you care to convey any hints or
+suggestions gleaned from your personal experiences in the climb to
+success that may make easier the gaining of the heights for the
+beginner?"
+
+The prominent author roared with laughter. "Read that again!" But when
+we had done so, he became grave, even sorrowful. "Is it really true,
+then, as we seem to see, that there is a large body of young people
+taking up literature as a business? The thing that all my life I have
+fondly dreamed was an art, dear and almost holy! Are they going into it
+for the money there is in it? And am I, in my prominence--more or less
+fraudulent, as you say--an incentive to them to persevere in their
+enterprises? Is that what one has to come to after a life of
+conscientious devotion to--an ideal? Come, old friend, say it isn't so
+bad as that! It is? Then"--the prominent author paused and sank weakly
+into the chair from which he had risen--"perhaps I have been dreaming
+all these years; but in my dream it seems to me that everything outside
+of myself which seemed to hinder me has really helped me. There has been
+no obstacle in my way which if I were at the bottom of the hill, where I
+might very rightfully be, I would have removed. I am glad that the climb
+to success, as your friend calls it, has been hard and long, and I bless
+God for my difficulties and backsets, all of them. Sometimes they seemed
+cruel; they filled me with despair and shame; but there was not one that
+did not make me stronger and fitter for my work, if I was fit for it.
+You know very well that in this art of ours we need all the strength we
+can get from our overthrows. There is no training that can ever make the
+true artist's work easy to him, and if he is a true artist he will
+suspect everything easily done as ill done. What comes hard and slow and
+hopelessly, that is the thing which when we look at it we find is the
+thing that was worth doing. I had my downs with my ups, and when I was
+beginning the downs outnumbered the ups ten to one. For one manuscript
+accepted, and after the days of many years printed, I had a dozen
+rejected and rejected without delay. But every such rejection helped me.
+In some cases I had to swallow the bitter dose and own that the editor
+was right; but the bitter was wholesome. In other cases I knew that he
+was wrong, and then I set my teeth, and took my courage in both hands,
+and tried and tried with that rejected manuscript till the divinely
+appointed editor owned that I was right. But these are the commonplaces
+of literary biography. I don't brag of them; and I have always tried to
+keep my head in such shape that even defeat has not swelled it beyond
+the No. 7 I began with. Why should I be so wicked as to help another and
+a younger man over the bad places? If I could only gain his confidence I
+should like to tell him that these are the places that will strengthen
+his heart for the climb. But if he has a weak heart, he had better try
+some other road. There! I have given you all the 'hints and suggestions
+from my experience' that I can think of, and now let me go."
+
+Once more he rose, and once more we stayed him. "Yes," we said, "no
+doubt you think you have spoken honestly and faithfully, but you have
+addressed yourself to the wrong audience. You have spoken to artists,
+born and self-made, but artists can always manage without help. Your
+help was invoked in behalf of artisans, of adventurers, of speculators.
+What was wanted of you was a formula for the fabrication of gold bricks
+which would meet the demands of current dealers in that sort of wares."
+
+"But if I have never made gold bricks myself, or not knowingly?"
+
+"Ah, that is what you say! But do you suppose anybody will believe you?"
+
+The prominent author put on the hat which he flattered himself was a
+No. 7, but which we could plainly see was a No. 12, and said, with an
+air of patronizing compassion, "You have sat here so long in your
+cushioned comfort, looking out on the publishing world, that you have
+become corrupt, cynical, pessimistic."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH
+
+
+The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to some of its most valued
+friends was of the life after death, and it will not surprise any
+experienced observer to learn that the talk went on amid much unserious
+chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more appropriate to the pouring of
+champagne, and the changing of plates, than to the very solemn affair in
+hand. It may not really have been so very solemn. Nobody at table took
+the topic much to heart apparently. The women, some of them, affected an
+earnest attention, but were not uncheerful; others frankly talked of
+other things; some, at the farther end of the table, asked what a given
+speaker was saying; the men did not, in some cases, conceal that they
+were bored.
+
+"No," the first speaker said, after weighing the pros and cons, "for my
+part, I don't desire it. When I am through, here, I don't ask to begin
+again elsewhere."
+
+"And you don't expect to?" his closest listener inquired.
+
+"And I don't expect to."
+
+"It is curious," the closest listener went on, "how much our beliefs are
+governed by our wishes in this matter. When we are young and are still
+hungering for things to happen, we have a strong faith in immortality.
+When we are older, and the whole round of things, except death, has
+happened, we think it very likely we shall not live again. It seems to
+be the same with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old peoples
+doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be convinced, as a friend of
+mine has been convinced against the grain, of the reality of the life
+after death. I will not say by what means he was convinced, for that is
+not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to me:
+'Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that people do.
+The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are irresistible; and I
+have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to reject them.'"
+
+"Yes," the first speaker said, "that is certainly an uncommon
+experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy him
+his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don't."
+
+"No," the other rejoined, "I don't know that I accuse your sincerity.
+But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to immortality?"
+
+"It wouldn't be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not
+have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak
+truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a
+good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I
+have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes out
+of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of
+grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me enormously
+leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I can't trust
+immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances are
+that in the lapse of a few æons I should find eternity hanging heavy on
+my hands. But it isn't that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what
+my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what
+it _really_ is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I
+suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to
+another life, I have an acquired antipathy."
+
+"That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not inconceivable,"
+the closest listener assented.
+
+"I'm not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke his silence for the
+first time. "Do you mean to say," he asked of the first speaker, "that
+you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and
+that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?"
+
+The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied,
+and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, "Precisely."
+
+"Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 'instinct of death,'
+which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to
+when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty
+years or more, as they once did."
+
+"Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book?" the
+light skirmisher cut in.
+
+"He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and
+his book is called _The Nature of Man_."
+
+"That blighting book!" One of the women who had caught on to the drift
+of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.
+
+"Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker parleyed.
+
+"Don't you call it blighting," she returned, "to be told not only that
+you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape--we had got used to
+that--but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?"
+
+"Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher formulated the case.
+"We are merely apes in error."
+
+The closest listener put this playfulness by. "What seems to me a
+fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant
+fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we
+are badly made, and that there are all sorts of 'disharmonies,' as
+Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not
+all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or
+later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything,
+than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five
+times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an
+obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life
+here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy
+hereafter."
+
+"Well, I suppose," the first speaker said, "that Metchnikoff may err in
+his premises through a temperamental 'disharmony' of Russian nature
+rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors
+seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their
+readers which we don't recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends
+and neighbors. Other people don't think of death so much as he supposes,
+and when they do they don't dread it so much. But I think he is still
+more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less afraid of
+death than the old because they risk their lives more readily. That is
+not from indifference to death, it is from inexperience of life; they
+haven't learned yet the dangers which beset it and the old have; that is
+all."
+
+"I don't know but you're right," the first speaker said. "And I couldn't
+see the logic of Metchnikoff's position in regard to the 'instinct of
+death' which he expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a
+hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred and fifty we
+shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death after we die.
+The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we have not the
+instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. Then,
+until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we have the
+instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun death; lastly
+the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I
+don't see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, children dread
+death far more than men who are not yet old enough to have developed the
+instinct of it. Still, it's a fascinating and suggestive book."
+
+"But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living again
+which it takes away so pitilessly," said the woman who had followed the
+talk.
+
+"Is that such a very precious hope?" the first speaker asked.
+
+"I know you pretend not," she said, "but I don't believe you."
+
+"Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good end,
+are buoyed up by that hope?"
+
+"I don't see why they shouldn't be. I know it's the custom for
+scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely
+part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can't
+prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just
+as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?"
+
+"Ah," the light skirmisher put in, "some of the scientific people
+dispose of that point very simply. They say it's self-hypnotism."
+
+"Well, but they can't prove that, either," she retorted. Then she went
+on: "Besides, the dying are not almost universally willing to die.
+Sometimes they are very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling because
+they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn't it be just as reasonable
+to suppose that we could evolve the instinct of death by believing in
+the life hereafter as by living here a hundred and fifty years? For the
+present, it's as easy to do the one as the other."
+
+"But not for the future," the first speaker said. "As you suggest, it
+may be just as reasonable to think we can evolve the instinct of death
+by faith as by longevity, but it isn't as scientific."
+
+"What M. Metchnikoff wants is the scientific certainty--which we can
+have only by beginning to live a century and a half apiece--that the
+coming man will not be afraid to die." This, of course, was from the
+light skirmisher.
+
+The woman contended, "The coming man may be scientifically resigned if
+he prefers, but the going man, the _gone_ man, was rapturously ready to
+die, in untold thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed that he
+should live again."
+
+The first speaker smiled compassionately, and perhaps also a little
+patronizingly. "I'm not sure that you have met the point exactly.
+Metchnikoff denies, on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is
+possible for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two extremely
+interesting chapters of his, which treat of the 'Religious Remedies' and
+the 'Philosophical Remedies' for the 'disharmonies of the human
+constitution,' he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of the saints.
+The Christians and the Buddhists fare no worse than Plato and the
+Stoics; the last are no less unscientific than the first in his view,
+and no less fallacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned or
+enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physically desire it
+when we are tired of living, just as we physically desire sleep when we
+are tired of waking."
+
+"And to that end," the light skirmisher said, "he asks nothing but that
+we shall live a hundred and fifty years."
+
+"No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives that we shall die
+natural deaths, which are voluntary deaths. He contends that most of us
+now die accidental and violent deaths."
+
+The woman who had caught on demanded, "Why does he think we could live a
+century and a half?"
+
+"From analogies in the lives of other animals and from the facts of our
+constitution. He instances the remarkable cases of longevity recorded in
+the Bible."
+
+"I think he's very inconsistent," his pursuer continued. "The Bible says
+men lived anywhere from a hundred to nine hundred years, and he thinks
+it quite possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and he
+thinks that's impossible."
+
+"Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after death?" the first
+speaker asked.
+
+"No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years old? If it comes to
+undeniable proof there is far more proof of ghosts than of
+bicentenarians."
+
+"Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I don't believe in
+either."
+
+"And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch!" the light skirmisher reproached
+him. "You don't believe in the instinct of death! And I was just going
+to begin living to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily by leaving
+off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gorgonzola."
+
+Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the woman who had caught on;
+they both looked rather grave, and the closest listener left off
+laughing soonest.
+
+"We can't be too grateful to science for its devotion to truth. But
+isn't it possible for it to overlook one kind of truth in looking for
+another? Isn't it imaginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went
+wrong and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a soul, and as a
+slight compensation for having involuntarily degenerated from his
+anthropoid ancestor, came into the birthright of eternal life?"
+
+"It's imaginable," the first speaker granted. "But science leaves
+imagining things to religion and philosophy."
+
+"Ah, that's just where you're mistaken!" the woman who had caught on
+exclaimed. "Science does nothing but imagine things!"
+
+"Well, not quite," the light skirmisher mocked.
+
+She persisted unheeding: "First the suggestion from the mystical
+somewhere--the same _where_, probably, that music and pictures and
+poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the
+established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and
+knocks it over."
+
+"It would be very interesting if some one would proceed hypothetically
+concerning the soul and its immortality, as the scientific people do in
+their inquiries concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and
+the rest."
+
+"Yes," the light skirmisher agreed. "Why doesn't some fellow bet himself
+that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the proofs?"
+The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, and he
+launched a random inquiry upon the general silence. "By-the-way, I
+wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again than men, as a
+general thing."
+
+"Because they don't feel," one of them at table ventured, "that they
+have had a fair chance here."
+
+"Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn't had their say."
+
+"Is it quite certain," the closest listener asked, "that they _are_ more
+anxious to live again than men?" He looked round at the ladies present,
+and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they feared the men
+would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing than themselves
+for immortality.
+
+Finally the woman who had caught on said: "I don't know whether it's so
+or not; and I don't think it matters. But I don't mind saying that I
+long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don't think very much of
+myself; but I'm interested in living. Then"--she dropped her voice a
+little--"there are some I should like to see again. I have known
+people--characters--natures--that I can't believe are wasted. And those
+that were dear to us and that we have lost--"
+
+She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her with a compassion
+unalloyed by patronage, and did not ask, as he might, "What has all that
+to do with it?"
+
+In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole company. It was
+broken at last by the closest listener's saying: "After all, I don't
+know that Metchnikoff's book is so very blighting. It's certainly a very
+important book, and it produces a reaction which may be wholesome or
+unwholesome as you choose to think. And no matter what we believe, we
+must respect the honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a
+matter that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, perhaps. In all
+seriousness I wish some scientific man would apply the scientific method
+to finding out the soul, as you"--he turned to the light
+skirmisher--"suggest. Why shouldn't it be investigated?"
+
+Upon this invitation the light skirmisher tried to imagine some
+psychological experiments which should bear a certain analogy to those
+of the physicists, but he failed to keep the level of his suggestion.
+
+"As I said," the closest listener remarked, "he produces a secondary
+state of revolt which is desirable, for in that state we begin to
+inquire not only where we stand, but where _he_ stands."
+
+"And what is your conclusion as to his place in the inquiry?"
+
+"That it isn't different from yours or mine, really. We all share the
+illusion of the race from the beginning that somehow our opinion of the
+matter affects its reality. I should distinguish so far as to say that
+we think we believe, and he thinks he knows. For my own part, I have the
+impression that he has helped my belief."
+
+The light skirmisher made a desperate effort to retrieve himself: "Then
+a few more books like his would restore the age of faith."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE
+
+
+A number of the Easy Chair's friends were sitting round the fire in the
+library of a country-house. The room was large and full of a soft,
+flattering light. The fire was freshly kindled, and flashed and crackled
+with a young vivacity, letting its rays frolic over the serried bindings
+on the shelves, the glazed pictures on the walls, the cups of
+after-luncheon coffee in the hands of the people, and the tall jugs and
+pots in the tray left standing on the library table. It was summer, but
+a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else could come,
+and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a just
+self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the accidental
+assemblage of those people at that time and place.
+
+The talk was rather naturally, though not necessarily, of books, and one
+of the people was noting that children seemed to like short stories
+because their minds had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole
+book. The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not because a book did
+not interest them, but because it exhausted their little powers. They
+were good for a leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature, even
+very high literature, but they had not really the force for anything
+covering greater time and space.
+
+Another declared this very suggestive, and declared it in such a way
+that the whole company perceived he had something behind his words, and
+besought him to say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could, after
+protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, perhaps not very
+important, and if it was important, perhaps it was not true. They said
+they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a
+notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new
+reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile
+literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence
+but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth,
+but æsthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow
+into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they
+might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which
+should not be a travesty of the old fairy-tales, or stories of
+adventures among giants and robbers and pirates, or fables with human
+beings speaking from the motives and passions of animals. He mentioned
+fiction, he said, because the new reading of the new reading public
+seemed to be nearly altogether fiction.
+
+All this had so much the effect of philosophical analysis that those
+comfortable people were lulled into self-approving assent; and putting
+themselves altogether apart from the new reading public, they begged him
+to say what he meant. He answered that there was nothing more phenomenal
+in the modern American life; and he paid a pretty tribute to their
+ignorance in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing of that
+public. He promised that he would try to define it, and he began by
+remarking that it seemed to be largely composed of the kind of persons
+who at the theatre audibly interpret the action to one another. The
+present company must have heard them?
+
+His listeners again assented. Was the new reading public drawn from the
+theatre-going, or more definitely speaking, the matinée class?
+
+There was something odd, there, the philosopher returned. The matinée
+class was as large as ever: larger; while the new reading public,
+perfectly interchangeable with it in its intellectual pleasure and
+experiences, had suddenly outnumbered it a thousandfold. The popular
+novel and the popular play were so entirely of one fibre and texture,
+and so easily convertible, that a new novel was scarcely in every one's
+bread-trough before it was on the boards of all the theatres. This led
+some to believe that we were experiencing a revival of the drama, and
+that if we kept on having authors who sold half a million copies we
+could not help having a Shakespeare by-and-by: he must follow.
+
+One of those listening asked, But how had these people begun so
+instantaneously to form themselves into this new innumerable reading
+public? If they were of that quality of mind which requires the
+translation of an unmistakable meaning from the players to the
+playgoers, they must find themselves helpless when grappling in solitude
+with the sense of a book. Why did not they go increasingly to the
+theatre instead of turning so overwhelmingly to the printed word?
+
+The philosopher replied that they had not now begun to do this, but only
+seemed to have begun, since there really was no beginning in anything.
+The readers had always been in the immense majority, because they could
+read anywhere, and they could see plays only in the cities and towns. If
+the theatre were universal, undoubtedly they would prefer plays, because
+a play makes far less draft upon the mental capacities or energies than
+the silliest book; and what seemed their effort to interpret it to one
+another might very well be the exchange of their delight in it. The
+books they preferred were of the nature of poor plays, full of "easy
+things to understand," cheap, common incidents, obvious motives, and
+vulgar passions, such as had been used a thousand times over in
+literature. They were fitted for the new reading public for this reason;
+the constant repetition of the same characters, events, scenes, plots,
+gave their infantile minds the pleasure which children find in having a
+story told over and over in exactly the same terms. The new reading
+public would rebel against any variance, just as children do.
+
+The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at least were silent,
+but one of them made the speaker observe that he had not told them what
+this innumerable unreasoning multitude had read before the present
+plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had infested everybody's
+bread-trough.
+
+The philosopher said the actual interior form of non-literary literature
+was an effect of the thin spread of our literary culture, and outwardly
+was the effect of the thick spread of our material prosperity. The
+dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel of yesterday in an
+avatar which left its essence unchanged. It was even worse, for it was
+less sincerely and forcibly written, and it could not be so quickly worn
+out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, and binding gave it a
+claim to regard which could not be ignored, and established for it a
+sort of right to lie upon the table, and then stand upon the shelf,
+where it seemed to relate itself to genuine literature, and to be of the
+same race and lineage. As for this vast new reading public, it was the
+vast old reading public with more means in its pocket of satisfying its
+crude, childish taste. Its head was the same empty head.
+
+There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for a while no one
+spoke. Then some one tried in vain to turn the subject, while the
+philosopher smiled upon the desolation he had made; and then one of that
+sex which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its "sense of
+satisfaction ache" through the increase of conviction, asked him why the
+English reading public, which must be so much more cultivated than our
+new reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile effects in
+works of imagination, the stirring incidents, the well-worn plots, the
+primitive passions, and the robustious incentives. He owned the fact,
+but he contended that the fact, though interesting, was not so
+mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be explained that the
+English had never taken the imagination very seriously, and that in
+their dense, close civilization, packed tight with social, political,
+and material interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly excitement
+and amusement. They had not turned to it for edification or instruction,
+for that thrill of solemn joy which comes of vital truth profoundly seen
+and clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe besides turned her
+face to the light, some decades ago, in the pages of the great prose
+poets who made the age illustrious, England preferred the smoky links
+and dancing camp-fires which had pleased her immature fancy, and kept
+herself well in the twilight of the old ideal of imagination as the
+mother of unrealities. There could be no doubt, the philosopher thought,
+that the recrudescence which her best wits recognized as the effects of
+this perversity, was the origin of the preposterous fiction which we now
+feed to the new reading public, and which we think must somehow be right
+because it was hers and is ours, and has the sanction of race and
+tradition.
+
+It was not, he continued, a thing to shed the tear of unavailing regret
+for, though it was not a transitory phase, or a state of transition, for
+the condition that now existed had always existed. The new reading
+public was larger than ever before not merely because there was a fresh
+demand for reading, but because more people were lettered and moneyed
+and leisured, and did not know what otherwise to do with themselves. It
+was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted in itself than
+for an indirect result which might be feared from it. He paused at this,
+in order to be asked what this result was, and being promptly asked he
+went on.
+
+It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a calling, in the
+popular regard. He owned that in the past authorship had enjoyed too
+much honor in the reverence and affection of the world: not always,
+indeed, but at certain times. As long as authors were the clients and
+dependents of the great, they could not have been the objects of a
+general interest or honor. They had then passed the stage when the
+simple poet or story-teller was wont to
+
+                        --sit upon the ground,
+   And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,
+
+to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had not
+yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the peasantry,
+now turned people, and threw itself upon the people's generous
+acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that hour came,
+it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent curiosity
+concerning literature and the literary life, which the philosopher said
+he was afraid could not survive the actual superabundance of authors and
+the transformation of the novelist into the artisan. There seemed, he
+pursued, a fixed formula for the manufacture of a work of fiction, to be
+studied and practised like any other. Literature was degraded from an
+art to a poor sort of science, in the practical application of which
+thousands were seen prospering; for the immense output of our press
+represented the industry of hundreds and thousands. A book was
+concocted, according to a patent recipe, advertised, and sold like any
+other nostrum, and perhaps the time was already here when it was no
+longer more creditable to be known as the author of a popular novel than
+as the author of a popular medicine, a Pain-killer, a Soothing Syrup, a
+Vegetable Compound, a Horse Liniment, or a Germicide. Was it possible,
+he asked, for a reader of the last book selling a hundred thousand
+copies to stand in the loving or thrilling awe of the author that we
+used to feel for Longfellow and Tennyson, for Emerson and Carlyle, for
+Hawthorne and George Eliot, for Irving and Scott, or for any of their
+great elders or youngers? He repeated that perhaps authorship had worked
+its worshippers too hard, but there was no doubt that their worship was
+a genuine devotion. For at least a hundred and fifty years it had been
+eagerly offered in a full acceptance of the Schiller superstition that
+at the sharing of the earth the poet, representing authorship, had been
+so much preoccupied with higher things that he had left the fleshpots
+and the loaves and fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a
+share of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. From Goethe to Carlyle,
+what a long roll of gods, demigods, and demisemigods it was! It might
+have been bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather thought it
+was, but burning incense on the different shrines was an excellent thing
+for the votaries, and kept them out of all sorts of mischiefs, low
+pleasures, and vain amusements. Whether that was really so or not, the
+doubt remained whether authorship was not now a creed outworn. Did
+tender maids and virtuous matrons still cherish the hope of some day
+meeting their literary idols in the flesh? Did generous youth aspire to
+see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires teach their children
+that it was an epoch-making event when a great poet or novelist visited
+the country; or when they passed afar, did they whip some favored boy,
+as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped him at sight of a salamander
+in the fire that he might not forget the prodigy? Now that the earth had
+been divided over again, and the poet in his actual guise of novelist
+had richly shared in its goods with the farmer, the noble, the merchant,
+and the abbot, was it necessary or even fair that he should be the guest
+of heaven? In other words, now that every successful author could keep
+his automobile, did any one want his autograph?
+
+In the silence that fell upon the company at these words, the ticking of
+the clock under its classic pediment on the mantel was painfully
+audible, and had the effect of intimating that time now had its innings
+and eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes seemed to pass
+before any one had the courage to ask whether the degradation of
+authorship was not partially the result of the stand taken by the
+naturalists in Zola, who scorned the name of art for his calling and
+aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who suggested this
+possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to
+the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist,
+the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former times by the
+poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist
+of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the
+scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the pianist,
+the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor, and the
+architect, who still deigned to practise an art.
+
+The philosopher smiled, and owned that this was very interesting, and
+opened up a fresh field of inquiry. The first question there was whether
+the imaginative author were not rather to blame for not having gone far
+enough in the scientific direction in the right scientific fashion than
+for having taken that course at all. The famous reproach of poetry made
+by Huxley, that it was mostly "sensual caterwauling," might well have
+given the singer pause in striking the sympathetic catgut of his lyre:
+perhaps the strings were metallic; but no matter. The reproach had a
+justice in it that must have stung, and made the lyrist wish to be an
+atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that very moment science had,
+as it were, caught the bread out of fiction's mouth, and usurped the
+highest functions of imagination. In almost every direction of its
+recent advance it had made believe that such and such a thing was so,
+and then proceeded to prove it. To this method we owed not only the
+possession of our present happy abundance of microbes in every sort, but
+our knowledge of the universe in almost every respect. Science no longer
+waited for the apple to fall before inferring a law of gravitation, but
+went about with a stick knocking fruit off every bough in the hope that
+something suggestive would come of it. On make-believes of all kinds it
+based the edifices of all kinds of eternal veracities. It behooved
+poetry, or fiction, which was radically the same, to return to its
+earliest and simplest devices if it would find itself in the embrace of
+science, and practise the make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many
+there were chances of some coming true if they were carried far enough
+and long enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science had
+apparently been used in the art of advertising the works in which the
+appetite of the new reading public was flattered. The publishers had
+hypothesized from the fact of a population of seventy millions, the
+existence of an immense body of raw, coarse minds, untouched by taste or
+intelligence, and boldly addressed the new fiction to it. As in many
+suppositions of science their guess proved true.
+
+Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken before inquired, was not
+make-believe the right method for the author, if it was the right method
+for the scientist and the publisher? Why should not the novelist
+hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and then go on by
+persistent study to find them true? It seemed to this inquirer that the
+mistake of fiction, when it refused longer to be called an art and
+wished to be known as a science, was in taking up the obsolescent
+scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, or human documents, and
+deducing a case from them, instead of boldly supposing a case, as the
+new science did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it.
+
+The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very thing he was contending
+for. The documents should be collected in support of the hypothesis; the
+hypothesis should not be based on documents already collected. First the
+inference, then the fact; was not that the new scientific way? It looked
+like it; and it seemed as if the favorite literature of the new reading
+public were quite in the spirit of the new science. Its bold events, its
+prodigious characters, its incredible motives, were not they quite of
+the nature of the fearless conjecture which imagined long and short
+electric waves and then spread a mesh of wire to intercept them and
+seize their message?
+
+The hardy inquirer demanded: Then if so, why despise the literature of
+the new reading public? Why despise the new reading public, anyway?
+
+The philosopher responded that he despised nothing, not even a thing so
+unphilosophical as modern science. He merely wished his interpellant to
+observe again that the unification of the literary spirit and the
+scientific spirit was degrading the literary man to the level of the
+scientific man. He thought this was bad for the small remnant of
+mankind, who in default of their former idolatry might take to the
+worship of themselves. Now, however bad a writer might be, it was always
+well for the reader to believe him better than himself. If we had not
+been brought up in this superstition, what would have become of the
+classics of all tongues? But for this, what was to prevent the present
+company from making a clearance of three-fourths of the surrounding
+shelves and feeding that dying flame on the hearth?
+
+At this the host, who had been keeping himself in a modest abeyance,
+came forward and put some sticks on the fire. He said he would like to
+see any one touch his bindings; which seemed to be his notion of books.
+Nobody minded him; but one of those dutyolators, who abound in a certain
+sex, asked the philosopher what he thought we ought to do for the
+maintenance of author-worship among us.
+
+He answered, he had not thought of that; his mind had been fixed upon
+the fact of its decay. But perhaps something could be done by looking up
+the author whose book had sold least during the season, and asking him
+candidly whether he would not like to be paid the divine honors now
+going begging from one big seller to another; for the decay of
+author-worship must be as much from the indifference of the authors as
+from the irreverence of the readers. If such a low-selling author did
+not seem to regard it as rather invidious, then pay him the divine
+honors; it might be a wholesome and stimulating example; but perhaps we
+should afterward have the demigod on our hands. Something might be
+safelier done by writing, as with the present company, and inquiring
+into "the present condition of polite learning." This would keep the
+sacred flame alive, and give us the comfort of refined association in an
+exquisite moment of joy from the sense of our superiority to other
+people. That, after all, was the great thing.
+
+The company drew a little closer round the fire. The rain beat upon the
+panes, and the wind swept the wet leaves against them, while each
+exhaled a sigh of aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM
+
+
+The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of that strange passion for
+reading which has of late possessed the public, and the contagion or
+infection by which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never read
+before; and then the talk was of how this prodigious force might be
+controlled and turned in the right way: not suffered to run to waste
+like water over the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon wheels
+that turn the mills of the gods or something like that. There were, of
+course, a great many words; in fact, talk is composed of words, and the
+people at that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, and
+they did not mind how many words they used. But the sum of their words
+was the hope, after a due season of despair, that the present passion
+for reading might be made to eventuate in more civilization than it
+seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to good literature,
+supposing it was ever there in great strength, and the question was how
+to do this.
+
+One of the company said he had lately been reading a good many books of
+Leigh Hunt's, and after everybody had interrupted with "Delightful!"
+"Perfectly charming!" and the like, he went on to observe that one of
+the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in quotation. That, he
+remarked, was almost a lost art with critics, who had got to thinking
+that they could tell better what an author was than the author himself
+could. Like every other power disused, the power of apt quotation had
+died, and there were very few critics now who knew how to quote: not one
+knew, as Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the great
+quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps overworked their
+gift, and might have been justly accused, as they certainly were
+accused, of misleading the reader and making him think that the poets,
+whose best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so that they
+could not be missed, were as good throughout as in the passages given.
+It was this sense of having abused innocence, or ignorance, which led to
+the present reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the present reaction
+was an error. Suppose that the poets whose best was given by quotation
+were not altogether as good as that? The critics never pretended they
+were; they were merely showing how very good these poets could be, and
+at the same time offering a delicate pleasure to the reader, who could
+not complain that his digestion was overtaxed by the choice morsels. If
+his pleasure in them prompted him to go to the entire poet quoted, in
+the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the reader was rightly served
+in one sense. In another, he was certainly not misserved or his time
+wasted. It would be hard for him to prove that he could have employed it
+more profitably.
+
+Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had the eye and ear of
+the table went on to remark that he had not meant to make a defence of
+the extinct school of quotational criticism. What he really meant to do
+was to suggest a way out of the present situation in which the new
+multitude of voracious readers were grossly feeding upon such
+intellectual husks as swine would not eat, and imagining themselves
+nourished by their fodder. There might be some person present who could
+improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as he conceived it, was
+that something might be done in the line of quotational criticism to
+restore the great poets to the public favor, for he understood that good
+authors were now proportionately less read than they once were. He
+thought that a pity: and the rest of the company joined in asking him
+how he proposed to employ the quotational method for his purpose.
+
+In answering he said that he would not go outside of the English
+classics, and he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of
+these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that
+mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less
+familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
+Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
+Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to
+the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring
+about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy,
+he would have each of these poets treated in the whole measure of his
+work as many or most of them had been topically or partially treated by
+the quotational critics. Some one here made him observe that he was
+laying out rather a large piece of work, and to this he answered, Not at
+all; the work had been already done. Asked then, somewhat derisively,
+why it need be done over again, he explained, with a modesty and
+patience which restored him to the regard he had lost by the derision
+(all had impartially united in it), that though the work had already
+been done, there needed some slight additions to it which would easily
+fit it to his purpose. He was not thinking of going in for one of those
+dreadful series of books which seemed the dismay alike of publisher and
+reader, and required rewriting of matter more than enough rewritten. In
+fact, he said, that for his purpose the writing was done fully and
+probably better than it could be done again, and it was only the reading
+and quoting that demanded editorial attention.
+
+Another said he did not see how that could be, and the inventor of the
+brave scheme, which was still _in petto_, said that he would try to show
+him. We had, he contended, only too great riches in the criticisms of
+the poets open to our choice, but suppose we took Spenser and let Lowell
+introduce him to us. There would be needed a very brief biographical
+note, and then some able hand to intersperse the criticism with passages
+from Spenser, or with amplifications of the existing quotations, such as
+would give a full notion of the poet's scope and quality. The story of
+each of his poems could be given in a few words, where the poems
+themselves could not be given even in part, and with the constant help
+of the critic the reader could be possessed of a luminous idea of the
+poet, such as he probably could not get by going to him direct, though
+this was not to be deprecated, but encouraged, after the preparatory
+acquaintance. The explanatory and illustrative passages could be
+interpolated in the text of the criticism without interrupting the
+critic, and something for Spenser might thus be done on the scale of
+what Addison did for Milton. It was known how those successive papers in
+the _Spectator_ had rehabilitated one of the greatest English poets, or,
+rather, rehabilitated the English public, and restored the poet and the
+public to each other. They formed almost an ideal body of criticism, and
+if they did not embody all that the reader need know of Milton, they
+embodied so much that he could no longer feel himself ignorant of
+Milton. In fact, they possessed him of a high degree of Miltonian
+culture, which was what one wanted to have with respect to any poet.
+They might be extended with still greater quotation, and if something
+more yet were needed the essay on Milton which made Macaulay's
+reputation might be employed as a vessel to catch the overrunnings of
+the precious ichor.
+
+Who could not wish to know the poetry of Keats as we already knew his
+life through the matchless essay of Lowell? That might be filled out
+with the most striking passages of his poetry, simply let in at
+appropriate places, without breaking the flow of that high discourse,
+and forming a rich accompaniment which could leave no reader unpleasured
+or uninstructed. The passages given from the poet need not be relevant
+to the text of the critic; they might be quite irrelevant and serve the
+imaginable end still better. For instance, some passages might be given
+in the teeth of the critic, and made to gainsay what he had been saying.
+This would probably send the reader, if he was very much perplexed, to
+the poet himself, which was the imaginable end. He might be disappointed
+one way or he might be disappointed the other way, but in the mean while
+he would have passed his time, and he would have instructed if he had
+not amused himself.
+
+It would be very interesting to take such a criticism as that of Lowell
+on Dryden and give not only the fine things from him, but the things
+that counted for the critic in his interesting contention that Dryden
+failed of being a prime poet because of the great weight of prose in
+him, and very good prose; or, as the critic charmingly put it, he had
+wings that helped him run along the ground, but did not enable him to
+fly. It would be most valuable for us to see how Dryden was a great
+literary man, but not one of the greatest poets, and yet must be ranked
+as a great poet. If the balance inclined now toward this opinion, and
+now against it, very possibly the reader would find himself impelled to
+turn to the poet's work, and again the imaginable end would be served.
+
+A listener here asked why the talker went chiefly to Lowell for the
+illustration of his theory, and was frankly answered, For the same
+reason that he had first alluded to Leigh Hunt: because he had lately
+been reading him. It was not because he had not read any other
+criticism, or not that he entirely admired Lowell's; in fact, he often
+found fault with that. Lowell was too much a poet to be a perfect
+critic. He was no more the greatest sort of critic than Dryden was the
+greatest sort of poet. To turn his figure round, he had wings that
+lifted him into the air when he ought to be running along the ground.
+
+The company laughed civilly at this piece of luck, and then they asked,
+civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had not done for a great many poets just
+what he was proposing to have done. What about the treatment of the
+poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on _Wit and Humor,
+Imagination and Fancy_, _A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla_, and the rest?
+The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to
+his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and
+fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than
+representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt's
+stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would
+have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was
+not prepared to answer for them.
+
+One of the company said that she had read those Italian poets in Leigh
+Hunt's version of them when she was a girl, and it had had the effect of
+making her think she had read the poets themselves, and she had not
+since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. She regarded
+that as an irreparable injury, and she doubted whether, if the great
+English poets could be introduced in that manner, very many people would
+pursue their acquaintance for themselves. They would think they were
+familiar with them already.
+
+Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, but it was not; or,
+at least, it was only part of the scheme. The scheme was to give the
+ever-increasing multitude of readers a chance to know something of the
+best literature. If they chose to pursue the acquaintance, very good; if
+they chose not to pursue the acquaintance, still very good; they could
+not have made it at all without being somewhat refined and enlightened.
+He felt very much about it as he felt about seeing Europe, which some
+people left unseen because they could not give all the time to it they
+would like. He always said to such people, Go if they could only be gone
+a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, was a treasure such as a
+lifetime at home could not lay up; an hour of Venice or Florence was
+precious; a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or Mantua, was beyond
+price. So you could not know a great poet so little as not to be
+enriched by him. A look from a beautiful woman, or a witty word from a
+wise one, distinguished and embellished the life into which it fell, so
+that it could never afterward be so common as it was before.
+
+Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the ladies tried to think
+whether the speaker had her in mind or not, and whether he ought really
+to be so personal, why could not Mr. Morley's _English Men of Letters_
+series be used to carry out the scheme proposed; and its proposer said
+he had nothing to say against that, except perhaps that the frames might
+be too much for the pictures. He would rather choose a critical essay,
+as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in this sort of
+thing we had an endless choice, both new and old. If he had any
+preference it would be for the older-fashioned critics, like Hazlitt or
+perhaps like De Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without the book,
+whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, but he had the
+sense of wonderful things in him about the eighteenth-century poets:
+things that made you think you knew them, and that yet made you burn to
+be on the same intimate terms with them as De Quincey himself.
+
+His method of knowing the poets through the critics, the sympathetic
+critics, who were the only real critics, would have the advantage of
+acquainting the reader with the critics as well as the poets. The
+critics got a good deal of ingratitude from the reader generally, and
+perhaps in their character of mere reviewers they got no more than they
+merited, but in their friendly function of ushers to the good things,
+even the best things, in the authors they were studying, they had a
+claim upon him which he could not requite too generously. They acted the
+part of real friends, and in the high company where the reader found
+himself strange and alone, they hospitably made him at home. Above all
+other kinds of writers, they made one feel that he was uttering the good
+things they said. Of course, for the young reader, there was the danger
+of his continuing always to think their thoughts in their terms, but
+there were also great chances that he would begin by-and-by to think
+his own thoughts in terms of his own.
+
+The more quotational the critics were, the better. For himself the
+speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest
+things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had
+not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but it
+was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great beauty
+pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one
+does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of
+puzzling it out; sometimes he never sees it, and then his life is
+sublimed with an insoluble conundrum. Sometimes, still, he sees what the
+critic means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is not likely to
+go to the end of his journey without finding a critic whom he agrees
+with about the passage in question.
+
+After all, however, it was asked by one that had not spoken before (with
+that fine air of saying a novel thing which people put on who have not
+spoken before), would not the superficial knowledge of the poets
+imparted by quotational criticism result in a sort of pseudo-culture
+which would be rather worse than nothing, a kind of intellectual plated
+ware or æsthetic near-silk?
+
+The talker said he thought not, and that he had already touched upon
+some such point in what he had said about going to Europe for a few
+months. He offered the opinion that there was no such thing as
+pseudo-culture; there was culture or there was not; and the reader of a
+quotational criticism, if he enjoyed the quotations, became, so far,
+cultivated. It could not be said that he knew the poets treated of, but
+neither could it be said that he was quite ignorant of them. As a
+matter of fact, he did know them in a fashion, through a mind larger and
+clearer than his own.
+
+For this reason the talker favored the reading of criticism, especially
+the kind of criticism that quoted. He would even go so far as to say
+that there was no just and honest criticism without quotation. The
+critic was bound to make out his case, or else abdicate his function,
+and he could not make out his case, either for or against an author,
+without calling him to testify. Therefore, he was in favor of
+quotational criticism, for fairness' sake, as well as for his pleasure;
+and it was for the extension of it that he now contended. He was not
+sure that he wished to send the reader to the authors quoted in all
+cases. The reader could get through the passages cited a pretty good
+notion of the authors' quality, and as for their quantity, that was
+often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the case of the old poets,
+and most of the English classics, there was a great deal of filth which
+the reader would be better for not taking into his mind and which the
+most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer him. If any one
+said that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of those
+authors, he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that without
+the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of themselves,
+yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their
+dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them
+from living at periods when manners were foul.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+READING FOR A GRANDFATHER
+
+
+A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had the
+real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a Christmas
+present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She thought,
+only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the finest cigars,
+of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling
+embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house
+shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did not
+smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he went
+to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her grandmother,
+very short and very scant (according to her notion at the chance moments
+when she had surprised him in it), from which neither love nor money
+could part him; the others she rejected for the reason already assigned.
+Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, and she was
+glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected,
+she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at
+least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it.
+As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over
+again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world
+of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about
+books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across the
+afternoon tea-cups whether she had seen this or that new book, and
+scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact
+that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the
+person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old
+gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she
+plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would
+delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to
+inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those new books.
+
+"Now, grandfather," she began, "you know I always give you a Christmas
+present."
+
+"Yes, my dear," the old gentleman patiently assented, "I know you do.
+You are very thoughtful."
+
+"Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being thoughtful. What I
+like is being spontaneous."
+
+"Well, then, my dear, I don't mind saying you are very spontaneous."
+
+"And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make a lasting enemy of
+me, let him surprise me. So I am going to tell you now what I am going
+to give you. Do you like that?"
+
+"I like everything you do, my child."
+
+"Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I am going to give
+you books. And in order not to disappoint you by giving you books that
+you have read before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you mind
+it?"
+
+"Oh no, but I'm afraid you won't find me very frank."
+
+"I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there is no fun in not
+surprising you, or in not giving you books that you have read."
+
+"There is something in that," her grandfather assented. "But now,
+instead of finding out what I have read, or what I like, why not tell me
+what I ought to read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of
+advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn't the girls turn the
+tables and advise their elders? I often feel the need of advice from
+girls on all sorts of subjects, and you would find me very grateful, I
+believe."
+
+The girl's eyes sparkled and then softened toward this docile ancestor.
+"Do you really mean it, grandfather? It would be fun if you did."
+
+"But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I should be glad if your
+good counsel could include the whole conduct of life, for I am sensible
+sometimes of a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am sure you
+could help me to combat."
+
+"Oh, grandfather," said the girl, tenderly, "you know that isn't true!"
+
+"Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn't. My difficulty in
+regard to reading remains, and there you certainly could help me. At
+moments it seems to me that I have come to the end of my line."
+
+The old gentleman's voice fell, and she could no longer suspect him of
+joking. So she began, "Why, what have you been reading last?"
+
+"Well, my dear, I have been looking into the _Spectator_ a little."
+
+"The London _Spectator_? Jim says they have it at the club, and he
+swears by it. But I mean, what books; and that's a weekly newspaper, or
+a kind of review, isn't it?"
+
+"The _Spectator_ I mean was a London newspaper, and it was a kind of
+review, but it was a daily. Is it possible that you've never heard of
+it?" The young girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully, but upon
+the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any important thing in
+literature had escaped her. "But you've heard of Addison, and Steele,
+and Pope, and Swift?"
+
+"Oh yes, we had them at school, when we were reading _Henry Esmond_;
+they all came into that. And I remember, now: Colonel Esmond wrote a
+number of the _Spectator_ for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought it
+was all a make-up."
+
+"And you don't know about Sir Roger de Coverley?"
+
+"Of course I do! It's what the English call the Virginia Reel. But why
+do you ask? I thought we were talking about your reading. I don't see
+how you could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it amuses
+you! _Is_ it so amusing?"
+
+"It's charming, but after one has read it as often as I have one begins
+to know it a little too well."
+
+"Yes; and what else have you been reading?"
+
+"Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues the old essayist
+tradition, and he is gently delightful."
+
+"Never heard of him!" the girl frankly declared.
+
+"He was a poet, too, and he wrote the _Story of Rimini_--about Paolo and
+Francesca, you know."
+
+"Oh, there you're away off, grandfather! Mr. Philips wrote about _them_;
+and that horrid D'Annunzio. Why, Duse gave D'Annunzio's play last
+winter! What are you thinking of?"
+
+"Perhaps I am wandering a little," the grandfather meekly submitted, and
+the girl had to make him go on.
+
+"Do you read poetry a great deal?" she asked, and she thought if his
+taste was mainly for poetry, it would simplify the difficulty of
+choosing the books for her present.
+
+"Well, I'm rather returning to it. I've been looking into Crabbe of
+late, and I have found him full of a quaint charm."
+
+"Crabbe? I never heard of him!" she owned as boldly as before, for if he
+had been worth hearing of, she knew that she would have heard of him.
+"Don't you like Kipling?"
+
+"Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer William Watson among your
+very modern moderns."
+
+"Why, is _he_ living yet? I thought he wrote ten or fifteen years ago!
+You don't call _him_ modern! You like Stevenson, don't you? He's a great
+stylist; everybody says he is, and so is George Meredith. You must like
+_him_?"
+
+"He's a great intellect, but a little of him goes almost as long a way
+as a little of Browning. I think I prefer Henry James."
+
+"Oh yes, he's just coming up. He's the one that has distinction. But the
+people who write _like_ him are a great deal more popular. They have all
+his distinction, and they don't tax your mind so much. But don't let's
+get off on novelists or there's no end to it. Who are really your
+favorite poets?"
+
+"Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read Dante by fits and
+starts; and I do not mind Milton from time to time. I like Wordsworth,
+and I like Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take up
+Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself going back to Pope with
+real relish. And Byron; yes, Byron! But I shouldn't advise your reading
+_Don Juan_."
+
+"That's an opera, isn't it? What they call 'Don Giovanni.' I never heard
+of any such poem."
+
+"That shows how careful you have been of your reading."
+
+"Oh, we read everything nowadays--if it's up to date; and if _Don Juan_
+had been, you may be sure I would have heard of it. I suppose you like
+Tennyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those _old_ poets?"
+
+"Are they old? They used to be so new! Yes, I like them, and I like
+Whittier and some things of Bryant's."
+
+At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she said: "Oh yes, I
+suppose so. And I suppose you like the old dramatists?"
+
+"Some of them--Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their plays.
+But I can't stand most of the Elizabethans; I can't stand Ben Jonson at
+all."
+
+"Oh yes--'Rasselas.' I can't stand him either, grandfather. I'm quite
+with you about Ben Jonson. 'Too much Johnson,' you know."
+
+The grandfather looked rather blank. "Too _different_ Johnsons, I think,
+my dear. But perhaps you didn't mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean
+the dramatists of the other Johnson's time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty
+well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer
+Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his _Vicar of Wakefield_, and his poems
+to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very
+best. Shakespeare's are the only plays that one _wants_ to read."
+
+The young girl held up her charming chin, with the air of keeping it
+above water too deep for her. "And Ibsen?" she suggested. "I hope you
+despise Ibsen as much as I do. He's clear gone out now, thank goodness!
+Don't you think _Ghosts_ was horrid?"
+
+"It's dreadful, my dear; but I shouldn't say it was horrid. No, I don't
+despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero's plays good reading."
+
+"Oh," the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. "'The Gay Lord
+Quex'; Miss Vanbrugh was _great_ in that. But now don't get off on the
+theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the old,
+_old_ poets--before Burns or Shelley even--do you like?"
+
+"Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked him very much; and
+the other day when I was looking over Leigh Hunt's essays, I found a
+number of them about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I
+don't know when I've found greater pleasure in poetry. If I must have a
+favorite among the old poets, I will take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser is
+rather more modern."
+
+"Yes, but I can't bear his agnosticism, can you? And I hate metaphysics,
+anyway."
+
+The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, "Now, I'm afraid we are
+getting too much Spenser."
+
+The girl went off at a tangent. "Don't you just _love_ Mr. Gillette in
+'Sherlock Holmes'? There's a play I should think you would like to read!
+They say there's a novel been made out of it. I wish I could get hold of
+it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!"
+
+"No, my dear, it's for you to go on. But don't you think you've
+catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very
+old-fashioned."
+
+"No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always laughing
+at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and
+Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I should
+say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in fiction,
+grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels."
+
+"Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I----"
+
+"Tell me what novels you have read," she broke in upon him
+imperatively. "The ones you consider the greatest."
+
+The grandfather had to think. "It is rather a long list--so long that
+I'm ashamed of it. Perhaps I'd better mention only the very greatest,
+like _Don Quixote_, and _Gil Blas_, and _Wilhelm Meister_, and _The
+Vicar of Wakefield_, and _Clarissa Harlowe_, and _Emma_, and _Pride and
+Prejudice_, and _The Bride of Lammermoor_, and _I Promessi Sposi_, and
+_Belinda_, and _Frankenstein_, and _Chartreuse de Parme_, and _César
+Birotteau_, and _The Last Days of Pompeii_, and _David Copperfield_, and
+_Pendennis_, and _The Scarlet Letter_, and _Blithedale Romance_, and
+_The Cloister and the Hearth_, and _Middlemarch_, and _Smoke_, and
+_Fathers and Sons_, and _A Nest of Nobles_, and _War and Peace_, and
+_Anna Karénina_, and _Resurrection_, and _Dona Perfecta_, and _Marta y
+Maria_, and _I Malavoglia_, and _The Return of the Native_, and
+_L'Assomoir_, and _Madame Bovary_, and _The Awkward Age_, and _The
+Grandissimes_--and most of the other books of the same authors. Of
+course, I've read many more perhaps as great as these, that I can't
+think of at the moment."
+
+The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile ancestor
+in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of which she
+did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she believed to
+be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply moralized,
+denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or the authors.
+Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession which his
+reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than ever the
+necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his reform, in
+respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give him books
+for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas for good
+resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn over a new
+leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it.
+
+She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm him too much, and
+said she had never been so much interested as in knowing what books he
+really liked. But as he had read all those he named--
+
+"Oh, dozens of times!" he broke in.
+
+--Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an entirely new list
+for him, so that he could have something freshly entertaining; she did
+not like to say more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and
+taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed him on his bald
+head and ran away to take the matter under immediate advisement. Her
+notion then was to look over several lists of the world's best hundred
+books which she had been keeping by her, but when she came to compare
+them, she found that they contained most of the books he had mentioned,
+besides many others. It would never do to give him any one of these
+libraries of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the reason
+that a hundred books would cost more of her grandfather's money than she
+felt justified in spending on him at a season when she had to make so
+many other presents.
+
+Just when she was at her wit's end, a sudden inspiration seized her. She
+pinned on her hat, and put on her new winter jacket, and went out and
+bought the last number of _The Bookworm_. At the end of this periodical
+she had often got suggestions for her own reading, and she was sure that
+she should find there the means of helping her poor grandfather to a
+better taste in literature than he seemed to have. So she took the
+different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Cincinnati, New
+Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and up-town and
+down-town in New York, giving the best-selling books of the month in all
+those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them, which she gave to
+her bookseller with orders to get them as nearly of the same sizes and
+colors as possible. He followed her instructions with a great deal of
+taste and allowed her twenty-five per cent. off, which she applied
+toward a wedding-present she would have to give shortly. In this way she
+was able to provide her grandfather for the new year with reading that
+everybody was talking about, and that brought him up to date with a
+round turn.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE
+
+
+Among the many letters which the Easy Chair has received after its
+conference on the state of poetry, one of most decided note was from a
+writer confessing herself of the contrary-minded. "I love some children,
+but not childhood in general merely because it is childhood. So I love
+some poems rather than poetry in general just because it is poetry.... I
+object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a
+Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete
+thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain,
+there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious
+effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do
+this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms
+in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life
+and more or less the common thought of the day, then more of the common
+people will read it."
+
+There were other things in this letter which seemed to us of so much
+importance that we submitted it as a whole to a Woman's Club of our
+acquaintance. The nine ladies composing the club were not all literary,
+but they were all of æsthetic pursuits, and together they brought a good
+deal of culture to bear on the main points of the letter. They were not
+quite of one mind, but they were so far agreed that what they had to say
+might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We will not attempt
+to report their remarks at any length--they ran to all lengths--but in
+offering a résumé of what they variously said to a sole effect, we will
+do what we can to further the cause they joined in defending.
+
+The Muses--for we will no longer conceal that this Woman's Club was
+composed of the tuneful Nine--acknowledged that there was a great deal
+in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one
+bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her
+place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in
+all its established forms, they thought themselves bound to direct her
+attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had apparently
+overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to take her own
+part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it _was_ ridiculous for
+poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it apart and put it
+together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or
+in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses
+wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention,
+or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you
+looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest
+thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance,
+there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of
+shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and
+singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and trills, or
+even expressing yourself in _recitativo secco_, it would simply set
+people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had to make
+believe that things two inches high were life-size, and that there were
+relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that
+colors which were really like nothing in nature were natural. As for
+sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether you took it in
+bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or three-quarters out,
+or in groups with people in eternal action; or in single figures,
+standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if they were
+not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors bareheaded where
+they would take their deaths of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up
+rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without a
+stitch of clothes on.
+
+All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the
+contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so
+handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to them
+perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of poetry
+_not_ to conform to "the mental tone and spirit of the times"; and
+though it might very well reflect the life, it must not reflect "the
+common thought of the day" upon pain of vulgarizing and annulling
+itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its business was the
+interpretation of enduring beauty and eternal veracity. If it stooped in
+submission to any such expectation as that expressed, and dedicated
+itself to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions and
+opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had its law, and its
+law was distinction of ideal and elevation of tendency, no matter what
+material it dealt with. It might deal with the commonest, the cheapest
+material, but always in such a way as to dignify and beautify the
+material.
+
+Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge all
+those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty
+syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the
+ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what
+our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as
+nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it
+certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its
+true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun;
+shunning those silly elisions like _ne'er_ and _o'er_, and, above all,
+avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite article. Of the
+tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded sister meant the
+rhyme, they said they could very well remember when there was no such
+thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on perfectly well without
+it, and even those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that
+though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their
+greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns
+managed very well with blank verse.
+
+The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both because
+they were really great authorities and because it is always best to
+agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite
+the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view of their
+sister's contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In short, the
+Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very intimate occasion
+as this, when it could impart them without wounding the susceptibilities
+of others, or risking a painful snub for itself. But it appeared to the
+Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough in justifying the
+convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. They
+could easily have proved that much of the mystical charm which
+differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its syntactical
+acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a
+man inverting his head and looking at the landscape between his legs
+gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so literature
+forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really achieves something
+richly strange by the novel and surprising postures permissible in
+verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps lingering
+in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually full of these
+licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little proved as
+denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly to
+the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which is a sort
+of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him.
+
+While the ladies of that club were talking, some such thoughts as these
+were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear, delightful
+poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again
+wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is proof, indeed,
+how shallow was all the debate about realism and romanticism that the
+poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the
+charm which truth to condition and character has, in whatever form. But
+once, long before that ineffectual clamor arose, he was valued as he
+should be still. Edmund Burke was the first to understand his purpose
+and appreciate his work. He helped the poet not only with praises but
+with pounds till he could get upon his feet. He introduced Crabbe's
+verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once
+that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the
+brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose oaths were
+harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young singer. The
+sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best followed him through
+his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox loved him and his rhyme,
+and wished his tales to be read to him on the bed he never left alive.
+Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him letters of
+cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, the magnanimous, hailed him
+brother, and would always have his books by him; none of his poems
+appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and
+applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day.
+
+Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was
+accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple
+and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in
+pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but
+everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of
+persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the
+actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These
+tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute
+directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean,
+the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in
+some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound
+in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis,
+sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the
+name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected
+singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.
+
+Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these
+finished pictures, which so perfectly "reflect the common life ... of
+the day," are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of
+verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul
+abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in
+which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it
+often had before; and he made it go as like Pope's couplet as he could,
+with the same cæsura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of
+rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each
+couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in
+their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe's
+impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in
+English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the
+outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the
+quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is
+the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how
+largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing
+itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The
+demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the
+sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the
+process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the
+mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English
+mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of
+the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home
+as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that
+travel is the fool's paradise. For such a person to realize anything the
+terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a
+period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must
+first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that;
+any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a
+test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which
+is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked
+civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than
+it has worried along with hitherto.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK
+
+
+They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to
+distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too
+obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were
+actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over
+and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree
+before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye
+for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair
+perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly
+felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late.
+As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate
+pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their
+fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have
+seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion
+suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was
+not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then
+say: "No, they don't want us any more. I don't understand why; it is
+very strange; but it is perfectly certain."
+
+"Yes, there's no doubt of that," the young man returned, in a despair
+tinged with resentment.
+
+She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both tastefully
+dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal
+qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it
+promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest
+self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or
+worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed
+father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful
+aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she
+shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or
+she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and
+sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true
+beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or
+business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college
+or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in
+them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average
+which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of
+civilized life yet known.
+
+"I sometimes think," the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion,
+"that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It's a great
+disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as
+I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had
+been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I
+shouldn't have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily
+married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the
+story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to
+be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven't been in a short story for
+ages."
+
+"Is it so bad as that?" the young man asked, sadly.
+
+"Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know
+lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can't do anything
+wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period,
+because I'm so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I've
+always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don't believe that I
+should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should
+be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don't think
+I'm very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an
+author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his
+readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessary,
+and, if I didn't like to live in England because I was fond of my own
+country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time with me;
+and that would appeal to a large class. I don't know whether I would
+care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was from.
+But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it
+came to anything like right or wrong I should act conscientiously. In
+society, I shouldn't mind any amount of dancing or dining or teaing, and
+I should be willing to take my part in the lighter athletics. But," she
+ended, as she began, with a sigh, "I'm not wanted."
+
+"Yes, I see what you mean," the young man said, with a thoughtful knot
+between his brows. "I'm not wanted myself, at present, in the short
+stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I
+certainly didn't meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a
+story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of
+course, a hero is only something in an author's fancy, and I've no right
+to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who ropes
+cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of the
+kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can't forget that I'm a
+gentleman, and it's difficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her
+makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like it
+themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way. They're
+generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have
+married lady-like girls and wouldn't think of associating with a shady
+or ignorant person."
+
+"The authoresses are quite as inconsistent," the professional heroine
+rejoined. "They wouldn't speak to the kind of young men whom they expect
+a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know how very oddly
+a girl feels about people who are outside of the world she's been
+brought up in. It isn't enough that a man should be very noble at heart
+and do grand things, or save your life every now and then, or be
+masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with him. I don't
+see why they can't let one have, now and then, the kind of husbands they
+get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to give my heart
+to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable man who could
+offer me a pleasant home--I wouldn't mind the suburbs; and I could work
+with him and work for him till I dropped--the kind of man that the real
+world seems to be so full of. I've never had a fair chance to show what
+was in me; I've always been placed in such a false position. Now I have
+no position at all, not even a false one!"
+
+Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: "Yes, they all seem,
+authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the
+constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more
+poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions
+and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can
+have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won't avail
+themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad
+for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the
+chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives,
+morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As
+I said before, I know I'm only a creature of the storyteller's fancy,
+and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a
+good moment--I'm sure _you_ were--and I should like an engagement in an
+honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it."
+
+"I _know_ you could," the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly,
+so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary
+_rapprochement_ of their shadowy substances on the bench where they
+floated in a sitting posture. "I don't want to be greedy; I believe in
+living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right
+to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out
+altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether
+they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they
+know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its
+average in their fiction. It's impossible for us to change--"
+
+"I shouldn't wish _you_ to change," the hero said, so fondly that the
+witness trembled for something more demonstrative.
+
+"Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn't _they_ change a little?
+Couldn't they give us another trial? They've been using the abnormal, in
+some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero
+and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a
+house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each
+other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and
+happiness, till they got married--a relief from, well, the other thing.
+I'm sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive
+to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty."
+
+"You would have more than the charm of novelty," the hero said, and the
+witness trembled again for the _convenances_ which one so often sees
+offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these
+young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of
+misbehavior. "And for a time, at least, I believe you--I believe _we_,
+for I must necessarily be engaged with you--would succeed. The
+difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors."
+It was on the listener's tongue to say that he thought he could manage
+that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, "But they would
+say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever
+having a run."
+
+A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this
+engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word.
+"No, no!" he conjured them. "_Not_ commonplace. A judicious paragraph
+anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could
+be hailed as the _normal_ hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful
+relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short
+story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediæval men and
+maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid
+analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that
+luminous word _normal_ before the reading public at once, and you will
+be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start--yes! in
+_advance_ of the start--for what you are: types of the loveliness of
+our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature
+which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious
+civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the
+normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is
+coming again!"
+
+It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath,
+and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have
+heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not
+spoken, and then the heroine said: "Perhaps we shall have to wait for a
+new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the
+magazines. Some beginner _must_ see in us what has always pleased: the
+likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the
+American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably
+_end well_, and that we're a consolation and refuge for readers, who can
+take heart from our happy dénouements, when they see a family
+resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our
+examples they will share our blessings. Authors can't really enjoy
+themselves in the company of those degenerates, as _I_ call them.
+They're mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as
+ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of
+friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as
+well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck."
+
+"Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?" he returned, in
+his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.
+
+Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted,
+like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her
+first position: "Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour
+before the dawn. We must wait."
+
+"And perish in the mean time?"
+
+"Oh, we shall not perish," she responded, heroinically. "It's not for
+nothing that we are immortal," and as she spoke she passed her
+translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together
+and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed
+with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall.
+
+
+
+
+OTHER ESSAYS
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY
+
+
+In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green,
+crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but
+the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a
+faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too
+inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost
+self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things
+when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of
+the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned
+iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and
+writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and
+blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were
+bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now
+dead.
+
+That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and
+seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their
+ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and
+hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the
+trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices,
+and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country.
+Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are
+not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a
+charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it
+in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are
+imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New
+York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused
+himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who
+had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him
+in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season
+broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward
+winter.
+
+There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of
+it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are
+equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect,
+but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready
+to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in
+Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and
+naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered
+activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their
+summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like
+fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze;
+the tables d'hôte express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the
+management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms;
+the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show
+of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with
+their retarded displays of butcher's meats and poultry.
+
+[Illustration: BROADWAY AT NIGHT]
+
+But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its
+returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we
+began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of _revenants_,
+which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid
+sort of _revenants_ if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at
+the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric
+lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the
+beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now
+past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the
+vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the
+bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are
+filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables
+d'hôte; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for
+the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.
+
+But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when
+those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their
+Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their
+Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that
+round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society
+news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does
+not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in
+crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman's hand
+to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist
+whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on
+suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once
+seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the
+furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on
+the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his
+walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds,
+without an emotion of self-approval.
+
+But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the
+superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all
+sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and
+winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up
+to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount
+and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of
+the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead
+by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the
+bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the
+trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the
+grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but
+cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous
+flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will
+soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have
+frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the
+footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle
+over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the
+passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the
+children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the
+saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and
+of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for
+their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first
+snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of
+air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will
+claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it.
+
+Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the
+beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day,
+and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has
+five saturnalia every year: New Year's Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of
+July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is
+Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime
+wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will
+equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of
+political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot,
+will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the
+litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the
+great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into
+your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a
+rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of
+all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large
+centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you
+will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy
+and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the
+returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the
+wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and
+twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct.
+Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang
+upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it
+seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put
+pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable
+positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before
+the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the
+whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into
+or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the
+fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the
+actresses.
+
+At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be
+old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even
+the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be,
+if it is not positively raining, you "do not know or need to know."
+Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down
+from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still
+greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of
+moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night,
+which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the
+Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we
+have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something
+Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of
+these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression
+of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That
+mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there
+never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic
+corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies,
+does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events
+from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not
+been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York's present
+at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang,
+"Forget it, forget it." There remains only the future from which she can
+derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what
+that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was
+confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derived from
+immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth's
+despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced,
+though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes
+brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that
+youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth
+of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists.
+
+[Illustration: ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS]
+
+Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad
+heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and
+one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But
+mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that
+interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of
+time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in
+compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of
+those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable
+lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to
+be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months.
+It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time
+expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored
+in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany
+and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But
+if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the
+Election Night you _feel_ New York as you do in no other hour. The sense
+extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come,
+when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and
+rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks
+with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a
+brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning
+after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but
+wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more
+lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience,
+and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has
+its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself
+his sins and is no longer sorry for them.
+
+After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which
+we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers come in
+late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so
+characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end
+of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him
+for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain
+upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and
+the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We
+foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as
+naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty
+flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats
+it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches
+our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he
+questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right
+in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most
+characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment
+yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his
+indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked
+high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze
+and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which
+the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the
+foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where
+the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains
+roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on
+every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare
+through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the
+trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of
+the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful
+vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who
+have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing
+the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself
+remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he
+decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and
+holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the
+duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows?
+New York's hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical
+quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we must
+wait another year before we can put it to the test again; wait till the
+trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson,
+russet, and the wind comes up and blows them bare, and yet another
+summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the _revenants_ have once
+more returned to town.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES
+
+
+A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty
+which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will
+join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry
+jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the
+table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon
+
+   "Across the walnuts and the wine."
+
+"How," this puzzled spirit has asked, "shall I address a friend of mine
+who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to the
+respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our letters
+to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy, of
+letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities? Shall I
+greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe
+Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?"
+
+Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, _not_ "Mr. Smythe Johnes" if
+you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with any man who
+knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply "Smythe
+Johnes," with his street and number, for he feels himself classed by
+your "Mr. Smythe Johnes" with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he
+loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but
+does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our revolt
+in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are now
+conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in
+non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr.
+Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or below
+it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they will
+address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and Smythe
+Johnes, Esq., at his private residence.
+
+The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of
+them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough
+satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as
+The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in
+their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than they
+think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier
+self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes
+as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was the
+proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so commonly
+called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older form of
+Armiger they forgot that _inter arma silent leges_, and that Esquire was
+logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, divines, or
+mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago, yielded to
+the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately
+addressed all his contributors as "Mr." One of them, the most liberal of
+them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a year, and then he
+protested. After that the young editor (he was then almost as young as
+any one now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately addressed his
+contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abiding sense of the absurdity in
+directing letters to John G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a
+Friend and an abhorrer of war, he could not be hailed Armiger without
+something like insult.
+
+With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but it
+is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly addressing
+doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays
+all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said that you are now
+to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as
+formerly. In England, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you cannot
+call a surgeon "doctor" without offence; he is Mr. Smythe Johnes when
+spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven
+knows.
+
+It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that
+troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of
+etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest
+point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we
+still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered
+no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be
+taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is
+legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to
+address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons
+in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to the
+lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This
+simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once
+holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little
+easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or
+Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire
+him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall
+superscribe him.
+
+A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of philosophy,
+of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their letters simply
+Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or
+affix. They kept up this good custom till in process of time they went
+to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted their manners, so
+that when they came home they began addressing each other as Esq., and
+have done so ever since. Neither is any the better for the honors they
+exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and doubtless if mankind
+could be brought to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes
+which these friends once disused the race would be none the worse for
+it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes on one's
+visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial who is not
+to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is
+the United States post-office which delivers the letters of Smythe
+Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service which
+conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely the
+explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other
+William H. Taft.
+
+Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was
+christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends
+understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were wanting
+in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well as
+hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest
+presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying
+slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned
+whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead
+of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their
+dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The signory
+of the proudest republic in the world held that their family names were
+of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who
+called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, or
+Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own day a lady of
+the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that
+the title of count existed in it or need exist: "Ognuno può essere
+conte: Peruzzi, no." ("Any one may be a count; but not a Peruzzi.") In
+like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and Washington and
+Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. before
+them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or Doctor Seneca would not have
+descended to us in higher regard with the help of these titles; and
+Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not have
+had greater glory from the survival of parchments so directed to them.
+
+The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to be
+saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when used
+orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became
+Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the
+family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become
+"Doc," and Captain, "Cap," until one might rather have no title at all.
+Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a
+silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses,
+can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though
+doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of
+Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use
+of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success,
+though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the bell-strap,
+"Step lively, lady," but you cannot say, "Step lively, gentleman," and
+the fine old vocative "Sir" is quite obsolete. We ourselves remember it
+on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted each other with "Sir!" and
+"Sir!" when they met; and "Step lively, sir," might convey the same
+delicate regard from the trolley conductor as "Step lively, lady." Sir
+might look very well on the back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would
+on some accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly
+enough, it would be less archaic.
+
+Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present
+King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to
+say to the sovereign, "Yes, ma'am," or "Yes, sir," as the use is,
+instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say "Yes, ma'am," or
+"Yes, sir," unless you are in that station of life to which you would be
+very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem
+undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the difference
+of years is great enough.
+
+The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an envelope,
+Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we
+find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant reader's
+difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to simplify
+themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe
+Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We fancy not;
+besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is hardly the
+meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best Comrade looks
+affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on
+the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, though no one
+could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as Friend Smythe
+Johnes.
+
+It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on without
+the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the roll of
+parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Cæsar
+was simply C. Julius Cæsar to his correspondents, and Pericles was yet
+more simply Pericles to the least of his fellow-citizens. These
+historical personages may have had the number of their houses inscribed
+on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus added to
+his name for purposes of identification; but apparently he managed quite
+as well as our Presidents, without anything equivalent to Excellency or
+Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of
+
+   "The glory that was Greece
+   And the grandeur that was Rome,"
+
+name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but
+much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the
+Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which
+were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add
+Cæsar to the last name, though Cæsar seems to have finally served the
+turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In the
+Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style for
+imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the Roman
+state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred
+majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine.
+
+However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in common
+parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be styled on the
+backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in
+signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not Miss Mary but Mrs.
+Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon does she cease to be
+Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to write in the
+case of any literary doctorate, Smythe Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or
+Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr. before his name? In the case of
+a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it and
+D.D. after it? These are important questions, or, if they are not
+important, they are at least interesting. Among the vast mass of
+unceremonied, or call it unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter
+probably knows no better than the sender how it should be addressed; but
+in the rarer case in which he does know, his self-respect or his
+self-love is wounded if it is misaddressed. It is something like having
+your name misspelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and
+every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it.
+
+The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by legislation, as
+it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be. The first French
+Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of
+address, which could be used without offence to the self-love or the
+self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and Citoyenne for all women
+was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified; but some things, though
+they are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. The same
+imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal chronology, and a new era,
+very handy and very clear; but the old week of seven days came back and
+replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our Lord resumed the
+place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur and Madame returned
+victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the reform of weights and
+measures, when once established, continued, and spread from France to
+most other countries--to nearly all, indeed, less stupid than Great
+Britain and the United States--so that the whole civilized world now
+counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine difference? Here is a
+pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an opportunity to prove
+himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less
+personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly be, or else the
+Society of Friends could not have so absolutely substituted First Day
+and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and
+could not have successfully refused all name-honor whatsoever in
+addressing their fellow-mortals.
+
+But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic, one
+and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest
+nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and
+family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to
+Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the
+experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters
+of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board,
+something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should
+not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to
+take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every
+manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their
+correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have
+no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames
+merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and
+Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would
+mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and
+women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among
+the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and
+Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the
+usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the
+recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it
+could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety.
+The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the
+case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's
+given names could be added.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER
+
+
+Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of
+such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last
+very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with
+hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes,
+and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of
+the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand,
+whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his
+customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but
+what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as
+"supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not even certain
+just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority;
+what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male
+citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless
+clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us
+as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the
+paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the
+lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's
+judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least
+amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the
+reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit
+it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city
+and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such
+hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen
+of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a
+dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred
+against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque.
+It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit
+with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their
+avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter.
+But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident
+was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud
+tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon
+the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public
+banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in
+his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service,
+nowise appears.
+
+What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of one's
+inn, as a place where one shall take one's ease, has perished in the
+evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been
+maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One
+may take one's ease in one's hotel only if one is dressed to the mind of
+the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is more
+important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed
+vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate,
+tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper
+or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice,
+would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for
+the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their
+commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management
+might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like,
+with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in
+white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for
+their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure
+of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be
+marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree
+intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that
+the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was
+not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well
+have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he
+cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels
+in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical
+acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his
+paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so
+much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real
+characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had
+the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their
+costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of
+their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic
+society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After
+that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another
+theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal
+columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone
+primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and
+secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners
+of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London.
+
+Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower
+than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which
+we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and which
+now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is a
+question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and it
+will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom of
+the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent
+experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its
+charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of
+the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the
+subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the
+place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or
+sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do
+people from every part of their country who have got bored out with
+their happy homes and want a few days' or a few weeks' change. One may
+not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade,
+or at least more distinguished than one's own; with the best will in the
+world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four: a
+tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up,
+dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of a set in
+some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches aplenty, and
+aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true, intelligent, and
+heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle class,
+offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the effect of
+champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer, was to be
+noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the effect of
+something more than champagne in the face loomed in the perspective
+through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely far, the
+greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming promenade were
+simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, of a
+varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity. They were the
+stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it his
+imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the
+collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped
+contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The
+whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving
+through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong
+with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of
+indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these
+familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he
+knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of
+them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them
+into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often
+contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.
+
+The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the
+collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had
+befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted
+with his kind for half a century of æsthetic consciousness, and now had
+he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is
+always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet
+quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this
+question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If
+that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his
+like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell
+into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity
+could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his
+all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No,"
+he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that
+they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they
+illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years,
+society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating
+no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which
+were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level
+of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of
+which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock
+foundations."
+
+Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but
+it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his
+fancy--never imagination--began to play forward with the vivacity of
+that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five.
+If all this were true--and its truth shone the more distinctly from a
+ground of potential dissent--was not there the stuff in the actual
+conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now
+that the first glow of his prime was past, might fashion an image of our
+decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and
+uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign
+authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was
+opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more
+divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness
+and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had
+been easy--how easy it had been!--to catch the likeness of those
+formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and
+the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of
+seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a
+society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace
+and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an
+overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when
+men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were
+past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing
+from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting
+subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of
+classic fable or mediæval romance. But there remained the days of the
+years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an
+inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as
+to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang.
+
+The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly
+sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would
+have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which
+would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is
+indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its
+fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the
+most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a
+million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either
+at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which
+culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature;
+which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral
+and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none
+where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its
+own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing
+could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits
+which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the
+ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim,
+the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that
+the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the
+Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave
+and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that
+the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous
+Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted,
+hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the
+Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is
+going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of
+perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity
+sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by
+desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a
+reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than
+once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of
+Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must
+refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached
+delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to
+catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian
+underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in
+characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it
+will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has
+never yet taken the eyes of wonder.
+
+We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high
+achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar
+gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by
+any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see
+his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we
+should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any _genre_
+result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large
+allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that
+Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which
+should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some
+such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving emotion of an
+immense hotel dining-room, all in _décolletée_ and _frac paré_, the old,
+simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be
+led out between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and delivered
+over to the police to be conducted in ignominy to the nearest Italian
+table d'hôte. The national character, on the broad level of equality
+which fiction once delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a
+deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have no fear
+but some genius will arrive and impart the effect of the society which
+has arrived.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH
+
+
+As Eugenio--we will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal name--grew
+older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known
+for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal
+from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or
+wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating the
+case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were young
+enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had only
+the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact, however,
+will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were young
+writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to know one
+thing: namely, how he did it.
+
+What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for making
+the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint their
+phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at
+first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one's modesty, one
+likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's pleasure in their flatteries
+was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how to return
+them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out to those
+generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in their
+teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with the
+fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing to
+show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any
+merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had
+grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he
+never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods; he
+said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt
+that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left
+them out of the question.
+
+In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he
+had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he
+put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure
+they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as
+they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that
+the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever
+else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he
+was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the
+beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his
+reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had
+constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of
+beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not
+his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be
+uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he
+was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.
+
+Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible.
+If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own
+secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect
+honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to
+literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway;
+that there were only byways; private paths over other people's grounds;
+easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a
+subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery
+to the latest-comer.
+
+His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they
+wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they
+could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret
+that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever
+he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing
+with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five
+balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew
+that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it
+themselves from _his_ having practised.
+
+The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself
+if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had gone out
+of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or
+that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled
+the stock criticism of the connoisseur in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, that
+the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains;
+but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom
+in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had
+occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he
+had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French
+painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the
+French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more
+pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their
+pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words
+applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could
+only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: "Courage
+is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have
+in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will
+and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely,
+because the end with them absorbs the means."
+
+Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of
+painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal
+force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own
+American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the
+same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his
+mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the
+consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and
+passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had
+tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had
+excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have
+been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he
+thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and
+as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and
+indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was
+apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master
+workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and
+fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps
+the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could
+not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by
+the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing
+beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul
+had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had
+been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some
+other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur
+his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same
+time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the
+same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the
+youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for
+perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end
+could no more justify bad means in æsthetics than in ethics; in fact,
+without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result.
+If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high
+result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the
+results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were
+coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the
+wrong shop.
+
+Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he
+had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the
+end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the
+business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed
+always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There
+were times when it changed to some other end or took a different
+significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself
+that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it
+first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events
+and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by
+all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or
+even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more
+carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous
+without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from
+all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more
+eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the
+preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age
+to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking
+into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was
+going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he
+might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock
+when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel
+turning out other than he had forecast it.
+
+In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with
+processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as
+he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of
+his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and
+manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little
+authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds,
+and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled
+them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as
+he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was
+the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story
+never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the
+author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up
+the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.
+
+As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was
+less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked
+more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some
+spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the
+more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast
+design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose
+might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious
+insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with
+unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art,
+and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience
+to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical
+things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like _Hamlet_,
+say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had
+educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and
+had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with
+the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia
+from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch,
+forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome
+Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the
+whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not
+fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went
+down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so
+many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a
+playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he
+had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and,
+in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from
+death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and
+walk the world forever.
+
+Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so
+reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done?
+The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided
+that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the
+earnestness of his nature, to write their _Hamlets_ from the beginning
+forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He
+saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did
+not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of
+producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every
+part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it
+seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the
+parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of
+any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the
+true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to
+outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective _Hamlets_; they must
+slowly make their _Hamlets_' acquaintance by living with them.
+
+If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought
+he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation
+for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had
+noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better
+in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would
+smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a
+certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest
+happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the
+perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of
+little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate
+triumph.
+
+"But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was
+one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to
+say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about
+perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a
+style?"
+
+"By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this
+come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well,
+patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you.
+That is the one thing you must _not_ try for. If you try for style, you
+will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will
+be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You
+will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come
+into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that
+any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then
+have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of
+expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which
+every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have
+borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no
+better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing
+that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary
+qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme
+artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or
+Dante?"
+
+Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so
+dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said
+that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected
+the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves
+respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but
+probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He
+realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they
+did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help
+outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without
+learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He
+reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their
+circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could
+do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their
+aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?
+
+One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper
+maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to
+secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of
+indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening
+conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of
+the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While
+we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure,
+coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval,
+the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our
+endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this
+censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we
+grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the
+environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a
+compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer
+matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if
+we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than
+ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most
+perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our
+work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower
+and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight
+the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our
+choice of two things--stop working; stop going, cease to move, to
+exist--or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of
+conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which
+we have not dropped, drops us.
+
+Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his
+palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling
+them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when
+they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would
+count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal
+than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he
+meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and
+not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their
+youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly
+doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or
+borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could
+sell or give or lend it.
+
+Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not
+only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it
+used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw
+abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself
+instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to
+hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they
+seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due
+course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through
+living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and
+would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that
+it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that,
+whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they
+lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by
+universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men,
+and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How
+instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work,
+patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or
+borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than
+idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?
+
+If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he
+was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much
+longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event
+he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his
+correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art
+_was_ a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider,
+deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in
+being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if
+the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other
+terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow
+apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it,
+partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his
+achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of
+nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it
+was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his
+gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it
+and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that
+its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done
+and call him master.
+
+But how could Eugenio make such things--so true and yet so
+self-contradictory, so mutually repellent--clear to these simple-hearted
+young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more
+he resolved to do nothing about it.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM
+
+
+It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when
+they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a
+cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books
+are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that
+displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain
+merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits
+for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is
+tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues,
+but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course,
+the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain
+defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and
+immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.
+
+Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that,
+if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He
+had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being
+told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or
+that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was
+culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be
+the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made
+it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of
+always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt,
+that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely
+the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly
+been cropped the season before.
+
+The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of
+other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong
+favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could
+not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though
+he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill
+wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and
+for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have
+already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly
+aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted,
+quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was
+vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it
+seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to
+himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence
+which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in
+circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would
+notice the coincidence.
+
+He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the
+conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly
+always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties
+they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which
+supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and
+which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage
+that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an
+ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which
+the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of
+course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they
+necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if
+it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it
+is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these
+collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them,
+if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The
+reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the
+established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his
+generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling
+omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work
+which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of
+course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author
+has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the
+reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but obliged to say
+that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the author in question
+has endeared to generations of readers; or one of those tedious prudes
+for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many psychological romances,
+the author has stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised
+or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his work; or if the
+contrary is the case, he has to read of himself as doing something
+habitual and entirely characteristic of him. In vain, so far as that
+acute young critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if he has
+with much compunction consciously turned his furrows in a field tilled
+before, he stands a fair chance of being hailed at the outset of a new
+career.
+
+He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help being
+what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the veteran
+author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any rate,
+bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer brings.
+What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive book of
+his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful
+friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had liked him
+from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work. Such a
+critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground, and that
+he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he seemed to
+be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields. Such a critic
+would be alert to detect those fine differences of situation which
+distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He would note with
+unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which constitute Florindo
+an essentially novel character when presented under the name of Lindoro,
+or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even when
+he could not deny that these persons were in themselves one and the
+same, he would be able to make the reader observe that the new light
+thrown upon them by the author's ever-renascent art revealed in familiar
+creations traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined before. He
+would insist that, if not new, they were newer, because being more fully
+ascertained they were truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in
+Eugenio's former books whom they reminded one of, and, studying them in
+contrast, would convince the reader that the increasing purpose of the
+author in the treatment of the well-known types had been to reveal the
+infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human
+type.
+
+Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary
+authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran
+authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic
+justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair
+of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards
+and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as
+only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal
+intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits
+of a veteran author.
+
+In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author
+like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic
+for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic,
+coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won
+from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to
+appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion,
+when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an
+author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its
+immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one
+really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the
+invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who
+invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it
+so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer,
+because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor,
+as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly
+as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a
+great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might
+be the means of destroying himself as a great author.
+
+After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must
+often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise.
+There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the
+way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the
+testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the
+lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a
+power, to turn Matthew Arnold's phrase to our use, "not ourselves, that
+works for" beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this
+mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you
+come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may
+confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious
+metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents
+and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold
+yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is
+something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say?
+You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right,
+then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is
+really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats
+when it is actually eighteen?
+
+Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the
+point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the
+desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing
+amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too
+much praise, though he never has got all he wants. "Why don't they
+clap?" Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his
+audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like
+Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. "Do they
+think I can't stand it? Why don't they give me three times three? I can
+stand it very well." An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely
+praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation
+trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of
+insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine
+fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought,
+therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the
+article of criticism, but somehow it is not.
+
+Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly
+enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its
+convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its
+qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits
+assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The
+author would not mind if the critic's report were physically
+commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand
+that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain.
+Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets
+something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his
+deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible
+generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with
+regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its
+theories and methods with gratitude.
+
+As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book,
+even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more
+than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative
+and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning
+anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by
+others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go
+round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk
+of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the
+general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they
+differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still
+accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal
+of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider
+without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied
+himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which
+seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even
+when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he
+reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of
+feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or
+jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used
+the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or
+deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself
+in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the
+judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far
+finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to
+wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent
+talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts
+and sentences of the courts of criticism.
+
+In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own
+experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of
+criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had
+already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty,
+bring himself to call "creative," though he did not mind others calling
+it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports
+upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant,
+not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever
+wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it,
+remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it
+might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the
+recognition.
+
+Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the
+conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad
+of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was
+that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and
+that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it
+might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the
+courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he
+said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his
+critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured
+publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was
+lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed,
+should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of
+fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the
+brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book?
+Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author
+direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by
+the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when
+personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements,
+this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition.
+
+In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors
+who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated
+by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author.
+What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty
+of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality
+which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It
+is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his
+hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the
+intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether
+he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own
+generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old
+with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the
+readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who
+find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been
+trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be
+difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad,
+the grateful care of such elders?
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+THE FICKLENESS OF AGE
+
+
+All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than
+people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which
+one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and
+fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and
+feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that
+underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined
+he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the
+reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and
+given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and
+be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that
+
+   "From some odd corner of the mind
+   Beats time to nothing in the brain."
+
+But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer
+self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him
+its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not
+an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where
+the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the
+centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer
+of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears
+to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning
+into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and
+listener are the twin spheres that form one star.
+
+A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener
+than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most
+fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the
+confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of
+Longfellow's. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the
+outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his
+soul with a newly realized purport in the words,
+
+   "A boy's will is the wind's will,
+   And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
+
+The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland
+song, which "is haunting his memory still," which "murmurs and whispers
+still," which "is singing and saying still," which "is mournful" and
+"sweet" and "fitful" and "fatal" and "strange" and "beautiful." Yet he
+seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that
+they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age,
+and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in
+objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the
+old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a
+truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or,
+if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first
+who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive
+property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad
+right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or
+none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them
+because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and
+how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to
+our friend's age a language which his youth could not have understood,
+and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the
+thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.
+
+He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in
+the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But
+nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as
+he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his
+youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree
+itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and
+they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is
+consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever
+have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary
+is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of
+enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in
+its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they
+seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from
+day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them.
+He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond
+of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such
+delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed
+travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his
+baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself
+in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the
+domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a
+trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The
+succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and
+there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give
+him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not
+amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain,
+when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to
+hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in
+all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of
+horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly
+when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed
+with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.
+
+These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any
+powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from
+youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He
+is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to
+gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest
+refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he
+could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his
+shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it
+would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves
+and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast
+of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of
+her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little
+longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his
+repose.
+
+His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not
+interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to
+repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which is
+superannuated, while its "muddy vesture of decay" is in very tolerable
+repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in
+the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged,
+with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he
+once predicated of eternity. "If it is going to be like _this_ with me!"
+he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of
+his conditional.
+
+But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly
+metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same
+man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the
+differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in
+noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of
+fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless
+iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the
+period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives
+for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of
+the Lapland song,
+
+   "The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,"
+
+erred, to our friend's sense, in singing of
+
+   "The young heart hot and restless,
+   And the old subdued and slow."
+
+He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth
+and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is
+hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the
+swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity
+shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion
+against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is
+no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so
+it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless;
+it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there
+is.
+
+Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at
+the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than
+that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those
+marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such
+hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of
+the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the
+supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as
+much in one respect as in the other, but our friend contends only for
+greater justice to it in the last. In the light that he has come into,
+he holds that where such unions are unhappy, though they may have been
+formed with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior partner who
+is to blame if blame may ever be attached to involuntary change. It is
+the senior partner who has wearied first of the companionship and wished
+for release with the impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of
+the annoyances which seem inherent in every union of the kind, and
+impatient of those differences of temperament which tell far more than
+any disparities of age, and which exist even where there are no such
+disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic
+of the husband where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer
+instances of her seniority. In the unions where two old people join
+their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically,
+doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything
+else of marriages in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in
+their youth, attempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such
+survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in
+their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are,
+for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are
+overwhelmingly against them.
+
+Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with the
+value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can appeal
+for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we could
+imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain regret, an
+acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed for no
+apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the constitution
+of things, and to attribute one's fickleness to one's time of life.
+Youth's errors have possibly been too much condoned upon grounds where
+age could more justly base its defence. It may be more reckless than
+age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long
+thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly hobbles or
+hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate, for it has plenty
+of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little but eternity before
+it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life's trolley while it is still in
+motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps impatiently
+before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see physical proof of
+this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one
+young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old
+ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate
+themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet
+one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who
+would willingly wait years for them?
+
+The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the
+painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age.
+Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with
+ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no
+fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant
+occupation in the æons before it, or that its emotions or volitions
+shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is
+immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an
+eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that
+doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things
+which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly
+with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of
+waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living
+doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless
+not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is
+unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to
+age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the
+long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may
+accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite
+him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing
+endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast
+of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his
+despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly
+through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in
+some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long
+thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The
+restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression
+of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and
+that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader
+prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by
+rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and
+running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems
+it in.
+
+Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of
+late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and
+brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally
+darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they
+can discern the light, they will "pour the day" on the dim orbs of age
+and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into
+the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable
+horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in
+behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost
+their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the
+trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something
+temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from
+human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast,
+because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth--the
+star of trust and hope which
+
+   "Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."
+
+These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that
+their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers
+have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by
+a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines,
+and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that
+the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of
+an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause,
+but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its
+throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder
+pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as
+that indestructible life-property or organizing power which
+characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this
+consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human
+spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very
+disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the
+meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would
+be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was
+reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in
+its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of
+the Addisonian Cato:
+
+   "But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
+   Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
+   The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION
+
+
+There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated purveyor of
+intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems
+finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had
+garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be
+found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if
+he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a
+frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered
+leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls
+being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether
+he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every
+day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a
+magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give
+forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his
+auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to
+appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a
+miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty.
+
+Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a
+sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated
+essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and
+convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need
+was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to
+cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its
+increase of incident; the moral and social and æsthetical world is open
+on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If
+ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these
+resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he
+has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie
+near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye.
+
+A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener
+the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio
+was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of
+the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of
+subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them.
+Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than
+any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: "I feel that I have got my
+technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of
+any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a
+subject." It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the
+more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case.
+They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their
+work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it;
+and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been
+no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged
+steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of
+a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were
+equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all
+round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they
+fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently
+proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately
+come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic
+vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it
+had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon
+as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional
+themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him.
+
+Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same
+experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long
+seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them,
+he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the
+characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble
+enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the
+other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which
+painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left
+him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was
+always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last
+fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting
+his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they
+were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for
+something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of
+excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in
+the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of
+violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear
+themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned
+to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At
+these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world
+where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which
+every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it.
+
+He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray,
+very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened
+to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe
+thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives,
+situations, catastrophes and dénouements, and characters eagerly fitting
+themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he
+could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place
+through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality
+in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had
+but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to
+find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to
+find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting,
+fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was
+something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but
+the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind
+Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects.
+
+After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was concerning
+his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself capable of
+in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of
+a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed sometimes
+weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that others
+would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work of
+producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the
+subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium
+which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant
+reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and
+delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had
+afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.
+
+Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may
+not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the
+due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are
+saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if
+nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark
+will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher
+thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is
+suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind
+of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes
+material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the
+congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The
+journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on
+his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America,
+or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too
+bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart
+rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the
+long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not
+forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he
+certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as
+interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not
+be so dull as it promises.
+
+One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the
+preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range
+enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his
+hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end.
+Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously
+garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small
+acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in
+sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk
+of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you
+come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne,
+you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his
+subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him
+(like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that
+story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is
+left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the
+tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the
+same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the
+beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The
+writers in the _Spectator_, the _Guardian_, the _Tatler_, the _Rambler_,
+and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic,
+because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to
+something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come
+to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De
+Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point,
+to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking
+about everything else in the world but the business they started with.
+But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter
+with any sort of talker.
+
+When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more
+contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text
+was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they
+shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It
+was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their
+main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance
+and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few
+supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not
+forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though
+why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is,
+though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or
+as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the
+early Victorian period.
+
+But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he
+returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher's concern was
+with his text, but not an essayist's or a reviewer's, and he was right
+enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His
+reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and
+it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued
+that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or
+causes of the essay's decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical
+conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the
+essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull
+loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome.
+
+The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that
+pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and
+remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially
+ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to
+suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score,
+he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he
+mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be
+honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what
+seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing
+forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he
+will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure
+than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single
+thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we
+imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are
+the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people
+are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the
+good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of
+labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an
+excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails
+his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth,
+with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least
+one is as right as the other.
+
+When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine
+redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced
+ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our
+eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a
+thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its
+growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to
+bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not
+the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is
+apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed
+and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all
+round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses
+and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while
+man is working--plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the
+heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where
+poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature
+her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is
+perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal
+world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings
+it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the
+unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose
+before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what
+makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable
+reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of
+the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have
+sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from
+the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the
+unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from
+themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind
+a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be
+merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?
+
+It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have
+been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His
+trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them,
+his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory
+progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the
+wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or
+roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering
+brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that
+does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to
+his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or
+coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays,
+will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but
+the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an
+artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of
+his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity;
+only in the practice of the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can
+he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he
+cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished
+mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which
+we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon,
+it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote
+Shakespeare.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA
+
+
+At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country,
+eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it
+becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the
+city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either
+moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain
+interest.
+
+Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after
+forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each
+hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea,
+sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if
+not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as
+encyclopædic.
+
+The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in
+the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip
+to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those
+simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of
+pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no
+longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of
+three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo
+and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they
+can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the
+earliest of the eighteen-seventies.
+
+After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to
+Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such
+an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every
+Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there
+had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom
+the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised
+with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the
+house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left
+only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family wash,
+sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl with her as
+maid. In the first days of September, when the most enterprising of the
+fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the table, and the
+mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in the cellar and
+rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting used to the
+peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little teethers back to
+town with her; and when she found her husband in the comfortable
+dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and tender steak,
+and rich cream (such as never comes on "pure milk"), and hot and cold
+baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he had been very
+selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday
+morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and
+she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it.
+
+In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting
+the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next
+step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried
+it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the
+same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct
+difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the seaside, but
+if it had been better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as it
+was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better; and there was the
+beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an effect of superior
+fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every three of the three
+hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing at the
+yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out to lie on the sand
+and dry their hair.
+
+At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and
+half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid
+ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside
+boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the
+children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap,
+but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they
+could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him,
+as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she
+allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much
+less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends;
+he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo
+was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last
+train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his
+family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during
+the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only
+thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to
+get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real
+change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the
+Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo
+could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it
+would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo
+agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got
+his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting
+in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the
+house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company,
+they would be cutting off a frightful drain.
+
+It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that
+Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she
+made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week,
+when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice
+during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and
+said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora
+stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places where
+you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city after a
+long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this.
+Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased
+cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great
+success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed.
+
+Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, sick and tired;
+and, as far as she could see, all those mountain-places were the same
+places. She could get no good of the air if she bored herself; the nice
+people did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the children were
+dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, who had long ceased to
+teethe but needed a summer outing as much as ever. A series of seasons
+followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person
+of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a
+controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a
+quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children
+Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or
+summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in. Then, at least,
+she could look a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the
+club that he had fairly forgotten he _had_ a wife and children. The
+trouble was all with Florindo, anyway; he cared more for his business
+than his family, much; if he did not, he could have managed somehow to
+spend the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran down once a
+month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then came back.
+
+Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one morning
+with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a revelation.
+She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having
+thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only solution. Once in
+Europe, you need not worry about where to go, for you could go anywhere.
+Europe was everywhere, and you had your choice of the Swiss mountains,
+where every breath made another person of you, or the Italian lakes with
+their glorious scenery, or the English lakes with their literary
+associations, or Scheveningen and all Holland, or Étretât, or Ostend, or
+any of those thousands of German baths where you could get over whatever
+you had, and the children could pick up languages with tutors, and the
+life was so amusing. Going to Europe was excuse enough in itself for
+Florindo to leave his business, and, if he could not be gone more than
+one summer, he could place her and the children out there till their
+health and education were completed, and they could all return home
+when it was time for the girls to think of coming out and the boys of
+going to college.
+
+Florindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word to say against a
+scheme that must commend itself to any reasonable man. In fact, he
+scarcely opposed it. He said he had begun to feel a little run down, and
+he had just been going to propose Europe himself as the true solution.
+She gladly gave him credit for the idea, and said he had the most
+inventive mind she ever heard of. She agreed without a murmur to the
+particular German baths which the doctor said would be best for him,
+because she just knew that the waters would be good for all of them; and
+when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure with him, and
+they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about
+Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in the early autumn,
+and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were comfortably
+settled in Paris for the winter.
+
+As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After three
+years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and the
+family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the
+summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there,
+and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished
+cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not
+think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that
+summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding.
+They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so
+very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it
+finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent,
+however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the
+purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking.
+
+She was now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries
+and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of
+tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an
+environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay
+the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and, if not ideal to
+those within, it is nevertheless the best way of spending the hot season
+known to competitive civilization. What is most interesting to the
+student of that civilization is the surprisingly short time in which it
+has been evolved. Half a century ago it was known only to some of the
+richest people. A few very old and opulent families in New York had
+country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the same class had summer houses
+at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy planters of the South came North
+to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the vast
+majority of the fashionable Northern people also resorted. In the West
+it was the custom to leave home for a summer trip up the lakes or down
+the St. Lawrence. But this was the custom only for the very
+sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not summer outside of
+their winter homes to at all the same extent as in the East.
+
+The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in that of
+innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the primitive
+joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of
+farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for
+Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young
+couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in
+its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city
+boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos
+and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in
+the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the
+more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels,
+as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish in
+their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly
+full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the
+shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic.
+
+The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have typically
+come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the typical
+experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of
+the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow domestic
+things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be astonished
+to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively poor, have
+summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps as much
+below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of Newport
+are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those who have
+them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, progressing toward
+those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and gradually arriving at
+picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with all the modern
+conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more of
+one's income than one has a quiet conscience in.
+
+It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora
+proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces
+of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when
+you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you
+have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to
+endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been
+known, after keeping a private hotel in their cottages for a series of
+summers, to shut them or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed rest,
+leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days of their youth, or
+even allowing them to live in their own houses with their cooks.
+
+Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we want it to be; we
+ourselves are not all that we could wish; and, whatever shape our
+summering takes, the crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose.
+The only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under them are those
+who have no repose, but stay striving on amid the heat of the city while
+the prey of the crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills or by
+the sea. Those home-keeping Sybarites, composing seven-eighths of our
+urban populations, immune from the anguish of the rose-leaf, form
+themselves the pang of its victims in certain extreme cases; the thought
+of them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleepless rest-seeker
+in the resorts where there are no mosquitoes. There are Florindos, there
+are Lindoras, so sensitively conscienced that, in the most picturesque,
+the most prettily appointed and thoroughly convenienced cottages, they
+cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the summer hotels, in the
+boarding-houses by sea or shore, in the farms where they have small
+fruits, fresh vegetables, and abundance of milk and eggs; yes, they even
+remember those distant relations who toil and swelter in the offices,
+the shops, the streets, the sewers; and they are not without an
+unavailing shame for their own good-fortune.
+
+But is it really their good-fortune? They would not exchange it for the
+better fortune of the home-keepers, and yet it seems worse than that of
+people less voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left for
+Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the summer on a yacht,
+which they see many other Florindos and Lindoras doing. Even these gay
+voyagers, or gay anchorers (for they seem most of the time to be moored
+in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their lot, or to be
+so constantly contented with it but that they are always coming off in
+boats to dine at the neighboring hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a
+crumpled rose-leaf under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the
+houseboat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere.
+
+Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of that in her own
+case, for she has never been unreasonably exacting of circumstance. She
+has always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that
+is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual endeavor for
+the amelioration of circumstance that civilization springs. The fault
+may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot see, but it is
+certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the
+summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself
+to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the
+mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the
+seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and
+mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of
+Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora's
+experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle
+read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her practical
+guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable sphinx for
+which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor
+cottaging is the true answer.
+
+Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the summer,
+and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo, as far as
+she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business to provide
+the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it impossible, he is
+not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her that their trouble is
+that they have always endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly
+borne might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make her believe
+that some of the best times he has had in summer have been when he was
+too busy to think about it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from
+morning till night, without finding the least relief from the summer
+ordeal or forgetting it a single moment.
+
+The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and told
+her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was properly
+disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once, she did not
+care where it was.
+
+"Well, I don't know," he answered. "There would have to be two opinions,
+I believe."
+
+"Why?" she demanded, sharply. "Where is it?"
+
+"In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me about
+it. In one of the celestial heavens--there seem to be seven of them--it
+appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the
+different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This sole
+season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual
+springtime. How would you like that?"
+
+Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry. He,
+too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and he
+would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora's impatience
+with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of his greatest
+amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that law of the
+universal life by which no human creature is permitted to escape a due
+share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common lot, or realized
+that to seek escape from them is a species of immorality which is
+unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and from itself.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING
+
+
+As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and money to
+waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for squandering both,
+find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who
+have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is
+that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person
+who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable
+disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the
+accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal
+peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true
+diner must be well on in middle life, for though the young may eat and
+drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray head difficultly
+bowed over the successive courses, and the full form of third youth
+straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it,
+that the vision presents itself when one thinks of dinners and diners.
+
+After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large that
+one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than attach
+itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of
+dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger or
+smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet a
+step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part elderly
+men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need not be
+counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to throng
+the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit, looking
+down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of bald
+heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and showing
+like dim, décolleté angels to the bleared vision raised to them from the
+floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and speaking
+have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds of tobacco
+and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether they abuse the
+chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height,
+where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear them softly
+gasping, gently coughing.
+
+It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner has
+recorded her bird's-eye impression of it at the interesting moment when
+their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and
+all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and
+it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of
+projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various
+figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one
+another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables' edges or
+planted on their owners' thighs, must seem of a very characterless
+monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables
+slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and the speakers sit
+must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in bed.
+
+What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and looking
+down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration? Does it
+seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization? To their
+"finer female sense," what is the appeal of that evanescing spectacle,
+as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the clapping of hands
+rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the
+oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal intelligences as
+the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we may have still the
+hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them the splendid and
+graceful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of the next
+day's papers.
+
+The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the mellowed
+tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those courses of
+meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the
+morning following, he wakes "high sorrowful and cloyed," and has not yet
+read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it
+is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened
+the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical
+edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any
+platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of
+coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as
+with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of
+sentiment refreshes "the burning forehead and the parching tongue" like
+a gush of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker goes a
+great way, almost the whole way; and, especially if he is a comic
+speaker, he might rise up and sit down without a word and yet leave his
+hearers the sense of having been richly amused. If he does more, if he
+really says something droll, no matter how much below the average of the
+give and take of common talk, the listener's gratitude is frantic. It
+is so eager, it so outruns utterance, that it is not strange the
+after-dinner speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist,
+who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and prospers on to a
+celebrity for brilliancy which there is little danger of his ever
+forfeiting so long as he keeps there.
+
+The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the
+fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out
+mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and
+splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will
+applaud when they have the courage of one another's ineptitude. They
+will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the
+old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of
+eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are
+going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the
+accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising.
+They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their
+intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to
+reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in
+their torpidity.
+
+The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from
+dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner
+is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of
+some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of
+Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America.
+Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at
+large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It
+rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for
+the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The
+only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the
+man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless
+wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of
+despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences,
+leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be
+pitied from the bottom of one's soul. But the man whose words come
+actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests to
+him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not feared
+the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still, who
+thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly,
+but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to say something
+before he stops, and so cannot stop.
+
+The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the
+control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The
+old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still
+appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may
+say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, "We have
+with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of
+gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from
+General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless
+explosives." Or if it is the Discovery of America they are
+commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable
+citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the
+humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of
+Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at
+his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners
+to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle
+it.
+
+At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a while at
+least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the honored
+guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods,
+poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on the
+honored guest and talk of other things; and when sometimes he does so it
+seems rude.
+
+The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a
+variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole
+course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The
+honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped open
+for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter from
+every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous ladle in
+his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the
+lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the
+application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality
+which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to
+overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and
+roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant
+intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the honored
+guest's character or career and drenches it with drawn butter.
+
+To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless
+fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural
+achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of
+inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the
+climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth
+filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place,
+proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place
+before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He
+may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation,
+some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have
+mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of
+the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but
+that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may
+have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly
+treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to
+impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered
+palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored
+guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to
+make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this
+in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to
+lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is
+a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the
+missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared,
+preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other
+poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the
+boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a
+furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at
+the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they
+clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and
+shouting, "Here's to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk
+eggs grew before."
+
+Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have
+been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared
+nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these
+two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and
+was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education
+would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be
+taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure
+of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray
+anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and
+so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter,
+till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.
+
+Of course, the reader--especially if he has never been asked to a
+personal dinner of this sort--will be saying that the fault is not with
+the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the
+ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the
+object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the
+speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the
+example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the
+banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the
+supper given to Æschylus on the hundredth performance of the _OEdipus_
+of Sophocles.
+
+The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the
+banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the
+occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the
+prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that
+he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more
+in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as
+much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and
+it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even
+under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an
+inconspicuous place at the reporters' table, while he was represented
+on the chairman's right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for
+the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a
+plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was
+thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when
+portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in
+the opening toast, "The Dewey of Our Day," which was drunk sitting, the
+guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The
+chairman's opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement
+of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved,
+in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest
+possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the
+other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and
+further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of
+Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the
+machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia
+to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the
+noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had
+brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with
+his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies
+of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his
+countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far
+as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the
+reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly
+obliterated under the régime of the Thirty Tyrants.
+
+At the supper to Æschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with
+verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable
+reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was
+delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the
+committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the
+supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at
+Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which
+some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke of
+inspiration to have on the speaker's left, where Sophocles would have
+sat if he had been present at a supper given to Æschylus, the sitting
+figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No allusion
+was made to Æschylus during the evening, after his health had been
+proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and exquisite
+surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches that
+followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all ostensibly
+devoted to the examination of the _OEdipus_ and the other dramas of
+Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt with. But the
+unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly to take the
+character of appreciation of the Æschylus tragedies, whose good points
+were all turned to the light without open mention of them. This afforded
+the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending his younger
+_confrère_, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as some one said, from
+head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could not
+put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he
+could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by
+point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly
+elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman gentleman present
+remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for sincere deprecation,
+since Cæsar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and
+the effect was that intended throughout--the supreme honor of Æschylus
+in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was
+struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to
+make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long
+enough to quote the old Attic proverb, "Gentlemen, there are many ways
+to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter," and then lay
+down again amid shrieks of merriment from the whole company.
+
+There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian
+ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of
+commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each
+certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern
+world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the
+celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more
+safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be questioned
+whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They
+cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making
+themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair;
+they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that
+they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating
+memory of the other.
+
+There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as
+vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to
+inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he
+probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows
+perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries
+with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and
+suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and
+which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on,
+each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think
+that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel
+the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns
+in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in
+his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the
+sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his
+head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his
+soul.
+
+They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not
+against a permanent _folie des grandeurs_ that we need seek to guard the
+victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the
+ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to
+intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a
+public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In
+this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike
+the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having
+appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and
+subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In
+calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything
+that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could
+invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the
+speeches to follow.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+A DAY AT BRONX PARK
+
+
+In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of
+journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and
+the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something
+to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in
+search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that
+the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but
+should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the
+most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on
+which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of
+lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions
+were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region
+of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet
+visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long
+succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the
+guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and
+simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street.
+This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the
+slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life:
+the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and
+rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind,
+which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.
+
+When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and
+tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the
+ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they
+did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and
+let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish
+Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinità de' Monti at Rome.
+
+It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this
+was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and
+they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract
+of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the
+classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering
+woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the
+tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a
+certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of
+some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was
+poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group
+of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely,
+so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from
+which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning
+to paint themselves palely green.
+
+At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that
+made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have
+been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of
+another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at
+half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded
+to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild
+youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.
+
+He had the very horse he ought to have had--old, weary, infirm, decently
+hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped
+away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be
+explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse
+from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time
+went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left
+so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive
+there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy
+of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost
+nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow
+with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading
+into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running
+down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting
+with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched
+little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts--the
+collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold
+for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white
+sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over
+her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the
+baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered
+the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and
+took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They
+said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content
+in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to
+cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie
+were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They
+felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could
+afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the
+mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by
+name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance
+where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would
+not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did
+not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and
+mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground--so short is our
+patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the
+endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again
+in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in
+the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of
+mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and
+whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and
+they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb
+matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem
+last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not
+really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been
+the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless
+it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with
+humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for
+two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because
+they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this
+time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological
+grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun
+smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press.
+
+[Illustration: ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK]
+
+While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they
+could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have
+learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in
+a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down;
+when he turned away as if _that_ cask were done for, there it was
+bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it
+under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it
+floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would
+renew the struggle presently.
+
+There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all
+their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really
+have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of
+giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one's
+pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But
+why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why
+even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which
+looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above
+all, so many small mammals?
+
+Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman,
+who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was
+pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small
+mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right;
+but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he
+had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell
+into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way
+mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man's
+country by pushing first to the lions' house instead of going to the
+flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him.
+
+It was his sole revolt. "But what," we hear the reader asking, "is the
+flying-cage?" We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at
+the lions' house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world
+smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage
+species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are
+staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the
+rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires
+of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved
+solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune
+their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt
+before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing
+peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical
+forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our
+names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of
+parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see
+the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her
+imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us
+in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in
+the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the
+cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated
+upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and
+wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other
+water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this
+kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in
+which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality,
+instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.
+
+Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an
+invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the
+Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the
+slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of
+the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now
+added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their
+fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share
+their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of
+the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man.
+These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched
+itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven,
+rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as
+their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide
+grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy
+sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.
+
+But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly
+jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader's
+lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in
+bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the
+silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing
+slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up
+its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from
+their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching
+their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the
+keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the
+former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone
+mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of
+minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual
+state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the
+old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in
+the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with
+steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving
+presences by the water's brink.
+
+The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous
+park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may
+stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself
+indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.
+
+They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which
+will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your
+share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts,
+from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely
+browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small
+mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as
+another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman
+will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and
+there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc
+iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.
+
+The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your
+driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by
+his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and
+offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes
+you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.
+
+Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the end
+of their day's pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was
+the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly
+picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the
+added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of
+children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the
+roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the
+park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward the
+shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked better,
+through that mystical law of population by which poverty is richer than
+prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and screaming at
+their games, though they could not hear them, and they yelled and
+screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the
+greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they
+might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the
+preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes
+which in the east of these States is such a crying evil.
+
+Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which made
+the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental operations
+are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She was
+a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face full of a
+petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too much for her
+weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out of
+the window and looking both ways at once, and she fought away the feebly
+restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks, so that the companions
+expected every moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death,
+and suffered many things from their fear. When it seemed as if nothing
+could save them, the guard came in and told the weak, meek mother that
+the child must not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the force
+of all constituted authority among us, the child sat down quietly in her
+mother's lap, and for the rest of the journey remained an example to
+angels, so that the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness as
+in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of their happy day, a
+day so happy that now in the faint air of August it is hard to believe
+it even of May.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Imaginary Interviews, by W. D. Howells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS ***
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