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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literature and Life, Entire***
+#36 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Literature and Life, Entire
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+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3389]
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+sample the author's ideas before making an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+     Man of Letters in Business
+     Confessions of a Summer Colonist
+     The Young Contributor
+     Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
+     Anomalies of the Short Story
+     Spanish Prisoners of War
+     American Literary Centers
+     Standard Household Effect Co.
+     Notes of a Vanished Summer
+     Worries of a Winter Walk
+     Summer Isles of Eden
+     Wild Flowers of the Asphalt
+     A Circus in the Suburbs
+     A She Hamlet
+     The Midnight Platoon
+     The Beach at Rockaway
+     Sawdust in the Arena
+     At a Dime Museum
+     American Literature in Exile
+     The Horse Show
+     The Problem of the Summer
+     Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
+     From New York into New England
+     The Art of the Adsmith
+     The Psychology of Plagiarism
+     Puritanism in American Fiction
+     The What and How in Art
+     Politics in American Authors
+     Storage
+     "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Man of Letters as a Man of Business
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity
+which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer
+wishes to offer a word of explanation.  He owns, as he must, that they
+have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays,
+without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to
+any central motive.  Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes
+his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like
+this relation and this allegiance.
+
+For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here
+on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between
+what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life.  If I did not
+find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession,
+and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite
+sure of life unless I find literature in it.  Unless the thing seen
+reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it
+pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will
+do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first
+glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy.  Instantly I
+love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as
+many ones else as I can get to look or listen.  If the thing is something
+read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like
+life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart.  There can be no
+offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.
+
+Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things,
+about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which
+is which.  But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have
+found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will
+last till I forget my letters.
+
+               So was it when my life began;
+               So is it, now I am a man;
+               So be it when I shall grow old."
+
+It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without
+some bit of rainbow in it.  Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes
+not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of
+them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with
+glasses which would at least have helped their vision.
+
+As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose
+their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact.  "The Man of
+Letters as a Man of Business" was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the
+May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner's Magazine;
+"Confessions of a Summer Colonist" was done at York Harbor in the fall of
+1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant
+resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement,
+long before motors and almost before private carriages; "American
+Literary Centres," "American Literature in Exile," "Puritanism in
+American Fiction," "Politics of American Authors," were, with three or
+four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the
+London Times's literary supplement, to enlighten the British
+understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago,
+and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete
+actuality in the year 1899.  Most of the studies and sketches are from an
+extinct department of "Life and Letters" which I invented for Harper's
+Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth
+century.  Notable among these is the "Last Days in a Dutch Hotel," which
+was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps
+because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally
+recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England,
+are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer-
+memoried reader as papers from the "Editor's Easy Chair" in Harper's
+Monthly; "Wild Flowers of the Asphalt" is the review of an ever-
+delightful book which I printed in Harper's Bazar; "The Editor's
+Relations with the Young Contributor" was my endeavor in Youth's
+Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon
+the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.
+
+So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may
+persist in disintegrating under the reader's eye, in spite of my well-
+meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it.  The group at least
+attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary
+production in time and space.  From the beginning the journalist's
+independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with
+me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried
+volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library
+table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer
+hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a
+dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running
+brooks outside.
+                                             W. D. HOWELLS.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                          LITERATURE AND LIFE
+
+
+
+THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS
+
+I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception,
+and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society
+should provide him with work and warrant him a living.  I do not think
+any man ought to live by an art.  A man's art should be his privilege,
+when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned
+his daily bread; and its results should be free to all.  There is an
+instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion
+of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane,
+something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue.
+Most of all, the artist himself feels this.  He puts on a bold front with
+the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows very
+well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the work
+which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money.
+He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading the
+marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying the
+last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice
+itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is
+and must be.  He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art
+he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit
+its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly
+true.  He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his
+wares.  Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making
+something that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues.
+All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them
+still, with its inward vision.  Many will make believe otherwise, but I
+would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write of
+Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying that Business is
+the opprobrium of Literature.
+
+
+I.
+
+Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the
+arts.  It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as
+the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is
+the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms,
+of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all.  It cannot
+awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to express
+precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it says
+nothing, and is nothing.  So that when a poet has put his heart, much or
+little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater
+than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has
+modelled a statue to order.  These are artists less articulate and less
+intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are
+less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker.
+It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and
+Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most
+mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind.  They
+submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not
+justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of
+hucksters because they are imposed upon poets.  If it will serve to make
+my meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossed
+in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife or
+child.  He pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of
+sacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred
+dollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice.  It is
+perfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is
+perfectly true that it was sold for them.  The poet must use his emotions
+to pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does not
+propose to pay his bills for him.  Yet, and at the end of the ends, the
+unsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it
+repulsive, finds it shabby.  Somehow he knows that if our huckstering
+civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of
+things, the poet's song would have been given to the world, and the poet
+would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man
+should be who does the duty that every man owes it.
+
+The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is
+so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise
+refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble
+pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience.
+But Byron's publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his
+readers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her
+husband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of protest against
+business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis.
+I know of no others; but there may be many that I am culpably ignorant
+of.  Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the fact that
+Literature is Business as well as Art, and almost as soon.  At present
+business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with
+that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us,
+and I feel quite sure that in writing of the Man of Letters as a Man of
+Business I shall attract far more readers than I should in writing of him
+as an Artist.  Besides, as an artist he has been done a great deal
+already; and a commercial state like ours has really more concern in him
+as a business man.  Perhaps it may sometime be different; I do not
+believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way
+off.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In the mean time I confidently appeal to the reader's imagination with
+the fact that there are several men of letters among us who are such good
+men of business that they can command a hundred dollars a thousand words
+for all they write.  It is easy to write a thousand words a day, and,
+supposing one of these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that his
+net earnings during the year would come to some such sum as the President
+of the United States gets for doing far less work of a much more
+perishable sort.  If the man of letters were wholly a business man, this
+is what would happen; he would make his forty or fifty thousand dollars a
+year, and be able to consort with bank presidents, and railroad
+officials, and rich tradesmen, and other flowers of our plutocracy on
+equal terms.  But, unfortunately, from a business point of view, he is
+also an artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the
+public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly.  "No rose blooms
+right along," as the English boys at Oxford made an American collegian
+say in a theme which they imagined for him in his national parlance; and
+the man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when
+he cannot blossom.  Very often it shall happen that his mind will lie
+fallow between novels or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when
+the suggestions of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays
+or articles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, or
+shall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which he might sell
+indeed, but which it would not be good business for him to put on the
+market.  But supposing him to be a very diligent and continuous worker,
+and so happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights him and bears him
+along, he may please himself so ill with the result of his labors that he
+can do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day's work, a
+week's work, a month's work.  I know one man of letters who wrote to-day
+and tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer.  But even if part of the
+mistaken work may be saved, because it is good work out of place, and not
+intrinsically bad, the task of reconstruction wants almost as much time
+as the production; and then, when all seems done, comes the anxious and
+endless process of revision.  These drawbacks reduce the earning capacity
+of what I may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that an
+author whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation is
+commensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not transcend
+them, shall have the income, say, of a rising young physician, known to a
+few people in a subordinate city.
+
+In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of a
+nation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can establish the
+man of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man,
+after all.  He must still have a low rank among practical people; and he
+will be regarded by the great mass of Americans as perhaps a little off,
+a little funny, a little soft!  Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not
+have a consensus of public opinion on the question; I think I am more
+comfortable without it.
+
+
+III.
+
+There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the business
+side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and, so far
+from having been protected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety years
+after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of stolen
+goods.  It is true that we now have the international copyright law at
+last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but literary
+property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, and
+if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and
+punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon any
+other kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suit
+against them, and recover damages, if he can.  This may be right enough
+in itself; but I think, then, that all property should be defended by
+civil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of private
+tenure.  The Constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, but
+the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary
+industry.  So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the best
+business talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keep
+his present low grade among business men.
+
+As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing
+at all.  I may say that it is only since the Civil War that literature
+has become a business with us.  Before that time we had authors, and very
+good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember
+any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we
+all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans.  They were either men
+of fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomes
+apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with
+public offices; one need not go over their names or classify them.  Some
+of them must have made money by their books, but I question whether any
+one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books brought
+him.  No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could not
+recognize as a work of literature.  But many authors live now, and live
+prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings
+to the magazines.  They do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople,
+of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to make
+themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators,
+and the like is, in the nature of the case, beyond their fondest dreams
+of pecuniary affluence and social splendor.  Perhaps they do not want the
+chief seats in the synagogue; it is certain they do not get them.  Still,
+they do very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that
+would seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work with
+their hands for a living--when they can get the work.  Their incomes are
+mainly from serial publication in the different magazines; and the
+prosperity of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a
+class, was wholly unknown among us before the Civil War.  It is not only
+the famous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much
+larger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the
+editors, and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a
+kind of acceptable work.  These are the sort who do not get reprinted
+from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted,
+and then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readers
+who say they do not read serials.  The multitude of these is not great,
+and if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much
+more imbittered man than he now generally is.  But he understands
+perfectly well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the
+return from that he may count as so much money found in the road--a few
+hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most, unless he is the author of
+an historical romance.
+
+
+IV
+
+I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are absolutely as
+great as they were earlier in the century, in any of the English-speaking
+countries; relatively they are nothing like as great.  Scott had forty
+thousand dollars for 'Woodstock,' which was not a very large novel, and
+was by no means one of his best; and forty thousand dollars then had at
+least the purchasing power of sixty thousand now.  Moore had three
+thousand guineas for 'Lalla Rookh,' but what publisher would be rash
+enough to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the masterpiece of a minor
+poet now?  The book, except in very rare instances, makes nothing like
+the return to the author that the magazine makes, and there are few
+leading authors who find their account in that form of publication.
+Those who do, those who sell the most widely in book form, are often not
+at all desired by editors; with difficulty they get a serial accepted by
+any principal magazine.  On the other hand, there are authors whose
+books, compared with those of the popular favorites, do not sell, and yet
+they are eagerly sought for by editors; they are paid the highest prices,
+and nothing that they offer is refused.  These are literary artists; and
+it ought to be plain from what I am saying that in belles-lettres, at
+least, most of the best literature now first sees the light in the
+magazines, and most of the second-best appears first in book form.  The
+old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not
+reading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake, and
+simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they
+cannot enjoy the best.  Of course, this is true mainly, if not merely, of
+belles-lettres; history, science, politics, metaphysics, in spite of the
+many excellent articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to be
+called various emergent occasions, are still to be found at their best in
+books.  The most monumental example of literature, at once light and
+good, which has first reached the public in book form is in the different
+publications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens has of late turned to the
+magazines too, and now takes their mint-mark before he passes into
+general circulation.  All this may change again, but at present the
+magazines--we have no longer any reviews form the most direct approach to
+that part of our reading public which likes the highest things in
+literary art.  Their readers, if we may judge from the quality of the
+literature they get, are more refined than the book readers in our
+community; and their taste has no doubt been cultivated by that of the
+disciplined and experienced editors.  So far as I have known these, they
+are men of aesthetic conscience and of generous sympathy.  They have
+their preferences in the different kinds, and they have their theory of
+what kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but they exercise
+their selective function with the wish to give them the best things they
+can.  I do not know one of them--and it has been, my good fortune to know
+them nearly all--who would print a wholly inferior thing for the sake of
+an inferior class of readers, though they may sometimes decline a good
+thing because for one reason or another, they believe it would not be
+liked.  Still, even this does not often happen; they would rather chance
+the good thing they doubted of than underrate their readers' judgment.
+
+The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine has
+achieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then with the best
+reading public.  Many factitious and fallacious literary reputations have
+been made through books, but very few have been made through the
+magazines, which are not only the best means of living, but of outliving,
+with the author; they are both bread and fame to him.  If I insist a
+little upon the high office which this modern form of publication fulfils
+in the literary world, it is because I am impatient of the antiquated and
+ignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephemeral.  They are
+ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not ephemeral, and what is
+best in them awaits its resurrection in the book, which, as the first
+form, is so often a lasting death.  An interesting proof of the value of
+the magazine to literature is the fact that a good novel will often have
+wider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial.
+
+
+V.
+
+Under the 'regime' of the great literary periodicals the prosperity of
+literary men would be much greater than it actually is if the magazines
+were altogether literary.  But they are not, and this is one reason why
+literature is still the hungriest of the professions.  Two-thirds of the
+magazines are made up of material which, however excellent, is without
+literary quality.  Very probably this is because even the highest class
+of readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love of pure
+literature, which seems to have been growing less and less in all
+classes.  I say seems, because there are really no means of ascertaining
+the fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making their
+periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and the
+timely topics which I will call contemporanics.  But, however that may
+be, their efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of literary
+industry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled by the
+unexampled prosperity of their periodicals.  They pay very well indeed
+for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand words for
+the work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand
+words for that of the most famous, or the most popular, if there is a
+difference between fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, want
+enough literature to justify the best business talent in devoting itself
+to belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel,
+or light essays; business talent can do far better in dry goods,
+groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like.  I do not
+think there is any danger of a ruinous competition from it in the field
+which, though narrow, seems so rich to us poor fellows, whose business
+talent is small, at the best.
+
+The most of the material contributed to the magazines is the subject of
+agreement between the editor and the author; it is either suggested by
+the author or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in any
+case the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is no longer the custom
+for a well-known contributor to leave the payment to the justice or the
+generosity of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, nor
+ever a wise thing.  Usually, the price is so much a thousand words, a
+truly odious method of computing literary value, and one well calculated
+to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his art at all.
+It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a square inch, or a
+sculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the pound.  But it is a
+custom that you cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most writers
+gladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand words is large enough.
+The sale to the editor means the sale of the serial rights only, but if
+the publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the
+republication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless there
+is an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are another
+affair.  Formerly something more could be got for the author by the
+simultaneous appearance of his work in an English magazine; but now the
+great American magazines, which pay far higher prices than any others in
+the world, have a circulation in England so much exceeding that of any
+English periodical that the simultaneous publication can no longer be
+arranged for from this side, though I believe it is still done here from
+the other side.
+
+
+VI.
+
+I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to
+the magazines.  I am not sure that the case is in every way improved for
+young authors.  The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful
+examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has
+been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use is
+very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in
+the course of a year.  The new writer, then, must be very good to be
+accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed.
+The pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one,
+two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay.  If the young writer
+has not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in
+the courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the
+book is his immediate hope.  How slight a hope the book is I have tried
+to hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude
+enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse
+still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not
+indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean
+success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does
+not personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it.
+I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which the
+young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind,
+such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it has
+found a publisher.  It is human nature, as competition has deformed human
+nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks, and
+he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own expense,
+and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing it.  If
+not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype
+plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this
+will not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he is
+commonly only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offers
+him ten per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies
+have been sold.  But if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten
+per cent. from the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication
+himself.  The book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the
+publisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred
+copies.  Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased is a
+question, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself to
+blame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-five
+dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and try to find work
+somewhere at five dollars a week.  The publisher has not made any more,
+if quite as much as the author, and until a book has sold two thousand
+copies the division is fair enough.  After that, the heavier expenses of
+manufacturing have been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself;
+there is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be
+met, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher.
+The author has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first
+book, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at all.  If it
+succeeds, he has himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his
+second or third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is
+practically the same thing.  It will be business for the publisher to
+take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault;
+but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very often
+not do so.
+
+At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the author's
+gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known American
+author prospered fabulously in that way.  The percentage offered by the
+subscription houses was only about half as much as that paid by the
+trade, but the sales were so much greater that the author could very well
+afford to take it.  Where the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold a
+hundred; or at least he did so in the case of Mark Twain's books; and we
+all thought it reasonable he could do so with ours.  Such of us as made
+experiment of him, however, found the facts illogical.  No book of
+literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens's
+books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew
+what good literature they were.  This sort of readers, or buyers, were so
+used to getting something worthless for their money that they would not
+spend it for artistic fiction, or, indeed, for any fiction at all except
+Mr. Clemens's, which they probably supposed bad.  Some good books of
+travel had a measurable success through the book-agents, but not at all
+the success that had been hoped for; and I believe now the subscription
+trade again publishes only compilations, or such works as owe more to the
+skill of the editor than the art of the writer.  Mr. Clemens himself no
+longer offers his books to the public in that way.
+
+It is not common, I think, in this country, to publish on the half-
+profits system, but it is very common in England, where, owing probably
+to the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy outline to every
+prospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring.  One of my own early books
+was published there on these terms, which I accepted with the insensate
+joy of the young author in getting any terms from a publisher.  The book
+sold, sold every copy of the small first edition, and in due time the
+publisher's statement came.  I did not think my half of the profits was
+very great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost had
+been charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture had been
+made to pay the expenses of composition, corrections, paper, printing,
+binding, advertising, and editorial copies.  The wonder ought to have
+been that there was anything at all coming to me, but I was young and
+greedy then, and I really thought there ought to have been more.  I was
+disappointed, but I made the best of it, of course, and took the account
+to the junior partner of the house which employed me, and said that I
+should like to draw on him for the sum due me from the London publishers.
+He said, Certainly; but after a glance at the account he smiled and said
+he supposed I knew how much the sum was?  I answered, Yes; it was eleven
+pounds nine shillings, was not it?  But I owned at the same time that I
+never was good at figures, and that I found English money peculiarly
+baffling.  He laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and
+ninepence.  In fact, after all those charges for composition,
+corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies,
+there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent.
+commission on sales, which reduced my half from pounds to shillings, and
+handsomely increased the publisher's half in proportion.  I do not now
+dispute the justice of the charge.  It was not the fault of the half-
+profits system; it was the fault of the glad young author who did not
+distinctly inform himself of its mysterious nature in agreeing to it, and
+had only to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed.
+
+But there is always something disappointing in the accounts of
+publishers, which I fancy is because authors are strangely constituted,
+rather than because publishers are so.  I will confess that I have such
+inordinate expectations of the sale of my books, which I hope I think
+modestly of, that the sales reported to me never seem great enough.  The
+copyright due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably mean,
+and I feel impoverished for several days after I get it.  But, then, I
+ought to add that my balance in the bank is always much less than I have
+supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back to me, have the
+air of having been in a conspiracy to betray me.
+
+No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves in
+business, that the distress we feel from our publisher's accounts is
+simply idiopathic; and I for one wish to bear my witness to the constant
+good faith and uprightness of publishers.  It is supposed that because
+they have the affair altogether in their hands they are apt to take
+advantage in it; but this does not follow, and as a matter of fact they
+have the affair no more in their own hands than any other business man
+you have an open account with.  There is nothing to prevent you from
+looking at their books, except your own innermost belief and fear that
+their books are correct, and that your literature has brought you so
+little because it has sold so little.
+
+The author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the contrary,
+especially if he has written a book that has set every one talking,
+because it is of a vital interest.  It may be of a vital interest,
+without being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it may be the
+kind of book that they are content to know at second hand; there are such
+fatal books; but hearing so much, and reading so much about it, the
+author cannot help hoping that it has sold much more than the publisher
+says.  The publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and the author had
+better put away the comforting question of his integrity.
+
+The English writers seem largely to suspect their publishers; but I
+believe that American authors, when not flown with flattering reviews,
+as largely trust theirs.  Of course there are rogues in every walk of
+life.  I will not say that I ever personally met them in the flowery
+paths of literature, but I have heard of other people meeting them there,
+just as I have heard of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe in
+both the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses.
+I suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers,
+but, in the case of our books that do not sell, I am afraid that it is
+the graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame than
+the wickedest of the publishers.  It is true that publishers will drive a
+hard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing to
+hinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or when
+he must; and it is to be said of the publisher that he is always more
+willing to abide by the bargain when it is made than the author is;
+perhaps because he has the best of it.  But he has not always the best of
+it; I have known publishers too generous to take advantage of the
+innocence of authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do with any
+race less diffident than authors, they would have won a repute for
+unselfishness that they do now now enjoy.  It is certain that in the long
+period when we flew the black flag of piracy there were many among our
+corsairs on the high seas of literature who paid a fair price for the
+stranger craft they seized; still oftener they removed the cargo and
+released their capture with several weeks' provision; and although there
+was undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and scuttling, still
+I feel sure that there was less of it than there would have been in any
+other line of business released to the unrestricted plunder of the
+neighbor.  There was for a long time even a comity among these amiable
+buccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with each other, and so were
+enabled to pay over to their victims some portion of the profit from
+their stolen goods.  Of all business men publishers are probably the most
+faithful and honorable, and are only surpassed in virtue when men of
+letters turn business men.
+
+
+VII.
+
+Publishers have their little theories, their little superstitions, and
+their blind faith in the great god Chance which we all worship.  These
+things lead them into temptation and adversity, but they seem to do
+fairly well as business men, even in their own behalf.  They do not make
+above the usual ninety-five per cent. of failures, and more publishers
+than authors get rich.
+
+Some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share together.
+One of these is that it is best to keep your books all in the hands of
+one publisher if you can, because then he can give them more attention
+and sell more of them.  But my own experience is that when my books were
+in the hands of three publishers they sold quite as well as when one had
+them; and a fellow-author whom I approached in question of this venerable
+belief laughed at it.  This bold heretic held that it was best to give
+each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all his
+energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisher
+rested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that the
+fresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones.
+I never knew this to happen; and I must class it with the superstitions
+of the trade.  It may be so in other and more constant countries, but in
+our fickle republic each last book has to fight its own way to public
+favor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage.  Of course this is
+stating it rather largely, and the truth will be found inside rather than
+outside of my statement; but there is at least truth enough in it to give
+the young author pause.  While one is preparing to sell his basket of
+glass, he may as well ask himself whether it is better to part with all
+to one dealer or not; and if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary
+customer who asks the favor of taking the entire stock, that will be his
+fault, and not the fault of the customer.
+
+However, the most important question of all with the man of letters as a
+man of business is what kind of book will sell the best of itself,
+because, at the end of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell at
+all; kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal of culture,
+still goes by favor, and though innumerable generations of horses have
+been led to the water, not one horse has yet been made to drink.  With
+the best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book
+into acceptance.  Advertising will not avail, and reviewing is
+notoriously futile.  If the book does not strike the popular fancy,
+or deal with some universal interest, which need by no means be a
+profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in
+vain.  The book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world,
+but if it has not this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and,
+worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit.  The secret of
+this, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the
+awful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky
+chance.  To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor,
+is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the unworthiest;
+and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of business, counsel
+the young author to do it.  The best that you can do is to write the book
+that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart and
+soul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to
+reach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That,
+and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.
+
+The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States the
+fate of a book is in the hands of the women.  It is the women with us who
+have the most leisure, and they read the most books.  They are far better
+educated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if not their
+minds, are more cultivated.  Our men read the newspapers, but our women
+read the books; the more refined among them read the magazines.  If they
+do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them, and it
+is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal from
+them.  To go from them to the men would be going from a higher to a lower
+court, which would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the thing
+were possible.  As I say, the author of light literature, and often the
+author of solid literature, must resign himself to obscurity unless the
+ladies choose to recognize him.  Yet it would be impossible to forecast
+their favor for this kind or that.  Who could prophesy it for another,
+who guess it for himself?  We must strive blindly for it, and hope
+somehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we must remember at
+the same time that it is not the ladies' man who is the favorite of the
+ladies.
+
+There are, of course, a few, a very few, of our greatest authors who have
+striven forward to the first place in our Valhalla without the help of
+the largest reading-class among us; but I should say that these were
+chiefly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any warm
+liking, and who have generally with us come up through the newspapers,
+and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers.  They have become
+literary men, as it were, without the newspaper readers' knowing it; but
+those who have approached literature from another direction have won fame
+in it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them; and then made
+their husbands and fathers read them.  Perhaps, then, and as a matter of
+business, it would be well for a serious author, when he finds that he is
+not pleasing the women, and probably never will please them, to turn
+humorous author, and aim at the countenance of the men.  Except as a
+humorist he certainly never will get it, for your American, when he is
+not making money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do
+it.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who approaches
+literature through journalism is not as fine and high a literary man as
+the author who comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; I have
+not the least notion of condemning myself by any such judgment.  But I
+think it is pretty certain that fewer and fewer authors are turning from
+journalism to literature, though the 'entente cordiale' between the two
+professions seems as great as ever.  I fancy, though I may be as mistaken
+in this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists would
+have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the
+kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the
+self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors.  When an
+author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to
+glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about
+him; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they
+would willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise brought
+to grief and shame.  They are apt to gird at him for his unhallowed
+gains, and they would be quite right in this if they proposed any way for
+him to live without them; as I have allowed at the outset, the gains are
+unhallowed.  Apparently it is unseemly for two or three authors to be
+making half as much by their pens as popular ministers often receive in
+salary; the public is used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the
+clergy, and at least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can
+always get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the
+ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel and the five pounds Milton
+got for his epic.  I have always thought Milton was paid too little, but
+I will own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes to
+that.  Again I say that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame to
+the art if not to the artist; but as yet there is no means of the
+artist's living otherwise and continuing an artist.
+
+The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the newspaper man,
+generally speaking.  I have often thought with amazement of the kindness
+shown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and of the help so
+lavishly and freely given to rising and even risen authors.  To put it
+coarsely, brutally, I do not suppose that any other business receives so
+much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre.  It is, enormous, the
+space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements,
+reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest,
+not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to time
+upon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism,
+capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism.  I have sometimes
+doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the editors
+gave them, but I have always said this under my breath, and I have
+thankfully taken my share of the common bounty.  A curious fact, however,
+is that this vast newspaper publicity seems to have very little to do
+with an author's popularity, though ever so much with his notoriety.
+Some of those strange subterranean fellows who never come to the surface
+in the newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long intervals,
+outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their horses
+and yachts and country seats, while immodest merit is left to get about
+on foot and look up summer-board at the cheaper hotels.  That is probably
+right, or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like
+millionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether the
+newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their actual
+generosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune, however
+much they help one to fame.  Such a question is almost too dreadful, and,
+though I have asked it, I will not attempt to answer it.  I would much
+rather consider the question whether, if the newspapers can make an
+author, they can also unmake him, and I feel pretty safe in saying that I
+do not think they can.  The Afreet, once out of the bottle, can never be
+coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers have
+made cannot be unmade by the newspapers.  Perhaps he could if they would
+let him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor,
+when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with the
+newspapers.  They consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the
+land, and they keep visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more
+and more notice to him.  An author who has long enjoyed their favor
+suddenly and rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on
+certain matters of literary taste, say.  For the space of five or six
+years he is denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought
+to convince him there is something wrong.  If he thinks it is his
+censors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constancy, while
+ridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation, and
+personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for
+instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of
+fiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of
+Tolstoy, Tourgunief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a moment's
+comparison with the school of Rider Haggard.  All this ought certainly to
+unmake the author in question, but this is not really the effect.  Slowly
+but surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishing
+one of his wicked opinions, or in any wise showing himself repentant,
+remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the old
+kindness--not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, but
+certainly to as much of it as he merits.
+
+I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case; believe that
+it is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the press.  In
+fact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be better business,
+for him to keep it altogether out of his mind.  There is only one whom he
+can safely try to please, and that is himself.  If he does this he will
+very probably please other people; but if he does not please himself he
+may be sure that he will not please them; the book which he has not
+enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading.  Still, I would not have him
+attach too little consequence to the influence of the press.  I should
+say, let him take the celebrity it gives him gratefully but not too
+seriously; let him reflect that he is often the necessity rather than the
+ideal of the paragrapher, and that the notoriety the journalists bestow
+upon him is not the measure of their acquaintance with his work, far less
+his meaning.  They are good fellows, those hard-pushed, poor fellows of
+the press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly or
+unfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than
+knowledge in it.
+
+
+IX.
+
+There are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but now
+apparently no longer desired by magazine editors, who ought to know what
+their readers desire.  Among these is the travel sketch, to me a very
+agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline.  There are
+some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and a
+possible surfeit.  Travel itself has become so universal that everybody,
+in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has no longer the
+charm of strangeness.  We do not think the Old World either so romantic
+or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an instinctive perception
+of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to our sentiment or our
+humor with sketches of outlandish people and places.  Of course, this can
+hold true only in a general way; the thing is still done, but not nearly
+so much done as formerly.  When one thinks of the long line of American
+writers who have greatly pleased in this sort, and who even got their
+first fame in it, one must grieve to see it obsolescent.  Irving, Curtis,
+Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville, Ross Browne, Warner, Ik Marvell,
+Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Hay, Mrs. Hunt,
+Mr. C. W. Stoddard, Mark Twain, and many others whose names will not come
+to me at the moment, have in their several ways richly contributed to our
+pleasure in it; but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with
+an editor in a sketch of travel or a study of foreign manners and
+customs; his work would have to be of the most signal importance and
+brilliancy to overcome the editor's feeling that the thing had been done
+already; and I believe that a publisher, if offered a book of such
+things, would look at it askance and plead the well-known quiet of the
+trade.  Still, I may be mistaken.
+
+I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary species
+--namely, the light essay.  We have essays enough and to spare of certain
+soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and deal with
+conditions; but the kind that I mean, the slightly humorous, gentle,
+refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once did.  I do
+not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his readers' frame,
+or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom find them in the
+magazines.  I certainly do not believe that if any one were now to write
+essays such as Warner's Backlog Studies, an editor would refuse them; and
+perhaps nobody really writes them.  Nobody seems to write the sort that
+Colonel Higginson formerly contributed to the periodicals, or such as
+Emerson wrote.  Without a great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume
+of essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a public
+in the magazines.  There are, of course, instances to the contrary, but
+they are not so many or so striking as to make me think that the essay
+could be offered as a good opening for business talent.
+
+I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid in
+the magazines than it is now.  I must say, too, that I think the quality
+of the minor poetry of our day is better than that of twenty-five or
+thirty years ago.  I could name half a score of young poets whose work
+from time to time gives me great pleasure, by the reality of its feeling
+and the delicate perfection of its art, but I will not name them, for
+fear of passing over half a score of others equally meritorious.  We have
+certainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poets
+themselves have to be so, and I do not think that even in the short story
+our younger writers are doing better work than they are doing in the
+slighter forms of verse.  Yet the notion of inviting business talent into
+this field would be as preposterous as that of asking it to devote itself
+to the essay.  What book of verse by a recent poet, if we except some
+such peculiarly gifted poet as Mr. Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses,
+not to speak of any profit to the author?  Of course, it would be rather
+more offensive and ridiculous that it should do so than that any other
+form of literary art should do so; and yet there is no more provision in
+our economic system for the support of the poet apart from his poems than
+there is for the support of the novelist apart from his novel.  One could
+not make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but it
+is a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men,
+and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have usually
+been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their devotion to a
+calling which is so seldom an election.
+
+To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up poet
+than to set up historian.  There is no outlay for copying documents, or
+visiting libraries, or buying books.  In fact, except as historian, the
+man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of the expenses of
+other men of business, but none of the expenses of other artists.  He has
+no such outlay to make for materials, or models, or studio rent as the
+painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such as it is, is immediate.
+If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the first thing he offers, as
+he very well may, it is as well with him as with other men after long
+years of apprenticeship.  Although he will always be the better for an
+apprenticeship, and the longer apprenticeship the better, he may
+practically need none at all.  Such are the strange conditions of his
+acceptance with the public, that he may please better without it than
+with it.  An author's first book is too often not only his luckiest, but
+really his best; it has a brightness that dies out under the school he
+puts himself to, but a painter or a sculptor is only the gainer by all
+the school he can give himself.
+
+
+X.
+
+In view of this fact it becomes again very hard to establish the author's
+status in the business world, and at moments I have grave question
+whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist.  There is, of
+course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any other sort
+of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some measure of
+preparation.  A young writer may produce a brilliant and very perfect
+romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in
+the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of
+manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the outset.  For
+this work he needs experience and observation, not so much of others as
+of himself, for ultimately his characters will all come out of himself,
+and he will need to know motive and character with such thoroughness and
+accuracy as he can acquire only through his own heart.  A man remains in
+a measure strange to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources of
+novelty in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give it
+freshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and better.  But
+a young writer and an untrained writer has not yet begun to be acquainted
+even with the lives of other men.  The world around him remains a secret
+as well as the world within him, and both unfold themselves
+simultaneously to that experience of joy and sorrow that can come only
+with the lapse of time.  Until he is well on towards forty, he will
+hardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he may
+have amassed them.  The novelist, then, is a man of letters who is like a
+man of business in the necessity of preparation for his calling, though
+he does not pay store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat,
+as the phrase is.  He alone among men of letters may look forward to that
+sort of continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence
+in other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade,
+and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world.  It is
+not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief that
+it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of
+business.  Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who
+gets a hundred dollars a thousand words or whose book sells five hundred
+thousand copies or less.  That is a fact appreciable to business, and the
+man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably feel that his place
+in our civilization, though he may owe it to the women who form the great
+mass of his readers, has something of the character of a vested interest
+in the eyes of men.  There is, indeed, as yet no conspiracy law which
+will avenge the attempt to injure him in his business.  A critic, or a
+dark conjuration of critics, may damage him at will and to the extent of
+their power,and he has no recourse but to write better books, or worse.
+The law will do nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might be
+preached with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the
+question of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism.  Still the market for
+his wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literary
+wares, and the prices are better.  The historian, who is a kind of
+inferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market,
+but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the
+novelist's trade are not to be compared in a business way.  As for the
+essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are
+nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers.  The reviewer,
+indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers
+who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point
+of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see
+them doing it.  Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best
+writers of fiction, who are most in demand with the magazines, probably
+get nearly as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who
+outsell them by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the
+innumerable multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of
+fiction in book form.  I think they earn their money, but if I did not
+think all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they
+get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who
+did not.
+
+The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has no
+objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so express
+it.  A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, may be
+worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing whatever to another.
+It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another
+mood of the same reader.  How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it to
+be fairly marketed?  All people must be fed, and all people must be
+clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelter
+are things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have a
+market price put upon them.  But there is no such positive and obvious
+necessity, I am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of
+fiction.  The sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to the
+circus and the variety theatre in the show-business seems essential to
+the spiritual health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the
+classes can get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel.  This
+is a great pity, and I should be-very willing that readers might feel
+something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of their finer
+fiction; but apparently they never do.  Their dumb and passive need is
+apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in the form of weariness of
+this author or that.  The publisher of books can ascertain the fact
+through the declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a magazine,
+who is the best customer of the best writers, must feel the market with a
+much more delicate touch.  Sometimes it may be years before he can
+satisfy himself that his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for
+Jones; even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is
+by no means safe in cutting down Smith's price and putting up Jones's.
+With the best will in the world to pay justly, he cannot.  Smith, who has
+been boring his readers to death for a year, may write tomorrow a thing
+that will please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite
+again; and Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so
+uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the
+magazine.  The only thing that gives either writer positive value is his
+acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to month
+wholly uncertain.  Authors are largely matters of fashion, like this
+style of bonnet, or that shape of gown.  Last spring the dresses were all
+made with lace berthas, and Smith was read; this year the butterfly capes
+are worn, and Jones is the favorite author.  Who shall forecast the fall
+and winter modes?
+
+
+XI.
+
+In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the publisher, always
+the contributor rather than the editor, whom I am concerned for.  I study
+the difficulties of the publisher and editor only because they involve
+the author and the contributor; if they did not, I will not say with how
+hard a heart I should turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing
+the business conditions of literature is for the makers of literature,
+not the purveyors of it.
+
+After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters ever
+am business man?  I suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is, except
+in those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is the
+publisher as well as the author of his books.  Then he puts something on
+the market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business.  But
+otherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass of
+wage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing done
+or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by
+marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it.  The
+quality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the
+case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a working-man, and is
+under the rule that governs the working-man's life.  If he is sick or
+sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy, and will not, then he earns
+nothing.  He cannot delegate his business to a clerk or a manager; it
+will not go on while he is sleeping.  The wage he can command depends
+strictly upon his skill and diligence.
+
+I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and proud to be
+of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows, and not the
+sweat of other men's brows; I think my bread is the sweeter for it.  In
+the mean time, I have no blame for business men; they are no more of the
+condition of things than we working-men are; they did no more to cause it
+or create it; but I would rather be in my place than in theirs, and I
+wish that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that economically
+they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers.  It ought to be
+our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the world
+something that was not choately there before; that at least we fashion or
+shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that binds us to all
+the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling chain, but as a
+mystic bond also uniting us to Him who works hitherto and evermore.
+I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-working-men we
+artists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows.  I like to
+look the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are often
+terrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and I will not pretend, in
+this light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for the
+masses, or so much.  Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of the
+classes.  Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and then
+they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual dulness
+with some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure that bruises
+and abashes.  In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the
+less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his
+art.  We all know that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than the
+figure which is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, and
+conceives of nothing outside of it, or above it.  In the social world, as
+well as in the business world, the artist is anomalous, in the actual
+conditions, and he is perhaps a little ridiculous.
+
+Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do well
+to regard himself as in a transition state.  He is really of the masses,
+but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yet
+the common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at all.  He is
+apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen to him; he
+often amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease among them;
+whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of their kind.
+Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as there
+are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot
+consort with.  The prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living,
+but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh the
+accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has been
+divinely planted in the human soul.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Artist has seasons, as trees,  when he cannot blossom. . . . . . . . . .
+Book that they are content to know at second hand. . . . . . . . . . . .
+Business to take advantage of his necessity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Competition has deformed human nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Fate of a book is in the hands of the women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity . . . . . . . . .
+Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+I do not think any man ought to live by an art . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. . . . . . . . .
+Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success . . . . . . . . .
+Literature beautiful only through the intelligence . . . . . . . . . . .
+Literature has no objective value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Literature is Business as well as Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Man is strange to himself as long as he lives. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books. . . . . . . . . .
+More zeal than knowledge in it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Most journalists would have been literary men if they could. . . . . . .
+Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. . . . . . . . .
+No man ought to live by any art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+No rose blooms right along . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Our huckstering civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best . . . . .
+Results of art should be free to all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reviewers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century. . . . . . . .
+Rogues in every walk of life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+There is small love of pure literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian . . . . . .
+Warner's Backlog Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Man of Letters in Business,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Confessions of a Summer Colonist
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST
+
+
+The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down East
+coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each
+loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant.
+A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already
+begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of
+words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some
+shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change
+should destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I should
+never come back to it.  Perhaps others in the distant future may turn to
+it for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristic
+phases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions of
+our own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as the
+visible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fire
+and a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American of
+all American things is the least fitted among them to survive from the
+present to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soon
+be a "portion and parcel" of our extremely forgetful past.
+
+It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one might say that last
+year it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogether
+different.  In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when the
+rudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, and
+vulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvan
+distinction.
+
+The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is the seven-o'clock
+supper.  Every one, in hotel or in cottage, dines between one and two,
+and no less scrupulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists who
+sup at half-past seven.  At this function, which is our chief social
+event, it is 'de rigueur' for the men not to dress, and they come in any
+sort of sack or jacket or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pomps
+which they forego.  From this fact may be inferred the informality of the
+men's day-time attire; and the same note is sounded in the whole range of
+the cottage life, so that once a visitor from the world outside, who had
+been exasperated beyond endurance by the absence of form among us (if
+such an effect could be from a cause so negative), burst out with the
+reproach, "Oh, you make a fetish of your informality!"
+
+"Fetish" is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mind
+saying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place.  American
+men are everywhere impatient of form.  It burdens and bothers them, and
+they like to throw it off whenever they can.  We may not be so very
+democratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies that
+separate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at one
+another; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as we
+do the expenses.  We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty in
+our colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humble
+than of the great.  In the nature of things it cannot last, however, and
+the only question is how long it will last.  I think, myself, until some
+one imagines giving an eight-o'clock dinner; then all the informalities
+will go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes will
+rush in.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and some still exist in the
+earlier stages of mutation from the fishermen's and farmers' houses which
+formed their germ.  But these are now mostly let as lodgings to bachelors
+and other single or semi-detached folks who go for their meals to the
+neighboring hotels or boarding-houses.  The hotels are each the centre of
+this sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of their own scores
+or hundreds of inmates.  A single boarding-house gathers about it half a
+dozen dependent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; and
+even where the cottages have kitchens and all the housekeeping
+facilities, their inmates sometimes prefer to dine at the hotels.
+By far the greater number of cottagers, however, keep house, bringing
+their service with them from the cities, and settling in their summer
+homes for three or four or five months.
+
+The houses conform more or less to one type: a picturesque structure of
+colonial pattern, shingled to the ground, and stained or left to take a
+weather-stain of grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dormer-
+windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms.  Within they are, if not
+elaborately finished, elaborately fitted up, with a constant regard to
+health in the plumbing and drainage.  The water is brought in a system of
+pipes from a lake five miles away, and as it is only for summer use the
+pipes are not buried from the frost, but wander along the surface,
+through the ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls on
+which the cottages are perched, and climb the old tumbling stone walls of
+the original pastures before diving into the cemented basements.
+
+Most of the cottages are owned by their occupants, and furnished by them;
+the rest, not less attractive and hardly less tastefully furnished,
+belong to natives, who have caught on to the architectural and domestic
+preferences of the summer people, and have built them to let.  The
+rugosities of the stony pasture land end in a wooded point seaward, and
+curve east and north in a succession of beaches.  It is on the point, and
+mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement
+are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as
+birds' nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild
+raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched
+as possible.  Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find
+the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage from
+another, and people walk rather than drive to each other's doors.
+From the deep-bosomed, well-sheltered little harbor the tides swim
+inland, half a score of winding miles, up the channel of a river which
+without them would be a trickling rivulet.  An irregular line of cottages
+follows the shore a little way, and then leaves the river to the
+schooners and barges which navigate it as far as the oldest pile-built
+wooden bridge in New England, and these in their turn abandon it to the
+fleets of row-boats and canoes in which summer youth of both sexes
+explore it to its source over depths as clear as glass, past wooded
+headlands and low, rush-bordered meadows, through reaches and openings of
+pastoral fields, and under the shadow of dreaming groves.
+
+If there is anything lovelier than the scenery of this gentle river I do
+not know it; and I doubt if the sky is purer and bluer in paradise.  This
+seems to be the consensus, tacit or explicit, of the youth who visit it,
+and employ the landscape for their picnics and their water parties from
+the beginning to the end of summer.
+
+The river is very much used for sunsets by the cottagers who live on it,
+and who claim a superiority through them to the cottagers on the point.
+An impartial mind obliges me to say that the sunsets are all good in our
+colony; there is no place from which they are bad; and yet for a certain
+tragical sunset, where the dying day bleeds slowly into the channel till
+it is filled from shore to shore with red as far as the eye can reach,
+the river is unmatched.
+
+For my own purposes, it is not less acceptable, however, when the fog has
+come in from the sea like a visible reverie, and blurred the whole valley
+with its whiteness.  I find that particularly good to look at from the
+trolley-car which visits and revisits the river before finally leaving
+it, with a sort of desperation, and hiding its passion with a sudden
+plunge into the woods.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The old fishing and seafaring village, which has now almost lost the
+recollection of its first estate in its absorption with the care of the
+summer colony, was sparsely dropped along the highway bordering the
+harbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of the time-worn
+wharves are still rotting.  A few houses of the past remain, but the type
+of the summer cottage has impressed itself upon all the later building,
+and the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, into
+abeyance.  He takes the situation philosophically, and in the season he
+caters to the summer colony not only as the landlord of the rented
+cottages, and the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but as
+livery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apothecary, and doctor;
+there is not one foreign accent in any of these callings.  If the native
+is a farmer, he devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruit
+for the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their doors; his
+children appear with flowers; and there are many proofs that he has
+accurately sized the cottagers up in their tastes and fancies as well as
+their needs.  I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if our somewhat
+conventionalized ideal of him is perfectly representative.  He is,
+perhaps, more complex than he seems; he is certainly much more self-
+sufficing than might have been expected.  The summer folks are the
+material from which his prosperity is wrought, but he is not dependent,
+and is very far from submissive.  As in all right conditions, it is here
+the employer who asks for work, not the employee; and the work must be
+respectfully asked for.  There are many fables to this effect, as, for
+instance, that of the lady who said to a summer visitor, critical of the
+week's wash she had brought home, "I'll wash you and I'll iron you, but I
+won't take none of your jaw."  A primitive independence is the keynote of
+the native character, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boasts
+itself.  "We're independent here, I tell you," said the friendly person
+who consented to take off the wire door.  "I was down Bangor way doin' a
+piece of work, and a fellow come along, and says he, 'I want you should
+hurry up on that job.' 'Hello!' says I, 'I guess I'll pull out.'  Well,
+we calculate to do our work," he added, with an accent which sufficiently
+implied that their consciences needed no bossing in the performance.
+
+The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly in
+some such form as, "Well, I don't know but what I can," or, "I guess
+there ain't anything to hinder me."  This compliance is so rarely, if
+ever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be said
+that all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported.
+The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in "to
+accommodate"; but they will not "live out."  I was one day witness of the
+extreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him,
+and who applied to a friendly farmer's wife in the vain hope that she
+might help him to some one who would help his family out in their strait.
+"Why, there ain't a girl in the Hollow that lives out!  Why, if you was
+sick abed, I don't know as I know anybody 't you could git to set up with
+you."  The natives will not live out because they cannot keep their self-
+respect in the conditions of domestic service.  Some people laugh at this
+self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I own I do.
+
+In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his relation to us, he
+is imagined as holding a kind of carnival when we leave him at the end of
+the season, and it is believed that he likes us to go early.  We have had
+his good offices at a fair price all summer, but as it draws to a close
+they are rendered more and more fitfully.  From some, perhaps flattered,
+reports of the happiness of the natives at the departure of the
+sojourners, I have pictured them dancing a sort of farandole, and
+stretching with linked hands from the farthest summer cottage up the
+river to the last on the wooded point.  It is certain that they get
+tired, and I could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of their
+guests, and to go back to their own social life.  This includes church
+festivals of divers kinds, lectures and shows, sleigh-rides, theatricals,
+and reading-clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellently
+chosen free village library.  They say frankly that the summer folks have
+no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone, and I am sure that the
+gayeties to which we leave them must be more tolerable than those which
+we go back to in the city.  It may be, however, that I am too confident,
+and that their gayeties are only different.  I should really like to know
+just what the entertainments are which are given in a building devoted to
+them in a country neighborhood three or four miles from the village.  It
+was once a church, but is now used solely for social amusements.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+The amusements of the summer colony I have already hinted at.  Besides
+suppers, there are also teas, of larger scope, both afternoon and
+evening.  There are hops every week at the two largest hotels, which are
+practically free to all; and the bathing-beach is, of course, a supreme
+attraction.  The bath-houses, which are very clean and well equipped,
+are not very cheap, either for the season or for a single bath, and there
+is a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands.  This is always full of
+gossiping spectators of the hardy adventurers who brave tides too remote
+from the Gulf Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty-five
+degrees.  The bathers are mostly young people, who have the courage of
+their pretty bathing-costumes or the inextinguishable ardor of their
+years.  If it is not rather serious business with them all, still I
+admire the fortitude with which some of them remain in fifteen minutes.
+Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there is a far more
+populous watering-place, east of the Point, known as the Beach, which is
+the resort of people several grades of gentility lower than ours: so
+many, in fact, that we never can speak of the Beach without averting our
+faces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile.  It is really a succession
+of beaches, all much longer and, I am bound to say, more beautiful than
+ours, lined with rows of the humbler sort of summer cottages known as
+shells, and with many hotels of corresponding degree.  The cottages may
+be hired by the week or month at about two dollars a day, and they are
+supposed to be taken by inland people of little social importance.  Very
+likely this is true; but they seemed to be very nice, quiet people, and I
+commonly saw the ladies reading, on their verandas, books and magazines,
+while the gentlemen sprayed the dusty road before them with the garden
+hose.  The place had also for me an agreeable alien suggestion, and in
+passing the long row of cottages I was slightly reminded of Scheveningen.
+Beyond the cottage settlements is a struggling little park, dedicated to
+the only Indian saint I ever heard of, though there may be others.  His
+statue, colossal in sheet-lead, and painted the copper color of his race,
+offers any heathen comer the choice between a Bible in one of his hands
+and a tomahawk in the other, at the entrance of the park; and there are
+other sheet-lead groups and figures in the white of allegory at different
+points.  It promises to be a pretty enough little place in future years,
+but as yet it is not much resorted to by the excursions which largely
+form the prosperity of the Beach.  The concerts and the "high-class
+vaudeville" promised have not flourished in the pavilion provided for
+them, and one of two monkeys in the zoological department has perished of
+the public inattention.  This has not fatally affected the captive bear,
+who rises to his hind legs, and eats peanuts and doughnuts in that
+position like a fellow-citizen.  With the cockatoos and parrots, and the
+dozen deer in an inclosure of wire netting, he is no mean attraction; but
+he does not charm the excursionists away from the summer village at the
+shore, where they spend long afternoons splashing among the waves, or in
+lolling groups of men, women, and children on the sand.  In the more
+active gayeties, I have seen nothing so decided during the whole season
+as the behavior of three young girls who once came up out of the sea, and
+obliged me by dancing a measure on the smooth, hard beach in their
+bathing-dresses.
+
+I thought it very pretty, but I do not believe such a thing could have
+been seen on OUR beach, which is safe from all excursionists, and sacred
+to the cottage and hotel life of the Port.
+
+Besides our beach and its bathing, we have a reading-club for the men,
+evolved from one of the old native houses, and verandaed round for summer
+use; and we have golf-links and a golf club-house within easy trolley
+reach.  The links are as energetically, if not as generally, frequented
+as the sands, and the sport finds the favor which attends it everywhere
+in the decay of tennis.  The tennis-courts which I saw thronged about by
+eager girl-crowds, here, seven years ago, are now almost wholly abandoned
+to the lovers of the game, who are nearly always men.
+
+Perhaps the only thing (besides, of course, our common mortality) which
+we have in common with the excursionists is our love of the trolley-line.
+This, by its admirable equipment, and by the terror it inspires in
+horses, has well-nigh abolished driving; and following the old country
+roads, as it does, with an occasional short-cut though the deep, green-
+lighted woods or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of a
+picturesque variety entirely satisfying.  After a year of fervent
+opposition and protest, the whole community--whether of summer or of
+winter folks--now gladly accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottager
+and the lowliest hotel dweller meet in a grateful appreciation of its
+beauty and comfort.
+
+Some pass a great part of every afternoon on the trolley, and one lady
+has achieved celebrity by spending four dollars a week in trolley-rides.
+The exhilaration of these is varied with an occasional apprehension when
+the car pitches down a sharp incline, and twists almost at right angles
+on a sudden curve at the bottom without slacking its speed.  A lady who
+ventured an appeal to the conductor at one such crisis was reassured, and
+at the same time taught her place, by his reply: "That motorman's life,
+ma'am, is just as precious to him as what yours is to you."
+
+She had, perhaps, really ventured too far, for ordinarily the employees
+of the trolley do not find occasion to use so much severity with their
+passengers.  They look after their comfort as far as possible, and seek
+even to anticipate their wants in unexpected cases, if I may believe a
+story which was told by a witness.  She had long expected to see some one
+thrown out of the open car at one of the sharp curves, and one day she
+actually saw a woman hurled from the seat into the road.  Luckily the
+woman slighted on her feet, and stood looking round in a daze.
+
+"Oh! oh!" exclaimed another woman in the seat behind, "she's left her
+umbrella!"
+
+The conductor promptly threw it out to her.
+
+"Why," demanded the witness, "did that lady wish to get out here?"
+
+The conductor hesitated before he jerked the bellpull to go on: Then he
+said, "Well, she'll want her umbrella, anyway."
+
+The conductors are, in fact, very civil as well as kind.  If they see a
+horse in anxiety at the approach of the car, they considerately stop, and
+let him get by with his driver in safety.  By such means, with their
+frequent trips and low fares, and with the ease and comfort of their
+cars, they have conciliated public favor, and the trolley has drawn
+travel away from the steam railroad in such measure that it ran no trains
+last winter.
+
+The trolley, in fact, is a fad of the summer folks this year; but what it
+will be another no one knows; it may be their hissing and by-word.  In
+the mean time, as I have already suggested, they have other amusements.
+These are not always of a nature so general as the trolley, or so
+particular as the tea.  But each of the larger hotels has been fully
+supplied with entertainments for the benefit of their projectors, though
+nearly everything of the sort had some sort of charitable slant.  I
+assisted at a stereopticon lecture on Alaska for the aid of some youthful
+Alaskans of both sexes, who were shown first in their savage state, and
+then as they appeared after a merely rudimental education, in the
+costumes and profiles of our own civilization.  I never would have
+supposed that education could do so much in so short a time; and I gladly
+gave my mite for their further development in classic beauty and a final
+elegance.  My mite was taken up in a hat, which, passed round among the
+audience, is a common means of collecting the spectators' expressions of
+appreciation.  Other entertainments, of a prouder frame, exact an
+admission fee, but I am not sure that these are better than some of the
+hat-shows, as they are called.
+
+The tale of our summer amusements would be sadly incomplete without some
+record of the bull-fights given by the Spanish prisoners of war on the
+neighboring island, where they were confined the year of the war.
+Admission to these could be had only by favor of the officers in charge,
+and even among the Elite of the colony those who went were a more elect
+few.  Still, the day I went, there were some fifty or seventy-five
+spectators, who arrived by trolley near the island, and walked to the
+stockade which confined the captives.  A real bull-fight, I believe, is
+always given on Sunday, and Puritan prejudice yielded to usage even in
+the case of a burlesque bull-fight; at any rate, it was on a Sunday that
+we crouched in an irregular semicircle on a rising ground within the
+prison pale, and faced the captive audience in another semicircle, across
+a little alley for the entrances and exits of the performers.  The
+president of the bull-fight was first brought to the place of honor in a
+hand-cart, and then came the banderilleros, the picadores, and the
+espada, wonderfully effective and correct in white muslin and colored
+tissue-paper.  Much may be done in personal decoration with advertising
+placards; and the lofty mural crown of the president urged the public on
+both sides to Use Plug Cut.  The picador's pasteboard horse was attached
+to his middle, fore and aft, and looked quite the sort of hapless jade
+which is ordinarily sacrificed to the bulls.  The toro himself was
+composed of two prisoners, whose horizontal backs were covered with a
+brown blanket; and his feet, sometimes bare and sometimes shod with
+india-rubber boots, were of the human pattern.  Practicable horns, of a
+somewhat too yielding substance, branched from a front of pasteboard, and
+a cloth tail, apt to come off in the charge, swung from his rear.  I have
+never seen a genuine corrida, but a lady present, who had, told me that
+this was conducted with all the right circumstance; and it is certain
+that the performers entered into their parts with the artistic gust of
+their race.  The picador sustained some terrific falls, and in his
+quality of horse had to be taken out repeatedly and sewed up; the
+banderilleros tormented and eluded the toro with table-covers, one red
+and two drab, till the espada took him from them, and with due ceremony,
+after a speech to the president, drove his blade home to the bull's
+heart.  I stayed to see three bulls killed; the last was uncommonly
+fierce, and when his hindquarters came off or out, his forequarters
+charged joyously among the aficionados on the prisoners' side, and made
+havoc in their thickly packed ranks.  The espada who killed this bull was
+showered with cigars and cigarettes from our side.
+
+I do not know what the Sabbath-keeping shades of the old Puritans made of
+our presence at such a fete on Sunday; but possibly they had got on so
+far in a better life as to be less shocked at the decay of piety among us
+than pleased at the rise of such Christianity as had brought us, like
+friends and comrades, together with our public enemies in this harmless
+fun.  I wish to say that the tobacco lavished upon the espada was
+collected for the behoof of all the prisoners.
+
+Our fiction has made so much of our summer places as the mise en scene of
+its love stories that I suppose I ought to say something of this side of
+our colonial life.  But after sixty I suspect that one's eyes are poor
+for that sort of thing, and I can only say that in its earliest and
+simplest epoch the Port was particularly famous for the good times that
+the young people had.  They still have good times, though whether on just
+the old terms I do not know.  I know that the river is still here with
+its canoes and rowboats, its meadowy reaches apt for dual solitude, and
+its groves for picnics.  There is not much bicycling--the roads are rough
+and hilly--but there is something of it, and it is mighty pretty to see
+the youth of both sexes bicycling with their heads bare.  They go about
+bareheaded on foot and in buggies, too, and the young girls seek the tan
+which their mothers used so anxiously to shun.
+
+The sail-boats, manned by weather-worn and weatherwise skippers, are
+rather for the pleasure of such older summer folks as have a taste for
+cod-fishing, which is here very good.  But at every age, and in whatever
+sort our colonists amuse themselves, it is with the least possible
+ceremony.  It is as if, Nature having taken them so hospitably to her
+heart, they felt convention an affront to her.  Around their cottages, as
+I have said, they prefer to leave her primitive beauty untouched, and she
+rewards their forbearance with such a profusion of wild flowers as I have
+seen nowhere else.  The low, pink laurel flushed all the stony fields to
+the edges of their verandas when we first came; the meadows were milk-
+white with daisies; in the swampy places delicate orchids grew, in the
+pools the flags and flowering rushes; all the paths and way-sides were
+set with dog-roses; the hollows and stony tops were broadly matted with
+ground juniper.  Since then the goldenrod has passed from glory to glory,
+first mixing its yellow-powdered plumes with the red-purple tufts of the
+iron-weed, and then with the wild asters everywhere.  There has come
+later a dwarf sort, six or ten inches high, wonderfully rich and fine,
+which, with a low, white aster, seems to hold the field against
+everything else, though the taller golden-rod and the masses of the high,
+blue asters nod less thickly above it.  But these smaller blooms deck the
+ground in incredible profusion, and have an innocent air of being stuck
+in, as if they had been fancifully used for ornament by children or
+Indians.
+
+In a little while now, as it is almost the end of September, all the
+feathery gold will have faded to the soft, pale ghosts of that
+loveliness.  The summer birds have long been silent; the crows, as if
+they were so many exultant natives, are shouting in the blue sky above
+the windrows of the rowan, in jubilant prescience of the depopulation of
+our colony, which fled the hotels a fortnight ago.  The days are growing
+shorter, and the red evenings falling earlier; so that the cottagers'
+husbands who come up every Saturday from town might well be impatient for
+a Monday of final return.  Those who came from remoter distances have
+gone back already; and the lady cottagers, lingering hardily on till
+October, must find the sight of the empty hotels and the windows of the
+neighboring houses, which no longer brighten after the chilly nightfall,
+rather depressing.  Every one says that this is the loveliest time of
+year, and that it will be divine here all through October.  But there are
+sudden and unexpected defections; there is a steady pull of the heart
+cityward, which it is hard to resist.  The first great exodus was on the
+first of the month, when the hotels were deserted by four-fifths of their
+guests.  The rest followed, half of them within the week, and within a
+fortnight none but an all but inaudible and invisible remnant were left,
+who made no impression of summer sojourn in the deserted trolleys.
+
+The days now go by in moods of rapid succession.  There have been days
+when the sea has lain smiling in placid derision of the recreants who
+have fled the lingering summer; there have been nights when the winds
+have roared round the cottages in wild menace of the faithful few who
+have remained.
+
+We have had a magnificent storm, which came, as an equinoctial storm
+should, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the sea
+upon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high.  I
+watched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage that
+crouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the
+rocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other.  The sea was
+such a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriously
+shuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back,
+purring and softly crackling in a quiet indifference to the storm.
+
+Twenty-four hours more made all serene again.  Bloodcurdling tales of
+lobster-pots carried to sea filled the air; but the air was as blandly
+unconscious of ever having been a fury as a lady who has found her lost
+temper.  Swift alternations of weather are so characteristic of our
+colonial climate that the other afternoon I went out with my umbrella
+against the raw, cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it against
+the broiling sun.  Three days ago I could say that the green of the woods
+had no touch of hectic in it; but already the low trees of the swamp-land
+have flamed into crimson.  Every morning, when I look out, this crimson
+is of a fierier intensity, and the trees on the distant uplands are
+beginning slowly to kindle, with a sort of inner glow which has not yet
+burst into a blaze.  Here and there the golden-rod is rusting; but there
+seems only to be more and more asters sorts; and I have seen ladies
+coming home with sheaves of blue gentians; I have heard that the orchids
+are beginning again to light their tender lamps from the burning
+blackberry vines that stray from the pastures to the edge of the swamps.
+
+After an apparently total evanescence there has been a like resuscitation
+of the spirit of summer society.  In the very last week of September we
+have gone to a supper, which lingered far out of its season like one of
+these late flowers, and there has been an afternoon tea which assembled
+an astonishing number of cottagers, all secretly surprised to find one
+another still here, and professing openly a pity tinged with contempt for
+those who are here no longer.
+
+I blamed those who had gone home, but I myself sniff the asphalt afar;
+the roar of the street calls to me with the magic that the voice of the
+sea is losing.  Just now it shines entreatingly, it shines winningly, in
+the sun which is mellowing to an October tenderness, and it shines under
+a moon of perfect orb, which seems to have the whole heavens to itself in
+"the first watch of the night," except for "the red planet Mars."  This
+begins to burn in the west before the flush of sunset has passed from it;
+and then, later, a few moon-washed stars pierce the vast vault with their
+keen points.  The stars which so powdered the summer sky seem mostly to
+have gone back to town, where no doubt people take them for electric
+lights.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego . . . . . . . . . .
+Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone. . . . .
+Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Confessions of a Summer Colonist,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Young Contributor
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+THE EDITOR'S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR
+
+
+One of the trustiest jokes of the humorous paragrapher is that the editor
+is in great and constant dread of the young contributor; but neither my
+experience nor my observation bears out his theory of the case.
+
+Of course one must not say anything to encourage a young person to
+abandon an honest industry in the vain hope of early honor and profit
+from literature; but there have been and there will be literary men and
+women always, and these in the beginning have nearly always been young;
+and I cannot see that there is risk of any serious harm in saying that it
+is to the young contributor the editor looks for rescue from the old
+contributor, or from his failing force and charm.
+
+The chances, naturally, are against the young contributor, and vastly
+against him; but if any periodical is to live, and to live long, it is by
+the infusion of new blood; and nobody knows this better than the editor,
+who may seem so unfriendly and uncareful to the young contributor.  The
+strange voice, the novel scene, the odor of fresh woods and pastures new,
+the breath of morning, the dawn of tomorrow--these are what the editor is
+eager for, if he is fit to be an editor at all; and these are what the
+young contributor alone can give him.
+
+A man does not draw near the sixties without wishing people to believe
+that he is as young as ever, and he has not written almost as many books
+as he has lived years without persuading himself that each new work of
+his has all the surprise of spring; but possibly there are wonted traits
+and familiar airs and graces in it which forbid him to persuade others.
+I do not say these characteristics are not charming; I am very far from
+wishing to say that; but I do say and must say that after the fiftieth
+time they do not charm for the first time; and this is where the
+advantage of the new contributor lies, if he happens to charm at all.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The new contributor who does charm can have little notion how much he
+charms his first reader, who is the editor.  That functionary may bide
+his pleasure in a short, stiff note of acceptance, or he may mask his joy
+in a check of slender figure; but the contributor may be sure that he has
+missed no merit in his work, and that he has felt, perhaps far more than
+the public will feel, such delight as it can give.
+
+The contributor may take the acceptance as a token that his efforts have
+not been neglected, and that his achievements will always be warmly
+welcomed; that even his failures will be leniently and reluctantly
+recognized as failures, and that he must persist long in failure before
+the friend he has made will finally forsake him.
+
+I do not wish to paint the situation wholly rose color; the editor will
+have his moods, when he will not see so clearly or judge so justly as at
+other times; when he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will want
+this or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, or sketch, which
+the author knows to be simply perfect as it stands; but he is worth
+bearing with, and he will be constant to the new contributor as long as
+there is the least hope of him.
+
+The contributor may be the man or the woman of one story, one poem, one
+sketch, for there are such; but the editor will wait the evidence of
+indefinite failure to this effect.  His hope always is that he or she is
+the man or the woman of many stories, many poems, many sketches, all as
+good as the first.
+
+From my own long experience as a magazine editor, I may say that the
+editor is more doubtful of failure in one who has once done well than of
+a second success.  After all, the writer who can do but one good thing is
+rarer than people are apt to think in their love of the improbable; but
+the real danger with a young contributor is that he may become his own
+rival.
+
+What would have been quite good enough from him in the first instance is
+not good enough in the second, because he has himself fixed his standard
+so high.  His only hope is to surpass himself, and not begin resting on
+his laurels too soon; perhaps it is never well, soon or late, to rest
+upon one's laurels.  It is well for one to make one's self scarce, and
+the best way to do this is to be more and more jealous of perfection in
+one's work.
+
+The editor's conditions are that having found a good thing he must get as
+much of it as he can, and the chances are that he will be less exacting
+than the contributor imagines.  It is for the contributor to be exacting,
+and to let nothing go to the editor as long as there is the possibility
+of making it better.  He need not be afraid of being forgotten because he
+does not keep sending; the editor's memory is simply relentless; he could
+not forget the writer who has pleased him if he would, for such writers
+are few.
+
+I do not believe that in my editorial service on the Atlantic Monthly,
+which lasted fifteen years in all, I forgot the name or the
+characteristic quality, or even the handwriting, of a contributor who had
+pleased me, and I forgot thousands who did not.  I never lost faith in a
+contributor who had done a good thing; to the end I expected another good
+thing from him.  I think I was always at least as patient with him as he
+was with me, though he may not have known it.
+
+At the time I was connected with that periodical it had almost a monopoly
+of the work of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe,
+Parkman, Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others not so well known,
+but still well known.  These distinguished writers were frequent
+contributors, and they could be counted upon to respond to almost any
+appeal of the magazine; yet the constant effort of the editors was to
+discover new talent, and their wish was to welcome it.
+
+I know that, so far as I was concerned, the success of a young
+contributor was as precious as if I had myself written his paper or poem,
+and I doubt if it gave him more pleasure.  The editor is, in fact, a sort
+of second self for the contributor, equally eager that he should stand
+well with the public, and able to promote his triumphs without egotism
+and share them without vanity.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In fact, my curious experience was that if the public seemed not to feel
+my delight in a contribution I thought good, my vexation and
+disappointment were as great as if the work hod been my own.  It was even
+greater, for if I had really written it I might have had my misgivings of
+its merit, but in the case of another I could not console myself with
+this doubt.  The sentiment was at the same time one which I could not
+cherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one stood more upon
+his own feet; and the young contributor may be sure that the editor's
+pride, self-interest, and sense of editorial infallibility will all
+prompt him to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the public,
+and whom he has vouched for.
+
+I hope I am not giving the young contributor too high an estimate of his
+value to the editor.  After all, he must remember that he is but one of a
+great many others, and that the editor's affections, if constant, are
+necessarily divided.  It is good for the literary aspirant to realize
+very early that he is but one of many; for the vice of our comparatively
+virtuous craft is that it tends to make each of us imagine himself
+central, if not sole.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not revolve around any
+one of us; we make our circuit of the sun along with the other
+inhabitants of the earth, a planet of inferior magnitude.  The thing we
+strive for is recognition, but when this comes it is apt to turn our
+heads.  I should say, then, that it was better it should not come in a
+great glare and aloud shout, all at once, but should steal slowly upon
+us, ray by ray, breath by breath.
+
+In the mean time, if this happens, we shall have several chances of
+reflection, and can ask ourselves whether we are really so great as we
+seem to other people, or seem to seem.
+
+The prime condition of good work is that we shall get ourselves out of
+our minds.  Sympathy we need, of course, and encouragement; but I am not
+sure that the lack of these is not a very good thing, too.  Praise
+enervates, flattery poisons; but a smart, brisk snub is always rather
+wholesome.
+
+I should say that it was not at all a bad thing for a young contributor
+to get his manuscript back, even after a first acceptance, and even a
+general newspaper proclamation that he is one to make the immortals
+tremble for their wreaths of asphodel--or is it amaranth?  I am never
+sure which.
+
+Of course one must have one's hour, or day, or week, of disabling the
+editor's judgment, of calling him to one's self fool, and rogue, and
+wretch; but after that, if one is worth while at all, one puts the
+rejected thing by, or sends it off to some other magazine, and sets about
+the capture of the erring editor with something better, or at least
+something else.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+I think it a great pity that editors ever deal other than frankly with
+young contributors, or put them off with smooth generalities of excuse,
+instead of saying they do not like this thing or that offered them.  It
+is impossible to make a criticism of all rejected manuscripts, but in the
+case of those which show promise I think it is quite possible; and if I
+were to sin my sins over again, I think I should sin a little more on the
+side of candid severity.  I am sure I should do more good in that way,
+and I am sure that when I used to dissemble my real mind I did harm to
+those whose feelings I wished to spare.  There ought not, in fact, to be
+question of feeling in the editor's mind.
+
+I know from much suffering of my own that it is terrible to get back a
+manuscript, but it is not fatal, or I should have been dead a great many
+times before I was thirty, when the thing mostly ceased for me.  One
+survives it again and again, and one ought to make the reflection that it
+is not the first business of a periodical to print contributions of this
+one or of that, but that its first business is to amuse and instruct its
+readers.
+
+To do this it is necessary to print contributions, but whose they are, or
+how the writer will feel if they are not printed, cannot be considered.
+The editor can consider only what they are, and the young contributor
+will do well to consider that, although the editor may not be an
+infallible judge, or quite a good judge, it is his business to judge, and
+to judge without mercy.  Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment in an
+artistic result than in a mathematical result.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I suppose, since I used to have it myself, that there is a superstition
+with most young contributors concerning their geographical position.  I
+used to think that it was a disadvantage to send a thing from a small or
+unknown place, and that it doubled my insignificance to do so.  I
+believed that if my envelope had borne the postmark of New York, or
+Boston, or some other city of literary distinction, it would have arrived
+on the editor's table with a great deal more authority.  But I am sure
+this was a mistake from the first, and when I came to be an editor myself
+I constantly verified the fact from my own dealings with contributors.
+A contribution from a remote and obscure place at once piqued my
+curiosity, and I soon learned that the fresh things, the original things,
+were apt to come from such places, and not from the literary centres.
+One of the most interesting facts concerning the arts of all kinds is
+that those who wish to give their lives to them do not appear where the
+appliances for instruction in them exist.  An artistic atmosphere does
+not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators;
+poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a
+picture seen.
+
+This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning,
+but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the
+instruments and means of beauty.  It may also suggest to that scholar-
+pride, that vanity of technique, which is so apt to vaunt itself in the
+teacher, that the best he can do, after all, is to let the pupil teach
+himself.  If he comes with divine authority to the thing he attempts, he
+will know how to use the appliances, of which the teacher is only the
+first.
+
+The editor, if he does not consciously perceive the truth, will
+instinctively feel it, and will expect the acceptable young contributor
+from the country, the village, the small town, and he will look eagerly
+at anything that promises literature from Montana or Texas, for he will
+know that it also promises novelty.
+
+If he is a wise editor, he will wish to hold his hand as much as
+possible; he will think twice before he asks the contributor to change
+this or correct that; he will leave him as much to himself as he can.
+The young contributor; on his part, will do well to realize this, and to
+receive all the editorial suggestions, which are veiled commands in most
+cases, as meekly and as imaginatively as possible.
+
+The editor cannot always give his reasons; however strongly he may feel
+them, but the contributor, if sufficiently docile, can always divine
+them.  It behooves him to be docile at all times, for this is merely the
+willingness to learn; and whether he learns that he is wrong, or that the
+editor is wrong, still he gains knowledge.
+
+A great deal of knowledge comes simply from doing, and a great deal more
+from doing over, and this is what the editor generally means.
+
+I think that every author who is honest with himself must own that his
+work would be twice as good if it were done twice.  I was once so
+fortunately circumstanced that I was able entirely to rewrite one of my
+novels, and I have always thought it the best written, or at least
+indefinitely better than it would have been with a single writing.  As a
+matter of fact, nearly all of them have been rewritten in a certain way.
+They have not actually been rewritten throughout, as in the case I speak
+of, but they have been gone over so often in manuscript and in proof that
+the effect has been much the same.
+
+Unless you are sensible of some strong frame within your work, something
+vertebral, it is best to renounce it, and attempt something else in which
+you can feel it.  If you are secure of the frame you must observe the
+quality and character of everything you build about it; you must touch,
+you must almost taste, you must certainly test, every material you
+employ; every bit of decoration must undergo the same scrutiny as the
+structure.
+
+It will be some vague perception of the want of this vigilance in the
+young contributor's work which causes the editor to return it to him for
+revision, with those suggestions which he will do well to make the most
+of; for when the editor once finds a contributor he can trust, he
+rejoices in him with a fondness which the contributor will never perhaps
+understand.
+
+It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise editor understands
+this, and averts his countenance from the contributor who writes at him;
+but if he feels that the contributor conceives the situation, and will
+conform to the conditions which his periodical has invented for itself,
+arid will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if he perceives that he
+has put artistic conscience in every general and detail, and though he
+has not done the best, has done the best that he can do, he will begin to
+liberate him from every trammel except those he must wear himself, and
+will be only too glad to leave him free.  He understands, if he is at all
+fit for his place, that a writer can do well only what he likes to do,
+and his wish is to leave him to himself as soon as possible.
+
+
+V.
+
+In my own case, I noticed that the contributors who could be best left to
+themselves were those who were most amenable to suggestion and even
+correction, who took the blue pencil with a smile, and bowed gladly to
+the rod of the proof-reader.  Those who were on the alert for offence,
+who resented a marginal note as a slight, and bumptiously demanded that
+their work should be printed just as they had written it, were commonly
+not much more desired by the reader than by the editor.
+
+Of course the contributor naturally feels that the public is the test of
+his excellence, but he must not forget that the editor is the beginning
+of the public; and I believe he is a faithfuller and kinder critic than
+the writer will ever find again.
+
+Since my time there is a new tradition of editing, which I do not think
+so favorable to the young contributor as the old.  Formerly the magazines
+were made up of volunteer contributions in much greater measure than they
+are now.  At present most of the material is invited and even engaged; it
+is arranged for a long while beforehand, and the space that can be given
+to the aspirant, the unknown good, the potential excellence, grows
+constantly less and less.
+
+A great deal can be said for either tradition; perhaps some editor will
+yet imagine a return to the earlier method.  In the mean time we must
+deal with the thing that is, and submit to it until it is changed.  The
+moral to the young contributor is to be better than ever, to leave
+nothing undone that shall enhance his small chances of acceptance.
+If he takes care to be so good that the editor must accept him in spite
+of all the pressure upon his pages, he will not only be serving-himself
+best, but may be helping the editor to a conception of his duty that
+shall be more hospitable to all other young contributors.  As it is,
+however, it must be owned that their hope of acceptance is very, very
+small, and they will do well to make sure that they love literature so
+much that they can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in its
+cause.
+
+The love of it is the great and only test of fitness for it.  It is
+really inconceivable how any one should attempt it without this, but
+apparently a great many do.  It is evident to every editor that a vast
+number of those who write the things he looks at so faithfully, and reads
+more or less, have no artistic motive.
+
+People write because they wish to be known, or because they have heard
+that money is easily made in that way, or because they think they will
+chance that among a number of other things.  The ignorance of technique
+which they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the palpable
+factitiousness of their product.  It is something that they have made; it
+is not anything that has grown out of their lives.
+
+I should think it would profit the young contributor, before he puts pen
+to paper, to ask himself why he does so, and, if he finds that he has no
+motive in the love of the thing, to forbear.
+
+Am I interested in what I am going to write about?  Do I feel it
+strongly?  Do I know it thoroughly?  Do I imagine it clearly?  The young
+contributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many more
+like them as he can think of.  Perhaps he will end by not being a young
+contributor.
+
+But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to his own conscience, by
+all means let him begin.  He may at once put aside all anxiety about
+style; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be added
+unto him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man's way
+of saying a thing.
+
+If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to say, perhaps he will
+try to say it in some other man's way, or to hide his own vacuity with
+rags of rhetoric and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from this
+author and that.  He will fancy that in this disguise his work will be
+more literary, and that there is somehow a quality, a grace, imparted to
+it which will charm in spite of the inward hollowness.  His vain hope
+would be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is destined to suffer
+defeat at the first glance of the editorial eye.
+
+If he really has something to say, however, about something he knows and
+loves, he is in the best possible case to say it well.  Still, from time
+to time he may advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he is
+saying the thing clearly and simply.
+
+If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully, and musically; and I
+would by no means have him aim to say it barely or sparely.  It is not so
+that people talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought of
+the writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue.
+
+To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some teach, is to practice
+a kind of quackery almost as offensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric.
+In either case the life goes out of the subject.
+
+To please one's self, honestly and thoroughly, is the only way to please
+others in matters of art.  I do not mean to say that if you please
+yourself you will always please others, but that unless you please
+yourself you will please no one else.  It is the sweet and sacred
+privilege of work done artistically to delight the doer.  Art is the
+highest joy, but any work done in the love of it is art, in a kind, and
+it strikes the note of happiness as nothing else can.
+
+We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomes
+drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if
+you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as digging
+ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the same blessings
+of God, become arts if they are done with conscience and the sense of
+beauty.
+
+The young contributor may test his work before the editor assays it, if
+he will, and he may know by a rule that is pretty infallible whether it
+is good or not, from his own experience in doing it.  Did it give him
+pleasure?  Did he love it as it grew under his hand?  Was he glad and
+willing with it?  Or did he force himself to it, and did it hang heavy
+upon him?
+
+There is nothing mystical in all this; it is a matter of plain, every-day
+experience, and I think nearly every artist will say the same thing about
+it, if he examines himself faithfully.
+
+If the young contributor finds that he has no delight in the thing he has
+attempted, he may very well give it up, for no one else will delight in
+it.  But he need not give it up at once; perhaps his mood is bad; let him
+wait for a better, and try it again.  He may not have learned how to do
+it well, and therefore he cannot love it, but perhaps he can learn to do
+it well.
+
+The wonder and glory of art is that it is without formulas.  Or, rather,
+each new piece of work requires the invention of new formulas, which will
+not serve again for another.  You must apprentice yourself afresh at
+every fresh undertaking, and our mastery is always a victory over certain
+unexpected difficulties, and not a dominion of difficulties overcome
+before.
+
+I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely the strength that comes
+of overcoming and is never a sovereign power that smooths the path of all
+obstacles.  The combinations in art are infinite, and almost never the
+same; you must make your key and fit it to each, and the key that unlocks
+one combination will not unlock another.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+There is no royal road to excellence in literature, but the young
+contributor need not be dismayed at that.  Royal roads are the ways that
+kings travel, and kings are mostly dull fellows, and rarely have a good
+time.  They do not go along singing; the spring that trickles into the
+mossy log is not for them, nor
+
+               "The wildwood flower that simply blows."
+
+But the traveller on the country road may stop for each of these; and it
+is not a bad condition of his progress that he must move so slowly that
+he can learn every detail of the landscape, both earth and sky, by heart.
+
+The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind, or
+apart.  The successful writer especially is in danger of becoming
+isolated from the realities that nurtured in him the strength to win
+success.  When he becomes famous, he becomes precious to criticism, to
+society, to all the things that do not exist from themselves, or have not
+the root of the matter in them.
+
+Therefore, I think that a young writer's upward course should be slow and
+beset with many obstacles, even hardships.  Not that I believe in
+hardships as having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard them
+in that way; but they oftener bring out the virtues inherent in the
+sufferer from them than what I may call the 'softships'; and at least
+they stop him, and give him time to think.
+
+This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward rapidly, we have no
+time for anything but prospering forward rapidly.  We have no time for
+art, even the art by which we prosper.
+
+I would have the young contributor above all things realize that success
+is not his concern.  Good work, true work, beautiful work is his affair,
+and nothing else.  If he does this, success will take care of itself.
+
+He has no business to think of the thing that will take.  It is the
+editor's business to think of that, and it is the contributor's business
+to think of the thing that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasure
+that comes from the sense of worth in the thing done.  Let him do the
+best he can, and trust the editor to decide whether it will take.
+
+It will take far oftener than anything he attempts perfunctorily; and
+even if the editor thinks it will not take, and feels obliged to return
+it for that reason, he will return it with a real regret, with the honor
+and affection which we cannot help feeling for any one who has done a
+piece of good work, and with the will and the hope to get something from
+him that will take the next time, or the next, or the next.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An artistic atmosphere does not create artists . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery . . . . . . . . . . .
+Put aside all anxiety about style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity. . . . . . . . .
+Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind. . . . . . .
+Work would be twice as good if it were done twice. . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Young Contributor,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL
+
+(1897)
+
+
+When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of
+September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be
+very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already;
+and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for
+a whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed
+to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumn
+leaves.  We were but a poor hundred at most where five hundred would not
+have been a crowd; and, when we sat down at the long tables d'hote in the
+great dining-room, we had to warm our hands with our plates before we
+could hold our spoons.  From time to time the weather varied, as it does
+in Europe (American weather is of an exemplary constancy in comparison),
+and three or four times a day it rained, and three or four times it
+cleared; but through all the wind blew cold and colder.  We were
+promised, however, that the hotel would not close till October, and we
+made shift, with a warm chimney in one room and three gas-burners in
+another, if not to keep warm quite, yet certainly to get used to the
+cold.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+In the mean time the sea-bathing went resolutely on with all its forms.
+Every morning the bathing machines were drawn down to the beach from the
+esplanade, where they were secured against the gale every night; and
+every day a half-dozen hardy invalids braved the rigors of wind and wave.
+At the discreet distance which one ought always to keep one could not
+always be sure whether these bold bathers were mermen or mermaids; for
+the sea costume of both sexes is the same here, as regards an absence of
+skirts and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, effectively
+tights.  The first time I walked down to the beach I was puzzled to make
+out some object rolling about in the low surf, which looked like a
+barrel, and which two bathing-machine men were watching with apparently
+the purpose of fishing it out.  Suddenly this object reared itself from
+the surf and floundered towards the steps of a machine; then I saw that
+it was evidently not a barrel, but a lady, and after that I never dared
+carry my researches so far.  I suppose that the bathing-tights are more
+becoming in some cases than in others; but I hold to a modest preference
+for skirts, however brief, in the sea-gear of ladies.  Without them there
+may sometimes be the effect of beauty, and sometimes the effect of
+barrel.
+
+For the convenience and safety of the bathers there were, even in the
+last half of September, some twenty machines, and half as many bath-men
+and bath-women, who waded into the water and watched that the bathers
+came to no harm, instead of a solitary lifeguard showing his statuesque
+shape as he paced the shore beside the lifelines, or cynically rocked in
+his boat beyond the breakers, as the custom is on Long Island.  Here
+there is no need of life-lines, and, unless one held his head resolutely
+under water, I do not see how he could drown within quarter of a mile of
+the shore.  Perhaps it is to prevent suicide that the bathmen are so
+plentifully provided.
+
+They are a provision of the hotel, I believe, which does not relax itself
+in any essential towards its guests as they grow fewer.  It seems, on the
+contrary, to use them with a more tender care, and to console them as it
+may for the inevitable parting near at hand.  Now, within three or four
+days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as
+it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit
+down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or
+vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America.
+It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on
+delicately, almost silently.  A strip of carpeting has come up from along
+our corridor, but we hardly miss it from the matting which remains.
+Through the open doors of vacant chambers we can see that beds are coming
+down, and the dismantling extends into the halls at places.  Certain
+decorative carved chairs which repeated themselves outside the doors have
+ceased to be there; but the pictures still hang on the walls, and within
+our own rooms everything is as conscientious as in midsummer.  The
+service is instant, and, if there is some change in it, the change is not
+for the worse.  Yesterday our waiter bade me good-bye, and when I said I
+was sorry he was going he alleged a boil on his cheek in excuse; he would
+not allow that his going had anything to do with the closing of the
+hotel, and he was promptly replaced by another who speaks excellent
+English.  Now that the first is gone, I may own that he seemed not to
+speak any foreign language long, but, when cornered in English, took
+refuge in French, and then fled from pursuit in that to German, and
+brought up in final Dutch, where he was practically inaccessible.
+
+The elevator runs regularly, if not rapidly; the papers arrive
+unfailingly in the reading-room, including a solitary London Times, which
+even I do not read, perhaps because I have no English-reading rival to
+contend for it with.  Till yesterday, an English artist sometimes got it;
+but he then instantly offered it to me; and I had to refuse it because I
+would not be outdone in politeness.  Now even he is gone, and on all
+sides I find myself in an unbroken circle of Dutch and German, where no
+one would dispute the Times with me if he could.
+
+Every night the corridors are fully lighted, and some mornings swept,
+while the washing that goes on all over Holland, night and morning, does
+not always spare our unfrequented halls and stairs.  I note these little
+facts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we once
+assisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before we
+left, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died out
+before us except at long intervals in the passages; while there were
+lightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we had
+to go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after
+the last bell-boy had winked out.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+But in Europe everything is permanent, and in America everything is
+provisional.  This is the great distinction which, if always kept in
+mind, will save a great deal of idle astonishment.  It is in nothing more
+apparent than in the preparation here at Scheveningen for centuries of
+summer visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet on
+a scant generation of them.  When it seemed likely that it might be a
+winning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the sea
+with spruce boards.  It was very handsomely planked, but it was never
+afterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs.  Here, for
+half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massive
+masonry, and bricked for carriages, and tiled for foot-passengers; and it
+is all kept as clean as if wheel or foot had never passed over it.  I am
+sure that there is not a broken brick or a broken tile in the whole
+length or breadth of it.  But the hotel here is not a bet; it is a
+business.  It has come to stay; and on Long Island it had come to see how
+it would like it.
+
+Beyond the walk and drive, however, the dunes are left to the winds, and
+to the vegetation with which the Dutch planting clothes them against the
+winds.  First a coarse grass or rush is sown; then a finer herbage comes;
+then a tough brushwood, with flowers and blackberry-vines; so that while
+the seaward slopes of the dunes are somewhat patched and tattered, the
+landward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly held
+against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon.
+The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of
+the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and
+on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop.
+On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks
+devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are
+here as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home.  Rocking there is
+not, and cannot be, in the nature of things, as there used to be at Mount
+Desert; but what is called Twoing at York Harbor is perfectly
+practicable.
+
+It is practicable not only in the nooks and corners of the dunes, but on
+discreeter terms in those hooded willow chairs, so characteristic of the
+Dutch sea-side.  These, if faced in pairs towards each other, must be as
+favorable to the exchange of vows as of opinions, and if the crowd is
+ever very great, perhaps one chair could be made to hold two persons.
+It was distinctly a pang, the other day, to see men carrying them up from
+the beach, and putting them away to hibernate in the basement of the
+hotel.  Not all, but most of them, were taken; though I dare say that on
+fine days throughout October they will go trooping back to the sands on
+the heads of the same men, like a procession of monstrous, two-legged
+crabs.  Such a day was last Sunday, and then the beach offered a lively
+image of its summer gayety.  It was dotted with hundreds of hooded
+chairs, which foregathered in gossiping groups or confidential couples;
+and as the sun shone quite warm the flaps of the little tents next the
+dunes were let down against it, and ladies in summer white saved
+themselves from sunstroke in their shelter.  The wooden booths for the
+sale of candies and mineral waters, and beer and sandwiches, were flushed
+with a sudden prosperity, so that when I went to buy my pound of grapes
+from the good woman who understands my Dutch, I dreaded an indifference
+in her which by no means appeared.  She welcomed me as warmly as if I had
+been her sole customer, and did not put up the price on me; perhaps
+because it was already so very high that her imagination could not rise
+above it.
+
+The hotel showed the same admirable constancy.  The restaurant was
+thronged with new-comers, who spread out even over the many-tabled
+esplanade before it; but it was in no wise demoralized.  That night we
+sat down in multiplied numbers to a table d'hote of serenely unconscious
+perfection; and we permanent guests--alas! we are now becoming transient,
+too--were used with unfaltering recognition of our superior worth.  We
+shared the respect which, all over Europe, attaches to establishment, and
+which sometimes makes us poor Americans wish for a hereditary nobility,
+so that we could all mirror our ancestral value in the deference of our
+inferiors.  Where we should get our inferiors is another thing, but I
+suppose we could import them for the purpose, if the duties were not too
+great under our tariff.
+
+We have not yet imported the idea of a European hotel in any respect,
+though we long ago imported what we call the European plan.  No travelled
+American knows it in the extortionate prices of rooms when he gets home,
+or the preposterous charges of our restaurants, where one portion of
+roast beef swimming in a lake of lukewarm juice costs as much as a
+diversified and delicate dinner in Germany or Holland.  But even if there
+were any proportion in these things the European hotel will not be with
+us till we have the European portier, who is its spring and inspiration.
+He must not, dear home-keeping reader, be at all imagined in the moral or
+material figure of our hotel porter, who appears always in his shirt-
+sleeves, and speaks with the accent of Cork or of Congo.  The European
+portier wears a uniform, I do not know why, and a gold-banded cap, and he
+inhabits a little office at the entrance of the hotel.  He speaks eight
+or ten languages, up to certain limit, rather better than people born to
+them, and his presence commands an instant reverence softening to
+affection under his universal helpfulness.  There is nothing he cannot
+tell you, cannot do for you; and you may trust yourself implicitly to
+him.  He has the priceless gift of making each nationality, each
+personality, believe that he is devoted to its service alone.  He turns
+lightly from one language to another, as if he had each under his tongue,
+and he answers simultaneously a fussy French woman, an angry English
+tourist, a stiff Prussian major, and a thin-voiced American girl in
+behalf of a timorous mother, and he never mixes the replies.  He is an
+inexhaustible bottle of dialects; but this is the least of his merits, of
+his miracles.
+
+Our portier here is a tall, slim Dutchman (most Dutchmen are tall and
+slim), and in spite of the waning season he treats me as if I were
+multitude, while at the same time he uses me with the distinction due the
+last of his guests.  Twenty times in as many hours he wishes me good-day,
+putting his hand to his cap for the purpose; and to oblige me he wears
+silver braid instead of gilt on his cap and coat.  I apologized yesterday
+for troubling him so often for stamps, and said that I supposed he was
+much more bothered in the season.
+
+"Between the first of August and the fifteenth," he answered, "you cannot
+think.  All that you can do is to say, Yes, No; Yes, No."  And he left me
+to imagine his responsibilities.
+
+I am sure he will hold out to the end, and will smile me a friendly
+farewell from the door of his office, which is also his dining-room, as I
+know from often disturbing him at his meals there.  I have no fear of the
+waiters either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits of sailor
+blue, and touch their foreheads when they bring you your letters like so
+many ancient sea-dogs.  I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit
+of snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of his
+elevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived at
+the beginning of the summer.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recall
+in their pathetic order the events of the final week.
+
+Nothing has been stranger throughout than the fluctuation of the guests.
+At times they have dwindled to so small a number that one must reckon
+chiefly upon their quality for consolation; at other times they swelled
+to such a tide as to overflow the table, long or short, at dinner, and
+eddy round a second board beside it.  There have been nights when I have
+walked down the long corridor to my seaward room through a harking
+solitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have come out
+to breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, and door-
+post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the place with a
+lively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence.  The worst was
+that, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some one came we
+only won a stranger.
+
+Among the first to go were the kindly English folk whose acquaintance we
+made across the table the first night, and who took with them so large a
+share of our facile affections that we quite forgot the ancestral
+enmities, and grieved for them as much as if they had been Americans.
+There have been, in fact, no Americans here but ourselves, and we have
+done what we could with the Germans who spoke English.  The nicest of
+these were a charming family from F-----, father and mother, and son and
+daughter, with whom we had a pleasant week of dinners.  At the very first
+we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann that
+I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of the
+controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us.
+Our frank literary difference established a kindness between us that was
+strengthened by our community of English, and when they went they left us
+to the sympathy of another German family with whom we had mainly our
+humanity in common.  They spoke no English, and I only a German which
+they must have understood with their hearts rather than their heads,
+since it consisted chiefly of good-will.  But in the air of their sweet
+natures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed each day for praise of
+the weather after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fond
+regrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, sadly perplexed in
+the genders and the order of the verbs: with me the verb will seldom
+wait, as it should in German, to the end.  Both of these families, very
+different in social tradition, I fancied, were one in the amiability
+which makes the alien forgive so much militarism to the German nation,
+and hope for its final escape from the drill-sergeant.  When they went,
+we were left for some meals to our own American tongue, with a brief
+interval of that English painter and his wife with whom we spoke, our
+language as nearly like English as we could.  Then followed a desperate
+lunch and dinner where an unbroken forest of German, and a still more
+impenetrable morass of Dutch, hemmed us in.  But last night it was our
+joy to be addressed in our own speech by a lady who spoke it as admirably
+as our dear friends from F-----.  She was Dutch, and when she found we
+were Americans she praised our historian Motley, and told us how his
+portrait is gratefully honored with a place in the Queen's palace, The
+House in the Woods, near Scheveningen.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+She had come up from her place in the country, four hours away, for the
+last of the concerts here, which have been given throughout the summer by
+the best orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged every
+afternoon and evening by people from The Hague.
+
+One honored day this week even the Queen and the Queen Mother came down
+to the concert, and gave us incomparably the greatest event of our waning
+season.  I had noticed all the morning a floral perturbation about the
+main entrance of the hotel, which settled into the form of banks of
+autumnal bloom on either side of the specially carpeted stairs, and put
+forth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much bigger round than a
+barrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor of the Queen's ancestral house
+of Orange.  Flags of blue, white, and red fluttered nervously about in
+the breeze from the sea, and imparted to us an agreeable anxiety not to
+miss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch succinctly call their sovereign and
+her parent; and at three o'clock we saw them drive up to the hotel.
+Certain officials in civil dress stood at the door of the concert-room to
+usher the Queens in, and a bareheaded, bald-headed dignity of military
+figure backed up the stairs before them.  I would not rashly commit
+myself to particulars concerning their dress, but I am sure that the
+elder Queen wore black, and the younger white.  The mother has one of the
+best and wisest faces I have seen any woman wear (and most of the good,
+wise faces in this imperfectly balanced world are women's) and the
+daughter one of the sweetest and prettiest.  Pretty is the word for her
+face, and it showed pink through her blond veil, as she smiled and bowed
+right and left; her features are small and fine, and she is not above the
+middle height.
+
+As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we who had waited to see
+her go in ran round to another door and joined the two or three thousand
+people who were standing to receive the Queens.  These had already
+mounted to the royal box, and they stood there while the orchestra played
+one of the Dutch national airs.  (One air is not enough for the Dutch;
+they must have two.)  Then the mother faded somewhere into the
+background, and the daughter sat alone in the front, on a gilt throne,
+with a gilt crown at top, and a very uncomfortable carved Gothic back.
+She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the rudest Republican
+could not have helped wishing her well out of a position so essentially
+and irreparably false as a hereditary sovereign's.  One forgot in the
+presence of her innocent seventeen years that most of the ruling princes
+of the world had left it the worse for their having been in it; at
+moments one forgot her altogether as a princess, and saw her only as a
+charming young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly.
+
+At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked slowly out, while
+the orchestra played the other national air.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and I like Holland so much
+that I should hate to differ with the Dutch in anything.  But, as a
+matter of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is the
+regent and the daughter will not be crowned till next year.
+
+But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion to our dying
+season, and thrilled the hotel with a fulness of summer life.  Since they
+went, the season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can just say
+that it is still alive.  Last Sunday was fine, and great crowds came down
+from The Hague to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace of
+the hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that the waiters had
+each morning wiped dry of the dew, from a mere Dutch desire of cleaning
+something.  The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played in
+the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the lovers wandered up into
+the hollows of the dunes.
+
+There was only the human life, however.  I have looked in vain for the
+crabs, big and little, that swarm on the Long Island shore, and there are
+hardly any gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for them to
+eat, if they eat crabs; I never saw gulls doing it, but they must eat
+something.  Dogs there are, of course, wherever there are people; but
+they are part of the human life.  Dutch dogs are in fact very human; and
+one I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly as a bad boy, with respect to
+his muzzle.  He did not like his muzzle, and by dint of turning
+somersaults in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his master
+in triumph to show him what he had done.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+It is now the last day, and the desolation is thickening upon our hotel.
+This morning the door-posts up and down my corridor showed not a single
+pair of trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely doormats.  In
+the lower hall I found the tables of the great dining-room assembled, and
+the chairs inverted on them with their legs in the air; but decently,
+decorously, not with the reckless abandon displayed by the chairs in our
+Long Island hotel for weeks before it closed.  In the smaller dining-room
+the table was set for lunch as if we were to go on dining there forever;
+in the breakfast -room the service and the provision were as perfect as
+ever.  The coffee was good, the bread delicious, the butter of an
+unfaltering sweetness; and the glaze of wear on the polished dress-coats
+of the waiters as respectable as it could have been on the first day of
+the season.  All was correct, and if of a funereal correctness to me, I
+am sure this effect was purely subjective.
+
+The little bell-boys in sailor suits (perhaps they ought to be spelled
+bell-buoys) clustered about the elevator-boy like so many Roman sentinels
+at their posts; the elevator-boy and his elevator were ready to take us
+up or down at any moment.
+
+The portier and I ignored together the hour of parting, which we had
+definitely ascertained and agreed upon, and we exchanged some compliments
+to the weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to enjoy it long
+together.  I rather dread going in to lunch, however, for I fear the
+empty places.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+All is over; we are off.  The lunch was an heroic effort of the hotel to
+hide the fact of our separation.  It was perfect, unless the boiled beef
+was a confession of human weakness; but even this boiled beef was
+exquisite, and the horseradish that went with it was so mellowed by art
+that it checked rather than provoked the parting tear.  The table d'hote
+had reserved a final surprise for us; and when we sat down with the fear
+of nothing but German around us, we heard the sound of our own speech
+from the pleasantest English pair we had yet encountered; and the
+travelling English are pleasant; I will say it, who am said by Sir Walter
+Besant to be the only American who hates their nation.  It was really an
+added pang to go, on their account, but the carriage was waiting at the
+door; the 'domestique' had already carried our baggage to the steam-tram
+station; the kindly menial train formed around us for an ultimate
+'douceur', and we were off, after the 'portier' had shut us into our
+vehicle and touched his oft-touched cap for the last time, while the
+hotel facade dissembled its grief by architecturally smiling in the soft
+Dutch sun.
+
+I liked this manner of leaving better than carrying part of my own
+baggage to the train, as I had to do on Long Island, though that, too,
+had its charm; the charm of the whole fresh, pungent American life, which
+at this distance is so dear.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Last Days in a Dutch Hotel,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Some Anomalies of the Short Story
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY
+
+
+The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses in
+putting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope that
+a courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to such
+collections when severally administered, suggests some questions as to
+this eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader's
+patience with.  I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, or
+that I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answered
+seems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters
+away from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away in
+the 'hortus siccus' of accomplished facts.  In view of this I may wish
+merely to state the problems and leave them for the reader's solution,
+or, more amusingly, for his mystification.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a
+form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short
+story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said
+to be.  Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as
+that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate
+householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances
+when gathered into a boarding-house.
+
+Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story where
+it is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazine
+is so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the
+more short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roof
+of his pension.  Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks so
+signally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book
+of short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded because
+of them.  He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books of
+them were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he alleged
+several well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had a
+great vogue.  He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could
+not well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted in
+his last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainly
+helped sell it.  I had in mind many books of short stories of the first
+excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded,
+for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in any
+literary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in another
+Base.
+
+I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in my
+doubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that his
+indolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failure
+of good books of short stories.  He is commonly so averse to any
+imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to that
+peculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him.  He
+can read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and a
+pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his own
+constructive faculty.  But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories,
+he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies;
+whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable
+sedative.  A condition that the short story tacitly makes with the
+reader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill in
+the details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions the
+story can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this too
+much for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to
+attempt it.
+
+My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accounts
+for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the
+reader against a number of short stories in a magazine.  But it may be
+that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in
+the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all
+the short stories in a magazine 'seriatim'.  On the other hand, the
+identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short
+stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination
+of the involuntary co-partner.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for short
+stories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively, and
+not in variety, but in identity of authorship?  Are they to be printed
+only in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining a
+variety of authorship?  Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasible
+to purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to the
+reader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work required of
+him.  In this event many short stories now cramped into undue limits by
+the editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand to greater length
+and breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short story might not make
+so heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader.
+
+If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should not
+contradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can help
+the short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have great
+pleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American.  If we have not
+excelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it;
+possibly because we are in the period of our literary development which
+corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently
+flourished among them.  But when one has said a thing like this, it
+immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires
+one to refine upon it, either for one's own peace of conscience or for
+one's safety from the thoughtful reader.  I am not much afraid of that
+sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I
+mean, if I mean anything in particular.
+
+In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literary
+development can be recognized separately from that of the whole English-
+speaking world.  I think it can, though, as I am always saying American
+literature is merely a condition of English literature.  In some sense
+every European literature is a condition of some other European
+literature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate
+indigenously.  A younger literature will choose, by a sort of natural
+selection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for no
+more apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it will
+transform them in the process so that it will give them the effect of
+indigeneity.  The short story among the Italians, who called it the
+novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fiction
+of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if it
+derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself in
+the variety of its types.  But still these remained types, and they
+remained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella.  It was
+not till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and transplanted
+it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit in
+the richness of their picaresque fiction.  When the English borrowed it
+they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of their
+nation, which was then both poetical and humorous.  Here it was full of
+character, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the bounds
+of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones.  But in so far as the
+novella was studied in the Italian sources, the French, Spanish, and
+English literatures were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly,
+though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American literature is a
+condition of English literature.  Each borrower gave a national cast to
+the thing borrowed, and that is what has happened with us, in the full
+measure that our nationality has differenced itself from the English.
+
+Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good deal
+of it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we are
+in some such period of our literary development as those other peoples
+when the short story flourished among them.  Or, if I restrict our claim,
+I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had not
+the novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we have
+the novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitative
+importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and
+some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians.  We
+surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in
+the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel.  Or, if I may
+not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of many
+German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one German
+novel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though not
+of American novels.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for
+several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern
+rise of the short story.  It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a
+play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that
+form the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form;
+but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the
+little studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler
+and Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of
+the novella.  The germ of the modern short story may have survived in
+these, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer
+and never wholly disappeared.  With Crabbe the novella became as
+distinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins.
+But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for
+until our time so great work was never done with it.  I remind myself of
+Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my
+bold stand.  They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work
+which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial
+limits.  They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with
+large and profound impressions.
+
+An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but
+I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is
+philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or
+Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes,
+by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to
+me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary
+preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more
+intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those
+lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.
+
+The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it
+might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection
+of form; though one might not like to affirm this.  Yet there have been
+but few modern fictions of the novel's dimensions which have the beauty
+of form many a novella embodies.  Is this because it is easier to give
+form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hide
+formlessness?  It is easier to give form in the novella than in the
+novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and because
+the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated.
+But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more in
+the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident.
+The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is no
+room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by which
+the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the
+anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set
+between it and the novel.  In both cases the difference of the novella is
+in the motive, or the origination.  The anecdote is too palpably simple
+and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a
+novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of
+the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader's consciousness,
+expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote.  Many
+anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short
+story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the
+story, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic
+anecdote in the novella.  The anecdote offers an illustration of
+character, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama
+and develops a type.
+
+It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases
+to be a novella and becomes a novel.  The frontiers are so vague that one
+is obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude,
+which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette.
+First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story,
+or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a
+smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three
+times longer than a short story.  We may realize them physically if we
+will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number
+story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or
+a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to
+become a novel.  As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair
+of editors and publishers.  The interest of so brief a serial will not
+mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the
+tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable
+force!) cares to handle.  It is therefore still awaiting its
+authoritative avatar, which it will be some one's prosperity and glory to
+imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet
+scarcely divined.
+
+The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella.  In fact,
+the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and
+some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than
+novelettes, like Tourguenief's Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring
+Floods.  The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, is
+scarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but no
+doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions of
+Hamlet.  If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for the
+character and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answer
+that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet.
+
+But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally be
+of the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for the
+novelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short.  I am
+disposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared the
+favor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because until
+somebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the
+one-number story or the serial.  I should like to say as my last word for
+it here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of their
+padding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes in
+disguise.
+
+It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if they
+were duly padded, would be found novelettes.  In that dim, subjective
+region where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with the
+authority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the difference
+between the short-story motive and the long-story motive.  One, if one is
+in that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carrying
+power of the given motive.  Or, if the reader prefers a different figure,
+the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere is
+mystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is going
+to grow up a tree, if left to itself.  Of course, the mind to which the
+seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or
+force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily
+detect the fact of such treasons.  Almost in the first germinal impulse
+the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the
+essential simplicity or complexity of the motive.  There will be a
+prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of
+characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be
+divined indivisible, and there will be a small group of people
+immediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact.
+The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that something
+might be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it is
+gospel.
+
+The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to the
+uninspired.  If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality and
+vitality.  It is one stock from which its various branches put out, and
+form it a living growth identical throughout.  The right novella is never
+a novel cropped back from the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of
+a tree stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush.  It is another
+species, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousness
+to be brought into being of its own kind, and not of another.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story,
+while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there was
+one), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them.  It has shown
+itself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention,
+whether of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or broad farce or
+delicate irony, of character or action.  The thing that first made itself
+known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized
+types and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most
+flexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the
+mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon
+some fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some
+phase or fact of life.
+
+The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if we
+consider what has been done in the short story, and is still doing
+everywhere.  The good novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle,
+since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make them,
+cannot be computed.  In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in quality
+they are wonderfully satisfying.  Then, why is it that so very, very few
+of the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by you, as
+the country people say, in characterization or action?  How hard it is to
+recall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most signally
+good!  We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is it, after
+all, a full meal?  We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted
+friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not
+apparently of a lasting acquaintance.  It is a single meeting we have
+with them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrence
+and repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold
+the personages in a novel.
+
+It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its
+irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the
+very farce, which it may quantitatively excel.  We can all recall by name
+many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out
+of short stories can we recall?  Most persons of the drama give
+themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps
+oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its
+characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater
+facilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on
+the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space.  The
+narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to
+representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of
+the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for
+they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays.  It is
+possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will
+become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with
+lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember by
+name any of the people in them.  I may be risking too much in offering an
+instance, but who, in even such signal instances as The Revolt of Mother,
+by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by name
+the characters that made them delightful?
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an
+essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet
+have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with
+creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand.  The
+structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change
+which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and
+palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the
+filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of
+listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same
+things over and over again.  Now it has not only varied the persons and
+things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the
+natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms
+the vehicle of reality and spirituality.  When one thinks of a bit of Mr.
+James's psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga's or Kielland's
+sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett's exquisite veracity, one perceives
+the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the
+height it has reached.  It serves equally the ideal and the real; that
+which it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories
+which have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of
+that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic.  The only
+distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of
+is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so
+imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction.  I am never so
+enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell
+against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short
+stories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types and
+characters.  We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck
+and Tennessee's Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember their
+several qualities.  These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they
+are persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator's
+imagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do,
+out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of
+Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich's
+famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James's Daisy Miller.
+
+It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguished
+themselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order.
+Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long life
+before him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can only
+instance him provisionally.  On the other hand, one can be much more
+confident that the best novelle have been written by the greatest
+novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas Hardy,
+Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others.
+These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that one is
+tempted to call it their best work.  It is really not their best, but it
+is work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their novels,
+if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories sold
+well when they were good short stories.  That they ought to do so is so
+evident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting the
+anomaly the other day, insisted that they did.  I could only allege the
+testimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did not
+satisfy him.
+
+It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom the
+fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by
+itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will
+not have, a dozen short stories in a book.  This was the baffling
+question which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with,
+after all the light I have thrown upon the subject.  I leave it where I
+found it, but perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do.  If I had
+left it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound to deal with it
+practically by reading all the books of short stories he could lay hands
+on, and either divining why he did not enjoy them, or else forever
+foregoing his prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Some Anomalies of the Short Story,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Spanish Prisoners of War
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR
+
+
+Certain summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrived
+at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanish
+prisoners from Santiago de Cuba.  They were partly soldiers of the land
+forces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by far
+the greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera's ill-fated fleet.
+I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have stated
+made a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not hold
+out against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera to
+Annapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those of
+the Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of the
+spectator.  Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, and
+got a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies in
+the first hours of their imprisonment.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of the
+American summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered in
+the sun with a really incomparable brilliancy.  But nothing could light
+up the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which our
+White Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullen
+in the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities of
+the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks,
+seemed quite unrelated.  A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatened
+the fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered about
+her, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep.
+She had, in fact, finished her mission.  The captives whom death had
+released had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived to
+a further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a mile
+farther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through the
+Narrows like a torrent.  Its defiant rapidity has won it there the
+graphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach the
+island by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind and
+the tide, both dead against us.  Our boatman, one of those shore New
+Englanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master of
+the art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure I
+wanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captives
+who had just looked upon it.  It was beautiful, I had to own, even in my
+quality of exile and prisoner.  The meadows and the orchards came down to
+the water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and lifted
+in black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peered
+over it.  A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level;
+everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm-
+houses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and like
+freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness
+which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village,
+shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas.  Here,
+every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water,
+and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic
+alertness.  The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky,
+from which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire.
+I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturian
+fisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or any
+of it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell in
+which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands of
+strangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for a
+captivity of unknown term.  But I need not have been at so much pains;
+the intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author would
+have sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another in
+war it is its monstrous inconsequence.  If we had a grief with the
+Spanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we
+might have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the
+improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our
+command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen--mother and
+the little king.  This would have been consequent, logical, and in a sort
+reasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish peasants
+and fishermen, hapless conscripts to whom personally and nationally we
+were as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliating
+necessity of war which makes it homicide in which there is not even the
+saving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood.
+
+I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity of
+the Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearer
+and nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little
+ravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry -bushes, bay, and low
+blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellow
+pine boards.  Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by
+side across the general slope, with the captive officers' quarters,
+sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them.  About their
+doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on
+the grass, where some of them lounged smoking.  One operatic figure in a
+long blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was such poverty of
+drama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we were glad
+of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out of the stockade in
+his buggy.  On the heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns were
+posted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty feet sentries
+met and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that we wondered if we
+might get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called to
+us, "Fifty yards off, please!"  Our young skipper answered, "All right,"
+and as the sentry had a gun on his shoulder which we had every reason to
+believe was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to the
+specified limit.  In fact, we came away altogether, after that, so little
+promise was there of our being able to satisfy our curiosity further.
+We came away care fully nursing such impression as we had got of a spec
+tacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to feel.  It related
+us, after solicitation, to the wars against the Moors, against the
+Mexicans and Peruvians, against the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of
+the Gran Capitan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to the
+wars of the Spanish Succession, and ` what others.  I do not deny that
+there was a certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners there
+for this effect; we came away duly grateful for what we had seen of them;
+and we had long duly resigned ourselves to seeing no more, when word was
+sent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to visit the island,
+and wished us to go with him.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time we
+took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as
+the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the
+vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships.  The grass grew in the
+Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those
+pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they
+would have been if resonant with saw and hammer.  At several points, an
+unarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our path
+with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were nowhere delayed till we
+came to the office where it had to be countersigned, and after that we
+had presently crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were on the
+prison island.  Here, if possible, the sense of something pastoral
+deepened; a man driving a file of cows passed before us under kindly
+trees, and the bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore about
+her silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note as if from the depth
+of some grassy bosk, and instantly witched me away to the woods-pastures
+which my boyhood knew in southern Ohio.  Even when we got to what seemed
+fortifications they turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, and
+bore on their gate a paternal warning that children unaccompanied by
+adults were not allowed within.
+
+We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a young
+marine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit, and
+then went back satisfied.  Then we found ourselves in the presence of a
+sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting.
+Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out the
+headquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat.  At the
+headquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equally
+civil, and with the intervention of an orderly our leader saw the officer
+of the day.  He came out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he had
+learned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, but not to the
+stockade, which we might approach, at a certain point of vantage and look
+over into, but not penetrate.  We resigned ourselves, as we must, and
+made what we could of the nearest prison barrack, whose door overflowed
+and whose windows swarmed with swarthy captives.  Here they were, at such
+close quarters that their black, eager eyes easily pierced the pockets
+full of cigarettes which we had brought for them.  They looked mostly
+very young, and there was one smiling rogue at the first window who was
+obviously prepared to catch anything thrown to him.  He caught, in fact,
+the first box of cigarettes shied over the stockade; the next box flew
+open, and spilled its precious contents outside the dead-line under the
+window, where I hope some compassionate guard gathered them up and gave
+them to the captives.
+
+Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short of
+letting them go.  They were a most friendly company, with an effect of
+picnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had
+pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery as
+possible.  They were very polite to us, and when, after that misadventure
+with the cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to throwing the box,
+merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), I wandered vaguely towards a
+Gatling gun planted on an earthen platform where the laurel and the
+dogroses had been cut away for it, the man in charge explained with a
+smile of apology that I must not pass a certain path I had already
+crossed.
+
+One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to back
+them, and I retreated.  That seemed the end; and we were going
+crestfallenly away when the officer of the day came out and allowed us to
+make his acquaintance.  He permitted us, with laughing reluctance, to
+learn that he had been in the fight at Santiago, and had come with the
+prisoners, and he was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not let
+us into the stockade.  I said I had some cigarettes for the prisoners,
+and I supposed I might send them; in, but he said he could not allow
+this, for they had money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of our
+party, who had not a soul above buttons, and who asked if she could get
+one from the Spaniards, that so far from promoting her wish, he would
+have been obliged to take away any buttons she might have got from them.
+
+"The fact is," he explained, "you've come to the wrong end for
+transactions in buttons and tobacco."
+
+But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought upon him.  When we
+said we were going, and thanked him for his unavailing good-will, he
+looked at his watch and said they were just going to feed the prisoners;
+and after some parley he suddenly called out, "Music of the guard!"
+Instead of a regimental band, which I had supposed summoned, a single
+corporal ran out the barracks, touching his cap.
+
+"Take this party round to the gate," the officer said, and he promised us
+that he would see us there, and hoped we would not mind a rough walk.  We
+could have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would wade through
+fathoms of red-tape; but in fact we were arrested at the last point by
+nothing worse than the barbed wire which fortified the outer gate.  Here
+two marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners lived, while
+we stared into the stockade through an inner gate of plank which was run
+back for us.  They said the Spaniards had a breakfast of coffee, and hash
+or stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast; and now at five
+o'clock they were to have bread and coffee, which indeed we saw the
+white-capped, whitejacketed cooks bringing out in huge tin wash-boilers.
+Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt rightly, that these poor
+Spaniards had never known in their lives before what it was to have full
+stomachs.  But the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the one
+who had a German accent intimated that gratitude was not a virtue of any
+Roman (I suppose he meant Latin) people.  But I do not know that if I
+were a prisoner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicitly
+thankful for being unusually well fed.  I thought (or I think now) that a
+fig or a bunch of grapes would have been more acceptable to me under my
+own vine and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who were indeed
+showing themselves less my enemies than my own government, but were still
+not quite my hosts.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us?  The clock strikes
+twelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition.  As we stood
+there expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly
+struck twelve.  Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade our
+marines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure,
+where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, with
+many polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it were
+not chairs.
+
+The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trot
+towards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set.
+Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his turn
+received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of steaming
+coffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long tables
+under a shed at the side of the stockade.  One young fellow tried to get
+a place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came back
+explained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly.  We heard that
+eight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers,
+for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile and
+obedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at their
+bread and coffee.
+
+First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were the
+best looking of all the captives.  From their pretty fair average the
+others varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex-
+convicts, brought up the rear.  They were nearly all little fellows, and
+very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blond
+showed among them.  They were joking and laughing together, harmlessly
+enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather sorry jail-
+birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of our navy
+blue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, and
+sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like jail-birds I am not
+sure.  Still, they were not prepossessing, and though some of them were
+pathetically young, they had none of the charm of boyhood.  No doubt they
+did not do themselves justice, and to be herded there like cattle did not
+improve their chances of making a favorable impression on the observer.
+They were kindly used by our officer and his subordinates, who mixed
+among them, and straightened out the confusion they got into at times,
+and perhaps sometimes wilfully.  Their guards employed a few handy words
+of Spanish with them; where these did not avail, they took them by the
+arm and directed them; but I did not hear a harsh tone, and I saw no
+violence, or even so much indignity offered them as the ordinary trolley-
+car passenger is subjected to in Broadway.  At a certain bugle-call they
+dispersed, when they had finished their bread and coffee, and scattered
+about over the grass, or returned to their barracks.  We were told that
+these children of the sun dreaded its heat, and kept out of it whenever
+they could, even in its decline; but they seemed not so much to withdraw
+and hide themselves from that, as to vanish into the history of "old,
+unhappy, far-off" times, where prisoners of war, properly belong.  I
+roused myself with a start as if I had lost them in the past.
+
+Our officer came towards us and said gayly, "Well, you have seen the
+animals fed," and let us take our grateful leave.  I think we were rather
+a loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to
+talk.  I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate,
+who walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerly
+when it brought him back.  Then he delayed for a rapid and comprehensive
+exchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending military
+subordination with American equality in his manner.
+
+The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the utter
+absence of ceremony.  Those good fellows were in the clothes they wore
+through the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on much
+splendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish.  They were
+simple, straightforward, and adequate.  There was some dry joking about
+the superiority of the prisoners' rations and lodgings, and our officer
+ironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers.
+But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupid
+and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapers
+and politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind.  There was
+nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to that
+military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal of
+self-interest.  Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the
+peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united
+for the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike,
+imparted itself from what I had seen?  Or was this more properly an
+effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred
+and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers?  I cannot say
+that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a more
+positive humanity which was at work.  Most of the sufferers were
+stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which
+received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come,
+with every equipment for their comfort.  At five o'clock, when we passed
+down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalant
+effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it was
+really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their
+temperature.  It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if
+they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke,
+anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of
+cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon.
+I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sick
+captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the
+least.  They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said,
+smiling sadly, "Muchas gracias," but the others merely smiled sadly; and
+I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the
+faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity.  Italians would
+have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another
+tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we
+sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation.  Perhaps
+there are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities,
+and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans.
+When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas.
+
+They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces
+their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as they
+turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not "support
+the government" so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere.  But the
+truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who,
+in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like
+somebody's brothers, and even somebody's children.  I may have been
+infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which
+prevailed in the place.  There it was as wholly business to be kind and
+to cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel
+and to kill.  How droll these things are!  The surgeons had their
+favorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted;
+inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their
+hapless foes, whom they spoke of as "a sort of pets."  One of these was
+very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was liked
+apparently because he was so likable.  At a certain cot the chief surgeon
+stopped and said, "We did not expect this boy to live through the night."
+He took the boy's wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderly
+as he leaned over him, "Poco mejor?"  The boy could not speak to say that
+he was a little better; he tried to smile--such things do move the
+witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been half
+chopped away by a machete tend to restore one's composure.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Spanish Prisoners of War,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--American Literary Centers
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES
+
+
+One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to
+a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a
+literature of our own, we have no literary centre.  We have so much
+literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a
+literary centre.  We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where
+there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace.
+But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we
+deceive ourselves.  Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have
+kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a
+dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a
+literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.
+
+I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I
+wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has lately
+come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as
+that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand the
+London friend who wishes "a comparative view of the centres of literary
+production" among us; "how and why they change; how they stand at
+present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other such
+centres."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment
+which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have
+a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too
+succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy
+or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be
+taken at my word.  I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that
+in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only
+say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get
+further every day from having such a centre.  The fault, if it is a
+fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is
+centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life,
+it shares this tendency.  I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in
+order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the
+blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our
+eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at
+some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing
+literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense
+of limits.
+
+Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at
+Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death
+of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, during
+the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis,
+and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined by
+the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes,
+Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights.  These are all still great
+publishing centres.  If it were not that the house with the largest list
+of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was now
+the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or
+even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controlling
+influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither New
+York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once have
+been.  Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when New
+York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave it
+lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was a
+New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, a
+Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their
+prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poe
+did not even die here, though he often came near starving.  One cannot
+then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston,
+and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre.
+
+However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the
+Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to
+have an American literature.  Up to that time we had a Colonial
+literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature.
+But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the
+coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the
+different sections--North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not
+before that time.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded
+from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr.
+Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his
+beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group of
+poets and humorists whom these names must stand for.  The San Francisco
+school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it endured
+it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, for
+its writers were of every American origin except Californian.
+
+After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the
+dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of
+all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then has
+begun again.  It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel Chandler
+Harris's Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long
+masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock.  Louisiana found expression in
+the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of
+Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr.
+Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finely
+directed as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett's studies of
+country life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins's work.  To be sure, the
+portrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists was
+known; Lowell's Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe's Old Town
+Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her
+unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry
+Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut.  With the later
+group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with
+truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the
+material which characterizes Russian fiction.
+
+Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men and
+White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen
+Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and
+characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad
+circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from
+the experience of one who had been part of what he saw.  Later came Mr.
+Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well as
+something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burly
+of Chicago.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that
+I am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me to
+an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so
+personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism with
+intense sympathy.  In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in
+times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those who
+believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not now
+be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its
+chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life.
+Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole I
+have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interested
+spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity with
+which some phases of it have been rendered.  The lightning-or the flash-
+light, to speak more accurately--has been rather late in striking this
+ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notable
+effect at some points.  This began, I believe, with the local dramas of
+Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character,
+loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the thread
+of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours.  It was very
+rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the
+mirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gave
+us East-Side types--Irish, German, negro, and Italian--which were
+instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying.  I never could
+understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gone
+far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others.  The
+next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge of
+Courage wronged the finer art which he showed in such New York studies as
+Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and George's Mother.  He has been followed
+by Abraham Cahan, a Russian Hebrew, who has done portraits of his race
+and nation with uncommon power.  They are the very Russian Hebrews of
+Hester Street translated from their native Yiddish into English, which
+the author mastered after coming here in his early manhood.  He brought
+to his work the artistic qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and in
+his 'Jekl: A Story of the Ghetto', he gave proof of talent which his more
+recent book of sketches--'The Imported Bride groom'--confirms.  He sees
+his people humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as he
+is compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsy
+pathos of their lives.  He is a Socialist, but his fiction is wholly
+without "tendentiousness."
+
+A good many years ago--ten or twelve, at least--Mr. Harry Harland had
+shown us some politer New York Jews, with a romantic coloring, though
+with genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness of his material;
+but I do not think of any one who has adequately dealt with our Gentile
+society.  Mr. James has treated it historically in Washington Square, and
+more modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as well as in some of
+his shorter stories; Mr. Edgar Fawcett has dealt with it intelligently
+and authoritatively in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander Matthews has
+sketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic cleverness,
+neatness, and point.  In the novel, 'His Father's Son', he in fact faces
+it squarely and renders certain forms of it with masterly skill.  He has
+done something more distinctive still in 'The Action and the Word', one
+of the best American stories I know.  But except for these writers, our
+literature has hardly taken to New York society.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+It is an even thing: New York society has not taken to our literature.
+New York publishes it, criticises it, and circulates it, but I doubt if
+New York society much reads it or cares for it, and New York is therefore
+by no means the literary centre that Boston once was, though a large
+number of our literary men live in or about New York.  Boston, in my time
+at least, had distinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or less
+pervaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing of the kind, in any
+pervasive sense.  It is a vast mart, and literature is one of the things
+marketed here; but our good society cares no more for it than for some
+other products bought and sold here; it does not care nearly so much for
+books as for horses or for stocks, and I suppose it is not unlike the
+good society of any other metropolis in this.  To the general, here,
+journalism is a far more appreciable thing than literature, and has
+greater recognition, for some very good reasons; but in Boston literature
+had vastly more honor, and even more popular recognition, than
+journalism.  There journalism desired to be literary, and here literature
+has to try hard not to be journalistic.  If New York is a literary centre
+on the business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, as
+Weimar was, and as Edinburgh was.  It felt literature, as those capitals
+felt it, and if it did not love it quite so much as might seem, it always
+respected it.
+
+To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Boston
+to our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no such
+literary centre as Boston was.  Boston itself has perhaps outgrown the
+literary consciousness which formerly distinguished it from all our other
+large towns.  In a place of nearly a million people (I count in the
+outlying places) newspapers must be more than books; and that alone says
+everything.
+
+Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, the New-
+Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some such means
+that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not passed to New
+York.  But still there is enough literature left in the body at Boston to
+keep her first among equals in some things, if not easily first in all.
+
+Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, the
+foremost of our poets.  At Cambridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, an
+essayist in a certain sort without rival among us; and Mr. William James,
+the most interesting and the most literary of psychologists, whose repute
+is European as well as American.  Mr. Charles Eliot Norton alone survives
+of the earlier Cambridge group--Longfellow, Lowell, Richard Henry Dana,
+Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, and Henry James, the father of the
+novelist and the psychologist.
+
+To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our abler historians, has
+gone from Ohio; and there Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts
+Senator, whose work in literature is making itself more and more known,
+was born and belongs, politically, socially, and intellectually.  Mrs.
+Julia Ward Howe, a poet of wide fame in an elder generation, lives there;
+Mr. T. B. Aldrich lives there; and thereabouts live Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart
+Phelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, the first of a fame
+beyond the last, who was known to us so long before her.  Then at Boston,
+or near Boston, live those artists supreme in the kind of short story
+which we have carried so far: Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss Alice
+Brown, Mrs. Chase-Wyman, and Miss Gertrude Smith, who comes from Kansas,
+and writes of the prairie farm-life, though she leaves Mr. E. W. Howe
+(of 'The Story of a Country Town' and presently of the Atchison Daily
+Globe) to constitute, with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontier
+literary centre at Topeka.  Of Boston, too, though she is of western
+Pennsylvania origin, is Mrs. Margaret Deland, one of our most successful
+novelists.  Miss Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into New
+Jersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen.
+
+All these are more or less embodied and represented in the Atlantic
+Monthly, still the most literary, and in many things still the first of
+our magazines.  Finally, after the chief publishing house in New York,
+the greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with by far the
+largest list of the best American books.  Recently several firms of
+younger vigor and valor have recruited the wasted ranks of the Boston
+publishers, and are especially to be noted for the number of rather nice
+new poets they give to the light.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+Dealing with the question geographically, in the right American way, we
+descend to Hartford obliquely by way of Springfield, Massachusetts,
+where, in a little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropolitan
+influence and of distinctly literary tone is published.  At Hartford
+while Charles Dudley Warner lived, there was an indisputable literary
+centre; Mark Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely count
+Hartford among our literary centres, though it is a publishing centre of
+much activity in subscription books.
+
+At New Haven, Yale University has latterly attracted Mr. William H.
+Bishop, whose novels I always liked for the best reasons, and has long
+held Professor J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child's death at
+Cambridge, our best Chaucer scholar.  Mr. Donald G.  Mitchell, once
+endeared to the whole fickle American public by his Reveries of a
+Bachelor and his Dream Life, dwells on the borders of the pleasant town,
+which is also the home of Mr. J. W. De Forest, the earliest real American
+novelist, and for certain gifts in seeing and telling our life also one
+of the greatest.
+
+As to New York (where the imagination may arrive daily from New Haven,
+either by a Sound boat or by eight or ten of the swiftest express trains
+in the world), I confess I am more and more puzzled.  Here abide the
+poets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Stedman, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and many
+whom an envious etcetera must hide from view; the fictionists, Mr. R. H.
+Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. Frank
+Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham Cahan, Mr. Frank Norris, and Mr. James Lane
+Allen, who has left Kentucky to join the large Southern contingent, which
+includes Mrs. Burton Harrison and Mrs. McEnery Stuart; the historians,
+Professor William M. Sloane and Dr. Eggleston (reformed from a novelist);
+the literary and religious and economic essayists, Mr. Hamilton W.
+Mabie, Mr. H. M. Alden, Mr. J. J. Chapman, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, with
+critics, dramatists, satirists, magazinists, and journalists of literary
+stamp in number to convince the wavering reason against itself that here
+beyond all question is the great literary centre of these States.  There
+is an Authors' Club, which alone includes a hundred and fifty authors,
+and, if you come to editors, there is simply no end.  Magazines are
+published here and circulated hence throughout the land by millions; and
+books by the ton are the daily output of our publishers, who are the
+largest in the country.
+
+If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard to
+say what does; and I am not going to try for a reason against such facts.
+It is not quality that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of the
+quality; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump.  It may be that
+New York is going to be our literary centre, as London is the literary
+centre of England, by gathering into itself all our writing talent, but
+it has by no means done this yet.  What we can say is that more authors
+come here from the West and South than go elsewhere; but they often stay
+at home, and I fancy very wisely.  Mr. Joel Chandler Harris stays at
+Atlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb Riley stays at Indianapolis; Mr.
+Maurice Thompson spent his whole literary life, and General Lew. Wallace
+still lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison Cawein stays at
+Louisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree stays at St. Louis, Missouri; Francis
+R. Stockton spent the greater part of the year at his place in West
+Virginia, and came only for the winter months to New York; Mr. Edward
+Bellamy, until his failing health exiled him to the Far West, remained at
+Chicopee, Massachusetts; and I cannot think of one of these writers whom
+it would have advantaged in any literary wise to dwell in New York.  He
+would not have found greater incentive than at home; and in society he
+would not have found that literary tone which all society had, or wished
+to have, in Boston when Boston was a great town and not yet a big town.
+
+In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was ever so much taste
+and feeling for literature as there was in that Boston.  At Edinburgh (as
+I imagine it) there was a large and distinguished literary class, and at
+Weimar there was a cultivated court circle; but in Boston there was not
+only such a group of authors as we shall hardly see here again for
+hundreds of years, but there was such regard for them and their calling,
+not only in good society, but among the extremely well-read people of the
+whole intelligent city, as hardly another community has shown.  New York,
+I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see no signs that it ever
+will be.  It does not influence the literature of the whole country as
+Boston once did through writers whom all the young writers wished to
+resemble; it does not give the law, and it does not inspire the love that
+literary Boston inspired.  There is no ideal that it represents.
+
+A glance at the map of the Union will show how very widely our smaller
+literary centres are scattered; and perhaps it will be useful in
+following me to other more populous literary centres.  Dropping southward
+from New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary centre of importance
+at Philadelphia, since that is the home of Mr. J. B. McMasters, the
+historian of the American people; of Mr. Owen Wister, whose fresh and
+vigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir Mitchell, a novelist of
+power long known to the better public, and now recognized by the larger
+in the immense success of his historical romance, Hugh Wynne.
+
+If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre of great promise, but
+while I do not forget the excellent work of Johns Hopkins University in
+training men for the solider literature of the future, no Baltimore names
+to conjure with occur to me at the moment; and we must really get on to
+Washington.  This, till he became ambassador at the Court of St. James,
+was the home of Mr. John Hay, a poet whose biography of Lincoln must rank
+him with the historians, and whose public service as Secretary of State
+classes him high among statesmen.  He blotted out one literary centre at
+Cleveland, Ohio, when he removed to Washington, and Mr. Thomas Nelson
+Page another at Richmond, Virginia, when he came to the national capital.
+Mr. Paul Dunbar, the first negro poet to divine and utter his race,
+carried with him the literary centre of Dayton, Ohio, when he came to be
+an employee in the Congressional Library; and Mr. Charles Warren
+Stoddard, in settling at Washington as Professor of Literature in the
+Catholic University, brought somewhat indirectly away with him the last
+traces of the old literary centre at San Francisco.
+
+A more recent literary centre in the Californian metropolis went to
+pieces when Mr. Gelett Burgess came to New York and silenced the 'Lark',
+a bird of as new and rare a note as ever made itself heard in this air;
+but since he has returned to California, there is hope that the literary
+centre may form itself there again.  I do not know whether Mrs. Charlotte
+Perkins Stetson wrecked a literary centre in leaving Los Angeles or not.
+I am sure only that she has enriched the literary centre of New York by
+the addition of a talent in sociological satire which would be
+extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us.
+
+Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago?  I fancy, yes;
+or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute
+it.  In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he has
+already done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may well
+leave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking that
+role.  Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original gift
+who centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well
+known in romantic fiction.  Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, of
+the finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne
+in their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satires
+form with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country.
+It would be hard to match among our critical journals the 'Dial' of
+Chicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often as
+good within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim to
+rank with our first literary centres.
+
+It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, with
+Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an
+American literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston.
+Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready
+to say.  When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts,
+I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, it
+seems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale-
+on-the-Hudson.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Leaven, but not for so large a lump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Mark Twain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Not lack of quality but  quantity of the quality . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Our deeply incorporated civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of American Literary Centers,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Standard Household-Effect Company
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY
+
+
+My friend came in the other day, before we had left town, and looked
+round at the appointments of the room in their summer shrouds, and said,
+with a faint sigh, "I see you have had the eternal-womanly with you,
+too."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+"Isn't the eternal-womanly everywhere?  What has happened to you?"
+I asked.
+
+"I wish you would come to my house and see.  Every rug has been up for a
+month, and we have been living on bare floors.  Everything that could be
+tied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has been
+sewed up.  Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chests
+has been moth-balled and put away.  Everything that could be taken down
+has been taken down.  Bags with draw-strings at their necks have been
+pulled over the chandeliers and tied.  The pictures have been hidden in
+cheese-cloth, and the mirrors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my own
+miserable face anywhere."
+
+"Come!  That's something."
+
+"Yes, it's something.  But I have been thinking this matter over very
+seriously, and I believe it is going from bad to worse.  I have heard
+praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the
+housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense."
+
+"Do you really believe that?"  I asked.  "And if you do, what of it?"
+
+"Simply this, that if we don't put a stop to it, at the gait it's going,
+it will put a stop to the eternal-womanly."
+
+"I suppose we should hate that."
+
+"Yes, it would be bad.  It would be very bad; and I have been turning the
+matter over in my mind, and studying out a remedy."
+
+"The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over in his mind and lets
+some one else study out a remedy."
+
+"Yes, I know.  I feel that I may be wrong in my processes, but I am sure
+that I am right in my results.  The reason why our grandmothers could be
+such good housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the eternal-
+womanly was that they had so few things to look after in their houses.
+Life was indefinitely simpler with them.  But the modern improvements,
+as we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeeping without
+subtracting its burdens, as they were expected to do.  Every novel
+convenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every means
+of refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to the
+burdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from the
+grandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, which
+will not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiest
+of their superfluities."
+
+"Yes, I see what you mean," I said.  This is what one usually says when
+one does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case I
+really did know, or thought I did.  "That survival of the conscience is a
+very curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly.  I suppose that
+the North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental European
+conscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more or
+less religious and economical in its origin.  But with the advance of
+wealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simply
+conscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social.  The eternal-womanly
+continues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse,
+and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on.  It
+is something in the air, or something in the blood.  Perhaps it is
+something in both."
+
+"Yes," said my friend, quite as I had said already, "I see what you mean.
+But I think it is in the air more than in the blood.  I was in Paris,
+about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my
+house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with
+drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests.  At any
+rate, I was there.  One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging
+three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and
+tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing
+paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the
+house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house
+when she went into the country for the summer.  'Leave them just as they
+are,' she said.  'But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and
+the tarnish?'  She said, 'Why, the things would have to be all gone over
+when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself
+double trouble?'  I asked her if she didn't even roll anything up and put
+it away in closets, and she said: 'Oh, you mean that old American horror
+of getting ready to go away.  I used to go through all that at home, too,
+but I shouldn't dream of it here.  In the first place, there are no
+closets in the house, and I couldn't put anything away if I wanted to.
+And really nothing happens.  I scatter some Persian powder along the
+edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and
+I pull down the shades.  When I come back in the fall I have the powder
+swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again.  Suppose a
+little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and
+there?  The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting
+everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of
+discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit.  No, thank goodness--I left
+American housekeeping in America.'  I asked her: 'But if you went back?'
+and she gave a sigh, and said:
+
+'I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest.  Everybody
+does it there.'  So you see," my friend concluded, "it's in the air,
+rather than the blood."
+
+"Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and live
+in Paris?"
+
+"Oh, dear, not" said my friend.  "Nothing so drastic as all that.  Merely
+the extinction of household property."
+
+"I see what you mean," I said.  "But--what do you mean?"
+
+"Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be
+furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them,
+and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel.  There
+must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own
+linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the
+expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean.  It
+must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case of
+violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order
+when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order when
+the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to clean
+it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests.
+All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord
+that it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to
+close the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual
+way that houses are now closed and opened.  Otherwise my scheme would be
+measurably vitiated."
+
+"I see what you mean," I murmured.  "Well?"
+
+"Some years ago," my friend went on, "when we came home from Europe, we
+left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about,
+and did not settle anywhere in particular.  During that interval my wife
+opened and closed five furnished houses in two years."
+
+"And she has lived to tell the tale?"
+
+"She has lived to tell it a great many times.  She can hardly be kept
+from telling it yet.  But it is my belief that, although she brought to
+the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence
+of the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in
+her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does
+with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and
+opens it for the winter.  But if there had been a clause in the lease, as
+there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when
+she left them, life would have been simply a rapture.  Why, in Europe
+custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you come
+and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind
+taking them for a month, or a few weeks.  We are very far behind in this
+matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended
+scale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, more
+perfectly than any other people in the world.  You see what I mean?"
+
+"I am not sure that I do.  But go on."
+
+"I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax
+personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would
+necessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costly
+that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the
+very wicked, and ought to suffer."
+
+"Oh, come, now!"
+
+"I refer you to your Testament.  In the end, all household property would
+pass into the hands of the state."
+
+"Aren't you getting worse and worse?"
+
+"Oh, I'm not supposing there won't be a long interval when household
+property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many
+millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like
+you and me, along with the houses we hire of them.  I have no doubt that
+there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its
+relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world
+into its grasp.  It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably
+groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal
+ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the moth-
+ball.  We shall suffer, but--"
+
+"I see what you mean," I hastened to interrupt at this point, "but these
+suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond-- Do you think you could
+defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?"
+
+"Well, for not more than a week," said my friend, with an air of
+discomfort in his arrest.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+--"We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system," said
+my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week.  By
+this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the
+veranda of a sea-side hotel.  "As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her
+salvation from herself.  When once she is expropriated from her household
+effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of
+the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her
+peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began
+housekeeping."
+
+"That may all very well be," I assented, though I did not believe it, and
+I found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme.  "But
+when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to
+become of our tender and sacred associations with them?"
+
+"What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of
+ancestors?  Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living,
+so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the
+ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used
+by their spirits as well as their bodies.  A man could not sell the
+bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred.  By-and by,
+when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of
+the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the
+tombs of one's forefathers could be sold without violence to their
+spectres.  I dare say it wouldn't be different in the case of our tender
+and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and
+bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac.  We have only to evolve a little
+further.  In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that
+troubles you.  Most people in modern towns and cities have changed their
+domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paid
+the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connected
+with them.  I don't suppose you would say that a man has no such
+associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has them
+with the stuff that has furnished it?"
+
+"No, I shouldn't say that."
+
+"If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear.  Yet at
+each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards,
+portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils,
+and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to
+part with them.  At several times in our own lives we have accumulated
+stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff
+house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow.  Why, I am doing that
+very thing now!  Aren't you?"
+
+"I am--in a certain degree," I assented.
+
+"We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves.  Once my wife
+and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and
+slavery of the thing.  We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or
+four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer.  Some of the pieces we
+had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and
+decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of
+rejoicing.  Tender and sacred associations!  We hadn't had such light
+hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe
+indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our
+lives forever.  Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one
+had been a pang.  All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again."
+
+"I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations
+pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage.  But the
+things that we have in daily use?"
+
+"It is exactly the same with them.  Why should they be more to us than
+the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no
+particular pathos?  And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly
+not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the
+anxiety she feels for them.  She is really much more precious, if she
+could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps
+up with moth-balls.  The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a
+piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for
+years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet
+not form the slightest attachment to the furniture.  Why should we have
+tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with
+a thing we have hired?"
+
+"I confess, I don't know.  And do you really think we could liberate
+ourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us?  Wouldn't the
+eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them
+out for winter?"
+
+"At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it
+would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease.  When the Standard
+Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty
+for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of
+her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical,
+whatever we say about the dressmaker's bills; and the very futilities of
+putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
+are founded in the instinct of saving."
+
+"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
+character if they didn't belong to us?  Wouldn't our domestic interiors
+become dreadfully impersonal?"
+
+"How many houses now have character-personality?  Most people let the
+different dealers choose for them, as it is.  Why not let the Standard
+Household-Effect Company, and finally the state?  I am sure that either
+would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
+few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves.  In most
+interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
+the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
+they are the result of design, they are worse.  I see what you mean by
+character and personality in them.  You mean the sort of madness that let
+itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
+since gone to make the junk-shops hideous.  Each of the eternal-womanly
+was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift
+for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp
+herself upon our interiors.  One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle
+with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;
+another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the
+scarf through its handle.  One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a
+chair; another knotted it around the leg.  In a day, an hour, a moment,
+the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the
+sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in
+slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius.  The walls
+became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified
+ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a
+hysterical chaos, full of character.  Some people had their doors painted
+black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with
+morning-glories.  I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day,
+thinking I might hire it.  The sight of that black door and its morning-
+glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt
+Whitman says.  No, the less we try to get personality and character into
+our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be.
+As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and
+render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect
+and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a
+new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly
+concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she
+will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a
+thing she wants, begins to hate it.  The company's agents will begin by
+convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up
+her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in
+the region of pure aesthetics.  I once asked an Italian painter if he did
+not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said
+'SI.  Ma troppa roba.'  There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas,
+pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers.  'Troppa roba' is the vice of all
+our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly
+if it is not stopped.  But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will
+teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South,
+and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails
+among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with.
+What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?"
+
+"That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains
+are concerned," I said, "but surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures and
+objects of art?"
+
+"I would apply it to them first of all and above all," rejoined my
+friend, hardily.  "Among all the people who buy and own such things there
+is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and
+the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and
+degrade them further.  The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the
+Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real
+sense of art, and a knowledge of it.  When the house-letting and house-
+furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would
+be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for
+the purpose."
+
+"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
+other pictures?"  I sneered.
+
+"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, with unruffled temper.
+"So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
+have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
+company or the state.  The agents of the one, or the officers of the
+other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
+ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
+agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
+family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
+be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
+now have in many cases.  Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme," my friend
+concluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome.  We must
+alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
+exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
+I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
+sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
+punishable by fine or imprisonment.  This, and nothing short of it, will
+be the salvation of the eternal-womanly."
+
+"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"
+
+"What can be more precious?"
+
+"Individuality."
+
+"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
+gradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is any
+individuality in such things now?  What have we been saying about
+character?"
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," I said.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
+
+As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. . . . . . .
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Standard Household Effect Co.,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Staccato Notes of a Vanished Summer
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER
+
+
+Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against the
+southeasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the
+northwest.  The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened the
+open sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef of
+Whaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages
+within.
+
+Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with a
+casual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded knowingly
+to one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the breast of
+the invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and pleasure-boats
+which always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe waters.  The
+craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seiners
+from Gloucester.  They were all of one graceful shape and one size; they
+came with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their
+flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seines
+piled in black heaps between the thwarts.  As soon as they came inside
+their jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from their
+bows.  Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty or seventy
+ships in the harbor, and as the night fell they improvised a little
+Venice under the hill with their lights, which twinkled rhythmically,
+like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine and New
+Hampshire coasts.
+
+There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but that
+ended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a storm.
+The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at anchor through
+the day; but the next night the weather cleared.  We woke to the clucking
+of tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea.  When
+they were fairly gone, the summer, which had held aloof in dismay of the
+sudden cold, seemed to return and possess the land again; and the
+succession of silver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil round
+which we thought had ceased.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, "There never
+was such a summer"; but if the summer is one of those which slip from the
+feeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckoned
+with the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad conviction
+of the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of never
+seeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know.  Each new
+summer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: its
+Junes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, in
+compliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compass
+that fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size like
+shrivelled peas in a pod.
+
+To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas put
+to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we first
+spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hours
+long.  Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where there
+is nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and muse
+beside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Point
+that they hardly know themselves apart.  The days, whatever their length,
+are divided, not into hours, but into mails.  They begin, without regard
+to the sun, at eight o'clock, when the first mail comes with a few
+letters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before.  At
+half-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o'clock there is
+another indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in the
+morning; and at seven the last mail arrives with the Boston evening
+papers and the New York morning papers, to make you forget any letters
+you were looking for.  The opening of the mid-day mail is that which most
+throngs with summer folks the little postoffice under the elms, opposite
+the weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pepperrell; but the evening
+mail attracts a large and mainly disinterested circle of natives.  The
+day's work on land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, perched
+upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness which
+we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight
+on our own ground.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a complexion which seems to be
+inherited rather than personally acquired; for the commerce of Kittery
+Point perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to fit out from
+her wharves have almost as long ago passed to Gloucester.  All that is
+left of the fishing interest is the weir outside which supplies, fitfully
+and uncertainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets.  But in
+spite of this the tint taken from the suns and winds of the sea lingers
+on the local complexion; and the local manner is that freer and easier
+manner of people who have known other coasts, and are in some sort
+citizens of the world.  It is very different from the inland New England
+manner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from the
+clipped nasals of the hill-country.  The lounging native walk is not the
+heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the
+deck in it.
+
+Nothing could be better suited to progress through the long village,
+which rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legs
+on; and nothing could be more charming and friendly than this village.
+It is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which have covered so
+much of the coast, and made it look as if the aesthetic suburbs of New
+York and Boston had gone ashore upon it.  There are two or three old-
+fashioned summer hotels; but the summer life distinctly fails to
+characterize the place.  The people live where their forefathers have
+lived for two hundred and fifty years; and for the century since the
+baronial domain of Sir William was broken up and his possessions
+confiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in small red or white
+houses on their small holdings along the slopes and levels of the low
+hills beside the water, where a man may pass with the least inconvenience
+and delay from his threshold to his gunwale.  Not all the houses are
+small; some are spacious and ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns; but
+most are simple and homelike.  Their gardens, following the example of
+Sir William's vanished pleasaunce, drop southward to the shore, where the
+lobster-traps and the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity.  But
+the fish-flakes which once gave these inclines the effect of terraced
+vineyards have passed as utterly as the proud parterres of the old
+baronet; and Kittery Point no longer "makes" a cod or a haddock for the
+market.
+
+Three groceries, a butcher shop, and a small variety store study the few
+native wants; and with a little money one may live in as great real
+comfort here as for much in a larger place.  The street takes care of
+itself; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is not of the
+insatiable Dutch type which will not spare the stones of the highway; but
+within the houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness.  The other day I
+found myself in a kitchen where the stove shone like oxidized silver; the
+pump and sink were clad in oilcloth as with blue tiles; the walls were
+papered; the stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and braided
+rugs; and I felt the place so altogether too good for me that I pleaded
+to stay there for the transaction of my business, lest a sharper sense of
+my unfitness should await me in the parlor.
+
+The village, with scarcely an interval of farm-lands, stretches four
+miles along the water-side to Portsmouth; but it seems to me that just at
+the point where our lines have fallen there is the greatest concentration
+of its character.  This has apparently not been weakened, it has been
+accented, by the trolley-line which passes through its whole length, with
+gayly freighted cars coming and going every half-hour.  I suppose they
+are not longer than other trolley-cars, but they each affect me like a
+procession.  They are cheerful presences by day, and by night they light
+up the dim, winding street with the flare of their electric bulbs, and
+bring to the country a vision of city splendor upon terms that do not
+humiliate or disquiet.  During July and August they are mostly filled
+with summer folks from a great summer resort beyond us, and their lights
+reveal the pretty fashions of hats and gowns in all the charm of the
+latest lines and tints.  But there is an increasing democracy in these
+splendors, and one might easily mistake a passing excursionist from some
+neighboring inland town, or even a local native with the instinct of
+clothes, for a social leader from York Harbor.
+
+With the falling leaf, the barge-like open cars close up into well-warmed
+saloons, and falter to hourly intervals in their course.  But we are
+still far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing or
+fading leaf.  Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn;
+the ancient Pepperrell elms fling down showers of the baronet's fairy
+gold in the September gusts; the sumacs and the blackberry vines are
+ablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but it is still summer, it
+is still summer: I cannot allow otherwise!
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifference
+of one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the first
+Pepperrell, who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally
+at Kittery Point.  He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortune
+in colonial New England, which revolutionary New England seized and
+dispersed, as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly.  In my personal
+quality I am of course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civic
+capacity I am a patriot.  But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth a
+century old, and if I could now have my way, I would not have had their
+possessions reft from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help
+being loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors.  Sir William,
+indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people who
+despoiled him to a national consciousness.  If he did not imagine, he
+mainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at
+Cape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and his
+splendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught the
+colonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than
+they liked.  His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding American
+armies, and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort
+natural to an amiable man who knew most of them personally.  He was
+already the richest man in America, and his grateful king made him a
+baronet; but he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his old
+life in a region where he had the comfortable consideration of an
+unrivalled magnate.  He built himself the dignified mansion which still
+stands across the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within an
+easy stone's cast of the far older house, where his father wedded Margery
+Bray, when he came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of
+Shoals, and established his family on Kittery.  The Bray house had been
+the finest in the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansion
+was built; it still remembers its consequence in the panelling and
+wainscoting of the large, square parlor where the young people were
+married and in the elaborate staircase cramped into the little, square
+hall; and the Bray fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of the
+Pepperrells.
+
+I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirty
+miles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William's having done it
+here a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had left
+his family, say, about a mile of it.  They could now, indeed, enjoy it
+only in the collateral branches, for all Sir William's line is extinct.
+The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and
+the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death
+belongs to the remotest of kinsmen.  A group of these, the descendants of
+a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as
+the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of
+drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir
+William's father, cherishes the family memories with due American
+"proceedings."
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chief
+excitement of our summer.  In fact, I do not know that it was an
+excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence of
+our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and kraken
+shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in the
+fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under my
+window.
+
+I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were
+here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited
+locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent
+accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train.  The poetry
+of the man-of-war still clings to the "three-decker out of the foam" of
+the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about
+the modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the Texas and
+the Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, "Ah, but for you, and our need of
+proving your dire efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with the
+wickedness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been no war!"  Under my
+reluctant eyes the great, dreadful spectacle of the Santiago fight
+displayed itself in peaceful Kittery Harbor.  I saw the Spanish ships
+drive upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hampshire, was camping in
+a little wooden shanty unconscious; and I heard the dying screams of the
+Spanish sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of their own
+wicked war-kettles.
+
+As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like "kind Lieutenant
+Belay of the 'Hot Cross-Bun'," seemed to be "banging away the whole day
+long."  They set a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcastle
+shore, which, till they came, only recollected itself to salute the
+sunrise and sunset with a single gun; but which, under provocation of the
+squadron, formed a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon.
+
+Other martial shows and noises were not so bad.  I rather liked seeing
+the morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks,
+with the lively music that went with it.  The bugle calls and the bells
+were charming; the week's wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness by
+day, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the waves
+and shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive.
+There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latest coon-
+songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from various
+nations; and yes, I remember the white squadron kindly, though I was so
+glad to have it go, and let us lapse back into our summer silence and
+calm.  It was (I do not mind saying now) a majestic sight to see those
+grotesque monsters gather themselves together, and go wallowing, one
+after another, out of the harbor, and drop behind the ledge of Whaleback
+Light, as if they had sunk into the sea.
+
+
+V.
+
+A deep peace fell upon us when they went, and it must have been at this
+most receptive moment, when all our sympathies were adjusted in a mood of
+hospitable expectation, that Jim appeared.
+
+Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat; but unless one has
+lived at Kittery Point, and realized, from observation and experience,
+what a leading part cats may play in society, one cannot feel the full
+import of this fact.  Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, but
+every house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, and
+young; of divers colors, tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell.  With a
+whole ocean inviting to the tragic rite, I do not believe there is ever a
+kitten drowned in Kittery; the illimitable sea rather employs itself in
+supplying the fish to which "no cat's averse," but which the cats of
+Kittery demand to have cooked.  They do not like raw fish; they say it
+plainly, and they prefer to have the bones taken out for them, though
+they do not insist upon that point.
+
+At least, Jim never did so from the time when he first scented the odor
+of delicate young mackerel in the evening air about our kitchen, and
+dropped in upon the maids there with a fine casual effect of being merely
+out for a walk, and feeling it a neighborly thing to call.  He had on a
+silver collar, engraved with his name and surname, which offered itself
+for introduction like a visiting-card.  He was too polite to ask himself
+to the table at once, but after he had been welcomed to the family
+circle, he formed the habit of finding himself with us at breakfast and
+supper, when he sauntered in like one who should say, "Did I smell fish?"
+but would not go further in the way of hinting.
+
+He had no need to do so.  He was made at home, and freely invited to our
+best not only in fish, but in chicken, for which he showed a nice taste,
+and in sweetcorn, for which he revealed a most surprising fondness when
+it was cut from the cob for him.  After he had breakfasted or supped he
+gracefully suggested that he was thirsty by climbing to the table where
+the water-pitcher stood and stretching his fine feline head towards it.
+When he had lapped up his saucer of water; he marched into the parlor,
+and riveted the chains upon our fondness by taking the best chair and
+going to sleep in it in attitudes of Egyptian, of Assyrian majesty.
+His arts were few or none; he rather disdained to practise any; he
+completed our conquest by maintaining himself simply a fascinating
+presence; and perhaps we spoiled Jim.  It is certain that he came under
+my window at two o'clock one night, and tried the kitchen door.  It
+resisted his efforts to get in, and then Jim began to use language which
+I had never heard from the lips of a cat before, and seldom from the lips
+of a man.  I will not repeat it; enough that it carried to the listener
+the conviction that Jim was not sober.  Where he could have got his
+liquor in the totally abstinent State of Maine I could not positively
+say, but probably of some sailor who had brought it from the neighboring
+New Hampshire coast.  There could be no doubt, however, that Jim was
+drunk; and a dash from the water-pitcher seemed the only thing for him.
+The water did not touch him, but he started back in surprise and grief,
+and vanished into the night without a word.
+
+His feelings must have been deeply wounded, for it was almost a week
+before he came near us again; and then I think that nothing but young
+lobster would have brought him.  He forgave us finally, and made us of
+his party in the quarrel he began gradually to have with the large yellow
+cat of a next-door neighbor.  This culminated one afternoon, after a long
+exchange of mediaeval defiance and insult, in a battle upon a bed of rag-
+weed, with wild shrieks of rage, and prodigious feats of ground and lofty
+tumbling.  It seemed to our anxious eyes that Jim was getting the worst
+of it; but when we afterwards visited the battle-field and picked up
+several tufts of blond fur, we were in a doubt which was afterwards
+heightened by Jim's invasion of the yellow cat's territory, where he
+stretched himself defiantly upon the grass and seemed to be challenging
+the yellow cat to come out and try to put him off the premises.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn . . . . . . . .
+Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Leading part cats may play in society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad. . . . . . . .
+Has the lurch and the sway of the deck in it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Notes of a Vanished Summer,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Short Stories and Essays
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+     Worries of a Winter Walk
+     Summer Isles of Eden
+     Wild Flowers of the Asphalt
+     A Circus in the Suburbs
+     A She Hamlet
+     The Midnight Platoon
+     The Beach at Rockaway
+     Sawdust in the Arena
+     At a Dime Museum
+     American Literature in Exile
+     The Horse Show
+     The Problem of the Summer
+     Aesthetic New York Fifty-odd Years Ago
+     From New York into New England
+     The Art of the Adsmith
+     The Psychology of Plagiarism
+     Puritanism in American Fiction
+     The What and How in Art
+     Politics in American Authors
+     Storage
+     "Floating down the River on the O-hi-o"
+
+
+
+
+WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK
+
+The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River,
+I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization,
+which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish
+now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful
+consideration.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The morning was extremely cold.  It professed to be sunny, and there was
+really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being
+tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it.  Blasts of
+frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of
+resentment when they met around the corners.  Although I was passing
+through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the
+sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the
+sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no
+peddlers' carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four shawl-
+hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases in
+their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the
+beer saloons.  The butchers' windows were painted with patterns of frost,
+through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous
+stalactites from the roof.  When I came to the river, I ached in sympathy
+with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine,
+which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers
+of powdered quartz.
+
+But it was before I reached this final point that I received into my
+consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an
+increasing burden to it.  Within a block of the river I met a child so
+small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until
+she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the
+pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little
+mittened hands.  I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to
+write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold.  This would
+have been more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth
+obliges me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on.
+The pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to
+overflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been
+for this I might have taken her for a child of the better classes, she
+was so comfortably clad.  But in that case she would have had to be
+fifteen or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently and
+responsibly the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she was
+actually doing at five or six.  We must, indeed, allow that the early
+self-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more so
+because they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according to the
+theories of all polite economists, they have to have their discontent
+with their conditions put into their heads by malevolent agitators.
+
+From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest;
+it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothing
+of it.  From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits of
+coke that tumbled from her heaping pail.  She could not consent to lose
+one of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of them
+stay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her
+jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, who
+planted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands in
+his pockets.  I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in his
+furtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him.  The chance to have
+fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about till
+she cried with vexation, was one which might not often present itself,
+and I do not know what made him forego it, but I know that he did, and
+that he finally passed her, as I have seen a young dog pass a little cat,
+after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it.
+
+I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towards
+the river again I received the second instalment of my present
+perplexity.  A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard
+which I now perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed two
+brisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold
+like the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of coke
+that were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them; such
+old women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the withered
+apples red in their cheeks, I have not often seen.  They may have been
+about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most women are
+grandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats of
+their children's homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visions
+of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren.
+The fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimble
+beldams, who hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking up
+their day's supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart.
+Even the attempt is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeble
+fancy, not bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them
+before me in that figure.  I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of
+thing; I can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all
+their lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from their
+cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight without
+ceasing to their graves.  But I am not unreasonable; I understand and I
+understood what I saw to be one of the things that must be, for the
+perfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and at
+the moment I got what pleasure I could out of the stolid indifference of
+the cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interested
+me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe in
+the freezing eddies of the air behind him.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is
+what to do with the fact.  The question began with me almost at once, or
+at least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the
+wind at my back.  I was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic
+instinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I could
+make of what I had seen in the way of my trade.  Should I have something
+very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick
+up coke for her sick daughter's freezing orphans till she fell sick
+herself?  What should I do with the family in that case?  They could not
+be left at that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of
+about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her
+humble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother's place.  I decided
+that I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, and
+could manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena;
+either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw that
+I must make her Venetian.  Here I was on safe ground, and at once the
+love-interest appeared to help me out.  By virtue of the law of
+contrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall,
+silent, blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance with
+Scandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels.  His name was Janssen, a good,
+distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I
+thought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from
+that of a Swedish waitress we once had.
+
+Janssen--Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina's grandmother
+used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they
+were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference.
+At first he noticed Marina--or Nina, as I soon saw I must call her--with
+the same unconcern; for in her grandmother's hood and jacket and check
+apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly like
+the old woman.  I thought I would have Nina make her self-sacrifice
+rebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow the
+cokecart with tears.  This would catch Janssen's notice, and he would
+wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old woman was crying about,
+and then he would see that it was not the old woman.  He would see that
+it was Nina, and he would be in love with her at once, for she would not
+only be very pretty, but he would know that she was good, if she were
+willing to help her family in that way.
+
+He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, Northern way.  He would
+do nothing to betray himself.  But little by little he would begin to
+befriend her.  He would carelessly overload his cart before he left the
+yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not only
+this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he would
+drive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load.
+
+Nina would get to watching for him.  She must not notice him much at
+first, except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart.
+But after several mornings she must see that he is very strong and
+handsome.  Then, after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, her
+vivid black eyes, with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his cold
+blue eyes.  This must be the climax; and just at this point I gave my
+fancy a rest, while I went into a drugstore at the corner of Avenue B to
+get my hands warm.
+
+They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and I had suffered past
+several places trying to think of an excuse to go in.  I now asked the
+druggist if he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, and
+this put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was very
+polite.  We agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave way
+respectfully when I doubted his opinion that the winters were getting
+milder.  I made him reflect that there was no reason for this, and that
+it was probably an illusion from that deeper impression which all
+experiences made on us in the past, when we were younger; I ought to say
+that he was an elderly man, too.  I said I fancied such a morning as this
+was not very mild for people that had no fires, and this brought me back
+again to Janssen and Marina, by way of the coke-cart.  The thought of
+them rapt me so far from the druggist that I listened to his answer with
+a glazing eye, and did not know what he said.  My hands had now got warm,
+and I bade him good-morning with a parting regret, which he civilly
+shared, that he had not the thing I had not wanted, and I pushed out
+again into the cold, which I found not so bad as before.
+
+My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and I saw that to be truly
+modern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy and
+strength, I must not let them get further acquainted with each other.
+The affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning Jan must
+note that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who was
+following his cart.  She must be very weak from a long sickness--I was
+not sure whether to have it the grippe or not, but I decided upon that
+provisionally and she must totter after Janssen, so that he must get down
+after a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-board
+of his cart, or something of that kind; I did not care for the detail.
+They should get into talk in the broken English which was the only
+language they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, and
+tell him that now Nina was sick; I imagined making this very simple, but
+very touching, and I really made it so touching that it brought the lump
+into my own throat, and I knew it would be effective with the reader.
+Then I had Jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, and
+the old woman limp feebly after.
+
+There should not be any more, I decided, except that one very cold
+morning, like that; Jan should be driving through that street, and should
+be passing the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, just as a
+little procession should be issuing from it.  The fact must be told in
+brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality.  The last touch
+must be Jan's cart turning the street corner with Jan's figure sharply
+silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light.  Nothing more.
+
+But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic,
+so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world
+which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his
+suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from
+the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will
+have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the head of
+it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youth
+with ear-rings who had long had her heart.
+
+With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, at
+the fond reader's expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, in
+such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be.
+I should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame,
+and that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan's part that Nina might
+very well have known nothing of his feeling for her.  Perhaps at the very
+end I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had no
+such feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is what
+has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my
+ever writing it.  Here is material of the best sort lying useless on my
+hands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might be wrought into a
+short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and I
+think I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the broken
+English of Jan and Nina's grandmother, and certainly something novel.
+All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the reader, and
+let him decide for himself how it should end.
+
+The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served for
+having regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all;
+that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I ought
+to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried
+to learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer my
+knowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and
+happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us.  I own there is
+something in this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged by
+nice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that
+it is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that
+we ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating
+grandes dames for their amusement.  This sort of people could say to the
+humanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall
+off from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment;
+for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must be
+aesthetically, though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction
+already overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN
+
+It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer a
+small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from
+continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly upon
+them, to show how sharp and swift the ship's course is, but they seem so
+far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down a
+steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous
+somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the
+rush of the meteoric fall.  There were, of course, facts and incidents
+contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the raw
+March morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal
+seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and
+cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in
+sight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes from
+the turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the white
+walls and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became the
+dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through air
+became the sole reality.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever
+offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact.  Those low hills, that
+climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summer
+sky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the coast of
+Maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palms
+and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you had
+never noticed these growths in Maine before, where you were so familiar
+with the cedars.  The hotel itself, which has brought the Green Mountains
+with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the
+white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly
+waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it,
+swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it
+migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season,
+you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and
+equally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July.  There
+will be the same American groups looking out over them, and rocking and
+smoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking.
+
+But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue
+jackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and color
+here to the veranda groups?  Where should one get the house walls of
+whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun,
+and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies?  These things must
+come from some other association, and in the case of him who here
+confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters
+as far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian
+Junes haunts the coral shore.  (They are beginning to say the shore is
+not coral; but no matter.)  To be sure, the white roofs are not accounted
+for in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the
+snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely
+tropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries.
+They at least suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one remembers
+seeing it through Titbottom's spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofs
+of brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the lagoon-like
+expanses that lend themselves to the fond effect.  It is so Venetian,
+indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers,
+in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to
+complete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good reason why
+the rough little isles that fill the bay should not call themselves
+respectively San Giorgio and San Clemente, and Sant' Elena and San
+Lazzaro: they probably have no other names!
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural Eden,
+that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, when
+once she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound in
+the Summer Islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found.  There
+are some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no other
+reptiles.  The frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that its
+vibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it has
+never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchal
+age, and are fond of Boston brown bread and baked beans, if their
+preferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the care
+of an American family living on the islands.  The observer who
+contributes this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-
+fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple
+cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a
+sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its native waters.
+The angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they are of a
+transparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of expression,
+but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not lend themselves
+to the resemblance.
+
+Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it
+might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the
+pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent
+vegetable growths about it.  All things here are of a weird
+convertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts
+of nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest and
+most familiar.  You drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and
+realize only now and then that these willows are thick clumps of
+oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards,
+which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks.  The fields
+of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are
+presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not
+frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which
+they wear as far off as New York.  The potato-fields, on the other hand,
+are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies'
+lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, unless because they
+are not nearly enough to characterize the landscape, which in spite of
+their presence remains so northern in aspect.  They were much whipped and
+torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of the
+islands, and some of the royal palms were blown down.  Where these are
+yet standing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quite
+one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that of any king who could
+pass by them: no sovereign except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial
+moments could pass between them.
+
+The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass,
+but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden,
+employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom.
+It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take
+away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and
+enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it
+merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas.
+One such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house
+which this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from
+the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior
+one of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersed
+among the pleasant places of the earth.  It fills the night with a heavy
+heliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the
+waxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legal
+owners stretches itself in an interminable reverie, and hears Youth come
+laughing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other
+white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning.
+In this dream the multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel
+with the young girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn;
+and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation which
+shall night-long gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of
+military and naval uniforms.  Of course the multiple has been at the
+dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of forty years ago),
+and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling
+in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops.
+They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a
+deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so
+varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods.  How came they all here,
+seven hundred miles from any larger land?  Some think, on the stronger
+wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men
+brought them.  Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarm
+about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier
+birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands.
+Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places
+the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and
+holds its own against them.  The little ground-doves mimic in miniature
+the form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves,
+but perhaps not their melancholy cooing.  Nature has nowhere anything
+prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed
+white gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas,
+and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail their
+meteoric splendor against the midday sky.  Full twenty-four inches they
+measure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a
+foot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter
+than they, and they attack fiercely anything they suspect of too intimate
+a curiosity concerning their nests.
+
+They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer Islands,
+where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find it
+again.  Sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human
+quality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are in
+no wise light.  Our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the large
+majority, and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the full
+enjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves from
+their old inferiority.  They do the hard work, in their own easy way, and
+possibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom
+here, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their
+existence involves for him.  They are not very gay, and do not rise to a
+joke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home.  If you
+have them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery
+canes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air and
+sky; nor are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, where
+visitors of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question.  Such
+visitors spare no islander of any color.  Once, in the pretty Public
+Garden which the multiple had claimed for its private property, three
+unmerciful American women suddenly descended from the heavens and began
+to question the multiple's gardener, who was peacefully digging at the
+rate of a spadeful every five minutes.  Presently he sat down on his
+wheelbarrow, and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to
+the other.  Then he rose and braced himself desperately against the tool-
+house, where, when his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to the soft eye
+of pity pinned to the wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed
+points were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose feathered shafts
+stuck out half a yard before his breast.
+
+Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was.
+At least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a Jamaican
+regiment of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the white
+street, with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet and
+gold upon the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole
+were coming towards you, or a mighty tulip.  These gorgeous creatures
+seem so much readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to test
+them with a joke.  But it might fail.  The Summer Islands are a British
+colony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some other
+things.
+
+To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hear
+it first named, and when you are offered a 'loquat', if you are of a
+frivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with 'loquor'
+which it seems to intimate.  Failing in this, you taste the fruit, and
+then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness as
+if you had bitten a green persimmon.  But if it is ripe, it is delicious,
+and may be consumed indefinitely.  It is the only native fruit which one
+can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimed
+that with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws.  These break out
+in clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which may
+have some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinite
+summer.  They are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little
+muskmelon which has grown too near a patch of squashes.
+
+One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard.  It is
+best when plucked by a young islander of Italian blood whose father
+orders him up the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to oblige the
+signori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with them
+about the two bad years there have been in Bermuda, and the probability
+of his doing better in Nuova York.  He has not imagined our winter,
+however, and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the
+signori go with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses.
+
+The roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment which
+attends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude,
+and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake at
+another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit
+and white blossoms on the same stem.  They are a pleasure to the nose and
+eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the
+tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausibly
+deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in
+mid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet?
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+What remains?  The events of the Summer Islands are few, and none out of
+the order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what may
+be called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight.
+But far better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain of
+such like quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, now
+from the south and now from the north, with the languor of the one and
+the vigor of the other in them.  There were drives upon drives that were
+always to somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they had
+been mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little
+lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees.  The lawns professed to be
+of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not
+grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to
+satisfy their inexacting stomachs.  They are never very green, and in
+fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it
+wears with us in late August; and why not, after all its interminable,
+innumerable summers?  Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coral
+hills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches of potatoes and
+lilies and onions drawing their geometrical lines across the brown-red,
+weedless soil; and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which are
+never so snugly sheltered there but their broad leaves are whipped to
+shreds.  The white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiable
+disintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhair
+ferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where the
+cactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them
+with speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboring
+bamboo.  The loquat-trees cluster--like quinces in the garden closes, and
+show their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit.
+
+For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it
+climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn
+and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black
+legs of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostrate
+rainbow.
+
+All this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how will
+it be when one has turned one's back upon it?  Will it not lapse into the
+gross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who swap
+them cannot themselves believe?  What will be said to you when you tell
+that in the Summer Islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard and
+take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to living
+in it?  What, when you relate that among the northern and southern
+evergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no
+fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping
+them on, and put out others when they feel like it?  What, when you
+pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long,
+and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the
+drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and
+in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the
+ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them
+the holes they emerged from?
+
+These every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, even
+in their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant back
+to New York you foresee that they will become impossible.  As impossible
+as the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderingly
+figures it a Bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting
+icicles and snowballs in the March air!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT
+
+Looking through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey's charming book on the Flowers
+of Field, Hill, and Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly reminded of
+the number of these pretty, wilding growths which I had been finding all
+the season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks of
+artificial stone in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who has
+been kept in New York, as I have been this year, beyond the natural time
+of going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan
+invasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early
+spring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue
+hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down
+Broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the
+cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must
+find itself at home there.  The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any
+sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the
+passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars.
+The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey's book.
+He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight,
+I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in August.  It is
+a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought along
+the shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road overhead
+forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs.  The arrow-head likes such
+swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man's Curve
+and the corners of Twenty third Street.  This is in flower now, and will
+be till September; and St.-John's-wort, which some call the false golden-
+rod, is already here.  You may find it in any moist, low ground, but the
+gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, are not
+too dry for it.  The real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us, for
+it comes only when summer is on the wane.  The other night, however, on
+the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted to see
+it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response to the
+cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at the base
+of a potted ever green.  This lonely insect had no sooner sounded its
+winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave and
+droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side
+pastures!  But this may have been only a transitory response to the
+cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he will
+find golden-rod there every night.  I believe there is always Golden
+Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of
+"deep, cool, moist woods," where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing,
+along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and
+Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman's breeches, and
+Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop's--cap, and Wintergreen, and
+Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder's-tongue, and Wakerobin, and
+Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their
+names from some fairy of genius.  I should say it was a female fairy of
+genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in
+mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little
+girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives.  The author tells
+how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one
+would know how they looked from their names; and when you call them over
+they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our
+sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations
+whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket's cry flowered the dome
+with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra sloped
+all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollar
+gale that always blows over the city at that height.  But as one turns
+the leaves of Mrs. Creevey's magic book-perhaps one ought to say turns
+its petals--the forests and the fields come and make themselves at home
+in the city everywhere.  By virtue of it I have been more in the country
+in a half-hour than if I had lived all June there.  When I lift my eyes
+from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of
+wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the
+air after dwelling on his brightness.  The rose-mallow flaunts along
+Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house
+fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that it
+was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion.
+
+Yet Mrs. Creevey's book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by any
+of the ordinary arts.  It is rather matter of fact in form and manner,
+and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject.
+One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titles
+of chapters as "Wet Meadows and Low Grounds"; "Dry Fields--Waste Places--
+Waysides"; "Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods"; and "Deep, Cool, Moist
+Woods"; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing
+opulence of suggestion.  The spring and, summer months pass in stately
+processional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the
+names of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the
+blooms themselves.
+
+They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or
+their own wayward wills led them astray.  A singularly fascinating
+chapter is that called "Escaped from Gardens," in which some of these
+pretty runagates are catalogued.  I supposed in my liberal ignorance that
+the Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that the
+Pansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, the
+Snapdragon, the Prince's Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star of
+Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone
+Crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company.  One is not surprised to meet
+the Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart;
+but that the Baby's Breath should be found wandering by the road-sides
+from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender pang as for a
+lost child.  Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feed
+at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the Baby's Breath,
+and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they
+were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the
+flowers.  Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her,
+and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience,
+but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well
+know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name
+of the flowers she loves to write of.  I am not saying that the Day-Lily
+would not smell as sweet by her title of 'Hemerocallis Fulva', or that
+the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her
+scholar's cap and gown of 'Saponaria Officinalis'; but merely that their
+college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even
+melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays.  So I
+like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them,
+and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes
+them grow here in the city streets.  I have a fancy that they would all
+vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms.  As long as I talk of
+cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences
+help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff
+spears; but if I called them 'Typha Latifolia', or even 'Typha
+Angustifolia', there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof
+and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me
+forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream.  The street sparrows,
+pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant
+if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the 'Viola Pedata'; and the
+commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood
+maligned as the 'Rhus Venenata'.  The very milk-cans would turn to their
+native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple American
+Cowslip as the 'Dodecatheon Meadia'.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and I
+should be far from undervaluing this side of Mrs. Creevey's book.  In
+fact, I secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever
+I get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to some of the
+humblest flowers, such as I can feel myself on easy terms with, and tell
+them what they are in Latin.  I think it will surprise them, and I dare
+say they will some of them like it, and will want their initials
+inscribed on their leaves, like those signatures which the medicinal
+plants bear, or are supposed to bear.  But as long as I am engaged in
+their culture amid this stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best to
+invite their presence by their familiar names, and I hope they will not
+think them too familiar.  I should like to get them all naturalized here,
+so that the thousands of poor city children, who never saw them growing
+in their native places, might have some notion of how bountifully the
+world is equipped with beauty, and how it is governed by many laws which
+are not enforced by policemen.  I think that would interest them very
+much, and I shall not mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, and
+carrying them home by the armfuls.  When good-will costs nothing we ought
+to practise it even with the tramps, and these are very welcome, in their
+wanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of my
+pleached bowers they come to.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS
+
+We dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have more
+than our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past we
+have been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as great
+misery as famine in that kind could be.  For our sins, or some of our
+friends' sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of three
+rings and two raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in the
+country there are still circuses of one ring and no platform at all.
+We are accustomed, in the gross and foolish-superfluity of these city
+circuses, to see no feat quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at
+the most important instant in the hope of greater wonders in another
+ring.  We have four or five clowns, in as many varieties of grotesque
+costume, as well as a lady clown in befitting dress; but we hear none of
+them speak, not even the lady clown, while in the country circus the old
+clown of our childhood, one and indivisible, makes the same style of
+jokes, if not the very same jokes, that we used to hear there.  It is not
+easy to believe all this, and I do not know that I should quite believe
+it myself if I had not lately been witness of it in the suburban village
+where I was passing the summer.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by the
+vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell
+upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with
+their festive pink.  They prophesied it in a name borne by the first
+circus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must
+all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie
+attached to it.  I did not know this when I heard the band braying
+through the streets of the village on the morning of the performance,
+and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the
+procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in
+their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an
+advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to
+himself in the darkness of his moving prison.  I felt the old thrill of
+excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and
+I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had
+done lunch.  My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so
+very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two-
+platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women and
+lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping under the
+fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like the
+ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in its triumph;
+and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at work over their
+kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk.
+
+I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd,
+but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a
+crowd.  I bought my admittances without a moment's delay, and the man who
+sold me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to look
+at the change he had given me, mostly nickels.  "I thought I didn't give
+you enough," he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to the
+doorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed.
+It was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be,
+to give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance.  They
+were already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices from
+the tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took my
+seat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermost
+tread of the benches, so that I had to step across its prostrate form.
+These reserved seats were carpeted; but I had forgotten how little one
+rank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon the
+back and legs.  But for the carpeting, I could not see how I was
+advantaged above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and I
+reflected how often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor.
+I could not see but they were as well off as I; they were much more gayly
+dressed, and some of them were even smoking cigars, while they were
+nearly all younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more.
+They did not look like the country people whom I rather hoped and
+expected to see, but were apparently my fellow-villagers, in different
+stages of excitement.  They manifested by the usual signs their
+impatience to have the performance begin, and I confess that I shared
+this, though I did not take part in the demonstration.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+I have no intention of following the events seriatim.  Front time to time
+during their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the
+circus-men.  They were quite the same people, I believe, but strangely
+softened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and looking not a day older,
+which I cannot say of myself, exactly.  The supernumeraries were patently
+farmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit of
+adventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and a
+pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a
+deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators
+and were very glad when they were not.  The man who went round with a dog
+to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his
+dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town.  The man came
+up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred
+that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to
+all the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family.  He was good to the
+poor supes, and instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best to
+manage the guy ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began.
+
+There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over the
+whole circus.  This was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extreme
+proximity to its performances; I had never been on quite such intimate
+terms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but I think it was
+also largely from the good hearts of the whole company.  A circus must
+become, during the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especially
+sisterhood, and its members must forget finally that they are not united
+by ties of blood.  I dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives
+and fathers and mothers, if not as brothers.
+
+The domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady in
+a Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting
+for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern.  She really
+looked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must
+have worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined in the
+bath, or just out of it.  But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown,
+and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on
+her slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most
+goddesses.  What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood
+there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were
+their collective sister.  They were all in their shirt-sleeves for the
+sake of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away as
+indifferent to her as so many born brothers.
+
+Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of the
+ring, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might have
+been; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully,
+left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why
+we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other
+people.  I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the
+trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a
+poignancy to the contemplation of her perils.  One could follow every
+motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as
+she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining
+eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which
+she forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions!  Why
+should such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure?  Perhaps
+it does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of
+the many delusions we are in with regard to each other in this
+bewildering world.  They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions,
+and I suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from
+the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily.  I remember that
+I liked hearing his old jokes, not because they were jokes, but because
+they were old and endeared by long association.  He sang one song which I
+must have heard him sing at my first circus (I am sure it was he), about
+"Things that I don't like to see," and I heartily agreed with him that
+his book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth the
+half-dime asked for it, though I did not buy it.
+
+Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, I will
+not allow that I did not feel for him and suffer with him because of the
+thick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with the
+sweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain.
+He was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke
+(though you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively,
+I dare say he outdated the pyramids.  They must have made clowns whiten
+their faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the
+antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means.  All
+the same, I pitied this clown for it, and I fancied in his wildest
+waggery the note of a real irascibility.  Shall I say that he seemed the
+only member of that little circus who was not of an amiable temper?  But
+I do not blame him, and I think it much to have seen a clown once more
+who jested audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better of him
+in repartee.  It was long since I had known that pleasure.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+Throughout the performance at this circus I was troubled by a curious
+question, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeur
+as the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin and
+slight, too.  We all know how the places of our childhood, the heights,
+the distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was it
+possible that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses?
+The doubt was painful, but I was forced to own that there might be more
+truth in it than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence.
+Very likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness and
+variety of  their entertainments, and I was spoiled for the simple joys
+of this.  But I could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the
+young faces around me, and I must confess that there was at least so much
+of the circus that I left when it was half over.  I meant to go into the
+side-shows and see the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the
+giant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly foot, if I might be
+so honored.  But I did none of these things, and I am willing to believe
+the fault was in me, if I was disappointed in the circus.  It was I who
+had shrunk and dwindled, and not it.  To real boys it was still the size
+of the firmament, and was a world of wonders and delights.  At least I
+can recognize this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress all
+over the country of the simple circuses which the towns never see, but
+which help to render the summer fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes
+and hearts they appeal to.  I hope it will be long before they cease to
+find profit in the pleasure they give.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A SHE HAMLET
+
+The other night as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre and
+waited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the
+rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain
+upon any Hamlet passed through my eager frame.  There is, indeed, no
+scene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror)
+than that which opens the great tragedy.  The sentry pacing up and down
+upon the platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greeting
+between him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of
+the bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these before
+they can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in
+the act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the
+ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulseless
+awe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturally
+supernatural?  What promise of high mystical things to come there is in
+the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us from
+ourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with the
+troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents!
+As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed in
+long procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so much of their
+world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual
+one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of the
+less considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in its
+course.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for an
+intelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands.
+You do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your
+mind are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not really
+effective for the purpose.  The best way is to own yourself unfair at the
+start, and then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if not
+your subject.  In other words, if you went to see the Hamlet of Mme.
+Bernhardt frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely in
+the end to be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blame
+her if you were.  To be ideally fair to that representation, it would be
+better not to have known any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet of
+Shakespeare.
+
+From the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelmingly
+against her--her sex, her race, and her speech.  You never ceased to feel
+for a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy Dane, and
+that the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess.  These three
+removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the
+impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is in
+nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so
+little French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry
+expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which the French words
+always failed to convey.  The battle was lost from the first, and all you
+could feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was
+not war.
+
+While the battle went on I was the more anxious to be fair, because I
+had, as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and I welcomed, in the
+interest of critical impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind,
+through readily traceable associations.  This was a Hamlet also of French
+extraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeply
+derived than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large imagination of
+Charles Fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of her
+subtlest womanish intuition.  His was the first blond Hamlet known to our
+stage, and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for a
+complexion; and it was of the quality of his Hamlet in masterly
+technique.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past,
+and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme.  Bernhardt was
+figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in
+being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre.
+It was romantic as Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense of
+the word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was romanticistic.  It was,
+therefore, the most realistic Hamlet ever yet seen, because the most
+naturally poetic.  Mme.  Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her
+school; for Fechter's poetic naturalness differed from the
+conventionality of the accepted Hamlets in nothing so much as the
+superiority of its self-instruction.  In Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet, as in
+his, nothing was trusted to chance, or "inspiration."  Good or bad, what
+one saw was what was meant to be seen.  When Fechter played Edmond Dantes
+or Claude Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions,
+and in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it
+might be held to be nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and after
+all, you said Hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with what
+he gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel.  When he
+challenged the ghost with "I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane," you
+Would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered.  It sufficed as it
+was; and when he said to Rosencrantz, "Will you pleh upon this pyip?"
+it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you
+made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their
+quaintness afterwards.  For the most part you were not aware of these
+betrayals of his speech; and in certain high things it was soul
+interpreted to soul through the poetry of Shakespeare so finely, so
+directly, that there was scarcely a sense of the histrionic means.
+
+He put such divine despair into the words, "Except my life, except my
+life, except my life!" following the mockery with which he had assured
+Polonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal than his
+leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for thirty
+years, and I had been alert for them with every Hamlet since.  But before
+I knew, Mme. Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever.  Her
+Hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think the
+points of Hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation of
+the translator's interpretation of Shakespeare that they passed
+unrecognized.  Soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for the
+most part, but as such things go that soliloquy of Hamlet's, "To be or
+not to be," is at least very noble poetry; and yet Mme.  Bernhardt was so
+unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of its delivery.
+Perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre melancholy of
+Shakespeare's thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it its
+proper mystery.  But there was always a hardness, not always from the
+translation, upon this feminine Hamlet.  It was like a thick shell with
+no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare's Hamlet
+could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia's grave, where he
+reproaches Laertes with those pathetic words
+
+              "What is the reason that you use me thus?
+               I loved you ever; but it is no matter."
+
+Here Mme.  Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not
+a man.  At the close of the Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a mad
+whirl, her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, a
+mischievous she-crow.
+
+There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leaden
+lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her
+elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit.
+Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong
+emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman.  At times
+her movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly
+womanish, especially those of the whole person.  Her quickened pace was a
+woman's nervous little run, and not a man's swift stride; and to give
+herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman's high heels to
+her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them.
+
+In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and American
+Hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two
+brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme.
+Bernhardt's preferred full-length, life-size family portraits.  The dead
+king's effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter's
+art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it in
+the wall at the right moment.  She achieved a novelty by this treatment
+of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took with
+the wretched queen.  Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though it
+could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of a
+good daughter to give it her?
+
+One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become
+impossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet as a man, if it
+ever had been possible.  She had traversed the bounds which tradition as
+well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an
+actress may personate a man.  This condition is that there shall be
+always a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all
+the time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself
+such before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a
+man only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it.
+Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men's roles, which, as
+women's roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys,
+could be more naturally managed then than now.  But when it came to the
+eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of
+women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have
+been confused if not weakened.  If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of
+doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or
+Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in
+men's roles.  These characters are, of course, "lighter motions bounded
+in a shallower brain" than the creation she aimed at; but she could at
+least have made much of them, and she does not make much of Hamlet.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence to
+an ideal.  Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types
+that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing
+Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from the
+fancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crises
+of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady.  Hamlet is in
+nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself
+unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them.
+If we could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself,
+invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his
+perplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex.
+As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be a
+wicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet's father hard upon the murder of her
+mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance.  No fine
+scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment's
+question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with
+her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through her
+aunt's breast.
+
+To be sure, there would then have been no play of " Hamlet," as we have
+it; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme.
+Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully.  It is in attempting a
+masculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an
+ideal.  It is not thinkable.  After you have seen it done, you say, as
+Mr. Clemens is said to have said of bicycling: "Yes, I have seen it, but
+it's impossible.  It doesn't stand to reason."
+
+Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable
+in the work of an artist is inartistic.  By the time I had reached these
+bold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to
+declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would be
+forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something
+precious and sacred.
+
+In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in
+the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to
+judgment when they violate them.  After Mme. Bernhardt was perversely
+willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it
+well or not was of slight consequence.  She had already made her failure
+in wishing to play the part.  Her wish impugned her greatness as an
+artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as
+the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor.  There
+is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace,
+but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader.  I can note
+merely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary
+actions to figure as men than for men to figure as women.  In the theatre
+we have conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less
+obvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction.  A woman
+may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a
+man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of
+a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome.  One feels
+this true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a
+case in point.  Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking
+effect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play
+Hamlet at all.  That sublime ideal is the property of the human
+imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the
+impossible.  No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most
+irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched.
+Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by a
+woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect,
+is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence.
+I felt that it would take many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare to
+efface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt's Hamlet; and as I prepared to
+escape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, I experienced a
+noble shame for having seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell's
+word.  I had not been obliged to come; I had voluntarily shared in the
+wrong done; by my presence I had made myself an accomplice in the wrong.
+It was high ground, but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure of
+self-respect in assuming it.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON
+
+He had often heard of it.  Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper
+men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under
+the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into
+their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive
+sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought
+to see it.  He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it
+in his experience so largely subjective.  If there was any drama at all
+it was wholly in his own consciousness.  But the thing was certainly
+impressive in its way.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by
+chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised
+to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the
+pleasure of seeing.
+
+Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all
+hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though
+upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see
+his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of
+bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight
+to the next midnight.  But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and
+the sight of it, from the very first instant.  He was proud of knowing
+just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing
+an earthquake, though one has never felt one before.  He saw the double
+file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from
+the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the
+stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with his
+perspicacity.
+
+It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup,
+warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and was
+wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as a
+duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming
+them for his health.  He now practised another piece of self-denial: he
+let the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry
+him to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the
+Christmas party.  He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child
+from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going
+back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene.  He got
+the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the
+coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over
+from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: "When you
+get up there near that bakery again, drive slowly.  I want to have a look
+at those men."
+
+"All right, sir," said the driver intelligently, and he found his why
+skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable
+Christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till
+they could get round to it with their carts.
+
+When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it
+was a few minutes before.  Except for their own coup, the cable-cars,
+with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs
+at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves.  A tall,
+lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in
+the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the
+letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central
+Station.  He listened with half an ear to the child's account of the fun
+she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the
+men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.
+
+He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an
+apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the
+place where he had left them.  But the driver remembered, and checked his
+horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater
+number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along
+the side street.  They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the
+night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week
+stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their
+mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door
+where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before
+they were all gone.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+My friend's heart beat with glad anticipation.  He was really to see this
+important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage.
+He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight
+loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the next
+day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those who
+needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise.  She
+understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with
+the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked
+very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic.
+Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having
+fancied it.
+
+He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would get
+out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving
+the bread.  Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them
+about themselves.  At the time it did not strike him that it would be
+indecent.
+
+A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture.  It
+was not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as
+the saying is.  They were all there because they were hungry, or else
+they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry.  But it was
+always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any
+test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving.
+If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not
+so much matter.
+
+It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they
+would tell him lies.  A fantastic association of their double files and
+those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey
+Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind.  He smiled, and
+then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts
+--slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty.  All at once he fancied
+them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives
+taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to
+buy.  He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would
+ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been.  Would the world ever
+outlive it?  Would some New-Year's day come when some President would
+proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more?
+That would be fine.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+He noticed how still the most of them were.  A few of them stepped a
+little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the
+rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together.
+They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no
+more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.
+
+He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a
+second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among
+them.  He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not
+true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff,
+wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their
+deceit.
+
+He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions,
+his reflections.  It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be
+something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril,
+and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the
+fact.
+
+To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great
+dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-
+black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that
+the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal,
+after vain prayer.
+
+Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind.  How
+early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of
+bread?  As early as ten, as nine o'clock?  If so, did the fact argue
+habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure?  Did the slaves in the
+coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they
+were closely neighbored night after night by their misery?  Perhaps they
+joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes.  Which
+of them were old-comers, and which novices?  Did they ever quarrel over
+questions of precedence?  Had they some comity, some etiquette, which a
+man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back?  Could
+one say to his next-hand man, "Will you please keep my place?"  and would
+this man say to an interloper, "Excuse me, this place is engaged"?  How
+was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door
+where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear
+that the supply was exhausted?  This must sometimes happen, and what did
+they do then?
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+My friend did not quite like to think.  Vague, reproachful thoughts for
+all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind.
+If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold?  But what was
+the use?  There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go
+round.
+
+The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully.  He was not only
+walking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by.  His action caught
+the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned
+and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a
+superior.  They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their
+eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through.
+
+My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he
+stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never,
+never hope to know.  He was Society: Society that was to be preserved
+because it embodies Civilization.  He wondered if they hated him in his
+capacity of Better Classes.  He no longer thought of getting out and
+watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee.  He would
+have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it;
+that he was their friend, and wished them well--as well as might be
+without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he
+could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless.  He put his hand on
+that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least
+with intelligence.
+
+"You mustn't mind.  What we are and what we do is all right.  It's what
+they are and what they suffer that's all wrong."
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+"Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?"  I asked, when he
+had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently not
+coloring it at all.
+
+"I don't know," he answered.  "It seems to be the only way out."
+
+"Well, it's an easy way," I admitted, "and it's an idea that ought to
+gratify the midnight platoon."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY
+
+I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as
+beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I
+have to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July,
+four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near
+New York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within
+reach of them.  I know very well that the excursionists must go
+somewhere, and as a man and a brother I am willing they should go
+anywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to
+have them come much where I am.  It is not because I would deny them a
+share of any pleasure I enjoy, but because they are so many and I am so
+few that I think they would get all the pleasure and I none.  I hope the
+reader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfish
+people who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow-beings whose mere
+multitude was too much for me.  They were otherwise wholly without
+offence towards me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they were,
+in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude I ever saw in any country,
+and the very quietest.
+
+There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, of
+them, in every variety of age and sex; yet I heard no voice lifted above
+the conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of its
+privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying the
+attractions of the spectacle in his charge.  I used to think the American
+crowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived in
+Italy, I celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of the
+Italian crowds.  But we have certainly changed all that within a
+generation, and if what I saw the other day was a typical New York crowd,
+then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it
+once was to the peaceful observer.  The tough was not visibly present,
+nor the toughness, either of the pure native East Side stock or of the
+Celtic extraction; yet there were large numbers of Americans with rather
+fewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans,
+Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities.
+
+There was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in every
+kind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables under
+all the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet I saw
+not one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women.  No one that I
+saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or
+unseemly behavior.  The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic
+ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal
+conduct, I have not any notion who or what the people were, or how
+virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that no
+society assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly
+outside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd.
+
+I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all the
+Americans in it, were Long-Islanders from the inland farms and villages
+within easy distance of the beach.  They had probably the hereditary
+habit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of their
+fathers and grandfathers, who had
+
+                    --"many an hour whiled away
+                    Listening to the breakers' roar
+                    That washed the beach at Rockaway."
+
+But the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaper
+dress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countryman
+apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and I can
+only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk I saw were from New York
+and Brooklyn.  They came by boat, and came and went by the continually
+arriving and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, both
+sexes.  A few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of the
+neighborhood, but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor the
+trains had brought had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles,
+which no one seemed so poor as not to be able to keep.  The bicyclers
+stormed into the frantic village of the beach the whole afternoon, in the
+proportion of one woman to five men, and most of these must have ridden
+down on their wheels from the great cities.  Boys ran about in the
+roadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, and put them for
+safekeeping in what had once been the stable-yards of the hotels; the
+restaurants had racks for them, where you could see them in solid masses,
+side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop was without its door-side
+rack, which the wheelman might slide his wheel into when he stopped for a
+soda, a cigar, or a sandwich.  All along the road the gay bicycler and
+bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the inns, munching, lunching, while
+their wheels formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning of the
+house and a novel balustering for the steps.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The amusements provided for these throngs of people were not different
+from those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of much
+the same mind and taste the world over.  I had fine moments when I moved
+in an illusion of the Midway Plaisance; again I was at the Fete de
+Neuilly, with all of Paris but the accent about me; yet again the county
+agricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me.  At
+none of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainous
+chute, and I made haste to experience the variety these afforded,
+beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chute
+might be closed for the day if I waited to view it last.  I meant only to
+enjoy the pleasure of others in it, and I confined my own participation
+to the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the watery
+steep into the oblong pool below.  When I bought my ticket for the car
+that carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal,
+certifying for me, "You have shot the chute," and I resolved to keep this
+and show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is a
+curious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwards
+could not find the medal.  So I will frankly own that for me it was quite
+enough to see others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myself
+in the car.  There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with
+its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main
+object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute.
+There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that
+flew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who
+clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but
+sometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her,
+who was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their father
+for any harm that came of it.  Apparently no harm came of it in any case.
+
+The boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half-
+perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struck
+again and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farther
+shore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with their
+viscera, and to get their breath as they could.  I did not ask any of
+them what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as I could
+conjecture, the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare
+transport of a fall from a ten-story building and the delight of a
+tempestuous passage of the Atlantic, powerfully condensed.
+
+The mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite I might
+have had to witness the feats of strength performed by Madame La Noire at
+the nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at the
+door-to testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force may
+be masked in vast masses of adipose.  She had a weary, bored look, and
+was not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse the
+public; but I could not find her quite justifiable as a Sunday
+entertainment.  One forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time I
+did not pretend to be so much better than my neighbors that I would not
+compromise upon a visit to, an animal show a little farther on.  It was a
+pretty fair collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and in
+the cage of the lions there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired young
+man, exciting them to madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom I
+was extremely glad to have get away without being torn in pieces, or at
+least bitten in two.  A little later I saw him at the door of the tent,
+very breathless, dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness
+one could wish.  But perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with the
+intimacy of lions and lionesses.  He had had his little triumph; one
+spectator of his feat had declared that you would not see anything like
+that at Coney Island; and soiled and dusty as he was in his cotton
+tights, he was preferable to the living picture of a young lady whom he
+replaced as an attraction of the show.  It was professedly a moral show;
+the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether it was good or not;
+and in the box-office sat a kind and motherly faced matron who would have
+apparently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any distance, much
+less have it at her elbow.
+
+Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the people
+to whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently,
+than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmless
+enough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in the
+living picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face
+respectable enough.
+
+I would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not in
+every respect decorous.  As a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both
+horizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, and
+was none the worse for being called by the French name of carrousel, for
+our people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallic
+wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal.  At every other step there
+were machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there were
+photographers' booths, and X-ray apparatus for showing you the inside of
+your watch; and in one open tent I saw a gentleman (with his back to the
+public) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an Egyptian
+seeress.  Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softer
+drinks abounded.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+I think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat and
+sitting down to your wine or beer at a table.  Again I say that I saw no
+effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built
+out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the
+braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures
+by the fumes of the bar.  In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that
+reigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards
+which hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly
+announced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry
+umbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit on
+the floor.
+
+The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; they
+seemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young
+wives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for the
+day's pleasure.  A slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby,
+passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the child's
+father meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to lay
+it.  Almost any place would do; at another great restaurant I saw two
+chairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid the
+coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home.
+
+Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especially
+frankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them.
+They disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels,
+piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brown
+in deep skillets of fat.  The old acrid smell of frying brought back many
+holidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on the Riva at Venice,
+and in the Mercato Vecchio at Florence.  But the Continental Sunday
+cannot be felt to have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; the
+Puritan leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consent
+willingly to the transformation, I fancy they always enjoy themselves on
+Sunday with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day it
+was.  Nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds.  It
+was the Fourth of July, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, and
+it was the high day of the week.  But if it was very wicked, and I must
+recognize that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feel
+bound to say that the people themselves did not look wicked.  They looked
+harmless; they even looked good, the most of them.  I am sorry to say
+they were not very good-looking.  The women were pretty enough, and the
+men were handsome enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect of
+beauty than the average is anywhere else; I was lately from New England,
+where the people were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all those
+thousands at Rockaway I found no striking types.  It may be that as we
+grow older and our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become more
+fastidious as to the looks of others.  At any rate, there seems to be
+much less beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty years ago.
+
+On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they should
+be in compensation.  When we were all so handsome we could well afford to
+wear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poor
+things must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices of
+the modiste and the tailor.  I do not mean that there was any distinction
+in the dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly or
+grotesquely out of taste.  The costumes were as good as the customs, and
+I have already celebrated the manners of this crowd.  I believe I must
+except the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in
+effect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for
+tottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow
+little, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes.  How severe I am!
+But those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in the
+wholesome exercise of the wheel, and to keep them in the tradition of
+cheap coquetry still, and imbecilly dependent.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that there
+is a sea somewhere about at Rockaway Beach, and it is this that the
+people have come for.  I might well forget that modest sea, it is so
+built out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backs
+and shops that border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaring
+along the road that divides the village, and the planked streets that
+intersect this.  But if you walk southward on any of the streets, you
+presently find the planks foundering in sand, which drifts far up over
+them, and then you find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean
+bathing.  Swarms and heaps of people in all lolling and lying and
+wallowing shapes strew the beach, and the water is full of slopping and
+shouting and shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white arms to
+the life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these the
+lifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the
+incoming surf.
+
+All that you can say of it is that it is queer.  It is not picturesque,
+or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer.  An enfilading glance gives this
+impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine
+restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added
+effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs' legs
+inverted in a downward plunge.
+
+On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humble
+condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand.
+This made us beg each other's pardon; he said that he did not know I was
+there, and I said it did not matter.  Then we both looked at the bathing,
+and he said:
+
+"I don't like that."
+
+"Why," I asked, "do you see any harm in it?"
+
+"No.  But I don't like the looks of it.  It ain't nice.  It's queer."
+
+It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not
+dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a
+very public appearance.  This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess
+of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it
+could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct.  Here and there a
+gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and
+there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight
+of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand.  But otherwise all was
+a damp and dreary decorum.  I challenged my philosopher in vain for a
+specific cause of his dislike of the scene.
+
+Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a
+multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the
+sea-bathing.  A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were
+cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over
+them.  There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who
+seemed getting the most of the good that was going.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the
+good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I
+have since thought of it as rather melancholy.  It was in fact no wiser
+or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it
+afforded.  The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much
+to their own devices.  The established pleasures were clumsy and
+tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them.  The more of them one
+eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for much
+pleasure; and even a day's rest is more than most people can bear.  They
+endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a
+twenty-mile run on the wheel.  The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward
+wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver
+professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his
+profession.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SAWDUST IN THE ARENA
+
+It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus events
+I wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit of
+seeing two circuses there.  Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire
+circus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory
+of a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in
+adversity.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the exception of the
+clowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always Americans, or
+advertised as such, in Italy.  Its chief and almost absorbing event was a
+reproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at Rome in
+celebration of Prince Tommaso's coming of age, and for a copy of a copy
+it was really fine.  It had fitness in the arena, which must have
+witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and I am sensible
+still of the pleasure its effects of color gave me.  There was one
+beautiful woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have
+ridden, as she was, out of a canvas of Titian's, if he had ever painted
+equestrian pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent Carpaccio.
+Then, the 'Clowns Americani' were very amusing, from a platform devoted
+solely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me to
+think that we were almost the only people present who understood their
+jokes.  In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked
+very little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady's hat in front
+of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we
+were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been
+needed to distinguish the features of the actors.  I could not make out,
+therefore, whether the 'Clowns Americani' had the national expression or
+not, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the United States language
+with a cockney accent.  I suspect that he was an Englishman who had
+passed himself off upon the Italian management as a true Yankee, and who
+had formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of the
+recent English humorists have patterned after certain famous wits of
+ours.  I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even if
+occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own
+primacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erring
+aspirates.
+
+The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience
+always is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions
+concerning the place and people.  I reflected that it was the same race
+essentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in that
+arena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among these
+spectators persons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians who had
+left their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claim
+this or that seat for their own.  In fact, there was so little
+difference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that I
+felt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if
+Nature had been present, I might very well have asked her why, when she
+had once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on
+repeating it indefinitely?  How were all those similar souls to know
+themselves apart in their common eternity?  Merely to have been
+differently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and I think Nature
+would have been puzzled to answer me.  But perhaps not; she may have had
+her reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and that
+when the type was so fine in most respects as the Italian you could not
+do better than go on repeating impressions from it.
+
+Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the young
+officer of 'bersaglieri', who had come down from antiquity to the topmost
+gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against the
+clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, while
+his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind.  I have since
+wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he did
+not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the young
+officer of 'bersaglieri'.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus
+I have mentioned.  This event was one that I have often witnessed
+elsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping.  The top of the
+outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the
+centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet.  At its base an
+immense net was stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby
+hat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing
+the guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with his
+own hands.  While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and,
+after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole,
+where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even
+from the loveliness of the officer of 'bersaglieri'.  There the man in
+the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and
+looked up at her.
+
+She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized,
+denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, "Is it all
+right?"
+
+He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, "Yes; keep to the left,"
+and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before she
+reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh.
+
+It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerous
+it was; but I think that the brief English colloquy was the great wonder
+of the event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been perfectly
+happy again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy my
+curiosity concerning the speakers.  A few evenings after that, I was at
+that copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, I saw
+the man of the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat.  I had already made
+up my mind that he was an American, for I supposed that an Englishman
+would rather perish than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as I had
+wished all my life to speak to a circus-man, I went down and boldly
+accosted him.  "Are you a brother Yankee?"  I asked, and he laughed, and
+confessed that he was an Englishman, but he said he was glad to meet any
+one who spoke English, and he made a place for me by his side.  He was
+very willing to tell how he happened to be there, and he explained that
+he was the manager of a circus, which had been playing to very good
+business all winter in Spain.  In an evil hour he decided to come to
+Italy, but he found the prices so ruinously low that he was forced to
+disband his company.  This diving girl was all that remained to him of
+its many attractions, and he was trying to make a living for both in a
+country where the admission to a circus was six of our cents, with fifty
+for a reserved seat.  But he was about to give it up and come to America,
+where he said Barnum had offered him an engagement.  I hope he found it
+profitable, and is long since an American citizen, with as good right as
+any of us to wear a Prince Albert coat with a derby hat.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where many Venetians had
+the only opportunity of their lives to see a horse.  The horses were the
+great attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitual
+destitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good.  It
+was so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does,
+especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, on
+his back-bared horse, and ends by waving an American flag in triumph at
+having been so tiresome.
+
+I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumps
+through paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to render
+her transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hop
+over a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a manner
+to minify her exertion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at all
+circuses.  At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of
+the Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the
+ground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand,
+quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the
+other day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world than
+circus events.  It must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind
+as in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely
+resembles.
+
+At a circus which played all one winter in Florence I saw for the first
+time-outside of polite society--the clown in evening dress, who now seems
+essential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I missed
+so gladly at my village circus.  He is nearly as futile as the lady
+clown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of New
+Womanhood.
+
+Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most the clown who
+catches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrown
+across the ring by an accomplice.  This is a very pretty sight always,
+and at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted creature take his
+stand high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats on
+his head from a flight of a hundred feet through the air.  This made me
+proud of human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether I do
+not think that after a real country circus there are many better things
+in life than the Hippodrome.  It had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, a
+polish, which I should not know where to match, and when the superb coach
+drove into the ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of their
+events, there was a majesty in the effect which I doubt if courts have
+the power to rival.  Still, it should be remembered that I have never
+been at court, and speak from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AT A DIME MUSEUM
+
+"I see," said my friend, "that you have been writing a good deal about
+the theatre during the past winter.  You have been attacking its high
+hats and its high prices, and its low morals; and I suppose that you
+think you have done good, as people call it."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I prepared myself to take
+it up warily.  I said I should be very sorry to do good, as people called
+it; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pride
+for the doer and general demoralization for the doee.  Still, I said, a
+law had lately been passed in Ohio giving a man who found himself behind
+a high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and if
+the passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly to
+my teachings, I should not altogether grieve for the good I had done.
+I added that if all the States should pass such a law, and other laws
+fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or
+obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the
+law does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays--
+
+"I see what you mean," said my friend, a little impatiently.  "You mean
+sumptuary legislation.  But I have not come to talk to you upon that
+subject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking yourself.
+I want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper amusements of
+this metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and charming
+things one may see there for a very little money."
+
+"Ten cents, for instance?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; and
+I expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the
+amusement that could be had for that money.  I questioned if anything
+intellectual could be had for it.
+
+"What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?"  my friend retorted.  "And
+do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?"
+
+I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my
+grief with it.
+
+Then he said: "I don't contend that it is intellectual, but I say that it
+is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is less
+often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines.  I think the average
+of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; and
+it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that.
+The other day," said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably in
+his chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table he
+knocked off some books for review, "I went to a dime museum for an hour
+that I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passed
+an hour's time more agreeably.  In the curio hall, as one of the
+lecturers on the curios called it--they had several lecturers in white
+wigs and scholars' caps and gowns--there was not a great deal to see, I
+confess; but everything was very high-class.  There was the inventor of a
+perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram.
+There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview;
+there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another.  On a
+platform at the end of the hall was an Australian family a good deal
+gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staring
+down the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholy
+madness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom got
+from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres.  They allowed me to come
+quite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection in
+exile without stint.  I couldn't enter into conversation with them, and
+express my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs and
+kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was so
+evident.  I didn't see their performance, and I don't know that they had
+any.  They may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a good
+object, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price
+of admission.
+
+"After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to a
+close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles
+lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a
+small model of it.  None of the events were so exciting that we could
+regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the
+entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the
+theatre was about to begin.  He invited us to buy tickets at an
+additional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery,
+orchestra circle, or orchestra.
+
+"I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once.  We were three in
+the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the little
+boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozen
+at least in the orchestra circle.  An attendant shouted, 'Hats off!' and
+the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage
+and began to play the piano in front of it.  The curtain rose, and the
+entertainment began at once.  It was a passage apparently from real life,
+and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady.
+There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of
+conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with
+unflagging energy.  The young woman was equipped for the dance she
+brought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain
+in the drama.  It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she
+was tired of it, but was not going to falter.  She delivered her lines
+with a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come up
+in a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a
+strong local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth,
+or Peg Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not.
+
+"Her performance was followed by an event involving a single character.
+The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress
+he was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he had
+temperament.  I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began to
+address his entire drama to me.  This was not surprising, for it would
+not have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the
+other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth,
+whom he would hardly have given the preference over me.  I felt the
+compliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate,
+and it gave me a publicity I would willingly have foregone.  I did what I
+could to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even
+frowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated his
+ambition.  He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a
+number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and
+looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect
+of delicate apology, 'I hope I'm not disturbing you any,' I broke down
+and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand.  He immediately said to
+me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty
+large family, eight of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then for
+no reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song
+written expressly for him--by an expressman; and he went on from one wild
+gayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy
+of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off.
+
+"I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad that the next
+performers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of Spanish-
+American extraction, behaved more impartially.  They were really
+remarkable artists in their way, and though it's a painful way, I
+couldn't help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses.
+The gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none.  I
+think perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailed
+among us, we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approval
+as a gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety in
+witnessing her skill.  But I could see that the poor girl was hurt in her
+artist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did I led off the
+applause with my umbrella.  She instantly lighted up with a joyful smile,
+and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathy
+to me while she clapped.  We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it
+was very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I had better go."
+
+"And do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?"  I asked, with
+a smile that was meant to be sceptical.
+
+"Profitable?"  said my friend.  "I said agreeable.  I don't know about
+the profit.  But it was very good variety, and it was very cheap.  I
+understand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar theatre
+to come down to, or up to."
+
+"Not exactly, or not quite," I returned, thoughtfully, "though I must say
+I think your time was as well spent as it would have been at most of the
+plays I have seen this winter."
+
+My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: "It was all very
+pathetic, in a way.  Three out of those five people were really clever,
+and certainly artists.  That colored brother was almost a genius, a very
+common variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his calling
+that couldn't be disputed.  He was a genuine humorist, and I sorrowed
+over him--after I got safely away from his intimacy--as I should over
+some author who was struggling along without winning his public.  Why
+not?  One is as much in the show business as the other.  There is a
+difference of quality rather than of kind.  Perhaps by-and-by my colored
+humorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you are
+always hoping to do with yours."
+
+"You don't think you're making yourself rather offensive?"  I suggested.
+
+"Not intentionally.  Aren't the arts one?  How can you say that any art
+is higher than the others?  Why is it nobler to contort the mind than to
+contort the body?"
+
+"I am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind,"
+I returned, "and I feel that to aim at nothing higher than the amusement
+of your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of the
+show business."
+
+"Yes, I know that is your pose," said my friend.  "And I dare say you
+really think that you make a distinction in facts when you make a
+distinction in terms.  If you don't amuse your readers, you don't keep
+them; practically, you cease to exist.  You may call it interesting them,
+if you like; but, really, what is the difference?  You do your little
+act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you
+are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places,
+with perhaps cruder means--"
+
+"I don't know whether I like your saws less than your instances, or your
+instances less than your saws," I broke in.  "Have you been at the circus
+yet?"
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+"Yet?"  demanded my friend.  "I went the first night, and I have been a
+good deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever since.
+I can't find out just why I have so much pleasure in the trapeze.
+Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time I do
+look away; but I wouldn't spare any actor the most dangerous feat.
+One of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net after
+her performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprained
+ankle.  It made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give up
+her perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but
+it didn't take away my interest in the other trapezists flying through
+the air above another net.
+
+"If I had honestly complained of anything it would have been of the
+superfluity which glutted rather than fed me.  How can you watch three
+sets of trapezists at once?  You really see neither well.  It's the same
+with the three rings.  There should be one ring, and each act should have
+a fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; I would willingly
+give the time.  Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays going
+on at once!"
+
+"No, don't fancy that!" I entreated.  "One play is bad enough."
+
+"Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the same
+time to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two platforms
+between the rings," my friend calmly persisted.  "The three rings are an
+abuse and an outrage, but I don't know but I object still more to the
+silencing of the clowns.  They have a great many clowns now, but they are
+all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of the
+single clown of the old one-ring circus.  Why, it's as if the literary
+humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then
+put asterisks where the humor ought to come in."
+
+"Don't you think you are going from bad to worse?"  I asked.
+
+My friend went on: "I'm afraid the circus is spoiled for me.  It has
+become too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the best
+thing in the way of an entertainment that there is.  I'm still very fond
+of it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because I have been
+embarrassed with riches, and have been given more than I was able to
+grasp.  My greed has been overfed.  I think I must keep to those
+entertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till ten
+at night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall of
+the curtain.  I suppose you would object to them because they're getting
+rather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the first
+seats."
+
+I said that I did not think this too much for twelve hours, if the
+intellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high.
+
+"It's as high as that of some magazines," said my friend, "though I could
+sometimes wish it were higher.  It's like the matter in the Sunday
+papers--about that average.  Some of it's good, and most of it isn't.
+Some of it could hardly be worse.  But there is a great deal of it, and
+you get it consecutively and not simultaneously.  That constitutes its
+advantage over the circus."
+
+My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked:
+
+"Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the dime
+museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of
+the theatres?"
+
+"You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn't seem to have
+met with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness.  Now,
+why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE
+
+A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable
+primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for
+material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature.
+He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in
+attributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an
+imaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, "the old race of
+writers of distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and
+Washington Irving, have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are most
+prominent in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, like
+Sargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America,
+and draw their inspiration from England, France, and Italy."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what many
+Americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort
+of self-love which calls itself patriotism.  If it would at all help to
+put an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated
+with us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad to
+believe that it was driving our literary men out of the country.  This
+would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the
+millionaires and the tramps.  But I am afraid it would not have this
+effect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the
+state of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, I
+believe that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if a
+general mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be
+rich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be
+considerably affected.  As matters stand, I think we may reasonably ask
+whether the Americans "most prominent in cultivated European opinion,"
+the Americans who "live habitually out of America," are not less exiles
+than advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world.
+They may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to
+overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to
+our advantage.  They probably themselves do not know it, but in the act
+of "drawing their inspiration" from alien scenes, or taking their own
+where they find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe "the
+struggle for material prosperity " which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal
+to them here?
+
+There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the
+question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm
+our patriotism.  Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr.
+Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as well
+as in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very
+great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair
+measure of home-keeping authorship.  Our destitution is not nearly so
+great now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in the
+times before the "struggle for material prosperity" when Washington
+Irving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nigh
+half his life.
+
+Sir Lepel Griffin--or Sir Lepel Griffin's reporter--seems to forget the
+fact of Irving's long absenteeism when he classes him with "the old race"
+of eminent American authors who stayed at home.  But really none of those
+he names were so constant to our air as he seems--or his reporter seems--
+to think.  Longfellow sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain,
+and Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant was a frequent
+traveller, and each of them "drew his inspiration" now and then from
+alien sources.  Lowell was many years in Italy, Spain, and England;
+Motley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne was away from us
+nearly a decade.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I am
+proving too much in another.  My facts go to show that the literary
+spirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere.  If any good
+American were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I should
+first advise him that American literature was not derived from the folk-
+lore of the red Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition
+of English literature, and was independent even of our independence.
+Then I should entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had
+found it more comfortable or more profitable to live out of their
+respective countries than in them.  I should allege for his consolation
+the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterly that of the
+Brownings and Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italian to an
+English sojourn; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who
+voluntarily lived several years in Vermont, and has "drawn his
+inspiration" in notable instances from the life of these States.  It will
+serve him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors,
+Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in France and Italy.  Heinrich
+Heine loved to live in Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in
+Hamburg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any man's country could
+get on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managed
+to dispense with his own in the French capital, and died there after he
+was quite free to go back to St. Petersburg.  In the last century
+Rousseau lived in France rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried
+to live in Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni
+left fame and friends in Venice for the favor of princes in Paris.
+
+Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an American vice
+or an American virtue.  It is an expression and a proof of the modern
+sense which enlarges one's country to the bounds of civilization.
+I cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if any
+American feels it a grievance, I suggest that he do what he can to have
+embodied in the platform of his party a plank affirming the right of
+American authors to a public provision that will enable them to live as
+agreeably at home as they can abroad on the same money.  In the mean
+time, their absenteeism is not a consequence of "the struggle for
+material prosperity," not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not
+less in Europe than in America, and must, of course, go on everywhere as
+long as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances and
+preferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HORSE SHOW
+
+"As good as the circus--not so good as the circus--better than the
+circus."  These were my varying impressions, as I sat looking down upon
+the tanbark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison Square Garden;
+and I came away with their blend for my final opinion.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+I might think that the Horse Show (which is so largely a Man Show and a
+Woman Show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but I
+could not get away from the circus, in my impression of it.  Perhaps the
+circus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master are
+joined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator.  I am sure
+that I have never been able quite to dissociate from it the
+picturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest to
+me the last correctness of fashion.  It is through the horse that these
+far extremes meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expression
+of aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder world
+prophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the Swell shall have
+evolved into the Centaur.
+
+Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as
+you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about
+you and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier.
+
+In this first affair of the new--comer, the horses are not so much on
+show as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossing
+manes, with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines of
+people coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feet
+deep, against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there in
+perfect relief, and it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you.
+The fact is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is that
+they are there to be seen.
+
+The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which I tasted with
+pleasure.  It was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization,
+and the American might feel a characteristic pride that what came to Rome
+in five hundred years had come to America in a single century.  There was
+something fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and I
+perceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive in
+its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramatically
+apparent.  "Yes," I found myself thinking, "this is what it all comes to:
+the 'subiti guadagni' of the new rich, made in large masses and seeking a
+swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly accumulated fortunes, put
+together from sparing and scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, in
+former times, and now in the stainless white hands of the second or third
+generation, they both meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation,
+and create a Horse Show."
+
+I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now they
+had got it; and, so far as I have been able to observe them, people of
+wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of being
+bored in the midst of their amusements.  This reserve of rapture may be
+their delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered;
+and I should not have objected to the swells at the Horse Show looking
+dreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardness
+of the countenance (which I found my own sympathetically taking on) I
+should not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may have
+been merely the consequence of being so much stared at.  Perhaps, indeed,
+they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but only companies of
+ordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes;
+I understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization so
+far misled.  But certainly if they were swells they did not look quite up
+to themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities of
+foreign countries, and on one or two occasions when I have seen them,
+kings and emperors have failed me in like manner.  They have all wanted
+that indescribable something which I have found so satisfying in
+aristocracies and royalties on the stage; and here at the Horse Show,
+while I made my tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on foot
+who could much better have taken the role of the people in the boxes.
+The promenaders may not have been actors at all; they may have been the
+real thing for which I was in vain scanning the boxes, but they looked
+like actors, who indeed set an example to us all in personal beauty and
+in correctness of dress.
+
+I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors.  We have not
+distinction, as a people; Matthew Arnold noted that; and it is not our
+business to have it: When it is our business our swells will have it,
+just as our actors now have it, especially our actors of English birth.
+I had not this reflection about me at the time to console me for my
+disappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what I took for an
+absence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of it
+that the result was necessarily a species of indistinction.  But in the
+complexion of any social assembly we Americans are at a disadvantage with
+Europeans from the want of uniforms.  A few military scattered about in
+those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons,
+would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been
+heaping upon them.  Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty
+in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the
+Horse Show that I am complaining.  If the men had borne their part as
+well, there would not have been these tears: and yet, what am I saying?
+There was here and there a clean-shaven face (which I will not believe
+was always an actor's), and here and there a figure superbly set up, and
+so faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, and
+gloves as to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clothes
+which I will not at last call less than distinction.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+At any rate, I missed these marked presences when I left the lines of the
+promenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers above
+the boxes.  I am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not one
+of those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poor
+who could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets.  I bought
+it of a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that I
+conceived it the last in the house; but I found the chairs by no means
+all filled, though it was as good an audience as I have sometimes seen in
+the same place at other circuses.  The people about me were such as I had
+noted at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers from
+provincial towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home with,
+and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown upon
+me during my association with the swells below.  My neighbors were
+sufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than their
+betters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion upon
+them, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring.
+
+There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of costume.  The bugler
+who stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare
+(I hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to
+enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that
+filled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management
+I thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters.  At
+any rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the
+fashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes
+are always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions.  As I have
+hinted, I do not know just what costumes they were, but they took the
+light well from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands of little
+electric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed the
+sullenness of the dull, rainy afternoon.  When the knights entered the
+lists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them,
+and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, and
+the spectacle was so brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven a
+novelist pining for the pageantries of the past.  I do not know to this
+moment whether these knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only their
+deputies, driving their tandems for them, and I am equally at a loss to
+account for the variety, of their hats.  Some wore tall, shining silk
+hats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple black pot-hats;--and is
+there, then, no rigor as to the head-gear of people driving tandems?
+I felt that there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule as to
+where the number of each tandem should be displayed.  As it was, this was
+sometimes carelessly stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it was
+worn at the back of the groom's waist, and sometimes full upon his
+stomach.  In the last position it gave a touch of burlesque which wounded
+me; for these are vital matters, and I found myself very exacting in
+them.
+
+With the horses themselves I could find no fault upon the grounds of my
+censure of the show in some other ways.  They had distinction; they were
+patrician; they were swell.  They felt it, they showed it, they rejoiced
+in it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory of
+blood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands
+and ages.  Their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, and
+for an aristocracy I suppose that they had a high average of
+intelligence, though there might be two minds about this.  They made me
+think of mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spirit
+of the beholder with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvetting
+and caracoling, as they jingled in their shining harness around the long
+ring.  Their noble uselessness took the fancy, for I suppose that there
+is nothing so superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of the
+best society.  It is something which only the ambition of wealth and
+unbroken leisure can mount to; and I was glad that the display of tandems
+was the first event of the Horse Show which I witnessed, for it seemed to
+me that it must beyond all others typify the power which created the
+Horse Show.  I wished that the human side of it could have been more
+unquestionably adequate, but the equine side of the event was perfect.
+Still, I felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and simple and
+childlike, in the next event.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty Shetland
+ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors.  A cry of delight went up from a
+group of little people near me, and the spell of the Horse Show was
+broken.  It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet and
+kindly pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had ever
+had, or ever wished to have, a Shetland pony; the touch of nature made
+the whole show kin.  I could not see that the freakish, kittenish
+creatures did anything to claim our admiration, but they won our
+affection by every trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy.  The small
+colts broke away from the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark in
+wanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinnyings, which might well have
+touched a responsive chord in the bosom of fashion itself: I dare say it
+is not so hard as it looks.  The scene remanded us to a moment of
+childhood; and I found myself so fond of all the ponies that I felt it
+invidious of the judges to choose among them for the prizes; they ought
+every one to have had the prize.
+
+I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions;
+no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribe
+when it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-working
+donkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings without too great
+reproach.  I gazed after the broken, refluent wave of these amiable
+creatures, with the vague toleration here formulated, but I was not quite
+at peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism till the next
+event brought the hunters with their high-jumping into the ring.  These
+noble animals unite use and beauty in such measure that the censor must
+be of Catonian severity who can refuse them his praise.  When I reflected
+that by them and their devoted riders our civilization had been
+assimilated to that of the mother-country in its finest expression, and
+another tie added to those that bind us to her through the language of
+Shakespeare and Milton; that they had tamed the haughty spirit of the
+American farmer in several parts of the country so that he submitted for
+a consideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they had all but
+exterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, once so common and destructive
+among us, I was in a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were
+now set up at four or five places for the purposes of the high-jumping.
+As to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, I think I must hedge a
+little, while I stand firmly to my admiration of his use.  To be honest,
+the tandem horse is more to my taste.  He is better shaped, and he bears
+himself more proudly.  The hunter is apt to behave, whatever his reserve
+of intelligence, like an excited hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bred
+away to nothing where the ideal horse abounds; he has the behavior of a
+turkey-hen when not behaving like the common or garden hen.  But there
+can be no question of his jumping, which seems to be his chief business
+in a world where we are all appointed our several duties, and I at once
+began to take a vivid pleasure in his proficiency.  I have always felt a
+blind and insensate joy in running races, which has no relation to any
+particular horse, and I now experienced an impartial rapture in the
+performances of these hunters.  They looked very much alike, and if it
+had not been for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the centre of
+the ring announcing that 650, 675, or 602 was now jumping, I might have
+thought it was 650 all the time.
+
+A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses have
+got half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it is
+still a fine sight.  I became very fastidious as to which moment of it
+was the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when his
+aerial hoof touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking his
+rider's head half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective;
+and I do not know to this hour which I prefer.  But I suppose I was
+becoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on I noticed
+that I was not satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses'
+execution.  Will it be credited that I became willing something should
+happen, anything, to vary it?  I asked myself why, if some of the more
+exciting incidents of the hunting-field which I had read of must befall;
+I should not see them.  Several of the horses had balked at the barriers,
+and almost thrown their riders across them over their necks, but not
+quite done it; several had carried away the green-tufted top rail with
+their heels; when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the farther
+side of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence had gone down.  I
+looked eagerly for the prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but they
+were cantering safely away.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+It was enough, however.  I perceived that I was becoming demoralized, and
+that if I were to write of the Horse Show with at all the superiority one
+likes to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come away.  But I
+came away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus for
+circus, the Greatest Show on Earth which I had often seen in that place
+had certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show.  It had three rings
+and two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in the
+races, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands,
+instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses'
+ears.  The events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitely
+more varied and picturesque.  As for the people in the boxes, I do not
+know that they were less distinguished than these at the Horse Show, but
+if they were not of the same high level in which distinction was
+impossible, they did not show it in their looks.
+
+The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the first
+qualities; and I had moments of suspecting that it was no more than the
+evolution of the county cattle show.  But in any case I had to own that
+its great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole,
+appeals to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally,
+than any other interest, not excepting politics or religion.  I cannot,
+indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot be
+always civilizing.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER
+
+It has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how and
+where to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged to
+spend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in the
+proportion of one's ability to spend it wherever and however one chose.
+Few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few are
+greatly to be pitied.  I know that they are often envied and hated for it
+by those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake.  If we
+could look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so much
+misery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach them
+with their better fortune, or what appeared so.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summer
+brings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted.
+They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard
+necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed
+somewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are an
+infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population.  Their bane
+is not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has no
+choice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem,
+one must begin at once to distinguish.  It is the problem of the East
+rather than of the West (where people are much more in the habit of
+staying at home the year round), and it is the problem of the city and
+not of the country.  I am not sure that there is one practical farmer in
+the whole United States who is obliged to witness in his household those
+sad dissensions which almost separate the families of professional men as
+to where and how they shall pass the summer.  People of this class, which
+is a class with some measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly of
+varying and decided minds, and I once knew a family of the sort whose
+combined ideal for their summer outing was summed up in the simple desire
+for society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing.  They spent the
+whole months of April, May, and June in a futile inquiry for a resort
+uniting these attractions, and on the first of July they drove to the
+station with no definite point in view.  But they found that they could
+get return tickets for a certain place on an inland lake at a low figure,
+and they took the first train for it.  There they decided next morning to
+push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, but
+before it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weeks
+where they were.  Then they took train for a place on the coast, but in
+the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; they
+decided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decided
+again to keep on.  They arrived at their original destination, and the
+following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast.
+The answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready to
+start, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel.
+The landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at a
+smaller house, and 'mealed' them (as it used to be called at Mt. Desert)
+in his own.  But upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they
+liked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and they
+spent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardly
+come away when the house closed in the fall.
+
+This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always
+turn out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trust
+themselves to Providence in these matters than they do.  There is really
+an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could
+quite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should
+go, and check one's baggage accordingly.  I think the chances of an
+agreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and-
+fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it.  My own experience is
+that in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does
+in most non-moral things.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the
+kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who
+left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle
+in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels.  Yet such people were
+in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient
+persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe
+discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts,
+and reformed them altogether.  I believe the city boarding-house remains
+very much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the country
+boarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it.  As for the
+summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of
+except the prices.  I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of-
+town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the
+chief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have already
+spoken of.
+
+I have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice you
+make, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense of
+responsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you.
+I observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish they
+did not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and I have been
+told that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so
+eminently detachable.  To great numbers Europe looks from this shore like
+a safe refuge from the American summer problem; and yet I am not sure
+that it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe;
+one has to choose where to go when one has got there.  A European city is
+certainly always more tolerable than an American city, but one cannot
+very well pass the summer in Paris, or even in London.  The heart there,
+as here, will yearn for some blessed seat
+
+               Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
+               Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
+               Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns
+               And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea,"
+
+and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world,
+you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere in
+particular.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as I say, my
+heart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer the
+consequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but must
+stay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that they
+have any work to keep them there.  I am not meaning now, of course,
+business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread--or, more
+correctly, the cake--of their families in the country, or even their
+clerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people as I
+sometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant
+midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms over
+sewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenement
+streets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending
+over wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without.
+These all get on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not to
+accuse themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another.
+Their fate is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those who
+decide their fate are always rebelling against it.  They it is whom I am
+truly sorry for, and whom I write of with tears in my ink.  Their case is
+hard, and it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish they
+will look and how flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they are
+asked about their summer outings.  I do not really suppose we shall be
+held to a very strict account for our pleasures because everybody else
+has not enjoyed them, too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yet
+there is an old-fashioned compunction which will sometimes visit the
+heart if we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many have no
+pleasures to take.  I would suggest, then, to those on whom the curse of
+choice between pleasures rests, that they should keep in mind those who
+have chiefly pains to their portion in life.
+
+I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, or
+counselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has been
+accurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round,
+as things now are; but I would seriously entreat them to consider whether
+they could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at the
+sea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others
+in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life.  I know very well
+that it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality to
+take comfort in one's advantages from the disadvantages of others, and
+this is not quite what I mean to teach.  Perhaps I mean nothing more than
+an overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages,
+which would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of the
+summer outer.  It might be very interesting, and possibly it might be
+amusing, for one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock to
+inquire into the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is not
+beyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion on
+this subject would go far to enlighten the world upon a question that has
+vexed the world ever since mankind was divided into those who work too
+much and those who rest too much.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO
+
+A study of New York civilization in 1849 has lately come into my hands,
+with a mortifying effect, which I should like to share with the reader,
+to my pride of modernity.  I had somehow believed that after half a
+century of material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before,
+New York in 1902 must be very different from New York in 1849, but if I
+am to trust either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, New
+York is essentially the same now that it was then.  The spirit of the
+place has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly
+commercial.  Even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration;
+it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of 'New York
+in Slices' wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or
+overgrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have been
+structural in it from the beginning.  He felt in his time the same
+vulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that I have
+felt in my time, and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, amid
+the warring forms, with a prescience of my own affliction, which deprives
+me of the satisfaction of a discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of
+being rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his New
+York with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; but
+I am afraid I must own that 'New York in Slices' affects one as having
+first been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings to the
+study of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a country
+visitor.  This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he wished to
+make with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a certain
+innocent charm to his work.  I may make myself better understood if I say
+that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller New York is much
+the same as that of Mr. Stead towards the wickedness of a much larger
+Chicago.  He seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of the
+prisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs
+(who then called themselves b'hoys and g'hals), the quacks, the theatres,
+and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their iniquities with a
+ready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with him.
+
+But if he treated of these things alone, I should not perhaps have
+brought his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers.
+He treats also of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all,
+"the literary soirees" of that remote New York of his in a manner to make
+us latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it.  Fifty-odd years
+ago journalism had already become "the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous
+thing" we now know, and very different from the thing it was when
+"expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from the
+lightning's blue and fiery film."  Reporterism was beginning to assume
+its present importance, but it had not yet become the paramount
+intellectual interest, and did not yet "stand shoulder to shoulder" with
+the counting-room in authority.  Great editors, then as now, ranked great
+authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double primacy by uniting
+journalism and literature in the same personality.  They were often the
+owners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and they
+indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries,
+recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not the
+chief use, of our contemporaneous journals.  Apparently, however,
+notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the
+delight of their readers, and the press had not become the detective
+agency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities.
+
+But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre as
+still eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism.  "How can you
+expect," our author asks, "a frank and unbiassed criticism upon the
+performance of George Frederick Cooke Snooks .  .  .  when the editor or
+reporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewed
+potatoes at Windust's, and regaling himself on brandy-and-water cold,
+without, at the expense of the aforesaid George Frederick Cooke Snooks?"
+The severest censor of the press, however, would hardly declare now that
+"as to such a thing as impartial and independent criticism upon theatres
+in the present state of the relations between editors, reporters,
+managers, actors--and actresses--the thing is palpably out of the
+question," and if matters were really at the pass hinted, the press has
+certainly improved in fifty years, if one may judge from its present
+frank condemnations of plays and players.  The theatre apparently has
+not, for we read that at that period "a very great majority of the
+standard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancy
+and their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with married
+women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of every
+description .  .  .  .  Stage costume, too, wherever there is half a
+chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and a
+freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece which
+would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the
+audacity to make its appearance there."
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if not
+quite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts were
+presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849.
+That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artists
+clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among
+themselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions were
+finally suppressed under the law against lotteries.  While they lasted,
+however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and
+intellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as our
+private views now are, or ought to be; and the author "devotes an entire
+number" of his series "to a single institution"--fearless of being
+accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of the
+fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind."
+
+He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides
+treating of various literary celebrities at the "literary soirees," he
+imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants.
+At Delmonico's, where if you had "French and money" you could get in that
+day "a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by
+Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers," he meets such a
+musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean as
+N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman.  But it would
+be a warm day for Delmonico's when the observer in this epoch could
+chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us
+has no longer the French or the money.  Indeed, the author of 'New York
+in Slices' seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for his
+own period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that if
+Willis and Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico's, they ought to
+have done so.  He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical
+critic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his "literary
+soiree" a dozen distinguished-looking men and "twice as many women....
+listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by
+a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading
+a basketful of gilt-edged notes.  It is .  .  .  the annual Valentine
+Party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the
+purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which,
+for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise
+which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb-
+spinners."
+
+It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a 'salon' as
+this.  It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its
+celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently
+intending immortality.  Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich
+and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of
+posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours?  Shall we, too,
+appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as "John
+Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and
+magazines," or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes
+to be "stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm .  .  .
+an early copy of his forthcoming 'Female Poets of America'"; or as Lewis
+Gaylord Clark, the "sunnyfaced, smiling" editor of the Knickerbocker
+Magazine, "who don't look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever heard of him,"
+as he stands up to dance a polka with "a demure lady who has evidently
+spilled the inkstand over her dress"; or as "the stately Mrs. Seba Smith,
+bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright,
+cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight"; or as "the
+spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a
+baby," where she sits "nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a
+bird escaped from its cage"; or as Margaret Fuller, "her large, gray eyes
+Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a
+Pythoness"?
+
+I hope not; I earnestly hope not.  Whatever I said at the outset,
+affirming the persistent equality of New York characteristics and
+circumstances, I wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warn
+malign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us
+as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in
+the taste of 1849.  Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the
+author of 'New York in Slices' would have us believe; and perhaps any one
+who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived by
+a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our
+modern "society journalism."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND
+
+There is, of course, almost a world's difference between England and the
+Continent anywhere; but I do not recall just now any transition between
+Continental countries which involves a more distinct change in the
+superficial aspect of things than the passage from the Middle States into
+New England.  It is all American, but American of diverse ideals; and you
+are hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects,
+which are the more apparent to you the more American you are.  If you
+want the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave New York on a
+Sound boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle State civilization and
+wake into the civilization of New England, which seems to give its stamp
+to nature herself.  As to man, he takes it whether native or alien; and
+if he is foreign-born it marks him another Irishman, Italian, Canadian,
+Jew, or negro from his brother in any other part of the United States.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out,
+and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England's influence of this
+sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I could
+wish.  A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man can
+well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shore
+in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young
+chicken in the road.  The natural expectation is that any chicken in
+these circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it
+with a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat
+(it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the
+hay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which
+passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then
+fall still.  The poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me,
+but I bore it well, compared with my driver.  He could hardly stop
+lamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up.
+"You goin' past Jim Marden's?"  "Yes."  "Well, I wish you'd tell him I
+just run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess.  I guess it was
+a pretty big one."  "Oh no," I put in, "it was only a broiler.  What do
+you think it was worth?"  I took out some money, and the farmer noted the
+largest coin in my hand; "About half a dollar, I guess."  On this I put
+it all back in my pocket, and then he said, "Well, if a chicken don't
+know enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain't to blame."
+I expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on.  When
+we parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let
+the owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled
+his pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I
+have no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he
+has paid for it.  He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially
+plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it
+breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership.  But the
+spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile
+broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory
+negligence, was saddening him, while I was off in my train without a pang
+for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for the pullet.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in a
+psychological direction away from the simpler differences which I meant
+to note in New England.  They were evident as soon as our train began to
+run from the steamboat landing into the country, and they have
+intensified, if they have not multiplied, themselves as I have penetrated
+deeper and deeper into the beautiful region.  The land is poorer than the
+land to the southward--one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and often
+so thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borne
+any other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, cut away the
+primeval woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light.  But
+wherever you come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of
+the village groups that New England farm-houses have always liked to
+gather themselves into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of a
+repair that ought to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going
+conditions.  Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts
+an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and
+blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood
+lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of
+potatoes and corn.  The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New
+England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover
+blows honey--sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut
+hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the sun.
+
+We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continental
+weather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering by
+anticipation.  But the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the
+shade of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass that
+grows so tall about them that the June roses have to strain upward to get
+themselves free of it.  Behind each dwelling is a billowy mass of
+orchard, and before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches above the
+quiet street.  There is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as the
+American elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these New England
+villages, which are themselves, I think, the prettiest and wholesomest of
+mortal sojourns.  By a happy instinct, their wooden houses are all
+painted white, to a marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and the
+contrast of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing.  There
+was an evil hour, the terrible moment of the aesthetic revival now
+happily past, when white walls and green blinds were thought in bad
+taste, and the village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, or
+a doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have returned to their
+earlier love.  Not the first love; that was a pale buff with white trim;
+but I doubt if it were good for all kinds of village houses; the eye
+rather demands the white.  The pale buff does very well for large
+colonial mansions, like Lowell's or Longfellow's in Cambridge; but when
+you come, say, to see the great square houses built in Portsmouth, New
+Hampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white,
+after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns.
+
+In such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way to
+the beach it was of an absolute fitness; and I wish I could convey a due
+sense of the exquisite keeping of the place.  Each white house was more
+or less closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; the
+grassy door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing rose
+embowered the door-way with its bloom.  Away backward or sidewise
+stretched the woodshed from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the whole
+under one cover; the turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over
+which the elms rose and drooped; and from one end of the village to the
+other you could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog.
+I know Holland; I have seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up for
+Sunday to the very middle of their brick streets, but I doubt if Dutch
+cleanliness goes so far without, or comes from so deep a scruple within,
+as the cleanliness of New England.  I felt so keenly the feminine quality
+of its motive as I passed through that village, that I think if I had
+dropped so much as a piece of paper in the street I must have knocked at
+the first door and begged the lady of the house (who would have opened it
+in person after wiping her hands from her work, taking off her apron, and
+giving a glance at herself in the mirror and at me through the window
+blind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of good morals.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the
+New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I
+am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the
+relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there.
+At best I was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it used to
+give me great pleasure--so penetratingly does the place qualify even the
+sojourning Westerner--to think of the defect of New York in the virtue
+that is next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head for shame at the
+mortifying contrast of the Boston streets to the well-swept asphalt which
+I had left frying in the New York sun the afternoon before.  Later,
+however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces I remembered so
+well--good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of challenge,
+of interrogation, almost of reproof--they not only ignored the
+disgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a state
+of transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind it;
+and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares and
+narrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, and
+seemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them.
+
+In New York you see the American face as Europe characterizes it; in
+Boston you see it as it characterizes Europe; and it is in Boston that
+you can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all
+alien things must yield to till they take the American cast.  It is
+almost dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew;
+and in the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your
+conscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from it
+and make ready to do penance for them.  I felt almost as if I had brought
+the dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lying
+about, so impossible were they with reference to the Boston face.
+
+It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and it
+looked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of our
+elderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we drove
+away from the station.  It was a little rigorous with us, as requiring us
+to have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it was
+patient from long experience.  In New York there are no elderly hackmen;
+but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe they would be capable of
+bad faith with travellers.  In fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere as
+predatory as it is painted; but in Boston it appears to have the public
+honor in its keeping.  I do not mean that it was less mature, less self-
+respectful in Portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so it could
+not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both places,
+and all through New England it is of native birth, while in New York it
+is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numbers towards the
+Celtic strain.  The prevalence of the native in New England helps you
+sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are in America as
+the first Americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in New England is
+the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautiful old seaport
+of New Hampshire.  In fact, without being quite prepared to defend a
+thesis to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is preeminently
+American, and in this it differs from Newburyport and from Salem, which
+have suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and,
+though among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after Boston, are
+now largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actually
+the majority, I believe, in Newburyport.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the century, but before that
+time she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able to
+build themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of a
+grandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country.  I do not know
+what architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worth
+remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful
+proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of
+pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house
+our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs.  The decoration is
+oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement;
+or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate
+iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultless
+propriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the arching
+elms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behind
+them to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances.  They are all
+of wood, except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout
+edifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as if
+they might keep it yet another century.
+
+Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whose
+gravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needs
+cleaning.  Even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives
+the most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as if
+the wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the
+narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd
+each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water--side, are
+doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New
+England conscience against getting them untidy.
+
+When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high-
+shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few with
+their gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion.  These, with their
+mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the
+whole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the
+past, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water's
+edge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants
+and opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome
+space of gardened ground.
+
+My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty,
+and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of
+the town.  Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich
+field when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for it
+needs some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to
+express a fit sense of its life in the past.  Of its life in the present
+I know nothing.  I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and
+sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors.  When now and then a young
+shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin,
+fluttered out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy
+would have been unable to deal with what went on in them.  Some girl of
+those flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become the
+creative historian of the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now
+growing up in Portsmouth.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shown
+herself in fiction, I might say the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already
+with us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material.
+One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from New Hampshire into Maine, and
+took the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country,
+we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are a
+little different sort of New-Englanders from those of Miss Wilkins.  They
+began to flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and
+grandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youth
+of marriageable age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it,
+all in the Sunday best which they had worn to the graduation exercises at
+the High School, where we took them mostly up.  The womenkind were in a
+nervous twitter of talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond
+their wont, "passing the time of day" with one another, and helping the
+more tumultuous sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car.  They
+courteously made room for one another, and let the children stand between
+their knees, or took them in their laps, with that unfailing American
+kindness which I am prouder of than the American valor in battle,
+observing in all that American decorum which is no bad thing either.  We
+had chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year,
+when people might well have been a little off their balance, but there
+was not a boisterous note in the subdued affair.  As we passed the
+school-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white gowns and white
+slippers stood on the steps and gently smiled upon our company.  One
+could see that they were inwardly glowing and thrilling with the
+excitement of their graduation, but were controlling their emotions to a
+calm worthy of the august event, so that no one might ever have it to say
+that they had appeared silly.
+
+The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or
+gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private
+ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people
+along its obliging lines.  One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk,
+was just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins's story where the
+bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me
+think more of Miss Jewett's people.  The shore folk and the Down-Easters
+are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in
+'The Country of the Pointed Firs', or 'Sister Wisby's Courtship', or
+'Dulham Ladies', or 'An Autumn Ramble', or twenty other entrancing tales.
+Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling
+toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip
+round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once
+between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as
+neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white-
+walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as
+the very kitchen itself.
+
+The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in an
+effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it
+climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the
+country road which it followed.  It is a land of low hills, broken by
+frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see
+how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties.  It
+scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a
+sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud
+caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles.  Its course
+does not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but as
+yet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one
+would think.  The landscape has already accepted it, and is making the
+best of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience.
+It passes everybody's front door or back door, and the farmers can get
+themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth
+in an hour, twice an hour, all day long.  In summer the cars are open,
+with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of
+wind or rain.  In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity.
+The young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let
+a car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out
+in a blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift.  "But the
+cah was so wa'm, I neva suff'ed a mite."
+
+"Well," I summarized, "it must be a great advantage to all the people
+along the line."
+
+"Well, you wouldn't 'a' thought so, from the kick they made."
+
+"I suppose the cottagers"--the summer colony--"didn't like the noise."
+
+"Oh yes; that's what I mean.  The's whe' the kick was.  The natives like
+it.  I guess the summa folks 'll like it, too."
+
+He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both
+understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow
+to the will of the majority.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ART OF THE ADSMITH
+
+The other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a bad
+conscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky
+book under his arm, and said, "I see by a guilty look in your eye that
+you are meaning to write about spring."
+
+"I am not," I retorted, "and if I were, it would be because none of the
+new things have been said yet about spring, and because spring is never
+an old story, any more than youth or love."
+
+"I have heard something like that before," said my friend, "and I
+understand.  The simple truth of the matter is that this is the fag-end
+of the season, and you have run low in your subjects.  Now take my advice
+and don't write about spring; it will make everybody hate you, and will
+do no good.  Write about advertising."  He tapped the book under his arm
+significantly.  "Here is a theme for you."
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+He had no sooner pronounced these words than I began to feel a weird and
+potent fascination in his suggestion.  I took the book from him and
+looked it eagerly through.  It was called Good Advertising, and it was
+written by one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almost
+to the grade of an art, or a humanity.
+
+"But I see nothing here," I said, musingly, "which would enable a self-
+respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in giving due hold
+upon the public interest those charming characteristics of his book which
+no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate so persuasively."
+
+"I expected some such objection from you," said my friend.  "You will
+admit that there is everything else here?"
+
+"Everything but that most essential thing.  You know how we all feel
+about it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense of
+insufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poor
+authors.  The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for the
+reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher--"
+
+"I see what you mean," said my friend.  "But you must have patience.
+If the author of this book can write so luminously of advertising in
+other respects, I am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactory
+light upon your problem.  The question is, I believe, how to translate
+into irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which a writer
+feels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its singular
+beauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, without
+infringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is the
+distinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?"
+
+"Something like that.  But you understand."
+
+"Perhaps a Roentgen ray might be got to do it," said my friend,
+thoughtfully, "or perhaps this author may bring his mind to bear upon it
+yet.  He seems to have considered every kind of advertising except book-
+advertising."
+
+"The most important of all!" I cried, impatiently.
+
+"You think so because you are in that line.  If you were in the line of
+varnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or of
+malt--"
+
+"Still I should be interested in book--advertising, because it is the
+most vital of human interests."
+
+"Tell me," said my friend, "do you read the advertisements of the books
+of rival authors?"
+
+"Brother authors," I corrected him.
+
+"Well, brother authors."
+
+I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to add that I thought them
+little better than a waste of the publishers' money.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, but
+seemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter.
+
+"I have often wondered," he said, "at the enormous expansion of
+advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted.  But my
+author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was unwittingly
+groping for.  When you take up a Sunday paper"--I shuddered, and my
+friend smiled intelligence--" you are simply appalled at the miles of
+announcements of all sorts.  Who can possibly read them?  Who cares even
+to look at them?  But if you want something in particular--to furnish a
+house, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go, to
+the theatre--then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, and
+cares to look at them.  They respond to the multifarious wants of the
+whole community.  You have before you the living operation of that law of
+demand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about.
+As often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that's
+only an appearance.  You wanted something, and you found an offer to meet
+your want."
+
+"Then you don't believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?"
+
+"I see that my author believes something of the kind.  We may be full of
+all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influence
+of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I have a
+feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potential
+wants is largely thrown away.  You must want a thing, or think you want
+it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence."
+
+"There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I read
+without the slightest interest in the subject matter.  Simply the beauty
+of the style attracts me."
+
+"I know.  But does it ever move you to get what you don't want?"
+
+"Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sort
+of advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint."
+
+"He doesn't contemn it, quite.  But I think he feels that it may have had
+its day.  Do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?"
+
+"No; the zest for nearly everything goes.  I don't care so much for
+Tourguenief as I used.  Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconic
+suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the
+season's wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction.  The
+advertising expert--"
+
+"This author calls him the adsmith."
+
+"Delightful!  Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it.  It's
+as legitimate as lunch.  But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have
+caught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists
+have caught the American social tone."
+
+"Yes," said my friend, "and he seems to have prospered as richly by it.
+You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by
+adsmithing.  They have put their art quite on a level with fiction
+pecuniarily."
+
+"Perhaps it is a branch of fiction."
+
+"No; they claim that it is pure fact.  My author discourages the
+slightest admixture of fable.  The truth, clearly and simply expressed,
+is the best in an ad.
+
+"It is best in a wof, too.  I am always saying that."
+
+"Wof?"
+
+"Well, work of fiction.  It's another new word, like lunch or ad."
+
+"But in a wof," said my friend, instantly adopting it, "my author
+insinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity, while in
+an ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness.
+In one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay by the word.
+That is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground than the
+wofsmith."
+
+"I should think your author might have written a recent article in
+'The ---------, reproaching fiction with its unhallowed gains."
+
+"If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced.  He would have been
+incapable of it.  My author is no more the friend of honesty in
+adsmithing than he is of propriety, He deprecates jocosity in
+apothecaries and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business;
+and he is as severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attention
+by disgusting or shocking the reader.
+
+"He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and I shouldn't
+have minded his criticising the ready wofsmith.  I hope he attacks the
+use of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the poster-
+plastered fences around vacant lots.  In New York there is only one paper
+whose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves."
+
+"Well," said my friend, "he attacks foolish and ineffective display."
+
+"It is all foolish and ineffective.  It is like a crowd of people trying
+to make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice.
+A paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congested
+and delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions it
+is unnecessary, and it is futile.  Compare any New York paper but one
+with the London papers, and you will see what I mean.  Of course I refer
+to the ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with pictures
+and scare heads as all the rest.  I wish your author could revise his
+opinions and condemn all display in ads."
+
+"I dare say he will when he knows what you think," said my friend, with
+imaginable sarcasm.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+"I wish," I went on, "that he would give us some philosophy of the
+prodigious increase of advertising within the last twenty-five years, and
+some conjecture as to the end of it all.  Evidently, it can't keep on
+increasing at the present rate.  If it does, there will presently be no
+room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the
+advertisements of things."
+
+"Before that time, perhaps," my friend suggested, "adsmithing will have
+become so fine and potent an art that advertising will be reduced in
+bulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing its
+effectiveness."
+
+"Perhaps," I said, "some silent electrical process will be contrived, so
+that the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the fascination of a
+spring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady's consciousness without
+even the agency of words.  All other facts of commercial and industrial
+interest could be dealt with in the same way.  A fine thrill could be
+made to go from the last new book through the whole community, so that
+people would not willingly rest till they had it.  Yes, one can see an
+indefinite future for advertising in that way.  The adsmith may be the
+supreme artist of the twentieth century.  He may assemble in his grasp,
+and employ at will, all the arts and sciences."
+
+"Yes," said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice, "that is very
+well.  But what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every
+pore with a sense of the world's demand and supply?"
+
+"Oh, that is another affair.  I was merely imagining the possible
+resources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising while
+guarding the integrity of the planet.  I think, very likely, if the thing
+keeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able to
+criticise the others.  Or possibly the thing may work its own cure.  You
+know the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotism
+to which conditions appeal.  They do not deny that these foster greed and
+rapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth-
+winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and good
+comes of it all.  I never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn't
+a sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess and
+invasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to us
+still more by the adsmith?  Come, isn't there hope in that?"
+
+"I see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream," said my
+friend.  "Why don't you turn it to account?"
+
+"You know that isn't my line; I must leave that sort of wofsmithing to
+the romantic novelist.  Besides, I have my well-known panacea for all the
+ills our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall legislate
+foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of the possibility
+of existence.  Most of the adsmithing is now employed in persuading
+people that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure.  But in any
+civilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much less
+foisted upon the community by adsmiths."
+
+"I see what you mean," said my friend; and he sighed gently.  "I had much
+better let you write about spring."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM
+
+A late incident in the history of a very widespread English novelist,
+triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist had
+casually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the real
+author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics.
+The friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuously
+dismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but
+declared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist's
+works.  The novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so using
+material in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or idea
+from life, and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answer
+critics who regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation.  In a
+manner he brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general
+public that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his own
+way, duly to ticket the flies preserved in his amber.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+When I read this haughty vindication, I thought at first that if the case
+were mine I would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friend
+as that; but since, I have not been so sure.  I have asked myself upon a
+careful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be frankly
+avowed, as in nowise dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would take
+the affair into consideration and make it clear for me.  If we are to
+suppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that
+public dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently
+plagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it
+does not disgrace.  The dictionary, indeed, defines it as "the crime of
+literary theft"; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame,
+it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, if
+it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the word is
+not harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as white-
+lying.
+
+The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took his own where he found
+it, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the things
+other people have rushed in with before them.  But really they seem to
+need neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they are
+caught in the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rash
+intruder upon their premises.  The novelist in question is by no means
+the only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant example.  While
+the ratification of the treaty with Spain was pending before the Senate
+of the United States, a member of that body opposed it in a speech almost
+word for word the same as a sermon delivered in New York City only a few
+days earlier and published broadcast.  He was promptly exposed by the
+parallel-column system; but I have never heard that his standing was
+affected or his usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him.  A
+few years ago an eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own
+the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected
+and promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever
+happened from the exposure.  Every one must recall like instances, more
+or less remote.  I remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a
+journalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages of
+Macaulay's article on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name to
+the character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty
+to devote to infamy.  He was caught in the fact, and by means of the
+parallel column pilloried before the community.  But the community did
+not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either.  He prospered on
+amid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to another
+city it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commanding
+influence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape the
+destinies of the nation.
+
+So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as
+harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from
+time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its
+foundations.  They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings,
+rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I do
+not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest
+victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or
+heads of his readers.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts.
+I am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from my
+own sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever
+another's have found him out.  But as yet I have not convinced myself
+that the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it
+seems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the
+dictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a "crime" and a
+"theft."  If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not
+differently natured, from all other crimes and thefts.  These may be more
+or less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries
+inevitable detection with it.  If you take a man's hat or coat out of his
+hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his
+horse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it;
+if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the
+crowd, and easily prove your innocence.  But if you take his sermon, or
+his essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery.
+The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too
+glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing
+their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court
+of parallel columns.  You have no safety in the obscurity of the author
+from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader,
+the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more
+indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and
+wishes to display his erudition.  A man may escape for centuries and yet
+be found out.  In the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender
+seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a
+lunatic asylum, was able to detect him at last, and to restore the goods
+to their rightful owner, Sir Francis Bacon.
+
+In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure,
+plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probability
+that it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, and
+journalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mind
+at the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere.  Now and then
+it takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when the
+plagiarist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece of
+literary property.  When Mr. William Allen Butler's famous poem of
+"Nothing to Wear" achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girl
+declared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lost
+the MS. in an omnibus.  All her friends apparently believed so, too; and
+the friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed the
+authorship of "Beautiful Snow" and "Rock Me to Sleep" were ready to
+support them by affidavit against the real authors of those pretty
+worthless pieces.
+
+From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader that
+plagiarism is not the simple "crime" or "theft" that the lexicographers
+would have us believe.  It argues a strange and peculiar courage on the
+part of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure of having
+it brought home to them, for they seem to dread the exposure, though it
+involves no punishment outside of themselves.  Why do they do it, or,
+having done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not?  Their
+temerity and their timidity are things almost irreconcilable, and the
+whole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what one would do if one's
+own plagiarisms were found out.  But this is a mere question of conduct,
+and of infinitely less interest than that of the nature or essence of the
+thing itself.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION
+
+The question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of
+reality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of
+those inquiries to which there is no very final answer.  The most
+baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident;
+and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the
+convictions of those whom they have persuaded.  It will not do to affirm
+anything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary
+present themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of
+the verity which you cannot gainsay.  The most that you can do is to
+appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else.
+Perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art
+which created the picture.  Is it clear, simple, unaffected?  Is it true
+to human experience generally?  If it is so, then it cannot well be false
+to the special human experience it deals with.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Not long ago I heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically,
+illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of our
+writers, whose art is of the kind I mean.  A lady was driving with a
+young girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New York through one of
+those little towns of the North Shore in Massachusetts, where the small;
+wooden houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schooners
+slip, in and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if they
+were blown about through the tall grass.  She tried to make her feel the
+shy charm of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to the
+manner born are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned New England villages;
+but she found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored
+cottages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yards
+lit by patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with their
+close-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them,
+and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of them
+altogether.  She said that they were terrible, and she knew that in each
+of them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, or
+unhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in Miss Wilkins's
+stories.
+
+She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of
+these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous,
+conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no
+doubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for
+their stoical sorrows.  Without being so very young, I, too, have found
+the humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit of
+experiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote New
+England village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in
+quite the mood that Miss Wilkins's bleaker studies leave one in.  At mid-
+day, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to
+fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the
+fiction; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying
+this or, that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house
+and in placing one of her muted dramas in it.  One cannot know the people
+of such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know
+New England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England
+character, though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort of
+stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other
+phases of New England village life.
+
+To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident that
+their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is
+seldom on show anywhere.  I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy
+and Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I went
+through Russia and met none of their people.  I should be rather more
+surprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga's or Fogazzaro's,
+but that would be because I already knew Italy a little.  In fact, I
+suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to the
+connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist
+himself.  One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an
+author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great
+deal of patience to the scrutiny.  Types are very backward and shrinking
+things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you
+seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is
+distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author's
+reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his
+truth.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there finds
+them dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions are
+dramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in real
+life are recreantly undramatic.  One might go through a New England
+village and see Mary Wilkins houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet not
+witness a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales.  It is
+only too probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaint
+or humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; and
+yet I should not question her revelation on that account.  The life of
+New England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and Miss Sarah O. Jewett,
+and Miss Alice Brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except to
+the accustomed eye.  It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by the
+Puritanic theology.  One must not be very positive in such things, and I
+may be too bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some New
+Englanders approaches this theology the belief of most is now far from
+it; and yet its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the New
+England character that Puritanism survives in the moral and mental make
+of the people almost in its early strength.  Conduct and manner conform
+to a dead religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just,
+the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful,
+humble.  A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations
+without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after
+they cease to believe themselves chosen.  They are often stiffened in the
+neck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point of
+making them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterate
+responsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they are
+strengthened for any fate.  They are what we see in the stories which,
+perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction.
+
+As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so
+Puritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the
+inherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it
+from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere.  There was, however,
+always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and
+securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness,
+which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of
+some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing.  There is also a
+sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for
+it), which awaits full recognition in fiction.  This efflorescence from
+the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the
+ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New
+England manners.  It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which
+prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theology
+ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so
+common in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America.  Then, there
+is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages
+which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which
+forms with us an author's closest appreciation, if not his best.  But as
+yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still
+less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted
+beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a
+blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can
+always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period.
+Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing
+itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy,
+and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins
+there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large.  The good
+causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in a
+wholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New England
+conscience, has imparted itself to the American people.
+
+Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to
+have in such excellent degree, has spread from New England.  That is,
+indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there been
+brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett,
+of Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners,
+Mrs. Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture
+of New England village life in some of its more obvious phases.  I say
+obvious because I must, but I have already said that this is a life which
+is very little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought the
+portrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and
+unnatural, though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic was
+wrong.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART
+
+One of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of the
+artist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarely
+care for their work artistically.  They care for it morally, personally,
+partially.  I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled
+preference for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a
+philistine question of the material when it should, aesthetically
+speaking, be concerned solely with the form.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and amusing
+illustration of my point.  They were playing a most soul-filling
+melodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first that
+there will be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just as
+it should, no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course of
+the action.  An over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigencies
+of the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment in
+behalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never had the least
+occasion for anxiety.  Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villain
+in the piece; so very black-hearted that he seemed not to have a single
+good impulse from first to last.  Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage
+Providence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly
+aims.  He accomplished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intents
+had been of the best; except for the satisfaction afforded by the
+edifying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been in the
+play at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, he was so
+continually baffled.  But this was not enough for the audience, or for
+that part of it which filled the gallery to the roof.  Perhaps he was
+such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very, very cold-blooded in
+his wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out to him by the
+dramatist could not suffice.  At any rate, the gallery took such a vivid
+interest in his punishment that it had out the actor who impersonated the
+wretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate
+passage across the stage before the curtain.  The hisses were not at all
+for the actor, but altogether for the character.  The performance was
+fairly good, quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part in the
+piece, and easily up to the level of other villanous performances (I
+never find much nature in them, perhaps because there is not much nature
+in villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but the mere
+conception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much for
+an audience of the average popular goodness.  It was only after he had
+taken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectators
+forbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparently
+they did not care to "give him a realizing sense that there was a
+punishment after death," as the man in Lincoln's story did with the dead
+dog.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me upon
+thinking (I like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-century
+essayists were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable
+reprobate is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers at
+pictures and statues, listeners to music, and so on through the whole
+list of the arts.  It is absolutely different from the artist's attitude,
+from the connoisseur's attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their
+attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist works
+for.  Art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is
+produced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally,
+personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions.
+
+Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not,
+he, does not succeed without it.  Their brute liking or misliking is the
+final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all.  Only, in
+some cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o'clock on the
+first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but remain open
+forever, and the voting goes on.  Still, even the first day's canvass is
+important, or at least significant.  It will not do for the artist to
+electioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of his
+defeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universal
+interest.  He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to his
+fellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, but
+whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise.  If he can make
+something that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may
+not have done any great thing, but if he has made something that they
+will neither cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter
+how well, how finely, how truly he has done the thing.
+
+This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one's artist-pride such as
+one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one.  Not long ago I
+was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to my
+thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from reading
+poetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps
+putting on a little more modesty than I felt.  I said that I could enjoy
+pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul
+to those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly to
+interest painters.  He replied that it was a confession of weakness in a
+painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the
+spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and
+that if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of
+painting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear and
+appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art.  He even insisted
+that a picture ought to tell a story.
+
+The difficulty in humbling one's self to this view of art is in the ease
+with which one may please the general by art which is no art.  Neither
+the play nor the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor was
+hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at all
+fine; and yet I perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a
+supreme effect.  If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be
+very sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very proud if, on
+the level I chose and with the quality I cared for, I could invent a
+villain that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassing
+wickedness.  In other words, I think it a thousand pities whenever an
+artist gets so far away from the general, so far within himself or a
+little circle of amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens no
+response in the multitude.  I am afraid this is rather the danger of the
+arts among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain.  It makes one
+sick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the common people
+is won.  It is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting to
+any performance, we may be pretty sure it is not the greatest
+performance.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, to
+confound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that.  We talk,
+for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is
+different from talking of cookery for cooks.  Poetry is not made for
+poets; they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for people
+who are not poets.  If it does not please these, it may still be poetry,
+but it is poetry which has failed of its truest office.  It is none the
+less its truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to do
+it.
+
+The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this
+truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study
+how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are
+wanting in universal interest, in human appeal.  Leaving the drama out of
+the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the
+favor of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a race
+more open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours.  The
+artist who feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now and
+here a chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the world
+before.  Of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanity
+are the simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when the
+complex and the recondite may not universally please.  288
+
+The art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them in
+him.  Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters a
+foot high.
+
+The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has a
+success to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that it
+goes no further.  He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar
+because bad art pleases them.  It is part of his reason for being that he
+should please them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is
+wanting in force, however much he abounds in fineness.  Who would not
+wish his picture to draw a crowd about it?  Who would not wish his novel
+to sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid love
+of gain which I am told governs novelists?  One should not really wish it
+any the less because chromos and historical romances are popular.
+
+Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer together
+in a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions.
+I put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be more
+than living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in the
+mean time I think that the artist might very well study the springs of
+feeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quite
+humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and
+inquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so
+personal.  Not being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest
+contempt of that play and its public.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS
+
+No thornier theme could well be suggested than I was once invited to
+consider by an Englishman who wished to know how far American politicians
+were scholars, and how far American authors took part in politics.  In my
+mind I first revolted from the inquiry, and then I cast about, in the
+fascination it began to have for me, to see how I might handle it and
+prick myself least.  In a sort, which it would take too long to set
+forth, politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were to
+deal quite frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one might
+accuse one's self of an unwarrantable personality.  So, in what I shall
+have to say in answer to the question asked me, I shall seek above all
+things not to be quite frank.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors no
+longer living.  Not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safe
+to say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of men
+among us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Curtis, Emerson, and Bryant more
+or less promptly and openly took sides against slavery.  Holmes was very
+much later in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his final
+strenuousness; as for Hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially a
+spectator of life to be classed with either party, though his
+associations, if not his sympathies, were with the Northern men who had
+Southern principles until the civil war came.  After the war, when our
+political questions ceased to be moral and emotional and became economic
+and sociological, literary men found their standing with greater
+difficulty.  They remained mostly Republicans, because the Republicans
+were the anti-slavery party, and were still waging war against slavery in
+their nerves.
+
+I should say that they also continued very largely the emotional
+tradition in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things the
+politics of literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional.  In fact,
+though the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly the
+greater number of Americans are so.  Nothing else would account for the
+fact that during the last ten or fifteen years men have remained
+Republicans and remained Democrats upon no tangible issues except of
+office, which could practically concern only a few hundreds or thousands
+out of every million voters.  Party fealty is praised as a virtue, and
+disloyalty to party is treated as a species of incivism next in
+wickedness to treason.  If any one were to ask me why then American
+authors were not active in American politics, as they once were, I should
+feel a certain diffidence in replying that the question of other people's
+accession to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them as
+compared with literary questions.  I should have the more diffidence
+because it might be retorted that literary men were too unpractical for
+politics when they did not deal with moral issues.
+
+Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might
+even be regarded as complimentary.  It is not our custom to be tender
+with any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be
+bettered, especially in public affairs.  We are apt to call such a one
+out of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held.  This
+may be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part in
+politics with us.  They are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, and
+always averse to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrust
+their fitness to lead, when they have quite a firm faith in their
+convictions.  They hesitate to urge these in the face of practical
+politicians, who have a confidence in their ability to settle all affairs
+of State not surpassed even by that of business men in dealing with
+economic questions.
+
+I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at least
+for the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not.
+Our politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so
+far, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunned
+our good society--which is not picturesque or apparently anything but a
+tiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under the
+same name.  In nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with our
+politics as material, they have given the practical politicians only too
+much reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand the
+mere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did not
+withhold me I might name some striking ones.  Privately and
+unprofessionally, I think our authors take as vivid an interest in public
+affairs as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry to
+think that they took a less intelligent interest.  Now and then, but only
+very rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side.
+In this event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like to
+visit difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him.
+
+Such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man need
+shrink from, but they have a bearing upon what I am trying to explain,
+and in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in our
+literary men.  No one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown at
+him, though they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrown
+in joke.  But it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes
+them seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrown
+at him.  He might burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them,
+with safety; but if he spoke of public questions with heart and
+conscience, he could not do it with impunity, unless he were authorized
+to do so by some practical relation to them.  I do not mean that then he
+would escape; but in this country, where there were once supposed to be
+no classes, people are more strictly classified than in any other.
+Business to the business man, law to the lawyer, medicine to the
+physician, politics to the politician, and letters to the literary man;
+that is the rule.  One is not expected to transcend his function, and
+commonly one does not.  We keep each to his last, as if there were not
+human interests, civic interests, which had a higher claim than the last
+upon our thinking and feeling.  The tendency has grown upon us severally
+and collectively through the long persistence of our prosperity; if
+public affairs were going ill, private affairs were going so well that we
+did not mind the others; and we Americans are, I think, meridional in our
+improvidence.  We are so essentially of to-day that we behave as if to-
+morrow no more concerned us than yesterday.  We have taught ourselves to
+believe that it will all come out right in the end so long that we have
+come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if I may so
+phrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largely
+attracted literary men.  It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy himself,
+whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vast
+numbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field of
+practical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of
+economic equality.  But he virtually founded the Populist party, which,
+as the vital principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing its
+candidate for the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first
+among our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side
+since the days of the old antislavery agitation.  Without too great
+disregard of the reticence concerning the living which I promised myself,
+I may mention Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas Wentworth
+Higginson as prominent authors who encouraged the Nationalist movement
+eventuating in Populism, though they were never Populists.  It may be
+interesting to note that Dr. Hale and Colonel Higginson, who later came
+together in their sociological sympathies, were divided by the schism of
+1884, when the first remained with the Republicans and the last went off
+to the Democrats.  More remotely, Colonel Higginson was anti slavery
+almost to the point of Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the
+war.  Dr. Hale was of those who were less radically opposed to slavery
+before the war, but hardly so after it came.  Since the war a sort of
+refluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in
+Southern tradition Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sentiment
+of his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant
+renunciation of his fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequently
+ceased to be the first of Southern authors, though he would still have
+continued the author of at least one of the greatest American novels.
+
+If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, as
+I seem really to be doing, I may mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, as
+an author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, Mr.
+Hamlin Garland has been known from the first as a zealous George man, or
+single-taxer.  Mr. John Hay, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry Cabot
+Lodge are Republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men.
+Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing Uncle Remus, writes political
+articles in a leading Southern journal.  Mark Twain is a leading anti-
+imperialist.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I am not sure whether I have made out a case for our authors or against
+them; perhaps I have not done so badly; but I have certainly not tried to
+be exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to the
+reader, and I wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himself
+whether American literary men take part in American politics or not.
+I think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope
+(it may be too fondly) is the American way.  They are none of them
+politicians in the Latin sort.  Few, if any, of our statesmen have come
+forward with small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in
+Spain; none of our poets or historians have been chosen Presidents of the
+republic as has happened to their French confreres; no great novelist of
+ours has been exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled as
+Zola has been, though I have no doubt that if, for instance, one had once
+said the Spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally 'conspue'.
+They have none of them reached the heights of political power, as several
+English authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors,
+ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed for
+political reasons.  I fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather
+faithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses or
+conventions.
+
+As for the other half of the question--how far American politicians are
+scholars--one's first impulse would be to say that they never were so.
+But I have always had an heretical belief that there were snakes in
+Ireland; and it may be some such disposition to question authority that
+keeps me from yielding to this impulse.  The law of demand and supply
+alone ought to have settled the question in favor of the presence of the
+scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him among us for
+almost a generation past.  Perhaps the response has not been very direct,
+but I imagine that our politicians have never been quite so destitute of
+scholarship as they would sometimes make appear.  I do not think so many
+of them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as the politicians
+of forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part of
+the impression of the general worsening of things, familiar after middle
+life to every one's experience, from the beginning of recorded time.  If
+something not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of finance,
+of economics, of international affairs is in question, it seems to go on
+rather more to their own satisfaction than that of their critics.  But
+without being always very proud of the result, and without professing to
+know the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that under an
+outside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in our
+statesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even so
+unscholarly as it might be supposed.  It is not the effect of specific
+training, and yet it is the effect of training.  I do not find that the
+matters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and in
+this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislation
+or administration; but still I should not like to say that none of our
+politicians were scholars.  That would be offensive, and it might not be
+true.  In fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted to call
+scholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not to
+deal quite frankly with this inquiry.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+STORAGE
+
+It has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the one
+half of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might be
+brought together in a family affection not now so observable in human
+relations.  Probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still be
+things, to bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is
+so interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one can
+hardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in the
+advantage of the ignorant, to find one's excuse with the better informed.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+City and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that one
+can safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things.
+For instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, they
+sell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or a
+hundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vast
+warehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage.
+The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and
+ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and
+carefully planned for the purpose.  They are more or less fire-proof,
+slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have
+devastated.  But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not
+destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal.  Such a
+warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the
+private tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only to
+the tenants or their order.  The aisles are concreted, the doors are
+iron, and the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by
+steam and lighted by electricity.  Behind the iron doors, which in the
+New York warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout all
+our other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households is
+stored--the effects of people who have gone to Europe, or broken up
+house-keeping provisionally or definitively, or have died, or been
+divorced.  They are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their
+yet living bodies held in hypnotic trances; destined again in some future
+time to animate some house or flat anew.  In certain cases the spell
+lasts for many years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs
+itself indefinitely.
+
+I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw visiting the warehouse to
+take out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years.
+He had been all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come home and
+begin life again, in his own land.  That dream had passed, and now he was
+taking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to Italy.  I did not envy
+him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him in
+formless resurrection.  It was not that they were all broken or defaced.
+On the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far more
+heartbreaking than any decay.  In well-managed storage warehouses the
+things are handled with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into the
+appointed rooms that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in
+fifteen or fifty years.  The places are wonderfully well kept, and if you
+will visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has
+all been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you
+shall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted,
+and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense of
+secure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of your
+family vault.
+
+That is what it comes to.  One may feign that these storage warehouses
+are cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whose
+shelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners'
+lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one's
+dead self that one revisits them.  If one takes the fragments out to fit
+them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and
+incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they
+are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it
+upon them forever.  One feels then that the old way was far better, and
+that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as
+chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to
+pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser.
+Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to
+the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best
+recourse.  Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted
+the reconstruction of their homes with these
+
+          "Portions and parcels of the dreadful past "
+
+have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their
+belongings in an indiscriminate ruin.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you,
+if comfort is to attend the enterprise.  It is not only sorrowful but it
+is futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old
+happiness in taking them out and using them again.  It is not that they
+will not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office,
+but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the other
+places where they served their purpose in other years will be only the
+keener for the perfection with which they do it now.  If they cannot be
+sold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they
+had better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again.
+
+That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort
+of storage they are put into.  The inexperienced in such matters may be
+surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the
+fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the
+rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a
+family's living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can be
+sheltered.  Yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sized
+rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction
+in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, and
+seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away.  To be
+sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides or
+backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or dining
+tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions, pillows,
+pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses pad the
+walls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture that
+would otherwise rend each other.  Carpets sewn in cotton against moths,
+and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a whole
+brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and 3supporting
+on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling of
+the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from their
+companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all the
+what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion.
+
+There is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects;
+against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front of
+and on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may be
+first wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency of
+the homeless life of the owners, pending removal.  The lightest and
+slightest articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a
+kind of fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind.
+The effect is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the Roman
+Capuchins design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt of
+their church, but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it,
+and feel an artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance.
+
+It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futile
+dream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past on
+the old terms.  It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and
+when an end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as a
+suspense of function.  When the poor break up their homes, with no
+immediate hope of founding others, they must sell their belongings
+because they cannot afford to pay storage on them.  The rich or richer
+store their household effects, and cheat themselves with the illusion
+that they are going some time to rehabilitate with them just such a home
+as they have dismantled.  But the illusion probably deceives nobody so
+little as those who cherish the vain hope.  As long as they cherish it,
+however--and they must cherish it till their furniture or themselves fall
+to dust--they cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have kept
+nothing of the sort to link them to the past.  This is one of the
+disabilities of the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of it
+till some means of storing the owner as well as the' furniture is
+invented.  In the immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps not
+impossible.  Why not, while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious
+antidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse
+for the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess
+us of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall again
+array it?  Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy
+fabric of a romance, and I handsomely make a present of it to the first
+comer.  If the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to make
+the reader feel that with the universal longing to return to former
+conditions or circumstances it must always be a mistake to do so, and he
+will subtly insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the stored
+personality in resuming its old relations.  With that just mixture of the
+comic and pathetic which we desire in romance, he will teach convincingly
+that a stored personality is to be desired only if it is permanently
+stored, with the implication of a like finality in the storage of its
+belongings.
+
+Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot be
+established in its former function without a sense of its comparative
+inadequacy.  It stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet
+a new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be more
+appropriate, if I may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time is
+new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are
+mainly passed.  We are supposed to have associations with the old things
+which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render
+them painful?  If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it
+is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives!
+Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to
+the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of
+years?  Such a meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tender
+joy, a rapture that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly
+in womanly tears.  But really is it any such emotion?  Honestly is not it
+a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide?
+The old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another,
+but are they genuinely glad?  Is not each wishing the other at that end
+of the earth from which he came?  Have they any use for each other such
+as people of unbroken associations have?
+
+I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are bound
+together more closely than most men in a community of interests,
+occupations, and ideals.  During a long separation they had kept account
+of each other's opinions as well as experiences; they had exchanged
+letters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully to
+each other, and found themselves constantly in accord.  When they met
+they made a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the other
+just what he used to be.  They talked a long, long time, fighting the
+invisible enemy which they felt between them.  The enemy was habit, the
+habit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and things
+which in their separation they had not had in common.  When the old
+friends parted they promised to meet every day, and now, since their
+lines had been cast in the same places again, to repair the ravage of the
+envious years, and become again to each other all that they had ever
+been.  But though they live in the same town, and often dine at the same
+table, and belong to the same club, yet they have not grown together
+again.  They have grown more and more apart, and are uneasy in each
+other's presence, tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect which
+neither of them could avert or repair.  They had been respectively in
+storage, and each, in taking the other out, has experienced in him the
+unfitness which grows upon the things put away for a time and reinstated
+in a former function.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+I have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose of
+finding some way out of the coil.  There seems none better than the
+counsel of keeping one's face set well forward, and one's eyes fixed
+steadfastly upon the future.  This is the hint we will get from nature if
+we will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takes
+out of storage.  Fancy rehabilitating one's first love: how nature would
+mock at that!  We cannot go back and be the men and women we were, any
+more than we can go back and be children.  As we grow older, each year's
+change in us is more chasmal and complete.  There is no elixir whose
+magic will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps we
+shall return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, to
+come.  Some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but only
+on condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, and
+hoard its mummified image in our hearts.  We must not seek to store
+ourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof of
+others, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from one
+place to another.  It is a curious and significant property of our
+outworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serve
+admirably in the life of some other, and that this other can profitably
+make them his when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to
+resume them.  They not only go down to successive generations, but they
+spread beyond our lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we never
+knew to be within the circle of our influence.
+
+Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes are
+clothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been stored
+would have left the inferiors rude and barbarous.  We have only to think
+how socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautiful
+manners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion when
+it dropped them.
+
+All earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and not
+preserved against decay by any unnatural artifice.  Even when broken and
+disabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which must
+commend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive grace
+of ruin.  An old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in
+the woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, with
+all its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a broken
+home.  Spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that is
+itself falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they are
+dragged from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft of
+fresh tow, and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they
+were a few years ago.  A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered
+kettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and
+copper-ware stored in the possibility of future need.  However carefully
+handed down from one generation to another, the old objects have a
+forlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to the
+compassion rather than the veneration of the witness.
+
+It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne declared against any
+sort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generation
+should newly house itself.  He preferred the perishability of the wooden
+American house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which in
+Europe affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of sires
+and sons and grandsons that had died out of them.  But even of such
+structures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with the
+passage of time.  Where once a great city of them stood, you shall find a
+few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than "the cellar
+and the well" which Holmes marked as the ultimate monuments, the last
+witnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations.  It is
+the law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and if
+by reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishable
+shall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannot
+be felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men's
+happiness or cheerfulness.  Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the
+gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares
+has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and
+the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world.  As far as
+his comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities had
+not been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all their
+contemporaries.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam:
+if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period,
+and are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned against
+putting them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type.
+Better, far better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to a
+continuous use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will take
+them, then hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames.
+By that means you shall bear witness against a custom that insults the
+order of nature, and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes,
+where there is scarcely space for the living homes.  Do not vainly fancy
+that you shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to the
+ends that it served before it was put in.  You will not be the same, or
+have the same needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new place
+which you shall hope to equip with it will receive it with cold
+reluctance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions that
+render it ridiculous or impossible.  The law is that nothing taken out of
+storage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in
+those rude 'graffiti' apparently inscribed by accident in the process of
+removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule.
+
+The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all
+the difference.  Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods
+and fashions change.  The ideals remain, and these alone you can go back
+to, secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they were
+yesterday.  This perhaps is because they have never been in storage, but
+in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and
+taken out a thousand times.  Most people have never had ideals, but only
+moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in
+them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old
+moods and fashions reappear.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+"FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O "
+
+There was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of a mid-
+March day at Pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chimneys
+gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fell with the
+constant rain which it dyed its own black.  But early memories stirred
+joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness I was making my
+tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lying beside the
+wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing its best to
+represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in the old
+days.  It had the help of three others in its generous effort, and the
+levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and
+succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and
+agricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-worn
+stones, in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud.
+The boats and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made upon
+them by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who were
+setting out on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and
+for whom much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitated
+the past.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save it
+from the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of the
+steamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them.
+From the clerk's office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the saloon
+stretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous
+splendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, and
+fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass.  Midway between
+the great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stove
+at the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which the
+tradition of Western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundred
+years, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactly
+duplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could have
+believed themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the
+events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience.  When
+they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of
+belated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty
+faces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of
+other days that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecide
+feasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with the
+appetites of the year 1850.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the table
+of the good steamboat 'Avonek' left something to be desired, if tested by
+more sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was of
+an inapproachable preeminence.  This bread was made of the white corn
+which North knows not, nor the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes at
+breakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in the
+abundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice.
+The only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in a
+land flowing with ham and bacon was that the 'Avonek' had not imagined
+providing either for the guests, no one of whom could have had a
+religious scruple against them.
+
+The thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in the
+passengers, was their perfectly American race and character.  At the
+start, when with an acceptable observance of Western steamboat tradition
+the 'Avonek' left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, there
+were very few passengers; but they began to come aboard at the little
+towns of both shores as she swam southward and westward, till all the
+tables were so full that, in observance of another Western steamboat
+tradition; one did well to stand guard over his chair lest some other who
+liked it should seize it earlier.  The passengers were of every age and
+condition, except perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none the
+worse for being more like Americans of the middle of the last century
+than of the beginning of this.  Their fashions were of an approximation
+to those of the present, but did not scrupulously study detail; their
+manners were those of simpler if not sincerer days.
+
+The women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from the
+study of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhere
+else about, and open to observation.  They were not so open to
+conversation, for your mid-Westerner is not a facile, though not an
+unwilling, talker.  They sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval
+pattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silently
+ruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at their
+feet.  They would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenest
+intelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have
+none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by Dickens and
+other averse aliens.  They had mostly faces of resolute power, and such a
+looking of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promised
+well for any collectively or individually opposing them.  If ever the
+sense of human equality has expressed itself in the human countenance it
+speaks unmistakably from American faces like theirs.
+
+They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few striking
+exceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where they
+were notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty.
+They were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face,
+absolute Greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and
+slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting down
+and leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and
+gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice.  In his young comeliness
+he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing
+and a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm.
+
+He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-Western human-beings
+about him.  One heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of
+cities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk; and it
+may have been not far enough West for the true Western humor.  At any
+rate, when they were not silent these men still were serious.
+
+The women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associated
+with the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, in
+the spectator's eye.  The average of them was certainly not above the
+American woman's average in good looks, though one young mother of six
+children, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type some
+masters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows.  She
+had the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes fitly
+with such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many of
+the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman when
+she is New.  As she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his mother
+seeming.
+
+All these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along the
+stream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, if
+quiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco and
+spat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior.  The
+use of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuously
+rather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise,
+however they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steak
+deserved no gentler usage, indeed.  They were usually young, and they
+were constantly changing, bent upon short journeys between the shore
+villages; they were mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were said
+to be going to find work at the great potteries up the river for wages
+fabulous to home-keeping experience.
+
+One personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists was
+a Kentucky mountaineer who, after three years' exile in a West Virginia
+oil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all his
+brood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had never
+ceased to pine.  His eagerness to get back was more than touching; it was
+awing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that could
+own no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region.  He had
+prospered at high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and
+children had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the family
+expenses from it, but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that he
+might return to a land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time,
+they came out and made you come in and eat.  "When you eat where I've
+been living you pay fifty cents," he explained.  "And are you taking all
+your household stuff with you?"  "Only the cook-stove.  Well, I'll tell
+you: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and they
+were not worth-moving."  Here was the backwoods surviving into the day of
+Trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from the old
+ideals!
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently
+expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil-
+wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad
+chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the
+quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful
+suns.  But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless
+means of millionairing?  There must be iron and coal as well as wheat and
+corn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread.
+If the combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giant
+clutch upon all those warring industries beside the Ohio and swept them
+into one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than
+competition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings of
+the universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealths
+have always had the vision.
+
+The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all the
+land to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in its
+strenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect.  That was rather
+of farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of the
+stream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough could
+drive.  In the spring and in the Mall, when it is suddenly swollen by the
+earlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims over
+those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves
+the cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the
+forests were first cut from the land.  Other fertilizing the fields have
+never had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied
+into their laps.  They feel themselves so rich that they part with great
+lengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for
+the river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose
+ease learns slowly, are beginning more and more to fence their borders
+with the young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash such a
+great part of the way up and down the Ohio.  Elms and maples wade in
+among the willows, and in time the river will be denied the indigestion
+which it confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a difficulty
+of channel at all stages.
+
+Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to the
+stream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly that
+they are never out of sight.  Most commonly they are of brick, but
+sometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences high
+enough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river that
+they cannot fail of its passing life.  Usually a group of planted
+evergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will not
+lose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the paling
+fence to watch the 'Avonek' float by: motionless men and women, who lean
+upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their skirts
+and hands.  There is not the eager New England neatness about these
+homes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discord
+with their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenly
+in a ruinous neglect.  Except where a log cabin has hardily survived the
+pioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facades
+front the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-story
+forms the attic of the two stories below.  Gardens of pot-herbs flank
+them, and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stables
+stretch into the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantily
+wooded, but ever lovely in the lines that change with the steamer's
+course.
+
+Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition
+beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore.  There is no
+such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of
+name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio.  As yet the land
+is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep
+it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to
+waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard.  The only
+distinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industry
+above the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it is
+hoped is not dishonest.  But, honest or dishonest, it is there apparently
+to stay in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeat
+on Occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far Cathay.
+
+They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found
+absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every
+other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly
+naturalized to their memories of it.  The houses had in common the form
+of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or
+longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of
+stovepipe softly smoking from its roof.  The windows might be curtained
+or they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinction
+among the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among the
+willows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake on
+shore.  There were cases in which they had not followed the fall of the
+river promptly enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to a
+more habitable level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house had
+gone down with the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood.  But
+they all gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul of
+the beholder envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lord
+of the house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse
+some household utensil at its stern.  Infrequently a group of the house-
+boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event they
+exhibited a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuous
+characterized their attitude on any other occasion.  The accepted theory
+of them was that they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do and
+live, and that by night their forays on the bordering farms supplied the
+simple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but only
+to emulate Solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion.  The
+joyful witness of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any
+amount of the facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them and
+left them slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax-
+gatherer.  Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true
+interpretation of the sage's philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet's
+aspiration.
+
+     "Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things.
+
+How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from the
+fishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night?  Did they read the new
+historical fictions aloud to one another?  Did some of them even meditate
+the thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude?  Perhaps the ladies of
+the house-boats, when they found themselves--as they often did--in
+companies of four or five, had each other in to "evenings," at which one
+of them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+The trader's boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition, sometimes
+shouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it, too, was
+a peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand with
+commerce.  When the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of a
+neighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river's tide to
+where it meets the ocean's tide in the farthermost Mississippi, and there
+either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his home to some
+returning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses, back to the
+upper Ohio.  But his home is not so interesting as that of the
+houseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor of
+logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current.  As
+the pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is
+adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wide
+berth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole.  By day
+the raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its
+convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have
+broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or
+stamps.  Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving
+beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of
+corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have
+brought down and left stranded.  The tops of the little willows are
+tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one
+place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water-
+maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of
+birds.  The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage
+which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and
+everywhere were proofs of the river's power to devastate as well as
+enrich its shores.  The dwellers there had no power against it, in its
+moments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from its
+encroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if
+planted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept
+the torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise
+crumbling helplessly into it.
+
+The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders' boats, but
+the most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of coal-barges
+which, going or coming, the 'Avonek' met every few miles.  Whether going
+or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer which
+gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-current
+with them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore when
+they were empty.  They claimed the river where they passed, and the
+'Avonek' bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way,
+from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneys
+of their steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually
+making themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with the
+wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades.
+It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or
+the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest
+scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared.  They
+perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck,
+and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting
+shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered
+themselves to their choice up and down the shores.  The weather commonly
+favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river
+when the weather was divinely flattering.  The soft, dull air lulled
+their nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked
+through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and
+found itself again in their hearts.  Perhaps it was there that the water-
+elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the
+drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also
+spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their
+voices.  There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within,
+and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those
+opulent fields.
+
+When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or
+uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of
+the two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the
+lore of the river on which all their days had been passed.  They knew
+from indelible association every ever-changing line of the constant
+hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns;
+every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud
+and bird in the sky.  They talked only of the river; they cared for
+nothing else.  The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far
+from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here,
+but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that
+of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly
+debating.  Were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if
+the State unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of
+those railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which would
+have made a solitude of the river if they could?
+
+But they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightful
+in this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffic
+had strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving.  Perhaps
+it was not; perhaps the fondness of those Ohio-river-born passengers was
+abused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a
+vivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream.  But again,
+perhaps not.  They were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs of
+both in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript
+steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, and
+climbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotest
+hills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men.
+She would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with his
+telescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to
+gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wished
+to ship.  She lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging
+one cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which we
+call commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws.  But
+wherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot's marvellous skill;
+for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place, could
+be twice the same.  At each return the varying stream and shore must be
+studied, and every caprice of either divined.  It was always a triumph,
+a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under the
+pilot's inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and without a
+jar slipped from them again and went on her course.
+
+But the landings by night were of course the finest.  Then the wide fan
+of the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and the
+heavy staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing the
+willow hedges in it's fall, and scarcely touching the land before a
+black, ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a line
+fast to the trunk of the nearest tree.  Then the work of lading or
+unlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set into
+radiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the
+deck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares,
+or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked
+or cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back
+to the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his
+broken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the
+heaps of freight.
+
+No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! why
+should their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be all
+so gay and glad?  But ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hard
+world, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, who
+still endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden of
+their brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their
+mother earth?
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Absence of distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers . . . . . . . .
+Anise-seed bag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Any man's country could get on without him . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Begun to fight with want from their cradles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Clemens is said to have said of bicycling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. . . . . . .
+Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Do not want to know about such squalid lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable. . . . . . . . . .
+Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years. . . . . . . . . . . .
+Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear. . . . . . . . . . .
+Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety . . . . . . . . .
+For most people choice is a curse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+General worsening of things, familiar after middle life. . . . . . . . .
+Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us.. . . . . . . . .
+Hard to think up anything new. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Heighten our suffering by anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+If one were poor, one ought to be deserving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Lascivious and immodest as possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Literary spirit is the true world-citizen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof . . . . . . . . .
+Malevolent agitators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Neatness that brings despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Noble uselessness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Openly depraved by shows of wealth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions. . . . . . . .
+People might oftener trust themselves to Providence. . . . . . . . . . .
+People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy. . . . . . . . .
+Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence . . . . . . . . . .
+Refused to see us as we see ourselves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it . . . . . . . . . .
+So many millionaires and so many tramps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat. . . . . . . . .
+Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer. . . . . . . .
+Some of it's good, and most of it isn't. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach . . . . . . . . .
+Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great . . . . . . . .
+Take our pleasures ungraciously. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others. . . . . . . .
+They are so many and I am so few . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it. . . . . . .
+Those who work too much and those who rest too much. . . . . . . . . . .
+Unfailing American kindness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Visitors of the more inquisitive sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+We cannot all be hard-working donkeys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it . . . . . .
+Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it . . . . . . .
+
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+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Short Stories and Essays,
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS FOR THE ENTIRE FILE:
+
+Absence of distinction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Advertising. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers . . . . . . . . 
+Ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+An artistic atmosphere does not create artists . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Anise-seed bag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Any man's country could get on without him . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Artist has seasons, as trees,  when he cannot blossom. . . . . . . . . . 
+As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. . . . . . . 
+Begun to fight with want from their cradles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Book that they are content to know at second hand. . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Business to take advantage of his necessity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Clemens is said to have said of bicycling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Competition has deformed human nature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Conditions of hucksters imposed upon poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. . . . . . . 
+Disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Do not want to know about such squalid lives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Early self-helpfulness of children is very remarkable. . . . . . . . . . 
+Encounter of old friends after the lapse of years. . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Even a day's rest is more than most people can bear. . . . . . . . . . . 
+Eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety . . . . . . . . . 
+Fate of a book is in the hands of the women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+For most people choice is a curse. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+General worsening of things, familiar after middle life. . . . . . . . . 
+God of chance leads them into temptation and adversity . . . . . . . . . 
+Happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us.. . . . . . . . . 
+Hard to think up anything new. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Heighten our suffering by anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn . . . . . . . . 
+Historian, who is a kind of inferior realist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+I do not think any man ought to live by an art . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+If he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. . . . . . . . . 
+If one were poor, one ought to be deserving. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Impropriety if not indecency promises literary success . . . . . . . . . 
+Ladies make up the pomps which they (the men) forego . . . . . . . . . . 
+Lascivious and immodest as possible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Leading part cats may play in society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Leaven, but not for so large a lump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Literary spirit is the true world-citizen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Literature beautiful only through the intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Literature has no objective value. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Literature is Business as well as Art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof . . . . . . . . . 
+Malevolent agitators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Man is strange to himself as long as he lives. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Mark Twain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Men read the newspapers, but our women read the books. . . . . . . . . . 
+More zeal than knowledge in it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Most journalists would have been literary men if they could. . . . . . . 
+Neatness that brings despair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. . . . . . . . . 
+No man ought to live by any art. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+No rose blooms right along . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Noble uselessness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Not lack of quality but  quantity of the quality . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Openly depraved by shows of wealth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Our deeply incorporated civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Our huckstering civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+People have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions. . . . . . . . 
+People might oftener trust themselves to Providence. . . . . . . . . . . 
+People of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy. . . . . . . . . 
+Picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad. . . . . . . . 
+Plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it. . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best . . . . . 
+Pure accident and by its own contributory negligence . . . . . . . . . . 
+Put aside all anxiety about style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Refused to see us as we see ourselves. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Results of art should be free to all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Reviewers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Reward is in the serial and not in the book--19th Century. . . . . . . . 
+Rogues in every walk of life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Should be very sorry to do good, as people called it . . . . . . . . . . 
+Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity. . . . . . . . . 
+So many millionaires and so many tramps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+So touching that it brought the lump into my own throat. . . . . . . . . 
+Solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer. . . . . . . . 
+Some of it's good, and most of it isn't. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Some of us may be toys and playthings without reproach . . . . . . . . . 
+Summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone. . . . . 
+Superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great . . . . . . . . 
+Take our pleasures ungraciously. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+The old and ugly are fastidious as to the looks of others. . . . . . . . 
+Their consciences needed no bossing in the performance . . . . . . . . . 
+There is small love of pure literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+They are so many and I am so few . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it. . . . . . . 
+Those who work too much and those who rest too much. . . . . . . . . . . 
+Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind. . . . . . . 
+Two branches of the novelist's trade: Novelist and Historian . . . . . . 
+Unfailing American kindness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Visitors of the more inquisitive sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+Wald with the lurch and the sway of the deck in it.. . . . . . . . . . . 
+Warner's Backlog Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+We cannot all be hard-working donkeys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
+We who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it . . . . . . 
+Whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it . . . . . . . 
+Work not truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money . . . . . . 
+Work would be twice as good if it were done twice. . . . . . . . . . . . 
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literature and Life, Entire,
+by William Dean Howells
+