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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Modern Essays
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Modern Essays
+
+Author: John Macy
+        William Allen White
+        Rupert Brooke
+        Don Marquis
+        David W. Bone
+        William McFee
+        Joyce Kilmer
+        Joseph Conrad
+        A. P. Herbert
+        O. W. Firkins
+        Hilaire Belloc
+        William Osler
+        Stephen Leacock
+        Harry Morgan Ayres
+        Thomas Burke
+        A. A. Milne
+        Max Beerbohm
+        Stuart P. Sherman
+        H. M. Tomlinson
+        Louise Imogen Guiney
+        Stewart Edward White
+        Marian Storm
+        George Santayana
+        Simeon Strunsky
+        George Saintsbury
+        Bertrand Russell
+        Philip Guedalla
+        Robert Palfrey Utter
+        Logan Pearsall Smith
+        James Branch Cabell
+        Robert Cortes Holliday
+        Harry Esty Dounce
+        Heywood Broun
+
+Editor: Christopher Morley
+
+Release Date: December 11, 2011 [eBook #38280]
+[Most recently updated: January 23, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN ESSAYS ***
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ESSAYS
+
+SELECTED BY
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+[Illustration]
+
+NEW YORK
+
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
+
+COPYRIGHT. 1921, BY
+
+HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
+
+PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. BY
+
+QUINN & BODEN COMPANY, INC.
+
+RAHWAY, N. J.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+IT had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat lightly of the
+labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland
+sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a
+collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be
+the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the
+mind.
+
+Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has conscience, are
+burdensome. There are so many considerations to be tenderly weighed;
+personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan;
+for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned
+and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the
+authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be enjoyable
+(for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered
+over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally
+sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times--twenty at least--I
+have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's _The Victorian Age in
+Literature_ to reconsider whether his ten pages on Dickens, or his
+glorious summing-up of Decadents and Æsthetes, were not absolutely
+essential. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in
+_The Education of Henry Adams_ and in Mr. Wells's _Outline of History_,
+which, I assured myself, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly
+excerpted.
+
+But I usually concluded that would not be quite fair. I have not been
+overscrupulous in this matter, for the essay is a mood rather than a
+form; the frontier between the essay and the short story is as
+imperceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and Dixon line.
+Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country between the two empires lie (to
+my way of thinking) some of the most fertile fields of prose--fiction
+that expresses feeling and character and setting rather than action and
+plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the
+essayist's mood. This is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get
+into the movies. I think of short stories such as George Gissing's, in
+that too little known volume _The House of Cobwebs_, which I read again
+and again at midnight with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget;
+and again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They have no
+brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no worked-up 'situations'
+which have to be taken at high speed to pass without breakdown over
+their brittle bridgework of credibility. They have only the modest and
+faintly melancholy savor of life itself.
+
+Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay does not have easily
+recognizable manners. It may be severely planned, or it may ramble in
+ungirdled mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it from the
+short story proper, or the merely personal memoir. That distinction,
+easily felt by the sensitive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps
+the true meaning of the word _essay_--an attempt--gives a clue. No
+matter how personal or trifling the topic may be, there is always a
+tendency to generalize, to walk round the subject or the experience, and
+view it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short story)
+cutting a carefully landscaped path through a chosen tract of human
+complication. So an essay can never be more than an attempt, for it is
+an excursion into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that in
+the composition of a short story many entertaining and valuable
+elaborations may rise in the mind of the author which must be strictly
+rejected because they do not forward the essential motive. But in the
+essay (of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot, but relevance
+to mood. That is why there are so many essays that are mere marking
+time. The familiar essay is easier to write than the short story, but it
+imposes equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in fiction the
+writer is controlled and limited and swept along by his material; but in
+the essay, the writer rides his pen. A good story, once clearly
+conceived, almost writes itself; but essays are written.
+
+There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay--the temptation to
+become too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word
+which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine flavor and
+genius of the essay--as in Bacon and Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt,
+Thackeray, Thoreau; perhaps even in Stevenson--is the rich bouquet of
+personality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. One might put
+it thus: that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious
+revelation of self done inadvertently.
+
+The art of the anthologist is the art of the host: his tact is exerted
+in choosing a congenial group; making them feel comfortable and at ease;
+keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly
+alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general
+cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the
+background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and
+seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one into some
+characteristic and felicitous vein. I think I can offer you, in this
+parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the most genuine sort; and
+having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more.
+
+But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do,
+just why this particular company has been called together. My intention
+is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that
+too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating
+those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to
+be frank, a secret ambition that a book of this sort may even be used as
+a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to
+the student that as brilliant and sincere work is being done to-day in
+the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces
+reprinted here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is
+foolery; there is straightforward literary criticism; there is pathos,
+politics, and the picturesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a
+work of art. And I would call the reader's attention to this: that the
+greater number of these essays were written not by retired æsthetes, but
+by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press.
+The names of some of the most widely bruited essayists of our day are
+absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include
+material less generally known.
+
+I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal tone of the
+introductory notes on each author. But I conceived the reader in the
+rôle of a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves.
+Pulling out one's favorites and talking about them, now and then reading
+a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some time after midnight) by
+choosing some special volume for the guest to take to bed with him--in
+the same spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the editorial
+comments have too much the manner of dressing gown and slippers; but
+what a pleasant book this will be to read in bed!
+
+And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a small contribution to
+Anglo-American friendliness. Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-,
+but that is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are much
+better acquainted with what their professional colleagues are doing in
+Britain, than they with our concerns. But surely there should be a
+congenial fraternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue in
+print. There are some of us who even imagine a day when there may be
+regular international exchanges of journalists, as there have been of
+scholars and students. The contributions to this book are rather evenly
+divided between British and American hands; and perhaps it is not
+insignificant that two of the most pleasing items come from Canada,
+where they often combine the virtues of both sides.
+
+It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and publishers who have
+assented to the reprinting of these pieces. To the authors themselves,
+and to the following publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the
+use of material copyrighted by them:--Doubleday Page and Company for the
+extracts from books by John Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall
+Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's _Niagara Falls_; the
+New York _Sun_ for Don Marquis's _Almost Perfect State_; the George H.
+Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday;
+Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to _A
+Personal Record_; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M.
+Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osler for the essay
+by the late Sir William Osler; Henry Holt and Company for Thomas Burke's
+_The Russian Quarter_; E. P. Dutton and Company for _A Word for Autumn_,
+by A. A. Milne; the New York _Evening Post_ for the essays by Stuart P.
+Sherman and Harry Esty Dounce; Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's _A
+Woodland Valentine_; Dodd, Mead and Company for Simeon Strunsky's
+_Nocturne_, from his volume _Post-Impressions_; the Macmillan Company
+for _Beer and Cider_, from Professor Saintsbury's _Notes on a Cellar
+Book_; Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's _A Free Man's
+Worship_, from _Mysticism and Logic_; Robert M. McBride and Company for
+the selection from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and Company for
+the essay by Heywood Broun; _The Weekly Review_ for the essays by O. W.
+Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The present
+ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I have
+been unable to discover. It was published in _Patrins_ (Copeland and
+Day, 1897), which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity of my
+motives I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce Miss
+Guiney's exquisite work to the younger generation that knows her hardly
+at all.
+
+CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
+
+OCTOBER, 1921
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+
+Preface                                                              iii
+
+AMERICAN LITERATURE                _John Macy_                         3
+
+MARY WHITE                         _William Allen White_              22
+
+NIAGARA FALLS                      _Rupert Brooke_                    30
+
+THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE           _Don Marquis_                      39
+
+"THE MAN O' WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND"     _David W. Bone_                    49
+
+THE MARKET                         _William McFee_                    60
+
+HOLY IRELAND                       _Joyce Kilmer_                     67
+
+A FAMILIAR PREFACE                 _Joseph Conrad_                    81
+
+ON DRAWING                         _A. P. Herbert_                    94
+
+O. HENRY                           _O. W. Firkins_                   100
+
+THE MOWING OF A FIELD              _Hilaire Belloc_                  113
+
+THE STUDENT LIFE                   _William Osler_                   128
+
+THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA           _Stephen Leacock_                 145
+
+AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION  _Harry Morgan Ayres_              153
+
+THE RUSSIAN QUARTER                _Thomas Burke_                    160
+
+A WORD FOR AUTUMN                  _A. A. Milne_                     173
+
+"A CLERGYMAN"                      _Max Beerbohm_                    177
+
+SAMUEL BUTLER                      _Stuart P. Sherman_               187
+
+BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS         _H. M. Tomlinson_                 210
+
+THE PRECEPT OF PEACE               _Louise Imogen Guiney_            219
+
+ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT            _Stewart Edward White_            229
+
+A WOODLAND VALENTINE               _Marian Storm_                    236
+
+THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY             _George Santayana_                241
+
+NOCTURNE                           _Simeon Strunsky_                 246
+
+BEER AND CIDER                     _George Saintsbury_               253
+
+A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP               _Bertrand Russell_                263
+
+SOME HISTORIANS                    _Philip Guedalla_                 278
+
+WINTER MIST                        _Robert Palfrey Utter_            291
+
+TRIVIA                             _Logan Pearsall Smith_            297
+
+BEYOND LIFE                        _James Branch Cabell_             304
+
+THE FISH REPORTER                  _Robert Cortes Holliday_          316
+
+SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG          _Harry Esty Dounce_               331
+
+THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON             _Heywood Broun_                   338
+
+
+
+
+MODERN ESSAYS
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN LITERATURE
+
+_By_ JOHN MACY
+
+
+     This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter of
+     John Macy's admirable volume _The Spirit of American Literature_,
+     published in 1913--a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, which has
+     unfortunately never reached one-tenth of the many readers who would
+     find it permanently delightful and profitable. Mr. Macy has no
+     skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to himself: no shafts
+     of limelight have followed him across the stage. But those who have
+     an eye for criticism that is vivacious without bombast, austere
+     without bitterness, keen without malice, know him as one of the
+     truly competent and liberal-minded observers of the literary scene.
+
+     Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877; graduated from Harvard in 1899;
+     did editorial service on the _Youth's Companion_ and the _Boston
+     Herald_; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Village, writing
+     a good deal for _The Freeman_ and _The Literary Review_. Perhaps,
+     if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, you
+     might see him treading thoughtfully along, with a wide sombrero
+     hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray forelock that droops over
+     his brow. You would know, as soon as you saw him, that he is a man
+     greatly lovable. I like to think of him as I first saw him, some
+     years ago, in front of the bright hearth of the charming St.
+     Botolph Club in Boston, where he was usually the center of an
+     animated group of nocturnal philosophers.
+
+     The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawakening of
+     American creative work that began in the 'teens of this century.
+     The reader will find it interesting to consider how far Mr. Macy's
+     remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.
+
+     _The Spirit of American Literature_ has been reissued in an
+     inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well worth
+     owning.
+
+AMERICAN literature is a branch of English literature, as truly as are
+English books written in Scotland or South Africa. Our literature lies
+almost entirely in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of
+the western world were freely interchanged among the nations and became
+accessible to an increasing number of readers. In literature nationality
+is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. M.
+Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to French
+literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is already an English
+classic. Geography, much less important in the nineteenth century than
+before, was never, among modern European nations, so important as we
+sometimes are asked to believe. Of the ancestors of English literature
+"Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than
+our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the true progenitors
+of English literature are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and French.
+
+American literature and English literature of the nineteenth century are
+parallel derivatives from preceding centuries of English literature.
+Literature is a succession of books from books. Artistic expression
+springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a
+river which is swollen throughout its course by new tributaries and by
+the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows,
+taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, but its power and
+volume descend from distant headwaters and affluents far up stream. Or
+it may be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or
+impoverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or damage, but
+which flows on through us, strangely impersonal and beyond our power to
+kill or create.
+
+It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will draw my
+inspiration from life!" For we have too many books that are simply
+better books diluted by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not
+born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage,
+and students find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism
+reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled
+at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers are often prolific of
+anæmic offspring. The stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and
+returns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. But of the main
+fact of descent there is no doubt.
+
+American literature is English literature made in this country. Its
+nineteenth-century characteristics are evident and can be analyzed and
+discussed with some degree of certainty. Its "American"
+characteristics--no critic that I know has ever given a good account of
+them. You can define certain peculiarities of American politics,
+American agriculture, American public schools, even American religion.
+But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is just as
+American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as American as Whittier. The
+American spirit in literature is a myth, like American valor in war,
+which is precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The
+American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which he calls America,
+can say that the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American
+home life. An Irish Englishman, Mr. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely
+idealized image of America, surprised that a face does not fit his
+image, can ask: "What is Poe doing in that galley?" There is no answer.
+You never can tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and
+lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia. Professor van Dyke
+says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do
+not understand what that means. Facts are uncomfortable consorts of
+prejudices and emotional generalities; they spoil domestic peace, and
+when there is a separation they sit solid at home while the other party
+goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious
+care, said: "It has been a matter of marvel, to European readers, that a
+man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable
+English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a marvel that Blake
+and Keats flowered in the brutal city of London a hundred years ago.
+
+The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is influenced and
+mastered, by the accumulated riches of literature. In the last century
+the strongest thinkers in our language were Englishmen, and not only the
+traditional but the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists
+were British. This may account for one negative characteristic of
+American literature--its lack of American quality. True, our records
+must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of nightingales and Persian
+gardens, have not altogether forgotten the mocking-bird and the woods of
+Maine. Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and
+Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those
+mighty commonwealths, just as English fiction written by Lancashire men
+about Lancashire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits
+and scenery of that county. But wherever an English-speaking man of
+imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is
+subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot
+escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave
+of him. He is assigned to the department of the service for which his
+gifts qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by
+drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far from his
+birthplace.
+
+Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who writes of
+California, and Bret Harte influences Kipling, who writes of India. Each
+is intensely local in subject matter. The affinity between them is a
+matter of temperament, manifested, for example, in the swagger and
+exaggeration characteristic of all three. California did not "produce"
+Bret Harte; the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras
+and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that never existed,
+and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling
+invented an army and an empire unknown to geographers and war-offices.
+
+The ideas at work among these English men of letters are
+world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is
+on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows
+west across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe
+influenced Rossetti; Whitman influenced Henley. For a century Cooper has
+been in command of the British literary marine. Literature is
+reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, as individual
+citizens, afflicted with local prides and hostilities. It takes only a
+dramatic interest in the guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly
+uttered by Gaston Paris in the Collège de France in 1870, when the city
+was beleaguered by the German armies: "Common studies, pursued in the
+same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions
+of diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country which no
+war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where souls find that refuge and
+unity which in former times was offered them by the city of God." The
+catholicity of English language and literature transcends the temporal
+boundaries of states.
+
+What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American province of the
+empire of British literature? Is it an observable general
+characteristic, and is it a virtue or a vice? There is a sense in which
+American literature is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all
+literature is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing outside of Greece and
+needed to know nothing. The Old Testament is tribal in its
+provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and
+sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. If this racial
+localism is not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is
+inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our
+cosmopolitan age and there are few traces of it in American books. No
+American poet has sung of his neighborhood with naïve passion, as if it
+were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously American, but his
+sympathies are universal, his vision is cosmic; when he seems to be
+standing in a city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his
+spirit is racing with the winds.
+
+The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an admirable kind
+of provincialism; it shows us defective in local security of judgment.
+Some of us have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of European
+culture that we could not see a poet in our own back yard until European
+poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to
+a disposition found in some Americans to disregard world standards and
+proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of
+San Francisco. The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about "The
+American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the
+mouth of that sort of gaping village reverence.
+
+Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce
+so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our
+poets desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Elizabethan dramas
+and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on
+the banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they croon
+the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his noble steed. This is
+not a very grave offence, for poets live among the stars, and it makes
+no difference from what point of the earth's surface they set forth on
+their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully
+about nightingales, and a New England Unitarian may write beautifully
+about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.
+
+The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been few of them; they
+have not been adequate in numbers or in genius to the task of describing
+the sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits from New
+Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small band as they are, with great
+domestic opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes
+to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and to Italy,
+where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense American literature
+is too globe-trotting, it has too little savor of the soil.
+
+Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, like other men
+of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice
+sometimes imputed to them by provincial critics who view literature from
+the office of a London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of
+American colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example,
+Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in outlook, but
+cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their provinciality by a
+self-conscious internationalism. Probably English and French writers may
+be similarly classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's
+collection of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and
+exquisite specimen of _provincialism_ ever prepared for the edification
+of men." It is nothing like that. It is an example of what happens when
+a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected into a volume
+because he turns out to be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not
+more remarkable for the number of nonentities it includes than "The
+Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was hack for a
+bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets that the taste of the time
+encouraged the bookseller to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit; his
+prejudices were personal and highly original, usually against the
+prejudices of his _moment and milieu._ Hawthorne is less provincial, in
+the derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, as will
+become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American notes on England,
+written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. James's British
+notes on America ("The American Scene"), written in our happy days of
+spacious vision.
+
+Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like the sky above
+a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew more about American life and
+about what other people ought to do than any other British writer
+earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly complains that Emerson is not
+sufficiently local and concrete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's
+Life, American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson loves and
+wonders at, well _Emersonised._" Longfellow would not stay at home and
+write more about the excellent village blacksmith; he made poetical
+tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from several languages
+for the delight of the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so
+heartily cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of
+Anglomania--which proves their provincialism but acquits him. Mr.
+Howells has written a better book about Venice than about Ohio. Mark
+Twain lived in every part of America, from Connecticut to California, he
+wrote about every country under the sun (and about some countries beyond
+the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of men in the
+English-speaking world, and he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is
+difficult to come to any conclusion about provincialism as a
+characteristic of American literature.
+
+American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely
+finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the
+_Youth's Companion._ The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men of
+genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American
+literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not
+lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom come
+to grips with the problems of life, especially the books cast in
+artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, and preachers attack life
+vigorously and wrestle with the meaning of it. The poets are thin,
+moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble, and
+dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to exceptions,
+are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen volumes of the _Atlantic
+Monthly_, which are a treasure-house of the richest period of American
+literary expression. In those volumes one finds a surprising number of
+vigorous, distinguished papers on politics, philosophy, science, even on
+literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose names are not
+well remembered, are clustered there about the half dozen salient men of
+genius; and the collection gives one a sense that the New England mind
+(aided by the outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an
+abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, except
+for some verses by the few standard poets. And the fiction is naïve.
+Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is almost the only
+story there that one comes on with a thrill either of recognition or of
+discovery.
+
+It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and
+passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American
+life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty
+things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the
+absence of international copyright threw our market open too
+unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an
+unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without
+paying royalty and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does
+not explain. For there were many American novelists, published, read,
+and probably paid for their work. The trouble is that they lacked
+genius; they dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not
+take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no doubt
+they were in another sense serious enough about their poor productions.
+"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions to
+the prevailing weakness and superficiality of American novels.
+
+Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its intensities,
+its significance? The American Civil War was the most tremendous
+upheaval in the world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative
+reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses,
+Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which came before the war but
+is part of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second
+series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man Without a Country"--and
+what else? The novels laid in war-time are either sanguine melodrama or
+absurd idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front--a tragic theme if
+tragically and not sentimentally conceived. Perhaps the bullet that
+killed Theodore Winthrop deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil
+War, for he was on the right road. In a general speculation such a
+might-have-been is not altogether futile; if Milton had died of whooping
+cough there would not have been any "Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this
+is that some geniuses whose works ought inevitably to have been produced
+by this or that national development may have died too soon. This
+suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is that the
+American literary imagination after the Civil War was almost sterile. If
+no books had been written, the failure of that conflict to get itself
+embodied in some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands
+of books were written by people who knew the war at first hand and who
+had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these books none
+rises to distinction.
+
+An example of what seems to be the American habit of writing about
+everything except American life, is the work of General Lew Wallace.
+Wallace was one of the important secondary generals in the Civil War,
+distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote
+"Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and
+it shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, so
+dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war experiences.
+"Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergyman with a pretty literary gift,
+is a ridiculous inanity to come from a man who has seen the things that
+Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of experience may not
+write at all, and, on the other hand, that the man of secluded life may
+have the imagination to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with
+experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering the ability and the
+ambition to write--for him to make spurious oriental romances which
+achieve an enormous popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical,
+yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The American
+literary artist has written about everything under the skies except what
+matters most in his own life. General Grant's plain autobiography, not
+art and of course not attempting to be, is better literature than most
+of our books in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity
+and the profound importance of the subject-matter.
+
+Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, but their faces
+have been averted from the mightier issues of life. They have been
+high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to the
+real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years
+from Irving's first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel,
+most of our books are eminent for just those virtues which America is
+supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are fanciful, dainty,
+reserved; they are literose, sophisticated in craftsmanship, but
+innocently unaware of the profound agitations of American life, of life
+everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of reality, Whitman,
+Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell
+and Emerson at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beautiful
+and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious of
+contemporaneous realities, too seldom vibrate with a tremendous sense of
+life.
+
+The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed his life in
+a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous seas is a
+connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss
+Marie Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. He who is
+figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the desert with the
+steam locomotive, sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little
+garden. The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most
+tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love stories that
+would have made Jane Austen smile.
+
+Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac had seen
+Pittsburgh, he would have cried: "Give me a pen!" The truth is, the
+whole country is crying out for those who will record it, satirize it,
+chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient as life and
+fresh as a wilderness. American literature is one occupation which is
+not over-crowded, in which, indeed, there is all too little competition
+for the new-comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest young
+writers are discovering the fertility of a soil that has scarcely been
+scratched.
+
+American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are not
+assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong is crude. The
+stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are
+admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, not of large
+vitality. On the other hand, some of the stronger American fictions fail
+in workmanship; for example, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid
+and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded; the novels of
+Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, who attempted to
+put national economics into something like an epic of daily bread; and
+Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A
+few American novelists have felt the meaning of the life they knew and
+have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various reasons failed
+to make first-rate novels; for example, Edward Eggleston, whose stories
+of early Indiana have the breath of actuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe,
+author of "The Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great
+ability, whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he died;
+George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who
+gives a genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its people;
+and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of
+Courage" and "Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short stories
+America has been prolific. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Annie Trumbull
+Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward
+Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are
+some of those whose short stories are perfect in their several kinds.
+But the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains an
+inferior production.
+
+On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and drama in the English
+language are the works of ten British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G.
+Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr.
+Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Sinclair, Mr. William De
+Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes,
+and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but two Americans, Mrs.
+Edith Wharton and Mr. Theodore Dreiser. There may be others, for one
+cannot pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet for
+every American that should be added, I would agree to add four to the
+British list. However, a contemporary literature that includes Mrs.
+Wharton's "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt" both
+published last year, is not to be despaired of.
+
+In the course of a century a few Americans have said in memorable words
+what life meant to them. Their performance, put together, is
+considerable, if not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one
+feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion between a limited
+expression and the multifarious immensity of the country. Our
+literature, judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, is
+insufficient to the opportunity and the need. The American Spirit may be
+figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and
+eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.
+
+
+
+
+MARY WHITE
+
+By WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE
+
+
+     Mary White--one seems to know her after reading this sketch written
+     by her father on the day she was buried--would surely have laughed
+     unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together
+     with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the
+     pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave.
+
+     This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy
+     comment. It was written for the Emporia _Gazette,_ which William
+     Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best-known,
+     most public-spirited and most truly loved of American journalists.
+     He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two
+     characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that
+     vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that
+     seems to be a Kansas birthright.
+
+     Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.
+
+
+THE Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death
+declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she
+would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life.
+Horses have fallen on her and with her--"I'm always trying to hold 'em
+in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one
+was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death
+resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured
+her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the
+parking.
+
+The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness. She came home
+from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on
+the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She
+climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was
+doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the
+country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode
+through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passers-by. She
+knew everyone in town. For a decade the little figure with the long
+pig-tail and the red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of
+Emporia, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her.
+She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of the Normal Library,
+and waved at them; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on,
+and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North
+Merchant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a
+lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still
+moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A _Gazette_ carrier passed--a
+High School boy friend--and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand;
+the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging
+limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came.
+But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,
+staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite recovered consciousness.
+
+But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year
+or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and
+she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and
+to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a
+physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back
+of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the
+streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong,
+muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first
+years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released
+a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she
+was happy because she was enlarging her horizon. She came to know all
+sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one
+of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom
+O'Connor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police
+judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her special friends, and all
+the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in
+Pepville and Stringtown, were among her acquaintances. And she brought
+home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage
+was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a continual bubble of
+joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mischievous
+without malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary
+White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five
+minutes in her life.
+
+With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her
+table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy,
+"Creative Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark
+Twain, Dickens and Kipling before she was ten--all of their writings.
+Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted her. She was
+entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assistant editor of the
+High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship
+of the Annual next year. She was a member of the executive committee of
+the High School Y. W. C. A.
+
+Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to
+draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her school books,
+funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and took a course--rather
+casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong
+purposes--and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having
+her pictures accepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of
+delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal Annual, asked her to do
+the cartooning for that book this spring, was too beautiful for words.
+She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were
+accepted, and her pride--always repressed by a lively sense of the
+ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting--was a really gorgeous
+thing to see. No successful artist ever drank a deeper draught of
+satisfaction than she took from the little fame her work was getting
+among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse--but
+never her car.
+
+For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never
+had a "party" in all her nearly seventeen years--wouldn't have one; but
+she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to
+fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White--white and
+black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing
+better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an
+occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a "date," nor went
+to a dance, except once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy
+proposition" didn't interest her--yet. But young people--great
+spring-breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads
+of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun
+she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that
+got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folks at the county home;
+scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a
+wilderness of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
+home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own
+Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it
+all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While
+there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing
+but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags
+enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to
+make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And
+the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored
+girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet,
+because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it
+inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those
+who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with
+her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness;
+and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the
+Congregational Church without consulting her parents; not particularly
+for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
+would have hooted at a "testimony." But even as a little child she felt
+the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance,
+and she wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes
+meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but
+eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
+no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but
+a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly
+seventeen. "Mother," she protested, "you don't know how much I get by
+with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above
+every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a
+child. The tom-boy in her, which was big, seemed to loathe to be put
+away forever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.
+
+Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have
+wished it; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from
+her Brother Bill's Harvard classmen--Heavens, how proud that would have
+made her! and the red roses from the _Gazette_ force--in vases at her
+head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on "Love" from the
+Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her
+democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastor and police
+judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down
+for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow,
+poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which she loved,
+and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first
+movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in
+certain moods on the phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends
+in the High School.
+
+That was all.
+
+For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen; her Latin teacher--W.
+L. Holtz; her High School principal, Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank
+Foncannon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the _Gazette_ office,
+Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to
+know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been
+transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to
+direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.
+
+A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her
+coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But
+the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was
+flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.
+
+
+
+
+NIAGARA FALLS
+
+_By_ RUPERT BROOKE
+
+
+     The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not
+     merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle
+     suggestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of
+     description was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters sent
+     to the _Westminster Gazette_ describing his trip in the United
+     States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume _Letters
+     from America_ to which Henry James contributed so affectionate and
+     desperately unintelligible a preface--one of the last things James
+     wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth reading: they are
+     full of delightful and lively comments, though sometimes much (oh,
+     very much!) too condescending. The last paragraph in this essay is
+     interesting in view of subsequent history.
+
+     Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; was at
+     King's College, Cambridge; died of blood-poisoning in the Ægean,
+     April 23, 1915.
+
+
+Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveler
+could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling
+himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake
+of their too-human comments. It is his fault if a peasant's _naïveté_
+has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen
+are more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at
+observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from
+trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the
+wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara means
+nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything.
+It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for
+Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian
+character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water
+falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human
+race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to
+surround the Falls with every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity.
+Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends,
+stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
+there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-place for all
+the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous,
+greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly,
+take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle;
+professionals, amateurs, and _dilettanti_, male and female; touts who
+would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked
+background of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into
+cars, char-à-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a
+carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards,
+moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and
+touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just
+purely, simply, merely, incessantly, indefatigably, and ineffugibly to
+tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls.
+He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but
+they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the
+Canadian and the American.
+
+Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water of the
+great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion. It descends
+with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into
+a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. Sometimes it is
+divided by islands and rocks, sometimes the eye can see nothing but a
+waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even
+seeming to stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously
+forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and
+you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and
+foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water.
+Perpetually the eye is on the point of descrying a pattern in this
+weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of
+the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile
+or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of
+almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But
+it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment. Here
+and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that
+faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really
+stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluctance,
+the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their
+fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience.
+They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are
+preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the
+sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves riot on
+towards the verge.
+
+But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and
+blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend
+and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of disaster
+the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in
+ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder
+and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of
+violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they
+fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps
+up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The
+spray falls back into the lower river once more; all but a little that
+fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air,
+graining it, and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and
+houses, and so vanishes.
+
+The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks of the river
+above the Falls told me that the center of the riverbed at the Canadian
+Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill this
+up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the power-houses.
+And this, he said, would supply the need for more power, which will
+certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
+This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary
+sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real secret of
+the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the
+feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the
+plunge of that vast body of water. If that were taken away, there would
+be little visible change, but the heart would be gone.
+
+The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the
+Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water
+does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is
+almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily level, one long
+curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is
+on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark
+against them. With both Falls the color of the water is the
+ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into
+one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun.
+Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow
+from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white
+intricacies of dropping foam become opaque and creamy. And always there
+are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a
+great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top
+to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the cliff
+opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accompanies
+you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and
+awakens again as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler
+who attempts the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare open
+his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in
+span, leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling beside
+him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that place was
+a complete circle, such as I have never seen before, and so near that I
+could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind
+the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the
+water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of
+falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So,
+if you are close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recognize
+liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware
+that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front
+of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar
+and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally to slide down some invisible
+plane of air.
+
+Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor of
+marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum that was foam.
+It slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly
+exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries more swiftly,
+smooth and ominous. As the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs,
+and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more
+terrifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its bands
+of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as
+if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly
+convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up
+into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps with incredible
+speed from the crest of one vast wave to another, along the shining
+curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually
+suggests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids moves one
+with a different sense of awe and terror from that of the Falls. Here
+the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost resolute;
+masculine vigor compared with the passive gigantic power, female,
+helpless and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear.
+
+One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every
+hour, and especially by night, when the cloud of spray becomes an
+immense visible ghost, straining and wavering high above the river,
+white and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close below
+the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy
+thoughts of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind;
+for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind
+the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were
+like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of
+life--caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct
+or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise
+in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single
+current, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a
+community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream;
+a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In
+such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet
+comforting certitude, that both men and nations are hurried onwards to
+their ruin or ending as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to
+it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And
+as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs
+over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying.... With some such
+thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder
+of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can
+never give.
+
+
+
+
+THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE
+
+_By_ DON MARQUIS
+
+
+     Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym; it is pronounced
+     _Markwiss_, not _Markee_. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's
+     amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have
+     appeared in the column (_The Sun Dial_) conducted by him for ten
+     years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional motto of
+     sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers only the serene
+     hours; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight of his Muse is
+     shining, it casts darker and even more precious shadows of satire
+     and mysticism. His many readers know by this time the depth and
+     reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis is a true philosopher and wit,
+     his humor adorns a rich and mellow gravity. When strongly moved he
+     sometimes utters an epigram that rings like steel leaving the
+     scabbard.
+
+     There are many things to be said against American newspapers, but
+     much of the indictment is quashed when one considers that every now
+     and then they develop a writer like Don Marquis. The violent haste,
+     pressure and instancy of newspaper routine, purgatorial to some
+     temperaments, is a genuine stimulus to others--particularly if they
+     are able, as in the case of the columnist, to fall back upon
+     outside contributors in their intervals of pessimism or sloth.
+
+     Mr. Marquis's _The Old Soak_, a post-prohibition portrait of a
+     genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American humor
+     since _Mr. Dooley_--some say since Mark Twain. His _Prefaces_ and
+     his poems will also be considered by the judicious. He was born in
+     Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in Philadelphia and
+     Atlanta before coming to the _Sun_ in 1912.
+
+
+I
+
+No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not
+nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can,
+somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a
+few years. The most wonderful governmental system in the world does not
+attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is
+a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals
+as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they
+die.
+
+Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all
+the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is
+untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly
+untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing
+that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing
+and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against
+them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is certainly far from a
+uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time
+of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow
+into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that
+a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in
+spite of his troubles.
+
+It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And
+most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and
+racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of
+all.
+
+In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years
+before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living ... things will be so
+arranged economically that this will be possible for each individual.
+
+Personally we look forward to an old age of dissipation and indolence
+and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years
+old. We intend to work rather hard during those fifty years and
+accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten
+years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.
+
+During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that
+we have been forced by circumstances to forego. We have always been
+compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be
+prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, industrious, respectful
+of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but
+we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our
+observation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the
+argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as
+associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the
+radicals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the
+idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good-for-nothings, the
+sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know
+any of them, far less become intimate with them.
+
+Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall
+be the ribald, useless, drunken outcast person we have always wished to
+be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not
+walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic
+beverages; in the winter we shall sit before the fire with our feet in a
+bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and
+write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our
+chair will be a forty-five caliber revolver, and we shall shoot out the
+lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off; when we
+want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window
+and be damned to it; we shall address public meetings to which we have
+been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall
+... but we don't wish to make any one envious of the good time that is
+coming to us ... we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored
+and disorderly old age.
+
+(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you can't have us pinched
+and deported for our yearnings.)
+
+We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old
+age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not
+want the kind we want ... some of you may prefer prunes and morality to
+the bitter end. Some of you may be dissolute now and may look forward to
+becoming like one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem. But for
+our part we have always been a hypocrite and we shall have to continue
+being a hypocrite for a good many years yet, and we yearn to come out in
+our true colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you want to
+be, during those last ten years, that you may be, in the Almost Perfect
+State.
+
+Any system of government under which the individual does all the
+sacrificing for the sake of the general good, for the sake of the
+community, the State, gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things
+that cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all the time.
+
+The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you
+have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth
+doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and
+get some joy out of it.
+
+Do the best you can, without straining yourself too much and too
+continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much
+you'll have to ask God to patch you up. And for all you know, patching
+you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.
+
+BUT ... overstrain yourself _now and then_. For this reason: The things
+you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and
+joyously unless you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when
+you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new
+self--if you get what we mean. And if you should ask us suddenly just
+what this has to do with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair
+we should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed to sort o' run into
+it, somehow.
+
+
+II
+
+Interplanetary communication is one of the persistent dreams of the
+inhabitants of this oblate spheroid on which we move, breathe and suffer
+for lack of beer. There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if
+we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we might learn from
+them something to our advantage. There is a disposition to concede the
+superiority of the fellows Out There ... just as some Americans
+capitulate without a struggle to poets from England, rugs from
+Constantinople, song and sausage from Germany, religious enthusiasts
+from Hindustan and cheese from Switzerland, although they have not
+tested the goods offered and really lack the discrimination to determine
+their quality. Almost the only foreign importations that were ever
+sneezed at in this country were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.
+
+But are the Martians ... if Martians there be ... any more capable than
+the persons dwelling between the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn,
+between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.?
+Perhaps the Martians yearn toward earth, romantically, poetically, the
+Romeos swearing by its light to the Juliets; the idealists and
+philosophers fabling that already there exists upon it an ALMOST PERFECT
+STATE--and now and then a wan prophet lifting his heart to its gleams,
+as a cup to be filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and courage.
+For this earth, it is also a star.
+
+We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in the far stars, the
+philosophers, poets, the prophets ... or _are_ they wrong?
+
+They are both right and wrong, as we are probably both right and wrong
+about them. If we tumbled into Mars or Arcturus or Sirius this evening
+we should find the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the
+inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers, no doubt ...
+and they would be equally disappointed by the way we flitter, frivol,
+flutter and flivver.
+
+And yet, that other thing would be there too ... that thing that made
+them look at our star as a symbol of grace and beauty.
+
+Men could not think of THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE if they did not have it
+in them ultimately to create THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE.
+
+We used sometimes to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, that song in stone
+and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist, at dusk, when the
+tides of shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a surf of glory
+and mystery and illusion against the tall towers of Manhattan. Seen from
+the middle arch of the bridge at twilight, New York with its girdle of
+shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its quick pulsations
+of unstable light is a miracle of splendor and beauty that lights up the
+heart like the laughter of a god.
+
+But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with the details. The dirty
+old shed from which the "L" trains and trolleys put out with their
+jammed and mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the unknown
+bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same dirty old shed; on a hot,
+damp night the pasty streets stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you
+are trodden and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their
+hopping victims; you are encompassed round about by the ugly and the
+sordid, and the objectionable is exuded upon you from a myriad candid
+pores; your elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snowflakes
+that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery brow, and you say:
+"Beauty? Aw, h--l! What's the use?"
+
+And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was created by these
+people and people like these.... You have seen the tall towers of
+Manhattan, wonderful under the stars. How did it come about that such
+growths came from such soil--that a breed lawless and sordid and prosaic
+has written such a mighty hieroglyphic against the sky? This glamor out
+of a pigsty ... how come? How is it that this hideous, half-brute city
+is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?
+
+It comes about because the wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy
+to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored;
+no conscious thought; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of
+commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of
+them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the
+broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one
+labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and
+trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul; the
+aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were
+the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one
+of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the
+silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the
+unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation,
+the inchoate art, the submerged spirit--these groped and found each
+other and gathered themselves together and worked themselves into the
+tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow
+of the sunrise and the sea winds.
+
+Humanity triumphs over its details.
+
+The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and
+expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being
+of the race.
+
+The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it
+first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots. Coming
+closer, you will be profoundly discouraged at the number of low spots,
+not to say two-spots. Coming still closer, you will become discouraged
+once more by the reflection that the same stuff that is in the high
+spots is also in the two-spots.
+
+
+
+
+"THE MAN-O'-WAR'S 'ER 'USBAND"
+
+_By_ DAVID W. BONE
+
+
+     Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his ship
+     will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone describes the
+     loss of the _Cameronia_, his command, torpedoed in the
+     Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive us for
+     pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title pays
+     tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the
+     sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not
+     less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture of a
+     sea tragedy is taken from _Merchantmen-at-Arms_, a history of the
+     British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of enthralling
+     power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother, Muirhead
+     Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers.
+
+     David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow) in 1873; his
+     father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his great-grandfather
+     was a boyhood companion of Robert Burns. Bone went to sea as an
+     apprentice in the _City of Florence_, an old-time square-rigger, at
+     the age of fifteen; he has been at sea ever since. He is now master
+     of S.S. _Columbia_ of the Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New
+     York Harbor, as she has carried passengers between the Clyde and
+     the Hudson for more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea
+     tale, The _Brass-bounder_, published in 1910, has become a classic
+     of the square-sail era; his _Broken Stowage_ (1915) is a collection
+     of shorter sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have
+     reflected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone
+     will take a permanent and honorable place.
+
+
+A sense of security is difficult of definition. Largely, it is founded
+upon habit and association. It is induced and maintained by familiar
+surroundings. On board ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be
+contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be sailing beyond the
+influences of the land and of other ships. The sea is the same we have
+known for so long. Every item of our ship fitment--the trim arrangement
+of the decks, the set and rake of mast and funnel, even the furnishings
+of our cabins--has the power of impressing a stable feeling of custom,
+normal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought to recall
+that in their homely presence we are endangered. Relating his
+experiences after having been mined and his ship sunk, a master confided
+that the point that impressed him most deeply was when he went to his
+room for the confidential papers and saw the cabin exactly in everyday
+aspect--his longshore clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella
+standing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard.
+
+Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assurance. Unlike us, they
+cannot carry their home with them to the battlefields. All their scenes
+and surroundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance and comfort
+from the familiar presence of their comrades. At sea in a ship there is
+a yet greater incitement to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless
+sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. The atmosphere that
+is so familiar and comforting to us, is to many of them an environment
+of dread possibilities.
+
+It is with some small measure of this sense of security--tempered by our
+knowledge of enemy activity in these waters--we pace the bridge. Anxiety
+is not wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flotsam that may
+have come from the decks of a French mail steamer, torpedoed three days
+ago. The passing of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the
+steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly presence of
+familiar surroundings has effect in allaying immediate fears. The rounds
+of the bridge go on--the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass,
+the small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. Two days out
+from Marseilles--and all well! In another two days we should be
+approaching the Canal, and then--to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a
+term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accompany us for the present,
+but the filmy glare of the sun, now low, and a backward movement of the
+glass foretells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed to make
+the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each bow, our two escorting
+destroyers conform to the angles of our zigzag--spurring out and
+swerving with the peculiar "thrown-around" movement of their class.
+Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch of the ship's crew,
+military signalers are posted; the boats swung outboard have each a
+party of troops on guard.
+
+An alarmed cry from aloft--a half-uttered order to the steersman--an
+explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in
+her stride!
+
+The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of impact. Hatches, coal, a huge
+column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent
+on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and
+hangs--watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water--the
+steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on
+his forehead.... Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the
+thrust of the engines marking the heartbeats of the stricken ship.
+
+Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits: they have been but two days
+on the sea. The torpedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of
+our calculated drill. The troops are at their evening meal when the blow
+comes, the explosion killing many outright. We had counted on a
+proportion of the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to
+balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw in emergency.
+Hurrying from the mess-decks as enjoined, the quick movement gathers way
+and intensity: the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gangways and
+passages are blocked in the struggle. There is the making of a
+panic--tuned by their outcry, _"God! O God! O Christ!"_ The swelling
+murmur is neither excited nor agonized--rather the dull, hopeless
+expression of despair.
+
+The officer commanding troops has come on the bridge at the first
+alarm. His juniors have opportunity to take their stations before the
+struggling mass reaches to the boats. The impossibility of getting among
+the men on the lower decks makes the military officers' efforts to
+restore confidence difficult. They are aided from an unexpected quarter.
+The bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. "Hey! Steady up
+you men doon therr," he shouts. "Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels
+croodin' th' ledders!"
+
+We could not have done it as well. The lad is plainly in sight to the
+crowd on the decks. A small boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr!" The
+effect is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is arrested.
+
+The engines are stopped--we are now beyond range of a second
+torpedo--and steam thunders in exhaust, making our efforts to control
+movements by voice impossible. At the moment of the impact the
+destroyers have swung round and are casting here and there like hounds
+on the scent: the dull explosion of a depth-charge--then another, rouses
+a fierce hope that we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has
+broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial still holds and,
+when a measure of order on the boatdeck allows, we send a message of our
+peril broadcast. There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our
+bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. We have
+nearly three thousand on board. There are boats for sixteen
+hundred--then rafts. Boats--rafts--and the glass is falling at a rate
+that shows bad weather over the western horizon!
+
+Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with only
+half-complements in them, will not serve. We pass orders to lower away
+in any condition, however overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it
+is with some apprehension we watch the packed boats that drop away from
+the davit heads. The shrill ring of the block-sheaves indicates a
+tension that is not far from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats
+reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the
+tackles--far beyond their working load--is too great for all to stand to
+it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown violently
+to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A
+third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at
+parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights,
+disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We
+can make no attempt to reach the men in the water. Their life-belts are
+sufficient to keep them afloat: the ship is going down rapidly by the
+head, and there remains the second line of boats to be hoisted and swung
+over. The chief officer, pausing in his quick work, looks to the bridge
+inquiringly, as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two hands
+suffice to mark our estimate.
+
+The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch of the bows. Pumps are
+utterly inadequate to make impression on the swift inflow. The chief
+engineer comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only a
+question of time. How long? Already the water is lapping at a level of
+the foredeck. Troops massed there and on the forecastle-head are
+apprehensive: it is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them
+for so long. The commanding officer sets example by a cool nonchalance
+that we envy. Posted with us on the bridge, his quick eyes note the
+flood surging in the pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have
+removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the sea.
+
+Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving _Nemesis_ to steam fast
+circles round the sinking ship, _Rifleman_ swings in and brings up
+alongside at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety and distress,
+we cannot but admire the precision of the destroyer captain's
+manœuver--the skilful avoidance of our crowded life-boats and the men
+in the water--the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant that brings
+her to a standstill at the lip of our brimming decks. The troops who
+have stood so well to orders have their reward in an easy leap to
+safety. Quickly the foredeck is cleared. _Rifleman_ spurts ahead in a
+rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to eddy in her wash. She takes
+up the circling high-speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in
+and embark a number of our men.
+
+It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the
+gallant service of the destroyers. There remain the rafts, but many of
+these have been launched over to aid the struggling men in the water.
+Half an hour has passed since we were struck--thirty minutes of frantic
+endeavor to debark our men--yet still the decks are thronged by a packed
+mass that seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers alters
+the outlook. _Rifleman's_ action has taken over six hundred. A sensible
+clearance! _Nemesis_ swings in with the precision of an express, and the
+thud and clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a continuous
+drumming note of deliverance. Alert and confident, the naval men accept
+the great risks of their position. The ship's bows are entered to the
+water at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weighing, casting
+her stern high in the air. The bulkheads are by now taking place of keel
+and bearing the huge weight of her on the water. At any moment she may
+go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of the destroyer and
+bear her down. For all the circling watch of her sister ship, the
+submarine--if still he lives--may get in a shot at the standing target.
+It is with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. Her decks
+are jammed to the limit. She can carry no more. _Nemesis_ lists heavily
+under her burdened decks as she goes ahead and clears.
+
+Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheelhouse goes on ringing the
+angles of time and course as though we were yet under helm and speed.
+For a short term we have noted that the ship appears to have reached a
+point of arrest in her foundering droop. She remains upright as she has
+been since righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like the
+lady she always was, she has added no fearsome list to the sum of our
+distress. The familiar bridge, on which so many of our safe sea-days
+have been spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold uneasy. She
+cannot remain for long afloat. The end will come swiftly, without
+warning--a sudden rupture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight.
+We are not now many left on board. Striving and wrenching to man-handle
+the only remaining boat--rendered idle for want of the tackles that have
+parted on service of its twin--we succeed in pointing her outboard, and
+await a further deepening of the bows ere launching her. Of the
+military, the officer commanding, some few of his juniors, a group of
+other ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a muster of
+seamen, a few stewards, are banded with us at the last. We expect no
+further service of the destroyers. The position of the ship is
+over-menacing to any approach. They have all they can carry. Steaming at
+a short distance they have the appearance of being heavily overloaded;
+each has a staggering list and lies low in the water under their deck
+encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick out-throw of the
+remaining boat and the chances of a grip on floating wreckage to count
+upon.
+
+On a sudden swift sheer, _Rifleman_ takes the risk. Unheeding our
+warning hail, she steams across the bows and backs at a high speed: her
+rounded stern jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch on
+a projection and give with the ring of buckling steel--she turns on the
+throw of the propellers and closes aboard with a resounding impact that
+sets her living deck-load to stagger.
+
+We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, our small company
+endeavors to get foothold on her decks. The destroyer widens off at the
+rebound, but by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged aboard. One
+fails to reach safety. A soldier loses grip and goes to the water. The
+chief officer follows him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the
+devoted labors of the last half-hour, he is in no condition to effect a
+rescue. A sudden deep rumble from within the sinking ship warns the
+destroyer captain to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our
+shipmates: the propellers tear the water in a furious race that sweeps
+them away, and we draw off swiftly from the side of the ship.
+
+We are little more than clear of the settling fore-end when the last
+buoyant breath of _Cameronia_ is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to
+the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly,
+steadily, as we had seen her leave the launching ways at Meadowside, she
+goes down.
+
+
+
+
+THE MARKET
+
+_By_ WILLIAM MCFEE
+
+
+     William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his writing
+     he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a background than
+     as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen this brief
+     and colorful little sketch to represent his talent because it is
+     different from the work with which most of his readers are
+     familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic of
+     him--an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings of
+     commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been for
+     some years an engineer in the sea service of the United Fruit
+     Company, with a Mediterranean interim--reflected in much of his
+     recent writing--during the War.
+
+     The publication of McFee's _Casuals of the Sea_ in 1916 was
+     something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to the
+     reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and subtlety.
+     His earlier books, _An Ocean Tramp_ and _Aliens_ (both republished
+     since), had gone almost unnoticed--which, it is safe to say, will
+     not happen again to anything he cares to publish. His later books
+     are _Captain Macedoine's Daughter_, _Harbours of Memory_, and _An
+     Engineer's Notebook_. He was born at sea in 1881, the son of a
+     sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb of London, served his
+     apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, and has been in ships
+     most of the time since 1905.
+
+
+There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door; a rap having within
+its insistent urgency a shadow of delicate diffidence, as though the
+person responsible were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe
+to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four-forty. One of the
+dubious by-products of continuous service as a senior assistant at sea
+is the habit of waking automatically about 4 A. M. This gives one
+several hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one's sins, frailties, and
+(more rarely) triumphs and virtues. For a man who gets up at say
+four-thirty is regarded with aversion ashore. His family express
+themselves with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and meditate, or
+suffer the ignominy of being asked when he is going away again.
+
+But this morning, in these old Chambers in an ancient Inn buried in the
+heart of London City, I have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for
+this momentous departure from a life of temporary but deliberate
+indolence is a lady. "Cherchez la femme," as the French say with the dry
+animosity of a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being on the
+outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as already hinted, with a sharp
+insistent delicacy. To this romantic summons I reply with an articulate
+growl of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve the anxiety
+of any reader who imagines an impending elopement it may be stated in
+succinct truthfulness that we are bound on no such desperate venture. We
+are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand, to Covent Garden
+Market, to see the arrival of the metropolitan supply of produce.
+
+Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as primitive as that favored
+by gentlemen aroused to go on watch, and placating an occasional
+repetition of the tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I
+take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts of my door,
+discover a young woman standing by the window looking out upon the
+quadrangle of the old Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is
+continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for articles in the
+press. That is her profession, or one of her professions--writing
+articles for the press. The other profession is selling manuscripts,
+which constitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual agent's
+commission she is selling one of my manuscripts. Being an unattached
+and, as it were, unprotected male, she plans little excursions about
+London to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is attired in the
+flamboyant finery of a London flowergirl. She is about to get the
+necessary copy for a special article in a morning paper. With the
+exception of a certain expectant flash of her bright black Irish eyes,
+she is entirely businesslike. Commenting on the beauty of an early
+summer morning in town, we descend, and passing out under the ponderous
+ancient archway, we make our leisurely progress westward down the
+Strand.
+
+London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that
+extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about
+her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness
+which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are shining in the
+sunlight as though paved with "patines of bright gold." Early 'buses
+rumble by from neighboring barns where they have spent the night. And,
+as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward into the great
+rivers of traffic soon to pour round its base like some bold Byzantine
+promontory, we see Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high.
+From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross the great wains
+are arriving from Paddington Terminal, from the market-garden section of
+Middlesex and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts laden with
+vegetables from Brentwood and Coggeshall, and neat vans packed with
+crates of watercress which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and
+Cambridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four-horse vehicles
+from the docks, vehicles with peaches from South Africa, potatoes from
+the Canary Islands, onions from France, apples from California, oranges
+from the West Indies, pineapples from Central America, grapes from Spain
+and bananas from Colombia.
+
+We turn in under an archway behind a theatre and adjacent to the
+stage-door of the Opera House. The booths are rapidly filling with
+produce. Gentlemen in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable marbled
+note-books walk about with an important air. A mountain range of
+pumpkins rises behind a hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being
+suspended from rails. The heads of barrels are being knocked in,
+disclosing purple grapes buried in corkdust. Pears and figs, grown under
+glass for wealthy patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken
+crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in a splash of ruddy
+gold on the plank runway. A wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets,
+and the broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the air is
+heavy with the acrid sweetness.
+
+We pick our way among the booths and stalls until we find the flowers.
+Here is a crowd of ladies, young, so-so and some quite matronly, and all
+dressed in this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken. They are
+grouped about an almost overpowering mass of blooms. Roses just now
+predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a
+glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without
+ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge
+aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one
+imagines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round baskets,
+eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to the majestic blazonry of
+the roses and the dew-spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by.
+
+"And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a
+moment from the flowers. She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs
+piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and
+displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs
+and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh,
+penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the
+flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps
+Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see the
+timber pier and the long line of rackety open-slatted cars jangling into
+the dark shed, pushed by a noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys
+lying asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats covering their
+faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise the blue mountains; behind is
+the motionless blue sea. I hear the whine of the elevators, the
+monotonous click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible and
+argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the tropic day, and see the
+gleam of the white waves breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I
+recall the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a solitude
+alive, if one is equipped with knowledge, with a ceaseless warfare of
+winged and crawling hosts. And while my companion is busily engaged in
+getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out
+of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his
+two-wheeled barrow is the last link in the immense chain of
+transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the
+cockney pedestrian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a banana for
+a couple of pennies.
+
+
+
+
+HOLY IRELAND
+
+_By_ JOYCE KILMER
+
+
+     This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kilmer
+     ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and insight that
+     lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub Street. In him,
+     as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become legendary, it was
+     part of his religion and his dream-life, and he treated it with
+     real affection and humor. You will find it cropping out many times
+     in his verses. The Irish problem as it is reflected in this country
+     is not always clearly understood. Ireland, in the minds of our
+     poets, is a mystical land of green hills, saints and leprechauns,
+     and its political problems are easy.
+
+     Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at Rutgers
+     College and Columbia University; taught school; worked on the staff
+     of the Standard Dictionary; passed through phases of socialism and
+     Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and joined the Sunday
+     staff of the New York _Times_ in 1913. He was killed fighting in
+     France in 1918. This sketch is taken from the second of the three
+     volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday, his friend and executor,
+     has collected Joyce Kilmer's work.
+
+
+We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day--the third of a
+four days' journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles
+were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen
+stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a
+little house in a side street.
+
+"Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and
+dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a
+spotless stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three
+children--a girl of eight years, a boy of five, a boy of three. They
+stared with round frightened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first
+they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We at once climbed
+to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night. First we
+lifted the packs from one another's aching shoulders: then, without
+spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.
+
+For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an occasional groan, an
+oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like fireflies in a
+forest. Then a voice came from the corner:
+
+"Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily searched. There was no
+Sergeant Reilly to be found.
+
+"I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint," said the voice. And
+with the curiosity of the American and the enthusiasm of the Irish we
+lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.
+
+He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were off and his
+bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to
+expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the
+little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years of
+soldiering and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic
+sweetness, he was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More." We
+listened respectfully.
+
+"They cheer the King and then salute him," said Sergeant Reilly.
+
+"A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we all joined in the chorus,
+"Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More."
+
+"Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to
+talk at the top of their voices. What they said Heaven knows, but the
+tones were friendly, even admiring.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, "the lady who
+runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take
+off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don't
+crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs."
+
+Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true bourgeoise, with all
+the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the
+authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the
+attic of her house to sleep in--nothing more; no light, no heat. Also,
+wood is very expensive in France--for reasons that are engraven in
+letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless--
+
+"Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And she brought nearer to
+the fire all the chairs the establishment possessed and some chests and
+boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was
+Solange, went out into the snow and came back with heaping armfuls of
+small logs. The fire blazed merrily--more merrily than it had blazed
+since August, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was
+thick with steam from our drying socks.
+
+Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had generously admitted all eleven of
+us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in
+spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French
+was "du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon jour." Those of us who knew a
+little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for the
+others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We learned
+that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle just one
+month before our arrival in her home. She showed us with simple pride
+and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she showed us those
+of her two brothers--one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner
+of war--of her mother and father, of herself dressed for First
+Communion.
+
+This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we
+would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if
+Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Communion, then
+Madame's face cleared.
+
+"Mais oui!" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous êtes Catholiques,
+n'est-ce pas?"
+
+At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this
+question affirmatively. Tattered prayer-books and somewhat dingy
+scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered their
+surprise and delight to each other, and every exhibit called for a new
+outburst.
+
+"Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voilà, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le
+Sacré Cœur!" (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent
+as it looks in print).
+
+Now other treasures, too, were shown--treasures chiefly photographic.
+There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame
+and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They admired
+and sympathized; they exclaimed appropriately at the beauty of every
+girl's face, the tenderness of every pictured mother. We had become the
+intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and we her into
+ours.
+
+Soldiers--American soldiers of Irish descent--have souls and hearts.
+These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But our
+stomachs remained--and that they yearned was evident to us. We had made
+our hike on a meal of hardtack and "corned willy." Mess call would sound
+soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through the snowy
+streets to the temporary mess-shack? We knew our supply wagons had not
+succeeded in climbing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread
+and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great depression settled
+upon us.
+
+But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.
+
+"Boys," he said, "this here lady has got a good fire going, and I'll bet
+she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?"
+
+The proposal was received joyously at first. Then some one said:
+
+"But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I--not a damn sou!" said
+another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.
+
+Again Sergeant Reilly spoke:
+
+"I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he said. "But let's have
+a show-down. I guess we've got enough to buy somethin' to eat."
+
+It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of the
+search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made up for
+the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins on the
+table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a Chinese
+piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money
+came in all to eight francs.
+
+It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry soldiers these days
+in France. But there was no harm in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an
+ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly in
+explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that we
+were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and that
+we wanted her to cook us something to eat.
+
+Now Madame was what they call in New England a "capable" woman. In a
+jiffy she had the money in Solange's hand and had that admirable child
+cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what
+she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for
+supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the fire,
+the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed.
+Nothing in the way of a food cupboard could be seen. And the only other
+room of the house was the bare attic.
+
+When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself these
+articles: (1) two loaves of war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3)
+three cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat; (6) a bag of
+coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated, exactly
+the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.
+
+Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then with a veritable French
+trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange
+had put the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a chain
+over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed, Madame
+standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret that I do
+not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping the
+potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any attempt on their part
+to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.
+
+We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The only
+absentees were the two little boys, Michael and Paul. And they were
+really absent only from our board--they were in the room, in the great
+built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange. Their
+little bodies were covered by the three-foot thick mattress-like red
+silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us
+unblinkingly all the evening.
+
+But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of
+dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame
+stopped her chattering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped her
+chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather searchingly
+at us. We didn't know what was the matter, but we felt rather
+embarrassed.
+
+Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make
+foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was
+surprised to see that American Catholics did not say grace before
+eating like French Catholics.
+
+We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved
+the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an
+ex-seminarian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if a
+bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after we had
+blessed ourselves: "Benedicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat
+Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen."
+
+Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we
+sat down again to eat.
+
+It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation--except on the
+part of Madame and Solange--but there was plenty of good cheer. Also
+there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of
+us--half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who
+drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an
+apple pie without stopping to take breath, was satisfied. There were
+toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly--toasts to Madame, and to
+the children, and to France, and to the United States, and to the Old
+Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent only
+to illuminati of Sergeant Reilly's circle).
+
+The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly said, we sat
+before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and
+full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by
+Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the
+evening's expenditures--totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.
+
+Now when soldiers are unhappy--during a long, hard hike, for
+instance--they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy,
+as on the evening now under consideration, they sing to express their
+satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." We shook the
+kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We
+informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact, the whole village,
+that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana
+home. We grew sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant Reilly
+obliged with a reel--in his socks--to an accomplishment of whistling and
+handclapping.
+
+Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She
+responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and
+finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking
+down some paper-covered books.
+
+There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of
+pages. Then, after some preliminary coughing and humming, the music
+began--the woman's rich alto blending with the child's shrill but sweet
+notes. And what they sang was "Tantum ergo Sacramentum."
+
+Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this
+company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why we
+found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem
+appropriate to all of us--to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive
+a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on
+Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fitting. Not
+one of us then or later expressed any surprise that this hymn, familiar
+to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down
+the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to
+us in this strange land and in these strange circumstances.
+
+Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the season
+was appropriate, one of us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item
+on the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our ex-seminarian knew
+all the words and the rest of us came in strong with "Venite, adoremus
+Dominum."
+
+Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies
+obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune" and other simple ballads of old
+France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and
+there was yawning, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening's
+entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections. We
+sang--as best we could--the "Star-Spangled Banner," Solange and her
+mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we
+attempted "La Marseillaise." Of course, we did not know the words.
+Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the
+song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got to work in
+earnest. Madame sang with us, and Solange. But during the final stanza
+Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and
+looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from under the red
+comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred
+hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about
+that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's widow--we all felt it.
+And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.
+
+There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchanging, that hang over the
+green slopes of some mountains I know. I have seen them on the Irish
+hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they are
+made of the tears of good brave women.
+
+Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant
+Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw.
+Blankets, shelter-halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep.
+Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The
+final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a corner of his mouth.
+
+"That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said. "We sure were in luck
+when we struck this billet."
+
+He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes. Then
+he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the floor,
+where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.
+
+"You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is right. What do you know
+about that lady, anyway?"
+
+"Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty white."
+
+"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how much trouble that woman
+took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a
+damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give
+her. And she's out about six francs for firewood, too--I wish to God I
+had the money to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and
+hungry, too.
+
+"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an
+occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she
+cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit
+down there with her like we was her family. And look at the way she and
+the little Sallie there sung for us.
+
+"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing
+them church hymns to me that way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn
+sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I
+sort of realize what we're fighting for now, and I never did before.
+It's for women like that and their kids.
+
+"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing them hymns. I
+remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there's many
+women like that in France now--telling their beads and singing the old
+hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she's just after treating
+us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I
+think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.'"
+
+
+
+
+A FAMILIAR PREFACE
+
+_By_ JOSEPH CONRAD
+
+
+     This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in whatever
+     form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It is from
+     the preface to _A Personal Record_, that fascinating
+     autobiographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of
+     a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in English. As
+     a companion piece, those who have the honor of the writer's craft
+     at heart should read Conrad's preface to _The Nigger of the
+     Narcissus_.
+
+     "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the
+     miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to wonder
+     what some newspaper owners--say Mr. Hearst--would reply to that?
+
+     Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here. If by
+     any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be to his
+     soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.
+
+
+As a general rule we do not want much encouragement to talk about
+ourselves; yet this little book[A] is the result of a friendly
+suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself
+with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice
+insisted, "You know, you really must."
+
+It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must!...
+
+You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put
+his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of
+sound has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this
+by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable
+than reflective. Nothing humanely great--great, I mean, as affecting a
+whole mass of lives--has come from reflection. On the other hand, you
+cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for
+instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek.
+Shouted with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction, these two by
+their sound alone have set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry,
+hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric. There's "virtue" for
+you if you like!... Of course, the accent must be attended to. The right
+accent. That's very important. The capacious lung, the thundering or the
+tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was
+an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics
+commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the
+right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
+
+What a dream for a writer! Because written words have their accent, too.
+Yes! Let me only find the right word! Surely it must be lying somewhere
+among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out
+aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It
+may be there, close by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's
+no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a
+pottle of hay at the first try. For myself, I have never had such luck.
+
+And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to
+tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and
+fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world
+unmoved? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and
+something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts,
+maxims, reflections which chance has preserved for the edification of
+posterity. Among other sayings--I am quoting from memory--I remember
+this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic
+truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking
+that it is an easy matter for an austere emperor to jot down grandiose
+advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic;
+and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of
+heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.
+
+Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words
+of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However
+humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of
+Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more fit for a moralist than
+for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also
+sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it
+delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to
+embroil one with one's friends.
+
+"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine among
+either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do
+as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the
+mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life
+have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in
+his work. He stands there, the only reality in an invented world, among
+imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only
+writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains,
+to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil; a suspected rather than a
+seen presence--a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction.
+In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help
+thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic
+author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons
+esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the
+opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of
+fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.
+
+While these reminiscent pages were appearing serially I was remonstrated
+with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence
+wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not
+sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print
+till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence
+and his experience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and
+emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of
+his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some
+three years ago, when I published "The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of
+impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical
+remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift
+they recommend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its
+men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me
+what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to
+their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else.
+It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I
+am incorrigible.
+
+Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of
+sea life, I have a special piety toward that form of my past; for its
+impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be
+responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the
+call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having
+broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter
+which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by
+great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me,
+and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally
+unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so
+mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind
+force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant
+service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then,
+that in my two exclusively sea books--"The Nigger of the Narcissus," and
+"The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth"
+and "Typhoon")--I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the
+vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the
+simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that
+something sentient which seems to dwell in ships--the creatures of their
+hands and the objects of their care.
+
+One's literary life must turn frequently for sustenance to memories and
+seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to
+write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or praise it for
+what it is not, or--generally--to teach it how to behave. Being neither
+quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these
+things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the insignificance
+which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other.
+But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left
+standing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying
+onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so
+much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.
+
+It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism
+I am suspected of a certain unemotional, grim acceptance of facts--of
+what the French would call _sécheresse du cœur_. Fifteen years of
+unbroken silence before praise or blame testify sufficiently to my
+respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the
+garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the
+man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume
+which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I
+feel hurt in the least. The charge--if it amounted to a charge at
+all--was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of regret.
+
+My answer is that if it be true that every novel contains an element of
+autobiography--and this can hardly be denied, since the creator can
+only express himself in his creation--then there are some of us to whom
+an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the
+virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not
+always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more
+humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emotion miss the mark of
+either laughter or tears. Nothing more humiliating! And this for the
+reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of
+emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoidably in disgust or
+contempt. No artist can be reproached for shrinking from a risk which
+only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with impunity. In a
+task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the
+world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the
+regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the
+dignity of one's work.
+
+And then--it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this
+earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of
+pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity
+for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their
+source in weaknesses which must be recognized with smiling compassion as
+the common inheritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world pass
+into each other, mingling their forms and their murmurs in the twilight
+of life as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzling
+brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the
+distant edge of the horizon.
+
+Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over
+laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of
+imaginative literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender
+oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within
+one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for
+love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence
+can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound
+to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because
+of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea
+training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one
+thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of
+losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which
+is the first condition of good service. And I have earned my notion of
+good service from my earlier into my later existence. I, who have never
+sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful--I
+have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the
+more circumscribed space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have
+become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the ineffable company of
+pure esthetes.
+
+As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself
+mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness
+of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable
+or hate what was not hateful out of deference for some general
+principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know
+not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dangers and joys
+with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have
+always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of
+emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others
+deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond
+the bounds of our normal sensibility--innocently enough, perhaps, and of
+necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the
+pitch of natural conversation--but still we have to do that. And surely
+this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the
+victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity,
+and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too
+blunt for his purpose--as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent
+emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivelling and
+giggles.
+
+These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals,
+condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear
+duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, however
+humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his
+thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined
+adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of circumstance
+or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say
+Nay to his temptations if not his conscience?
+
+And besides--this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly
+open talk--I think that all ambitions are lawful except those which
+climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellectual
+and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit
+of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much
+the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such
+ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to
+believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for
+other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work?
+To try to go deeper is not to be insensible. A historian of hearts is
+not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he
+may be, since his aim is to reach the wry fount of laughter and tears.
+The sight of human affairs deserves admiration and pity. They are worthy
+of respect, too. And he is not insensible who pays them the
+undemonstrative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile
+which is not a grin. Resignation, not mystic, not detached, but
+resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one
+of our feelings for which it is impossible to become a sham.
+
+Not that I think resignation the last word of wisdom. I am too much the
+creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to
+will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will
+is--or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life
+and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the
+How. As the Frenchman said, "_Il y a toujours la manière_." Very true.
+Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in
+indignations and enthusiasms, in judgments--and even in love. The manner
+in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner
+truth is foreshadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.
+
+Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal
+world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as
+old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of
+Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way
+or other can expect to attract much attention I have not been
+revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty
+convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards
+ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace
+of fanaticism and intolerance it contains. No doubt one should smile at
+these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All
+claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from
+which a philosophical mind should be free.
+
+
+
+
+ON DRAWING
+
+_By_ A. P. HERBERT
+
+
+     A. P. Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger English
+     writers, and has done remarkable work in fields apparently
+     incompatible: light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beautifully
+     written tragic novel, _The Secret Battle_. This last was
+     unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War, but
+     its sale was tragically small. _The House by the River_, a later
+     book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale, apparently
+     cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery story," but
+     really a study of selfishness and cowardice done with startling
+     irony and intensity.
+
+     Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College, Oxford,
+     where he took his degree in 1914. He saw military service at the
+     Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the staff of _Punch_.
+     There is no young writer in England from whom one may more
+     confidently expect a continuance of fine work. This airy and
+     delicious little absurdity is a perfect example of what a genuine
+     humorist can do.
+
+     If there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the
+     oldfashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let
+     him examine Mr. Herbert's _The Secret Battle_. This book often
+     sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek--e.g.,
+     Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet,
+     informal and swift. If these are not the cardinal prose virtues,
+     what are?
+
+
+It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom; and this is
+true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I
+have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have
+to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such
+functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can
+satisfactorily pursue during the speeches. One really cannot sing
+during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an
+expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know
+Drawing as well as it can be known.
+
+The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and
+by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials.
+An ordinary departmental committee is no use: generally they only give
+you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and
+very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is
+essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much
+artistic pleasure--except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose
+between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and
+making foot-marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thingummy.
+
+Much the best committees from the point of view of material are
+committees about business which meet at business premises--shipping
+offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white
+blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the
+directors of that firm are Drawers; for they always give you two
+pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.
+
+When you have selected your committee and the speeches are well away,
+the Drawing begins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the
+chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but
+just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of selecting a subject for
+their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when
+they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are discouraged. If they
+had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.
+
+As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. 1).
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 1]
+
+When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most
+difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where the eye goes.
+If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man
+spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye
+(Fig. 2).
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 2]
+
+Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a
+gamble. Personally, I go in for _strong heads_ (Fig. 3).
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 3]
+
+I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is
+not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads; they make it so
+difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck.
+
+The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this
+the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4).
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 4]
+
+I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the
+southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you
+can't go back; not unless you are on a _very_ good committee which
+provides india-rubber as well as pencils.
+
+Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy or black, or lightish
+and thin. It depends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For
+myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up better
+(Fig. 5).
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 5]
+
+Until one draws hair one never realizes what large heads people have.
+Doing the hair takes the whole of a speech, usually, even one of the
+chairman's speeches.
+
+This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place.
+And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he
+would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at
+the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.
+
+I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing.
+Sometimes I draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is
+always a dud.
+
+There, you see (Fig. 6)? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a
+low forehead and beetling brows--a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a
+powerful face. The one on the left was meant to be another Bolshevik,
+arguing with him. But he has turned out to be a lady, so I have had to
+give her a "bun." She is a lady solicitor; but I don't know how she came
+to be talking to the Bolshevik.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 6]
+
+When you have learned how to do men, the only other things in Drawing
+are Perspective and Landscape.
+
+PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road
+with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).
+
+I have put in a fence as well.
+
+LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most
+amusing, especially fluffy trees.
+
+Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).
+
+Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would
+have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 7]
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 8]
+
+But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like
+this through.
+
+There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a
+man front-face. It can't be done.
+
+
+
+
+O. HENRY
+
+_By_ O. W. FIRKINS
+
+
+     Several years ago I turned to _Who's Who in America_ in hope of
+     finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilliant
+     reviews--chiefly of poetry--were appearing in _The Nation_. I found
+     no entry, but every few months I would again rummage that stout red
+     volume with the same intention, forgetting that I had done so
+     before without success. It seemed hardly credible that a critic so
+     brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious compilers of that
+     work, which includes hundreds of hacks and fourflushers. When
+     gathering the contents of this book I tried _Who's Who_ again,
+     still without result. I wrote to Mr. Firkins pleading for
+     biographical details; modestly, but firmly, he denied me.
+
+     So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind one
+     of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. One
+     sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destination by
+     the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and paradoxes. That
+     is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, an author who has
+     often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not say overpraised) by
+     people incompetent to appreciate his true greatness. Mr. Robert
+     Cortes Holliday, in an essay called "The Amazing Failure of O.
+     Henry," said that O. Henry created no memorable characters. Mr.
+     Firkins suggests the obvious but satisfying answer--New York itself
+     is his triumph. The New York of O. Henry, already almost erased
+     physically, remains a personality and an identity.
+
+     Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of Minnesota,
+     and a contributing editor of _The Weekly Review_, in which this
+     essay first appeared in September, 1919. The footnotes are, of
+     course, his own.
+
+
+There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle class views him
+as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy; part of the higher
+criticism sees in him little but sensation and persiflage. Between these
+views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens are _ipso
+facto_ the demons of Christianity. Unmixed assertions, however, are
+commonly mixtures of truth and falsehood; there is room to-day for an
+estimate which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither.
+
+There is one literary trait in which I am unable to name any writer of
+tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry.[B] It is not primary or
+even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value _per se_ than
+the condition or foundation of values. But its utility is manifest, and
+it is rare among men: Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of
+its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence
+would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories--not to
+the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer
+phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed,
+but to the disposition of masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a
+half-educated American provincial should have been original in a field
+in which original men have been copyists is enough of itself to make his
+personality observable.
+
+Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely superfluous. I supply
+two instances. Two lads, parting in New York, agree to meet "After
+Twenty Years" at a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful;
+but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual silence and
+ignorance have turned the one into a dashing criminal, the other into a
+sober officer of the law. Behind the picturesque and captivating
+rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral problem of
+arresting gravity. This is dealt with in six pages of the "Four
+Million." The "Furnished Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve
+pages. Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower West Side a man
+trails a woman. Chance leads him to the very room in which the woman
+ended her life the week before. Between him and the truth the avarice of
+a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of a lie. In the bed in which
+the girl slept and died, the man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of
+the deadly fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mournful
+coincidence forever from the knowledge of mankind. O. Henry gave these
+tales neither extension nor prominence; so far as I know, they were
+received without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body of work in
+which such specimens are undistinguished hardly requires comment.
+
+A few types among these stories may be specified. There are the Sydney
+Cartonisms, defined in the name; love-stories in which divided hearts,
+or simply divided persons, are brought together by the strategy of
+chance; hoax stories--deft pictures of smiling roguery; "prince and
+pauper" stories, in which wealth and poverty face each other, sometimes
+enact each other; disguise stories, in which the wrong clothes often
+draw the wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim sacrifices
+his beloved watch to buy combs for Della, who, meanwhile, has sacrificed
+her beloved hair to buy a chain for Jim.
+
+This imperfect list is eloquent in its way; it smooths our path to the
+assertion that O. Henry's specialty is the enlistment of original method
+in the service of traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty
+years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane to the old homestead.[C]
+
+Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives and antitheses in
+which his own faculty delighted. In mechanical invention he is almost
+the leader of his race. In a related quality--a defect--his leadership
+is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the probable, or, more
+precisely, of the available in the improbable, ever became equally
+weakened or deadened in a man who made his living by its exercise. The
+improbable, even the impossible, has its place in art, though that place
+is relatively low; and it is curious that works such as the "Arabian
+Nights" and Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the incredible,
+are the works which give almost no trouble on the score of
+verisimilitude. The truth is that we reject not what it is impossible to
+prove, or even what it is possible to disprove, but what it is
+impossible to imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimaginable--that
+is his crime.
+
+The right and wrong improbabilities may be illustrated from two burglar
+stories. "Sixes and Sevens" contains an excellent tale of a burglar and
+a citizen who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the score of
+their common sufferings from rheumatism. This feeling in practice would
+not triumph over fear and greed; but the feeling is natural, and
+everybody with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. Nature
+_tends_ towards that impossibility, and art, lifting, so to speak, the
+lid which fact drops upon nature, reveals nature in belying fact. In
+another story, in "Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in
+which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette of their mutual
+relation by formulas derived from short stories with which both are
+amazingly conversant. This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an
+imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the maturity of small
+boys will have naught to do with this insanity.
+
+But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inventions in his tales the
+very utterance of which--not the mere substance but the utterance--on
+the part of a man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses the
+reader as incredible. In a "Comedy in Rubber," two persons become so
+used to spectatorship at transactions in the street that they drift into
+the part of spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. Can
+human daring or human folly go further? O. Henry is on the spot to prove
+that they can. In the "Romance of a Busy Broker," a busy and forgetful
+man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his hand to the
+stenographer _whom he had married the night before_.
+
+The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I came upon the
+following sentence: "Never will the imagination approach the
+improbabilities and the antitheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated
+February 21, 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was not born
+till September of the same year.
+
+Passing on to style, we are still in the land of antithesis. The style
+is gross--and fine. Of the plenitude of its stimulus, there can be no
+question. In "Sixes and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental
+morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and blows. O. Henry's
+public seems imaged in that young man. But I draw a sharp distinction
+between the _tone_ of the style and its _pattern_. The tone is brazen,
+or, better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incorrigible; it
+reeks with that air of _performance_ which is opposed to real
+efficiency. But the pattern is another matter. The South rounds its
+periods like its vowels; O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in
+his boyhood. His sentences are _built_--a rare thing in the best writers
+of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, he was strong, though it
+must be confessed that the tale-teller was now and then hustled from the
+rostrum by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce a felicity
+with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the
+sovereigns of English. "In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs.
+McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat
+went into Mrs. McCaskey."
+
+I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet even for these
+levities with which his pages are so liberally besprinkled or bedaubed,
+some half-apology may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is
+consummate. A horseman who should dismount to pick up a bauble would be
+childish; O. Henry picks it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is
+most pardonable in the man with whom its use is least exclusive and
+least necessary. There are men who, going for a walk, take their dogs
+with them; there are other men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute
+slang for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to the second
+will exactly illustrate the superiority of O. Henry to the abject
+traffickers in slang.
+
+In the "Pendulum" Katy has a new patch in her crazy quilt which the ice
+man cut from the end of his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate,"
+threading the mazes of a banana grove is compared to "paging the palm
+room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith." O. Henry's is the type
+of mind to which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room are
+presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging continuity. There was
+hardly an object in the merry-go-round of civilized life that had not
+offered at least an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming eyes.
+Nothing escapes from the besom of his allusiveness, and the style is
+streaked and pied, almost to monotony, by the accumulation of lively
+details.
+
+If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but it is part of the
+grimness of the bargain that destiny drives with us that the mixture of
+the crude and the rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites
+and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the kingdom of style O.
+Henry's estates were princely, but, to pay his debts, he must have sold
+them all.
+
+Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have been offset by
+extraordinary defects. To lift our author out of the class of brilliant
+and skilful entertainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I should
+answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowledge of setting, which is clear
+and first-hand, but subsidiary, above the order of events, which is,
+generally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which are sound and
+warm, but almost purely derivative, there is a rather small, but
+impressive body of first-hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his
+endurance may hinge.
+
+I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York. With the
+exception of his New Orleans, I care little for his South and West,
+which are a boyish South and West, and as little, or even less, for his
+Spanish-American communities. My objection to his opera-bouffe republics
+is, not that they are inadequate as republics (for that we were entirely
+prepared), but that they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his
+show from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even among
+pretenses, and a faith must be induced before its removal can enliven
+us. But his New York has quality. It is of the family of Dickens's
+London and Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the family. Mr.
+Howells, in his profound and valuable study of the metropolis in a
+"Hazard of New Fortunes," is penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand,
+is _penetrated_. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is caught in
+the mesh of the imagination.
+
+O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human destiny and human
+nature. In these pictures he is not formally accurate; he could never or
+seldom set his truth before us in that moderation and proportion which
+truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality. He was apt to present
+his insight in a sort of parable or allegory, to upraise it before the
+eyes of mankind on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggeration.
+Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a lie, and tales which are
+dramatized epigrams are subject to a like constraint. The force,
+however, is real. I could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful
+exposition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial story in the
+volume which appropriates its title. It wanted only the skilled romantic
+touch of a Gautier or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the
+masterpieces of its kind in contemporary letters.
+
+Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly perceptible; we draw
+close to the bare fact. O. Henry, fortunate in plots, is peculiarly
+fortunate in his renunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it
+is also costly. There is an admirable little story called the "Pendulum"
+(in the "Trimmed Lamp"), the simplicity of whose fable would have
+satisfied Coppée or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom, has
+come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture. She departs for a few
+hours, and, by the break in usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to
+womanhood. She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That is all. O.
+Henry could not have given us less--or more. Farcical, clownish, if you
+will, the story resembles those clowns who carry daggers under their
+motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious hat, the reader
+smiles, and quails. I will mention a few other examples of insights with
+the proviso that they are not specially commended to the man whose quest
+in the short story is the electrifying or the calorific. They include
+the "Social Triangle," the "Making of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign
+Policy of Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief Début of
+Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Complete Life of John Hopkins" in
+the "Voice of the City." I cannot close this summary of good points
+without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive portrayal of humane
+and cheerful scoundrels in the "Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false
+to species, is faithful to genus.
+
+O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side, both in merits and
+defects, reminds us of those park benches so characteristic of his tales
+which are occupied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at the
+other. But, to complete the image, we must add as a casual visitor to
+that bench a seer or a student, who, sitting down between the previous
+comers and suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should gaze
+with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison upon the passing crowd.
+
+In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian tradition meet. His
+mind, quick to don the guise of modernity, was impervious to its spirit.
+The specifically modern movements, the scientific awakening, the
+religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, the
+enfranchisement of women--these never interfered with his artless and
+joyous pursuit of the old romantic motives of love, hate, wealth,
+poverty, gentility, disguise, and crime. On two points a moral record
+which, in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, rises
+almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excitement had become
+available and permissible, this worshiper of stimulus never touched with
+so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The
+second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. His passionate
+concern for this wrong derives a peculiar emphasis from the general
+refusal of his books to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in
+its collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he is asked: "Are
+you one of the bunch?" (meaning one of the bunch of grasping and
+grinding employers), the response, through all its slang, is
+soul-stirring. "'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the fellow
+that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind man for his
+pennies.'" The author of that retort may have some difficulty with the
+sentries that watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none with
+the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem.
+
+
+
+
+THE MOWING OF A FIELD
+
+_By_ HILAIRE BELLOC
+
+
+     We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of the
+     scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious fellow:
+     if you read him much you will find yourself trying to imitate him;
+     there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught the trick from
+     Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the essay I wrote about
+     him in a book called _Shandygaff_. You can refer to it there, which
+     will be good business all round. I know it is a worthy essay, for
+     much of it was cribbed from an article by Mr. Thomas Seccombe,
+     which an American paper lifted from the English journal which,
+     presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for it. I wrote it for the Boston
+     _Transcript_, where I knew the theft would be undetected; and in
+     shoveling together some stuff for a book (that was in 1917, the
+     cost of living was rising at an angle of forty-five degrees, as so
+     many graphs have shown) I put it in, forgetting (until too late)
+     that some of it was absolute plunder.
+
+     Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake to
+     think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish it to
+     become _their_ property, so that they may more perfectly respect
+     it."
+
+     And by the way, Max Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in _A Christmas
+     Garland_, is something not to be missed. It is one of the best
+     proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm does not
+     waste his time mimicking the small fry.
+
+     Hilaire Belloc--son of a French father and an English mother; his
+     happy junction of both English and French genius in prose is
+     hereditary--was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex as a
+     child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol
+     College, Oxford, 1893-95, and sat four years (1906-10) in the House
+     of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gatherings of
+     essays) _On Nothing_, _On Everything_, _On Something_, _Hills and
+     the Sea_, _First and Last_; then you can read _The Path to Rome_,
+     and _The Four Men_, and _Caliban's Guide to Letters_ and _The
+     Pyrenees_ and _Marie Antoinette_. If you desire the bouillon (or
+     bullion) of his charm, there is _A Picked Company_, a selection (by
+     Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work. It is published
+     by Methuen and Company, 36 Essex Street W. C., London.
+
+     Having done so, come again: we will go off in a corner and talk
+     about Mr. Belloc.
+
+
+There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear,
+where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the
+scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to
+that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they
+choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alone
+leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable: now green
+where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the
+homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they
+reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot
+attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the
+floor of the valley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by
+lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.
+
+The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great
+rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that
+other. But the plains above which they have traveled and the Weald to
+which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall.
+The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the
+salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze; and those whose blood was
+nourished here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and
+all the life that all things draw from the air.
+
+In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches
+that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a
+glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and
+glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw the sea. To this place
+very lately I returned.
+
+The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not
+less charming than when a distant memory had enshrined them, but much
+more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not
+intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy
+ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more
+beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now returned to me
+as I approached--a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a
+small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a
+low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things
+fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the
+place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its
+better reality. "Here," I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say
+is reserved for the soul: pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined
+save in a moment when at last it is attained."
+
+When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house
+I knew, I looked around a little (though it was already evening), and I
+saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for
+the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do--of those
+things at least which are very old--there is an exact moment when they
+are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it
+works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not
+given at the precise moment when they would have filled him with
+delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn
+of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in
+the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is
+thickest; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has
+already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for
+delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it
+comes year after year) that we have rain always in South England between
+the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are
+over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had
+come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south-east wind;
+and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which
+always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the
+very end of that rain--but not later--that grass should be cut for hay.
+True, upland grass, which is always thin, should be cut earlier than
+the grass in the bottoms and along the water meadows; but not even the
+latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower
+and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a
+harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before
+maturity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our
+hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and
+Time with a sickle; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes
+always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass
+too late than too early; and I, under that evening and come back to
+these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time.
+June was in full advance; it was the beginning of that season when the
+night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it,
+never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.
+
+Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the
+mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window,
+all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald,
+where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the
+hazel spinneys, and especially along the little river Adur, one of the
+rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had
+awakened me, and I went down the stairs and along the stone floors to
+where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I
+remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe,
+just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were
+many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and
+the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.
+
+When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there
+were already many colors in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen
+my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry.
+Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to
+get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an
+advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait
+till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours of
+work (and those the coolest), and next--which is more important--you
+lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. So
+I at once began to sharpen my scythe.
+
+There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe, and it is worth
+describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will
+see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then
+also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good
+thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's
+mowing. The scythe you stand upright, with the blade pointing away from
+you, and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping
+it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade-edge and
+then down the other, beginning near the handle and going on to the point
+and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps,
+cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen
+to you.
+
+To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the
+stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly; then it rings
+musically to one note; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and
+stone were exactly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp
+enough; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite
+silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.
+
+When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much
+for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily
+recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower.
+Mowing well and mowing badly--or rather not mowing at all--are separated
+by very little; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle,
+and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing.
+For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower
+Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all
+these things: He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the
+point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the
+handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with
+his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it
+clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the
+ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his
+stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the
+meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be
+done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of
+these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just
+barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of
+his mowing are always the same.
+
+So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much
+is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with
+which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on
+good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed
+wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you
+treat it honorably and in a manner that makes it recognize its service.
+The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that
+swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength
+into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work.
+The bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force
+the scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as
+nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up
+every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every
+stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing
+a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repetitive
+mood: be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious
+only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound. In
+this mowing should be like one's prayers--all of a sort and always the
+same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work them, as it
+were, with half your mind: that happier half, the half that does not
+bother.
+
+In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went
+forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and
+bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until
+the air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I sharpened my
+scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down
+again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell rang
+in the chapel above me--that is, long before six o'clock, which is the
+time for the Angelus--I had many swathes already lying in order parallel
+like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great contrast
+with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of
+Val-ès-Dunes, where--
+
+    The tall son of the Seven Winds
+    Came riding out of Hither-hythe,
+
+and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made
+a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)
+
+      was like a scythe
+    In Arcus when the grass is high
+    And all the swathes in order lie,
+    And there's the bailiff standing by
+      A-gathering of the tithe.
+
+So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and
+from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be
+seen.
+
+I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the
+village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in
+older times, before I had left the Valley.
+
+He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but
+which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called--Iberian, or
+Celtic, or what you will--is the permanent root of all England, and
+makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the
+Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Everywhere else you will find it active
+and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors
+turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that
+our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and
+ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I believe, an
+older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the
+strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and
+camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the
+upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road
+from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and
+mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and
+were glad to see the captains and the priests destroyed. They remain;
+and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin
+and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.
+
+To this race, I say, belonged the man who now approached me. And he said
+to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar." Then he also said "Ar," as in
+duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.
+
+Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand;
+and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly." For it is a good
+custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a courteous
+pastime; and though what he was after was money, and what I wanted was
+his labor at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were
+free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the
+dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the
+Valley; and we cover them up with a pretty body of fiction and
+observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not
+begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom
+with lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion:--
+
+First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own
+steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say
+that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder,
+according to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking critically
+at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains.
+There is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their
+exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: "That's a fine pig
+you have there, Mr. ----" (giving the seller's name). "Ar, powerful fine
+pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in
+one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I
+say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the
+pig, and falls into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved
+by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig, naming
+half the proper price, or a little less. Then the seller remains in
+silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly,
+till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will
+also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the
+pig--and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly
+accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a
+spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you
+what I _will_ do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value,
+the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a
+crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in
+the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.
+
+Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or lime, always with
+elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and
+more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous
+higgling. As happened with the land at Underwaltham, which the
+mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred
+and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a
+sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great fortunes, a man in a
+motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two
+thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they might
+take his offer or leave it; and all because he did not begin by praising
+the land.
+
+Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get
+his scythe. But I went into this house and brought out a gallon jar of
+small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small
+ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs
+called "I see you," we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because
+he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the
+other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun
+rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only
+for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there
+was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of
+linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead
+lying around them when the battle is over and done.
+
+Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man
+and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the
+musical sharpening of a scythe.
+
+The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley;
+for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading;
+and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the
+field lay flat and smooth, with the very green short grass in lanes
+between the dead and yellow swathes.
+
+These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our
+return at daybreak; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could,
+for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to
+spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling
+blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the
+carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little
+over two acres; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.
+
+When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and
+deliberate evening; so that as we sat a little while together near the
+rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the
+trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I
+paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should
+meet in the same place before sunrise.
+
+He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do,
+making their walking a part of the easy but continual labor of their
+lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north
+and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind
+the woods of No Man's Land.
+
+
+
+
+THE STUDENT LIFE
+
+By WILLIAM OSLER
+
+
+     Sir William Osler, one of the best-loved and most influential
+     teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began his
+     education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, where he
+     served as professor of medicine, 1874-84. Wherever he worked his
+     gifted and unique personality was a center of inspiration--at the
+     University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns Hopkins, 1889-1904.
+     In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Professor of Medicine; he died
+     in England in 1919.
+
+     Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great
+     doctor's place in their own world; but one would like to see his
+     honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. His
+     generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully
+     expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can
+     afford to overlook _Æquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Alabama
+     Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Immortality and
+     Counsels and Ideals_, this last an anthology collected from his
+     professional papers by one of his pupils. He stands in the
+     honorable line of those great masters who have found their highest
+     usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. His lucid and
+     exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quotation from
+     the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness,
+     put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. One could get a
+     liberal education in literature merely by following up all his
+     quotations and references. He was more deeply versed in the
+     classics than many professors of Greek and Latin; the whole music
+     of English poetry seemed to be current in his blood. His essay on
+     Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful story _Via Wireless_, tells
+     the student more about that poet than many a volume of biography.
+     When was biography more delightfully written than in his volume _An
+     Alabama Student?_
+
+     Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osler attended him years ago, "Osler
+     believes in the gospel of encouragement--of putting the best
+     construction on things--the best foot forward. He's a fine fellow
+     and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel of
+     encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight reader.
+     Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his books
+     are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young
+     student. As one who has found them an unfailing delight, I venture
+     to hope that our medical confrères may not be the only readers to
+     enjoy their vivacity and charm.
+
+
+EXCEPT it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study
+than a student. Shakespeare might have made him a fourth in his immortal
+group. The lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine frenzy,
+the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the student aflame with the
+desire for knowledge are of "imagination all compact." To an absorbing
+passion, a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring energy, if
+the student is to become a devotee of the gray-eyed goddess to whose law
+his services are bound. Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of
+Minerva is not for all. For the one, the pure life; for the other, what
+Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." Here again the student
+often resembles the poet--he is born, not made. While the resultant of
+two molding forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the hidden
+germinal energies, which produce in each one of us national, family, and
+individual traits, the true student possesses in some measure a divine
+spark which sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies
+definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by which you may
+recognize the genuine article from a Boojum--an absorbing desire to know
+the truth, an unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open,
+honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.
+
+At the outset do not be worried about this big question--Truth. It is a
+very simple matter if each one of you starts with the desire to get as
+much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the
+whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be
+content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
+In this unsatisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the
+thirst--a thirst that from the soul must rise!--the fervent longing, are
+the be-all and the end-all. What is the student but a lover courting a
+fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is
+brought out his second great characteristic--steadfastness of purpose.
+Unless from the start the limitations incident to our frail human
+faculties are frankly accepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you.
+The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that
+the best men accept--with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining
+at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger
+portion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive does the student
+escape perdition. It is not, as Charles Lamb remarks, that some people
+do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, but the
+tragic fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condition of
+mind-blindness in which the truth is not recognized, though it stares
+you in the face. This can never happen to a man who has followed step by
+step the growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases of its
+evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of life that every truth has
+to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey
+knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years
+demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to publish the
+facts on which the truth was based.[D]
+
+Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift
+his position to meet the new conditions in which new truths are born, or
+old ones modified beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart
+will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense
+of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say
+advisedly an honest heart--the honest head is prone to be cold and
+stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain
+that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put
+the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It
+will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by
+the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of
+a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a
+lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.
+
+You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since
+that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude
+of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be
+in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most
+delightful way, signifying a bond of intellectual filiation. A fraternal
+attitude is not easy to cultivate--the chasm between the chair and the
+bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a
+cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a
+height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The
+new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps
+unconsciously by his very manner antagonizing minds to whose level he
+cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his
+juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no
+appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught--both are in the
+same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated,
+the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor,
+whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first
+consideration.
+
+The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the
+education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a
+medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years
+under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will falter and fail in
+the race or whether you will be faithful to the end depends on the
+training before the start, and on your staying powers, points upon which
+I need not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few may become
+great students, and now and again one of you will be found who does
+easily and well what others cannot do at all, or very badly, which is
+John Ferriar's excellent definition of a genius.
+
+In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which is the life of this
+continent, it is not easy to train first-class students. Under present
+conditions it is hard to get the needful seclusion, on which account it
+is that our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I have
+always been much impressed by the advice of St. Chrysostom: "Depart from
+the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is
+hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep her fruit till it be
+ripe." The dilettante is abroad in the land, the man who is always
+venturing on tasks for which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind
+fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curriculum: and while
+many things are studied, few are studied thoroughly. Men will not take
+time to get to the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the
+price the modern student pays for success. Thoroughness is the most
+difficult habit to acquire, but it is the pearl of great price, worth
+all the worry and trouble of the search. The dilettante lives an easy,
+butterfly life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which the
+treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or wrung by patient
+research in the laboratories. Take, for example, the early history of
+this country--how easy for the student of the one type to get a
+smattering, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of the
+French and Spanish settlements. Put an original document before him, and
+it might as well be Arabic. What we need is the other type, the man who
+knows the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in what may be
+called the embryology of history, has yet a powerful vision for the
+minutiæ of life. It is these kitchen and backstair men who are to be
+encouraged, the men who know the subject in hand in all possible
+relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is possible to become
+so absorbed in the problem of the "enclitic de," or the
+structure of the flagella of the Trichomonas, or of the toes of the
+prehistoric horse, that the student loses the sense of proportion in his
+work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which are valueless
+because not in touch with current knowledge. You remember poor Casaubon,
+in "Middlemarch," whose painful scholarship was lost on this account.
+The best preventive to this is to get denationalized early. The true
+student is a citizen of the world, the allegiance of whose soul, at any
+rate, is too precious to be restricted to a single country. The great
+minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language,
+and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company
+of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the
+cosmopolitan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the
+full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands
+other than his own--French, English, German, American, Japanese,
+Russian, Italian--there must be no discrimination by the loyal student
+who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind
+and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what
+stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the
+rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be
+effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How
+often has it happened that years of precious time have been given to a
+problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, because of the
+ignorance of what had been done elsewhere. And it is not only book
+knowledge and journal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed.
+The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not
+only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises,
+but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate
+better the failings or successes in his own line of work, perhaps to
+look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose
+limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own.
+Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the
+enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concentration must then
+be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a
+knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the
+slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he
+may be led to make what he believes to be important discoveries, but
+which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think
+that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may,
+perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt--men who
+took the whole field of knowledge for their domain and viewed it as from
+a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can
+tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle,
+as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of
+the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will
+look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal
+to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans-continental railway. He
+is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to
+order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling when or
+where he may arise. The conditions seem to be present even under the
+most unlikely externals. Some of the greatest students this country has
+produced have come from small villages and country places. It is
+impossible to predict from a study of the environment, which a "strong
+propensity of nature," to quote Milton's phrase again, will easily bend
+or break.
+
+The student must be allowed full freedom in his work, undisturbed by the
+utilitarian spirit of the Philistine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts
+pure science. The present remarkable position in applied science and in
+industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible by men who did
+pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, in biology, and in physiology,
+without a thought in their researches of any practical application. The
+members of this higher group of productive students are rarely
+understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as little their
+unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect of the practical side of
+the problems.
+
+Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as an honored member of
+the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of
+some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack and
+wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swearings and starings,
+pribbles and prabbles"; but all that has changed with the curriculum,
+and the "Meds" now roar you as gently as the "Theologs." On account of
+the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your studies, what I
+have said upon the general life and mental attitude of the student
+applies with tenfold force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily
+anomalies and diseases--the machine in order, the machine in disorder,
+and the business yours to put it to rights. Through all the phases of
+its career this most complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will
+be the subject of our study and of your care--the naked, new-born
+infant, the artless child, the lad and the lassie just aware of the tree
+of knowledge overhead, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman
+with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the aged, peaceful in
+the contemplation of the past. Almost everything has been renewed in the
+science and in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries
+there has been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential
+features of the life which is our contemplation and our care. The sick
+love-child of Israel's sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the
+great Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and
+"Tully's daughter mourned so tenderly," are not of any age or any
+race--they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, and
+the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is
+laid, and this eternal note of sadness would be insupportable if the
+daily tragedies were not relieved by the spectacle of the heroism and
+devotion displayed by the actors. Nothing will sustain you more potently
+than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine, as perhaps it may
+be thought, the true poetry of life--the poetry of the commonplace, of
+the ordinary man, of the plain, toilworn woman, with their loves and
+their joys, their sorrows and their griefs. The comedy, too, of life
+will be spread before you, and nobody laughs more often than the doctor
+at the pranks Puck plays upon the Titanias and the Bottoms among his
+patients. The humorous side is really almost as frequently turned
+towards him as the tragic. Lift up one hand to heaven and thank your
+stars if they have given you the proper sense to enable you to
+appreciate the inconceivably droll situations in which we catch our
+fellow creatures. Unhappily, this is one of the free gifts of the gods,
+unevenly distributed, not bestowed on all, or on all in equal portions.
+In undue measure it is not without risk, and in any case in the doctor
+it is better appreciated by the eye than expressed on the tongue.
+Hilarity and good humor, a breezy cheerfulness, a nature "sloping toward
+the southern side," as Lowell has it, help enormously both in the study
+and in the practice of medicine. To many of a somber and sour
+disposition it is hard to maintain good spirits amid the trials and
+tribulations of the day, and yet it is an unpardonable mistake to go
+about among patients with a long face.
+
+Divide your attentions equally between books and men. The strength of
+the student of books is to sit still--two or three hours at a
+stretch--eating the heart out of a subject with pencil and notebook in
+hand, determined to master the details and intricacies, focussing all
+your energies on its difficulties. Get accustomed to test all sorts of
+book problems and statements for yourself, and take as little as
+possible on trust. The Hunterian "Do not think, but try" attitude of
+mind is the important one to cultivate. The question came up one day,
+when discussing the grooves left on the nails after fever, how long it
+took for the nail to grow out, from root to edge. A majority of the
+class had no further interest; a few looked it up in books; two men
+marked their nails at the root with nitrate of silver, and a few months
+later had positive knowledge on the subject. They showed the proper
+spirit. The little points that come up in your reading try to test for
+yourselves. With one fundamental difficulty many of you will have to
+contend from the outset--a lack of proper preparation for really hard
+study. No one can have watched successive groups of young men pass
+through the special schools without profoundly regretting the haphazard,
+fragmentary character of their preliminary education. It does seem too
+bad that we cannot have a student in his eighteenth year sufficiently
+grounded in the humanities and in the sciences preliminary to
+medicine--but this is an educational problem upon which only a Milton or
+a Locke could discourse with profit. With pertinacity you can overcome
+the preliminary defects and once thoroughly interested, the work in
+books becomes a pastime. A serious drawback in the student life is the
+self-consciousness, bred of too close devotion to books. A man gets shy,
+"dysopic," as old Timothy Bright calls it, and shuns the looks of men,
+and blushes like a girl.
+
+The strength of a student of men is to travel--to study men, their
+habits, character, mode of life, their behavior under varied conditions,
+their vices, virtues, and peculiarities. Begin with a careful
+observation of your fellow students and of your teachers; then, every
+patient you see is a lesson in much more than the malady from which he
+suffers. Mix as much as you possibly can with the outside world, and
+learn its ways. Cultivated systematically, the student societies, the
+students' union, the gymnasium, and the outside social circle will
+enable you to conquer the diffidence so apt to go with bookishness and
+which may prove a very serious drawback in after-life. I cannot too
+strongly impress upon the earnest and attentive men among you the
+necessity of overcoming this unfortunate failing in your student days.
+It is not easy for every one to reach a happy medium, and the
+distinction between a proper self-confidence and "cheek," particularly
+in junior students, is not always to be made. The latter is met with
+chiefly among the student pilgrims who, in traveling down the Delectable
+Mountains, have gone astray and have passed to the left hand, where
+lieth the country of Conceit, the country in which you remember the
+brisk lad Ignorance met Christian.
+
+I wish we could encourage on this continent among our best students the
+habit of wandering. I do not know that we are quite prepared for it, as
+there is still great diversity in the curricula, even among the leading
+schools, but it is undoubtedly a great advantage to study under
+different teachers, as the mental horizon is widened and the sympathies
+enlarged. The practice would do much to lessen that narrow "I am of Paul
+and I am of Apollos" spirit which is hostile to the best interests of
+the profession.
+
+There is much that I would like to say on the question of work, but I
+can spare only a few moments for a word or two. Who will venture to
+settle upon so simple a matter as the best time for work? One will tell
+us there is no best time; all are equally good; and truly, all times are
+the same to a man whose soul is absorbed in some great problem. The
+other day I asked Edward Martin, the well-known story-writer, what time
+he found best for work. "Not in the evening, and never between meals!"
+was his answer, which may appeal to some of my hearers. One works best
+at night; another, in the morning; a majority of the students of the
+past favor the latter. Erasmus, the great exemplar, says, "Never work at
+night; it dulls the brain and hurts the health." One day, going with
+George Ross through Bedlam, Dr. Savage, at that time the physician in
+charge, remarked upon two great groups of patients--those who were
+depressed in the morning and those who were cheerful, and he suggested
+that the spirits rose and fell with the bodily temperature--those with
+very low morning temperatures were depressed, and vice versa. This, I
+believe, expresses a truth which may explain the extraordinary
+difference in the habits of students in this matter of the time at which
+the best work can be done. Outside of the asylum there are also the two
+great types, the student-lark who loves to see the sun rise, who comes
+to breakfast with a cheerful morning face, never so "fit" as at 6 A. M.
+We all know the type. What a contrast to the student-owl with his
+saturnine morning face, thoroughly unhappy, cheated by the wretched
+breakfast bell of the two best hours of the day for sleep, no appetite,
+and permeated with an unspeakable hostility to his vis-à-vis, whose
+morning garrulity and good humor are equally offensive. Only gradually,
+as the day wears on and his temperature rises, does he become endurable
+to himself and to others. But see him really awake at 10 P. M. while our
+blithe lark is in hopeless coma over his books, from which it is hard to
+rouse him sufficiently to get his boots off for bed, our lean
+owl-friend, Saturn no longer in the ascendant, with bright eyes and
+cheery face, is ready for four hours of anything you wish--deep study,
+or
+
+    Heart affluence in discoursive talk,
+
+and by 2 A. M. he will undertake to unsphere the spirit of Plato. In
+neither a virtue, in neither a fault we must recognize these two types
+of students, differently constituted, owing possibly--though I have but
+little evidence for the belief--to thermal peculiarities.
+
+
+
+
+THE DECLINE OF THE DRAMA
+
+_By_ STEPHEN LEACOCK
+
+
+     Nineteen hundred and ten was an important year. Halley's comet came
+     along, and some predicted the End of the World. And Stephen
+     Leacock's first _humorous_ book--_Literary Lapses_--was published.
+     First humorous book, I said, for Mr. Leacock--who is professor of
+     political economy at McGill University, Montreal--had published his
+     _Elements of Political Science_ in 1906.
+
+     It seems to me that I have heard that _Literary Lapses_ was
+     obscurely or privately published in Canada before 1910; that Mr.
+     John Lane, the famous London publisher, was given a copy by some
+     one as he got on a steamer to go home to England; that he read it
+     on the voyage and cabled an offer for it as soon as he landed. This
+     is very vague in my mind, but it sounds probable. At any rate,
+     since that time Professor Leacock's humorous volumes have appeared
+     with gratifying regularity--_Nonsense Novels, Behind the Beyond_,
+     etc.; and some more serious books too, such as Essays and _Literary
+     Studies_ and The _Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice_. One of the
+     unsolved riddles of social injustice is, why should Professor
+     Leacock be so much more amusing than most people?
+
+     We usually think of him as a Canadian, but he was born in England
+     in 1869.
+
+
+Coming up home the other night in my car (the Guy Street car), I heard a
+man who was hanging onto a strap say: "The drama is just turning into a
+bunch of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it did,
+because I am being paid by this paper to think once a week, and it is
+wearing. Some days I never think from morning till night.
+
+This decline of the drama is a thing on which I feel deeply and
+bitterly; for I am, or I have been, something of an actor myself. I
+have only been in amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some
+mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare as a citizen, I
+have been a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and I was once one end
+(choice of ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other parts too,
+such as "A Voice Speaks From Within," or "A Noise Is Heard Without," or
+a "Bell Rings From Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as A
+Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses where people were being
+turned away from the door; and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a
+Tumult, and once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper."
+
+So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the Drama, I speak of what
+I know.
+
+Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very often into quite
+intimate personal contact, with some of the greatest actors of the day.
+I don't say it in any way of boasting, but merely because to those of us
+who love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. I remember,
+for example, that when Wilson Barrett played "The Bat" and had to wear
+the queer suit with the scales, it was I who put the glue on him.
+
+And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving one night when he said
+to me, "Fetch me a glass of water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it
+is not only a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee
+of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. I will go
+further--" "Do," he said. Henry was like that, quick, sympathetic, what
+we call in French "vibrant."
+
+Forbes Robertson I shall never forget: he owes me 50 cents. And as for
+Martin Harvey--I simply cannot call him Sir John, we are such dear old
+friends--he never comes to this town without at once calling in my
+services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt everybody knows that
+splendid play in which he appears, called "The Breed of the Treshams."
+
+There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing. Harvey, as the
+hero, has to be tortured, not on the stage itself, but off the stage in
+a little room at the side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured.
+Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used to working together
+that Harvey didn't want to let anybody do it but me.
+
+So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the Drama: and I hate to
+think of it going all to pieces.
+
+The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass of conversation
+and reflection: nothing happens in it; the action is all going out of it
+and there is nothing left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is
+time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
+
+Now in my day--I mean when I was at the apogee of my reputation (I think
+that is the word--it may be apologee--I forget)--things were very
+different. What we wanted was action--striking, climatic, catastrophic
+action, in which things not only happened, but happened suddenly and all
+in a lump.
+
+And we always took care that the action happened in some place that was
+worth while, not simply in an ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the
+way it is in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse (top
+story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a power house, or a dog
+house, or a bath house, in short, in some place with a distinct local
+color and atmosphere.
+
+I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote (I write plays,
+too) the manager to whom I submitted it asked me at once, the moment he
+glanced at it, "Where is the action of this laid?" "It is laid," I
+answered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good, good," he said;
+"keep it there."
+
+In the case of another play the manager said to me, "What are you doing
+for atmosphere?" "The opening act," I said, "is in a steam laundry."
+"Very good," he answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you
+brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had not. "That's rather
+unfortunate," he said, "because we are especially anxious to bring in a
+condemned cell. Three of the big theaters have got them this season, and
+I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?" "Yes," I said, "I can,
+if it's wanted. I'll look through the cast, and no doubt I can find one
+at least of them that ought to be put to death." "Yes, yes," said the
+manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can."
+
+But I think of all the settings that we used, the lighthouse plays were
+the best. There is something about a lighthouse that you don't get in a
+modern drawing room. What it is, I don't know; but there's a difference.
+I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never have enjoyed acting so
+much, have never thrown myself into acting so deeply, as in a play of
+that sort.
+
+There is something about a lighthouse--the way you see it in the earlier
+scenes--with the lantern shining out over the black waters that suggests
+security, fidelity, faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally
+to be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you could see the
+huddled figures of the fishermen and their wives on the foreshore
+pointing out to the sea (the back of the stage).
+
+"See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is lightning in yon sky."
+(I was the lightning and that my cue for it): "God help all the poor
+souls at sea to-night!" Then a woman cried, "Look! Look! a boat upon the
+reef!" And as she said it I had to rush round and work the boat to make
+it go up and down properly. Then there was more lightning, and some one
+screamed out, "Look! See! there's a woman in the boat!"
+
+There wasn't really; it was me; but in the darkness it was all the same,
+and of course the heroine herself couldn't be there yet because she had
+to be downstairs getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried out,
+"Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen ran up and down making
+a noise.
+
+Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully excited; and what with
+the excitement and the darkness and the bright beams of the lighthouse
+falling on the wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the
+reef--ah! me, those were plays! That was acting! And to think that there
+isn't a single streak of lightning in any play on the boards this year!
+
+And then the kind of climax that a play like this used to have! The
+scene shifted right at the moment of the excitement, and lo! we are in
+the tower, the top story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still
+and quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors flooding the
+little room, and the roar of the storm heard like muffled thunder
+outside.
+
+The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm and quiet and rugged he
+looks. The snows of sixty winters are on his head, but his eye is clear
+and his grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens the door and
+steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty feet above the water, and
+peers out upon the storm.
+
+"God pity all the poor souls at sea!" he says. (They all say that. If
+you get used to it, and get to like it, you want to hear it said, no
+matter how often they say it.) The waves rage beneath him. (I threw it
+at him, really, but the effect was wonderful.)
+
+And then, as he comes in from the storm to the still room, the climax
+breaks. A man staggers into the room in oilskins, drenched, wet,
+breathless. (They all staggered in these plays, and in the new drama
+they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea.
+"A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it."
+
+And the lighthouse keeper knows that it is his only daughter--the only
+one that he has--who is being cast to death upon the reef. Then comes
+the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat; no one can take it through
+the surf but him. You know that because the other man says so himself.
+
+But if he goes in the boat then the great light will go out. Untended it
+cannot live in the storm. And if it goes out--ah! if it goes out--ask of
+the angry waves and the resounding rocks of what to-night's long toll of
+death must be without the light!
+
+I wish you could have seen it--you who only see the drawing-room plays
+of to-day--the scene when the lighthouse man draws himself up, calm and
+resolute, and says: "My place is here. God's will be done." And you know
+that as he says it and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is
+drifting, at that very moment, to the rocks.
+
+"How did they save her?" My dear sir, if you can ask that question you
+little understand the drama as it was. Save her? No, of course they
+didn't save her. What we wanted in the Old Drama was reality and force,
+no matter how wild and tragic it might be. They did not save her. They
+found her the next day, in the concluding scene--all that was left of
+her when she was dashed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. Her bottom
+boards had been smashed in, her gunwale was gone--in short, she was a
+wreck.
+
+The girl? Oh, yes, certainly they saved the girl. That kind of thing was
+always taken care of. You see just as the lighthouse man said "God's
+will be done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope, hanging there.
+Providential, wasn't it? But then we were not ashamed to use Providence
+in the Old Drama. So he made a noose in it and threw it over the balcony
+and hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on to it every night.
+
+A rotten play? Oh, I am sure it must have been. But, somehow, those of
+us who were brought up on that sort of thing, still sigh for it.
+
+
+
+
+AMERICA AND THE ENGLISH TRADITION
+
+_By_ HARRY MORGAN AYRES
+
+
+     This admirable summary of Anglo-American history first appeared
+     (February, 1920) as an editorial in the _Weekly Review_. It seemed
+     to me then, and still does, as a model in that form of writing,
+     perfect in lucidity, temperance and good sense. Mr. Ayres is a
+     member of the faculty of Columbia University (Department of
+     English) and also one of the editors of the _Weekly Review_.
+     Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Seneca seem to be his favorite
+     hobbies.
+
+     To sum up the gist of Anglo-American relations in half a dozen
+     pages, as Mr. Ayres does here, is surely a remarkable achievement.
+
+
+The recently established chair in the history, literature, and
+institutions of the United States which is to be shared among the
+several universities of Great Britain, is quite different from the
+exchange professorships of sometimes unhappy memory. It is not at all
+the idea to carry over one of our professors each year and indoctrinate
+him with the true culture at its source. The occupant of the chair will
+be, if the announced intention is carried out, quite as often British as
+American, and quite as likely a public man as a professor. The chief
+object is to bring to England a better knowledge of the United States,
+and a purpose more laudable can scarcely be imagined. Peace and
+prosperity will endure in the world in some very precise relation to
+the extent to which England succeeds in understanding us.
+
+It is not an illusion to suppose that our understanding of the British
+is on the whole better than theirs of us. The British Empire is a large
+and comparatively simple fact, now conspicuously before the world for a
+long time. The United States was, in British eyes, until recently, a
+comparatively insignificant fact, yet vastly more complicated than they
+imagined. Each, of course, perfectly knew the faults of the other,
+assessed with an unerring cousinly eye. The American bragged in a nasal
+whine, the Briton patronized in a throaty burble. Whoever among the
+struggling nations of the world might win, England saw to it that she
+never lost; your Yankee was content with the more ignoble triumphs of
+merchandising, willing to cheapen life if he could only add to his
+dollars. But the excellence of English political institutions and
+methods, the charm of English life, the tremendous power of the Empire
+for promoting freedom and civilization in the world, these are things
+which Americans have long recognized and in a way understood. Anything
+like an equivalent British appreciation of America in the large seems
+confined to a very few honorable exceptions among them. Admiration for
+Niagara, which is half British anyway, or enthusiasm for the "Wild
+West"--your better-class Englishman always thrills to the frontier--is
+no step at all toward rightly appreciating America.
+
+To no inconsiderable extent this is America's own fault. She does not
+present to the world a record that is easily read. It is obvious, for
+instance--and so obvious that it is not often enough stated--that
+America has and will continue to have a fundamentally English
+civilization. English law is the basis of her law. English speech is her
+speech, and if with a difference, it is a difference that the
+philologist, all things considered, finds amazingly small. English
+literature is her literature--Chaucer and Shakespeare hers because her
+blood then coursed indistinguishably through the English heart they knew
+so well; Milton, Dryden, and the Queen Anne men hers, because she was
+still a part of England; the later men hers by virtue of affectionate
+acquaintanceship and a generous and not inconsiderable rivalry. English
+history, in short, is her history. The struggles of the thirteenth
+century through which law and parliament came into being, the struggles
+of the seventeenth century through which law and parliament came to
+rule, are America's struggles upon which she can look back with the
+satisfaction that some things that have been done in the world need
+never be undone or done over again, whatever the room for improvement
+may still be. Americans, no less than British, recognize that
+independence was largely an accidental result of a war which sprang out
+of a false theory of economics, but whose conclusion carried with it a
+lesson in the management of empire which subsequent history shows the
+British to have learned thoroughly and for the benefit of all concerned.
+American independence, however, once established, pointed a way to
+democratic freedom which England hastened to follow. This we know. And
+yet--
+
+And yet we allow these obvious and fundamental considerations to become
+marvelously obscured. We allow England's failure to solve an insoluble
+Irish problem to arouse in us an attitude of mind possibly excusable in
+some Irishmen, but wholly inexcusable in any American. We allow a
+sentimental regard for some immigrant from Eastern Europe, who comes to
+us with a philosophy born of conditions that in English-speaking lands
+ceased to be centuries ago, to make us pretend to see in him the true
+expression of America's traditional ideals. We allow ourselves to be far
+too easy with the phrase, "He is not pro-German, he is merely
+anti-British." Why are they anti-British? Why should they be permitted
+to make it falsely appear that recognition of the English basis of
+America involves approval of everything that England in her history may
+or may not have done? Why should they be allowed to pretend that
+disapproval of some particular act of England justifies repudiation of
+most of the things by virtue of which we are what we are? America from
+the first has been part of the great English experiment--great because
+it is capable of learning from experience.
+
+The world has put a big investment in blood and treasure, and all that
+they imply, into the education of England. It is satisfied--the world's
+response to Germany's insolent challenge is the proof of it--that its
+pains have been well bestowed. England is more nearly fit than any other
+nation to wield the power that is hers. That is not to deny the peculiar
+virtues of other nations; indeed, these virtues have largely contributed
+to the result. Italy has educated her; France has educated her; we have
+done something; and Germany. In result, she is not perfect--the English
+would perhaps least of all assert that--but she has learned a great deal
+and held herself steady while she learned it. It is a bigger job than
+the world cares to undertake to teach any other nation so much. Nor
+would it be at all likely to succeed so well. For what England has to
+offer the world in return is not simply her institutions; it is not
+merely a formula for the effective discharge of police duty throughout
+the world; it is the English freeman, whether he hail from Canada,
+Australia, Africa, or the uttermost isles of the sea.
+
+A most adaptable fellow, this freeman, doing all sorts of work
+everywhere, and with tremendous powers of assimilation. Consider him in
+his origins. He began by assimilating fully his own weight in Danes,
+while remaining an English freeman. He then perforce accepted a Norman
+king, as he had accepted a Danish one, hoping, as always, that the king
+would not trouble him too much. But when Norman William, who was very
+ill-informed about the breed, killed off most of his natural leaders and
+harried the rest into villeiny, how did he manage in a small matter of
+two hundred years or so to make an English gentleman not only of himself
+but of all the rag-tag of adventurers who had come over with William and
+since? How did he contrive, out of a band of exiles fleeing from an
+Egypt of ecclesiastical tyranny, broken younger sons, artisans out of a
+job, speculators, bondmen, Swedes, Dutchmen, and what not, to make
+America? Is he one likely to lose his bearings when in his America the
+age-old problem again heaves in view? This is a job he has been working
+at pretty successfully for more than a thousand years. Grant him a
+moment to realize himself afresh in the face of it. Don't expect him to
+stop and give a coherent explanation of what he is doing. He wouldn't
+be the true son of the English tradition that he is if he could do that.
+Perhaps the occupants of the new chair can do something of the sort for
+him.
+
+
+
+
+THE RUSSIAN QUARTER
+
+_By_ THOMAS BURKE
+
+
+     Thomas Burke, a young newspaper man in London, came into quick
+     recognition with his first book, _Nights in Town_ (published in
+     America as _Nights in London_) in 1915. His first really popular
+     success, however, was _Limehouse Nights_, less satisfactory to
+     those who had read the first book, as it was largely a repetition
+     of the same material in fiction form. (In fact, Mr. Burke holds
+     what must be almost a record among authors by having worked over
+     nearly the identical substance in four different versions--as
+     essays and sketches, in _Nights in Town_; as short stories, in
+     _Limehouse Nights_; as a novel, in _Twinkletoes_; as poetry, in
+     _The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse_.)
+
+     Mr. Burke has specialized on London, and with great ability. In the
+     Limehouse series his colorings seem just a little too consciously
+     vivid, his roguishness a little too studied, to be quite
+     satisfying. _The Outer Circle_, a volume of rambles in the London
+     suburbs, is to me more truly a work of art.
+
+
+I had known the quarter for many years before it interested me. It was
+not until I was prowling around on a Fleet Street assignment that I
+learned to hate it. A murder had been committed over a café in Lupin
+Street; a popular murder, fruity, cleverly done, and with a sex
+interest. Of course every newspaper and agency developed a virtuous
+anxiety to track the culprit, and all resources were directed to that
+end. Journalism is perhaps the only profession in which so fine a public
+spirit may be found. So it was that the North Country paper of which I
+was a hanger-on flung every available man into the fighting line, and
+the editor told me that I might, in place of the casual paragraphs for
+the London Letter, do something good on the Vassiloff murder.
+
+It was a night of cold rain, and the pavements were dashed with smears
+of light from the shop windows. Through the streaming streets my hansom
+leaped; and as I looked from the window, and noted the despondent
+biliousness of Bethnal Green, I realized that the grass withereth, the
+flower fadeth.
+
+I dismissed the cab at Brick Lane, and, continuing the tradition which
+had been instilled into me by my predecessor on the London Letter, I
+turned into one of the hostelries and had a vodka to keep the cold out.
+Little Russia was shutting up. The old shawled women, who sit at every
+corner with huge baskets of black bread and sweet cakes, were departing
+beneath umbrellas. The stalls of Osborn Street, usually dressed with
+foreign-looking confectionery, were also retiring. Indeed, everybody
+seemed to be slinking away, and as I sipped my vodka, and felt it burn
+me with raw fire, I cursed news editors and all publics which desired to
+read about murders. I was perfectly sure that I shouldn't do the least
+good; so I had another, and gazed through the kaleidoscopic window,
+rushing with rain, at the cheerful world that held me.
+
+Oh, so sad it is, this quarter! By day the streets are a depression,
+with their frowzy doss-houses and their vapor-baths. Gray and sickly is
+the light. Gray and sickly, too, are the leering shops, and gray and
+sickly are the people and the children. Everything has followed the
+grass and the flowers. Childhood has no place; so above the roofs you
+may see the surly points of a Council School. Such games as happen are
+played but listlessly, and each little face is smirched. The gaunt
+warehouses hardly support their lopping heads, and the low, beetling,
+gabled houses of the alleys seem for ever to brood on nights of bitter
+adventure. Fit objects for contempt by day they may be, but when night
+creeps upon London, the hideous darkness that can almost be touched,
+then their faces become very powers of terror, and the cautious soul,
+wandered from the comfort of the main streets, walks and walks in a
+frenzy, seeking outlet and finding none. Sometimes a hoarse laugh will
+break sharp on his ear. Then he runs.
+
+Well, I finished my second, and then sauntered out. As I was passing a
+cruel-looking passage, a girl stepped forward. She looked at me. I
+looked at her. She had the haunting melancholy of Russia in her face,
+but her voice was as the voice of Cockaigne. For she spoke and said:--
+
+"Funny-looking little guy, ain't you?"
+
+I suppose I was. So I smiled and said: "We are as God made us, old
+girl."
+
+She giggled....
+
+I said I felt sure I should do no good on the Vassiloff murder. I
+didn't. For just then two of her friends came out of the court, each
+with a boy. It was apparent that she had no boy. I had no idea what the
+occasion might be, but the other four marched ahead, crying, "Come on!"
+And, surprised, yet knowing of no good reason for being surprised, I
+felt the girl's arm slip into mine, and we joined the main column....
+
+That is one of London's greatest charms: it is always ready to toss you
+little encounters of this sort, if you are out for them.
+
+Across the road we went, through mire and puddle, and down a long,
+winding court. At about midway our friends disappeared, and, suddenly
+drawn to the right, I was pushed from behind up a steep, fusty stair.
+Then I knew where we were going. We were going to the tenements where
+most of the Russians meet of an evening. The atmosphere in these places
+is a little more cheerful than that of the cafés--if you can imagine a
+Russian ever rising to cheerfulness. Most of the girls lodge over the
+milliners' shops, and thither their friends resort. Every establishment
+here has a piano, for music, with them, is a somber passion rather than
+a diversion. You will not hear comic opera, but if you want to climb the
+lost heights of melody, stand in Bell Yard, and listen to a piano, lost
+in the high glooms, wailing the heart of Chopin, or Rubinstein or
+Glazounoff through the fingers of pale, moist girls, while the ghost of
+Peter the Painter parades the naphtha'd highways.
+
+At the top of the stair I was pushed into a dark, fusty room, and guided
+to a low, fusty sofa or bed. Then some one struck a match, and a lamp
+was lit and set on the mantelshelf. It flung a soft, caressing radiance
+on its shabby home, and on its mistress, and on the other girls and
+boys. The boys were tough youngsters of the district, evidently very
+much at home, smoking Russian cigarettes and settling themselves on the
+bed in a manner that seemed curiously continental in Cockney toughs. I
+doubt if you would have loved the girls at that moment; and yet ... you
+know ... their black or brassy hair, their untidiness, and the cotton
+blouses half-dropped from their tumultuous breasts....
+
+The girl who had collared me disappeared for a moment, and then brought
+a tray of Russian tea. "Help 'selves, boys!" We did so, and, watching
+the others, I discovered that it was the correct thing to lemon the
+ladies' tea for them and stir it well and light their cigarettes. I did
+so for Katarina--that was her name--while she watched me with little
+truant locks of hair running everywhere, and a slow, alluring smile
+that seemed to hold all the agony and mystery of the steppes.
+
+The room, on which the wallpaper hung in dank strips, contained a
+full-sized bed and a chair bedstead, a washstand, a samovar, a potpourri
+of a carpet, and certain mysteries of feminine toilet. A rickety
+three-legged table stood by the window, and Katarina's robes hung in a
+dainty riot of frill and color behind the door, which only shut when you
+thrust a peg of wood through a wired catch.
+
+One of the boys sprawled himself, in clumsy luxury, on the bed, and his
+girl arranged herself at his side, and when she was settled her hair
+tumbled in a shower of hairpins, and everybody laughed like children.
+The other girl went to the piano, and her boy squatted on the floor at
+her feet.
+
+She began to play.... You would not understand, I suppose, the
+intellectual emotion of the situation. It is more than curious to sit in
+these rooms, in the filthiest spot in London, and listen to Moszkowsky,
+Tchaikowsky, and Sibelius, played by a factory girl. It is ... something
+indefinable. I had visited similar places in Stepney before, but then I
+had not had a couple of vodkas, and I had not been taken in tow by an
+unknown girl. They play and play, while tea and cigarettes, and
+sometimes vodka or whisky, go round; and as the room gets warmer, so
+does one's sense of smell get sharper; so do the pale faces get
+moister; and so does one long more and more for a breath of cold air
+from the Ural Mountains. The best you can do is to ascend to the flat
+roof, and take a deep breath of Spitalfields ozone. Then back to the
+room for more tea and more music.
+
+Sanya played.... Despite the unventilated room, the greasy appointments,
+and other details that would have turned the stomach of Kensington, that
+girl at the piano, her dress cunningly disarranged, playing, as no one
+would have dreamed she could play, the finer intensities of Wieniawski
+and Moussorgsky, shook all sense of responsibility from me. The burdens
+of life vanished. News editors and their assignments be damned. Enjoy
+yourself, was what the cold, insidious music said. Take your moments
+when the fates send them; that was life's best lesson. Snatch the joy of
+the fleeting moment. Why ponder on time and tears?
+
+Devilish little fingers they were, Sanya's. Her technique was not
+perhaps all that it might have been; she might not have won the Gold
+Medal of our white-shirted academies, but she had enough temperament to
+make half a dozen Bechstein Hall virtuosi. From valse to nocturne, from
+sonata to prelude, her fancy ran. With crashing chords she dropped from
+"L'Automne Bacchanale" to the Nocturne in E flat; scarcely murmured of
+that, then tripped elvishly into Moszkowsky's Waltz, and from that she
+dropped to a song of Tchaikowsky, almost heartbreaking in its childish
+beauty, and then to the lecherous music of the second act of "Tristan."
+Mazurka, polonaise, and nocturne wailed in the stuffy chamber; her
+little hands lit up the enchanted gloom of the place with bright
+thrills, until the bed and the dingy surroundings faded into phantoms
+and left only two stark souls in colloquy: Katarina's and mine.
+
+Katarina had settled, I forget how, on the sofa, and was reclining very
+comfortably with her head on my shoulder and both arms about me. We did
+not talk. No questions passed as to why we had picked one another up.
+There we were, warmed with vodka and tea, at eleven o'clock at night,
+five stories above the clamorous world, while her friend shook the silly
+souls out of us. With the shy boldness of my native country, I stretched
+a hand and inclosed her fingers. She smiled; a curious smile that no
+other girl in London could have given; not a flushed smile, or a
+startled smile, or a satisfied smile, or a coy smile; but a smile of
+companionship, which seemed to have realized the tragedy of our living.
+So it was that she had, by slow stages, reached her comfortable
+position, for as my hand wandered from finger to wrist, from wrist to
+soft, rounded arm, and so inclosed her neck, she slipped and buried me
+in an avalanche of flaming, scented tresses.
+
+Sanya at the piano shot a glance over her shoulder, a very sad-gay
+glance; she laughed, curiously, I almost said foreignly. I felt somehow
+as though I had been taken complete possession of by these people. I
+hardly belonged to myself. Fleet Street was but a street of dream. I
+seemed now to be awake and in an adorable captivity.
+
+With a final volley of chords, the pianist slid from the chair, and sat
+by her boy on the carpet, smoothing his face with tobacco-stained
+fingers, and languishing, while her thick, over-ripe lips took his
+kisses as a baby bird takes food from its mother.
+
+We talked--all of us--in jerks and snatches. Then the oil in the lamp
+began to give out, and the room grew dim. Some one said: "Play
+something!" And some one said: "Too tired!" The girl reclining on the
+bed grew snappy. She did not lean for caresses. She seemed morose,
+preoccupied, almost impatient. Twice she snapped up her boy on a casual
+remark. I believe I talked vodka'd nonsense....
+
+But suddenly there came a whisper of soft feet on the landing, and a
+secret tap at the door. Some one opened it, and slipped out. One heard
+the lazy hum of voices in busy conversation. Then silence; and some one
+entered the room and shut the door. One of the boys asked, casually,
+"What's up?" His question was not answered, but the girl who had gone to
+the door snapped something in a sharp tone which might have been either
+Russian or Yiddish. Katarina loosened herself from me, and sat up. The
+girl on the bed sat up. The three of them spat angry phrases about, I
+called over to one of the boys: "What's the joke? Anything wrong?" and
+received a reply: "Owshdiknow? I ain't a ruddy Russian, am I?"
+
+Katarina suddenly drew back her flaming face. "Here," she said, "you
+better go."
+
+"Go?"
+
+"Yes--fathead! Go's what I said."
+
+"But--" I began, looking and feeling like a flabbergasted cat.
+
+"Don't I speak plain? Go!"
+
+I suppose a man never feels a finer idiot than when a woman tells him
+she doesn't want him. If he ever does, it is when a woman tells him that
+she loves him. Katarina had given me the bullet, and, of course, I felt
+a fool; but I derived some consolation from the fact that the other boys
+were being told off. Clearly, big things were in the air, about to
+happen. Something, evidently, had already happened. I wondered.... Then
+I sat down on the sofa, and flatly told Katarina that I was not going
+unless I had a reason.
+
+"Oh," she said, blithely, "ain't you? This is my room, ain't it? I
+brought you here, and you stay here just as long as I choose, and no
+longer. Who d'you think you are, saying you won't go? This is my room. I
+let you come here for a drink, and you just got to go when I say. See?"
+
+I was about to make a second stand, when again there came a stealthy tap
+at the door, and the whispering of slippered feet. Sanya glided to the
+door, opened it, and disappeared. In a moment she came back, and called,
+"'Rina!" Katarina slipped from my embrace, went to the door, and
+disappeared too. One girl and three boys remained--in silence.
+
+Next moment Katarina reappeared, and said something to Sanya. Sanya
+pulled her boy by the arm, and went out. The other girl pushed her boy
+at the neck and literally threw him out. Katarina came over to me, and
+said: "Go, little fool!"
+
+I said: "Shan't unless I know what the game is."
+
+She stood over me; glared; searched for words to meet the occasion;
+found none. She gestured. I sat as rigid as an immobile comedian.
+Finally, she flung her arms, and swept away. At the door she turned;
+"Blasted little fool! He'll do us both in if y'ain't careful. You don't
+know him. Both of us he'll have. Serveyeh right."
+
+She disappeared. I was alone. I heard the _sup-sup_ of her slippered
+feet down the stair.
+
+I got up, and moved to the door. I heard nothing. I stood by the window,
+my thoughts dancing a ragtime. I wondered what to do, and how, and
+whether. I wondered what was up exactly. I wondered ... well, I just
+wondered. My thoughts got into a tangle, sank, and swam, and sank again.
+Then there was a sudden struggle and spurt from the lamp, and it went
+black out. From a room across the landing a clock ticked menacingly. I
+saw, by the thin light from the window, the smoke of a discarded
+cigarette curling up and up to the ceiling like a snake.
+
+I went again to the door, peered down the steep stair and over the crazy
+balustrade. Nobody was about; no voices. I slipped swiftly down the five
+flights, met nobody. I stood in the slobbered vestibule. From afar I
+heard the sluck of the waters against the staples of the wharves, and
+the wicked hoot of the tugs.
+
+It was then that a sudden nameless fear seized me; it was that simple
+terror that comes from nothing but ourselves. I am not usually afraid of
+any man or thing. I am normally nervous, and there are three or four
+things that have power to terrify me. But I am not, I think, afraid. At
+that moment, however, I was afraid of everything: of the room I had
+left, of the house, of the people, of the inviting lights of the
+warehouses and the threatening shoals of the alleys.
+
+I stood a moment longer. Then I raced into Brick Lane, and out into the
+brilliance of Commercial Street.
+
+
+
+
+A WORD FOR AUTUMN
+
+_By_ A. A. MILNE
+
+
+     This is the sort of urbane pleasantry in which British essayists
+     are prolific and graceful. Alan Alexander Milne was born in 1882,
+     went to Trinity College, Cambridge; was editor of _The Granta_ (the
+     leading undergraduate publication at Cambridge at that time); and
+     plunged into the great whirlpool of London journalism. He was on
+     the staff of _Punch_, 1906-14. He has now collected several volumes
+     of charming essays, and has had considerable success as a
+     playwright: his comedy, _Mr. Pim Passes By_, recently played a
+     prosperous run in New York. "A Word for Autumn" is from his volume
+     _Not That It Matters_.
+
+
+Last night the waiter put the celery on with the cheese, and I knew that
+summer was indeed dead. Other signs of autumn there may be--the
+reddening leaf, the chill in the early-morning air, the misty
+evenings--but none of these comes home to me so truly. There may be cool
+mornings in July; in a year of drought the leaves may change before
+their time; it is only with the first celery that summer is over.
+
+I knew all along that it would not last. Even in April I was saying that
+winter would soon be here. Yet somehow it had begun to seem possible
+lately that a miracle might happen, that summer might drift on and on
+through the months--a final upheaval to crown a wonderful year. The
+celery settled that. Last night with the celery autumn came into its
+own.
+
+There is a crispness about celery that is of the essence of October. It
+is as fresh and clean as a rainy day after a spell of heat. It crackles
+pleasantly in the mouth. Moreover it is excellent, I am told, for the
+complexion. One is always hearing of things which are good for the
+complexion, but there is no doubt that celery stands high on the list.
+After the burns and freckles of summer one is in need of something. How
+good that celery should be there at one's elbow.
+
+A week ago--("A little more cheese, waiter")--a week ago I grieved for
+the dying summer. I wondered how I could possibly bear the waiting--the
+eight long months till May. In vain to comfort myself with the thought
+that I could get through more work in the winter undistracted by
+thoughts of cricket grounds and country houses. In vain, equally, to
+tell myself that I could stay in bed later in the mornings. Even the
+thought of after-breakfast pipes in front of the fire left me cold. But
+now, suddenly, I am reconciled to autumn. I see quite clearly that all
+good things must come to an end. The summer has been splendid, but it
+has lasted long enough. This morning I welcomed the chill in the air;
+this morning I viewed the falling leaves with cheerfulness; and this
+morning I said to myself, "Why, of course, I'll have celery for lunch."
+("More bread, waiter.")
+
+"Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," said Keats, not actually
+picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the
+general blessings of the autumn. Yet what an opportunity he missed by
+not concentrating on that precious root. Apples, grapes, nuts, and
+vegetable marrows he mentions specially--and how poor a selection! For
+apples and grapes are not typical of any month, so ubiquitous are they,
+vegetable marrows are vegetables _pour rire_ and have no place in any
+serious consideration of the seasons, while as for nuts, have we not a
+national song which asserts distinctly, "Here we go gathering nuts in
+May"? Season of mists and mellow celery, then let it be. A pat of butter
+underneath the bough, a wedge of cheese, a loaf of bread and--Thou.
+
+How delicate are the tender shoots unfolded layer by layer. Of what a
+whiteness is the last baby one of all, of what a sweetness his flavor.
+It is well that this should be the last rite of the meal--_finis coronat
+opus_--so that we may go straight on to the business of the pipe. Celery
+demands a pipe rather than a cigar, and it can be eaten better in an inn
+or a London tavern than in the home. Yes, and it should be eaten alone,
+for it is the only food which one really wants to hear oneself eat.
+Besides, in company one may have to consider the wants of others. Celery
+is not a thing to share with any man. Alone in your country inn you may
+call for the celery; but if you are wise you will see that no other
+traveler wanders into the room. Take warning from one who has learnt a
+lesson. One day I lunched alone at an inn, finishing with cheese and
+celery. Another traveler came in and lunched too. We did not speak--I
+was busy with my celery. From the other end of the table he reached
+across for the cheese. That was all right! it was the public cheese. But
+he also reached across for the celery--my private celery for which I
+owed. Foolishly--you know how one does--I had left the sweetest and
+crispest shoots till the last, tantalizing myself pleasantly with the
+thought of them. Horror! to see them snatched from me by a stranger. He
+realized later what he had done and apologized, but of what good is an
+apology in such circumstances? Yet at least the tragedy was not without
+its value. Now one remembers to lock the door.
+
+Yes, I can face the winter with calm. I suppose I had forgotten what it
+was really like. I had been thinking of the winter as a horrid wet,
+dreary time fit only for professional football. Now I can see other
+things--crisp and sparkling days, long pleasant evenings, cheery fires.
+Good work shall be done this winter. Life shall be lived well. The end
+of the summer is not the end of the world. Here's to October--and,
+waiter, some more celery.
+
+
+
+
+"A CLERGYMAN"
+
+_By_ MAX BEERBOHM
+
+
+     Max Beerbohm, I dare say (and I believe it has been said before),
+     is the most subtly gifted English essayist since Charles Lamb. It
+     is not surprising that he has (now for many years) been referred to
+     as "the incomparable Max," for what other contemporary has never
+     once missed fire, never failed to achieve perfection in the field
+     of his choice? Whether in caricature, short story, fable, parody,
+     or essay, he has always been consummate in grace, tact, insouciant
+     airy precision. I hope you will not miss "No. 2 The Pines" (in _And
+     Even Now_, from which this selection also comes), a reminiscence of
+     his first visit to Swinburne in 1899. That beautiful (there is no
+     other word) essay shows an even ampler range of Mr. Beerbohm's
+     powers: a tenderness and lovely grace that remind one, almost
+     against belief, that the gay youth of the '90's now mellows
+     deliciously with the end of the fifth decade. He was so enormously
+     old in 1896, when he published his first book and called it his
+     _Works_; he seems much younger now: he is having his first
+     childhood.
+
+     This portrait of the unfortunate cleric annihilated by Dr. Johnson
+     is a triumphant example of the skill with which a perfect artist
+     can manœuver a trifle, carved like an ivory trinket; in such
+     hands, subtlety never becomes mere tenuity.
+
+     Max Beerbohm was born in London in 1872; studied at Charterhouse
+     School and Merton College, Oxford; and was a brilliant figure in
+     the _Savoy_ and _Yellow Book_ circles by the time he was
+     twenty-four. His genius is that of the essay in its purest
+     distillation: a clear cross-section of life as seen through the
+     lens of self; the pure culture (in the biological sense) of
+     observing personality.
+
+     I have often wondered how it came about (though the matter is
+     wholly nonpertinent) that Mr. Beerbohm married an American
+     lady--quite a habit with English essayists, by the way: Hilaire
+     Belloc and Bertrand Russell did likewise. _Who's Who_ says she was
+     from Memphis, which adds lustre to that admirable city.
+
+     He now lives in Italy.
+
+
+Fragmentary, pale, momentary; almost nothing; glimpsed and gone; as it
+were, a faint human hand thrust up, never to reappear, from beneath the
+rolling waters of Time, he forever haunts my memory and solicits my
+weak imagination. Nothing is told of him but that once, abruptly, he
+asked a question, and received an answer.
+
+This was on the afternoon of April 7th, 1778, at Streatham, in the
+well-appointed house of Mr. Thrale. Johnson, on the morning of that day,
+had entertained Boswell at breakfast in Bolt Court, and invited him to
+dine at Thrale Hall. The two took coach and arrived early. It seems that
+Sir John Pringle had asked Boswell to ask Johnson "what were the best
+English sermons for style." In the interval before dinner, accordingly,
+Boswell reeled off the names of several divines whose prose might or
+might not win commendation. "Atterbury?" he suggested. "JOHNSON: Yes,
+Sir, one of the best. BOSWELL: Tillotson? JOHNSON: Why, not now. I
+should not advise any one to imitate Tillotson's style; though I don't
+know; I should be cautious of censuring anything that has been applauded
+by so many suffrages.--South is one of the best, if you except his
+peculiarities, and his violence, and sometimes coarseness of
+language.--Seed has a very fine style; but he is not very theological.
+Jortin's sermons are very elegant. Sherlock's style, too, is very
+elegant, though he has not made it his principal study.--And you may add
+Smalridge. BOSWELL: I like Ogden's Sermons on Prayer very much, both
+for neatness of style and subtility of reasoning. JOHNSON: I should like
+to read all that Ogden has written. BOSWELL: What I want to know is,
+what sermons afford the best specimen of English pulpit eloquence.
+JOHNSON: We have no sermons addressed to the passions, that are good for
+anything; if you mean that kind of eloquence. A CLERGYMAN, whose name I
+do not recollect: Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions?
+JOHNSON: They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may."
+
+The suddenness of it! Bang!--and the rabbit that had popped from its
+burrow was no more.
+
+I know not which is the more startling--the début of the unfortunate
+clergyman, or the instantaneousness of his end. Why hadn't Boswell told
+us there was a clergyman present? Well, we may be sure that so careful
+and acute an artist had some good reason. And I suppose the clergyman
+was left to take us unawares because just so did he take the company.
+Had we been told he was there, we might have expected that sooner or
+later he would join in the conversation. He would have had a place in
+our minds. We may assume that in the minds of the company around Johnson
+he had no place. He sat forgotten, overlooked; so that his
+self-assertion startled every one just as on Boswell's page it startles
+us. In Johnson's massive and magnetic presence only some very remarkable
+man, such as Mr. Burke, was sharply distinguishable from the rest.
+Others might, if they had something in them, stand out slightly. This
+unfortunate clergyman may have had something in him, but I judge that he
+lacked the gift of seeming as if he had. That deficiency, however, does
+not account for the horrid fate that befell him. One of Johnson's
+strongest and most inveterate feelings was his veneration for the Cloth.
+To any one in Holy Orders he habitually listened with a grace and
+charming deference. To-day, moreover, he was in excellent good humor. He
+was at the Thrales', where he so loved to be; the day was fine; a fine
+dinner was in close prospect; and he had had what he always declared to
+be the sum of human felicity--a ride in a coach. Nor was there in the
+question put by the clergyman anything likely to enrage him. Dodd was
+one whom Johnson had befriended in adversity; and it had always been
+agreed that Dodd in his pulpit was very emotional. What drew the
+blasting flash must have been not the question itself, but the manner in
+which it was asked. And I think we can guess what that manner was.
+
+Say the words aloud: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the
+passions?" They are words which, if you have any dramatic and histrionic
+sense, _cannot_ be said except in a high, thin voice.
+
+You may, from sheer perversity, utter them in a rich and sonorous
+baritone or bass. But if you do so, they sound utterly unnatural. To
+make them carry the conviction of human utterance, you have no choice:
+you must pipe them.
+
+Remember, now, Johnson was very deaf. Even the people whom he knew well,
+the people to whose voices he was accustomed, had to address him very
+loudly. It is probable that this unregarded, young, shy clergyman, when
+at length he suddenly mustered courage to 'cut in,' let his high, thin
+voice soar _too_ high, insomuch that it was a kind of scream. On no
+other hypothesis can we account for the ferocity with which Johnson
+turned and rended him. Johnson didn't, we may be sure, mean to be cruel.
+The old lion, startled, just struck out blindly. But the force of paw
+and claws was not the less lethal. We have endless testimony to the
+strength of Johnson's voice; and the very cadence of those words, "They
+were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may," convinces me
+that the old lion's jaws never gave forth a louder roar. Boswell does
+not record that there was any further conversation before the
+announcement of dinner. Perhaps the whole company had been temporarily
+deafened. But I am not bothering about them. My heart goes out to the
+poor dear clergyman exclusively.
+
+I said a moment ago that he was young and shy; and I admit that I
+slipped those epithets in without having justified them to you by due
+process of induction. Your quick mind will have already supplied what I
+omitted. A man with a high, thin voice, and without power to impress any
+one with a sense of his importance, a man so null in effect that even
+the retentive mind of Boswell did not retain his very name, would
+assuredly not be a self-confident man. Even if he were not naturally
+shy, social courage would soon have been sapped in him, and would in
+time have been destroyed, by experience. That he had not yet given
+himself up as a bad job, that he still had faint wild hopes, is proved
+by the fact that he did snatch the opportunity for asking that question.
+He must, accordingly, have been young. Was he the curate of the
+neighboring church? I think so. It would account for his having been
+invited. I see him as he sits there listening to the great Doctor's
+pronouncement on Atterbury and those others. He sits on the edge of a
+chair in the background. He has colorless eyes, fixed earnestly, and a
+face almost as pale as the clerical bands beneath his somewhat receding
+chin. His forehead is high and narrow, his hair mouse-colored. His hands
+are clasped tight before him, the knuckles standing out sharply. This
+constriction does not mean that he is steeling himself to speak. He has
+no positive intention of speaking. Very much, nevertheless, is he
+wishing in the back of his mind that he could say something--something
+whereat the great Doctor would turn on him and say, after a pause for
+thought, "Why, yes, Sir. That is most justly observed" or "Sir, this has
+never occurred to me. I thank you"--thereby fixing the observer forever
+high in the esteem of all. And now in a flash the chance presents
+itself. "We have," shouts Johnson, "no sermons addressed to the
+passions, that are good for anything." I see the curate's frame quiver
+with sudden impulse, and his mouth fly open, and--no, I can't bear it, I
+shut my eyes and ears. But audible, even so, is something shrill,
+followed by something thunderous.
+
+Presently I reopen my eyes. The crimson has not yet faded from that
+young face yonder, and slowly down either cheek falls a glistening tear.
+Shades of Atterbury and Tillotson! Such weakness shames the Established
+Church. What would Jortin and Smalridge have said?--what Seed and South?
+And, by the way, who _were_ they, these worthies? It is a solemn thought
+that so little is conveyed to us by names which to the palæo-Georgians
+conveyed so much. We discern a dim, composite picture of a big man in a
+big wig and a billowing black gown, with a big congregation beneath
+him. But we are not anxious to hear what he is saying. We know it is all
+very elegant. We know it will be printed and be bound in finely-tooled
+full calf, and no palæo-Georgian gentleman's library will be complete
+without it. Literate people in those days were comparatively few; but,
+bating that, one may say that sermons were as much in request as novels
+are to-day. I wonder, will mankind continue to be capricious? It is a
+very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years
+hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and
+sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly
+as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now. "Yes, Sir,"
+some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, "Wells is
+one of the best. Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his
+concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of
+problems, but is not very creational.--Caine's books are very edifying.
+I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is
+very edifying.--And you may add Upton Sinclair." "What I want to know,"
+says the disciple, "is, what English novels may be selected as specially
+enthralling." The pundit answers: "We have no novels addressed to the
+passions that are good for anything, if you mean that kind of
+enthralment." And here some poor wretch (whose name the disciple will
+not remember) inquires: "Are not Mrs. Glyn's novels addressed to the
+passions?" and is in due form annihilated. Can it be that a time will
+come when readers of this passage in our pundit's Life will take more
+interest in the poor nameless wretch than in all the bearers of those
+great names put together, being no more able or anxious to discriminate
+between (say) Mrs. Ward and Mr. Sinclair than we are to set Ogden above
+Sherlock, or Sherlock above Ogden? It seems impossible. But we must
+remember that things are not always what they seem.
+
+Every man illustrious in his day, however much he may be gratified by
+his fame, looks with an eager eye to posterity for a continuance of past
+favors, and would even live the remainder of his life in obscurity if by
+so doing he could insure that future generations would preserve a
+correct attitude towards him forever. This is very natural and human,
+but, like so many very natural and human things, very silly. Tillotson
+and the rest need not, after all, be pitied for our neglect of them.
+They either know nothing about it, or are above such terrene trifles.
+Let us keep our pity for the seething mass of divines who were not
+elegantly verbose, and had no fun or glory while they lasted. And let us
+keep a specially large portion for one whose lot was so much worse than
+merely undistinguished. If that nameless curate had not been at the
+Thrales' that day, or, being there, had kept the silence that so well
+became him, his life would have been drab enough, in all conscience. But
+at any rate an unpromising career would not have been nipped in the bud.
+And that is what in fact happened, I'm sure of it. A robust man might
+have rallied under the blow. Not so our friend. Those who knew him in
+infancy had not expected that he would be reared. Better for him had
+they been right. It is well to grow up and be ordained, but not if you
+are delicate and very sensitive, and shall happen to annoy the greatest,
+the most stentorian and roughest of contemporary personages. "A
+Clergyman" never held up his head or smiled again after the brief
+encounter recorded for us by Boswell. He sank into a rapid decline.
+Before the next blossoming of Thrale Hall's almond trees he was no more.
+I like to think that he died forgiving Dr. Johnson.
+
+
+
+
+SAMUEL BUTLER: DIOGENES OF THE VICTORIANS
+
+_By_ STUART P. SHERMAN
+
+
+     Professor Sherman's cold compress, applied to the Butler cult,
+     caused much suffering in some regions, where it was said to be more
+     than a cooling bandage--in fact, a wet blanket. In the general
+     rough-and-tumble among critical standards during recent years, Mr.
+     Sherman is one of those who have dealt some swinging blows in favor
+     of the Victorians and the literary Old Guard--which was often
+     square but rarely hollow.
+
+     Stuart Pratt Sherman, born in Iowa in 1881, graduated from Williams
+     in 1903, has been since 1911 professor of English at the University
+     of Illinois. His own account of his adventures, written without
+     intended publication, is worth consideration. He says:
+
+     "My life hasn't been quite as dryly 'academic,' nor as simply
+     'middle-Western,' as the record indicates. For example: I lived in
+     Los Angeles from my 5th to my 13th year, and then went on a seven
+     months' adventure in gold mining in the Black Cañon of Arizona,
+     where I had some experience with drouth in the desert, etc. That is
+     not 'literary.'
+
+     "Recently, I've been thinking I might write a little paper about
+     some college friends at Williams. I was in college with Harry James
+     Smith (author of _Mrs. Bumpstead Lee_), Max Eastman, and
+     'Go-to-Hell' Whittlesey. As editor of the _Williams Monthly_ I have
+     accepted and rejected manuscripts of both the two latter, and have
+     reminiscences of their literary youth.
+
+     "Then I spent a summer in the _Post_ and _Nation_ in 1908, which is
+     a pleasant chapter to remember; another summer teaching at
+     Columbia; this past summer teaching at the University of
+     California. My favorite recreations are climbing little mountains,
+     chopping wood, and canoeing on Lake Michigan.
+
+     "This summer I have been picking out a place to die in--or rather
+     looking over the sites offered in California. I lean towards the
+     high Sierras, up above the Yosemite Valley.
+
+     "My ambition in life is to retire--perhaps at the age of
+     seventy--and write only for amusement. When I can abandon the task
+     of improving my contemporaries, I hope to become a popular
+     author."
+
+     Professor Sherman, you will note, is almost an exact contemporary
+     of H. L. Mencken, with whom he has crossed swords in more than one
+     spirited encounter; and Sherman is likely to give as good as he
+     takes in such scuffles, or even rather better. It is high time that
+     his critical sagacity and powerful reasoning were better known in
+     the market-place.
+
+
+
+UNTIL I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in
+our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one
+should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last
+match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said;
+but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious
+spirit is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum of
+universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary
+sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians:
+Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment
+and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures
+forever. Destroy a man's faith in God and he will worship humanity;
+destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his
+faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in
+himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.
+
+What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of course, that Butler,
+poor dear, as the English say, was the least worshipful of men. He was
+not even--till his posthumous disciples made him so--a person of any
+particular importance. One writing a private memorandum of his death
+might have produced something like this: Samuel Butler was an
+unsociable, burry, crotchety, obstinate old bachelor, a dilettante in
+art and science, an unsuccessful author, a witty cynic of inquisitive
+temper and, comprehensively speaking, the unregarded Diogenes of the
+Victorians. Son of a clergyman and grandson of a bishop, born in 1835,
+educated at Cambridge, he began to prepare for ordination. But, as we
+are told, because of scruples regarding infant baptism he abandoned the
+prospect of holy orders and in 1859 sailed for New Zealand, where with
+capital supplied by his father he engaged in sheep-farming for five
+years. In 1864, returning to England with £8,000, he established himself
+for life at Clifford's Inn, London. He devoted some years to painting,
+adored Handel and dabbled in music, made occasional trips to Sicily and
+Italy, and wrote a dozen books, which generally fell dead from the
+press, on religion, literature, art and scientific theory. "Erewhon,"
+however, a Utopian romance published in 1872, had by 1899 sold between
+three and four thousand copies. Butler made few friends and apparently
+never married. He died in 1902. His last words were: "Have you brought
+the cheque book, Alfred?" His body was cremated and the ashes were
+buried in a garden by his biographer and his man-servant, with nothing
+to mark the spot.
+
+Butler's indifference to the disposal of his earthly part betokens no
+contempt for fame. Denied contemporary renown, he had firmly set his
+heart on immortality, and quietly, persistently, cannily provided for
+it. If he could not go down to posterity by the suffrage of his
+countrymen, he would go down by the shrewd use of his cheque book; he
+would buy his way in. He bought the publication of most of the books
+produced in his lifetime. He diligently prepared manuscripts for
+posthumous publication and accumulated and arranged great masses of
+materials for a biographer. He insured an interest in his literary
+remains by bequeathing them and all his copyrights to his literary
+executor, R. A. Streatfeild. He purchased an interest in a biographer by
+persuading Henry Festing Jones, a feckless lawyer of Butlerian
+proclivities, to abandon the law and become his musical and literary
+companion. In return for these services Mr. Jones received between 1887
+and 1900 an allowance of £200 a year, and at Butler's death a bequest of
+£500, the musical copyrights and the manifest responsibility and
+privilege of assisting Streatfeild with the propagation of Butler's
+fame, together with their own, in the next generation.
+
+These good and faithful servants performed their duties with exemplary
+zeal and astuteness. In 1903, the year following the Master's death,
+Streatfeild published "The Way of All Flesh," a book packed with
+satirical wit, the first since "Erewhon" which was capable of walking
+off on its own legs and exciting general curiosity about its
+author--curiosity intensified by the announcement that the novel had
+been written between 1872 and 1884. In the wake of this sensation there
+began the systematic annual relaunching of old works, with fresh
+introductions and memoirs and a piecemeal feeding out of other literary
+remains, culminating in 1917 with the publication of "The Note-Books," a
+skilful collection and condensation of the whole of Butler's
+intellectual life. Meanwhile, in 1908, the Erewhon dinner had been
+instituted. In spite of mild deprecation, this feast, with its two
+toasts to his Majesty and to the memory of Samuel Butler, assumed from
+the outset the aspect of a solemn sacrament of believers. Among these
+was conspicuous on the second occasion Mr. George Bernard Shaw, not
+quite certain, perhaps, whether he had come to give or to receive honor,
+whether he was himself to be regarded as the beloved disciple or rather
+as the one for whom Butler, preaching in the Victorian wilderness, had
+prepared the way with "free and future-piercing suggestions."
+
+By 1914 Streatfeild was able to declare that no fragment of Butler's was
+too insignificant to publish. In 1915 and 1916 appeared extensive
+critical studies by Gilbert Cannan and John F. Harris. In 1919 at last
+arrives Henry Festing Jones with the authoritative memoir in two
+enormous volumes with portraits, documents, sumptuous index, elaborate
+bibliography and a pious accounting to the public for the original
+manuscripts, which have been deposited like sacred relics at St. John's
+College, the Bodleian, the British Museum, the Library of Congress and
+at various shrines in Italy and Sicily. Here are materials for a fresh
+consideration of the man in relation to his work.
+
+The unconverted will say that such a monument to such a man is absurdly
+disproportionate. But Butler is now more than a man. He is a spiritual
+ancestor, leader of a movement, moulder of young minds, founder of a
+faith. His monument is designed not merely to preserve his memory but to
+mark as well the present importance of the Butlerian sect. The memoir
+appears to have been written primarily for them. The faithful will no
+doubt find it delicious; and I, though an outsider, got through it
+without fatigue and with a kind of perverse pleasure in its perversity.
+
+It is very instructive, but it by no means simplifies its puzzling and
+complex subject. Mr. Jones is not of the biographers who look into the
+heart of a man, reduce him to a formula and recreate him in accordance
+with it. He works from the outside, inward, and gradually achieves life
+and reality by an immense accumulation of objective detail, without
+ever plucking out, or even plucking at, the heart of the mystery. What
+was the man's "master passion" and his master faculty? Butler himself
+did not know; consequently he could not always distinguish his wisdom
+from his folly. He was an ironist entangled in his own net and an
+egotist bitten with self-distrust, concealing his wounds in
+self-assertion and his hesitancies in an external aggressiveness. Mr.
+Jones pierces the shell here and there, but never removes it.
+Considering his opportunities, he is sparing in composed studies of his
+subject based on his own direct observation; and, with all his
+ingenuousness and his shocking but illuminating indiscretions, he is
+frequently silent as a tomb where he must certainly possess information
+for which every reader will inquire, particularly those readers who do
+not, like the Butlerians, accept Samuel Butler as the happy
+reincarnation of moderation, common sense and fearless honesty.
+
+The whole case of the Georgians against the Victorians might be fought
+out over his life and works; and indeed there has already been many a
+skirmish in that quarter. For, of course, neither Streatfeild nor Mr.
+Jones is ultimately responsible for his revival. Ultimately Butler's
+vogue is due to the fact that he is a friend of the Georgian revolution
+against idealism in the very citadel of the enemy; the extraordinary
+acclaim with which he is now received is his reward for having long ago
+prepared to betray the Victorians into the hands of a ruthless
+posterity. He was a traitor to his own times, and therefore it follows
+that he was a man profoundly disillusioned. The question which we may
+all reasonably raise with regard to a traitor whom we have received
+within our lines is whether he will make us a good citizen. We should
+like to know pretty thoroughly how he fell out with his
+countrymen--whether through defects in his own temper and character or
+through a clear-eyed and righteous indignation with the incorrigible
+viciousness of their manners and institutions. We should like to know
+what vision of reformation succeeded his disillusion. Hitherto the
+Georgians have been more eloquent in their disillusions than in their
+visions, and have inclined to welcome Butler as a dissolving agent
+without much inspecting his solution.
+
+The Butlerians admire Butler for his withering attack on family life,
+notably in "The Way of All Flesh"; and many a studious literary man with
+a talkative wife and eight romping children would, of course, admit an
+occasional flash of romantic envy for Butler's bachelor apartments. Mr.
+Jones tells us that Theobald and Christina Pontifex, whose nakedness
+Butler uncovers, were drawn without exaggeration from his own father and
+mother. His work on them is a masterpiece of pitiless satire. Butler
+appears to have hated his father, despised his mother and loathed his
+sisters in all truth and sincerity. He nursed his vindictive and
+contemptuous feelings towards them all through his life; he studied
+these feelings, made notes on them, jested out of them, lived in them,
+reduced them to a philosophy of domestic antipathy.
+
+He was far more learned than any other English author in the psychology
+of impiety. When he heard some one say, "Two are better than one," he
+exclaimed, "Yes, but the man who said that did not know my sisters."
+When he was forty-eight years old he wrote to a friend that his father
+was in poor health and not likely to recover; "but may hang on for
+months or go off with the N. E. winds which we are sure to have later
+on." In the same letter he writes that he is going to strike out forty
+weak pages in "Erewhon" and stick in forty stronger ones on the "trial
+of a middle-aged man 'for not having lost his father at a suitable
+age.'" His father's one unpardonable offense was not dying early and so
+enlarging his son's income. If this had been a jest, it would have been
+a little coarse for a deathbed. But Mr. Jones, who appears to think it
+very amusing, proves clearly enough that it was not a jest, but an
+obsession, and a horrid obsession it was. Now a man who attacks the
+family because his father does not die as promptly as could be desired
+is not likely to propose a happy substitute: his mood is not
+reconstructive, funny though it may be in two old boys of fifty, like
+Butler and Jones, living along like spoiled children on allowances,
+Butler from his father, Jones from his mother.
+
+The Butlerians admire Butler for his brilliant attack on "romantic"
+relations between the sexes. Before the advent of Shaw he poured poison
+on the roots of that imaginative love in which all normal men and
+maidens walk at least once in a lifetime as in a rosy cloud shot through
+with golden lights.
+
+His portraits show a man of vigorous physique, capable of passion, a
+face distinctly virile, rather harshly bearded, with broad masculine
+eyebrows. Was he ever in love? If not, why was he not? Elementary
+questions which his biographer after a thousand pages leaves unanswered.
+Mr. Jones asserts that both Overton and Ernest in "The Way of All Flesh"
+are in the main accurately autobiographical, and he furnishes much
+evidence for the point. He remarks a divergence in this fact, that
+Butler, unlike his hero, was never in prison. Did Butler, like his hero,
+have children and farm them out? The point is of some interest in the
+case of a man who is helping us to destroy the conventional family.
+
+Mr. Jones leaves quite in the dark his relations with such women as the
+late Queen Victoria would not have approved, relations which J. B.
+Yeats has, however, publicly discussed. Mr. Jones is ordinarily cynical
+enough, candid enough, as we shall see. He takes pains to tell us that
+his own grandfather was never married. He does not hesitate to
+acknowledge abundance of moral ugliness in his subject. Why this access
+of Victorian reticence at a point where plain-speaking is the order of
+the day and the special pride of contemporary Erewhonians? Why did a
+young man of Butler's tastes leave the church and go into exile in New
+Zealand for five years? Could a more resolute biographer perhaps find a
+more "realistic" explanation than difficulties over infant baptism? Mr.
+Shaw told his publisher that Butler was "a shy old bird." In some
+respects he was also a sly old bird.
+
+Among the "future-piercing suggestions" extolled by Mr. Shaw we may be
+sure that the author of "Man and Superman" was pleased to acknowledge
+Butler's prediscovery that woman is the pursuer. This idea we may now
+trace quite definitely to his relations with Miss Savage, a witty,
+sensible, presumably virtuous woman of about his own age, living in a
+club in London, who urged him to write fiction, read all his
+manuscripts, knitted him socks, reviewed his books in women's magazines
+and corresponded with him for years till she died, without his
+knowledge, in hospital from cancer. Her letters are Mr. Jones' mainstay
+in his first volume and she is, except Butler himself, altogether his
+most interesting personality. Mr. Jones says that being unable to find
+any one who could authorize him to use her letters, he publishes them on
+his own responsibility. But he adds, "I cannot imagine that any relation
+of hers who may read her letters will experience any feelings other than
+pride and delight." This lady, he tells us, was the original of Alethea
+Pontifex. But he marks a difference. Alethea was handsome. Miss Savage,
+he says, was short, fat, had hip disease, and "that kind of dowdiness
+which I used to associate with ladies who had been at school with my
+mother." Butler became persuaded that Miss Savage loved him; this bored
+him; and the correspondence would lapse till he felt the need of her
+cheery friendship again. On one occasion she wrote to him, "I wish that
+you did not know wrong from right." Mr. Jones believes that she was
+alluding to his scrupulousness in matters of business. Butler himself
+construed the words as an overture to which he was indisposed to
+respond. The debate on this point and the pretty uncertainty in which it
+is left can surely arouse in Miss Savage's relations no other feelings
+than "pride and delight."
+
+This brings us to the Butlerian substitute for the chivalry which used
+to be practised by those who bore what the Victorians called "the grand
+old name of gentleman." In his later years, after the death of Miss
+Savage, in periods of loneliness, depression and ill-health, Butler made
+notes on his correspondence reproaching himself for his ill-treatment of
+her. "He also," says his biographer, "tried to express his remorse" in
+two sonnets from which I extract some lines:
+
+    She was too kind, wooed too persistently,
+    Wrote moving letters to me day by day;
+
+    Hard though I tried to love I tried in vain,
+    For she was plain and lame and fat and short,
+    Forty and overkind.
+
+    'Tis said that if a woman woo, no man
+       Should leave her till she have prevailed; and, true,
+    A man will yield for pity if he can,
+       But if the flesh rebel what can he do?
+          I could not; hence I grieve my whole life long
+          The wrong I did in that I did no wrong.
+
+In these Butlerian times one who should speak of "good taste" would
+incur the risk of being called a prig. Good taste is no longer "in." Yet
+even now, in the face of these sonnets, may not one exclaim, Heaven
+preserve us from the remorseful moments of a Butlerian Adonis of fifty!
+
+The descendants of eminent Victorians may well be thankful that their
+fathers had no intimate relations with Butler. There is a familiar story
+of Whistler, that when some one praised his latest portrait as equal to
+Velasquez, he snapped back, "Yes, but why lug in Velasquez?" Butler,
+with similar aversion for rivals, but without Whistler's extempore wit,
+slowly excogitated his killing sallies and entered them in his
+note-books or sent them in a letter to Miss Savage, preserving a copy
+for the delectation of the next age: "I do not see how I can well call
+Mr. Darwin the Pecksniff of Science, though this is exactly what he is;
+but I think I may call Lord Bacon the Pecksniff of his age and then, a
+little later, say that Mr. Darwin is the Bacon of the Victorian Era." To
+this he adds another note reminding himself to call "Tennyson the Darwin
+of Poetry, and Darwin the Tennyson of Science." I can recall but one
+work of a contemporary mentioned favorably in the biography; perhaps
+there are two. The staple of his comment runs about as follows:
+"Middlemarch" is a "longwinded piece of studied brag"; of "John
+Inglesant," "I seldom was more displeased with any book"; of "Aurora
+Leigh," "I dislike it very much, but I liked it better than Mrs.
+Browning, or Mr., either"; of Rossetti, "I dislike his face and his
+manner and his work, and I hate his poetry and his friends"; of George
+Meredith, "No wonder if his work repels me that mine should repel him";
+"all I remember is that I disliked and distrusted Morley"; of Gladstone,
+"Who was it said that he was 'a good man in the very worst sense of the
+words'?" The homicidal spirit here exhibited may be fairly related to
+his anxiety for the death of his father.
+
+It was on the whole characteristic of Victorian free-thinkers to attack
+Christianity with reverence and discrimination in an attempt to preserve
+its substance while removing obstacles to the acceptance of its
+substance. Butler was Voltairean. When he did not attack mischievously
+like a gamin, he attacked vindictively like an Italian laborer whose
+sweetheart has been false to him. I have seen it stated that he was a
+broad churchman and a communicant; and Mr. Jones produces a letter from
+a clergyman testifying to his "saintliness." But this must be some of
+Mr. Jones's fun. From Gibbon, read on the voyage to New Zealand, Butler
+imbibed, he says, in a letter of 1861, "a calm and philosophic spirit of
+impartial and critical investigation." In 1862 he writes: "For the
+present I renounce Christianity altogether. You say people must have
+something to believe in. I can only say that I have not found my
+digestion impeded since I left off believing in what does not appear to
+be supported by sufficient evidence." When in 1865 he printed his
+"Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," the manner of his
+attack was impish; and so was the gleeful exchange of notes between him
+and Miss Savage over the way the orthodox swallowed the bait. In his
+notebook he wrote: "Mead is the lowest of the intoxicants, just as
+Church is the lowest of the dissipations, and carraway seed the lowest
+of the condiments." He went to church once in 1883 to please a friend
+and was asked whether it had not bored him as inconsistent with his
+principles. "I said that, having given up Christianity, I was not going
+to be hampered by its principles. It was the substance of Christianity,
+and not its accessories of external worship, that I had objected to ...
+so I went to church out of pure cussedness." Finally, in a note of 1889:
+"There will be no comfortable and safe development of our social
+arrangements--I mean we shall not get infanticide, and the permission of
+suicide, nor cheap and easy divorce--till Jesus Christ's ghost has been
+laid; and the best way to lay it is to be a moderate churchman."
+
+Robert Burns was a free-thinker, but he wrote the "Cotter's Saturday
+Night"; Renan was a free-thinker, but he buried his God in purple;
+Matthew Arnold was a free-thinker, but he gave new life to the religious
+poetry of the Bible; Henry Adams believed only in mathematical physics,
+but he wrote of Mont St. Michel and Chartres with chivalrous and almost
+Catholic tenderness for the Virgin: for in all these diverse men there
+was reverence for what men have adored as their highest. There was
+respect for a tomb, even for the tomb of a God. Butler, having
+transferred his faith to the Bank of England, diverted himself like a
+street Arab with a slingshot by peppering the church windows. He
+established manners for the contemporary Butlerian who, coming down to
+breakfast on Christmas morning, exclaims with a pleased smile, "Well,
+this is the birthday of the hook-nosed Nazarene!"
+
+Butler's moral note is rather attractive to young and middle-aged
+persons: "We have all sinned and come short of the glory of making
+ourselves as comfortable as we easily might have done." His ethics is
+founded realistically on physiology and economics; for "goodness is
+naught unless it tends towards old age and sufficiency of means."
+Pleasure, dressed like a quiet man of the world, is the best teacher:
+"The devil, when he dresses himself in angels' clothes, can only be
+detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt
+this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at
+all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but
+more respectable and on the whole more trustworthy guide." There we have
+something of the tone of our genial Franklin; but Butler is a Franklin
+without a single impulse of Franklin's wide benevolence and practical
+beneficence, a Franklin shorn of the spirit of his greatness, namely,
+his immensely intelligent social consciousness.
+
+Having disposed of Christianity, orthodox and otherwise, and having
+reduced the morality of "enlightened selfishness" to its lowest terms,
+Butler turned in the same spirit to the destruction of orthodox
+Victorian science. We are less concerned for the moment with his
+substance than with his character and manner as scientific
+controversialist. "If I cannot," he wrote, "and I know I cannot, get the
+literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know
+I can, heave bricks into the middle of them." Though such professional
+training as he had was for the church and for painting, he seems never
+to have doubted that his mother wit was sufficient equipment,
+supplemented by reading in the British Museum, for the overthrow of men
+like Darwin, Wallace and Huxley, who from boyhood had given their lives
+to collecting, studying and experimenting with scientific data. "I am
+quite ready to admit," he records, "that I am in a conspiracy of one
+against men of science in general." Having felt himself covertly
+slighted in a book for which Darwin was responsible, he vindictively
+assailed, not merely the work, but also the character of Darwin and his
+friends, who, naturally inferring that he was an unscrupulous "bounder"
+seeking notoriety, generally ignored him.
+
+His first "contribution" to evolutionary theory had been a humorous
+skit, written in New Zealand, on the evolution of machines, suggested by
+"The Origin of Species," and later included in "Erewhon." To support
+this whimsy he found it useful to revive the abandoned "argument from
+design"; and mother wit, still working whimsically, leaped to the
+conception that the organs of our bodies are machines. Thereupon he
+commenced serious scientific speculator, and produced "Life and Habit,"
+1878; "Evolution Old and New," 1879; "Unconscious Memory," 1880; and
+"Luck or Cunning," 1886. The germ of all his speculations, contained in
+his first volume, is the notion of "the oneness of personality existing
+between parents and offspring up to the time that the offspring leaves
+the parent's body"; thence develops his theory that the offspring
+"unconsciously" remembers what happened to the parents; and thence his
+theory that a vitalistic purposeful cunning, as opposed to the Darwinian
+chance, is the significant factor in evolution. His theory has something
+in common with current philosophical speculation, and it is in part, as
+I understand, a kind of adumbration, a shrewd guess, at the present
+attitude of cytologists. It has thus entitled Butler to half a dozen
+footnotes in a centenary volume on Darwin; but it hardly justifies his
+transference of Darwin's laurels to Button, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin and
+himself; nor does it justify his reiterated contention that Darwin was
+a plagiarist, a fraud, a Pecksniff and a liar. He swelled the ephemeral
+body of scientific speculation; but his contribution to the verified
+body of science was negligible, and the injuries that he inflicted upon
+the scientific spirit were considerable.
+
+For their symptomatic value, we must glance at Butler's sallies into
+some other fields. He held as an educational principle that it is hardly
+worth while to study any subject till one is ready to use it. When in
+his fifties he wished to write music, he took up for the first time the
+study of counterpoint. Mr. Garnett having inquired what subject Butler
+and Jones would take up when they had finished "Narcissus," Butler said
+that they "might write an oratorio on some sacred subject"; and when
+Garnett asked whether they had anything in particular in mind, he
+replied that they were thinking of "The Woman Taken in Adultery." In the
+same decade he cheerfully applied for the Slade professorship of art at
+Cambridge; and he took credit for the rediscovery of a lost school of
+sculpture.
+
+At the age of fifty-five he brushed up his Greek, which he "had not
+wholly forgotten," and read the "Odyssey" for the purposes of his
+oratorio, "Ulysses." When he got to Circe it suddenly flashed upon him
+that he was reading the work of a young woman! Thereupon he produced his
+book, "The Authoress of the Odyssey," with portrait of the authoress,
+Nausicaa, identification of her birthplace in Sicily, which pleased the
+Sicilians, and an account of the way in which she wrote her poem. It was
+the most startling literary discovery since Delia Bacon burst into the
+silent sea on which Colonel Fabyan of the biliteral cypher is the latest
+navigator. That the classical scholars laughed at or ignored him did not
+shake his belief that the work was as important as anything he had done.
+"Perhaps it was," he would have remarked, if any one else had written
+it. "I am a prose man," he wrote to Robert Bridges, "and, except Homer
+and Shakespeare"--he should have added Nausicaa--"I have read absolutely
+nothing of English poetry and _very little_ of English prose." His
+inacquaintance with English poetry, however, did not embarrass him,
+when, two years after bringing out his Sicilian authoress, he cleared up
+the mysteries of Shakespeare's sonnets. Nor did it prevent his
+dismissing the skeptical Dr. Furnivall, after a discussion at an A. B.
+C. shop, as a poor old incompetent. "Nothing," said Alethea Pontifex,
+speaking for her creator, "is well done nor worth doing unless, take it
+all round, it has come pretty easily." The poor old doctor, like the
+Greek scholars and the professional men of science, had blunted his wits
+by too much research.
+
+Butler maintained that every man's work is a portrait of himself, and
+in his own case the features stand out ruggedly enough. Why should any
+one see in this infatuated pursuer of paradox a reincarnation of the
+pagan wisdom? In his small personal affairs he shows a certain
+old-maidish tidiness and the prudence of an experienced old bachelor,
+who manages his little pleasures without scandal. But in his
+intellectual life what vestige do we find of the Greek or even of the
+Roman sobriety, poise and decorum? In one respect Butler was
+conservative: he respected the established political and economic order.
+But he respected it only because it enabled him, without bestirring
+himself about his bread and butter, to sit quietly in his rooms at
+Clifford's Inn and invent attacks on every other form of orthodoxy. With
+a desire to be conspicuous only surpassed by his desire to be original
+he worked out the central Butlerian principle; videlicet: The fact that
+all the best qualified judges agree that a thing is true and valuable
+establishes an overwhelming presumption that it is valueless and false.
+With his feet firmly planted on this grand radical maxim he employed his
+lively wit with lawyer-like ingenuity to make out a case against family
+life, of which he was incapable; against imaginative love, of which he
+was ignorant; against chivalry, otherwise the conventions of gentlemen,
+which he had but imperfectly learned; against Victorian men of letters,
+whom, by his own account, he had never read; against altruistic
+morality and the substance of Christianity, which were repugnant to his
+selfishness and other vices; against Victorian men of science, whose
+researches he had never imitated; and against Elizabethan and classical
+scholarship, which he took up in an odd moment as one plays a game of
+solitaire before going to bed. To his disciples he could not bequeath
+his cleverness; but he left them his recipe for originality, his manners
+and his assurance, which has been gathering compound interest ever
+since. In the original manuscript of "Alps and Sanctuaries" he consigned
+"Raffaele, along with Socrates, Virgil [the last two displaced later by
+Plato and Dante], Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Goethe, Beethoven, and
+_another_, to limbo as the Seven Humbugs of Christiandom." Who was the
+unnamed seventh?
+
+
+
+
+BED-BOOKS AND NIGHT-LIGHTS
+
+_By_ H. M. TOMLINSON
+
+
+     I shall not forget with what a thrill of delight I came upon H. M.
+     Tomlinson's _Old Junk_, the volume of essays from which this is
+     borrowed. One feels, in stumbling upon such a book, much as some
+     happy and astounded readers must have felt in 1878 when _An Inland
+     Voyage_ came out. It makes one wonder, submitting one's self to the
+     moving music and magic of that prose, so simple and yet so subtle
+     in its flavor, whether poetry is not, after all, an inferior and
+     more mechanic form. "The cool element of prose," that perfect
+     phrase of Milton's, comes back to mind. How direct and satisfying a
+     passage to the mind Mr. Tomlinson's paragraphs have. How they build
+     and cumulate, how the sentences shift, turn and move in delicate
+     loops and ridges under the blowing wind of thought, like the sand
+     of the dunes that he describes in one essay. And through it all, as
+     intangible but as real and beautifying as moonlight, there is the
+     pervading brightness of a particular way of looking at the world,
+     something for which we have no catchword, the illumination of a
+     spirit at once humorous, melancholy, shrewd, lovely and humane.
+     Somehow, when one is caught in the web of that exquisite,
+     considered prose, the awkward symbols of speech seem transparent;
+     we come close to a man's mind.
+
+     In Mr. Tomlinson's three books--_The Sea and the Jungle_ (1912),
+     _Old Junk_ (1920) and _London River_ (1921) is revealed one of the
+     most sincere and perfect workmen in contemporary prose.
+
+     H. M. Tomlinson was born in 1873; among his early memories he
+     records: "I was an office boy and a clerk among London's ships, in
+     the last days of the clippers. And I am forced to recall some of
+     the things--such as bookkeeping in a jam factory and stoking on a
+     tramp steamer." He joined the staff of the London _Morning Leader_
+     in 1904; which was later merged with the _Daily News_, and to this
+     journal he was attached for several years. During the War he was a
+     correspondent in France; at the danger of incurring his anger
+     (should he see this) I quote Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe on this phase of
+     his work:--"One who was the friend of all, a sweet and fine spirit
+     moving untouched amid the ruin and terror, expressing itself
+     everywhere with perfect simplicity, and at times with a shattering
+     candor."
+
+     In 1917 he became associate editor of the London _Nation_, where,
+     if you are interested, you may find his initials almost weekly.
+
+
+The rain flashed across the midnight window with a myriad feet. There
+was a groan in outer darkness, the voice of all nameless dreads. The
+nervous candle-flame shuddered by my bedside. The groaning rose to a
+shriek, and the little flame jumped in a panic, and nearly left its
+white column. Out of the corners of the room swarmed the released
+shadows. Black specters danced in ecstasy over my bed. I love fresh air,
+but I cannot allow it to slay the shining and delicate body of my little
+friend the candle-flame, the comrade who ventures with me into the
+solitudes beyond midnight. I shut the window.
+
+They talk of the candle-power of an electric bulb. What do they mean? It
+cannot have the faintest glimmer of the real power of my candle. It
+would be as right to express, in the same inverted and foolish
+comparison, the worth of "those delicate sisters, the Pleiades." That
+pinch of star dust, the Pleiades, exquisitely remote in deepest night,
+in the profound where light all but fails, has not the power of a
+sulphur match; yet, still apprehensive to the mind though tremulous on
+the limit of vision, and sometimes even vanishing, it brings into
+distinction those distant and difficult hints--hidden far behind all our
+verified thoughts--which we rarely properly view. I should like to know
+of any great arc-lamp which could do that. So the star-like candle for
+me. No other light follows so intimately an author's most ghostly
+suggestion. We sit, the candle and I, in the midst of the shades we are
+conquering, and sometimes look up from the lucent page to contemplate
+the dark hosts of the enemy with a smile before they overwhelm us; as
+they will, of course. Like me, the candle is mortal; it will burn out.
+
+As the bed-book itself should be a sort of night-light, to assist its
+illumination, coarse lamps are useless. They would douse the book. The
+light for such a book must accord with it. It must be, like the book, a
+limited, personal, mellow, and companionable glow; the solitary taper
+beside the only worshiper in a sanctuary. That is why nothing can
+compare with the intimacy of candle-light for a bed-book. It is a living
+heart, bright and warm in central night, burning for us alone, holding
+the gaunt and towering shadows at bay. There the monstrous specters
+stand in our midnight room, the advance guard of the darkness of the
+world, held off by our valiant little glim, but ready to flood instantly
+and founder us in original gloom.
+
+The wind moans without; ancient evils are at large and wandering in
+torment. The rain shrieks across the window. For a moment, for just a
+moment, the sentinel candle is shaken, and burns blue with terror. The
+shadows leap out instantly. The little flame recovers, and merely looks
+at its foe the darkness, and back to its own place goes the old enemy
+of light and man. The candle for me, tiny, mortal, warm, and brave, a
+golden lily on a silver stem!
+
+"Almost any book does for a bed-book," a woman once said to me. I nearly
+replied in a hurry that almost any woman would do for a wife; but that
+is not the way to bring people to conviction of sin. Her idea was that
+the bed-book is soporific, and for that reason she even advocated the
+reading of political speeches. That would be a dissolute act. Certainly
+you would go to sleep; but in what a frame of mind! You would enter into
+sleep with your eyes shut. It would be like dying, not only unshriven,
+but in the act of guilt.
+
+What book shall it shine upon? Think of Plato, or Dante, or Tolstoy, or
+a Blue Book for such an occasion! I cannot. They will not do--they are
+no good to me. I am not writing about you. I know those men I have named
+are transcendent, the greater lights. But I am bound to confess at times
+they bore me. Though their feet are clay and on earth, just as ours,
+their stellar brows are sometimes dim in remote clouds. For my part,
+they are too big for bed-fellows. I cannot see myself, carrying my
+feeble and restricted glim, following (in pajamas) the statuesque figure
+of the Florentine where it stalks, aloof in its garb of austere pity,
+the sonorous deeps of Hades. Hades! Not for me; not after midnight! Let
+those go who like it.
+
+As for the Russian, vast and disquieting, I refuse to leave all,
+including the blankets and the pillow, to follow him into the gelid
+tranquillity of the upper air, where even the colors are prismatic
+spicules of ice, to brood upon the erratic orbit of the poor mud-ball
+below called earth. I know it is my world also; but I cannot help that.
+It is too late, after a busy day, and at that hour, to begin overtime on
+fashioning a new and better planet out of cosmic dust. By
+breakfast-time, nothing useful would have been accomplished. We should
+all be where we were the night before. The job is far too long, once the
+pillow is nicely set.
+
+For the truth is, there are times when we are too weary to remain
+attentive and thankful under the improving eye, kindly but severe, of
+the seers. There are times when we do not wish to be any better than we
+are. We do not wish to be elevated and improved. At midnight, away with
+such books! As for the literary pundits, the high priests of the Temple
+of Letters, it is interesting and helpful occasionally for an acolyte to
+swinge them a good hard one with an incense-burner, and cut and run, for
+a change, to something outside the rubrics. Midnight is the time when
+one can recall, with ribald delight, the names of all the Great Works
+which every gentleman ought to have read, but which some of us have
+not. For there is almost as much clotted nonsense written about
+literature as there is about theology.
+
+There are few books which go with midnight, solitude, and a candle. It
+is much easier to say what does not please us then than what is exactly
+right. The book must be, anyhow, something benedictory by a sinning
+fellow-man. Cleverness would be repellent at such an hour. Cleverness,
+anyhow, is the level of mediocrity to-day; we are all too infernally
+clever. The first witty and perverse paradox blows out the candle. Only
+the sick in mind crave cleverness, as a morbid body turns to drink. The
+late candle throws its beams a great distance; and its rays make
+transparent much that seemed massy and important. The mind at rest
+beside that light, when the house is asleep, and the consequential
+affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions
+because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in
+the heavens where duty, honor, witty arguments, controversial logic on
+great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in
+the indurated mud which presently will cover them--the mind then
+certainly smiles at cleverness.
+
+For though at that hour the body may be dog-tired, the mind is white and
+lucid, like that of a man from whom a fever has abated. It is bare of
+illusions. It has a sharp focus, small and starlike, as a clear and
+lonely flame left burning by the altar of a shrine from which all have
+gone but one. A book which approaches that light in the privacy of that
+place must come, as it were, with honest and open pages.
+
+I like Heine then, though. His mockery of the grave and great, in those
+sentences which are as brave as pennants in a breeze, is comfortable and
+sedative. One's own secret and awkward convictions, never expressed
+because not lawful and because it is hard to get words to bear them
+lightly, seem then to be heard aloud in the mild, easy, and confident
+diction of an immortal whose voice has the blitheness of one who has
+watched, amused and irreverent, the high gods in eager and secret debate
+on the best way to keep the gilt and trappings on the body of the evil
+they have created.
+
+That first-rate explorer, Gulliver, is also fine in the light of the
+intimate candle. Have you read lately again his Voyage to the
+Houyhnhnms? Try it alone again in quiet. Swift knew all about our
+contemporary troubles. He has got it all down. Why was he called a
+misanthrope? Reading that last voyage of Gulliver in the select intimacy
+of midnight I am forced to wonder, not at Swift's hatred of mankind, not
+at his satire of his fellows, not at the strange and terrible nature of
+this genius who thought that much of us, but how it is that after such a
+wise and sorrowful revealing of the things we insist on doing, and our
+reasons for doing them, and what happens after we have done them, men do
+not change. It does seem impossible that society could remain unaltered,
+after the surprise its appearance should have caused it as it saw its
+face in that ruthless mirror. We point instead to the fact that Swift
+lost his mind in the end. Well, that is not a matter for surprise.
+
+Such books, and France's "Isle of Penguins," are not disturbing as
+bed-books. They resolve one's agitated and outraged soul, relieving it
+with some free expression for the accusing and questioning thoughts
+engendered by the day's affairs. But they do not rest immediately to
+hand in the book-shelf by the bed. They depend on the kind of day one
+has had. Sterne is closer. One would rather be transported as far as
+possible from all the disturbances of earth's envelope of clouds, and
+"Tristram Shandy" is sure to be found in the sun.
+
+But best of all books for midnight are travel books. Once I was lost
+every night for months with Doughty in the "Arabia Deserta." He is a
+craggy author. A long course of the ordinary facile stuff, such as one
+gets in the Press every day, thinking it is English, sends one
+thoughtless and headlong among the bitter herbs and stark boulders of
+Doughty's burning and spacious expanse; only to get bewildered, and the
+shins broken, and a great fatigue at first, in a strange land of fierce
+sun, hunger, glittering spar, ancient plutonic rock, and very Adam
+himself. But once you are acclimatized, and know the language--it takes
+time--there is no more London after dark, till, a wanderer returned from
+a forgotten land, you emerge from the interior of Arabia on the Red Sea
+coast again, feeling as though you had lost touch with the world you
+used to know. And if that doesn't mean good writing I know of no other
+test.
+
+Because once there was a father whose habit it was to read with his boys
+nightly some chapters of the Bible--and cordially they hated that habit
+of his--I have that Book too; though I fear I have it for no reason that
+he, the rigid old faithful, would be pleased to hear about. He thought
+of the future when he read the Bible; I read it for the past. The
+familiar names, the familiar rhythm of its words, its wonderful
+well-remembered stories of things long past--like that of Esther, one of
+the best in English--the eloquent anger of the prophets for the people
+then who looked as though they were alive, but were really dead at
+heart, all is solace and home to me. And now I think of it, it is our
+home and solace that we want in a bed-book.
+
+
+
+
+THE PRECEPT OF PEACE
+
+_By_ LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
+
+
+     Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), one of the rarest poets and most
+     delicately poised essayists this country has reared, has been
+     hitherto scantily appreciated by the omnipotent General Reader. Her
+     dainty spoor is perhaps too lightly trodden upon earth to be
+     followed by the throng. And yet one has faith in the
+     imperishability of such a star-dust track. This lovely and profound
+     "Precept of Peace" is peculiarly characteristic of her, and reminds
+     one of the humorous tranquillity with which she faced the complete
+     failure (financially speaking) of almost all her books. There was a
+     certain sadness in learning, when the news of her death came, that
+     many of our present-day critical Sanhedrim had never even become
+     aware of her name.
+
+     There is no space, in this brief note, to do justice to her. The
+     student will refer to the newly published memoir by her friend,
+     Alice Brown.
+
+     She was born in Boston in 1861, daughter of General Patrick Guiney
+     who fought in the Civil War. From 1894-97 she was postmistress in
+     Auburndale, Mass. Her later years were spent in England, mostly at
+     Oxford: the Bodleian Library was a candle and she the ecstatic
+     moth.
+
+
+A certain sort of voluntary abstraction is the oldest and choicest of
+social attitudes. In France, where all esthetic discoveries are made, it
+was crowned long ago: la sainte indifférence is, or may be, a cult, and
+le saint indifférent an articled practitioner. For the Gallic mind,
+brought up at the knee of a consistent paradox, has found that not to
+appear concerned about a desired good is the only method to possess it;
+full happiness is given, in other words, to the very man who will never
+sue for it. This is a secret neat as that of the Sphinx: to "go softly"
+among events, yet domineer them. Without fear: not because we are brave,
+but because we are exempt; we bear so charmed a life that not even
+Baldur's mistletoe can touch us to harm us. Without solicitude: for the
+essential thing is trained, falcon-like, to light from above upon our
+wrists, and it has become with us an automatic motion to open the hand,
+and drop what appertains to us no longer. Be it renown or a new hat, the
+shorter stick of celery, or
+
+    "The friends to whom we had no natural right,
+     The homes that were not destined to be ours,"
+
+it is all one: let it fall away! since only so, by depletions, can we
+buy serenity and a blithe mien. It is diverting to study, at the feet of
+Antisthenes and of Socrates his master, how many indispensables man can
+live without; or how many he can gather together, make over into
+luxuries, and so abrogate them. Thoreau somewhere expresses himself as
+full of divine pity for the "mover," who on May-Day clouds city streets
+with his melancholy household caravans: fatal impedimenta for an
+immortal. No: furniture is clearly a superstition. "I have little, I
+want nothing; all my treasure is in Minerva's tower." Not that the
+novice may not accumulate. Rather, let him collect beetles and Venetian
+interrogation-marks; if so be that he may distinguish what is truly
+extrinsic to him, and bestow these toys, eventually, on the children of
+Satan who clamor at the monastery gate. Of all his store, unconsciously
+increased, he can always part with sixteen-seventeenths, by way of
+concession to his individuality, and think the subtraction so much
+concealing marble chipped from the heroic figure of himself. He would be
+a donor from the beginning; before he can be seen to own, he will
+disencumber, and divide. Strange and fearful is his discovery, amid the
+bric-a-brac of the world, that this knowledge, or this material benefit,
+is for him alone. He would fain beg off from the acquisition, and shake
+the touch of the tangible from his imperious wings. It is not enough to
+cease to strive for personal favor; your true indifférent is Early
+Franciscan: caring not to have, he fears to hold. Things useful need
+never become to him things desirable. Towards all commonly-accounted
+sinecures, he bears the coldest front in Nature, like a magician walking
+a maze, and scornful of its flower-bordered detentions. "I enjoy life,"
+says Seneca, "because I am ready to leave it." Meanwhile, they who act
+with too jealous respect for their morrow of civilized comfort, reap
+only indigestion, and crow's-foot traceries for their deluded
+eye-corners.
+
+Now nothing is farther from le saint indifférent than cheap
+indifferentism, so-called: the sickness of sophomores. His business is
+to hide, not to display, his lack of interest in fripperies. It is not
+he who looks languid, and twiddles his thumbs for sick misplacedness,
+like Achilles among girls. On the contrary, he is a smiling industrious
+elf, monstrous attentive to the canons of polite society. In relation to
+others, he shows what passes for animation and enthusiasm; for at all
+times his character is founded on control of these qualities, not on the
+absence of them. It flatters his sense of superiority that he may thus
+pull wool about the ears of joint and several. He has so strong a will
+that it can be crossed and counter-crossed, as by himself, so by a dozen
+outsiders, without a break in his apparent phlegm. He has gone through
+volition, and come out at the other side of it; everything with him is a
+specific act: he has no habits. Le saint indifférent is a dramatic
+wight: he loves to refuse your proffered six per cent, when, by a little
+haggling, he may obtain three-and-a-half. For so he gets away with his
+own mental processes virgin: it is inconceivable to you that, being
+sane, he should so comport himself. Amiable, perhaps, only by painful
+propulsions and sore vigilance, let him appear the mere inheritor of
+easy good-nature. Unselfish out of sheer pride, and ever eager to claim
+the slippery side of the pavement, or the end cut of the roast (on the
+secret ground, be it understood, that he is not as Capuan men, who
+wince at trifles), let him have his ironic reward in passing for one
+whose physical connoisseurship is yet in the raw. That sympathy which
+his rule forbids his devoting to the usual objects, he expends, with
+some bravado, upon their opposites; for he would fain seem a decent
+partizan of some sort, not what he is, a bivalve intelligence, Tros
+Tyriusque. He is known here and there, for instance, as valorous in
+talk; yet he is by nature a solitary, and, for the most part, somewhat
+less communicative than
+
+    "The wind that sings to himself as he makes stride,
+     Lonely and terrible, on the Andean height."
+
+Imagining nothing idler than words in the face of grave events, he
+condoles and congratulates with the genteelest air in the world. In
+short, while there is anything expected of him, while there are
+spectators to be fooled, the stratagems of the fellow prove
+inexhaustible. It is only when he is quite alone that he drops his jaw,
+and stretches his legs; then heigho! arises like a smoke, and envelopes
+him becomingly, the beautiful native well-bred torpidity of the gods, of
+poetic boredom, of "the Oxford manner."
+
+"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable!" sighed Hamlet of this mortal
+outlook. As it came from him in the beginning, that plaint, in its
+sincerity, can come only from the man of culture, who feels about him
+vast mental spaces and depths, and to whom the face of creation is but
+comparative and symbolic. Nor will he breathe it in the common ear,
+where it may woo misapprehensions, and breed ignorant rebellion. The
+unlettered must ever love or hate what is nearest him, and, for lack of
+perspective, think his own fist the size of the sun. The social prizes,
+which, with mellowed observers, rank as twelfth or thirteenth in order
+of desirability, such as wealth and a foothold in affairs, seem to him
+first and sole; and to them he clings like a barnacle. But to our
+indifférent, nothing is so vulgar as close suction. He will never
+tighten his fingers on loaned opportunity; he is a gentleman, the hero
+of the habitually relaxed grasp. A light unprejudiced hold on his
+profits strikes him as decent and comely, though his true artistic
+pleasure is still in "fallings from us, vanishings." It costs him little
+to loose and to forego, to unlace his tentacles, and from the many who
+push hard behind, to retire, as it were, on a never-guessed-at
+competency, "richer than untempted kings." He would not be a
+life-prisoner, in ever so charming a bower. While the tranquil Sabine
+Farm is his delight, well he knows that on the dark trail ahead of him,
+even Sabine Farms are not sequacious. Thus he learns betimes to play the
+guest under his own cedars, and, with disciplinary intent, goes often
+from them; and, hearing his heart-strings snap the third night he is
+away, rejoices that he is again a freedman. Where his foot is planted
+(though it root not anywhere), he calls that spot home. No Unitarian in
+locality, it follows that he is the best of travelers, tangential
+merely, and pleased with each new vista of the human Past. He sometimes
+wishes his understanding less, that he might itch deliciously with a
+prejudice. With cosmic congruities, great and general forces, he keeps,
+all along, a tacit understanding, such as one has with beloved relatives
+at a distance; and his finger, airily inserted in his outer pocket, is
+really upon the pulse of eternity. His vocation, however, is to bury
+himself in the minor and immediate task; and from his intent manner, he
+gets confounded, promptly and permanently, with the victims of
+commercial ambition.
+
+The true use of the much-praised Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, has
+hardly been apprehended: he is simply the patron saint of indifférents.
+From first to last, almost alone in that discordant time, he seems to
+have heard far-off resolving harmonies, and to have been rapt away with
+foreknowledge. Battle, to which all knights were bred, was penitential
+to him. It was but a childish means: and to what end? He meanwhile--and
+no man carried his will in better abeyance to the scheme of the
+universe--wanted no diligence in camp or council. Cares sat handsomely
+on him who cared not at all, who won small comfort from the cause which
+his conscience finally espoused. He labored to be a doer, to stand well
+with observers; and none save his intimate friends read his agitation
+and profound weariness. "I am so much taken notice of," he writes, "for
+an impatient desire for peace, that it is necessary I should likewise
+make it appear how it is not out of fear for the utmost hazard of war."
+And so, driven from the ardor he had to the simulation of the ardor he
+lacked, loyally daring, a sacrifice to one of two transient opinions,
+and inly impartial as a star, Lord Falkland fell: the young
+never-to-be-forgotten martyr of Newburg field. The imminent deed he made
+a work of art; and the station of the moment the only post of honor.
+Life and death may be all one to such a man: but he will at least take
+the noblest pains to discriminate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, if
+he has to write a book about the variations of their antennæ. And like
+the Carolian exemplar is the disciple. The indifférent is a good
+thinker, or a good fighter. He is no "immartial minion," as dear old
+Chapman suffers Hector to call Tydides. Nevertheless, his sign-manual is
+content with humble and stagnant conditions. Talk of scaling the
+Himalayas of life affects him, very palpably, as "tall talk." He deals
+not with things, but with the impressions and analogies of things. The
+material counts for nothing with him: he has moulted it away. Not so
+sure of the identity of the higher course of action as he is of his
+consecrating dispositions, he feels that he may make heaven again, out
+of sundries, as he goes. Shall not a beggarly duty, discharged with
+perfect temper, land him in "the out-courts of Glory," quite as
+successfully as a grand Sunday-school excursion to front the cruel
+Paynim foe? He thinks so. Experts have thought so before him. Francis
+Drake, with the national alarum instant in his ears, desired first to
+win at bowls, on the Devon sward, "and afterwards to settle with the
+Don." No one will claim a buccaneering hero for an indifférent, however.
+The Jesuit novices were ball-playing almost at that very time, three
+hundred years ago, when some too speculative companion, figuring the end
+of the world in a few moments (with just leisure enough, between, to be
+shriven in chapel, according to his own thrifty mind), asked Louis of
+Gonzaga how he, on his part, should employ the precious interval. "I
+should go on with the game," said the most innocent and most ascetic
+youth among them. But to cite the behavior of any of the saints is to
+step over the playful line allotted. Indifference of the mundane brand
+is not to be confounded with their detachment, which is emancipation
+wrought in the soul, and the ineffable efflorescence of the Christian
+spirit. Like most supernatural virtues, it has a laic shadow; the
+counsel to abstain, and to be unsolicitous, is one not only of
+perfection, but also of polity. A very little nonadhesion to common
+affairs, a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice,
+provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate. The
+indifférent believes in storms: since tales of shipwreck encompass him.
+But once among his own kind, he wonders that folk should be circumvented
+by merely extraneous powers! His favorite catch, woven in among escaped
+dangers, rises through the roughest weather, and daunts it:
+
+    "Now strike your sailes, ye jolly mariners,
+     For we be come into a quiet rode."
+
+No slave to any vicissitude, his imagination is, on the contrary, the
+cheerful obstinate tyrant of all that is. He lives, as Keats once said
+of himself, "in a thousand worlds," withdrawing at will from one to
+another, often curtailing his circumference to enlarge his liberty. His
+universe is a universe of balls, like those which the cunning Oriental
+carvers make out of ivory; each entire surface perforated with the same
+delicate pattern, each moving prettily and inextricably within the
+other, and all but the outer one impossible to handle. In some such
+innermost asylum the right sort of dare-devil sits smiling, while men
+rage or weep.
+
+
+
+
+ON LYING AWAKE AT NIGHT
+
+_By_ STEWART EDWARD WHITE
+
+
+     This is from _The Forest_--one of Stewart Edward White's many
+     delightful volumes. A very large public has enjoyed Mr. White's
+     writings--many of his readers, perhaps, without accurately
+     realizing how extraordinarily good they are.
+
+     Mr. White was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1873; studied at the
+     University of Michigan; has hunted big game in Africa; served as
+     major of field artillery, 1917-18; and is a Fellow of the Royal
+     Geographical Society. His first book, _The Westerners_, was
+     published in 1901, since when they have followed regularly.
+
+
+_"Who hath lain alone to hear the wild goose cry?"_
+
+About once in so often you are due to lie awake at night. Why this is so
+I have never been able to discover. It apparently comes from no
+predisposing uneasiness of indigestion, no rashness in the matter of too
+much tea or tobacco, no excitation of unusual incident or stimulating
+conversation. In fact, you turn in with the expectation of rather a good
+night's rest. Almost at once the little noises of the forest grow
+larger, blend in the hollow bigness of the first drowse; your thoughts
+drift idly back and forth between reality and dream; when--_snap!_--you
+are broad awake!
+
+Perhaps the reservoir of your vital forces is full to the overflow of a
+little waste; or perhaps, more subtly, the great Mother insists thus
+that you enter the temple of her larger mysteries.
+
+For, unlike mere insomnia, lying awake at night in the woods is
+pleasant. The eager, nervous straining for sleep gives way to a
+delicious indifference. You do not care. Your mind is cradled in an
+exquisite poppy-suspension of judgment and of thought. Impressions slip
+vaguely into your consciousness and as vaguely out again. Sometimes they
+stand stark and naked for your inspection; sometimes they lose
+themselves in the mist of half-sleep. Always they lay soft velvet
+fingers on the drowsy imagination, so that in their caressing you feel
+the vaster spaces from which they have come. Peaceful-brooding your
+faculties receive. Hearing, sight, smell--all are preternaturally keen
+to whatever of sound and sight and woods perfume is abroad through the
+night; and yet at the same time active appreciation dozes, so these
+things lie on it sweet and cloying like fallen rose-leaves.
+
+In such circumstance you will hear what the _voyageurs_ call the voices
+of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft
+and low and distinct beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even
+the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over
+the louder sounds. They are like the tear-forms swimming across the
+field of vision, which disappear so quickly when you concentrate your
+sight to look at them, and which reappear so magically when again your
+gaze turns vacant. In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness they
+speak; when you bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only
+the tumults and the tinklings remain.
+
+But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as
+often an odor will wake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the
+force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the
+cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a multitude
+_en fête_, so that subtly you feel the gray old town, with its walls,
+the crowded market-place, the decent peasant crowd, the booths, the
+mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted sun. Or, in
+the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters, sound faint
+and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant notes of
+laughter, as though many canoes were working against the current--only
+the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices louder. The
+_voyageurs_ call these mist people the Huntsmen; and look frightened. To
+each is his vision, according to his experience. The nations of the
+earth whisper to their exiled sons through the voices of the rapids.
+Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest always peaceful scenes--a
+harvest-field, a street fair, a Sunday morning in a cathedral town,
+careless travelers--never the turmoils and struggles. Perhaps this is
+the great Mother's compensation in a harsh mode of life.
+
+Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more
+concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water.
+And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive
+appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring
+louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside
+the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a
+whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some
+night creature--at once the yellow sunlit French meadows puff away--you
+are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through the
+texture of your tent.
+
+The voices of the rapids have dropped into the background, as have the
+dashing noises of the stream. Through the forest is a great silence, but
+no stillness at all. The whippoorwill swings down and up the short curve
+of his regular song; over and over an owl says his rapid _whoo, whoo,
+whoo_. These, with the ceaseless dash of the rapids, are the web on
+which the night traces her more delicate embroideries of the unexpected.
+Distant crashes, single and impressive; stealthy footsteps near at hand;
+the subdued scratching of claws; a faint _sniff! sniff! sniff!_ of
+inquiry; the sudden clear tin-horn _ko-ko-ko-óh_ of the little owl; the
+mournful, long-drawn-out cry of the loon, instinct with the spirit of
+loneliness; the ethereal call-note of the birds of passage high in the
+air; a _patter, patter, patter_, among the dead leaves, immediately
+stilled; and then at the last, from the thicket close at hand, the
+beautiful silver purity of the white-throated sparrow--the nightingale
+of the North--trembling with the ecstasy of beauty, as though a
+shimmering moonbeam had turned to sound; and all the while the blurred
+figure of the moon mounting to the ridge-line of your tent--these things
+combine subtly, until at last the great Silence of which they are a part
+overarches the night and draws you forth to contemplation.
+
+No beverage is more grateful than the cup of spring water you drink at
+such a time; no moment more refreshing than that in which you look about
+you at the darkened forest. You have cast from you with the warm blanket
+the drowsiness of dreams. A coolness, physical and spiritual, bathes you
+from head to foot. All your senses are keyed to the last vibrations. You
+hear the littler night prowlers; you glimpse the greater. A faint,
+searching woods perfume of dampness greets your nostrils. And somehow,
+mysteriously, in a manner not to be understood, the forces of the world
+seem in suspense, as though a touch might crystallize infinite
+possibilities into infinite power and motion. But the touch lacks. The
+forces hover on the edge of action, unheeding the little noises. In all
+humbleness and awe, you are a dweller of the Silent Places.
+
+At such a time you will meet with adventures. One night we put fourteen
+inquisitive porcupines out of camp. Near McGregor's Bay I discovered in
+the large grass park of my camp-site nine deer, cropping the herbage
+like so many beautiful ghosts. A friend tells me of a fawn that every
+night used to sleep outside his tent and within a foot of his head,
+probably by way of protection against wolves. Its mother had in all
+likelihood been killed. The instant my friend moved toward the tent
+opening the little creature would disappear, and it was always gone by
+earliest daylight. Nocturnal bears in search of pork are not uncommon.
+But even though your interest meets nothing but the bats and the woods
+shadows and the stars, that few moments of the sleeping world forces is
+a psychical experience to be gained in no other way. You cannot know the
+night by sitting up; she will sit up with you. Only by coming into her
+presence from the borders of sleep can you meet her face to face in her
+intimate mood.
+
+The night wind from the river, or from the open spaces of the wilds,
+chills you after a time. You begin to think of your blankets. In a few
+moments you roll yourself in their soft wool. Instantly it is morning.
+
+And, strange to say, you have not to pay by going through the day
+unrefreshed. You may feel like turning in at eight instead of nine, and
+you may fall asleep with unusual promptitude, but your journey will
+begin clear-headedly, proceed springily, and end with much in reserve.
+No languor, no dull headache, no exhaustion, follows your experience.
+For this once your two hours of sleep have been as effective as nine.
+
+
+
+
+A WOODLAND VALENTINE
+
+_By_ MARIAN STORM
+
+
+     Marian Storm was born in Stormville, N. Y., and educated at Penn
+     Hall, Chambersburg, Pa., and at Smith College. She did editorial
+     and free-lance work in New York after graduation, and later went to
+     Washington to become private secretary to the Argentine Ambassador.
+     Since 1918 she has been connected with the New York _Evening Post_.
+
+     This essay comes from _Minstrel Weather_, a series of open-air
+     vignettes which circle the zodiac with the attentive eye of a
+     naturalist and the enchanted ardor of a poet.
+
+
+Forces astir in the deepest roots grow restless beneath the lock of
+frost. Bulbs try the door. February's stillness is charged with a faint
+anxiety, as if the powers of light, pressing up from the earth's center
+and streaming down from the stronger sun, had troubled the buried seeds,
+who strive to answer their liberator, so that the guarding mother must
+whisper over and over, "Not yet, not yet!" Better to stay behind the
+frozen gate than to come too early up into realms where the wolves of
+cold are still aprowl. Wisely the snow places a white hand over eager
+life unseen, but perceived in February's woods as a swimmer feels the
+changing moods of water in a lake fed by springs. Only the thick stars,
+closer and more companionable than in months of foliage, burn alert and
+serene. In February the Milky Way is revealed divinely lucent to lonely
+peoples--herdsmen, mountaineers, fishermen, trappers--who are abroad in
+the starlight hours of this grave and silent time of year. It is in the
+long, frozen nights that the sky has most red flowers.
+
+February knows the beat of twilight wings. Drifting north again come
+birds who only pretended to forsake us--adventurers, not so fond of
+safety but that they dare risk finding how snow bunting and pine finch
+have plundered the cones of the evergreens, while chickadees, sparrows,
+and crows are supervising from established stations all the more
+domestic supplies available, a sparrow often making it possible to annoy
+even a duck out of her share of cracked corn. Ranged along a
+brown-draped oak branch in the waxing light, crows show a lordly
+glistening of feathers. (Sun on a sweeping wing in flight has the
+quality of sun on a ripple.) Where hemlocks gather, deep in somber
+woods, the great horned owl has thus soon, perhaps working amid snows at
+her task, built a nest wherein March will find sturdy balls of fluff.
+The thunderous love song of her mate sounds through the timber. By the
+time the wren has nested these winter babies will be solemn with the
+wisdom of their famous race.
+
+There is no season like the end of February for cleaning out brooks.
+Hastening yellow waters toss a dreary wreckage of torn or ashen leaves,
+twigs, acorn cups, stranded rafts of bark, and buttonballs from the
+sycamore, never to come to seed. Standing on one bank or both, according
+to the sundering flood's ambition, the knight with staff and bold
+forefinger sets the water princess free. She goes then curtsying and
+dimpling over the shining gravel, sliding from beneath the ice that
+roofs her on the uplands down to the softer valleys, where her quickened
+step will be heard by the frogs in their mansions of mud, and the fish,
+recluses in rayless pools, will rise to the light she brings.
+
+Down from the frozen mountains, in summer, birds and winds must bear the
+seed of alpine flowers--lilies that lean against unmelting snows,
+poppies, bright-colored herbs, and the palely gleaming, fringed beauties
+that change names with countries. How just and reasonable it would seem
+to be that flowers which edge the ice in July should consent to bloom in
+lowlands no colder in February! The pageant of blue, magenta, and
+scarlet on the austere upper slopes of the Rockies, where nights are
+bitter to the summer wanderer--why should it not flourish to leeward of
+a valley barn in months when icicles hang from the eaves in this tamer
+setting? But no. Mountain tempests are endurable to the silken-petaled.
+The treacherous lowland winter, with its coaxing suns followed by
+roaring desolation, is for blooms bred in a different tradition.
+
+The light is clear but hesitant, a delicate wine, by no means the mighty
+vintage of April. February has no intoxication; the vague eagerness that
+gives the air a pulse where fields lie voiceless comes from the secret
+stirring of imprisoned life. Spring and sunrise are forever miracles,
+but the early hour of the wonder hardly hints the exuberance of its
+fulfilment. Even the forest dwellers move gravely, thankful for any
+promise of kindness from the lord of day as he hangs above a sea-gray
+landscape, but knowing well that their long duress is not yet to end.
+Deer pathetically haunt the outskirts of farms, gazing upon cattle
+feeding in winter pasture from the stack, and often, after dark,
+clearing the fences and robbing the same disheveled storehouse. Not a
+chipmunk winks from the top rail. The woodchuck, after his single
+expeditionary effort on Candlemas, which he is obliged to make for
+mankind's enlightenment, has retired without being seen, in sunshine or
+shadow, and has not the slightest intention of disturbing himself just
+yet. Though snowdrops may feel uneasy, he knows too much about the Ides
+of March! Quietest of all Northern woods creatures, the otter slides
+from one ice-hung waterfall to the next. The solitary scamperer left is
+the cottontail, appealing because he is the most pursued and politest of
+the furry; faithfully trying to give no offense, except when starvation
+points to winter cabbage, he is none the less fey. So is the mink,
+though he moves like a phantom.
+
+Mosses, whereon March in coming treads first, show one hue brighter in
+the swamps. Pussy willows have made a gray dawn in viny caverns where
+the day's own dawn looks in but faintly, and the flushing of the red
+willow betrays reveries of a not impossible cowslip upon the bank
+beneath. The blue jay has mentioned it in the course of his voluble
+recollections. He is unwilling to prophesy arbutus, but he will just
+hint that when the leaves in the wood lot show through snow as early as
+this.... Once he found a hepatica bud the last day of February....
+Speaking with his old friend, the muskrat, last week.... And when you
+can see red pebbles in the creek at five o'clock in the afternoon....
+But it is no use to expect yellow orchids on the west knoll this spring,
+for some people found them there last year, and after that you might as
+well.... Of course cowslips beside red willows are remarkably pretty,
+just as blue jays in a cedar with blue berries.... He is interminable,
+but then he has seen a great deal of life. And February needs her blue
+jays' unwearied and conquering faith.
+
+
+
+
+THE ELEMENTS OF POETRY
+
+_By_ GEORGE SANTAYANA
+
+
+     George Santayana was born in Madrid in 1863, of Spanish parentage.
+     He graduated from Harvard in 1886, and taught philosophy there,
+     1889-1911. He lives now, I think, in England. I must be frank:
+     except his poems, I only know his work in that enthralling volume,
+     _Little Essays Drawn from the Writings of George Santayana_, edited
+     by L. Pearsall Smith. Much of it is too esoteric for my grasp, but
+     Mr. Smith's redaction brings the fascination of Santayana's
+     philosophy within the compass of what Tennyson called "a
+     second-rate sensitive mind"; and, if mine is a criterion, such will
+     find it of the highest stimulus. This discourse on poetry seems to
+     me one of the most pregnant utterances on the subject. It is not
+     perfectly appreciated by merely one reading; but even if you have
+     to become a poet to enjoy it fully, that will do yourself least
+     harm.
+
+
+If poetry in its higher reaches is more philosophical than history,
+because it presents the memorable types of men and things apart from
+unmeaning circumstances, so in its primary substance and texture poetry
+is more philosophical than prose because it is nearer to our immediate
+experience. Poetry breaks up the trite conceptions designated by current
+words into the sensuous qualities out of which those conceptions were
+originally put together. We name what we conceive and believe in, not
+what we see; things, not images; souls, not voices and silhouettes. This
+naming, with the whole education of the senses which it accompanies,
+subserves the uses of life; in order to thread our way through the
+labyrinth of objects which assault us, we must make a great selection in
+our sensuous experience; half of what we see and hear we must pass over
+as insignificant, while we piece out the other half with such an ideal
+complement as is necessary to turn it into a fixed and well-ordered
+conception of the world. This labor of perception and understanding,
+this spelling of the material meaning of experience, is enshrined in our
+workaday language and ideas; ideas which are literally poetic in the
+sense that they are "made" (for every conception in an adult mind is a
+fiction), but which are at the same time prosaic because they are made
+economically, by abstraction, and for use.
+
+When the child of poetic genius, who has learned this intellectual and
+utilitarian language in the cradle, goes afield and gathers for himself
+the aspects of nature, he begins to encumber his mind with the many
+living impressions which the intellect rejected, and which the language
+of the intellect can hardly convey; he labors with his nameless burden
+of perception, and wastes himself in aimless impulses of emotion and
+reverie, until finally the method of some art offers a vent to his
+inspiration, or to such part of it as can survive the test of time and
+the discipline of expression.
+
+The poet retains by nature the innocence of the eye, or recovers it
+easily; he disintegrates the fictions of common perception into their
+sensuous elements, gathers these together again into chance groups as
+the accidents of his environment or the affinities of his temperament
+may conjoin them; and this wealth of sensation and this freedom of
+fancy, which make an extraordinary ferment in his ignorant heart,
+presently bubble over into some kind of utterance.
+
+The fullness and sensuousness of such effusions bring them nearer to our
+actual perceptions than common discourse could come; yet they may easily
+seem remote, overloaded, and obscure to those accustomed to think
+entirely in symbols, and never to be interrupted in the algebraic
+rapidity of their thinking by a moment's pause and examination of heart,
+nor ever to plunge for a moment into that torrent of sensation and
+imagery over which the bridge of prosaic associations habitually carries
+us safe and dry to some conventional act. How slight that bridge
+commonly is, how much an affair of trestles and wire, we can hardly
+conceive until we have trained ourselves to an extreme sharpness of
+introspection. But psychologists have discovered, what laymen generally
+will confess, that we hurry by the procession of our mental images as we
+do by the traffic of the street, intent on business, gladly forgetting
+the noise and movement of the scene, and looking only for the corner we
+would turn or the door we would enter. Yet in our alertest moment the
+depths of the soul are still dreaming; the real world stands drawn in
+bare outline against a background of chaos and unrest. Our logical
+thoughts dominate experience only as the parallels and meridians make a
+checkerboard of the sea. They guide our voyage without controlling the
+waves, which toss forever in spite of our ability to ride over them to
+our chosen ends. Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a
+dream controlled.
+
+Out of the neglected riches of this dream the poet fetches his wares. He
+dips into the chaos that underlies the rational shell of the world and
+brings up some superfluous image, some emotion dropped by the way, and
+reattaches it to the present object; he reinstates things unnecessary,
+he emphasizes things ignored, he paints in again into the landscape the
+tints which the intellect has allowed to fade from it. If he seems
+sometimes to obscure a fact, it is only because he is restoring an
+experience. The first element which the intellect rejects in forming its
+ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and
+this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the
+image, because he stops to enjoy. He wanders into the bypaths of
+association because the bypaths are delightful. The love of beauty which
+made him give measure and cadence to his words, the love of harmony
+which made him rhyme them, reappear in his imagination and make him
+select there also the material that is itself beautiful, or capable of
+assuming beautiful forms. The link that binds together the ideas,
+sometimes so wide apart, which his wit assimilates, is most often the
+link of emotion; they have in common some element of beauty or of
+horror.
+
+
+
+
+NOCTURNE
+
+_By_ SIMEON STRUNSKY
+
+
+     Simeon Strunsky is one of the most brilliant and certainly the most
+     modest of American journalists. I regret that I cannot praise him,
+     for at present we both work in the same office, and kind words
+     uttered in public would cause him to avoid me forever. All that is
+     necessary is for my readers to examine his books and they will say
+     for themselves what I am restrained from hinting. There is a
+     spontaneous play of chaff in Mr. Strunsky's lighter vein which is
+     unsurpassed by any American humorist; his more inward musing is
+     well exemplified by this selection (from _Post-Impressions_, 1914).
+     If you read _Post-Impressions_, _The Patient Observer_, _Belshazzar
+     Court_, _Professor Latimer's Progress_ and _Sinbad and His
+     Friends_, you will have made a fair start.
+
+     Strunsky was born in Russia in 1879; studied at the Horace Mann
+     High School (New York) and graduated from Columbia University in
+     1900. He worked on the staff of the New International Encyclopædia
+     in 1900-06, and since then has been on the staff of the New York
+     _Evening Post_, of which he is now editor.
+
+
+Once every three months, with fair regularity, she was brought into the
+Night Court, found guilty, and fined. She came in between eleven o'clock
+and midnight, when the traffic of the court is at its heaviest, and it
+would be an hour, perhaps, before she was called to the bar. When her
+turn came she would rise from her seat at one end of the prisoners'
+bench and confront the magistrate.
+
+Her eyes did not reach to the level of the magistrate's desk. A
+policeman in citizen's clothes would mount the witness stand, take oath
+with a seriousness of mien which was surprising, in view of the
+frequency with which he was called upon to repeat the formula, and
+testify in an illiterate drone to a definite infraction of the law of
+the State, committed in his presence and with his encouragement. While
+he spoke the magistrate would look at the ceiling. When she was called
+upon to answer she defended herself with an obvious lie or two, while
+the magistrate looked over her head. He would then condemn her to pay
+the sum of ten dollars to the State and let her go.
+
+She came to look forward to her visits at the Night Court.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Night Court is no longer a center of general interest. During the
+first few months after it was established, two or three years ago, it
+was one of the great sights of a great city. For the newspapers it was a
+rich source of human-interest stories. It replaced Chinatown in its
+appeal to visitors from out-of-town. It stirred even the languid pulses
+of the native inhabitant with its offerings of something new in the way
+of "life." The sociologists, sincere and amateur, crowded the benches
+and took notes.
+
+To-day the novelty is worn off. The newspapers long ago abandoned the
+Night Court, clergymen go to it rarely for their texts, and the tango
+has taken its place. But the sociologists and the casual visitor have
+not disappeared. Serious people, anxious for an immediate vision of the
+pity of life, continue to fill the benches comfortably. No session of
+the court is without its little group of social investigators, among
+whom the women are in the majority. Many of them are young women,
+exceedingly sympathetic, handsomely gowned, and very well taken care of.
+
+As she sat at one end of the prisoners' bench waiting her turn before
+the magistrate's desk, she would cast a sidelong glance over the railing
+that separated her from the handsomely gowned, gently bred, sympathetic
+young women in the audience. She observed with extraordinary admiration
+and delight those charming faces softened in pity, the graceful bearing,
+the admirably constructed yet simple coiffures, the elegance of dress,
+which she compared with the best that the windows in Sixth Avenue could
+show. She was amazed to find such gowns actually being worn instead of
+remaining as an unattainable ideal on smiling lay figures in the shop
+windows.
+
+Occupants of the prisoners' bench are not supposed to stare at the
+spectators. She had to steal a glance now and then. Her visits to the
+Night Court had become so much a matter of routine that she would
+venture a peep over the railing while the case immediately preceding her
+own was being tried. Once or twice she was surprised by the clerk who
+called her name. She stood up mechanically and faced the magistrate as
+Officer Smith, in civilian clothes, mounted the witness stand.
+
+She had no grudge against Officer Smith. She did not visualize him
+either as a person or as a part of a system. He was merely an incident
+of her trade. She had neither the training nor the imagination to look
+behind Officer Smith and see a communal policy which has not the power
+to suppress, nor the courage to acknowledge, nor the skill to regulate,
+and so contents itself with sending out full-fed policemen in civilian
+clothes to work up the evidence that defends society against her kind
+through the imposition of a ten-dollar fine.
+
+To some of the women on the visitors' benches the cruelty of the process
+came home: this business of setting a two-hundred-pound policeman in
+citizen's clothes, backed up by magistrates, clerks, court criers,
+interpreters, and court attendants, to worrying a ten-dollar fine out of
+a half-grown woman under an enormous imitation ostrich plume. The
+professional sociologists were chiefly interested in the money cost of
+this process to the tax-payer, and they took notes on the proportion of
+first offenders. Yet the Night Court is a remarkable advance in
+civilization. Formerly, in addition to her fine, the prisoner would pay
+a commission to the professional purveyor of bail.
+
+Sometimes, if the magistrate was young or new to the business, she would
+be given a chance against Officer Smith. She would be called to the
+witness chair and under oath be allowed to elaborate on the obvious lies
+which constituted her usual defense. This would give her the
+opportunity, between the magistrate's questions, of sweeping the
+courtroom with a full, hungry look for as much as half a minute at a
+time. She saw the women in the audience only, and their clothes. The
+pity in their eyes did not move her, because she was not in the least
+interested in what they thought, but in how they looked and what they
+wore. They were part of a world which she would read about--she read
+very little--in the society columns of the Sunday newspaper. They were
+the women around whom headlines were written and whose pictures were
+printed frequently on the first page.
+
+She could study them with comparative leisure in the Night Court.
+Outside in the course of her daily routine she might catch an occasional
+glimpse of these same women, through the windows of a passing taxi, or
+in the matinée crowds, or going in and out of the fashionable shops. But
+her work took her seldom into the region of taxicabs and fashionable
+shops. The nature of her occupation kept her to furtive corners and the
+dark side of streets. Nor was she at such times in the mood for just
+appreciation of the beautiful things in life. More than any other walk
+of life, hers was of an exacting nature, calling for intense powers of
+concentration both as regards the public and the police. It was
+different in the Night Court. Here, having nothing to fear and nothing
+out of the usual to hope for, she might give herself up to the esthetic
+contemplation of a beautiful world of which, at any other time, she
+could catch mere fugitive aspects.
+
+Sometimes I wonder why people think that life is only what they see and
+hear, and not what they read of. Take the Night Court. The visitor
+really sees nothing and hears nothing that he has not read a thousand
+times in his newspaper and had it described in greater detail and with
+better-trained powers of observation than he can bring to bear in
+person. What new phase of life is revealed by seeing in the body, say, a
+dozen practitioners of a trade of whom we know there are several tens of
+thousands in New York? They have been described by the human-interest
+reporters, analyzed by the statisticians, defended by the social
+revolutionaries, and explained away by the optimists. For that matter,
+to the faithful reader of the newspapers, daily and Sunday, what can
+there be new in this world from the Pyramids by moonlight to the habits
+of the night prowler? Can the upper classes really acquire for
+themselves, through slumming parties and visits to the Night Court,
+anything like the knowledge that books and newspapers can furnish them?
+Can the lower classes ever hope to obtain that complete view of the
+Fifth Avenue set which the Sunday columns offer them? And yet there the
+case stands: only by seeing and hearing for ourselves, however
+imperfectly, do we get the sense of reality.
+
+That is why our criminal courts are probably our most influential
+schools of democracy. More than our settlement houses, more than our
+subsidized dancing-schools for shopgirls, they encourage the
+get-together process through which one-half the world learns how the
+other half lives. On either side of the railing of the prisoners' cage
+is an audience and a stage.
+
+That is why she would look forward to her regular visits at the Night
+Court. She saw life there.
+
+
+
+
+BEER AND CIDER
+
+_By_ GEORGE SAINTSBURY
+
+
+     How pleasant it is to find the famous Professor Saintsbury--known
+     to students as the author of histories of the English and French
+     literatures, the _History of Criticism_ and _History of English
+     Prosody_--spending the evening so hospitably in his cellar. I print
+     this--from his downright delightful _Notes on a Cellar Book_--as a
+     kind of tantalizing penance. It is a charming example of how
+     pleasantly a great scholar can unbend on occasion.
+
+     George Saintsbury, born in 1845, studied at Merton College, Oxford,
+     taught school 1868-76, was a journalist in London 1876-95, and held
+     the chair of English Literature at Edinburgh University, 1895-1915.
+     If you read _Notes on a Cellar Book_, as you should, you will agree
+     that it is a charmingly light-hearted _causerie_ for a gentleman to
+     publish at the age of seventy-five. More than ever one feels that
+     sound liquor, in moderation, is a preservative of both body and
+     wit.
+
+
+There is no beverage which I have liked "to live with" more than Beer;
+but I have never had a cellar large enough to accommodate much of it, or
+an establishment numerous enough to justify the accommodation. In the
+good days when servants expected beer, but did not expect to be treated
+otherwise than as servants, a cask or two was necessary; and persons who
+were "quite" generally took care that the small beer they drank should
+be the same as that which they gave to their domestics, though they
+might have other sorts as well. For these better sorts at least the good
+old rule was, when you began on one cask always to have in another.
+Even Cobbett, whose belief in beer was the noblest feature in his
+character, allowed that it required some keeping. The curious "white
+ale," or lober agol--which, within the memory of man, used to exist in
+Devonshire and Cornwall, but which, even half a century ago, I have
+vainly sought there--was, I believe, drunk quite new; but then it was
+not pure malt and not hopped at all, but had eggs ("pullet-sperm in the
+brewage") and other foreign bodies in it.
+
+I did once drink, at St David's, ale so new that it frothed from the
+cask as creamily as if it had been bottled: and I wondered whether the
+famous beer of Bala, which Borrow found so good at his first visit and
+so bad at his second, had been like it.[E]
+
+On the other hand, the very best Bass I ever drank had had an exactly
+contrary experience. In the year 1875, when I was resident at Elgin, I
+and a friend now dead, the Procurator-Fiscal of the district, devoted
+the May "Sacrament holidays," which were then still kept in those remote
+parts, to a walking tour up the Findhorn and across to Loch Ness and
+Glen Urquhart. At the Freeburn Inn on the first-named river we found
+some beer of singular excellence: and, asking the damsel who waited on
+us about it, were informed that a cask of Bass had been put in during
+the previous October, but, owing to a sudden break in the weather and
+the departure of all visitors, had never been tapped till our arrival.
+
+Beer of ordinary strength left too long in the cask gets "hard" of
+course; but no one who deserves to drink it would drink it from anything
+but the cask if he could help it. Jars are makeshifts, though useful
+makeshifts: and small beer will not keep in them for much more than a
+week. Nor are the very small barrels, known by various affectionate
+diminutives ("pin," etc.) in the country districts, much to be
+recommended. "We'll drink it in the firkin, my boy!" is the lowest
+admission in point of volume that should be allowed. Of one such firkin
+I have a pleasant memory and memorial, though it never reposed in my
+home cellar. It was just before the present century opened, and some
+years before we Professors in Scotland had, of our own motion and
+against considerable opposition, given up half of the old six months'
+holiday without asking for or receiving a penny more salary. (I have
+since chuckled at the horror and wrath with which Mr. Smillie and Mr.
+Thomas would hear of such profligate conduct.) One could therefore move
+about with fairly long halts: and I had taken from a friend a house at
+Abingdon for some time. So, though I could not even then drink quite as
+much beer as I could thirty years earlier a little higher up the Thames,
+it became necessary to procure a cask. It came--one of Bass's minor
+mildnesses--affectionately labeled "Mr. George Saintsbury. Full to the
+bung." I detached the card, and I believe I have it to this day as my
+choicest (because quite unsolicited) testimonial.
+
+Very strong beer permits itself, of course, to be bottled and kept in
+bottles: but I rather doubt whether it also is not best from the wood;
+though it is equally of course, much easier to cellar it and keep it
+bottled. Its kinds are various and curious. "Scotch ale" is famous, and
+at its best (I never drank better than Younger's) excellent: but its
+tendency, I think, is to be too sweet. I once invested in some--not
+Younger's--which I kept for nearly sixteen years, and which was still
+treacle at the end. Bass's No. 1 requires no praises. Once when living
+in the Cambridgeshire village mentioned earlier I had some, bottled in
+Cambridge itself, of great age and excellence. Indeed, two guests,
+though both of them were Cambridge men, and should have had what Mr.
+Lang once called the "robust" habits of that University, fell into one
+ditch after partaking of it. (I own that the lanes thereabouts are very
+dark.) In former days, though probably not at present, you could often
+find rather choice specimens of strong beer produced at small breweries
+in the country. I remember such even in the Channel Islands. And I
+suspect the Universities themselves have been subject to "declensions
+and fallings off." I know that in my undergraduate days at Merton we
+always had proper beer-glasses, like the old "flute" champagnes, served
+regularly at cheese-time with a most noble beer called "Archdeacon,"
+which was then actually brewed in the sacristy of the College chapel. I
+have since--a slight sorrow to season the joy of reinstatement
+there--been told that it is now obtained from outside.[F] And All Souls
+is the only other college in which, from actual recent experience, I can
+imagine the possibility of the exorcism,
+
+    Strongbeerum! discede a lay-fratre Petro,
+
+if lay-brother Peter were so silly as to abuse, or play tricks with, the
+good gift.
+
+I have never had many experiences of real "home-brewed," but two which I
+had were pleasing. There was much home-brewing in East Anglia at the
+time I lived there, and I once got the village carpenter to give me some
+of his own manufacture. It was as good light ale as I ever wish to drink
+(many times better than the wretched stuff that Dora has foisted on us),
+and he told me that, counting in every expense for material, cost and
+wear of plant, etc., it came to about a penny[G] a quart. The other was
+very different. The late Lord de Tabley--better or at least longer known
+as Mr. Leicester Warren--once gave a dinner at the Athenæum at which I
+was present, and had up from his Cheshire cellars some of the old ale
+for which that county is said to be famous, to make flip after dinner.
+It was shunned by most of the pusillanimous guests, but not by me, and
+it was excellent. But I should like to have tried it unflipped.[H]
+
+I never drank mum, which all know from The Antiquary, some from "The
+Ryme of Sir Lancelot Bogle," and some again from the notice which Mr.
+Gladstone's love of Scott (may it plead for him!) gave it once in some
+Budget debate, I think. It is said to be brewed of wheat, which is not
+in its favor (wheat was meant to be eaten, not drunk) and very bitter,
+which is. Nearly all bitter drinks are good. The only time I ever drank
+"spruce" beer I did not like it. The comeliest of black malts is, of
+course, that noble liquor called of Guinness. Here at least I think
+England cannot match Ireland, for our stouts are, as a rule, too sweet
+and "clammy." But there used to be in the country districts a sort of
+light porter which was one of the most refreshing liquids conceivable
+for hot weather. I have drunk it in Yorkshire at the foot of Roseberry
+Topping, out of big stone bottles like champagne magnums. But that was
+nearly sixty years ago. Genuine lager beer is no more to be boycotted
+than genuine hock, though, by the way, the best that I ever drank (it
+was at the good town of King's Lynn) was Low not High Dutch in origin.
+It was so good that I wrote to the shippers at Rotterdam to see if I
+could get some sent to Leith, but the usual difficulties in establishing
+connection between wholesale dealers and individual buyers prevented
+this. It was, however, something of a consolation to read the delightful
+name, "our top-and-bottom-fermentation beer," in which the
+manufacturer's letter, in very sound English for the most part, spoke of
+it. English lager I must say I have never liked; perhaps I have been
+unlucky in my specimens. And good as Scotch strong beer is, I cannot say
+that the lighter and medium kinds are very good in Scotland. In fact, in
+Edinburgh I used to import beer of this kind from Lincolnshire,[I] where
+there is no mistake about it. My own private opinion is that John
+Barleycorn, north of Tweed, says: "I am for whisky, and not for ale."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Cider and perry," says Burton, "are windy drinks"; yet he observes that
+the inhabitants of certain shires in England (he does not, I am sorry to
+say, mention Devon) of Normandy in France, and of Guipuzcoa in Spain,
+"are no whit offended by them." I have never liked perry on the few
+occasions on which I have tasted it; perhaps because its taste has
+always reminded me of the smell of some stuff that my nurse used to put
+on my hair when I was small. But I certainly have been no whit offended
+by cider, either in divers English shires, including very specially
+those which Burton does not include, Devon, Dorset, and Somerset, or in
+Normandy. The Guipuzcoan variety I have, unfortunately, had no
+opportunity of tasting. Besides, perry seems to me to be an abuse of
+that excellent creature the pear, whereas cider-apples furnish one of
+the most cogent arguments to prove that Providence had the production of
+alcoholic liquors directly in its eye. They are good for nothing else
+whatever, and they are excellent good for that. I think I like the weak
+ciders, such as those of the west and the Normandy, better than the
+stronger ones,[J] and draught cider much better than bottled. That of
+Norfolk, which has been much commended of late, I have never tasted; but
+I have had both Western and West-Midland cider in my cellar, often in
+bottle and once or twice in cask. It is a pity that the
+liquor--extremely agreeable to the taste, one of the most
+thirst-quenching to be anywhere found, of no overpowering alcoholic
+strength as a rule, and almost sovereign for gout--is not to be drunk
+without caution, and sometimes has to be given up altogether from other
+medical aspects. Qualified with brandy--a mixture which was first
+imparted to me at a roadside inn by a very amiable Dorsetshire farmer
+whom I met while walking from Sherborne to Blandford in my first Oxford
+"long"--it is capital: and cider-cup who knoweth not? If there be any
+such, let him not wait longer than to-morrow before establishing
+knowledge. As for the pure juice of the apple, four gallons a day per
+man used to be the harvest allowance in Somerset when I was a boy. It is
+refreshing only to think of it now.
+
+Of mead or metheglin, the third indigenous liquor of Southern Britain, I
+know little. Indeed, I should have known nothing at all of it had it not
+been that the parish-clerk and sexton of the Cambridgeshire village
+where I lived, and the caretaker of a vinery which I rented, was a
+bee-keeper and mead-maker. He gave me some once. I did not care much for
+it. It was like a sweet weak beer, with, of course, the special honey
+flavor. But I should imagine that it was susceptible of a great many
+different modes of preparation, and it is obvious, considering what it
+is made of, that it could be brewed of almost any strength. Old literary
+notices generally speak of it as strong.
+
+
+
+
+A FREE MAN'S WORSHIP
+
+_By_ BERTRAND RUSSELL
+
+
+     "A Free Man's Worship" was written in 1902; it was republished by
+     Mr. Russell in 1918 in his volume _Mysticism and Logic_. It is
+     interesting to note carefully Mr. Russell's views in this fine
+     essay in connection with the fact that he was imprisoned by the
+     British Government as a pacifist during the War.
+
+     Much of Mr. Russell's writing, in mathematical and philosophical
+     fields, is above the head of the desultory reader; but so
+     stimulating a paper as this one should not be neglected by the
+     moderately inquisitive amateur.
+
+     Bertrand Russell was born in 1872, studied at Trinity College,
+     Cambridge, and is widely known as a thinker of uncompromising
+     liberalism.
+
+
+To Dr. Faustus in his study Mephistopheles told the history of the
+Creation, saying:
+
+"The endless praises of the choirs of angels had begun to grow
+wearisome; for, after all, did he not deserve their praise? Had he not
+given them endless joy? Would it not be more amusing to obtain
+undeserved praise, to be worshiped by beings whom he tortured? He smiled
+inwardly, and resolved that the great drama should be performed.
+
+"For countless ages the hot nebula whirled aimlessly through space. At
+length it began to take shape, the central mass threw off planets, the
+planets cooled, boiling seas and burning mountains heaved and tossed,
+from black masses of cloud hot sheets of rain deluged the barely solid
+crust. And now the first germ of life grew in the depths of the ocean,
+and developed rapidly in the fructifying warmth into vast forest trees,
+huge ferns springing from the damp mould, sea monsters breeding,
+fighting, devouring, and passing away. And from the monsters, as the
+play unfolded itself, Man was born, with the power of thought, the
+knowledge of good and evil, and the cruel thirst for worship. And Man
+saw that all is passing in this mad, monstrous world, that all is
+struggling to snatch, at any cost, a few brief moments of life before
+Death's inexorable decree. And Man said: 'There is a hidden purpose,
+could we but fathom it, and the purpose is good; for we must reverence
+something, and in the visible world there is nothing worthy of
+reverence.' And Man stood aside from the struggle, resolving that God
+intended harmony to come out of chaos by human efforts. And when he
+followed the instincts which God had transmitted to him from his
+ancestry of beasts of prey, he called it Sin, and asked God to forgive
+him. But he doubted whether he could be justly forgiven, until he
+invented a divine Plan by which God's wrath was to have been appeased.
+And seeing the present was bad, he made it yet worse, that thereby the
+future might be better. And he gave God thanks for the strength that
+enabled him to forgo even the joys that were possible. And God smiled;
+and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and
+worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man's
+sun; and all returned again to nebula.
+
+"'Yes,' he murmured, 'it was a good play; I will have it performed
+again.'"
+
+Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is
+the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if
+anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the
+product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving;
+that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his
+beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that
+no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve
+an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages,
+all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of
+human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar
+system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably
+be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things,
+if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no
+philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the
+scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding
+despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.
+
+How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as
+Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that
+Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular
+hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a
+child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge
+of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his
+unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental
+control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to
+criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the
+world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this
+lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward
+life.
+
+The savage, like ourselves, feels the oppression of his impotence before
+the powers of Nature; but having in himself nothing that he respects
+more than Power, he is willing to prostrate himself before his gods,
+without inquiring whether they are worthy of his worship. Pathetic and
+very terrible is the long history of cruelty and torture, of degradation
+and human sacrifice, endured in the hope of placating the jealous gods:
+surely, the trembling believer thinks, when what is most precious has
+been freely given, their lust for blood must be appeased, and more will
+not be required. The religion of Moloch--as such creeds may be
+generically called--is in essence the cringing submission of the slave,
+who dare not, even in his heart, allow the thought that his master
+deserves no adulation. Since the independence of ideals is not yet
+acknowledged, Power may be freely worshiped, and receive an unlimited
+respect, despite its wanton infliction of pain.
+
+But gradually, as morality grows bolder, the claim of the ideal world
+begins to be felt; and worship, if it is not to cease, must be given to
+gods of another kind than those created by the savage. Some, though they
+feel the demands of the ideal, will still consciously reject them, still
+urging that naked Power is worthy of worship. Such is the attitude
+inculcated in God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind: the divine power
+and knowledge are paraded, but of the divine goodness there is no hint.
+Such also is the attitude of those who, in our own day, base their
+morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors
+are necessarily the fittest. But others, not content with an answer so
+repugnant to the moral sense, will adopt the position which we have
+become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in
+some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the
+world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the
+mystic unity of what is and what should be.
+
+But the world of fact, after all, is not good; and, in submitting our
+judgment to it, there is an element of slavishness from which our
+thoughts must be purged. For in all things it is well to exalt the
+dignity of Man, by freeing him as far as possible from the tyranny of
+non-human Power. When we have realized that Power is largely bad, that
+man, with his knowledge of good and evil, is but a helpless atom in a
+world which has no such knowledge, the choice is again presented to us:
+Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God
+exist and be evil, or shall he be recognized as the creation of our own
+conscience?
+
+The answer to this question is very momentous, and affects profoundly
+our whole morality. The worship of Force, to which Carlyle and Nietzsche
+and the creed of Militarism have accustomed us, is the result of failure
+to maintain our own ideals against a hostile universe: it is itself a
+prostrate submission to evil, a sacrifice of our best to Moloch. If
+strength indeed is to be respected, let us respect rather the strength
+of those who refuse that false "recognition of facts" which fails to
+recognize that facts are often bad. Let us admit that, in the world we
+know there are many things that would be better otherwise, and that the
+ideals to which we do and must adhere are not realized in the realm of
+matter. Let us preserve our respect for truth, for beauty, for the ideal
+of perfection which life does not permit us to attain, though none of
+these things meet with the approval of the unconscious universe. If
+Power is bad, as it seems to be, let us reject it from our hearts. In
+this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God
+created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which
+inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must
+submit perpetually to the tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in
+aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty
+planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even, while we live,
+from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith
+which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let
+us descend, in action, into the world of fact, with that vision always
+before us.
+
+When first the opposition of fact and ideal grows fully visible, a
+spirit of fiery revolt, of fierce hatred of the gods, seems necessary to
+the assertion of freedom. To defy with Promethean constancy a hostile
+universe, to keep its evil always in view, always actively hated, to
+refuse no pain that the malice of Power can invent, appears to be the
+duty of all who will not bow before the inevitable. But indignation is
+still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil
+world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs
+there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to
+overcome. Indignation is a submission of our thoughts, but not of our
+desires; the Stoic freedom in which wisdom consists is found in the
+submission of our desires, but not of our thoughts. From the submission
+of our desires springs the virtue of resignation; from the freedom of
+our thoughts springs the whole world of art and philosophy, and the
+vision of beauty by which, at last, we half reconquer the reluctant
+world. But the vision of beauty is possible only to unfettered
+contemplation, to thoughts not weighted by the load of eager wishes; and
+thus Freedom comes only to those who no longer ask of life that it shall
+yield them any of those personal goods that are subject to the mutations
+of Time.
+
+Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of
+evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding
+that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion. It must be admitted
+that, of the things we desire, some, though they prove impossible, are
+yet real goods; others, however, as ardently longed for, do not form
+part of a fully purified ideal. The belief that what must be renounced
+is bad, though sometimes false, is far less often false than untamed
+passion supposes; and the creed of religion, by providing a reason for
+proving that it is never false, has been the means of purifying our
+hopes by the discovery of many austere truths.
+
+But there is in resignation a further good element: even real goods,
+when they are unattainable, ought not to be fretfully desired. To every
+man comes, sooner or later, the great renunciation. For the young, there
+is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with the whole force of a
+passionate will, and yet impossible, is to them not credible. Yet, by
+death, by illness, by poverty, or by the voice of duty, we must learn,
+each one of us, that the world was not made for us, and that, however
+beautiful may be the things we crave for, Fate may nevertheless forbid
+them. It is the part of courage, when misfortune comes, to bear without
+repining the ruin of our hopes, to turn away our thoughts from vain
+regrets. This degree of submission to Power is not only just and right:
+it is the very gate of wisdom.
+
+But passive renunciation is not the whole wisdom; for not by
+renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own
+ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of
+imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of
+reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines
+and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of
+change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of
+fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will
+shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the
+world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs
+whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple.
+
+Except for those rare spirits that are born without sin, there is a
+cavern of darkness to be traversed before that temple can be entered.
+The gate of the cavern is despair, and its floor is paved with the
+gravestones of abandoned hopes. There Self must die; there the
+eagerness, the greed of untamed desire must be slain, for only so can
+the soul be freed from the empire of Fate. But out of the cavern the
+Gate of Renunciation leads again to the daylight of wisdom, by whose
+radiance a new insight, a new joy, a new tenderness, shine forth to
+gladden the pilgrim's heart.
+
+When, without the bitterness of impotent rebellion, we have learnt both
+to resign ourselves to the outward rule of Fate and to recognize that
+the non-human world is unworthy of our worship, it becomes possible at
+last so to transform and refashion the unconscious universe, so to
+transmute it in the crucible of imagination, that a new image of shining
+gold replaces the old idol of clay. In all the multiform facts of the
+world--in the visual shapes of trees and mountains and clouds, in the
+events of the life of man, even in the very omnipotence of Death--the
+insight of creative idealism can find the reflection of a beauty which
+its own thoughts first made. In this way mind asserts its subtle mastery
+over the thoughtless forces of Nature. The more evil the material with
+which it deals, the more thwarting to untrained desire, the greater is
+its achievement in inducing the reluctant rock to yield up its hidden
+treasures, the prouder its victory in compelling the opposing forces to
+swell the pageant of its triumph. Of all the arts, Tragedy is the
+proudest, the most triumphant; for it builds its shining citadel in the
+very center of the enemy's country, on the very summit of his highest
+mountain; from its impregnable watch-towers, his camps and arsenals, his
+columns and forts, are all revealed; within its walls the free life
+continues, while the legions of Death and Pain and Despair, and all the
+servile captains of tyrant Fate, afford the burghers of that dauntless
+city new spectacles of beauty. Happy those sacred ramparts, thrice happy
+the dwellers on that all-seeing eminence. Honor to those brave warriors
+who, through countless ages of warfare, have preserved for us the
+priceless heritage of liberty, and have kept undefiled by sacrilegious
+invaders the home of the unsubdued.
+
+But the beauty of Tragedy does but make visible a quality which, in more
+or less obvious shapes, is present always and everywhere in life. In the
+spectacle of Death, in the endurance of intolerable pain, and in the
+irrevocableness of a vanished past, there is a sacredness, an
+overpowering awe, a feeling of the vastness, the depth, the
+inexhaustible mystery of existence, in which, as by some strange
+marriage of pain, the sufferer is bound to the world by bonds of sorrow.
+In these moments of insight, we lose all eagerness of temporary desire,
+all struggling and striving for petty ends, all care for the little
+trivial things that, to a superficial view, make up the common life of
+day by day; we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the
+flickering light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling
+waves we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
+blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity amid
+hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which must
+struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against the whole
+weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and fears.
+Victory, in this struggle with the powers of darkness, is the true
+baptism into the glorious company of heroes, the true initiation into
+the overmastering beauty of human existence. From that awful encounter
+of the soul with the outer world, renunciation, wisdom, and charity are
+born; and with their birth a new life begins. To take into the inmost
+shrine of the soul the irresistible forces whose puppets we seem to
+be--Death and change, the irrevocableness of the past, and the
+powerlessness of man before the blind hurry of the universe from vanity
+to vanity--to feel these things and know them is to conquer them.
+
+This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of
+its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late
+autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still
+glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or
+strive; like Duncan, after life's fitful fever it sleeps well; what was
+eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the
+things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the
+night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable; but to a
+soul which has conquered Fate it is the key of religion.
+
+The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison
+with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed to worship Time and Fate
+and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself,
+and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour. But, great
+as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless
+splendor, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no
+longer bow before the inevitable in Oriental subjection, but we absorb
+it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private
+happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with
+passion for eternal things--this is emancipation, and this is the free
+man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of
+Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be
+purged by the purifying fire of Time.
+
+United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a
+common doom, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always,
+shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a
+long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by
+weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where
+none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from
+our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief
+is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or
+misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten
+their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a
+never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil faith
+in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging scales their merits
+and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the
+difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their
+lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same
+darkness, actors in the same tragedy with ourselves. And so, when their
+day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the
+immortality of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered,
+where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark
+of the divine fire kindled in their hearts, we were ready with
+encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage
+glowed.
+
+Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow,
+sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of
+destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man,
+condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through
+the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow
+falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the
+coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his
+own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a
+mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly
+defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his
+knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding
+Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the
+trampling march of unconscious power.
+
+
+
+
+SOME HISTORIANS
+
+By PHILIP GUEDALLA
+
+
+     Philip Guedalla, born 1889, is a London barrister and at the
+     present time an Independent Liberal candidate for the House of
+     Commons. He has written excellent light verse and parodies, and a
+     textbook on European history, 1715-1815. His most conspicuous
+     achievement so far is the brilliant volume _Supers and Supermen_,
+     from which my selection is taken.
+
+     _Supers and Supermen_ is a collection of historical and political
+     portraits and skits. It is mercilessly and gloriously humorous.
+     Those who can always follow the wit and irony that Guedalla knows
+     how to conceal in a cunningly turned phrase, will find the book a
+     prodigious delight. He has an unerring eye for the absurd; his
+     paradoxes, when pondered, have a way of proving excellent truth.
+     (Truth is sometimes like the furniture in Through the Looking
+     Glass, which could only be reached by resolutely walking away from
+     it.)
+
+     Ten years ago Mr. Guedalla was considered the most continuously and
+     insolently brilliant undergraduate of the Oxford of that day. The
+     charm and vigor of his ironical wit have not lessened since his
+     fellow-undergraduates strove to convince themselves that no man
+     could be as clever as "P. G." seemed to be. When Mr. Guedalla
+     "holds the mirror up to Nietzsche" or "gives thanks that Britons
+     never never will be Slavs," or dynasticizes Henry James into three
+     reigns: "James I, James II, and the Old Pretender;" or when he
+     speaks of "the cheerful clatter of Sir James Barrie's cans as he
+     went round with the milk of human kindness," there will be some who
+     will sigh; but there will also (I hope) be many who will forgive
+     the bravado for the quicksilver wit.
+
+
+It was Quintillian or Mr. Max Beerbohm who said, "History repeats
+itself: historians repeat each other." The saying is full of the mellow
+wisdom of either writer, and stamped with the peculiar veracity of the
+Silver Age of Roman or British epigram. One might have added, if the
+aphorist had stayed for an answer, that history is rather interesting
+when it repeats itself: historians are not. In France, which is an
+enlightened country enjoying the benefits of the Revolution and a public
+examination in rhetoric, historians are expected to write in a single
+and classical style of French. The result is sometimes a rather
+irritating uniformity; it is one long Taine that has no turning, and any
+quotation may be attributed with safety to Guizot, because _la nuit tous
+les chats sont gris_. But in England, which is a free country, the
+restrictions natural to ignorant (and immoral) foreigners are put off by
+the rough island race, and history is written in a dialect which is not
+curable by education, and cannot (it would seem) be prevented by
+injunction.
+
+Historians' English is not a style; it is an industrial disease. The
+thing is probably scheduled in the Workmen's Compensation Act, and the
+publisher may be required upon notice of the attack to make a suitable
+payment to the writer's dependants. The workers in this dangerous trade
+are required to adopt (like Mahomet's coffin) a detached
+standpoint--that is, to write as if they took no interest in the
+subject. Since it is not considered good form for a graduate of less
+than sixty years' standing to write upon any period that is either
+familiar or interesting, this feeling is easily acquired, and the
+resulting narrations present the dreary impartiality of the Recording
+Angel without that completeness which is the sole attraction of his
+style. Wilde complained of Mr. Hall Caine that he wrote at the top of
+his voice; but a modern historian, when he is really detached, writes
+like some one talking in the next room, and few writers have equaled the
+legal precision of Coxe's observation that the Turks "sawed the
+Archbishop and the Commandant in half, and committed other grave
+violations of international law."
+
+Having purged his mind of all unsteadying interest in the subject, the
+young historian should adopt a moral code of more than Malthusian
+severity, which may be learned from any American writer of the last
+century upon the Renaissance or the decadence of Spain. This manner,
+which is especially necessary in passages dealing with character, will
+lend to his work the grave dignity that is requisite for translation
+into Latin prose, that supreme test of an historian's style. It will be
+his misfortune to meet upon the byways of history the oddest and most
+abnormal persons, and he should keep by him (unless he wishes to forfeit
+his Fellowship) some convenient formula by which he may indicate at once
+the enormity of the subject and the disapproval of the writer. The
+writings of Lord Macaulay will furnish him at need with the necessary
+facility in lightning characterization. It was the practice of Cicero to
+label his contemporaries without distinction as "heavy men," and the
+characters of history are easily divisible into "far-seeing statesmen"
+and "reckless libertines." It may be objected that although it is
+sufficient for the purposes of contemporary caricature to represent Mr.
+Gladstone as a collar or Mr. Chamberlain as an eye-glass, it is an
+inadequate record for posterity. But it is impossible for a busy man to
+write history without formulæ, and after all sheep are sheep and goats
+are goats. Lord Macaulay once wrote of some one, "In private life he was
+stern, morose, and inexorable"; he was probably a Dutchman. It is a
+passage which has served as a lasting model for the historian's
+treatment of character. I had always imagined that Cliché was a suburb
+of Paris, until I discovered it to be a street in Oxford. Thus, if the
+working historian is faced with a period of "deplorable excesses," he
+handles it like a man, and writes always as if he was illustrated with
+steel engravings:
+
+     The imbecile king now ripened rapidly towards a crisis. Surrounded
+     by a Court in which the inanity of the day was rivaled only by the
+     debauchery of the night, he became incapable towards the year 1472
+     of distinguishing good from evil, a fact which contributed
+     considerably to the effectiveness of his foreign policy, but was
+     hardly calculated to conform with the monastic traditions of his
+     House. Long nights of drink and dicing weakened a constitution that
+     was already undermined, and the council-table, where once Campo
+     Santa had presided, was disfigured with the despicable apparatus of
+     Bagatelle. The burghers of the capital were horrified by the wild
+     laughter of his madcap courtiers, and when it was reported in
+     London that Ladislas had played at Halma the Court of St. James's
+     received his envoy in the deepest of ceremonial mourning.
+
+That is precisely how it is done. The passage exhibits the benign and
+contemporary influences of Lord Macaulay and Mr. Bowdler, and it
+contains all the necessary ingredients, except perhaps a "venal
+Chancellor" and a "greedy mistress." Vice is a subject of especial
+interest to historians, who are in most cases residents in small county
+towns; and there is unbounded truth in the rococo footnote of a writer
+on the Renaissance, who said _à propos_ of a Pope: "The disgusting
+details of his vices smack somewhat of the morbid historian's lamp." The
+note itself is a fine example of that concrete visualization of the
+subject which led Macaulay to observe that in consequence of Frederick's
+invasion of Silesia "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red
+men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America."
+
+A less exciting branch of the historian's work is the reproduction of
+contemporary sayings and speeches. Thus, an obituary should always close
+on a note of regretful quotation:
+
+     He lived in affluence and died in great pain. "Thus," it was said
+     by the most eloquent of his contemporaries, "thus terminated a
+     career as varied as it was eventful, as strange as it was unique."
+
+But for the longer efforts of sustained eloquence greater art is
+required. It is no longer usual, as in Thucydides' day, to compose
+completely new speeches, but it is permissible for the historian to
+heighten the colors and even to insert those rhetorical questions and
+complexes of personal pronouns which will render the translation of the
+passage into Latin prose a work of consuming interest and lasting
+profit:
+
+     The Duke assembled his companions for the forlorn hope, and
+     addressed them briefly in _oratio obliqua_. "His father," he said,
+     "had always cherished in his heart the idea that he would one day
+     return to his own people. Had he fallen in vain? Was it for nothing
+     that they had dyed with their loyal blood the soil of a hundred
+     battlefields? The past was dead, the future was yet to come. Let
+     them remember that great sacrifices were necessary for the
+     attainment of great ends, let them think of their homes and
+     families, and if they had any pity for an exile, an outcast, and an
+     orphan, let them die fighting."
+
+That is the kind of passage that used to send the blood of Dr. Bradley
+coursing more quickly through his veins. The march of its eloquence, the
+solemnity of its sentiment, and the rich balance of its pronouns unite
+to make it a model for all historians: it can be adapted for any period.
+
+It is not possible in a short review to include the special branches of
+the subject. Such are those efficient modern text-books, in which events
+are referred to either as "factors" (as if they were a sum) or as
+"phases" (as if they were the moon). There is also the solemn business
+of writing economic history, in which the historian may lapse at will
+into algebra, and anything not otherwise describable may be called
+"social tissue." A special subject is constituted by the early conquests
+of Southern and Central America; in these there is a uniform opening for
+all passages running:
+
+     It was now the middle of October, and the season was drawing to an
+     end. Soon the mountains would be whitened with the snows of winter
+     and every rivulet swollen to a roaring torrent. Cortez, whose
+     determination only increased with misfortune, decided to delay his
+     march until the inclemency of the season abated.... It was now the
+     middle of November, and the season was drawing to an end....
+
+There is, finally, the method of military history. This may be
+patriotic, technical, or in the manner prophetically indicated by Virgil
+as _Belloc_, _horrida Belloc_. The finest exponent of the patriotic
+style is undoubtedly the Rev. W. H. Fitchett, a distinguished colonial
+clergyman and historian of the Napoleonic wars. His night-attacks are
+more nocturnal, and his scaling parties are more heroically scaligerous
+than those of any other writer. His drummer-boys are the most moving in
+my limited circle of drummer-boys. One gathers that the Peninsular War
+was full of pleasing incidents of this type:
+
+     THE NIGHT ATTACK
+
+     It was midnight when Staff-Surgeon Pettigrew showed the flare from
+     the summit of Sombrero. At once the whole plain was alive with the
+     hum of the great assault. The four columns speedily got into
+     position with flares and bugles at the head of each. One made
+     straight for the Watergate, a second for the Bailey-guard, a third
+     for the Porter-house, and the last (led by the saintly Smeathe) for
+     the Tube station. Let us follow the second column on its secret
+     mission through the night, lit by torches and cheered on by the
+     huzzas of a thousand English throats. "---- the ----s," cried
+     Cocker in a voice hoarse with patriotism; at that moment a red-hot
+     shot hurtled over the plain and, ricocheting treacherously from the
+     frozen river, dashed the heroic leader to the ground. Captain
+     Boffskin, of the Buffs, leapt up with the dry coughing howl of the
+     British infantryman. "---- them," he roared, "---- them to ----";
+     and for the last fifty yards it was neck and neck with the ladders.
+     Our gallant drummer-boys laid to again, but suddenly a shot rang
+     out from the silent ramparts. The 94th Léger were awake. _We were
+     discovered!_
+
+The war of 1870 requires more special treatment. Its histories show no
+particular characteristic, but its appearance in fiction deserves
+special attention. There is a standard pattern.
+
+     HOW THE PRUSSIANS CAME TO GUITRY-LE-SEC
+
+     It was a late afternoon in early September, or an early afternoon
+     in late September--I forget these things--when I missed the boat
+     express from Kerplouarnec to Pouzy-le-roi and was forced by the
+     time-table to spend three hours at the forgotten hamlet of
+     Guitry-le-sec, in the heart of Dauphiné. It contained besides a
+     quantity of underfed poultry one white church, one white mairie,
+     and nine white houses. An old man with a white beard came towards
+     me up the long white road. "It was on just such an afternoon as
+     this forty years ago," he began, "that...."
+
+     "Stop!" I said sharply. "I have met you in a previous existence.
+     You are going to say that a solitary Uhlan appeared sharply
+     outlined against the sky behind M. Jules' farm." He nodded feebly.
+
+     "The red trousers had left the village half an hour before to look
+     for the hated Prussian in the cafés of the neighboring town. You
+     were alone when the spiked helmets marched in. You can hear their
+     shrieking fifes to this day." He wept quietly.
+
+     I went on. "There was an officer with them, a proud, ugly man with
+     a butter-colored mustache. He saw the little Mimi and drove his
+     coarse Suabian hand upward through his Mecklenburger mustache. You
+     dropped on one knee...." But he had fled.
+
+     In the first of the three cafés I saw a second old man. "Come in,
+     Monsieur," he said. I waited on the doorstep. "It was on just such
+     an afternoon...." I went on. At the other two cafés two further old
+     men attempted me with the story; I told the last that he was
+     rescued by Zouaves, and walked happily to the station, to read
+     about Vichy Célestins until the train came in from the south.
+
+The Russo-Japanese War is a more original subject and derives its
+particular flavor from the airy grace with which Sir Ian Hamilton has
+described it. Like this:
+
+     WAO-WAO, _Jan._ 31.--The _rafale_ was purring like a _mistral_ as I
+     shaved this morning. I wonder where it is; must ask ----. ---- is a
+     charming fellow with the face of a Baluchi Kashgai and a voice like
+     a circular saw.
+
+     11:40--It was eleven-forty when I looked at my watch. The
+     shrapnel-bursts look like a plantation of powder-puffs suspended in
+     the sky. Victor says there is a battle going on: capital chap
+     Victor.
+
+     2 P. M.--Lunched with an American lady-doctor. How feminine the
+     Americans can be.
+
+     7 P. M.--A great day. It was Donkelsdorp over again. Substitute the
+     Tenth Army for the Traffordshire's baggage wagon, swell Honks
+     Spruit into the roaring Wang-ho, elevate Oom Kop into the frowning
+     scarp of Pyjiyama, and you have it. The Staff were obviously
+     gratified when I told them about Donkelsdorp.
+
+     The Rooskis came over the crest-line in a huddle of massed
+     battalions, and Gazeka was after them like a rat after a terrier. I
+     knew that his horse-guns had no horses (a rule of the Japanese
+     service to discourage unnecessary changing of ground), but his men
+     bit the trails and dragged them up by their teeth. Slowly the
+     Muscovites peeled off the steaming mountain and took the funicular
+     down the other side.
+
+     I wonder what my friend Smuts would make of the Yen-tai coal mine?
+     Well, well.--_"Something accomplished, something done."_
+
+The technical manner is more difficult of acquisition for the beginner,
+since it involves a knowledge of at least two European languages. It is
+(a) cardinal rule that all places should be described as _points
+d'appui_, the simple process of scouting looks far better as
+_Verschleierung_, and the adjective "strategical" may be used without
+any meaning in front of any noun.
+
+But the military manner was revolutionized by the war. Mr. Belloc
+created a new Land and a new Water. We know now why the Persian
+commanders demanded "earth and water" on their entrance into a Greek
+town; it was the weekly demand of the Great General Staff, as it called
+for its favorite paper. Mr. Belloc has woven Baedeker and geometry into
+a new style: it is the last cry of historians' English, because one was
+invented by a German and the other by a Greek.
+
+
+
+
+WINTER MIST
+
+_By_ ROBERT PALFREY UTTER
+
+
+     Robert Palfrey Utter was born in 1875, in Olympia, Washington. He
+     graduated from Harvard (I am sorry there are so many Harvard men in
+     this book: I didn't know they were Harvard men until too late) in
+     1898 and took his Ph.D. there in 1906. After a varied experience,
+     including editorial work on the _Youth's Companion_, reporting on
+     the New York _Evening Post_, ranching in Mexico and graduate study
+     at Harvard, he went to Amherst, 1906-18, as associate professor of
+     English. He was on the faculty of the A. E. F. University at
+     Beaune, France, 1919; and in 1920 became associate professor of
+     English at the University of California.
+
+     Mr. Utter has contributed largely to the magazines, and has
+     published _Guide to Good English_ (1914), _Every-Day Words and
+     Their Uses_ (1916), and _Every-Day Pronunciation_ (1918).
+
+     Former students of his at Amherst have told me of the lasting
+     stimulus his teaching has given them: that he can beautifully
+     practise what he preaches of the art of writing, this essay shows.
+
+
+From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I learned very recently that
+for pond skating the proper costume is brown homespun with a fur collar
+on the jacket, whereas for private rinks one wears a gray herringbone
+suit and taupe-colored alpine. Oh, barren years that I have been a
+skater, and no one told me of this! And here's another thing. I was
+patiently trying to acquire a counter turn under the idle gaze of a
+hockey player who had no better business till the others arrived than to
+watch my efforts. "What I don't see about that game," he said at last,
+"is who wins?" It had never occurred to me to ask. He looked bored, and
+I remembered that the pictures in the magazine showed the wearers of the
+careful costumes for rink and pond skating as having rather blank eyes
+that looked illimitably bored. I have hopes of the "rocker" and the
+"mohawk"; I might acquire a proper costume for skating on a small river
+if I could learn what it is; but a bored look--why, even hockey does not
+bore me, unless I stop to watch it. I don't wonder that those who play
+it look bored. Even Alexander, who played a more imaginative game than
+hockey, was bored--poor fellow, he should have taken up fancy skating in
+his youth; I never heard of a human being who pretended to a complete
+conquest of it.
+
+I like pond skating best by moonlight. The hollow among the hills will
+always have a bit of mist about it, let the sky be clear as it may. The
+moonlight, which seems so lucid and brilliant when you look up, is all
+pearl and smoke round the pond and the hills. The shore that was like
+iron under your heel as you came down to the ice is vague, when you look
+back at it from the center of the pond, as the memory of a dream. The
+motion is like flying in a dream; you float free and the world floats
+under you; your velocity is without effort and without accomplishment,
+for, speed as you may, you leave nothing behind and approach nothing.
+You look upward. The mist is overhead now; you see the moon in a
+"hollow halo" at the bottom of an "icy crystal cup," and you yourself
+are in just such another. The mist, palely opalescent, drives past her
+out of nothing into nowhere. Like yourself, she is the center of a
+circle of vague limit and vaguer content, where passes a swift,
+ceaseless stream of impression through a faintly luminous halo of
+consciousness.
+
+If by moonlight the mist plays upon the emotions like faint, bewitching
+music, in sunlight it is scarcely less. More often than not when I go
+for my skating to our cosy little river, a winding mile from the
+mill-dam to the railroad trestle, the hills are clothed in silver mist
+which frames them in vignettes with blurred edges. The tone is that of
+Japanese paintings on white silk, their color showing soft and dull
+through the frost-powder with which the air is filled. At the mill-dam
+the hockey players furiously rage together, but I heed them not, and in
+a moment am beyond the first bend, where their clamor comes softened on
+the air like that of a distant convention of politic crows. The silver
+powder has fallen on the ice, just enough to cover earlier tracings and
+leave me a fresh plate to etch with grapevines and arabesques. The
+stream winds ahead like an unbroken road, striped across with soft-edged
+shadows of violet, indigo, and lavender. On one side it is bordered with
+leaning birch, oak, maple, hickory, and occasional groups of hemlocks
+under which the very air seems tinged with green. On the other, rounded
+masses of scrub oak and alder roll back from the edge of the ice like
+clouds of reddish smoke. The river narrows and turns, then spreads into
+a swamp, where I weave my curves round the straw-colored tussocks. Here,
+new as the snow is, there are earlier tracks than mine. A crow has
+traced his parallel hieroglyph, alternate footprints with long dashes
+where he trailed his middle toe as he lifted his foot and his spur as he
+brought it down. Under a low shrub that has hospitably scattered its
+seed is a dainty, close-wrought embroidery of tiny bird feet in
+irregular curves woven into a circular pattern. A silent glide towards
+the bank, where among bare twigs little forms flit and swing with low
+conversational notes, brings me in company with a working crew of pine
+siskins, methodically rifling seed cones of birch and alder, chattering
+sotto voce the while. Under a leaning hemlock the writing on the snow
+tells of a squirrel that dropped from the lowest branch, hopped
+aimlessly about for a few yards, then went up the bank. Farther on,
+where the river narrows again, a flutter-headed rabbit crossing at top
+speed has made a line seemingly as free from frivolous indirection as if
+it had been defined by all the ponderosities of mathematics. There is no
+pursuing track; was it his own shadow he fled, or the shadow of hawk?
+
+The mist now lies along the base of the hills, leaving the upper ridges
+almost imperceptibly veiled and the rounded tops faintly softened. The
+snowy slopes are etched with brush and trees so fine and soft that they
+remind me of Dürer's engravings, the fur of Saint Jerome's lion, the
+cock's feathers in the coat of arms with the skull. From behind the veil
+of the southernmost hill comes a faint note as
+
+    From undiscoverable lips that blow
+      An immaterial horn.
+
+It is the first far premonition of the noon train; I pause and watch
+long for the next sign. At last I hear its throbbing, which ceases as it
+pauses at the flag station under the hill. There the invisible
+locomotive shoots a column of silver vapor above the surface of the
+mist, breaking in rounded clouds at the top, looking like nothing so
+much as the photograph of the explosion of a submarine mine, a titanic
+outburst of force in static pose, a geyser of atomized water standing
+like a frosted elm tree. Then quick puffs of dusky smoke, the volley of
+which does not reach my ear till the train has stuck its black head out
+of fairyland and become a prosaic reminder of dinner. High on its
+narrow trestle it leaps across my little river and disappears between
+the sandbanks. Far behind it the mist is again spreading into its even
+layers. Silence is renewed, and I can hear the musical creaking of four
+starlings in an apple tree as they eviscerate a few rotten apples on the
+upper branches. I turn and spin down the curves and reaches of the river
+without delaying for embroideries or arabesques. At the mill-dam the
+hockey game still rages; the players take no heed of the noon train.
+
+    Let Zal and Rustum bluster as they will,
+    Or Hatim call to supper....
+
+Their minds and eyes are intent on a battered disk of hard rubber. I
+begin to think I have misjudged them when I consider what effort of
+imagination must be involved in the concentration of the faculties on
+such an object, transcending the call of hunger and the lure of beauty.
+Is it to them as is to the mystic "the great syllable Om" whereby he
+attains Nirvana? I cannot attain it; I can but wonder what the hockey
+players win one-half so precious as the stuff they miss.
+
+
+
+
+TRIVIA
+
+_By_ LOGAN PEARSALL SMITH
+
+
+     It would be extravagant to claim that Pearsall Smith's _Trivia_,
+     the remarkable little book from which these miniature essays are
+     extracted, is well known: it is too daintily, fragile and absurd
+     and sophisticated to appeal to a very large public. But it has a
+     cohort of its own devotees and fanatics, and since its publication
+     in 1917 it has become a sort of password in a secret brotherhood or
+     intellectual Suicide Club. I say suicide advisedly, for Mr. Smith's
+     irony is glitteringly edged. Its incision is so keen that the
+     reader is often unaware the razor edge has turned against himself
+     until he perceives the wound to be fatal.
+
+     Pearsall Smith was, in a way, one of the Men of the Nineties. But
+     he had Repressions--(an excellent thing to have, brothers. Most of
+     the great literature is founded on judicious repressions). He came
+     of an excellent old intellectual Quaker family down in the
+     Philadelphia region. His father (if we remember rightly) was one of
+     Walt Whitman's staunchest friends in the Camden days. But when the
+     strong wine of the Nineties was foaming in the vats and noggins,
+     Mr. Smith (so we imagine it, at least) was still too close to that
+     "guarded education in morals and manners" that he had had at
+     Haverford College, Pennsylvania (and further tinctured with
+     docility at Harvard and Balliol) to give full rein to his inward
+     gush of hilarious satirics. Like a Strong Silent Man he held in
+     that wellspring of champagne and mercury until many many years
+     later. When it came out (in 1902 he first began to print his
+     _Trivia_, privately; the book was published by Doubleday in 1917)
+     it sparkled all the more tenderly for its long cellarage.
+
+     But we must be statistical. Logan Pearsall Smith was born at
+     Melville, N. J., in 1865. As a boy he lived in Philadelphia and
+     Germantown (do you know Germantown? it is a foothill of that
+     mountain range whereof Parnassus and Olivet are twin peaks) and was
+     three years at Haverford in the class of '85. He went to Harvard
+     for a year, then to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his
+     degree in 1893. Ever since then, eheu, he has lived in England.
+
+
+STONEHENGE
+
+They sit there for ever on the dim horizon of my mind, that Stonehenge
+circle of elderly disapproving Faces--Faces of the Uncles and
+Schoolmasters and Tutors who frowned on my youth.
+
+In the bright center and sunlight I leap, I caper, I dance my dance; but
+when I look up, I see they are not deceived. For nothing ever placates
+them, nothing ever moves to a look of approval that ring of bleak, old,
+contemptuous Faces.
+
+
+THE STARS
+
+Battling my way homeward one dark night against the wind and rain, a
+sudden gust, stronger than the others, drove me back into the shelter of
+a tree. But soon the Western sky broke open; the illumination of the
+Stars poured down from behind the dispersing clouds.
+
+I was astonished at their brightness, to see how they filled the night
+with their soft lustre. So I went my way accompanied by them; Arcturus
+followed me, and becoming entangled in a leafy tree, shone by glimpses,
+and then emerged triumphant, Lord of the Western Sky. Moving along the
+road in the silence of my own footsteps, my thoughts were among the
+Constellations. I was one of the Princes of the starry Universe; in me
+also there was something that was not insignificant and mean and of no
+account.
+
+
+THE SPIDER
+
+What shall I compare it to, this fantastic thing I call my Mind? To a
+waste-paper basket, to a sieve choked with sediment, or to a barrel full
+of floating froth and refuse?
+
+No, what it is really most like is a spider's web, insecurely hung on
+leaves and twigs, quivering in every wind, and sprinkled with dewdrops
+and dead flies. And at its center, pondering for ever the Problem of
+Existence, sits motionless the spider-like and uncanny Soul.
+
+
+L'OISEAU BLEU
+
+What is it, I have more than once asked myself, what is it that I am
+looking for in my walks about London? Sometimes it seems to me as if I
+were following a Bird, a bright Bird that sings sweetly as it floats
+about from one place to another.
+
+When I find myself, however, among persons of middle age and settled
+principles, see them moving regularly to their offices--what keeps them
+going? I ask myself. And I feel ashamed of myself and my Bird.
+
+There is though a Philosophic Doctrine--I studied it at College, and I
+know that many serious people believe it--which maintains that all men,
+in spite of appearances and pretensions, all live alike for Pleasure.
+This theory certainly brings portly, respected persons very near to me.
+Indeed, with a sense of low complicity, I have sometimes watched a
+Bishop. Was he, too, on the hunt for Pleasure, solemnly pursuing his
+Bird?
+
+
+I SEE THE WORLD
+
+"But you go nowhere, see nothing of the world," my cousins said.
+
+Now though I do go sometimes to the parties to which I am now and then
+invited, I find, as a matter of fact, that I get really much more
+pleasure by looking in at windows, and have a way of my own of seeing
+the World. And of summer evenings, when motors hurry through the late
+twilight, and the great houses take on airs of inscrutable expectation,
+I go owling out through the dusk; and wandering toward the West, lose my
+way in unknown streets--an unknown City of revels. And when a door opens
+and a bediamonded Lady moves to her motor over carpets unrolled by
+powdered footmen, I can easily think her some great Courtezan, or some
+half-believed Duchess, hurrying to card-tables and lit candles and
+strange scenes of joy. I like to see that there are still splendid
+people on this flat earth; and at dances, standing in the street with
+the crowd, and stirred by the music, the lights, the rushing sound of
+voices, I think the Ladies as beautiful as Stars who move up those lanes
+of light past our rows of vagabond faces; the young men look like Lords
+in novels; and if (it has once or twice happened) people I know go by
+me, they strike me as changed and rapt beyond my sphere. And when on hot
+nights windows are left open, and I can look in at Dinner Parties, as I
+peer through lace curtains and window-flowers at the silver, the women's
+shoulders, the shimmer of their jewels, and the divine attitudes of
+their heads as they lean and listen, I imagine extraordinary intrigues
+and unheard-of wines and passions.
+
+
+THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
+
+I have my Anglican moments; and as I sat there that Sunday afternoon, in
+the Palladian interior of the London Church, and listened to the
+unexpressive voices chanting the correct service, I felt a comfortable
+assurance that we were in no danger of being betrayed into any unseemly
+manifestations of religious fervor. We had not gathered together at that
+performance to abase ourselves with furious hosannas before any dark
+Creator of an untamed Universe, no Deity of freaks and miracles and
+sinister hocus-pocus; but to pay our duty to a highly respected Anglican
+First Cause--undemonstrative, gentlemanly, and conscientious--whom,
+without loss of self-respect, we could decorously praise.
+
+
+CONSOLATION
+
+The other day, depressed on the Underground, I tried to cheer myself by
+thinking over the joys of our human lot. But there wasn't one of them
+for which I seemed to care a button--not Wine, nor Friendship, nor
+Eating, nor Making Love, nor the Consciousness of Virtue. Was it worth
+while then going up in a lift into a world that had nothing less trite
+to offer?
+
+Then I thought of reading--the nice and subtle happiness of reading.
+This was enough, this joy not dulled by Age, this polite and unpunished
+vice, this selfish, serene, life-long intoxication.
+
+
+THE KALEIDOSCOPE
+
+I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious
+collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining and fading for no
+reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable--the corner of a
+road, a heap of stones, an old gate. But there are many charming
+pictures too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down
+on harvest fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the
+leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts,
+with the rain beating for ever on the fields. Then Winter's upward
+glare of snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the
+windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in
+Summer's golden heats.
+
+And as I walk about, certain places haunt me; a cathedral rises above a
+dark blue foreign town, the color of ivory in the sunset light; now I
+find myself in a French garden, full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in
+sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and washing outside its walls;
+now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected
+light of Oxford lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the
+familiar Oxford hours.
+
+
+THE POPLAR
+
+There is a great tree in Sussex, whose cloud of thin foliage floats high
+in the summer air. The thrush sings in it, and blackbirds, who fill the
+late, decorative sunshine with a shimmer of golden sound. There the
+nightingale finds her green cloister; and on those branches sometimes,
+like a great fruit, hangs the lemon-colored Moon. In the glare of
+August, when all the world is faint with heat, there is always a breeze
+in those cool recesses, always a noise, like the noise of water, among
+its lightly-hung leaves.
+
+But the owner of this Tree lives in London, reading books.
+
+
+
+
+BEYOND LIFE
+
+_By_ JAMES BRANCH CABELL
+
+
+     To my taste, _Beyond Life_, an all-night soliloquy put into the
+     mouth of the author's _alter ego_ Charteris, is the most satisfying
+     of Mr. Cabell's books. Its point of view is deftly sharpened, its
+     manner is urbane and charming, without posture or allegorical
+     pseudo-romantics. From this book I have taken the two closing
+     sections, which form a beautiful and significant whole.
+
+     James Branch Cabell, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879, graduated
+     from William and Mary College in 1898. He had some newspaper
+     experience in Richmond and on the New York _Herald_, and began
+     publishing in 1904. Not until 1915, until Mr. McBride, the New York
+     publisher, and his untiring literary assistant, Mr. Guy Holt (to
+     whom much of Cabell's appreciation is due), began their work, did
+     critics begin to take him at all seriously. Since that time Mr.
+     Cabell's reputation has been enormously enhanced by the idiotic
+     suppression of his novel _Jurgen_. The Cabell cult has been almost
+     too active in zeal, but there can be no doubt of his very real and
+     refreshing imaginative talent.
+
+
+I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in
+my own life. I appeal for charity, and implore that literature afford me
+what I cannot come by in myself....
+
+For I want distinction for that existence which ought to be peculiarly
+mine, among my innumerable fellows who swarm about earth like ants. Yet
+which one of us is noticeably, or can be appreciably different, in this
+throng of human ephemeræ and all their millions and inestimable millions
+of millions of predecessors and oncoming progeny? And even though one
+mote may transiently appear exceptional, the distinction of those who
+in their heydays are "great" personages--much as the Emperor of Lilliput
+overtopped his subjects by the breadth of Captain Gulliver's nail--must
+suffer loss with time, and must dwindle continuously, until at most the
+man's recorded name remains here and there in sundry pedants' libraries.
+There were how many dynasties of Pharaohs, each one of whom was absolute
+lord of the known world, and is to-day forgotten? Among the countless
+popes who one by one were adored as the regent of Heaven upon earth, how
+many persons can to-day distinguish? and does not time breed emperors
+and czars and presidents as plentiful as blackberries, and as little
+thought of when their season is out? For there is no perpetuity in human
+endeavor: we strut upon a quicksand: and all that any man may do for
+good or ill is presently forgotten, because it does not matter. I wail
+to a familiar tune, of course, in this lament for the evanescence of
+human grandeur and the perishable renown of kings. And indeed to the
+statement that imperial Cæsar is turned to clay and Mizraim now cures
+wounds, and that in short Queen Anne is dead, we may agree lightly
+enough; for it is, after all, a matter of no personal concern: but how
+hard it is to concede that the banker and the rector and the
+traffic-officer, to whom we more immediately defer, and we ourselves,
+and the little gold heads of our children, may be of no importance,
+either!... In art it may so happen that the thing which a man makes
+endures to be misunderstood and gabbled over: yet it is not the man
+himself. We retain the _Iliad_, but oblivion has swallowed Homer so deep
+that many question if he ever existed at all.... So we pass as a cloud
+of gnats, where I want to live and be thought of, if only by myself, as
+a distinguishable entity. And such distinction is impossible in the long
+progress of suns, whereby in thought to separate the personality of any
+one man from all others that have lived, becomes a task to stagger
+Omniscience....
+
+I want my life, the only life of which I am assured, to have symmetry
+or, in default of that, at least to acquire some clarity. Surely it is
+not asking very much to wish that my personal conduct be intelligible to
+me! Yet it is forbidden to know for what purpose this universe was
+intended, to what end it was set a-going, or why I am here, or even what
+I had preferably do while here. It vaguely seems to me that I am
+expected to perform an allotted task, but as to what it is I have no
+notion.... And indeed, what have I done hitherto, in the years behind
+me? There are some books to show as increment, as something which was
+not anywhere before I made it, and which even in bulk will replace my
+buried body, so that my life will be to mankind no loss materially. But
+the course of my life, when I look back, is as orderless as a trickle of
+water that is diverted and guided by every pebble and crevice and
+grass-root it encounters. I seem to have done nothing with
+pre-meditation, but rather, to have had things done to me. And for all
+the rest of my life, as I know now, I shall have to shave every morning
+in order to be ready for no more than this!... I have attempted to make
+the best of my material circumstances always; nor do I see to-day how
+any widely varying course could have been wiser or even feasible: but
+material things have nothing to do with that life which moves in me.
+Why, then, should they direct and heighten and provoke and curb every
+action of life? It is against the tyranny of matter I would
+rebel--against life's absolute need of food, and books, and fire, and
+clothing, and flesh, to touch and to inhabit, lest life perish.... No,
+all that which I do here or refrain from doing lacks clarity, nor can I
+detect any symmetry anywhere, such as living would assuredly display, I
+think, if my progress were directed by any particular motive.... It is
+all a muddling through, somehow, without any recognizable goal in view,
+and there is no explanation of the scuffle tendered or anywhere
+procurable. It merely seems that to go on living has become with me a
+habit....
+
+And I want beauty in my life. I have seen beauty in a sunset and in the
+spring woods and in the eyes of divers women, but now these happy
+accidents of light and color no longer thrill me. And I want beauty in
+my life itself, rather than in such chances as befall it. It seems to me
+that many actions of my life were beautiful, very long ago, when I was
+young in an evanished world of friendly girls, who were all more lovely
+than any girl is nowadays. For women now are merely more or less
+good-looking, and as I know, their looks when at their best have been
+painstakingly enhanced and edited.... But I would like this life which
+moves and yearns in me, to be able itself to attain to comeliness,
+though but in transitory performance. The life of a butterfly, for
+example, is just a graceful gesture: and yet, in that its loveliness is
+complete and perfectly rounded in itself, I envy this bright flicker
+through existence. And the nearest I can come to my ideal is
+punctiliously to pay my bills, be polite to my wife, and contribute to
+deserving charities: and the program does not seem, somehow, quite
+adequate. There are my books, I know; and there is beauty "embalmed and
+treasured up" in many pages of my books, and in the books of other
+persons, too, which I may read at will: but this desire inborn in me is
+not to be satiated by making marks upon paper, nor by deciphering
+them.... In short, I am enamored of that flawless beauty of which all
+poets have perturbedly divined the existence somewhere, and which life
+as men know it simply does not afford nor anywhere foresee....
+
+And tenderness, too--but does that appear a mawkish thing to desiderate
+in life? Well, to my finding human beings do not like one another.
+Indeed, why should they, being rational creatures? All babies have a
+temporary lien on tenderness, of course: and therefrom children too
+receive a dwindling income, although on looking back, you will recollect
+that your childhood was upon the whole a lonesome and much put-upon
+period. But all grown persons ineffably distrust one another.... In
+courtship, I grant you, there is a passing aberration which often mimics
+tenderness, sometimes as the result of honest delusion, but more
+frequently as an ambuscade in the endless struggle between man and
+woman. Married people are not ever tender with each other, you will
+notice: if they are mutually civil it is much: and physical contacts
+apart, their relation is that of a very moderate intimacy. My own wife,
+at all events, I find an unfailing mystery, a Sphinx whose secrets I
+assume to be not worth knowing: and, as I am mildly thankful to narrate,
+she knows very little about me, and evinces as to my affairs no morbid
+interest. That is not to assert that if I were ill she would not nurse
+me through any imaginable contagion, nor that if she were drowning I
+would not plunge in after her, whatever my delinquencies at swimming:
+what I mean is that, pending such high crises, we tolerate each other
+amicably, and never think of doing more.... And from our blood-kin we
+grow apart inevitably. Their lives and their interests are no longer the
+same as ours, and when we meet it is with conscious reservations and
+much manufactured talk. Besides, they know things about us which we
+resent.... And with the rest of my fellows, I find that convention
+orders all our dealings, even with children, and we do and say what
+seems more or less expected. And I know that we distrust one another all
+the while, and instinctively conceal or misrepresent our actual thoughts
+and emotions when there is no very apparent need.... Personally, I do
+not like human beings because I am not aware, upon the whole, of any
+generally distributed qualities which entitle them as a race to
+admiration and affection. But toward people in books--such as Mrs.
+Millamant, and Helen of Troy, and Bella Wilfer, and Mélusine, and
+Beatrix Esmond--I may intelligently overflow with tenderness and
+caressing words, in part because they deserve it, and in part because I
+know they will not suspect me of being "queer" or of having ulterior
+motives....
+
+And I very often wish that I could know the truth about just any one
+circumstance connected with my life.... Is the phantasmagoria of sound
+and noise and color really passing or is it all an illusion here in my
+brain? How do you know that you are not dreaming me, for instance? In
+your conceded dreams, I am sure, you must invent and see and listen to
+persons who for the while seem quite as real to you as I do now. As I
+do, you observe, I say! and what thing is it to which I so glibly refer
+as I? If you will try to form a notion of yourself, of the sort of a
+something that you suspect to inhabit and partially to control your
+flesh and blood body, you will encounter a walking bundle of
+superfluities: and when you mentally have put aside the extraneous
+things--your garments and your members and your body, and your acquired
+habits and your appetites and your inherited traits and your prejudices,
+and all other appurtenances which considered separately you recognize to
+be no integral part of you,--there seems to remain in those
+pearl-colored brain-cells, wherein is your ultimate lair, very little
+save a faculty for receiving sensations, of which you know the larger
+portion to be illusory. And surely, to be just a very gullible
+consciousness provisionally existing among inexplicable mysteries, is
+not an enviable plight. And yet this life--to which I cling
+tenaciously--comes to no more. Meanwhile I hear men talk about "the
+truth"; and they even wager handsome sums upon their knowledge of it:
+but I align myself with "jesting Pilate," and echo the forlorn query
+that recorded time has left unanswered....
+
+Then, last of all, I desiderate urbanity. I believe this is the rarest
+quality in the world. Indeed, it probably does not exist anywhere. A
+really urbane person--a mortal open-minded and affable to conviction of
+his own shortcomings and errors, and unguided in anything by irrational
+blind prejudices--could not but in a world of men and women be regarded
+as a monster. We are all of us, as if by instinct, intolerant of that
+which is unfamiliar: we resent its impudence: and very much the same
+principle which prompts small boys to jeer at a straw-hat out of season
+induces their elders to send missionaries to the heathen. The history of
+the progress of the human race is but the picaresque romance of
+intolerance, a narrative of how--what is it Milton says?--"truth never
+came into the world but, like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that
+brought her forth, till time hath washed and salted the infant, declared
+her legitimate, and churched the father of his young Minerva." And I,
+who prattle to you, very candidly confess that I have no patience with
+other people's ideas unless they coincide with mine: for if the fellow
+be demonstrably wrong I am fretted by his stupidity, and if his notion
+seem more nearly right than mine I am infuriated.... Yet I wish I could
+acquire urbanity, very much as I would like to have wings. For in
+default of it, I cannot even manage to be civil to that piteous thing
+called human nature, or to view its parasites, whether they be
+politicians or clergymen or popular authors, with one-half the
+commiseration which the shifts they are put to, quite certainly, would
+rouse in the urbane....
+
+So I in point of fact desire of literature, just as you guessed,
+precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly
+feel the lack in my own life. And it is that which romance affords her
+postulants. The philtres of romance are brewed to free us from this
+unsatisfying life that is calendared by fiscal years, and to contrive a
+less disastrous elusion of our own personalities than many seek
+dispersedly in drink and drugs and lust and fanaticism, and sometimes in
+death. For, beset by his own rationality, the normal man is goaded to
+evade the strictures of his normal life, upon the incontestable ground
+that it is a stupid and unlovely routine; and to escape likewise from
+his own personality, which bores him quite as much as it does his
+associates. So he hurtles into these very various roads from reality,
+precisely as a goaded sheep flees without notice of what lies ahead....
+
+And romance tricks him, but not to his harm. For, be it remembered that
+man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams. Romance it is
+undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and
+aimless business, not all a hopeless waste and confusion; and that his
+existence is a pageant (appreciatively observed by divine spectators),
+and that he is strong and excellent and wise: and to romance he listens,
+willing and thrice willing to be cheated by the honeyed fiction. The
+things of which romance assures him are very far from true: yet it is
+solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the
+cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the
+whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee: so that, however
+extravagant may seem these flattering whispers to-day, they were
+immeasurably more remote from veracity when men first began to listen to
+their sugared susurrus, and steadily the discrepancy lessens. To-day
+these things seem quite as preposterous to calm consideration as did
+flying yesterday: and so, to the Gradgrindians, romance appears to
+discourse foolishly, and incurs the common fate of prophets: for it is
+about to-morrow and about the day after to-morrow, that romance is
+talking, by means of parables. And all the while man plays the ape to
+fairer and yet fairer dreams, and practice strengthens him at
+mimickry....
+
+To what does the whole business tend?--why, how in heaven's name should
+I know? We can but be content to note that all goes forward, toward
+something.... It may be that we are nocturnal creatures perturbed by
+rumors of a dawn which comes inevitably, as prologue to a day wherein we
+and our children have no part whatever. It may be that when our
+arboreal propositus descended from his palm-tree and began to walk
+upright about the earth, his progeny were forthwith committed to a
+journey in which to-day is only a way-station. Yet I prefer to take it
+that we are components of an unfinished world, and that we are but as
+seething atoms which ferment toward its making, if merely because man as
+he now exists can hardly be the finished product of any Creator whom one
+could very heartily revere. We are being made into something quite
+unpredictable, I imagine: and through the purging and the smelting, we
+are sustained by an instinctive knowledge that we are being made into
+something better. For this we know, quite incommunicably, and yet as
+surely as we know that we will to have it thus.
+
+And it is this will that stirs in us to have the creatures of earth and
+the affairs of earth, not as they are, but "as they ought to be," which
+we call romance. But when we note how visibly it sways all life we
+perceive that we are talking about God.
+
+
+
+
+THE FISH REPORTER
+
+_By_ ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY
+
+
+     This informal commentary on the picturesque humors of trade
+     journalism is typical of Mr. Holliday's great skill in capturing
+     the actual vibration of urban life. He has something of George
+     Gissing's taste for the actuality of city scenes and characters,
+     with rather more pungent idiosyncrasy in his manner of
+     self-expression. Careful observers of the art of writing will see
+     how much shrewd skill there is in the apparently unstudied manner.
+     One of Mr. Holliday's favorite discussions on the art of writing is
+     a phrase of Booth Tarkington's--"How to get the ink out of it." In
+     other words, how to strip away mere literary and conscious
+     adornment, and to get down to a translucent portraiture of life
+     itself in its actual contour and profile.
+
+     We are told that Mr. Holliday, in his native Indianapolis (where he
+     was born in 1880), was a champion bicycle rider at the age of
+     sixteen. That triumph, however, was not permanently satisfying, for
+     he came to New York in 1899 to study art; lived for a while,
+     precariously, as an illustrator; worked for several years as a
+     bookseller in Charles Scribner's retail store, and passed through
+     all sorts of curious jobs on Grub Street, among others book
+     reviewer on the _Tribune_ and _Times_. He was editor of _The
+     Bookman_ after that magazine was taken over by the George H. Doran
+     Company, and retired to the genteel dignity of "contributing
+     editor" in 1920, to obtain leisure for more writing of his own.
+
+     Mr. Holliday has the genuine gift of the personal essay, mellow,
+     fluent, and pleasantly eccentric. His _Walking-Stick Papers_,
+     Broome Street Straws, Turns about Town and _Peeps at People_ have
+     that charming rambling humor that descends to him from his masters
+     in this art, Hazlitt and Thackeray. When Mr. Holliday was racking
+     his wits for a title for _Men and Books and Cities_ (that odd
+     Borrovian chronicle of his mind, body and digestion on tour across
+     the continent) I suggested _The Odyssey of an Oddity_. He
+     deprecated this; but I still think it would have been a good title,
+     because strictly true.
+
+
+Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now and then,
+mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politicians, clergymen,
+and what not. And from these pursuits have they sucked the essence of
+yarns and in the setting of these activities found a flavor to stir and
+to charm hearts untold. Now, it is a thousand pities that no man of
+genius has ever been a fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great
+literary treasure, as it is highly probable that there is not under the
+sun any prospect so filled with the scents and colors of story as that
+presented by the commerce in fish.
+
+Take whale oil. Take the funny old buildings on Front Street, out of
+paintings, I declare, by Howard Pyle, where the large merchants in whale
+oil are. Take salt fish. Do you know the oldest salt-fish house in
+America, down by Coenties Slip? Ah! you should. The ghost of old Long
+John Silver, I suspect, smokes an occasional pipe in that old place. And
+many are the times I've seen the slim shade of young Jim Hawkins come
+running out. Take Labrador cod for export to the Mediterranean lands or
+to Porto Rico via New York. Take herrings brought to this port from
+Iceland, from Holland, and from Scotland; mackerel from Ireland, from
+the Magdalen Islands, and from Cape Breton; crabmeat from Japan;
+fishballs from Scandinavia; sardines from Norway and from France; caviar
+from Russia; shrimp which comes from Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia,
+or salmon from Alaska, and Puget Sound, and the Columbia River.
+
+Take the obituaries of fishermen. "In his prime, it is said, there was
+not a better skipper in the Gloucester fishing fleet." Take disasters to
+schooners, smacks, and trawlers. "The crew were landed, but lost all
+their belongings." New vessels, sales, etc. "The sealing schooner
+_Tillie B._, whose career in the South Seas is well known, is reported
+to have been sold to a moving-picture firm." Sponges from the Caribbean
+Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. "To most people, familiar only with the
+sponges of the shops, the animal as it comes from the sea would be
+rather unrecognizable." Why, take anything you please! It is such stuff
+as stories are. And as you eat your fish from the store how little do
+you reck of the glamor of what you are doing!
+
+However, as it seems to me unlikely that a man of genius will be a fish
+reporter shortly I will myself do the best I can to paint the tapestry
+of the scenes of his calling. The advertisement in the newspaper read:
+"Wanted--Reporter for weekly trade paper." Many called, but I was
+chosen. Though, doubtless, no man living knew less about fish than I.
+
+The news stands are each like a fair, so laden are they with magazines
+in bright colors. It would seem almost as if there were a different
+magazine for every few hundred and seven-tenth person, as the
+statistics put these matters. And yet, it seems, there is a vast, a very
+vast, periodical literature of which we, that is, magazine readers in
+general, know nothing whatever. There is, for one, that fine, old,
+standard publication, Barrel and Box, devoted to the subjects and the
+interests of the coopering industry; there is too, _The Dried Fruit
+Packer and Western Canner_, as alert a magazine as one could wish--in
+its kind; and from the home of classic American literature comes _The
+New England Tradesman and Grocer_. And so on. At the place alone where
+we went to press twenty-seven trade journals were printed every week,
+from one for butchers to one for bankers.
+
+_The Fish Industries Gazette_--Ah, yes! For some reason not clear
+(though it is an engaging thing, I think) the word "gazette" is the
+great word among the titles of trade journals. There are _The Jewellers'
+Gazette_ and _The Women's Wear Gazette_ and _The Poulterers' Gazette_
+(of London), and _The Maritime Gazette_ (of Halifax), and other gazettes
+quite without number. This word "gazette" makes its appeal, too,
+curiously enough, to those who christen country papers; and trade
+journals have much of the intimate charm of country papers. The "trade"
+in each case is a kind of neighborly community, separated in its parts
+by space, but joined in unity of sympathy. "Personals" are a vital
+feature of trade papers. "Walter Conner, who for some time has conducted
+a bakery and fish market at Hudson, N. Y., has removed to Fort Edward,
+leaving his brother Ed in charge at the Hudson place of business."
+
+_The Fish Industries Gazette_, as I say, was one of several in its
+field, in friendly rivalry with _The Oyster Trade and Fisherman_ and
+_The Pacific Fisheries_. It comprised two departments: the fresh fish
+and oyster department, and myself. I was, as an editorial announcement
+said at the beginning of my tenure of office, a "reorganization of our
+salt, smoked, and pickled fish department." The delectable, mellow
+spirit of the country paper, so removed from the crash and whirr of
+metropolitan journalism, rested in this, too, that upon the _Gazette_ I
+did practically everything on the paper except the linotyping. Reporter,
+editorial writer, exchange editor, make-up man, proof-reader,
+correspondent, advertisement solicitor, was I.
+
+As exchange editor, did I read all the papers in the English language in
+eager search of fish news. And while you are about the matter, just find
+me a finer bit of literary style evoking the romance of the vast wastes
+of the moving sea, in Stevenson, Defoe, anywhere you please, than such a
+news item as this: "Capt. Ezra Pound, of the bark _Elnora_, of Salem,
+Mass., spoke a lonely vessel in latitude this and longitude that,
+September 8. She proved to be the whaler _Wanderer_, and her captain
+said that she had been nine months at sea, that all on board were well,
+and that he had stocked so many barrels of whale oil."
+
+As exchange editor was it my business to peruse reports from Eastport,
+Maine, to the effect that one of the worst storms in recent years had
+destroyed large numbers of the sardine weirs there. To seek fish
+recipes, of such savory sound as those for "broiled redsnapper,"
+"shrimps bordelaise," and "baked fish croquettes." To follow fishing
+conditions in the North Sea occasioned by the Great War. To hunt down
+jokes of piscatory humor. "The man who drinks like a fish does not take
+kindly to water.--Exchange." To find other "fillers" in the consular
+reports and elsewhere: "Fish culture in India," "1800 Miles in a Dory,"
+"Chinese Carp for the Philippines," "Americans as Fish Eaters." And, to
+use a favorite term of trade papers, "etc., etc." Then to "paste up" the
+winnowed fruits of this beguiling research.
+
+As editorial writer, to discuss the report of the commission recently
+sent by congress to the Pribilof Islands, Alaska, to report on the
+condition of our national herd of fur seals; to discuss the official
+interpretation here of the Government ruling on what constitutes
+"boneless" codfish; to consider the campaign in Canada to promote there
+a more popular consumption of fish, and to brightly remark _à propos_
+of this that "a fish a day keeps the doctor away"; to review the current
+issue of _The Journal of the Fisheries Society of Japan_, containing
+leading articles on "Are Fishing Motor Boats Able to Encourage in Our
+Country" and "Fisherman the Late Mr. H. Yamaguchi Well Known"; to combat
+the prejudice against dogfish as food, a prejudice like that against
+eels, in some quarters eyed askance as "calling cousins with the great
+sea-serpent," as Juvenal says; to call attention to the doom of one of
+the most picturesque monuments in the story of fish, the passing of the
+pleasant and celebrated old Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich, near London,
+scene of the famous Ministerial white-bait dinners of the days of Pitt;
+to make a jest on an exciting idea suggested by some medical man that
+some of the features of a Ritz-Carlton Hotel, that is, baths, be
+introduced into the fo'c's'les of Grand Banks fishing vessels; to keep
+an eye on the activities of our Bureau of Fisheries; to hymn a praise to
+the monumental new Fish Pier at Boston; to glance at conditions at the
+premier fish market of the world, Billingsgate; to herald the fish
+display at the Canadian National Exhibition at Toronto, and, indeed,
+etc., and again etc.
+
+As general editorial roustabout, to find each week a "leader," a
+translation, say, from _In Allgemeine Fishcherei-Zeitung_, or _Economic
+Circular No. 10_, "Mussels in the Tributaries of the Missouri," or the
+last biennial report of the Superintendent of Fisheries of Wisconsin, or
+a scientific paper on "The Porpoise in Captivity" reprinted by
+permission of _Zoologica_, of the New York Zoölogical Society. To find
+each week for reprint a poem appropriate in sentiment to the feeling of
+the paper. One of the "Salt Water Ballads" would do, or John Masefield
+singing of "the whale's way," or "Down to the white dipping sails"; or
+Rupert Brooke: "And in that heaven of all their wish, There shall be no
+more land, say fish"; or a "weather rhyme" about "mackerel skies," when
+"you're sure to get a fishing day"; or something from the New York Sun
+about "the lobster pots of Maine"; or Oliver Herford, in the Century,
+"To a Goldfish"; or, best of all, an old song of fishing ways of other
+days.
+
+And to compile from the New York _Journal of Commerce_ better poetry
+than any of this, tables, beautiful tables of "imports into New York":
+"Oct. 15.--From Bordeaux, 225 cs. cuttlefish bone; Copenhagen, 173 pkgs.
+fish; Liverpool, 969 bbls. herrings, 10 walrus hides, 2,000 bags salt;
+La Guayra, 6 cs. fish sounds; Belize, 9 bbls. sponges; Rotterdam, 7
+pkgs. seaweed, 9,000 kegs herrings; Barcelona, 235 cs. sardines; Bocas
+Del Toro, 5 cs. turtle shells; Genoa, 3 boxes corals; Tampico, 2 pkgs.
+sponges; Halifax, 1 cs. seal skins, 35 bbls. cod liver oil, 215 cs.
+lobsters, 490 bbls. codfish; Akureyri, 4,150 bbls. salted herrings,"
+and much more. Beautiful tables of "exports from New York." "To
+Australia" (cleared Sep. 1); "to Argentina";--Haiti, Jamaica, Guatemala,
+Scotland, Salvador, Santo Domingo, England, and to places many more. And
+many other gorgeous tables, too. "Fishing vessels at New York," for one,
+listing the "trips" brought into this port by the _Stranger_, the _Sarah
+O'Neal_, the _Nourmahal_, a farrago of charming sounds, and a valuable
+tale of facts.
+
+As make-up man, of course, so to "dress" the paper that the "markets,"
+Oporto, Trinidad, Porto Rico, Demerara, Havana, would be together; that
+"Nova Scotia Notes"--"Weather conditions for curing have been more
+favorable since October set in"--would follow "Halifax Fish
+Market"--"Last week's arrivals were: Oct. 13, schr. _Hattie Loring_, 960
+quintals," etc.--that "Pacific Coast Notes"--"The tug _Tatoosh_ will
+perform the service for the Seattle salmon packers of towing a vessel
+from Seattle to this port via the Panama Canal"--would follow "Canned
+Salmon"; that shellfish matter would be in one place; reports of
+saltfish where such should be; that the weekly tale of the canned fish
+trade politically embraced the canned fish advertising; and so on and so
+on.
+
+Finest of all, as reporter, to go where the fish reporter goes. There
+the sight-seeing cars never find their way; the hurried commuter has
+not his path, nor knows of these things at all; and there that racy
+character who, voicing a multitude, declares that he would rather be a
+lamp post on Broadway than Mayor of St. Louis, goes not for to see. Up
+lower Greenwich Street the fish reporter goes, along an eerie, dark, and
+narrow way, beneath a strange, thundering roof, the "L" overhead. He
+threads his way amid seemingly chaotic, architectural piles of boxes, of
+barrels, crates, casks, kegs, and bulging bags; roundabout many great
+fetlocked draught horses, frequently standing or plunging upon the
+sidewalk, and attached to many huge trucks and wagons; and much of the
+time in the street he is compelled to go, finding the side walks too
+congested with the traffic of commerce to admit of his passing there.
+
+You probably eat butter, and eggs, and cheese. Then you would delight in
+Greenwich Street. You could feast your highly creditable appetite for
+these excellent things for very nearly a solid mile upon the signs of
+"wholesale dealers and commission merchants" in them. The letter press,
+as you might say, of the fish reporter's walk is a noble pæan to the
+earth's glorious yield for the joyous sustenance of man. For these
+princely merchants' signs sing of opulent stores of olive oil, of
+sausages, beans, soups, extracts, and spices, sugar, Spanish, Bermuda,
+and Havana onions, "fine" apples, teas, coffee, rice, chocolates, dried
+fruits and raisins, and of loaves and of fishes, and of "fish products."
+Lo! dark and dirty and thundering Greenwich Street is to-day's
+translation of the Garden of Eden.
+
+Here is a great house whose sole vocation is the importation of caviar
+for barter here. Caviar from over-seas now comes, when it comes at all,
+mainly by the way of Archangel, recently put on the map, for most of us,
+by the war. The fish reporter is told, however, if it be summer, that
+there cannot be much doing in the way of caviar until fall, "when the
+spoonbill start coming in." And on he goes to a great saltfish house,
+where many men in salt-stained garments are running about, their arms
+laden with large flat objects, of sharp and jagged edge, which resemble
+dried and crackling hides of some animal curiously like a huge fish; and
+numerous others of "the same" are trundling round wheelbarrow-like
+trucks likewise so laden. Where stacks of these hides stand on their
+tails against the walls, and goodness knows how many big boxes are,
+containing, as those open show, beautifully soft, thick, cream-colored
+slabs, which is fish. And where still other men, in overalls stained
+like a painter's palette, are knocking off the heads of casks and
+dipping out of brine still other kinds of fish for inspection.
+
+Here it is said by the head of the house, by the stove (it is chill
+weather) in his office like a shipmaster's cabin: "Strong market on
+foreign mackerel. Mines hinder Norway catch. Advices from abroad report
+that German resources continue to purchase all available supplies from
+the Norwegian fishermen. No Irish of any account. Recent shipment sold
+on the deck at high prices. Fair demand from the Middle West."
+
+So, by stages, on up to turn into North Moore Street, looking down a
+narrow lane between two long bristling rows of wagons pointed out from
+the curbs, to the façades of the North River docks at the bottom, with
+the tops of the buff funnels of ocean liners, and Whistleranean
+silhouettes of derricks, rising beyond. Hereabout are more importers,
+exporters, and "producers" of fish, famous in their calling beyond the
+celebrities of popular publicity. And he that has official entrée may
+learn, by mounting dusky stairs, half-ladder and half-stair, and by
+passing through low-ceilinged chambers freighted with many barrels, to
+the sanctums of the fish lords, what's doing in the foreign herring way,
+and get the current market quotations, at present sky-high, and hear
+that the American shore mackerel catch is very fine stock.
+
+Then roundabout, with a step into the broad vista of homely Washington
+Street, and a turn through Franklin Street, where is the man decorated
+by the Imperial Japanese Government with a gold medal, if he should
+care to wear it, for having distinguished himself in the development of
+commerce in the marine products of Japan, back to Hudson Street. An
+authentic railroad is one of the spectacular features of Hudson Street.
+
+Here down the middle of the way are endless trains, stopping, starting,
+crashing, laden to their ears with freight, doubtless all to eat.
+Tourists should come from very far to view Hudson Street. Here is a
+spectacle as fascinating, as awe-inspiring, as extraordinary as any in
+the world. From dawn until darkness falls, hour after hour, along Hudson
+Street slowly, steadily moves a mighty procession of great trucks. One
+would not suppose there were so many trucks on the face of the earth. It
+is a glorious sight, and any man whose soul is not dead should jump with
+joy to see it. And the thunder of them altogether as they bang over the
+stones is like the music of the spheres.
+
+There is on Hudson Street a tall handsome building where the fish
+reporter goes, which should be enjoyed in this way: Up in the lift you
+go to the top, and then you walk down, smacking your lips. For all the
+doors in that building are brimming with poetry. And the tune of it goes
+like this: "Toasted Corn-Flake Co.," "Seaboard Rice," "Chili Products,"
+"Red Bloom Grape Juice Sales Office," "Porto Rico and Singapore
+Pineapple Co.," "Sunnyland Foodstuffs," "Importers of Fruit Pulps,
+Pimentos," "Sole Agents U. S. A. Italian Salad Oil," "Raisin Growers,"
+"Log Cabin Syrups," "Jobbers in Beans, Peas," "Chocolate and Cocoa
+Preparations," "Ohio Evaporated Milk Co.," "Bernese Alps and Holland
+Condensed Milk Co.," "Brazilian Nuts Co.," "Brokers Pacific Coast
+Salmon," "California Tuna Co.," and thus on and on.
+
+The fish reporter crosses the street to see the head of the Sardine
+Trust, who has just thrown the market into excitement by a heavy cut in
+prices of last year's pack. Thence, pausing to refresh himself by the
+way at a sign "Agency for Reims Champagne and Moselle Wines--Bordeaux
+Clarets and Sauternes," over to Broadway to interview the most august
+persons of all, dealers in fertilizer, "fish scrap." These mighty
+gentlemen live, when at business, in palatial suites of offices
+constructed of marble and fine woods and laid with rich rugs. The
+reporter is relayed into the innermost sanctum by a succession of richly
+clothed attendants. And he learns, it may be, that fishing in Chesapeake
+Bay is so poor that some of the "fish factories" may decide to shut
+down. Acid phosphate, it is said, is ruling at $13 f.o.b. Baltimore.
+
+And so the fish reporter enters upon the last lap of his rounds.
+Through, perhaps, the narrow, crooked lane of Pine Street he passes, to
+come out at length upon a scene set for a sea tale. Here would a lad,
+heir to vast estates in Virginia, be kidnapped and smuggled aboard to
+be sold a slave in Africa. This is Front Street. A white ship lies at
+the foot of it. Cranes rise at her side. Tugs, belching smoke, bob
+beyond. All about are ancient warehouses, redolent of the Thames, with
+steep roofs and sometimes stairs outside, and with tall shutters, a
+crescent-shaped hole in each. There is a dealer in weather-vanes. Other
+things dealt in hereabout are these: chronometers, "nautical
+instruments," wax gums, cordage and twine, marine paints, cotton wool
+and waste, turpentine, oils, greases, and rosin. Queer old taverns,
+public houses, are here, too. Why do not their windows rattle with a
+"Yo, ho, ho"?
+
+There is an old, old house whose business has been fish oil within the
+memory of men. And here is another. Next, through Water Street, one
+comes in search of the last word on salt fish. Now the air is filled
+with gorgeous smell of roasting coffee. Tea, coffee, sugar, rice,
+spices, bags and bagging here have their home. And there are haughty
+bonded warehouses filled with fine liquors. From his white cabin at the
+top of a venerable structure comes the dean of the saltfish business.
+"Export trade fair," he says; "good demand from South America."
+
+
+
+
+SOME NONSENSE ABOUT A DOG
+
+_By_ HARRY ESTY DOUNCE
+
+
+     Harry Esty Dounce was born in Syracuse in 1889 and graduated from
+     Hamilton College in 1910. His first job was as a cub reporter on
+     the journal that newspapermen affectionately call "the old _Sun_";
+     the adjective is pronounced as though it were in italics. He was on
+     the staff of the Syracuse _Herald_, 1912-14; spent a year in New
+     Orleans writing short stories, and returned in 1916 to the magazine
+     staff of the Sun. He was editor of the Sun's book review section,
+     1919-20; in 1920 he joined the staff of the New York _Evening
+     Post_.
+
+
+    "My hand will miss the insinuated nose--"
+
+                         _Sir William Watson_.
+
+But the dog that was written of must have been a big dog. Nibbie was
+just a comfortable lapful, once he had duly turned around and curled up
+with his nose in his tail.
+
+This is for people who know about dogs, in particular little mongrels
+without pedigree or market value. Other people, no doubt, will find it
+disgustingly maudlin. I would have found it so before Nibbie came.
+
+The day he came was a beautiful bright, cool one in an August. A touring
+car brought him. They put him down on our corner, meaning to lose him,
+but he crawled under the car, and they had to prod him out and throw
+stones before they could drive on. So that when I came home I found,
+with his mistress-elect, a sort of potbellied bundle of tarry oakum,
+caked with mud, panting convulsively still from fright, and showing the
+whites of uncommonly liquid brown eyes and a pink tongue. There was
+tennis that evening and he went along--I carried him over the railroad
+tracks; he gave us no trouble about the balls, but lay huddled under the
+bench where she sat, and shivered if a man came near him.
+
+That night he got chop bones and she got a sensible homily on the
+unwisdom of feeding strays, and he was left outdoors. He slept on the
+mat. The second morning we thought he had gone. The third, he was back,
+wagging approval of us and intent to stay, which seemed to leave no
+choice but to take him in. We had fun over names. "Jellywaggles,"
+suggested from next door, was undeniably descriptive. "Rags" fitted, or
+"Toby" or "Nig"--but they had a colored maid next door; finally we
+called him "Nibs," and soon his tail would answer to it.
+
+Cleaned up--scrubbed, the insoluble matted locks clipped from his coat,
+his trampish collar replaced with a new one bearing a license tag--he
+was far from being unpresentable. A vet. once opined that for a mongrel
+he was a good dog, that a black cocker mother had thrown her cap over
+Scottish mills, so to speak. This analysis accounted for him perfectly.
+Always, depending on the moment's mood, he was either terrier or
+spaniel, the snap and scrap and perk of the one alternating with the
+gentle snuggling indolence of the other.
+
+As terrier he would dig furiously by the hour after a field mouse; as
+spaniel he would "read" the breeze with the best nose among the dog folk
+of our neighborhood, or follow a trail quite well. I know there was
+retrieving blood. A year ago May he caught and brought me, not doing the
+least injury, an oriole that probably had flown against a wire and was
+struggling disabled in the grass.
+
+Nibbie was shabby-genteel black, sunburnt as to the mustache, grizzled
+as to the raggy fringe on his haunches. He had a white stock and
+shirt-frill and a white fore paw. The brown eyes full of heart were the
+best point. His body coat was rough Scottish worsted, the little black
+pate was cotton-soft like shoddy, and the big black ears were genuine
+spaniel silk. As a terrier he held them up smartly and carried a plumy
+fishhook of a tail; as a spaniel the ears drooped and the tail swung
+meekly as if in apology for never having been clipped. The other day
+when we had to say good-by to him each of us cut one silky tuft from an
+ear, very much as we had so often when he'd been among the burdocks in
+the field where the garden is.
+
+Burrs were by no means Nibbie's only failing. In flea time it seemed
+hardly possible that a dog of his size could sustain his population. We
+finally found a true flea bane, but, deserted one day, he was populous
+again the next. They don't relish every human; me they did; I used to
+storm at him for it, and he used, between spasms of scratching, to
+listen admiringly and wag. We think he supposed his tormentors were
+winged insects, for he sought refuge in dark clothes-closets where a
+flying imp wouldn't logically come.
+
+He was wilful, insisted on landing in laps when their makers wanted to
+read. He _would_ make advances to visitors who were polite about him. He
+_would_ get up on the living-room table, why and how, heaven knows,
+finding his opportunity when we were out of the house, and taking care
+to be upstairs on a bed--white, grimeable coverlets preferred--by the
+time we had the front door open; I used to slip up to the porch and
+catch through a window the diving flourish of his sinful tail.
+
+One of his faults must have been a neurosis really. He led a hard life
+before we took him in, as witnessed the game hind leg that made him sit
+up side-saddle fashion, and two such scars on his back as boiling hot
+grease might have made. And something especially cruel had been done to
+him when asleep, for if you bent over him napping or in his bed he would
+half rouse and growl, and sometimes snap blindly. (We dreaded exuberant
+visiting children.) Two or three experiments I hate to remember now
+convinced me that it couldn't be whipped out of him, and once wide
+awake he was sure to be perplexedly apologetic.
+
+He was spoiled. That was our doing. We babied him abominably--he was,
+for two years, the only subject we had for such malpractice. He had more
+foolish names than Wogg, that dog of Mrs. Stevenson's, and heard more
+Little Language than Stella ever did, reciprocating by kissing proffered
+ears in his doggy way. Once he had brightened up after his arrival, he
+showed himself ready to take an ell whenever we gave an inch, and he was
+always taking them, and never paying penalties. He had conscience enough
+to be sly. I remember the summer evening we stepped outside for just an
+instant, and came back to find a curious groove across the butter, on
+the dining table, and an ever-so-innocent Nibbie in a chair in the next
+room.
+
+While we were at the table he was generally around it, bulldozing for
+tid-bits--I fear he had reason to know that this would work. One
+fortnight when his Missie was away he slept on his Old Man's bed (we had
+dropped titles of dignity with him by then) and he rang the welkin
+hourly, answering far-away dog friends, and occasionally came north to
+lollop my face with tender solicitude, just like the fool nurse in the
+story, waking the patient up to ask if he was sleeping well.
+
+More recently, when a beruffled basket was waiting, he developed an
+alarming trick of stealing in there to try it, so I fitted that door
+with a hook, insuring a crack impervious to dogs. And the other night I
+had to take the hook, now useless, off; we couldn't stand hearing it
+jingle. He adopted the junior member on first sight and sniff of him, by
+the way; would look on beaming as proudly as if he'd hatched him.
+
+The last of his iniquities arose from a valor that lacked its better
+part, an absurd mixture of Falstaff and bantam rooster. At the critical
+point he'd back out of a fuss with a dog of his own size. But let a
+police dog, an Airedale, a St. Bernard, or a big ugly cur appear and
+Nibbie was all around him, blackguarding him unendurably. It was lucky
+that the big dogs in our neighborhood were patient. And he never would
+learn about automobiles. Usually tried to tackle them head on, often
+stopped cars with merciful drivers. When the car wouldn't stop, luck
+would save him by a fraction of an inch. I couldn't spank that out of
+him either. We had really been expecting what finally happened for two
+years.
+
+That's about all. Too much, I am afraid. A decent fate made it quick the
+other night, and clean and close at hand, in fact, on the same street
+corner where once a car had left the small scapegrace for us. We tell
+ourselves how glad we are it happened as it did, instead of an agonal
+ending such as many of his people come to. We tell ourselves we
+couldn't have had him for ever in any event; that some day, for the
+junior member's sake, we shall get another dog. We keep telling
+ourselves these things, and talking with animation on other topics. The
+muzzle, the leash, the drinking dish are hidden, the last muddy paw
+track swept up, the nose smudges washed off the favorite front window
+pane.
+
+But the house is full of a little snoofing, wagging, loving ghost. I
+know how the boy Thoreau felt about a hereafter with dogs barred. I want
+to think that somewhere, some time, I will be coming home again, and
+that when the door opens Nibbie will be on hand to caper welcome.
+
+
+
+
+THE FIFTY-FIRST DRAGON
+
+_By_ HEYWOOD BROUN
+
+
+     Heywood Broun, who has risen rapidly through the ranks of newspaper
+     honor from sporting reporter and war correspondent to one of the
+     most highly regarded dramatic and literary critics in the country,
+     is another of these Harvard men, but, as far as this book is
+     concerned, the last of them. Broun graduated from Harvard in 1910;
+     was several years on the New York _Tribune_, and is now on the
+     _World_.
+
+     There is no more substantially gifted newspaper man in his field;
+     his beautifully spontaneous humor and drollery are counterbalanced
+     by a fine imaginative sensitiveness and a remarkable power in the
+     fable or allegorical essay, such as the one here reprinted. His
+     book, _Seeing Things at Night_, is only the first-fruit of truly
+     splendid possibilities. If I may be allowed to prophesy, thus
+     hazarding all, I will say that Heywood Broun is likely, in the next
+     ten or fifteen years, to do as fine work, both imaginative and
+     critical, as any living American of his era.
+
+
+Of all the pupils at the knight school Gawaine le Cœur-Hardy was
+among the least promising. He was tall and sturdy, but his instructors
+soon discovered that he lacked spirit. He would hide in the woods when
+the jousting class was called, although his companions and members of
+the faculty sought to appeal to his better nature by shouting to him to
+come out and break his neck like a man. Even when they told him that the
+lances were padded, the horses no more than ponies and the field
+unusually soft for late autumn, Gawaine refused to grow enthusiastic.
+The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce were discussing
+the case one spring afternoon and the Assistant Professor could see no
+remedy but expulsion.
+
+"No," said the Headmaster, as he looked out at the purple hills which
+ringed the school, "I think I'll train him to slay dragons."
+
+"He might be killed," objected the Assistant Professor.
+
+"So he might," replied the Headmaster brightly, but he added, more
+soberly, "we must consider the greater good. We are responsible for the
+formation of this lad's character."
+
+"Are the dragons particularly bad this year?" interrupted the Assistant
+Professor. This was characteristic. He always seemed restive when the
+head of the school began to talk ethics and the ideals of the
+institution.
+
+"I've never known them worse," replied the Headmaster. "Up in the hills
+to the south last week they killed a number of peasants, two cows and a
+prize pig. And if this dry spell holds there's no telling when they may
+start a forest fire simply by breathing around indiscriminately."
+
+"Would any refund on the tuition fee be necessary in case of an accident
+to young Cœur-Hardy?"
+
+"No," the principal answered, judicially, "that's all covered in the
+contract. But as a matter of fact he won't be killed. Before I send him
+up in the hills I'm going to give him a magic word."
+
+"That's a good idea," said the Professor. "Sometimes they work wonders."
+
+From that day on Gawaine specialized in dragons. His course included
+both theory and practice. In the morning there were long lectures on the
+history, anatomy, manners and customs of dragons. Gawaine did not
+distinguish himself in these studies. He had a marvelously versatile
+gift for forgetting things. In the afternoon he showed to better
+advantage, for then he would go down to the South Meadow and practise
+with a battle-ax. In this exercise he was truly impressive, for he had
+enormous strength as well as speed and grace. He even developed a
+deceptive display of ferocity. Old alumni say that it was a thrilling
+sight to see Gawaine charging across the field toward the dummy paper
+dragon which had been set up for his practice. As he ran he would
+brandish his ax and shout "A murrain on thee!" or some other vivid bit
+of campus slang. It never took him more than one stroke to behead the
+dummy dragon.
+
+Gradually his task was made more difficult. Paper gave way to
+papier-mâché and finally to wood, but even the toughest of these dummy
+dragons had no terrors for Gawaine. One sweep of the ax always did the
+business. There were those who said that when the practice was
+protracted until dusk and the dragons threw long, fantastic shadows
+across the meadow Gawaine did not charge so impetuously nor shout so
+loudly. It is possible there was malice in this charge. At any rate, the
+Headmaster decided by the end of June that it was time for the test.
+Only the night before a dragon had come close to the school grounds and
+had eaten some of the lettuce from the garden. The faculty decided that
+Gawaine was ready. They gave him a diploma and a new battle-ax and the
+Headmaster summoned him to a private conference.
+
+"Sit down," said the Headmaster. "Have a cigarette."
+
+Gawaine hesitated.
+
+"Oh, I know it's against the rules," said the Headmaster. "But after
+all, you have received your preliminary degree. You are no longer a boy.
+You are a man. To-morrow you will go out into the world, the great world
+of achievement."
+
+Gawaine took a cigarette. The Headmaster offered him a match, but he
+produced one of his own and began to puff away with a dexterity which
+quite amazed the principal.
+
+"Here you have learned the theories of life," continued the Headmaster,
+resuming the thread of his discourse, "but after all, life is not a
+matter of theories. Life is a matter of facts. It calls on the young and
+the old alike to face these facts, even though they are hard and
+sometimes unpleasant. Your problem, for example, is to slay dragons."
+
+"They say that those dragons down in the south wood are five hundred
+feet long," ventured Gawaine, timorously.
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!" said the Headmaster. "The curate saw one last week
+from the top of Arthur's Hill. The dragon was sunning himself down in
+the valley. The curate didn't have an opportunity to look at him very
+long because he felt it was his duty to hurry back to make a report to
+me. He said the monster, or shall I say, the big lizard?--wasn't an inch
+over two hundred feet. But the size has nothing at all to do with it.
+You'll find the big ones even easier than the little ones. They're far
+slower on their feet and less aggressive, I'm told. Besides, before you
+go I'm going to equip you in such fashion that you need have no fear of
+all the dragons in the world."
+
+"I'd like an enchanted cap," said Gawaine.
+
+"What's that?" answered the Headmaster, testily.
+
+"A cap to make me disappear," explained Gawaine.
+
+The Headmaster laughed indulgently. "You mustn't believe all those old
+wives' stories," he said. "There isn't any such thing. A cap to make you
+disappear, indeed! What would you do with it? You haven't even appeared
+yet. Why, my boy, you could walk from here to London, and nobody would
+so much as look at you. You're nobody. You couldn't be more invisible
+than that."
+
+Gawaine seemed dangerously close to a relapse into his old habit of
+whimpering. The Headmaster reassured him: "Don't worry; I'll give you
+something much better than an enchanted cap. I'm going to give you a
+magic word. All you have to do is to repeat this magic charm once and no
+dragon can possibly harm a hair of your head. You can cut off his head
+at your leisure."
+
+He took a heavy book from the shelf behind his desk and began to run
+through it. "Sometimes," he said, "the charm is a whole phrase or even a
+sentence. I might, for instance, give you 'To make the'--No, that might
+not do. I think a single word would be best for dragons."
+
+"A short word," suggested Gawaine.
+
+"It can't be too short or it wouldn't be potent. There isn't so much
+hurry as all that. Here's a splendid magic word: 'Rumplesnitz.' Do you
+think you can learn that?"
+
+Gawaine tried and in an hour or so he seemed to have the word well in
+hand. Again and again he interrupted the lesson to inquire, "And if I
+say 'Rumplesnitz' the dragon can't possibly hurt me?" And always the
+Headmaster replied, "If you only say 'Rumplesnitz,' you are perfectly
+safe."
+
+Toward morning Gawaine seemed resigned to his career. At daybreak the
+Headmaster saw him to the edge of the forest and pointed him to the
+direction in which he should proceed. About a mile away to the southwest
+a cloud of steam hovered over an open meadow in the woods and the
+Headmaster assured Gawaine that under the steam he would find a dragon.
+Gawaine went forward slowly. He wondered whether it would be best to
+approach the dragon on the run as he did in his practice in the South
+Meadow or to walk slowly toward him, shouting "Rumplesnitz" all the way.
+
+The problem was decided for him. No sooner had he come to the fringe of
+the meadow than the dragon spied him and began to charge. It was a large
+dragon and yet it seemed decidedly aggressive in spite of the
+Headmaster's statement to the contrary. As the dragon charged it
+released huge clouds of hissing steam through its nostrils. It was
+almost as if a gigantic teapot had gone mad. The dragon came forward so
+fast and Gawaine was so frightened that he had time to say "Rumplesnitz"
+only once. As he said it, he swung his battle-ax and off popped the head
+of the dragon. Gawaine had to admit that it was even easier to kill a
+real dragon than a wooden one if only you said "Rumplesnitz."
+
+Gawaine brought the ears home and a small section of the tail. His
+school mates and the faculty made much of him, but the Headmaster wisely
+kept him from being spoiled by insisting that he go on with his work.
+Every clear day Gawaine rose at dawn and went out to kill dragons. The
+Headmaster kept him at home when it rained, because he said the woods
+were damp and unhealthy at such times and that he didn't want the boy to
+run needless risks. Few good days passed in which Gawaine failed to get
+a dragon. On one particularly fortunate day he killed three, a husband
+and wife and a visiting relative. Gradually he developed a technique.
+Pupils who sometimes watched him from the hill-tops a long way off said
+that he often allowed the dragon to come within a few feet before he
+said "Rumplesnitz." He came to say it with a mocking sneer. Occasionally
+he did stunts. Once when an excursion party from London was watching him
+he went into action with his right hand tied behind his back. The
+dragon's head came off just as easily.
+
+As Gawaine's record of killings mounted higher the Headmaster found it
+impossible to keep him completely in hand. He fell into the habit of
+stealing out at night and engaging in long drinking bouts at the village
+tavern. It was after such a debauch that he rose a little before dawn
+one fine August morning and started out after his fiftieth dragon. His
+head was heavy and his mind sluggish. He was heavy in other respects as
+well, for he had adopted the somewhat vulgar practice of wearing his
+medals, ribbons and all, when he went out dragon hunting. The
+decorations began on his chest and ran all the way down to his abdomen.
+They must have weighed at least eight pounds.
+
+Gawaine found a dragon in the same meadow where he had killed the first
+one. It was a fair-sized dragon, but evidently an old one. Its face was
+wrinkled and Gawaine thought he had never seen so hideous a countenance.
+Much to the lad's disgust, the monster refused to charge and Gawaine was
+obliged to walk toward him. He whistled as he went. The dragon regarded
+him hopelessly, but craftily. Of course it had heard of Gawaine. Even
+when the lad raised his battle-ax the dragon made no move. It knew that
+there was no salvation in the quickest thrust of the head, for it had
+been informed that this hunter was protected by an enchantment. It
+merely waited, hoping something would turn up. Gawaine raised the
+battle-ax and suddenly lowered it again. He had grown very pale and he
+trembled violently. The dragon suspected a trick. "What's the matter?"
+it asked, with false solicitude.
+
+"I've forgotten the magic word," stammered Gawaine.
+
+"What a pity," said the dragon. "So that was the secret. It doesn't
+seem quite sporting to me, all this magic stuff, you know. Not cricket,
+as we used to say when I was a little dragon; but after all, that's a
+matter of opinion."
+
+Gawaine was so helpless with terror that the dragon's confidence rose
+immeasurably and it could not resist the temptation to show off a bit.
+
+"Could I possibly be of any assistance?" it asked. "What's the first
+letter of the magic word?"
+
+"It begins with an 'r,'" said Gawaine weakly.
+
+"Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What
+sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"
+
+Gawaine could do no more than nod.
+
+"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican."
+
+Gawaine shook his head.
+
+"Well, then," said the dragon, "we'd better get down to business. Will
+you surrender?"
+
+With the suggestion of a compromise Gawaine mustered up enough courage
+to speak.
+
+"What will you do if I surrender?" he asked.
+
+"Why, I'll eat you," said the dragon.
+
+"And if I don't surrender?"
+
+"I'll eat you just the same."
+
+"Then it doesn't mean any difference, does it?" moaned Gawaine.
+
+"It does to me," said the dragon with a smile. "I'd rather you didn't
+surrender. You'd taste much better if you didn't."
+
+The dragon waited for a long time for Gawaine to ask "Why?" but the boy
+was too frightened to speak. At last the dragon had to give the
+explanation without his cue line. "You see," he said, "if you don't
+surrender you'll taste better because you'll die game."
+
+This was an old and ancient trick of the dragon's. By means of some such
+quip he was accustomed to paralyze his victims with laughter and then to
+destroy them. Gawaine was sufficiently paralyzed as it was, but laughter
+had no part in his helplessness. With the last word of the joke the
+dragon drew back his head and struck. In that second there flashed into
+the mind of Gawaine the magic word "Rumplesnitz," but there was no time
+to say it. There was time only to strike and, without a word, Gawaine
+met the onrush of the dragon with a full swing. He put all his back and
+shoulders into it. The impact was terrific and the head of the dragon
+flew away almost a hundred yards and landed in a thicket.
+
+Gawaine did not remain frightened very long after the death of the
+dragon. His mood was one of wonder. He was enormously puzzled. He cut
+off the ears of the monster almost in a trance. Again and again he
+thought to himself, "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz'!" He was sure of that
+and yet there was no question that he had killed the dragon. In fact, he
+had never killed one so utterly. Never before had he driven a head for
+anything like the same distance. Twenty-five yards was perhaps his best
+previous record. All the way back to the knight school he kept rumbling
+about in his mind seeking an explanation for what had occurred. He went
+to the Headmaster immediately and after closing the door told him what
+had happened. "I didn't say 'Rumplesnitz,'" he explained with great
+earnestness.
+
+The Headmaster laughed. "I'm glad you've found out," he said. "It makes
+you ever so much more of a hero. Don't you see that? Now you know that
+it was you who killed all these dragons and not that foolish little word
+'Rumplesnitz.'"
+
+Gawaine frowned. "Then it wasn't a magic word after all?" he asked.
+
+"Of course not," said the Headmaster, "you ought to be too old for such
+foolishness. There isn't any such thing as a magic word."
+
+"But you told me it was magic," protested Gawaine. "You said it was
+magic and now you say it isn't."
+
+"It wasn't magic in a literal sense," answered the Headmaster, "but it
+was much more wonderful than that. The word gave you confidence. It took
+away your fears. If I hadn't told you that you might have been killed
+the very first time. It was your battle-ax did the trick."
+
+Gawaine surprised the Headmaster by his attitude. He was obviously
+distressed by the explanation. He interrupted a long philosophic and
+ethical discourse by the Headmaster with, "If I hadn't of hit 'em all
+mighty hard and fast any one of 'em might have crushed me like a, like
+a--" He fumbled for a word.
+
+"Egg shell," suggested the Headmaster.
+
+"Like a egg shell," assented Gawaine, and he said it many times. All
+through the evening meal people who sat near him heard him muttering,
+"Like a egg shell, like a egg shell."
+
+The next day was clear, but Gawaine did not get up at dawn. Indeed, it
+was almost noon when the Headmaster found him cowering in bed, with the
+clothes pulled over his head. The principal called the Assistant
+Professor of Pleasaunce, and together they dragged the boy toward the
+forest.
+
+"He'll be all right as soon as he gets a couple more dragons under his
+belt," explained the Headmaster.
+
+The Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed. "It would be a shame to
+stop such a fine run," he said. "Why, counting that one yesterday, he's
+killed fifty dragons."
+
+They pushed the boy into a thicket above which hung a meager cloud of
+steam. It was obviously quite a small dragon. But Gawaine did not come
+back that night or the next. In fact, he never came back. Some weeks
+afterward brave spirits from the school explored the thicket, but they
+could find nothing to remind them of Gawaine except the metal parts of
+his medals. Even the ribbons had been devoured.
+
+The Headmaster and the Assistant Professor of Pleasaunce agreed that it
+would be just as well not to tell the school how Gawaine had achieved
+his record and still less how he came to die. They held that it might
+have a bad effect on school spirit. Accordingly, Gawaine has lived in
+the memory of the school as its greatest hero. No visitor succeeds in
+leaving the building to-day without seeing a great shield which hangs on
+the wall of the dining hall. Fifty pairs of dragons' ears are mounted
+upon the shield and underneath in gilt letters is "Gawaine le
+Cœur-Hardy," followed by the simple inscription, "He killed fifty
+dragons." The record has never been equaled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The following typographical errors were corrected by the etext
+transcriber:
+
+wtihout malice=>without malice
+
+smooth and omnious=>smooth and ominous
+
+kinds words uttered=>kind words uttered
+
+It is cardinal rule=>It is (a) cardinal rule
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[A] _A Personal Record._
+
+[B] William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney Porter,
+physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in Greensboro, North
+Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; in Texas he was amateur
+ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and bank teller. Convicted of
+misuse of bank funds on insufficient evidence (which he supplemented by
+the insanity of flight), he passed three years and three months in the
+Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus. Release was the prelude to life in
+New York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, his
+stories, published in New York journals and in book form, were consumed
+by the public with an avidity which his premature death, in 1910,
+scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, is almost certainly borrowed
+from a French chemist Etienne-Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell
+upon in his pharmacal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry
+Biography" by C. Alphonso Smith.
+
+[C] O Henry's stories have been known to coincide with earlier work in a
+fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without clouding the
+originality of the author. I thought the brilliant "Harlem Tragedy" (in
+the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through sheer audacity, but the other day I
+found its motive repeated with singular exactness in Montesquieu's
+"Lettres Persanes" (Letter LI).
+
+[D] "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less; some chid
+and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to
+depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anatomists."--De Motu
+Cordis, chap. i.
+
+[E] This visit (in the early eighties) had another relish. The inn
+coffee-room had a copy of Mr. Freeman's book on the adjoining Cathedral,
+and this was copiously annotated in a beautiful and scholarly hand, but
+in a most virulent spirit. "Why can't you call things by their plain
+names?" (in reference to the historian's Macaulayesque periphrases) etc.
+I have often wondered who the annotator was.
+
+[F] When I went up this March to help man the last ditch for Greek, I
+happened to mention "Archdeacon": and my interlocutor told me that he
+believed no college now brewed within its walls. After the defeat, I
+thought of the stages of the Decline and Fall of Things: and how a sad
+but noble ode might be written (by the right man) on the Fates of Greek
+and Beer at Oxford. He would probably refer in the first strophe to the
+close of the Eumenides; in its antistrophe to Mr. Swinburne's great
+adaptation thereof in regard to Carlyle and Newman; while the epode and
+any reduplication of the parts would be occupied by showing how the
+departing entities were of no equivocal magnificence like the Eumenides
+themselves; of no flawed perfection (at least as it seemed to their
+poet) like the two great English writers, but wholly admirable and
+beneficent--too good for the generation who would banish them, and whom
+they banished.
+
+[G] This was one of the best illustrations of the old phrase, "a good
+pennyworth," that I ever knew for certain. I add the two last words
+because of a mysterious incident of my youth. I and one of my sisters
+were sitting at a window in a certain seaside place when we heard, both
+of us distinctly and repeatedly, this mystic street cry: "A bible and a
+pillow-case for a penny!" I rushed downstairs to secure this bargain,
+but the crier was now far off, and it was too late.
+
+[H] By the way, are they still as good for flip at New College, Oxford,
+as they were in the days when it numbered hardly any undergraduates
+except scholars, and one scholar of my acquaintance had to himself a set
+of three rooms and a garden? And is "The Island" at Kennington still
+famous for the same excellent compound?
+
+[I] It came from Alford, the chef-lieu, if it cannot be called the
+capital, of the Tennyson country. I have pleasant associations with the
+place, quite independent of the beery ones. And it made me, partially at
+least, alter one of the ideas of my early criticism--that time spent on
+a poet's local habitations was rather wasted. I have always thought "The
+Dying Swan" one of its author's greatest things, and one of the champion
+examples of pure poetry in English literature. But I never fully heard
+the "eddying song" that "flooded"
+
+      the creeping mosses and clambering weeds,
+    And the willow branches hoar and dank,
+    And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds.
+    And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank,
+    And the silvery marish-flowers that throng
+      The desolate creeks and pools among--
+
+till I saw them.
+
+[J] Herefordshire and Worcestershire cider can be very strong and the
+perry, they say, still stronger.
+
+
+
+
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