Sic Transit—
IDO not recall a feeling of greater triumph than on last Saturday when I walked off the eighteenth green of the Country Club with my opponent four down. I have the card before me now with its pleasant row of fives and sixes, and a four, and a three. Usually my card has mounted here and there to an eight or nine, or I have blown up altogether in a sandpit. Like Byron—but, oh, how differently!—I have wandered in the pathless wood. Like Ruth I have stood in tears amid the alien corn.
In those old days—only a week ago, but dim already (so soon does time wash the memory white)—in those old days, if I were asked to make up a foursome, some green inferior fellow, a novice who used his sister's clubs, was paired against me; or I was insulted with two strokes a hole, with three on the long hole past the woods. But now I shall ascend to faster company. It was my elbow. I now square it and cock it forward a bit. And I am cured. Keep your head down, Fritzie Boy, I say. Mind your elbow—I say it aloud—and I have no trouble.
There is a creek across the course. Like a thread in the woof it cuts the web of nearly every green. It is a black strand that puts trouble in the pattern, an evil thread from Clotho's ancient loom. Up at the sixth hole this creek is merely a dirty rivulet and I can get out of the damned thing—one must write, they say, as one talks and not go on stilts—I can get out with a niblick by splashing myself a bit. But even here, in its tender youth, as it were, the rivulet makes all the mischief that it can. Gargantua with his nurses was not so great a rogue. It crawls back and forth three times before the tee with a kind of jeering tongue stuck out. It seems foredoomed from the cradle to a villainous course. Farther down, at the seventeenth and second holes, which are near together, it cuts a deeper chasm. The bank is shale and steep. As I drive I feel like a black sinner on the nearer shore of Styx, gazing upon the sunny fields of Paradise beyond. I put my caddy at the top of the slope, where he sits with his apathetic eye upon the sullen, predestined pool.
But since last Saturday all is different. I sailed across on every drive, on every approach. The depths beckoned but I heeded not. And, when I walked across the bridge, I snapped my fingers in contempt, as at a dog that snarls safely on a leash.
I play best with a niblick. It is not entirely that I use it most. (Any day you can hear me bawling to my caddy to fetch it behind a bunker or beyond a fence.) Rather, the surface of the blade turns up at a reassuring, hopeful angle. Its shining eye seems cast at heaven in a prayer. I have had spells, also, of fondness for my mashie. It is fluted for a back-spin. Except for the click and flight of a prosperous drive I know nothing of prettier symmetry than an accurate approach. But my brassie I consider a reckless creature. It has bad direction. It treads not in the narrow path. I have driven. Good! For once I am clear of the woods. That white speck on the fairway is my ball. But shall my ambition o'erleap itself? Shall I select my brassie and tempt twice the gods of chance? No! I'll use my mashie. I'll creep up to the hole on hands and knees and be safe from trap and ditch.
Has anyone spent more time than I among the blackberry bushes along the railroad tracks on the eleventh? It is no grossness of appetite. My niblick grows hot with its exertions.
Once our course was not beset with sandpits. In those bright days woods and gulley were enough. Once clear of the initial obstruction I could roll up unimpeded to the green. I practiced a bouncing stroke with my putter that offered security at twenty yards. But now these approaches are guarded by traps. The greens are balanced on little mountains with sharp ditches all about. I hoist up from one to fall into another. "What a word, my son, has passed the barrier of your teeth!" said Athene once to Odysseus. Is the game so ancient? Were there sandpits, also, on the hills of stony Ithaca? Or in Ortygia, sea-girt? Was the dear wanderer off his game and fallen to profanity? The white-armed nymph Calypso must have stuffed her ears.
But now my troubles are behind me. I have cured my elbow of its fault. I keep my head down. My very clubs have taken on a different look since Saturday. I used to remark their nicks against the stones. A bit of green upon the heel of my driver showed how it was that I went sidewise to the woods. In those days I carried the bag spitefully to the shower. Could I leave it, I pondered, as a foundling in an empty locker? Or should I strangle it? But now all is changed. My clubs are servants to my will, kindly, obedient creatures that wait upon my nod. Even my brassie knows me for its master. And the country seems fairer. The valleys smile at me. The creek is friendly to my drive. The tall hills skip and clap their hands at my approach. My game needs only thought and care. My fives will become fours, my sixes slip down to fives. And here and there I shall have a three.
Except for a row of books my mantelpiece is bare. Who knows? Some day I may sweep off a musty row of history and set up a silver cup.
Later—Saturday again. I have just been around in 123. Horrible! I was in the woods and in the blackberry bushes, and in the creek seven times. My envious brassie! My well-belovèd mashie! Oh, vile conspiracy! Ambition's debt is paid. 123! Now—now it's my shoulder.
The Posture of Authors.
THERE is something rather pleasantly suggestive in the fashion employed by many of the older writers of inscribing their books from their chambers or lodging. It gives them at once locality and circumstance. It brings them to our common earth and understanding. Thomas Fuller, for example, having finished his Church History of Britain, addressed his reader in a preface from his chambers in Sion College. "May God alone have the glory," he writes, "and the ingenuous reader the benefit, of my endeavors! which is the hearty desire of Thy servant in Jesus Christ, Thomas Fuller."
One pictures a room in the Tudor style, with oak wainscot, tall mullioned windows and leaded glass, a deep fireplace and black beams above. Outside, perhaps, is the green quadrangle of the college, cloistered within ancient buildings, with gay wall—flowers against the sober stones. Bells answer from tower to belfry in agreeable dispute upon the hour. They were cast in a quieter time and refuse to bicker on a paltry minute. The sunlight is soft and yellow with old age. Such a dedication from such a place might turn the most careless reader into scholarship. In the seat of its leaded windows even the quirk of a Latin sentence might find a meaning. Here would be a room in which to meditate on the worthies of old England, or to read a chronicle of forgotten kings, queens, and protesting lovers who have faded into night.
Here we see Thomas Fuller dip his quill and make a start. "I have sometimes solitarily pleased myself," he begins, and he gazes into the dark shadows of the room, seeing, as it were, the pleasant spectres of the past. Bishops of Britain, long dead, in stole and mitre, forgetful of their solemn office, dance in the firelight on his walls. Popes move in dim review across his studies and shake a ghostly finger at his heresy. The past is not a prude. To her lover she reveals her beauty. And the scholar's lamp is her marriage torch.
Nor need it entirely cool our interest to learn that Sion College did not slope thus in country fashion to the peaceful waters of the Cam, with its fringe of trees and sunny meadow; did not possess even a gothic tower and cloister. It was built on the site of an ancient priory, Elsing Spital, with almshouses attached, a Jesuit library and a college for the clergy. It was right in London, down near the Roman wall, in the heart of the tangled traffic, and street cries kept breaking in—muffins, perhaps, and hot spiced gingerbread and broken glass. I hope, at least, that the good gentleman's rooms were up above, somewhat out of the clatter, where muffins had lost their shrillness. Gingerbread, when distance has reduced it to a pleasant tune, is not inclined to rouse a scholar from his meditation. And even broken glass is blunted on a journey to a garret. I hope that the old gentleman climbed three flights or more and that a range of chimney-pots was his outlook and speculation.
It seems as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book by knowing the circumstance of its composition. Not only would we know the complexion of a man, whether he "be a black or a fair man," as Addison suggests, "of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor," but also in what posture he works and what objects meet his eye when he squares his elbows and dips his pen. We are concerned whether sunlight falls upon his papers or whether he writes in shadow. Also, if an author's desk stands at a window, we are curious whether it looks on a street, or on a garden, or whether it squints blindly against a wall. A view across distant hills surely sweetens the imagination, whereas the clatter of the city gives a shrewder twist to fancy.
And household matters are of proper concern. We would like to be informed whether an author works in the swirl of the common sitting-room. If he writes within earshot of the kitchen, we should know it. There has been debate whether a steam radiator chills a poet as against an open fire, and whether a plot keeps up its giddy pace upon a sweeping day. Histories have balked before a household interruption. Novels have been checked by the rattle of a careless broom. A smoky chimney has choked the sturdiest invention.
If a plot goes slack perhaps it is a bursted pipe. An incessant grocer's boy, unanswered on the back porch, has often foiled the wicked Earl in his attempts against the beautiful Pomona. Little did you think, my dear madam, as you read your latest novel, that on the very instant when the heroine, Mrs. Elmira Jones, deserted her babies to follow her conscience and become a movie actress—that on that very instant when she slammed the street door, the plumber (the author's plumber) came in to test the radiator. Mrs. Jones nearly took her death on the steps as she waited for the plot to deal with her. Even a Marquis, now and then, one of the older sort in wig and ruffles, has been left—when the author's ashes have needed attention—on his knees before the Lady Emily, begging her to name the happy day.
Was it not Coleridge's cow that calved while he was writing "Kubla Khan"? In burst the housemaid with the joyful news. And that man from Porlock—mentioned in his letters—who came on business? Did he not despoil the morning of its poetry? Did Wordsworth's pigs—surely he owned pigs—never get into his neighbor's garden and need quick attention? Martin Luther threw his inkpot, supposedly, at the devil. Is it not more likely that it was at Annie, who came to dust? Thackeray is said to have written largely at his club, the Garrick or the Athenæum. There was a general stir of feet and voices, but it was foreign and did not plague him. A tinkle of glasses in the distance, he confessed, was soothing, like a waterfall.
Steele makes no complaint against his wife Prue, but he seems to have written chiefly in taverns. In the very first paper of the Tatler he gratifies our natural curiosity by naming the several coffee-houses where he intends to compose his thoughts. "Foreign and domestic news," he says, "you will have from Saint James's Coffee-House." Learning will proceed from the Grecian. But "all accounts of gallantry, pleasure and entertainment shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-House." In the month of September, 1705, he continues, a gentleman "was washing his teeth at a tavern window in Pall Mall, when a fine equipage passed by, and in it, a young lady who looked up at him; away goes the coach—" Away goes the beauty, with an alluring smile—rather an ambiguous smile, I'm afraid—across her silken shoulder. But for the continuation of this pleasant scandal (you may be sure that the pretty fellow was quite distracted from his teeth) one must turn up the yellow pages of the Tatler.
We may suppose that Steele called for pens and paper and a sandbox, and took a table in one of White's forward windows. He wished no garden view or brick wall against the window. We may even go so far as to assume that something in the way of punch, or canary, or negus luke, my dear, was handy at his elbow. His paragraphs are punctuated by the gay procession of the street. Here goes a great dandy in red heels, with lace at his beard and wrists. Here is a scarlet captain who has served with Marlborough and has taken a whole regiment of Frenchmen by the nose. Here is the Lady Belinda in her chariot, who is the pledge of all the wits and poets. That little pink ear of hers has been rhymed in a hundred sonnets—ear and tear and fear and near and dear. The King has been toasted from her slipper. The pretty creature has been sitting at ombre for most of the night, but now at four of the afternoon she takes the morning air with her lap dog. That great hat and feather will slay another dozen hearts between shop and shop. She is attended by a female dragon, but contrives by accident to show an inch or so of charming stocking at the curb. Steele, at his window, I'm afraid, forgets for the moment his darling Prue and his promise to be home.
There is something rather pleasant in knowing where these old authors, who are now almost forgotten, wrote their books. Richardson wrote "Clarissa" at Parson's Green. That ought not to interest us very much, for nobody reads "Clarissa" now. But we can picture the fat little printer reading his daily batch of tender letters from young ladies, begging him to reform the wicked Lovelace and turn the novel to a happy end. For it was issued in parts and so, of course, there was no opportunity for young ladies, however impatient, to thumb the back pages for the plot.
Richardson wrote "Pamela" at a house called the Grange, then in the open country just out of London. There was a garden at the back, and a grotto—one of the grottoes that had been the fashion for prosperous literary gentlemen since Pope had built himself one at Twickenham. Here, it is said, Richardson used to read his story, day by day, as it was freshly composed, to a circle of his lady admirers. Hugh Thompson has drawn the picture in delightful silhouette. The ladies listen in suspense—perhaps the wicked Master is just taking Pamela on his knee—their hands are raised in protest. La! The Monster! Their noses are pitched up to a high excitement. One old lady hangs her head and blushes at the outrage. Or does she cock her ear to hear the better?
Richardson had a kind of rocking-horse in his study and he took his exercise so between chapters. We may imagine him galloping furiously on the hearth—rug, then, quite refreshed, after four or five dishes of tea, hiding his villain once more under Pamela's bed. Did it never occur to that young lady to lift the valance? Half a dozen times at least he has come popping out after she has loosed her stays, once even when she has got her stockings off. Perhaps this is the dangerous moment when the old lady in the silhouette hung her head and blushed. If Pamela had gone rummaging vigorously with a poker beneath her bed she could have cooled her lover.
Goldsmith wrote his books, for the most part, in lodgings. We find him starving with the beggars in Axe Lane, advancing to Green Arbour Court—sending down to the cook-shop for a tart to make his supper—living in the Temple, as his fortunes mended. Was it not at his window in the Temple that he wrote part of his "Animated Nature"? His first chapter—four pages—is called a sketch of the universe. In four pages he cleared the beginning up to Adam. Could anything be simpler or easier? The clever fellow, no doubt, could have made the universe—actually made it out of chaos—stars and moon and fishes in the sea—in less than the allotted six days and not needed a rest upon the seventh. He could have gone, instead, in plum-colored coat—"in full fig"—to Vauxhall for a frolic. Goldsmith had nothing in particular outside of his window to look at but the stone flagging, a pump and a solitary tree. Of the whole green earth this was the only living thing. For a brief season a bird or two lodged there, and you may be sure that Goldsmith put the remnant of his crumbs upon the window casement. Perhaps it was here that he sent down to the cook-shop for a tart, and he and the birds made a common banquet across the glass.
Poets, depending on their circumstance, are supposed to write either in garrets or in gardens. Browning, it is true, lived at Casa Guidi, which was "yellow with sunshine from morning to evening," and here and there a prosperous Byron has a Persian carpet and mahogany desk. But, for the most part, we put our poets in garrets, as a cheap place that has the additional advantage of being nearest to the moon. From these high windows sonnets are thrown, on a windy night. Rhymes and fancies are roused by gazing on the stars. The rumble of the lower city is potent to start a metaphor. "These fringes of lamplight," it is written, "struggling up through smoke and thousandfold exhalation, some fathoms into the ancient reign of Night, what thinks Boötes of them, as he leads his Hunting-dogs over the Zenith in their leash of sidereal fire? That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest...."
Here, under a sloping roof, the poet sits, blowing at his fingers. Hogarth has drawn him—the Distressed Poet—cold and lean and shabby. That famous picture might have been copied from the life of any of a hundred creatures of "The Dunciad," and, with a change of costume, it might serve our time as well. The poor fellow sits at a broken table in the dormer. About him lie his scattered sheets. His wife mends his breeches. Outside the door stands a woman with the unpaid milk-score. There is not a penny in the place—and for food only half a loaf and something brewing in a kettle. You may remember that when Johnson was a young poet, just come to London, he lived with Mr. Cave in St. John's Gate. When there were visitors he ate his supper behind a screen because he was too shabby to show himself. I wonder what definition he gave the poet in his dictionary. If he wrote in his own experience, he put him down as a poor devil who was always hungry. But Chatterton actually died of starvation in a garret, and those other hundred poets of his time and ours got down to the bone and took to coughing. Perhaps we shall change our minds about that sonnet which we tossed lightly to the moon. The wind thrusts a cold finger through chink and rag. The stars travel on such lonely journeys. The jest loses its relish. Perhaps those merry verses to the Christmas—the sleigh bells and the roasted goose—perhaps those verses turn bitter when written on an empty stomach.
But do poets ever write in gardens? Swift, who was by way of being a poet, built himself a garden-seat at Moor Park when he served Sir William Temple, but I don't know that he wrote poetry there. Rather, it was a place for reading. Pope in his prosperous days wrote at Twickenham, with the sound of his artificial waterfall in his ears, and he walked to take the air in his grotto along the Thames. But do poets really wander beneath the moon to think their verses? Do they compose "on summer eve by haunted stream"? I doubt whether Gray conceived his Elegy in an actual graveyard. I smell oil. One need not see the thing described upon the very moment. Shelley wrote of mountains—the awful range of Caucasus—but his eye at the time looked on sunny Italy. Ibsen wrote of the north when living in the south. When Bunyan wrote of the Delectable Mountains he was snug inside a jail. Shakespeare, doubtless, saw the giddy cliffs of Dover, the Rialto, the Scottish heath, from the vantage of a London lodging.
Where did Andrew Marvell stand or sit or walk when he wrote about gardens? Wordsworth is said to have strolled up and down a gravel path with his eyes on the ground. I wonder whether the gardener ever broke in—if he had a gardener—to complain about the drouth or how the dandelions were getting the better of him. Or perhaps the lawn-mower squeaked—if he had a lawn-mower—and threw him off. But wasn't it Wordsworth who woke up four times in one night and called to his wife for pens and paper lest an idea escape him? Surely he didn't take to the garden at that time of night in his pajamas with an inkpot. But did Wordsworth have a wife? How one forgets! Coleridge told Hazlitt that he liked to compose "walking over uneven ground, or breaking through the straggling branches of a copse-wood." But then, you recall that a calf broke into "Kubla Khan." On that particular day, at least, he was snug in his study.
No, I think that poets may like to sit in gardens and smoke their pipes and poke idly with their sticks, but when it comes actually to composing they would rather go inside. For even a little breeze scatters their papers. No poet wishes to spend his precious morning chasing a frisky sonnet across the lawn. Even a heavy epic, if lifted by a sudden squall, challenges the swiftest foot. He puts his stick on one pile and his pipe on another and he holds down loose sheets with his thumb. But it is awkward business, and it checks the mind in its loftier flight.
Nor do poets care to suck their pencils too long where someone may see them—perhaps Annie at the window rolling her pie-crust. And they can't kick off their shoes outdoors in the hot agony of composition. And also, which caps the argument, a garden is undeniably a sleepy place. The bees drone to a sleepy tune. The breeze practices a lullaby. Even the sunlight is in the common conspiracy. At the very moment when the poet is considering Little Miss Muffet and how she sat on a tuffet—doubtless in a garden, for there were spiders—even at the very moment when she sits unsuspectingly at her curds and whey, down goes the poet's head and he is fast asleep. Sleepiness is the plague of authors. You may remember that when Christian—who, doubtless, was an author in his odd moments—came to the garden and the Arbour on the Hill Difficulty, "he pulled his Roll out of his bosom and read therein to his comfort.... Thus pleasing himself awhile, he at last fell into a slumber." I have no doubt—other theories to the contrary—that "Kubla Khan" broke off suddenly because Coleridge dropped off to sleep. A cup of black coffee might have extended the poem to another stanza. Mince pie would have stretched it to a volume. Is not Shakespeare allowed his forty winks? Has it not been written that even the worthy Homer nods?
| "A pleasing land of drowsyhed it was: |
| Of dreams that wave before the half-shut eye; |
| And of gay castles in the clouds that pass, |
| For ever flushing round a summer sky." |
No, if one has a bit of writing to put out of the way, it is best to stay indoors. Choose an uncomfortable, straight-backed chair. Toss the sheets into a careless litter. And if someone will pay the milk-score and keep the window mended, a garret is not a bad place in which to write.
Novelists—unless they have need of history—can write anywhere, I suppose, at home or on a journey. In the burst of their hot imagination a knee is a desk. I have no doubt that Mr. Hugh Walpole, touring in this country, contrives to write a bit even in a Pullman. The ingenious Mr. Oppenheim surely dashes off a plot on the margin of the menu-card between meat and salad. We know that "Pickwick Papers" was written partly in hackney coaches while Dickens was jolting about the town.
An essayist, on the other hand, needs a desk and a library near at hand. Because an essay is a kind of back-stove cookery. A novel needs a hot fire, so to speak. A dozen chapters bubble in their turn above the reddest coals, while an essay simmers over a little flame. Pieces of this and that, an odd carrot, as it were, a left potato, a pithy bone, discarded trifles, are tossed in from time to time to enrich the composition. Raw paragraphs, when they have stewed all night, at last become tender to the fork. An essay, therefore, cannot be written hurriedly on the knee. Essayists, as a rule, chew their pencils. Their desks are large and are always in disorder. There is a stack of books on the clock shelf. Others are pushed under the bed. Matches, pencils and bits of paper mark a hundred references. When an essayist goes out from his lodging he wears the kind of overcoat that holds a book in every pocket. His sagging pockets proclaim him. He is a bulging person, so stuffed, even in his dress, with the ideas of others that his own leanness is concealed. An essayist keeps a notebook, and he thumbs it for forgotten thoughts. Nobody is safe from him, for he steals from everyone he meets.
An essayist is not a mighty traveler. He does not run to grapple with a roaring lion. He desires neither typhoon nor tempest. He is content in his harbor to listen to the storm upon the rocks, if now and then, by a lucky chance, he can shelter someone from the wreck. His hands are not red with revolt against the world. He has glanced upon the thoughts of many men; and as opposite philosophies point upon the truth, he is modest with his own and tolerant toward the opinion of others. He looks at the stars and, knowing in what a dim immensity we travel, he writes of little things beyond dispute. There are enough to weep upon the shadows, he, like a dial, marks the light. The small clatter of the city beneath his window, the cry of peddlers, children chalking their games upon the pavement, laundry dancing on the roofs and smoke in the winter's wind—these are the things he weaves into the fabric of his thoughts. Or sheep upon the hillside—if his window is so lucky—or a sunny meadow, is a profitable speculation. And so, while the novelist is struggling up a dizzy mountain, straining through the tempest to see the kingdoms of the world, behold the essayist snug at home, content with little sights. He is a kind of poet—a poet whose wings are clipped. He flaps to no great heights and sees neither the devil, the seven oceans nor the twelve apostles. He paints old thoughts in shiny varnish and, as he is able, he mends small habits here and there. And therefore, as essayists stay at home, they are precise—almost amorous—in the posture and outlook of their writing. Leigh Hunt wished a great library next his study. "But for the study itself," he writes, "give me a small snug place, almost entirely walled with books. There should be only one window in it looking upon trees." How the precious fellow scorns the mountains and the ocean! He has no love, it seems, for typhoons and roaring lions. "I entrench myself in my books," he continues, "equally against sorrow and the weather. If the wind comes through a passage, I look about to see how I can fence it off by a better disposition of my movables." And by movables he means his books. These were his screen against cold and trouble. But Leigh Hunt had been in prison for his political beliefs. He had grappled with his lion. So perhaps, after all, my argument fails.
Mr. Edmund Gosse had a different method to the same purpose. He "was so anxious to fly all outward noise" that he desired a library apart from the house. Maybe he had had some experience with Annie and her clattering broomstick. "In my sleep," he writes, "'Where dreams are multitude' I sometimes fancy that one day I shall have a library in a garden. The phrase seems to contain the whole felicity of man.... It sounds like having a castle in Spain, or a sheep-walk in Arcadia."
Montaigne's study was a tower, walled all about with books. At his table in the midst he was the general focus of their wisdom. Hazlitt wrote much at an inn at Winterslow, with Salisbury Plain around the corner of his view. Now and then, let us hope, when the London coach was due, he received in his nostrils a savory smell from the kitchen stove. I taste pepper, sometimes, and sharp sauces in his writing. Stevenson, except for ill-health and a love of the South Seas (here was the novelist showing himself), would have preferred a windy perch over—looking Edinburgh.
It does seem as if a rather richer flavor were given to a book by knowing the circumstance of its composition. Consequently, readers, as they grow older, turn more and more to biography. It is chiefly not the biographies that deal with great crises and events, but rather the biographies that are concerned with small circumstance and agreeable gossip, that attract them most. The life of Gladstone, with its hard facts of British policy, is all very well; but Mr. Lucas's life of Lamb is better. Who would willingly neglect the record of a Thursday night at Inner Temple Lane? In these pages Talfourd, Procter, Hazlitt and Hunt have written their memories of these gatherings. It was to his partner at whist, as he was dealing, that Lamb once said, "If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!" Nights of wit and friendly banter! Who would not crowd his ears with gossip of that mirthful company?—George Dyer, who forgot his boots until half way home (the dear fellow grew forgetful as the smoking jug went round)—Charles Lamb feeling the stranger's bumps. Let the Empire totter! Let Napoleon fall! Africa shall be parceled as it may. Here will we sit until the cups are empty.
Lately, in a bookshop at the foot of Cornhill, I fell in with an old scholar who told me that it was his practice to recommend four books, which, taken end on end, furnished the general history of English letters from the Restoration to a time within our own memory. These books were "Pepys' Diary," "Boswell's Johnson," the "Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay" and the "Diary of Crabb Robinson."
Beginning almost with the days of Cromwell here is a chain of pleasant gossip across the space of more than two hundred years. Perhaps, at the first, there were old fellows still alive who could remember Shakespeare—who still sat in chimney corners and babbled through their toothless gums of Blackfriars and the Globe. And at the end we find a reference to President Lincoln and the freeing of the slaves.
Here are a hundred authors—perhaps a thousand—tucking up their cuffs, looking out from their familiar windows, scribbling their large or trivial masterpieces.
After-Dinner Pleasantries.
THERE is a shop below Fourteenth Street, somewhat remote from fashion, that sells nothing but tricks for amateur and parlor use. It is a region of cobblers, tailors and small grocers. Upstairs, locksmiths and buttonhole cutters look through dusty windows on the L, which, under some dim influence of the moon, tosses past the buildings here its human tide, up and down, night and morning. The Trick Shop flatters itself on its signboard that it carries the largest line of its peculiar trickery on the western hemisphere—hinting modestly that Baluchistan, perhaps, or Mesopotamia (where magic might be supposed to flourish) may have an equal stock. The shop does not proclaim its greatness to the casual glance. Its enormity of fraud offers no hint to the unsuspecting curb. There must be caverns and cellars at the rear—a wealth of baffling sham un-rumored to the street, shelves sagging with agreeable deception, huge bales of sleight-of-hand and musty barrels of old magic.
But to the street the shop reveals no more than a small show-window, of a kind in which licorice-sticks and all-day-suckers might feel at home. It is a window at which children might stop on their way from school and meditate their choice, fumbling in their pockets for their wealth.
I have stood at this window for ten minutes together. There are cards for fortune tellers and manuals of astrology, decks with five aces and marked backs, and trick hats and boxes with false bottoms. There are iron cigars to be offered to a friend, and bleeding fingers, and a device that makes a noise like blowing the nose, "only much louder." Books of magic are displayed, and conjurers' outfits—shell games and disappearing rabbits. There is a line of dribble-glasses—a humorous contrivance with little holes under the brim for spilling water down the front of an unwary guest. This, it is asserted, breaks the social ice and makes a timid stranger feel at home. And there are puzzle pictures, beards for villains and comic masks—Satan himself, and other painted faces for Hallowe'en.
Some persons, of course, can perform their parlor tricks without this machinery and appliance. I know a gifted fellow who can put on the expression of an idiot. Or he wrinkles his face into the semblance of eighty years, shakes with palsy and asks his tired wife if she will love him when he's old. Again he puts a coffee cup under the shoulder of his coat and plays the humpback. On a special occasion he mounts a table—or two kitchen chairs become his stage—and recites Richard and the winter of his discontent. He needs only a pillow to smother Desdemona. And then he opens an imaginary bottle—the popping of the cork, the fizzing, the gurgle when it pours. Sometimes he is a squealing pig caught under a fence, and sometimes two steamboats signaling with their whistles in a fog.
I know a young woman—of the newer sort—who appears to swallow a lighted cigarette, with smoke coming from her ears. This was once a man's trick, but the progress of the weaker sex has shifted it. On request, she is a nervous lady with a fear of monkeys, taking five children to the circus. She is Camille on her deathbed. I know a man, too, who can give the Rebel yell and stick a needle, full length, into his leg. The pulpy part above his knee seems to make an excellent pincushion. And then there is the old locomotive starting on a slippery grade (for beginners in entertainment), the hand-organ man and his infested monkey (a duet), the chicken that is chased around the barnyard, Hamlet with the broken pallet (this is side-splitting in any company) and Moriarty on the telephone. I suppose our best vaudeville performers were once amateurs themselves around the parlor lamp.
And there is Jones, too, who plays the piano. Jones, when he is asked, sits at the keyboard and fingers little runs and chords. He seems to be thinking which of a hundred pieces he will play. "What will you have?" he asks. And a fat man wants "William Tell," and a lady with a powdered nose asks for "Bubbles." But Jones ignores both and says, "Here's a little thing of Schumann. It's a charming bit." On the other hand, when Brown is asked to sing, it is generally too soon after dinner. Brown, evidently, takes his food through his windpipe, and it is, so to speak, a one-way street. He can hardly permit the ascending "Siegfried" to squeeze past the cheese and crackers that still block the crowded passage.
There is not a college dinner without the mockery of an eccentric professor. A wag will catch the pointing of his finger, his favorite phrase. Is there a lawyers' dinner without its imitation of Harry Lauder? Isn't there always someone who wants to sing "It's Nice to Get Up in the Mornin'," and trot up and down with twinkling legs? Plumbers on their lodge nights, I am told, have their very own Charlie Chaplin. And I suppose that the soda clerks' union—the dear creatures with their gum—has its local Mary Pickford, ready with a scene from Pollyanna. What jolly dinners dentists must have, telling one another in dialect how old Mrs. Finnigan had her molars out! Forceps and burrs are their unwearied jest across the years. When they are together and the doors are closed, how they must frolic with our weakness!
And undertakers! Even they, I am informed, throw off their solemn countenance when they gather in convention. Their carnation and mournful smile are gone—that sober gesture that waves the chilly relations to the sitting-room. But I wonder whether their dismal shop doesn't cling always just a bit to their mirth and songs. That poor duffer in the poem who asked to be laid low, wrapped in his tarpaulin jacket—surely, undertakers never sing of him. They must look at him with disfavor for his cheap proposal. He should have roused for a moment at the end, with a request for black broadcloth and silver handles.
I once sat with an undertaker at a tragedy. He was of a lively sympathy in the earlier parts and seemed hopeful that the hero would come through alive. But in the fifth act, when the clanking army was defeated in the wings and Brutus had fallen on his sword, then, unmistakably his thoughts turned to the peculiar viewpoint of his profession. In fancy he sat already in the back parlor with the grieving Mrs. Brutus, arranging for the music.
To undertakers, Cæsar is always dead and turned to clay. Falstaff is just a fat old gentleman who drank too much sack, a' babbled of green fields and then needed professional attention. Perhaps at the very pitch of their meetings when the merry glasses have been three times filled, they pledge one another in what they are pleased to call the embalmers' fluid. This jest grows rosier with the years. For these many centuries at their banquets they have sung that it was a cough that carried him off, that it was a coffin—Now then, gentlemen! All together for the chorus!—that it was a coffin they carried him off in.
I dined lately with a man who could look like a weasel. When this was applauded, he made a face like the Dude of Palmer Cox's Brownies. Even Susan, the waitress, who knows her place and takes a jest soberly, broke down at the pantry door. We could hear her dishes rattling in convulsions in the sink. And then our host played the insect with his fingers on the tablecloth, smelling a spot of careless gravy from the roast with his long thin middle finger. He caught the habit that insects have of waving their forward legs.
I still recall an uncle who could wiggle his ears. He did it every Christmas and Thanksgiving Day. It was as much a part of the regular program as the turkey and the cranberries. It was a feature of his engaging foolery to pretend that the wiggle was produced by rubbing the stomach, and a circle of us youngsters sat around him, rubbing our expectant stomachs, waiting for the miracle. A cousin brought a guitar and played the "Spanish Fandango" while we sat around the fire, sleepy after dinner. And there was a maiden aunt with thin blue fingers, who played waltzes while we danced, and she nodded and slept to the drowsy sound of her own music.
Of my own after-dinner pleasantries I am modest. I have only one trick. Two. I can recite the fur-bearing animals of North America—the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, and sixteen others—and I can go downstairs behind the couch for the cider. This last requires little skill. As the books of magic say, it is an easy and baffling trick. With every step you crook your legs a little more, until finally you are on your knees, hunched together, and your head has disappeared from view. You reverse the business coming up, with tray and glasses.
But these are my only tricks. There is a Brahms waltz that I once had hopes of, but it has a hard run on the second page. I can never get my thumb under in time to make connections. My best voice, too, covers only five notes. You cannot do much for the neighbors with that cramped kind of range. "A Tailor There Sat on His Window Ledge" is one of the few tunes that fall inside my poverty. He calls to his wife, you may remember, to bring him his old cross-bow, and there is a great Zum! Zum! up and down in the bass until ready, before the chorus starts. On a foggy morning I have quite a formidable voice for those Zums. But after-dinner pleasantries are only good at night and then my bass is thin. "A Sailor's Life, Yo, Ho!" is a very good tune but it goes up to D, and I can sing it only when I am reckless of circumstance, or when I am taking ashes from the furnace. I know a lady who sings only at her sewing-machine. She finds a stirring accompaniment in the whirling of the wheel. Others sing best in tiled bathrooms. Sitting in warm and soapy water their voices swell to Caruso's. Laundresses, I have noticed, are in lustiest voice at their tubs, where their arms keep a vigorous rhythm on the scrubbing-board. But I choose ashes. I am little short of a Valkyr, despite my sex, when I rattle the furnace grate.
With hymns I can make quite a showing in church if the bass part keeps to a couple of notes. I pound along melodiously on some convenient low note and slide up now and then, by a happy instinct, when the tune seems to require it. The dear little lady, who sits in front of me, turns what I am pleased to think is an appreciative ear, and now and then, for my support, she throws in a pretty treble. But I have no tolerance with a bass part that undertakes a flourish and climbs up behind the tenor. This is mere egotism and a desire to shine. "Art thou there, true-penny? You hear this fellow in the cellarage?" That is the proper bass.
Dear me! Now that I recall it, we have guests—guests tonight for dinner. Will I be asked to sing? Am I in voice? I tum-a-lum a little, up and down, for experiment. The roar of the subway drowns this from my neighbors, but by holding my hand over my mouth I can hear it. Is my low F in order? No—undeniably, it is not. Thin. And squeaky. The Zums would never do. And that fast run in Brahms? Can I slip through it? Or will my thumb, as usual, catch and stall? Have my guests seen me go down--stairs behind the couch for the cider? Have they heard the fur-bearing animals—the bison, the bear, the wolf, the seal, the beaver, the otter, the fox and raccoon?
Perhaps—perhaps it will be better to stop at the Trick Shop and buy a dribble-glass and a long black beard to amuse my guests.
Little Candles.
HIGH conceit of one's self and a sureness of one's opinion are based so insecurely in experience that one is perplexed how their slight structure stands. One marvels why these emphatic builders trust again their glittering towers. Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees its void or malformation ought by rights to shrink from adulation of self, and his own opinion should appear to him merely as one candle among a thousand.
And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable failures, and any new pinnacle that is set up, neglecting the broken rubble on the ground and all the wreckage at the base, boasts again of its sure communion with the stars. A man, let us say, has gone headlong from one formula of belief into another. In each, for a time, he burns with a hot conviction. Then his faith cools. His god no longer nods. But just when you think that failure must have brought him modesty, again he amazes you with the golden prospect of a new adventure. He has climbed in his life a hundred hillocks, thinking each to be a mountain. He has journeyed on many paths, but always has fallen in a bog. Conceit is a thin bubble in the wind, it is an empty froth and breath, yet, hammered into ship-plates, it defies the U-boat.
On every sidewalk, also, we see some fine fellow, dressed and curled to his satisfaction, parading in the sun. An accident of wealth or birth has marked him from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in gaudy color, but is bare within. He is a cypher, but golden circumstance, like a figure in the million column, gives him substance. Yet the void cries out on all matters in dispute with firm conviction.
But this cypher need not dress in purple. He is shabby, let us say, and pinched with poverty. Whose fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in itself give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that the world is sick with pestilence, and accordingly he proclaims himself a doctor. Or perhaps he sits at ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon his ignorance until it flames with hatred. He sets up to be a thinker, and he is resolved to shatter the foundations of a thousand years.
The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy distance! And these thousand candles of belief, flickering in the night, are so insufficient even in their aggregate! Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick, shielded in the fingers from misadventure, the greatest light?
Who is there who has read more than a single chapter in the book of life? Most of us have faltered through scarcely a dozen paragraphs, yet we scribble our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling pebble fall in a muddy pool, and we think that we have listened to the pounding of the sea. We hold up our little candle and we consider that its light dispels the general night.
But it has happened once in a while that someone really strikes a larger light and offers it to many travelers for their safety. He holds his candle above his head for the general comfort. And to it there rush the multitude of those whose candles have been gutted. They relight their wicks, and go their way with a song and cry, to announce their brotherhood. If they see a stranger off the path, they call to him to join their band. And they draw him from the mire.
And sometimes this company respects the other candles that survive the wind. They confess with good temper that their glare, also, is sufficient; that there is, indeed, more than one path across the night. But sometimes in their intensity—in their sureness of exclusive salvation—they fall to bickering. One band of converts elbows another. There is a mutual lifting of the nose in scorn, an amused contempt, or they come to blows and all candles are extinguished. And sometimes, with candles out, they travel onward, still telling one another of their band how the darkness flees before them.
We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind conceit, of shrill and intolerant opinion. The past is worshiped. The past is scorned. Some wish only to kiss the great toe of old convention. Others shout that we must run bandaged in the dark, if we would prove our faith in God and man. It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It is the dawn. We grope toward midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our fathers were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to the past! Any change is sacrilege. Let's rip it up! Let's destroy it altogether!
We'll kill him and stamp on him: He's a Montague. We'll draw and quarter him: He's a Capulet. He's a radical: He must be hanged. A conservative: His head shall decorate our pike.
A plague on both your houses!
Panaceas are hawked among us, each with a magic to cure our ills. Universal suffrage is a leap to perfection. Tax reform will bring the golden age. With capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven. The soviet, the recall from office, the six-hour day, the demands of labor, mark the better path. The greater clamor of the crowd is the guide to wisdom. Men with black beards and ladies with cigarettes say that machine-guns and fire and death are pills that are potent for our good. We live in a welter of quarrel and disagreement. One pictures a mighty shelf with bottles, and doctors running to and fro. The poor world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. By the hubbub in the pantry—the yells and scuffling at the sink—we know that drastic and contrary cures are striving for the mastery.
There was a time when beacons burned on the hills to be our guidance. The flames were fed and moulded by the experience of the centuries. Men might differ on the path—might even scramble up a dozen different slopes—but the hill-top was beyond dispute.
But now the great fires smoulder. The Constitution, it is said,—pecked at since the first,—must now be carted off and sold as junk. Art has torn down its older standards. The colors of Titian are in the dust. Poets no longer bend the knee to Shakespeare.
Conceit is a pilot who scorns the harbor lights—
Modesty was once a virtue. Patience, diligence, thrift, humility, charity—who pays now a tribute to them? Charity is only a sop, it seems, that is thrown in fright to the swift wolves of revolution. Humility is now a weakness. Diligence is despised. Thrift is the advice of cowards. Who now cares for the lessons that experience and tested fact once taught? Ignorance sits now in the highest seat and gives its orders, and the clamor of the crowd is its high authority.
And what has become of modesty? A maid once was prodigal if she unmasked her beauty to the moon. Morality? Let's all laugh together. It's a quaint old word.
Tolerance is the last study in the school of wisdom. Lord! Lord! Tonight let my prayer be that I may know that my own opinion is but a candle in the wind!
A Visit to a Poet.
NOT long ago I accepted the invitation of a young poet to visit him at his lodging. As my life has fallen chiefly among merchants, lawyers and other practical folk, I went with much curiosity.
My poet, I must confess, is not entirely famous. His verses have appeared in several of the less known papers, and a judicious printer has even offered to gather them into a modest sheaf. There are, however, certain vile details of expense that hold up the project. The printer, although he confesses their merit, feels that the poet should bear the cost.
His verses are of the newer sort. When read aloud they sound pleasantly in the ear, but I sometimes miss the meaning. I once pronounced an intimate soul-study to be a jolly description of a rainy night. This was my stupidity. I could see a soul quite plainly when it was pointed out. It was like looking at the moon. You get what you look for—a man or a woman or a kind of map of Asia. In poetry of this sort I need a hint or two to start me right. But when my nose has been rubbed, so to speak, against the anise-bag, I am a very hound upon the scent.
The street where my friend lives is just north of Greenwich Village, and it still shows a remnant of more aristocratic days. Behind its shabby fronts are long drawing-rooms with tarnished glass chandeliers and frescoed ceilings and gaunt windows with inside blinds. Plaster cornices still gather the dust of years. There are heavy stairways with black walnut rails. Marble Lincolns still liberate the slaves in niches of the hallway. Bronze Ladies of the Lake await their tardy lovers. Diana runs with her hunting dogs upon the newel post. In these houses lived the heroines of sixty years ago, who shopped for crinoline and spent their mornings at Stewart's to match a Godey pattern. They drove of an afternoon with gay silk parasols to the Crystal Palace on Forty-second Street. In short, they were our despised Victorians. With our advancement we have made the world so much better since.
I pressed an electric button. Then, as the door clicked, I sprang against it. These patent catches throw me into a momentary panic. I feel like one of the foolish virgins with untrimmed lamp, just about to be caught outside—but perhaps I confuse the legend. Inside, there was a bare hallway, with a series of stairways rising in the gloom—round and round, like the frightful staircase of the Opium Eater. At the top of the stairs a black disk hung over the rail—probably a head.
"Hello," I said.
"Oh, it's you. Come up!" And the poet came down to meet me, with slippers slapping at the heels.
There was a villainous smell on the stairs. "Something burning?" I asked.
At first the poet didn't smell it. "Oh, that smell!" he said at last. "That's the embalmer."
"The embalmer?"
We were opposite a heavy door on the second floor. He pointed his thumb at it. "There's an embalmer's school inside."
"Dear me!" I said. "Has he any—anything to practice on?"
The poet pushed the door open a crack. It was very dark inside. It smelled like Ptolemy in his later days. Or perhaps I detected Polonius, found at last beneath the stairs.
"Bless me!" I asked, "What does he teach in his school?"
"Embalming, and all that sort of thing."
"It never occurred to me," I confessed, "that undertakers had to learn. I thought it came naturally. Ducks to water, you know. They look as if they could pick up a thing like embalming by instinct. I don't suppose you knew old Mr. Smith."
"No."
"He wore a white carnation on business afternoons."
We rounded a turn of the black walnut stair.
"There!" exclaimed the poet. "That is the office of the Shriek."
I know the Shriek. It is one of the periodicals of the newer art that does not descend to the popular taste. It will not compromise its ideals. It prints pictures of men and women with hideous, distorted bodies. It is solving sex. Once in a while the police know what it is talking about, and then they rather stupidly keep it out of the mails for a month or so.
Now I had intended for some time to subscribe to the Shriek, because I wished to see my friend's verses as they appeared. In this way I could learn what the newer art was doing, and could brush out of my head the cobwebs of convention. Keats and Shelley have been thrown into the discard. We have come a long journey from the older poets.
"I would like to subscribe," I said.
The poet, of course, was pleased. He rapped at a door marked "Editor."
A young woman's head in a mob-cap came into view. She wore a green and purple smock, and a cigarette hung loosely from her mouth. She looked at me at first as if I were an old-fashioned poem or a bundle of modest drawings, but cheered when I told my errand. There was a cup of steaming soup on an alcohol burner, and half a loaf of bread. On a string across the window handkerchiefs and stockings were hung to dry. A desk was littered with papers.
I paid my money and was enrolled. I was given a current number of the Shriek, and was told not to miss a poem by Sillivitch.
"Sillivitch?" I asked.
"Sillivitch," the lady answered. "Our greatest poet—maybe the greatest of all time. Writes only for the Shriek. Wonderful! Realistic!"
"Snug little office," I said to the poet, when we were on the stairs. "She lives in there, too?"
"Oh, yes," he said. "Smart girl, that. Never compromises. Wants reality and all that sort of thing. You must read Sillivitch. Amazing! Doesn't seem to mean anything at first. But then you get it in a flash."
We had now come to the top of the building.
"There isn't much smell up here," I said.
"You don't mind the smell. You come to like it," he replied. "It's bracing."
At the top of the stairs, a hallway led to rooms both front and back. The ceiling of these rooms, low even in the middle, sloped to windows of half height in dormers. The poet waved his hand. "I have been living in the front room," he said, "but I am adding this room behind for a study."
We entered the study. A man was mopping up the floor. Evidently the room had not been lived in for years, for the dirt was caked to a half inch. A general wreckage of furniture—a chair, a table with marble top, a carved sideboard with walnut dingles, a wooden bed with massive headboard, a mattress and a broken pitcher—had been swept to the middle of the room. There was also a pile of old embalmer's journals, and a great carton that seemed to contain tubes of tooth-paste.
"You see," said the poet, "I have been living in the other room. This used to be a storage—years ago, for the family that once lived here, and more recently for the embalmer."
"Storage!" I exclaimed. "You don't suppose that they kept any—?"
"No."
"Well," I said, "it's a snug little place."
I bent over and picked up one of the embalmer's journals. On the cover there was a picture of a little boy in a night-gown, saying his prayer to his mother. The prayer was printed underneath. "And, mama," it read, "have God make me a good boy, and when I grow up let me help papa in his business, and never use anything but Twirpp's Old Reliable Embalming Fluid, the kind that papa has always used, and grandpa before him."
Now, Charles Lamb, I recall, once confessed that he was moved to enthusiasm by an undertaker's advertisement. "Methinks," he writes, "I could be willing to die, in death to be so attended. The two rows all round close-drove best black japanned nails,—how feelingly do they invite, and almost irresistibly persuade us to come and be fastened down." But the journal did not stir me to this high emotion.
I crossed the room and stooped to look out of the dormer window—into a shallow yard where an abandoned tin bath-tub and other unprized valuables were kept. A shabby tree acknowledged that it had lost its way, but didn't know what to do about it. It had its elbow on the fence and seemed to be in thought. A wash-stand lay on its side, as if it snapped its fingers forever at soap and towels. Beyond was a tall building, with long tables and rows of girls working.
One of the girls desisted for a moment from her feathers with which she was making hats, and stuck out her tongue at me in a coquettish way. I returned her salute. She laughed and tossed her head and went back to her feathers.
The young man who had been mopping up the floor went out for fresh water.
"Who is that fellow?" I asked.
"He works downstairs."
"For the Shriek?"
"For the embalmer. He's an apprentice."
"I would like to meet him."
Presently I did meet him.
"What have you there?" I asked. He was folding up a great canvas bag of curious pattern.
"It's when you are shipped away—to Texas or somewhere. This is a little one. You'd need—" he appraised me from head to foot—"you'd need a number ten."
He desisted from detail. He shifted to the story of his life. Since he had been a child he had wished to be an undertaker.
Now I had myself once known an undertaker, and I had known his son. The son went to Munich to study for Grand Opera. I crossed on the steamer with him. He sang in the ship's concert, "Oh, That We Two Were Maying." It was pitched for high tenor, so he sang it an octave low, and was quite gloomy about it. In the last verse he expressed a desire to lie at rest beneath the churchyard sod. The boat was rolling and I went out to get the air. And then I did not see him for several years. We met at a funeral. He wore a long black coat and a white carnation. He smiled at me with a gentle, mournful smile and waved me to a seat. He was Tristan no longer. Valhalla no more echoed to his voice. He had succeeded to his father's business.
Here the poet interposed. "The Countess came to see me yesterday."
"Mercy," I said, "what countess?"
"Oh, don't you know her work? She's a poet and she writes for the people downstairs. She's the Countess Sillivitch."
"Sillivitch!" I answered, "of course I know her. She is the greatest poet, maybe, of all time."
"No doubt about it," said the poet excitedly, "and there's a poem of hers in this number. She writes in italics when she wants you to yell it. And when she puts it in capitals, my God! you could hear her to the elevated. It's ripping stuff."
"Dear me," I said, "I should like to read it. Awfully. It must be funny."
"It isn't funny at all," the poet answered. "It isn't meant to be funny. Did you read her 'Burning Kiss'?"
"I'm sorry," I answered.
The poet sighed. "It's wonderfully realistic. There's nothing old-fashioned about that poem. The Countess wears painted stockings."
"Bless me!" I cried.
"Stalks with flowers. She comes from Bulgaria, or Esthonia, or somewhere. Has a husband in a castle. Incompatible. He stifles her. Common. In business. Beer spigots. She is artistic. Wants to soar. And tragic. You remember my study of a soul?"
"The rainy night? Yes, I remember."
"Well, she's the one. She sat on the floor and told me her troubles."
"You don't suppose that I could meet her, do you?" I asked.
The poet looked at me with withering scorn. "You wouldn't like her," he said. "She's very modern. She says very startling things. You have to be in the modern spirit to follow her. And sympathetic. She doesn't want any marriage or government or things like that. Just truth and freedom. It's convention that clips our wings."
"Conventions are stupid things," I agreed.
"And the past isn't any good, either," the poet said. "The past is a chain upon us. It keeps us off the mountains."
"Exactly," I assented.
"That's what the Countess thinks. We must destroy the past. Everything. Customs. Art. Government. We must be ready for the coming of the dawn."
"Naturally," I said. "Candles trimmed, and all that sort of thing. You don't suppose that I could meet the Countess? Well, I'm sorry. What's the bit of red paper on the wall? Is it over a dirty spot?"
"It's to stir up my ideas. It's gay and when I look at it I think of something."
"And then I suppose that you look out of that window, against that brick wall and those windows opposite, and write poems—a sonnet to the girl who stuck out her tongue at me."
"Oh, yes."
"Hot in summer up here?"
"Yes."
"And cold in winter?"
"Yes."
"And I suppose that you get some ideas out of that old tin bath-tub and those ash-cans."
"Well, hardly."
"And you look at the moon through that dirty skylight?"
"No! There's nothing in that old stuff. Everybody's fed up on the moon."
"It's a snug place," I said. And I came away.
I circled the stairs into the denser smell which, by this time, I found rather agreeable. The embalmer's door was open. In the gloom inside I saw the apprentice busied in some dark employment. "I got somethin' to show you," he called.
"Tomorrow," I answered.
As I was opening the street door, a woman came up the steps. She was a dark, Bulgarian sort of woman. Or Esthonian, perhaps. I held back the door to let her pass. She wore long ear-rings. Her skirt was looped high in scollops. She wore sandals—and painted stockings.
Autumn Days.
IT was rather a disservice when the poet wrote that the melancholy days were come. His folly is inexplicable. If he had sung through his nose of thaw and drizzle, all of us would have pitched in to help him in his dismal chorus. But October and November are brisk and cheerful months.
In the spring, to be sure, there is a languid sadness. Its beauty is too frail. Its flowerets droop upon the plucking. Its warm nights, its breeze that blows from the fragrant hills, warn us how brief is the blossom time. In August the year slumbers. Its sleepy days nod across the heavy orchards and the yellow grain fields. Smoke looks out from chimneys, but finds no wind for comrade. For a penny it would stay at home and doze upon the hearth, to await a playmate from the north. The birds are still. Only the insects sing. A threshing-machine, far off, sinks to as drowsy a melody as theirs, like a company of grasshoppers, but with longer beard and deeper voice. The streams that frolicked to nimble tunes in May now crawl from pool to pool. The very shadows linger under cover. They crouch close beneath shed and tree, and scarcely stir a finger until the fiery sun has turned its back.
September rubs its eyes. It hears autumn, as it were, pounding on its bedroom door, and turns for another wink of sleep. But October is awakened by the frost. It dresses itself in gaudy color. It flings a scarlet garment on the woods and a purple scarf across the hills. The wind, at last, like a merry piper, cries out the tune, and its brisk and sunny days come dancing from the north.
Yesterday was a holiday and I went walking in the woods. Although it is still September it grows late, and there is already a touch of October in the air. After a week of sultry weather—a tardy remnant from last month—a breeze yesterday sprang out of the northwest. Like a good housewife it swept the dusty corners of the world. It cleared our path across the heavens and raked down the hot cobwebs from the sky. Clouds had yawned in idleness. They had sat on the dull circle of the earth like fat old men with drooping chins, but yesterday they stirred themselves. The wind whipped them to their feet. It pursued them and plucked at their frightened skirts. It is thus, after the sleepy season, that the wind practices for the rough and tumble of November. It needs but to quicken the tempo into sixteenth notes, to rouse a wholesome tempest.
Who could be melancholy in so brisk a month? The poet should hang his head for shame at uttering such a libel. These dazzling days could hale him into court. The jury, with one voice, without rising from its box, would hold for a heavy fine. Apples have been gathered in. There is a thirsty, tipsy smell from the cider presses. Hay is pitched up to the very roof. Bursting granaries show their golden produce at the cracks. The yellow stubble of the fields is a promise that is kept. And who shall say that there is any sadness in the fallen leaves? They are a gay and sounding carpet. Who dances here needs no bell upon his ankle, and no fiddle for the tune.
And sometimes in October the air is hazy and spiced with smells. Nature, it seems, has cooked a feast in the heat of summer, and now its viands stand out to cool.
November lights its fires and brings in early candles. This is the season when chimneys must be tightened for the tempest. Their mighty throats roar that all is strong aloft. Dogs now leave a stranger to go his way in peace, and they bark at the windy moon. Windows rattle, but not with sadness. They jest and chatter with the blast. They gossip of storms on barren mountains.
Night, for so many months, has been a timid creature. It has hid so long in gloomy cellars while the regal sun strutted on his way. But now night and darkness put their heads together for his overthrow. In shadowy garrets they mutter their discontent and plan rebellion. They snatch the fields by four o'clock. By five they have restored their kingdom. They set the stars as guardsmen of their rule.
Now travelers are pelted into shelter. Signboards creak. The wind whistles for its rowdy company. Night, the monarch, rides upon the storm.
A match! We'll light the logs. We'll crack nuts and pass the cider. How now, master poet, is there no thirsty passage in your throat? I offer you a bowl of milk and popcorn. Must you brood tonight upon the barren fields—the meadows brown and sear? Who cares now how the wind grapples with the chimneys? Here is snug company, warm and safe. Here are syrup and griddle-cakes. Do you still suck your melancholy pen when such a feast is going forward?
On Finding a Plot.
A YOUNG author has confessed to me that lately, in despair at hitting on a plot, he locked himself in his room after breakfast with an oath that he would not leave it until something was contrived and under way. He did put an apple and sandwich prudently at the back of his desk, but these, he swore, like the locusts and wild honey in the wilderness, should last him through his struggle. By a happy afterthought he took with him into retirement a volume of De Maupassant. Perhaps, he considered, if his own invention lagged and the hour grew late, he might shift its characters into new positions. Rather than starve till dawn he could dress a courtezan in honest cloth, or tease a happy wife from her household in the text to a mad elopement. Or by jiggling all the plots together, like the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, the pieces might fall into strange and startling patterns.
This is not altogether a new thought with him. While sucking at his pen in a former drouth he considered whether a novel might not be made by combining the characters of one story with the circumstance of another. Let us suppose, for example, that Carmen, before she got into that ugly affair with the Toreador, had settled down in Barchester beneath the towers. Would the shadow of the cloister, do you think, have cooled her southern blood? Would she have conformed to the decent gossip of the town? Or, on the contrary, does not a hot color always tint the colder mixture? Suppose that Carmen came to live just outside the Cathedral close and walked every morning with her gay parasol and her pretty swishing skirts past the Bishop's window.
We can fancy his pen hanging dully above his sermon, with his eyes on space for any wandering thought, as if the clouds, like treasure ships upon a sea, were freighted with riches for his use. The Bishop is brooding on an address to the Ladies' Sewing Guild. He must find a text for his instructive finger. It is a warm spring morning and the daffodils are waving in the borders of the grass. A robin sings in the hedge with an answer from his mate. There is wind in the tree-tops with lively invitation to adventure, but the Bishop is bent to his sober task. Carmen picks her way demurely across the puddles in the direction of the Vicarage. Her eyes turn modestly toward his window. Surely she does not see him at his desk. That dainty inch of scarlet stocking is quite by accident. It is the puddles and the wind frisking with her skirt.
"Eh! Dear me!" The good man is merely human. He pushes up his spectacles for nearer sight. He draws aside the curtain. "Dear me! Bless my soul! Who is the lady? Quite a foreign air. I don't remember her at our little gatherings for the heathen." A text is forgotten. The clouds are empty caravels. He calls to Betsy, the housemaid, for a fresh neck-cloth and his gaiters. He has recalled a meeting with the Vicar and goes out whistling softly, to disaster.
Alas! In my forgetfulness I have skimmed upon the actual plot. You have recalled already how La Signora Madeline descended on the Bishop's Palace. Her beauty was a hard assault. Except for her crippled state she might herself have toppled the Bishop over. But she pales beside the dangerous Carmen.
Suppose, for a better example, that the cheerful Mark Tapley who always came out strong in adversity, were placed in a modern Russian novel. As the undaunted Taplovitch he would have shifted its gloom to a sunny ending. Fancy our own dear Pollyanna, the glad girl, adopted by an aunt in "Crime and Punishment." Even Dostoyevsky must have laid down his doleful pen to give her at last a happy wedding—flower-girls and angel-food, even a shrill soprano behind the hired palms and a table of cut glass.
Oliver Twist and Nancy,—merely acquaintances in the original story,—with a fresh hand at the plot, might have gone on a bank holiday to Margate. And been blown off shore. Suppose that the whole excursion was wrecked on Treasure Island and that everyone was drowned except Nancy, Oliver and perhaps the trombone player of the ship's band, who had blown himself so full of wind for fox-trots on the upper deck that he couldn't sink. It is Robinson Crusoe, lodging as a handsome bachelor on the lonely island,—observe the cunning of the plot!—who battles with the waves and rescues Nancy. The movie-rights alone of this are worth a fortune. And then Crusoe, Oliver, Friday and the trombone player stand a siege from John Silver and Bill Sikes, who are pirates, with Spanish doubloons in a hidden cove. And Crusoe falls in love with Nancy. Here is a tense triangle. But youth goes to youth. Crusoe's whiskers are only dyed their glossy black. The trombone player, by good luck (you see now why he was saved from the wreck), is discovered to be a retired clergyman—doubtless a Methodist. The happy knot is tied. And then—a sail! A sail! Oliver and Nancy settle down in a semi-detached near London, with oyster shells along the garden path and cat-tails in the umbrella jar. The story ends prettily under their plane-tree at the rear—tea for three, with a trombone solo, and the faithful Friday and Old Bill, reformed now, as gardener, clipping together the shrubs against the sunny wall.