Prejudices

My old friends have never forgotten me and I have never forgotten them. Some of them are far from being desirable citizens, and spend much of their time in the workhouse. Others of them have become part of the valuable thing we call “the backbone of the nation.” In this they all do not differ very widely from some of my acquaintances more recently acquired, except that whereas the former are in the workhouse, the latter merely ought to be.

But I don’t see why I should be bombarding you with these reminiscences. Perhaps, after all, you won’t see what they always mean to me, and particularly here, in this wondrously unreal environment, where the “other half” is something one merely subscribes to, or occasionally reads about in a magazine. But, you see, I know the other half; at one period of my life I actually was the other half. And when I confess to my skinny old dinner companion that I don’t like truffles and loathe champagne, I have the most irrelevant visions. They make a snob of me, these visions; not a snob in the general acceptation of the term, but a snob, none the less. For I continually feel that I know more about life than these people know, or ever will know. It is a source of satisfaction that I can see all around them while they are able to see only the particular front I, for the moment, wish to display. If I could choose between millions and my memories of Elm street, I think I should cling to Elm street.

* * * * *

That, practically, was the letter. It was pleasant in spots. I have tried, as I said, to extract some of the spots.

IN THE UNDERTAKER’S SHOP

The conventional idea of grief is that it is an exclusive emotion; that it leaves no room in the mind, for the time being, for any other. Like most of our beliefs, and most of them are erroneous, we have derived this one from books and newspapers. “Mrs. So-and-so bore up bravely to the end, but is now under the care of a physician, and is completely prostrated by grief,” one almost always reads in a newspaper account of the last hours of that altogether estimable citizen, her husband. And she sincerely believes this—believes it even while she stands in front of the glass, telling the young woman from the dry-goods shop that the veil hasn’t been pinned on straight and that the skirt is at least three inches too long in the back. There is no hypocrisy here; she does feel acutely and deeply bereaved. But she is by no means completely prostrated, and there is plenty of place in her intelligence for a variety of sensations that have little or nothing to do with her sorrow. In fact, physicians tell me that persons in ordinary “good health” are very rarely prostrated by grief; that when they are, complete prostration, on the part of gentlemen, is generally traceable to too many drinks of whisky, and on the part of ladies, to the morphine pill of the family doctor.

Some persons are so constituted that even in the case of their own trouble they can appreciate this; other persons can’t. I happen to be one of the kind who can, so when I went into the undertaker’s shop, it was, after the first rather dreadful moment, easy and natural for me to regard the place and what I saw and heard there impersonally and with interest.

This was the less difficult, perhaps, from the fact that for several minutes I was alone, there was no one to attend to me and I had time to sit down and look about me—to collect myself and begin to wonder why the person whose establishment it was, was called an “undertaker,” in the first place. It is really a comic, a grotesque word, whether it means that the man to whom it applies merely “undertakes” in a general sense, or more specifically, undertakes to take one under. I decided to look this matter up in a dictionary when I went home, but I neglected to, of course, and it is still one of those philological mysteries through which we write and speak and have our being. I had time also to discover just why these places, quite aside from their associations, are in themselves always so hideous, so offensive, so utterly repellent. It is simply because they express in terms of furniture the characteristics and point of view of the always very unpleasant persons who conduct them. A being from another planet ought to be able to reconstruct an American undertaker merely by examining the furniture of the front room in which he transacts his business.

The locale of other trades and professions usually expresses some one thing, and nothing else. The offices of lawyers, stockbrokers and architects, for instance, suggest only the law, finance and construction. There is about them an intelligible directness, an admirable singleness of purpose. You know just where you are, and they admit of no emotional intricacies between you and the men you consult there. An undertaker’s office, on the other hand, is a piece of elaborate hypocrisy. It deprecatingly shrinks from admitting that it is one thing or the other. Over one of the most rapacious trades in all this sad world it seeks to draw a veil of domesticity and religion. One is repelled by the place because it is so deliberately false.

In it there is always the apparatus of business—telephones and a roll-top desk full of billheads and ledgers and writing materials. That corner of the room is practical to a degree. But there are always, as well, several rocking-chairs with “tidies,” half a dozen dreary palms and ferns, a few pictures of a semi-devotional nature in somber frames, and, if it can possibly be managed, an imitation stained-glass window. The rocking-chairs, the tidies, the dusty green things, the pictures, the colored glass are there to “soften the blow,” to extend a kind of mute sympathy, to make you feel that your relations with the place are not entirely sordid and commercial. On a table there is literature, but lest it should strike in one’s affliction a false and jarring note, it is invariably confined to last year’s reports, bound in dark-gray paper, of the trustees of local cemeteries. To one’s intelligence it is all very insulting.

So, also, was the manner of the abhorrent young man who presently appeared through a curtained doorway in the rear of the particular establishment I happened to be visiting. In the room beyond he had been whistling, as he approached, a popular two-step, but he instantly ceased when he saw me and unconsciously drawing his face into a wan, smitten smile, came forward noiselessly, almost on tiptoe. He would have shaken hands with a slight, prolonged pressure full of regret and comprehension if I had let him, but I saw it coming and putting my hand in my pocket allowed his to drop back with a sad gesture that sought to say: “Yes—yes, I understand.”

“I should like to look at coffins,” I remarked, and then coldly eyed his discomfiture. For it was clearly not the sort of beginning he had expected. I had been prosaic and unmoved, and the fact left him for a moment with his trained sympathy, his professional manner, on his hands so to speak. He didn’t exactly know what to do with it, and he couldn’t quite bring himself, all at once, to risk anything else. In the meantime I merely looked at him.

“Mr. Murksom” (Mr. Murksom was the proprietor; they always have names like that) “has stepped out for a few minutes, but he’s coming right back,” the young man at last explained in tones that tried to be commonplace like my own. But I could see how difficult it was for him to be commonplace under the circumstances. Separated from its traditional and odious technique, the pursuit of his vocation plainly seemed to him neither legitimate nor altogether decent. “Mr. Murksom is very helpful,” he added in a refined whisper, delicately averting his eyes. He had relapsed again into the “manner”; he just couldn’t help it. It was as if he had said: “Even if for some perverse reason you refuse to act your part, it will never be said of me that I have failed in mine.”

“Won’t you—rest,” he then suggested, indicating one of the rocking-chairs; and I realized, with an all but uncontrollable desire to laugh aloud, that the slight hesitation followed by the mortuary word “rest,” was his tribute to my presumable and complete prostration. I took possession of the rocking-chair, but he sat down on an angular piece of “mission” work, with a straight back, and then brought the tips of his fingers together in a fashion that positively murmured, but without the crudity of words: “The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.”

“Will you have a cigarette?” I brutally inquired, for I was about to smoke one myself. And this, I saw with relief, for the time being, definitely broke the spell. With a cigarette in his mouth, or between his fingers, it was impossible, even for him, to produce any of his effects. He gave up trying to, and we talked. Among other things, I asked him, while I waited for the return of Mr. Murksom, how he had come to choose his occupation. All my life I had wanted to ask an undertaker that, but I never before had been given so good an opening. His reply was interesting, as, indeed, I knew it would be, or I shouldn’t have asked the question.

“I didn’t exactly choose it,” he replied. “I don’t think anybody ever does. It isn’t the kind of a job a person really chooses. I just drifted into it, little by little. That’s what they all do, I think. I had a friend who used to drive the wagon, and sometimes when he had to go very far, I’d go along with him to keep him company and hold the horses while he was inside. You get to talking, sometimes, and when you talk about things you kind of get used to them. After awhile they seem natural. Sometimes, when my friend had things to do here at the office, I used to help him; you might just as well, as to sit around doing nothing. And then someone offers you a job, and as you know a good deal about it by that time, and don’t mind, you take it. You kind of get into it by degrees.”

Just here Mr. Murksom appeared, and I saw at a glance that beneath his spurious melancholy one might never penetrate. He had been at it for too many years. The professional manner, thick and unctuous, enveloped him. He couldn’t have abandoned it had he wanted to. It clung to him, I was sure, at the lightest moments of his life. Of course, it was impossible to imagine his life as having any light moments, but assuming that such a thing could be, I felt that gayety with him would vaguely approximate only the gayety of a flag at half-mast. He would have approached the back platform of a street car in precisely the same soundless, sympathetic, discreetly afflicted way in which he approached a sobbing widow. It was the way, moreover, in which he at once approached me. I had craftily evaded the hand of his assistant, but there was no escaping the condoling pressure of Mr. Murksom. It had sought my own and gently, lugubriously squeezed it before I had been able to take defensive measures, and it did not, although I tried to drop it, immediately relax. In fact, it held on, and, with a kind of ghoulish authority, led me across the room and through the curtained doorway in the rear. The creature had divined everything; he knew exactly why I had come long before I had arrived to tell him. As I was drawn into the inner room I recalled the phrase “hand in glove,” and it occurred to me that Mr. Murksom was quite unavoidably the glove upon the hand of God. I heard him sigh most convincingly on two notes, and although he didn’t say anything continuous or even very coherent, I seemed to catch the words “very sad,” and “always a shock, even when expected.”

Once beyond the curtained doorway, I disengaged myself and again declared that I wished to look at coffins; but the manner in which Mr. Murksom, from then on, combined the shrewd salesman with the spiritual consoler is something my feeble pen altogether balks at recording. As far as I could see, there were no coffins in the room in which I had expected to find an embarrassment of choice, but, resting a protecting palm upon my shoulder as if to shield me from a sudden shock, Mr. Murksom pressed a button in the room’s white paneling, and lo! a natty three hundred and fifty-dollar receptacle turned a sort of somersault and landed, so to speak, at our feet. It was exactly like opening, or letting down, the upper berth in a sleeping car, except that these berths were on end instead of on their sides. Before I had made up my mind, we had pressed buttons and lowered upper berths all around three sides of the room.

“Now, just what is the difference between this one, which costs two hundred, and that one, which is only ninety-eight?” I inquired, for to me they both looked very much alike.

“This one,” Mr. Murksom replied, and I could see he thought me a haggling, heartless person, “is something more—more permanent. That one won’t—well, that one is, as one might say, less able to withstand the—the inevitable conditions. Personally,” he, to my surprise, hastened to add, “I don’t wish for anything too permanent. ‘Dust to dust,’ you know,” he murmured, as he pressed another button. This, I confess, surprised me very much, for it seemed to me that anyone who, for years and years, had buried several persons a day would necessarily fall into the habit of considering himself immortal. For a moment I thought of drawing him out on the subject; it occurred to me that a man whose whole life consisted of death ought to have made some illuminating reflections. Indeed, after I finally accomplished what I had come for, I did begin to ask a question, but was interrupted in the middle of it. For the young man suddenly appeared in the curtained doorway with something wrapped in brown paper and tied with a pink string. He was not exactly excited, he never could have been that, but he was, at least, natural. After our little conversation, I think he had concluded that there wasn’t much point in keeping it up any longer with me. This, at any rate, is the only way in which I could account for his ignoring my presence to the extent of making, in a moment, a most extraordinary and startling announcement. He held the brown paper parcel toward Mr. Murksom, who had turned inquiringly toward him, and then exclaimed, with a pleased smile:

“They’ve found those legs.”

“Ah,” sighed Mr. Murksom, “and where were they?”

“In the wagon all the time. The horses just walked away from the house and a policeman stopped them as they were trying to get into a vacant lot to eat grass. Well,” he ended, in a gratified tone, “I’m glad they found those legs.”

At this, I somewhat hurriedly said good afternoon, and withdrew. They were very little legs. I read about them in the paper the next day.

WRITERS

I CAN never decide which is the more annoying to a writer: to have people elaborately ignore the fact that he writes and has written, or to have them assume that he can’t talk about, and isn’t interested in, anything but books in general and his own in particular. The happy medium is conversationally discovered by only a very few, but this no doubt is the case with almost all happy mediums. It isn’t in the least disconcerting to meet a person who is quite unaware of the fact that you are the clever Mr. Snooks, author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day.” Indeed, when your new acquaintance has not even heard of either you or your latest work, you may be able to have with him a perfectly rational and agreeable conversation. But there is a type of person who has read “The Swill Barrel” with interest, who knows you wrote it, and who for some cryptic reason never alludes to it or betrays the fact that he realizes you are the clever Mr. Snooks. This is really most trying. You know that he knows; he knows that you know that he knows, and you both somewhat consciously talk about other things—he, because of an utterly misguided idea that it is “in better taste” not to speak of a book to its author, and you, because, under the circumstances, you would rather die than admit you recognized a pen when you saw it reposing on a desk.

To refrain from speaking to a writer of his books because you think it in better taste not to, because “he must be so tired of having people talk to him about that book,” is to display a not particularly keen or sympathetic understanding of human nature. A writer, whether he be a novelist, a historian, a writer of essays, a writer of editorials, a poet, a reporter, a message indicting President of the United States, or the secretary of a charitable organization, invariably hopes that what he writes will be read; that it will please, amuse, instruct, inform, divert,—that, in a word, it will interest somebody, or rather, a group of somebodies. With many writers the commercial aspect of the transaction is, of course, always prominent, but their commercial success depends, after all, upon their ability to charm. Once having grasped the pen and set out to do any of these things, it is only human and natural to be gratified on learning that you have succeeded, and if the people you from time to time meet don’t tell you that you have, you remain in dreadful doubt. To the ears of a writer no music on earth is sweeter than intelligent praise, and even praise that is not intelligent is sweet if it has the ring of sincerity. I remember once taking in to dinner a young girl who assured me that she had very much enjoyed a certain story of mine because it had made her “cry and cry and cry.” Most insincerely, as I knew which story it must have been, I asked her the name of it. She thereupon adorably declared that she didn’t remember the name, she couldn’t recall where she had come across it, and she had forgotten what it was about, but she had “cried and cried and cried.”

Occasionally writers have assured me that it bored them to receive enthusiastic letters about their books, and I have at once, mentally, replied “You’re a liar.” No writer is ever anything but pleased to learn that some one has found something, anything, of interest or value in one of his efforts. One may write primarily for money, to make a living, but no matter to what trashy and flashy depths a writer may descend, there is always in his books something of himself. However hard he might try, he could not keep it out, and it immensely pleases him to have it discovered and commented upon, either in a letter from an unknown reader or in a five minutes’ conversation. To me few incidents are as agreeable, as altogether gratifying and satisfactory, as is the incident of opening an envelope addressed in an unknown handwriting and finding inside a letter that begins, “I have never written to an author before, but I feel that I must write to tell you that,” etc., etc. And any one who has written a book and declares that letters like this do not please him, is simply a poseur or untruthful, or both.

In the case of the great and famous it no doubt now and then ceases to be a pleasure. A daughter of Longfellow told me that her father had once received an imperative note from some woman, worded about as follows: “Dear Sir: I have issued invitations for a ladies’ luncheon a week from next Wednesday. There will be about fifty present and I wish to present each of them with your autograph as a souvenir. Kindly send me at once fifty autographs to the address given below.” Longfellow was the kindest and most courteous of men, but this was a little more than even he could “stand for,” as we would express it to-day. The luncheon was unautographic.

On the other hand, many persons not only do not ignore the fact that a writer is a writer, they have an inexplicable habit of regarding him and his books as a kind of legitimate prey. When they hear they are going to meet him at some gathering they make a point of refreshing their memories on the subject of his various volumes, if they have read them before, or endeavor to skim through one or two if they have not already made their acquaintance. They then have a comfortable feeling that their conversational equipment is complete, and they relentlessly talk to the poor wretch about nothing but his works. They ask him how he came to think of certain characters, if they were drawn from life, how long it takes him to write a novel, has he any regular hours for working or does he wait for an “inspiration,” how much does he get for a short story in such and such a magazine, has his latest book been selling well, doesn’t he find writing a delightful, a fascinating occupation, what is he writing now, when will it be finished, who is going to publish it, and does he get a lump sum for it or a royalty on every copy? I don’t exaggerate; in fact, I have omitted a long list of searching and personal questions to which a writer is constantly subjected. The ordinary attitude toward a person who makes his living by grinding out books has always been to me an inexplicable one. Nobody with the smallest grain of sense or tact is ever impelled to cross-question a lawyer about his cases in court or a doctor about his cases in the hospital. The thing is almost inconceivable, and when it does very occasionally happen, the thoughtless interlocutor is very properly snubbed. One would experience a certain delicacy in asking even a tailor about the various garments he was cutting and sewing, but comparatively few persons have scruples against putting a writer through the third degree. To me this has always been remarkable, because I realize that in almost every lawsuit, however trivial, and in almost every case of illness, there is more emotion, more hope and fear, more ingenuity, more drama, more “human interest,” than in all the novels and stories put together. And yet lawyers and doctors and tailors and real estate men seem to escape, while writers are everywhere lashed to the interrogatory mast.

It also has always seemed strange that a man or woman who writes books, however thin and lacking in importance, is invariably given, wherever he goes, a luncheon, a dinner, or that altogether horrible form of human intercourse known as a “tea.” Other men and women who from every point of view have made a success of their lives can enter a town, stay for two weeks and depart without being noticed. But when Richard Thyng Snooks (author of “The Swill Barrel: A Story of To-day,” a very poor story I beg to assert) arrives, innumerable festivities are arranged in his honor. He is asked to luncheon and dinner, it is hoped that he can be prevailed upon to “say something,” anything, at some entertainment during his all too brief stay. The local branch of the Federated Women’s Clubs invariably tries to lasso him, and is terribly disappointed if it doesn’t succeed. Knowing many writers of books, as by accident I happen to, this is something I have never been able to comprehend.

Personally, my feeling toward my various scribbling friends is that I like them, not because they write, but in spite of it. We meet and gossip about a thousand things, but I can scarcely remember talking with any of them on the subject of writing. It is only with the kind of person who looks upon a printed and launched book as a sort of achievement (which of course it isn’t) that one talks about the making of books. Men and women who write, I have learned, are usually grateful when they can temporarily be made to forget about it.

It is conventional to think of writers as eccentric creatures who live apart in a world of their own. I have known many, but I have not found this to be the fact. As a rule I have discovered that the anecdotes about them have been built upon the most slender foundations, either by well-meaning admirers who imagined for them an interesting atmosphere of which they themselves were guiltless, or by malicious gossips who hoped to do them harm. The things printed about writers in newspapers are usually half truths ingeniously distorted, or absolute falsehoods. The actual peculiarities of writers, the little prejudices and habits and superstitions they almost all have to a greater or less degree, rarely find their way into type, because they are so rarely spoken of. One knows, of course, that Fénelon was able to write in comfort only when dressed in court costume, with fine, clean lace falling over his slender, aristocratic hands; that Balzac, in the agonies of composition, consumed quarts of strong coffee and wore a kind of monastic dressing gown; that Dickens always had upon his desk, wherever he went, a little collection of valueless ornaments he was used to seeing there, and without which he felt ill at ease and unable to begin his task; that Thackeray usually hated to write and, as a rule, dragged himself to his pen and ink with extreme repugnance; that Schiller kept in the drawer of his writing table half a dozen rotten apples, the smell of which he inhaled deeply before he was able to compose. Such instances, and hundreds of others, are authentic and historic. They have become known because the writers who were responsible for them are famous the world over, and nothing in their lives seems to be too insignificant to be ferreted out and proclaimed.

It is interesting to know that lesser scribes are everywhere, in all sincerity, the victims of much the same whims and unaccountable, innocent manias. A talented and successful woman novelist of my acquaintance once confided in me that she never felt like writing unless her hands were dirty. In winter, before sitting down to write, she always dusts a room, a shelf of books, or builds a fire. In summer she spends half an hour or so pulling up weeds in the garden. Her hands are then dirty and comfortable, and she can write with comparative enjoyment. A man I know, however, always scrubs his hands with hot water and soap before beginning to write, and then squirts a drop or two of cologne on them. This sounds as if he wrote highly romantic fiction or lackadaisical poetry. As a matter of fact, his subjects are history and political economy, and he is regarded as an authority upon those serious matters. But these are queer, intensely personal little traits that emerge diffidently, almost reluctantly, only when one knows a writer very well indeed. They are not the sort of stuff that finds its way into the newspapers.

My experience with writers may not be conclusive, but it seems to have dawned on me that, the more important a writer is, the more stable and justified his place is in the world of letters, the less eager he is to chatter about his profession. It is the person who has more or less accidentally had one story accepted by Scribner’s, Harpers’ or the Century, or the contributor to some third-rate sectional magazine, who insists upon talking of his “work,” who is forever hinting of the conspiracy among editors and publishers to reject anything unsigned by a well-known name. Real writers usually go about their business calmly, methodically and with little or no enthusiasm. It is rarely writing that they find “delightful and fascinating”; it is the having written. Those I have known intimately have without exception admitted that they could always re-read with interest certain passages from their own books when other diversions failed them, and while they often were conscious of opportunities lost, of having gone astray, of having failed to achieve the effect at which they aimed, they on the other hand were more than compensated by the discovery of certain phrases, paragraphs and whole pages they had almost forgotten and that struck them as being surprisingly skilful.

One hears much of the long, discouraging struggle for acceptance and recognition waged by young authors, how their manuscripts are returned unread by the editors of great magazines because their names are unknown, and so on. Having been a reader on a magazine myself, I listen to such tales with an exceedingly skeptical ear. In the United States, at least, it is much more difficult to keep out of print than to get into it. Editors and publishers read, or have their readers read, with the most painstaking care, absolutely everything submitted to them. Not to do so would be fatal; it would incur the risk of missing something, of failing to make the occasional big killing. Being human, they naturally make mistakes they bitterly regret; and it seems to me that this usually happens when the manuscripts sent in have about them a touch of genius. Genius is always somewhat ahead of its time, and publishers are invariably a little afraid of it. They have toward it much the same attitude that a nice old lady might have toward an invitation from Wilbur Wright to take a spin with him in his flying machine. They prefer something more reliable, more within their experience. It is said that Kipling’s “Plain Tales” made the rounds of all our magazines and publishing houses before they found any one sufficiently daring to print them. They were “different,” both in matter and in manner; they were not of the old reliable, tried and true variety; they had about them something very like genius. But it seems incredible that anyone nowadays, who can borrow a respectable plot and unfold it in a style sufficiently lacking in originality, should be denied admittance to the magazines and the publishers’ catalogues. I don’t believe it. And at present the field appears to offer unusual opportunities, for not long ago Laura Jean Libbey decided (at least so I read in a New York paper) “to lay down her tired pen and give other women writers a chance.” Miss Libbey is furthermore said to have declared to the reporter who interviewed her on her retirement from the active world of letters, that in looking back upon her busy career she had but one regret; she sometimes feared that the name of one of her books was too long. When asked which one it could have been, she replied that it was the novel entitled, “You Would Not Have Blamed Her for Going Wrong, if You Had Known What the Conditions Were at Home.”

“ANN VERONICA”

ABOUT an hour ago I finished reading the latest novel of Mr. H. G. Wells. I laid it aside and since then I have been thinking about it. During the past month a great many other persons apparently have been doing precisely the same thing. For whatever may be one’s verdict on the novels of Mr. Wells, and the verdicts are absorbingly different, it cannot be said that these volumes do not incite one to think. The ordinary American and English novel does not. It may be, and often is, skilful and diverting; it holds the attention and “passes the time,” but on finishing it one immediately begins to think of something else. It almost never seems to be the cause of the slightest kind of mental result. Personally, I cannot, for instance, conceive of one’s reading a book by Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Chambers, Richard Harding Davis, Hamlin Garland, Robert Hichens, not to mention hundreds of others, and having, subsequently, any kind of mental reaction. They all without doubt write more or less well, amuse a great many people for a few hours, and incidentally make a good and honest living. But there it all ends. They are trained performers, and entirely justified because they are so well trained. They do things we are all accustomed to having well done and they do them better than most. Almost invariably I applaud the industrious Mrs. Ward when she produces still another work of fiction; it is usually so neat, so competent, so adequate, so professional. She once wrote with not much skill an important book, “Robert Elsmere,” and since then she has made an enormous income by writing with extreme skill books of no importance whatever. Toward the ordinary “good” writer of contemporary novels I confess that I feel very much as one feels at the theater devoted to vaudeville, when a lady hops along an almost invisible wire on one leg, or a gentleman gracefully promenades about the stage on his hands or his head. It is all rather difficult to do; it has taken time and training; it is diverting to watch and it is well paid for. But when the curtain descends one begins to think about the performing seals or the ventriloquist who is advertised to appear next. As soon as the act is over, it is over. There is nothing to reflect upon, to take home with one, so to speak. I should dislike to give the impression that for this reason I depreciate the act or “look down” on it. Such is not the case. I merely beg, superfluously, perhaps, to state, that it has its place in the world, fulfills its little destiny, and that its destiny has nothing to do with the progress, or even the activity, of human thought.

The novels of Mr. Wells, on the other hand, are quite different. I am not going to review them, criticise or appraise them. That has been done, and will be done, by far more able pens than mine. I simply have an irresistible desire to record that whatever one thinks about them they are, after all, first and last, novels about which it is impossible not to think. This seems to me to be a great deal at the outset. I am unable to recall more than three other English-writing novelists of the present day who inspire me with the same sensations. To sit for awhile and reflect on this volume leads me far away from it into a tortuous maze of thought about all kinds of things—about life, about art, about literary style in general, and then about certain specific aspects and corners and byways, disputed boundaries and quaking bogs of these subjects, in particular. The book has been discussed in my presence by several persons, all of whom are unusually intelligent, and I think my only reason for mentioning it is because it got these good minds started, got them going with, to me, distinctly interesting results. The discussions shed a light and also erected a perfect barricade of question marks at the end of every path I have, in considering the matter, attempted to tread.

The story, like the stories of most great writers (and it gives me pleasure to be able to say that I happen to consider Mr. Wells a great writer), is exceedingly simple. The unupholstered skeleton of it is this: A young English girl of an upper-middle-class family lives with her father and her aunt in a pleasant, comfortable London suburb. The temperaments, ideas and activities of the father and the aunt are absolutely mid-Victorian. The girl, however, has inhaled the atmosphere of the twentieth century. She has gone to lectures at a college and studied biology; in an immature fashion she inevitably belongs to a world entirely different from that of her estimable and tedious father, from that of her refined and intellectually unawakened aunt. One evening she wishes to go to a fancy-dress party with some artistic friends of hers who live in the same suburb. Her father, with his vague, natural and perfectly comprehensible horror of anything “artistic,” forbids her to go, makes it, in fact, impossible to go; whereupon the daughter, revolting from her sheltered, commonplace, mentally stultifying domesticity, leaves the paternal hearth and undertakes to lead a life of her own in London. The rest of the story has to do with the development of the mind and soul of the girl who is both essentially feminine and essentially modern.

Of course I was intensely interested in the comments to which I have referred, not so much because they threw light on the book (the book speaks for itself), but because of the light they threw on the persons who made them and the questions they evoked.

“Yes, I read the book and I consider it objectionable from almost every point of view,” declared Smith.

“What you really mean is that you consider it objectionable from every point of view which you are by temperament and education capable of taking,” replied Jones. “There are other points of view in the world; no one person is able to possess them all. I, for instance, do not consider the book objectionable in any way. It strikes me as being a theme, or rather several themes, of vital interest treated by a master in a masterly fashion.”

“But I cannot feel that such themes are legitimate in a work of fiction—a work of art,” protested Smith; “especially,” he went on, “when they are treated so mercilessly—with so much—so much——”

“So much truth,” Jones interposed in a tone of superiority and triumph. “You will have to admit, I am sure, that there isn’t a false note in the whole story; it has the ring of relentless truth from the first page to the last. Do you mean to say that you shrink from the truth—that you don’t prefer truth always to prevail?”

Smith squirmed a trifle, but held his ground. “I am not at all sure that, in a work of fiction (and a work of fiction should be a work of art), absolute truth should be sought for. I see the difference between art and science. Why should one endeavor to be the other?” he inquired.

“But a novel purports to be a picture of life.”

“Yes, exactly—a picture; and a picture isn’t life itself; it is, or ought to be, after all, a picture,” said Smith, momentarily triumphant in turn. “The human body, for instance, has been painted and sculptured from the beginning of civilization, and, indeed, before it, but even to-day, with all our modern passion for fact or verity or whatever you choose to call it, even the most realistic of sculptors and painters has a tendency to grope toward beauty of form, to portray human beings without clothes more as they ought to look rather than as they actually do. This, it seems to me, is the wonderful privilege and function of art. It should embellish life, not perpetuate its ugliness. Toward the writing of novels I feel much the same. There are entire sides of life that do not strike me as a proper field of exploitation in a tale, a narrative, a novel.”

“But what is a poor, unhappy man of talent to do?” exclaimed Jones. “Here is Wells. He has observed with microscopic fidelity a young girl whose character, habit of thought, conception of life, her attitude toward the entire universe, in short, has developed and been formed in an epoch grotesquely different from that in which her father and aunt received their indelible impressions. The result is a domestic tragedy. It interested Wells; he sees all around it; it strikes him as being of immense value in the history of human shift and change; he wants to record it; he does so with the marvelous vividness and truthfulness of which he almost alone is at present master, and then you go and call him offensive and objectionable and a lot of other things. What do you want a man like that to do? Ought he to observe and reflect merely for his own instruction, and then when he puts pen to paper, perpetrate a new series of the ‘Elsie Books’ or ‘Dottie Dimple’?”

“Now, of course, you have become extreme and unfair,” objected Smith. “I need hardly say that even during my earliest years I couldn’t endure the ‘Dottie Dimple’ and ‘Elsie’ tendencies of fiction. Besides, you know perfectly well the sort of books I enjoy. You know that, strangely enough, I revel in both Thackeray and Dickens. I have read ‘Middlemarch’ six times and hope to read it many times more. I can always re-read the Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell and Meredith and Hardy. Howells has rarely failed me. Henry James used to charm and enchant me and he still always interests me even when I have to work hard to translate him. But what’s the use of naming any others? The list is sufficiently comprehensive to show that I am not narrow-minded.”

“The list is admirable as far as it goes,” Jones agreed; “I have but one fault to find with it, which is that you have read this and several other books by Wells with interest, and yet you will not accept him and enroll his name. The man is important in the world of letters; if he were not, you and I could not possibly spend so much time in talking about him. Tacitly you admit this. Why do you refuse to admit it positively? It makes me feel that you are not quite keeping in step with your epoch, your age, your time, your period. This is a marvelous age, and aren’t you rather deliberately falling behind it? By the way, where does Balzac come in? You haven’t mentioned Balzac.”

“I have read nearly everything of Balzac with sincere interest,” Smith admitted. “He is a literary wonder, a giant; sometimes he seems to me to be a kind of intellectual monster.”

“Yet Balzac was anything but squeamish in his choice of subject or his fashion of treating it. He, too, had his microscope. He stuck the end of it in his eye and looked at life and wrote accounts of his investigations. Surely they cannot always have pleased you!”

“No, they don’t. And here, you may laugh if you want to, but I can’t help confessing that I have entirely different feelings when I read awful things about French people. It is no doubt illogical, absurd, anything you please; but somehow I can’t be upset and disgusted by the turpitude of a hero named, for example, ‘Lucien de Rubempré,’ as I should be if he did the same things and his name was Peter Jackson.”

“How splendidly limited you are!” reflected Jones. “It does not occur to you that human life is human life; that the fact of its being English or French, American or Norwegian, is a mere accident. In the end it is always just the same. You can, in a word, endure the naked truth about persons who are not of your own nationality and whose language is not very familiar to you, but you hate to have the truth told about your neighbors and acquaintances and friends. You hate to have a writer of English tackle either the fundamental questions of existence, or any of the ugly, gross, squalid, frightful, real aspects that can be found without any trouble whatever in every well-regulated family.”

“George Eliot tackled a tragic and ugly incident in ‘Adam Bede,’ but I think ‘Adam Bede’ is a great and beautiful book,” declared Smith. “You see, it isn’t altogether a question of subject; it is largely a question of treatment.”

“How differently Wells would have treated ‘Adam Bede’!” mused the other.

“Yes, and in my opinion he would have ruined it,” Smith hastened to add. “George Eliot wrote with a pen; Wells writes with a clinical thermometer and a stethoscope. I may be behind the times, but I prefer novels to be written with a pen. In the long run I firmly believe that for the purposes of literature the pen is mightier than the surgical instrument.”

“That may be,” conceded Jones with reluctance, “but why not keep one’s mind open to every sincere and interesting experiment in the world of letters or the world of anything else? And there can be no question at all of Wells’s sincerity. With a most extraordinary intellectual equipment and gift for expression through the medium of words, he has undertaken in his novels to examine the Anglo-Saxon mind and heart and soul; to strip them of every vestige of their conventional garments and to display them quivering, real, naked. It is not only an attempt entirely new in English fiction, which in itself attracts my literary attention; it is, in the case of Wells, a successful attempt which both attracts my attention and firmly holds it.”

“But I hate and detest and loathe ‘quivering’ souls and minds and hearts running around loose in fiction,” Smith almost shrieked. “I don’t wish to encounter them there; as a matter of fact, I don’t wish to encounter them anywhere. Sometimes on the journey through life one has to; the meeting is unavoidable, but I declare and protest that I have never sought an introduction to them. I don’t want them to be thrust upon me, ever.”

At this point Mrs. Robinson suddenly tossed aside the doily she had been all along crocheting in receptive silence, and exclaimed:

“I’ve read the book you two helpless and rather ridiculous men have been trying to discuss, and I think you have both missed the entire point of it. You’ve been chattering and gabbling about art and literature and morality but you haven’t touched at all on what is the backbone of the book. I’ve been listening to you, and you both express yourselves with conviction and some force; but both of you have missed the point.” Mrs. Robinson smiled at us wisely and maternally, including me, although I had kept out of the discussion. She is a woman of sixty-five. She has known the world, she has lived and she has thought, and on the subject of “Ann Veronica” she spoke as follows:

“I read the book. It of course interested me; if it hadn’t I should not have finished it. Now listen, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, to an old woman and try to realize where she rises intellectually above you both. To Mr. Smith the book is out of the question, impossible. To Mr. Jones it is an important, perhaps a great study of certain phases of contemporary life. Neither of you will concede an inch, and neither of you seem to be aware of the fact that the interest of the book does not consist in its frankness of phrase, in its matter-of-fact acceptance of unconventionality. What the story crystallizes, in a fashion that will make the average middle-aged parent sit up and gasp, is the tragic impossibility of a parent comprehending and sympathizing with its own offspring. As you know, I have long been a mother of grown-up children, and my family is remarkably ‘united,’ as the saying is; but if you take your courage in your hands, open wide your eyes and honestly, pitilessly examine almost any family however theoretically, technically ‘united,’ what do you discover? I am not talking of the idealist and the sentimentalist. I am referring to cool and calm investigators like, let us say, this man Wells you both have been talking about. He has examined a certain family. It is just one small family, but the writer has succeeded to an astonishing degree in typifying the modern family in general, although to admit that he has may be repellent.

“The world,” declared Mrs. Robinson, “is moving with a rather frightening, breath-taking rapidity. Even parents, comparatively young, no longer live the lives of their children. I’m not such an old fool as to believe for a moment that I know what my boys are doing or what my girls are thinking. I used to consider it possible; I now am convinced that it is impossible. Such character as I have developed and solidified, I achieved under circumstances that do not now obtain, although I tried, wrongly perhaps, to keep them up, to prolong them and make them influences in the lives of the beings for whom I am responsible. My greatest claim to modernity consists in the fact that I have gracefully recognized and accepted defeat. My children are my children, but they also are children of a period in the world’s history to which I really do not in a heartfelt way belong. This in many respects is sad, it is even at times horrible. But here we are! What are we going to do about it? Ann Veronica belonged violently to her time. Her father belonged tenaciously to his. To preserve a united family, what, given these conditions, must happen? Simply concessions. To preserve the happy family, Ann must always forfeit some of her intelligence and modernity; Papa and Mamma must always concede to—oh, all sorts of little things (sometimes they are dreadfully big things) that they abominate. Parents and children have to scare up a kind of domestic philosophy and meet one another half way. When they don’t there is no longer a ‘united’ family. There is a drama of some sort and Mr. Wells sits down and writes a story about it. Ann was the kind of offspring who would not concede. Her father was the kind of parent who would not concede. You have seen what happened. I am not so sure that Mr. Wells himself is aware of what is really the lesson of his novel, but it is that sixty rarely has sympathy with and genuine understanding of twenty, and twenty in its heart of hearts looks upon sixty, not as perhaps experienced and wise, but as rather absurd. Concessions! All life is an endless succession of them. If we didn’t at every moment make them, everybody in the world would have to live in absolute solitude, and even then he would have to concede to the forces of nature, the sun and the rain, the cold and the dark, hunger, weariness and sleep.

“Now stop this wrangling, Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones,” the good lady went on, “and both concede a little. You, Mr. Smith, must concede that the book is interesting and written with a skill, a gift for observation and expression possessed by few, although I shall allow you to retain your temperamental bias and consider the story uncalled for and the treatment coarse.

“You, Mr. Jones, must concede that this manner of writing, of depicting life, is an innovation in English; that although you enjoy it, it may not be a wise one; that instead of merely amusing and doing good it may have the power to do harm, and that Mr. Smith is entitled to his opinion even if it doesn’t coincide with yours. There is much to be said in favor of Mr. Smith’s opinion.”

“And what is your opinion, Mrs. Robinson?” I at this point inquired.

“Oh, I haven’t any,” she replied gayly. “A really wise old woman never has.”

HOLIDAYS

WITH me, at least, holidays finally became an issue that had to be met, faced and, once and for all, disposed of. For years I half-consciously postponed the matter and went through many of the motions supposed to be essential to their respective spirits. On the Fourth of July, for instance, I would try to feel noisily inclined and patriotic, although my patriotism is not of a blatant variety and I had begun to dread noise almost more than I dreaded any other ill to which the human flesh is heir. On Christmas I endeavored, in the most painstaking fashion, to scare up a good-will-to-everybody sensation that I didn’t sincerely possess. On Thanksgiving Day I tried to observe the convention, not of giving thanks, for that has never become a convention, but of pretending that I desired more than usual to eat, which I never did and never do. But, all the while, firecrackers were becoming more and more abhorrent, geniality around the Yule log more of a bore, the sight of excessive food more repulsive, and, finally, I began to realize what was happening to me. Quite simply and naturally and inevitably, darling “was growing old; silver threads among the gold,” and not only silver threads (they are the least of it) but a lot of other things were taking place. It is all very interesting, and one of the most interesting things about it is the incredibly short time in which it seems to happen. Perhaps my memory is extremely erratic; in fact I feel sure it is, for sometimes last week is almost a total blank, whereas twenty and occasionally even thirty (dear Heaven!) years ago are vivid, clear-cut and intelligible. The more ancient date often seems more real and alive than the later. I haven’t the vaguest idea of what I did last Tuesday. There undoubtedly was a last Tuesday, but now, as far as I am concerned, it did not exist, although I am reasonably sure that while it ticked itself away I was clothed and in my right mind. On the other hand, I can most accurately recall, for example, the early morning of the Fourth of July, 1884. How we “conspired at every pore”! I remember going to bed most respectably and innocently at the usual time, waiting until the more mature members of the family were sound asleep and then sneaking down to the drawing-room and dozing restlessly on a sofa until about half-past two A.M. At that weird and ecstatic hour we emerged from a French window, extricated our firecrackers from the little “dog-house” in which we had secreted them and proceeded to make the rest of the night altogether odious. It comes back to me that an accidental spark popped into the ammunition box and, with a heart-rending, rip-snorting crash, flash and agonized detonation, destroyed everything in about one and a half tragic minutes. It was astonishing and glorious while it lasted, but it lasted such a short time that the rest of the night would have been left, so to speak, on our hands, if someone had not reluctantly tiptoed to his house and produced the supply he had been hoarding for the daylight hours. Then, with a huge bonfire, we all but ruined a beautiful elm tree, set fire to the fence, burned great chasms in the wooden sidewalk and had a perfectly delightful time generally.

I refer to these ordinary activities of the American male child only because I feel as if I had been engaging in them yesterday morning instead of twenty-five years ago, and because, in spite of my photographic recollection, so many queer things have taken place. To begin with, whereas I still, in memory, am able to reëxperience the exquisite thrill I had when, at the age of thirteen, I would hold a giant firecracker in my hand until the last advisable fraction of a second. I now have a horror of giant firecrackers, or indeed of anything that noisily explodes with possible dire results. In Mexico, for instance, when my brother and I are making, on mule back, a journey in an isolated part of the country, he always insists on my carrying a revolver in a large, visible holster. Mexicans have a most erroneous idea that with a revolver all Americans have an accurate and deadly aim. My brother considers this a great moral support and declares that the idea ought to be encouraged. Well, I carry the revolver, but I don’t mind confessing that I am much more afraid of it than I am of anything else in Mexico. The dangerous implement keeps bumping against my hip, reminding me that it is there and that it might tear six large holes in me at any moment. It is always an immense relief to arrive somewhere and, in a gingerly fashion, take it off and put it on a table or a bureau. Yet twenty-five years ago, nothing could have made me feel so proud, so brave, so competent to face the entire world as a revolver bumping against my hip. The old feeling for the Fourth of July has simply gone, disappeared, evaporated in some inscrutable fashion. It now has become for me a day of genuine misery, unless I am happy enough to spend it where it is not “observed.” In addition to loathing the noise because I can’t help it, I more and more every year hate it because I am increasingly depressed by the knowledge of all the so easily preventable mutilations with which it is associated; I hate it because of the pain I have known it to inflict upon the sick and dying. Even many of the lower animals of my acquaintance, dogs and horses in particular, regularly once a year spend twenty-four hours of mental and physical agony on the Fourth of July. While trying to reassure an old dog who had crawled under a bed and collapsed with a nervous chill, while trying to calm the uncontrollable terror of a steady, sensible, intelligent horse, I have often fervently wished that there had been no Revolution and that we had remained a British colony.

Thanksgiving Day became a horror of an entirely different kind. As I look back on the evolution of what has finally become my attitude toward holidays, I am convinced that the impulse to my detestation of the well-meant festival was given originally by the annual proclamations of the Presidents of the United States and the governors of the state in which I happened to have been born and brought up. To be President of the United States of America is, we are told, to hold the highest possible public office in the universe, but apparently one of the conditions of election to this exalted estate is that no President shall ever officially write anything for publication that is not obvious, pompous, platitudinous and unreadable. The printed remarks of governors are even, if possible, more so. Reading, once in so often, dear, dead old phrases about the “universal prosperity now existing throughout the length and breadth of this great land,” was, I am sure, what first began to make me realize that Thanksgiving Day is a most dreadful affair.

If the Fourth of July drives one distracted with its fiendish noise, the day of giving thanks has almost the same effect if one pays any special attention to it, by reason of its unnatural quiet. It comes at a dreary time of year when outside there is nothing in particular to do and nowhere in particular to go. One stays in the house and, some time during the day, eats a variety of rather unusual and not necessarily agreeable things one would never think of ordering at a restaurant or a club. Until one has freed oneself from the thralldom of holidays (I have), the semi-historical, semi-culinary torpidity of Thanksgiving Day usually upsets one’s routine, one’s digestion, one’s entire scheme of life. It is as if the Fourth of July had eloped with Christmas and the result of the union had been a kind of illegitimate Sunday.

And then Christmas. As I grow older, its original significance, its reason for being a holiday at all, becomes more full of meaning, more touching, more beautiful. It is not in the least obligatory to be religiously inclined in order to be profoundly moved by the symbolism of its pathos and poetry. The incident stands out, sums up, crystallizes for us, all that in our gentlest and best moods we believe about the great facts of birth, of motherhood, of infancy, of the family relation. It is our standard, our ideal; a serious contemplation of it must arouse in us everything that is most kindly, affectionate, generous, humble. The birth of the Infant Jesus, the attendant circumstances, the general scene and the significance of it all is, I happen to know, one of the few things that can cause a hard-faced, avaricious old billionaire to sink his head on his library table and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

But Christmas itself! I mean the day we have made of it. It is really a terrible day unless, perhaps, you are pretending to relieve it with the children which some of us don’t possess. Just as I can recall delirious Fourths of July, I can recall Christmas days that were a scream of delight from energetic dawn until tired and sleepy midnight. The delicious, exciting smell of the pine tree, the feel of the “excelsior” in which the fragile ornaments were packed, the taste of those red and yellow animals made out of transparent candy, the taste of the little candles (for some strange, youthful reason we always purloined several of the candles and chewed them, even green ones, in secret. I can’t imagine now why they didn’t poison us), the thrilling effect of cotton batting spread on the floor at the tree’s base (there were always, of course, acres of real snow just outside the front door but it quite lacked the power to entrance possessed by a few square feet of cotton batting)—for years I haven’t smelled or tasted or seen any of these things. But how wonderful they used to be. Even the Christmas we spent at the ages of eight and five, in Gibraltar, and where our tree consisted of a small orange tree propped up in a slop jar, was the real thing. Every moment of it returns palpitating with the old Christmas sensation.

But now the day, aside from its real significance, to which apparently no great attention is paid, has, as far as I am concerned, lost all its old magic and charm. Of late years, when I have been sufficiently foolish to attempt to “make merry” on Christmas, I have found the twenty-fifth of December merely a memory that one can revive, but to which one may not give life or even a very successful, galvanic semblance of life. If, nowadays, I permitted Christmas to make any particular impression on me, which I don’t, it would, I fear, be chiefly an annoying impression that I ought to be spending more money than I can afford in order to give, to persons I take but little interest in, presents they don’t need. At any rate, that is the principal impression I seem to derive from the ante-Christmas conversation of most of my acquaintances who still conventionally observe the day.

In fact, the whole question of holidays had to be met and solved, and I rejoice in the fact that I have at last done it as successfully as have many other much more sensible people. It is the easier to do, I suppose, if circumstances have often necessitated one’s spending the more important days in an environment lacking the slightest suggestion of domesticity. I have spent Christmas in a hotel in Athens, in a hotel in Paris, on shipboard, on a railway train, in the desert of Sahara, in tropical countries where it was all but impossible to recall anything that remotely suggested the annual festival. Once I spent all of Christmas on the back of a lame mule.

This sort of thing, unless one happily possesses a temperament unusually innocent and robust, has but one result: holidays become mere dates on a calendar. They are welcome intruders if one happens to be tied down day after day, as most of us are, to any one exacting and monotonous occupation, but the way to enjoy them, to extract the best from them is, I have found, to ignore them. It is an immeasurable satisfaction when you at last haul down the flag and tell yourself that you don’t in the least care what other people are doing on a certain day; when you finally cast out the disturbing belief that you ought to engage in some irritating or melancholy activity, generally supposed to be in keeping with the occasion. To observe Christmas by not observing it at all but by doing what you really feel like doing on a day of leisure, to dine on bread and butter and a cup of tea on Thanksgiving Day because they are what you most want, to seek on the Fourth of July a locality in which there is absolute quiet, all require some courage and, I regret to say, a certain age, but it is worth it.