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Title: Essays on things
Author: Phelps, William Lyon
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Essays on things" ***
ESSAYS ON THINGS
BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
ESSAYS ON MODERN NOVELISTS
ESSAYS ON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS
ESSAYS ON BOOKS
ESSAYS ON MODERN DRAMATISTS
ESSAYS ON THINGS
HOWELLS, JAMES, BRYANT AND OTHER ESSAYS
READING THE BIBLE
TEACHING IN SCHOOL AND COLLEGE
SOME MAKERS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
THE ADVANCE OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL
THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT
HUMAN NATURE IN THE BIBLE
HUMAN NATURE AND THE GOSPEL
ADVENTURES AND CONFESSIONS
AS I LIKE IT, FIRST, SECOND, THIRD SERIES
ARCHIBALD MARSHALL
HAPPINESS
LOVE
MEMORY
MUSIC
A DASH AT THE POLE
BROWNING--HOW TO KNOW HIM
ESSAYS ON THINGS
BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPS
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1930
COPYRIGHT, 1930,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved--no part of this
book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from
the publisher.
Set up and printed. Published September, 1930.
· PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ·
CONTENTS
PAGE
SUNRISE 3
MOLASSES 8
RESOLUTIONS WHEN I COME TO BE OLD 14
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HUMOUR 20
A PAIR OF SOCKS 26
AN INSPIRING CEMETERY 31
ANCIENT FOOTBALL 35
RIVERS 39
ONE DAY AT A TIME 45
CITY AND COUNTRY 51
AGE BEFORE BEAUTY 57
CHURCH UNITY 63
POLITICAL HISTORY 68
A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW 74
TEA 80
THE WEATHER 86
WAR 91
MAN AND BOY 96
AMBITION 101
BIRDS AND STATESMEN 107
RUSSIA BEFORE THE REVOLUTION 113
THE DEVIL 119
THE FORSYTE SAGA 124
PROFESSION AND PRACTICE 130
LONDON AS A SUMMER RESORT 135
WHAT THE MAN WILL WEAR 140
DREAMS 146
EATING BREAKFAST 151
THE MOTHER TONGUE 157
OUR SOUTH AS CURE FOR FLU 163
GOING TO CHURCH IN PARIS 169
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 175
TRANSLATIONS 180
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES 185
DOG BOOKS 190
GOING TO HONOLULU 196
HYMNS 201
OLD-FASHIONED SNOBS 207
A FAIR CITY 212
TRADITIONS 218
SPOOKS 224
TRIAL BY JURY 230
ATHLETICS 235
A PRIVATE LIBRARY ALL YOUR OWN 240
THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 246
THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME 252
TEN SIXTY-SIX 258
GOING ABROAD THE FIRST TIME 264
SPIRITUAL HEALING 269
SUPERSTITION 274
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARTH 279
WHAT SHALL I THINK ABOUT? 285
ESSAYS ON THINGS
I
SUNRISE
At an uncertain hour before dawn in February 1912, as I lay asleep
in my room on the top floor of a hotel in the town of Mentone, in
Southern France, I was suddenly awakened by the morning star. It was
shining with inquisitive splendour directly into my left eye. At that
quiet moment, in the last stages of the dying night, this star seemed
enormous. It hung out of the velvet sky so far that I thought it was
going to fall, and I went out on the balcony of my room to see it
drop. The air was windless and mild, and, instead of going back to
bed, I decided to stay on the balcony and watch the unfolding drama
of the dawn. For every clear dawn in this spectacular universe is a
magnificent drama, rising to a superb climax.
The morning stars sang together and I heard the sons of God shouting
for joy. The chief morning star, the one that had roused me from
slumber, recited a splendid prologue. Then, as the night paled and
the lesser stars withdrew, some of the minor characters in the play
began to appear and take their respective parts. The grey background
turned red, then gold. Long shafts of preliminary light shot up from
the eastern horizon, and then, when the stage was all set, and the
minor characters had completed their assigned rôles, the curtains
suddenly parted and the sun--the Daystar--the star of the play, entered
with all the panoply of majesty. And as I stood there and beheld this
incomparable spectacle, and gazed over the mountains, the meadows and
the sea, the words of Shakespeare came into my mind:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen,
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.
Kissing with golden face the meadows green.
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy.
It is a pity that more people do not see the sunrise. Many do not
get up early enough, many do not stay up late enough. Out of the
millions and millions of men, women and children on this globe only
a comparatively few see the sunrise, and I dare say there are many
respectable persons who have never seen it at all. One really should
not go through life without seeing the sun rise at least once, because,
even if one is fortunate enough to be received at last into heaven,
there is one sight wherein this vale of tears surpasses the eternal
home of the saints. “There is no night there,” hence there can be no
dawn, no sunrise; it is therefore better to make the most of it while
we can.
As a man feels refreshed after a night’s sleep and his morning bath,
so the sun seems to rise out of the water like a giant renewed. Milton
gave us an excellent description:
So sinks the daystar in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.
Browning, in his poem, _Pippa Passes_, compares the sunrise to a glass
of champagne, a sparkling wine overflowing the world:
DAY!
Faster and more fast,
O’er night’s brim, day boils at last:
Boils, pure gold, o’er the cloud-cup’s brim,
Where spurting and suppressed it lay,
For not a froth-flake touched the rim
Of yonder gap in the solid gray
Of the eastern cloud, an hour away;
But forth one wavelet, then another, curled.
Till the whole sunrise, not to be suppressed,
Rose, reddened, and its seething breast
Flickered in bounds, grew gold, then overflowed the world.
The sunset has a tranquil beauty but to me there is in it always a
tinge of sadness, of the sadness of farewell, of the approach of
darkness. This mood is expressed in the old hymn which in my childhood
I used to hear so often in church:
Fading, still fading, the last beam is shining,
Father in heaven! the day is declining.
Safety and innocence fly with the light,
Temptation and danger walk forth with the night.
Sorrow may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning, saith
the Holy Book. The sunrise has not only inexpressible majesty and
splendour, but it has the rapture of promise, the excitement of
beginning again. Yesterday has gone forever, the night is over and we
may start anew. To how many eyes, weary with wakefulness in the long
watches of the night, or flushed with fever, is the first glimmer of
the dawn welcome. The night makes every fear and worry worse than the
reality, it magnifies every trivial distress. Mark Twain said the
night brought madness--none of us is quite sane in the darkness. That
particular regret for yesterday or apprehension for tomorrow that
strikes you like a whiplash in the face at 2:45 A.M. dwindles into an
absurdity in the healthy dawn.
Mark Twain, who had expressed the difference between the night and
the morning tragically, also expressed it humorously. He said that
when he was lying awake in the middle of the night he felt like an
awful sinner, he hated himself with a horrible depression and made
innumerable good resolutions; but when at 7:30 he was shaving himself
he felt just as cheerful, healthy and unregenerate as ever.
I am a child of the morning. I love the dawn and the sunrise. When I
was a child I saw the sunrise from the top of Whiteface and it seemed
to me that I not only saw beauty but heard celestial music. Ever since
reading in George Moore’s _Evelyn Innes_ the nun’s description of her
feelings while listening to Wagner’s Prologue to _Lohengrin_ I myself
never hear that lovely music rising to a tremendous climax without
seeing in imagination what was revealed to the Sister of Mercy. I am
on a mountain top before dawn; the darkness gives way; the greyness
strengthens, and finally my whole mind and soul are filled with the
increasing light.
II
MOLASSES
Before both the word molasses and the thing it signifies disappear
forever from the earth, I wish to recall its flavour and its importance
to the men and women of my generation. By any other name it would taste
as sweet; it is by no means yet extinct; but for many years maple syrup
and other commodities have taken its place on the breakfast table. Yet
I was brought up on molasses. Do you remember, in that marvellous book,
_Helen’s Babies_, when Toddie was asked what he had in his pantspocket,
his devastating reply to that tragic question? He calmly answered,
“Bread and molasses.”
Well, I was brought up on bread and molasses. Very often that was all
we had for supper. I well remember, in the sticky days of childhood,
being invited out to supper by my neighbour Arthur Greene. My table
manners were primitive and my shyness in formal company overwhelming.
When I was ushered into the Greene dining room not only as the guest of
honour but as the only guest, I felt like Fra Lippo Lippi in the most
august presence in the universe, only I lacked his impudence to help me
out.
The conditions of life in those days may be estimated from the fact
that the entire formal supper, even with “company,” consisted wholly
and only of bread, butter and molasses. Around the festive board sat
Mr. Greene, a terrifying adult who looked as if he had never been
young; Mrs. Greene, tight-lipped and serious; Arthur Greene, his sister
Alice, and his younger brother, Freddy. As I was company I was helped
first and given a fairly liberal supply of bread, which I unthinkingly
(as though I were used to such luxuries) spread with butter and then
covered with a thick layer of molasses. Ah, I was about to learn
something.
Mr. Greene turned to his eldest son, and enquired grimly, “Arthur,
which will you have, bread and butter or bread and molasses?”
The wretched Arthur, looking at my plate, and believing that his
father, in deference to the “company,” would not quite dare to enforce
what was evidently the regular evening choice, said, with what I
recognised as a pitiful attempt at careless assurance, “I’ll take both.”
“No, you don’t!” countered his father, with a tone as final as that of
a judge in court. His father was not to be bluffed by the presence
of company; he evidently regarded discipline as more important than
manners. The result was I felt like a voluptuary, being the only person
at the table who had the luxury of both butter and molasses. They stuck
in my throat; I feel them choking me still, after an interval of more
than fifty years.
* * * * *
The jug of molasses was on our table at home at every breakfast and
at every supper. The only variety lay in the fact (do you remember?)
that there were two distinct kinds of molasses--sometimes we had one,
sometimes the other. There was Porto Rico molasses and there was New
Orleans molasses--brunette and blonde. The Porto Rico molasses was so
dark it was almost black, and New Orleans molasses was golden brown.
The worst meal of the three was invariably supper, and I imagine this
was fairly common among our neighbours. Breakfast was a hearty repast,
starting usually with oatmeal, immediately followed by beefsteak and
potatoes or mutton chops, sometimes ham and eggs; but usually beef
or chops. It had a glorious coda with griddle cakes or waffles; and
thus stuffed, we rose from the table like condors from their prey,
and began the day’s work. Dinner at one was a hearty meal, with soup,
roast, vegetables and pie.
Supper consisted of “remainders.” There was no relish in it, and I
remember that very often my mother, who never complained vocally,
looking at the unattractive spread with lack-lustre eye, would either
speak to our one servant or would disappear for a moment and return
with a cold potato, which it was clear she distinctly preferred to the
sickening sweetish “preserves” and cookies or to the bread and molasses
which I myself ate copiously.
However remiss and indifferent and selfish I may have been in my
conduct toward my mother--and what man does not suffer as he thinks of
this particular feature of the irrecoverable past?--it does me good to
remember that, after I came to man’s estate, I gave my mother what it
is clear she always and in vain longed for in earlier years, a good
substantial dinner at night.
At breakfast we never put cream and sugar on our porridge; we always
put molasses. Then, if griddle cakes followed the meat, we once more
had recourse to molasses. And as bread and molasses was the backbone of
the evening meal, you will see what I mean when I say I swam to manhood
through this viscous sea. In those days youth was sweet.
The transfer of emphasis from breakfast to supper is the chief
distinguishing change in the procession of meals as it was and as it
became. It now seems incredible that I once ate large slabs of steak
or big chops at breakfast, but I certainly did. And supper, which
approached the vanishing point, turned into dinner in later years.
Many, many years ago we banished the molasses jug and even the lighter
and more patrician maple syrup ceased to flow at the breakfast table.
I am quite aware that innumerable persons still eat griddle cakes or
waffles and syrup at the first meal of the day. It is supposed that the
poet-artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti ruined his health by eating huge
portions of ham and eggs, followed by griddle cakes and molasses, for
breakfast. To me there has always been something incongruous between
syrup and coffee; they are mutually destructive; one spoils the taste
of the other.
Yet waffles and syrup are a delectable dish; and I am quite certain
that nectar and ambrosia made no better meal. What to do, then? The
answer is simple. Eat no griddle cakes, no waffles and no syrup at
breakfast; but use these commodities for dessert at lunch. Then comes
the full flavour.
Many taverns now have hit upon the excellent idea of serving only two
dishes for lunch or dinner--chicken and waffles. This obviates the
expense of waste, the worry of choice, the time lost in plans. And what
combination could possibly be better?
One of the happiest recollections of my childhood is the marvelous hot,
crisp waffle lying on my plate, and my increasing delight as I watched
the molasses filling each square cavity in turn. As the English poet
remarked, “I hate people who are not serious about their meals.”
III
RESOLUTIONS WHEN I COME TO BE OLD
At the age of thirty-two, Jonathan Swift wrote the following:
RESOLUTIONS WHEN I COME TO BE OLD
(1) Not to marry a young woman.
(2) Not to keep young company, unless they desire it.
(3) Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious.
(4) Not to scorn present ways, or wits, or fashions, or men, or
war, etc.
(5) Not to be fond of children.
(6) Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people.
(7) Not to be covetous.
(8) Not to neglect decency or cleanliness, for fear of falling into
nastiness.
(9) Not to be over severe with young people, but give allowances
for their youthful follies and weaknesses.
(10) Not to be influenced by, or give ear to, knavish tattling
servants, or others.
(11) Not to be too free of advice, or trouble any but those who
desire it.
(12) To desire some good friend to inform me which of these
resolutions I break or neglect, and wherein, and reform accordingly.
(13) Not to talk too much, nor of myself.
(14) Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favour with
ladies, etc.
(15) Not to hearken to flatteries, nor conceive I can be beloved by
a young woman.
(16) Not to be positive or opinionative.
(17) Not too set for observing all these rules, for fear I should
observe none.
Swift died at the age of seventy-eight; so far as I can find out, he
lived up to these resolutions with commendable consistency, except one:
his friend, Dr. Sheridan, was sufficiently indiscreet to remind him
that he was becoming too parsimonious. Swift resented this criticism,
and it spoiled their friendship.
* * * * *
Although Swift was a pessimist, a cynic and a misanthrope, these
resolutions contain much wisdom; so much, in fact, that a faithful
adherence to them would save most old men much suffering and
humiliation. I read them first when I was a boy and they produced a
profound impression; now that I am in a position where they fit my
case, I believe them to be good medicine, bitter but wholesome. Swift
must have been bored horribly by many old men, or he must have observed
many old people behaving in a silly fashion to have written down these
rules with such emphasis.
(1, 2) “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together,” said Shakespeare;
the few exceptions do no more than prove the rule. Many old people
suffer because they fear that young people do not desire their company.
The solution is for old people not to allow their happiness to be
dependent on young folks but to have either company of their own age
or intellectual resources which will make them mentally independent. I
have taught young people for forty years, and although I am very fond
of them, I prefer the society of people of my own age. If I were about
to take a trip around the world and could choose either a young or old
companion, I would take the latter.
(3) Good advice for any age, but old persons, owing to bodily
infirmities, are more apt to show these unlovely characteristics.
(4) This advice was never more needed than now.
(5) I would change this, so it would read “Not to fondle children.” A
man with a bushy beard can terrify babes.
(6) “I suppose you have all heard this before, but----” then why tell
it?
(7) Especially of the health, vigour, and activity of younger men.
(8) Swift was himself almost fanatically clean. It is a disgusting
sight to behold old men who are careless of their clothes and
appearance, as though old age gave one the privilege to appear in
public with the remains of the last meal on the coat, waistcoat and
shirt.
(9) Observe the ways of the dog, and learn wisdom. The dog allows
children to pull his tail, and bother him in many ways; not because he
likes it, but because he knows children have no sense. It is useless
to expect that children and young people will think and act like
middle-aged men and women; why be fretful when they are simply running
true to form?
(10) One must remember that slander is of value only as a
self-revelation, never as an accurate description. The recoil of that
particular gun is greater than the discharge.
(11) Every person loves to give advice and no one loves to take it.
The mother says to the child, “Now, Freddy, don’t forget to put your
rubbers on!” to which Freddy replies “Huh!” Then when Freddy is
seventy-six years old, his granddaughter says, “Now, Grandpa, don’t
forget to put your rubbers on!” to which the grandparent replies “Huh!”
It is a good thing not to force one’s opinion on others unless they
ask for it; one’s professions and creed will be judged by one’s life,
anyhow.
(12) Ah, that requires the very grace of God. This kind comes only by
prayer and fasting.
(13, 14) Many an old man likes to have others think that he was in his
prime a devil of a fellow. This particular vanity is hard to eradicate.
Even in the moment of Lear’s heartbreaking and shattering grief over
the death of his daughter Cordelia he found time to boast of his former
prowess.
(15) I say it not cynically, but in all seriousness: There is no one
who cannot be successfully flattered, provided the flattery be applied
with some skill. We have at the core such invincible egotism that
we not only listen greedily to flattery, but, what is far worse, we
believe it!
(16) An overbearing, domineering, dogmatic manner in conversation
is abominable in persons of any age; when old people behave in this
fashion, and it is not resented by the young, it should really all the
more humiliate the old. For such acquiescence means that the old man
hasn’t any sense, anyhow.
(17) Know thyself. Ulysses showed his wisdom in not trusting himself. A
Yale undergraduate left on his door a placard for the janitor on which
was written, “Call me at 7 o’clock; it is absolutely necessary that I
get up at seven. Make no mistake. Keep knocking until I answer.” Under
this he had written. “Try again at ten.”
IV
ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HUMOUR
Some one has said that American humour consists in over-statement
and English humour in understatement. This judgment does not include
everything, but so far as it goes it is not only accurate, but helps
both to explain English humour and the frequently heard remark that
the English are without it. I suppose one reason many ill-informed
Americans say that Englishmen have no sense of humour is because the
English do not indulge so commonly as we in boisterous jocularity,
exaggeration, surprise and burlesque. The average Englishman does not
see why a stranger should accost him with jocosity--many Englishmen do
not see why a stranger should accost them at all. It is an excellent
plan while travelling in England or anywhere in Europe never to speak
first to an Englishman; let him open the conversation.
One of the chief differences between the average Englishman and
American is in amiability, responsiveness, amenity. Americans are
probably the most amiable people in the world, the most happy to
respond to an exploratory remark, the most willing. I dare say it is
partly a matter of climate. Our chronic sunshine makes us expansive and
ebullient.
In any American city on a terrifically hot day, two hitherto
unacquainted men will speak to each other as they pass on the street,
one saying, “Don’t you wish you had brought your overcoat!” which
harmless jest is returned by the other with equal affability. If you
said that to an Englishman, he might stare at you blankly, and perhaps
hazard the query, “You mean, of course, your _light_ overcoat?”
After introduction to a resident Englishman in Vancouver, British
Columbia, at a small dining-table in a hotel, I remarked gently, “Even
though you are behind the times here in Vancouver, I do not see why you
should advertise the fact.” “What on earth do you mean?” he enquired.
Then I called his attention to the dinner-card, on which was printed
Vancouver, B. C. He exclaimed, “But it doesn’t mean that, you know!” I
do not believe he was deficient in a sense of humour. I had just met
him, and he did not see why a stranger should be sufficiently intimate
to be taken otherwise than seriously.
_Punch_ is the best of comic papers; it expresses the genuine original
humour of a humorous folk. I remember seeing there a picture of the
village orchestra, and as the director rapped for attention, the first
violin leaned forward and asked, “What is the next piece?” and being
informed, replied, “Why I just played that one.”
Woodrow Wilson once told me a story which illustrates how dangerous it
is for anyone to assume that the English have no sense of humour.
Three Americans were telling anecdotes to illustrate the English dearth
of humour, when they saw approaching a representative of that nation.
It was agreed that he should then and there be put to the test. So one
of them stopped him and narrated a side-splitting yarn. The Englishman
received the climax with an impassive face. The American, delighted,
cried, “Cheer up, old man, you’ll laugh at that next summer.” “No,”
said the Briton, gravely, “I think not.” “Why not?” “Because I laughed
at that _last_ summer.”
The humour of English political campaign speeches at its best, is
unsurpassed. When the late John Morley had finished an oration by
requesting his hearers to vote for him, one man jumped up and shouted
angrily, “I’d rather vote for the devil.” “Quite so,” returned the
unruffled statesman; “but in case your friend declines to run, may I
not then count upon your support?”
A perfect retort was made to the great and genial Thackeray, on the
one occasion when he ran for Parliament. He met his opponent, Edward
Cardwell, during the course of the campaign, and after a pleasant
exchange of civilities, Thackeray remarked, “Well, I hope it will be a
good fight, and may the best man win.” “Oh, I hope not,” said Cardwell.
The English are the only people who seem to be amused by attacks on
their country; does this show a sense of superiority that increases the
rage of the critic? Or is it that their sense of humour extends even to
that most sacred of all modern religions, the religion of nationalism?
The Irish are supposed to excel the English in humour; but it is a fact
that English audiences in the theatre are diverted by sarcastic attacks
on the English, whereas it is physically dangerous to try a similar
method on an Irish audience. The Irish patriot, Katharine Tynan, said
that if she could only once succeed in enraging the English, she would
feel that something might be accomplished. “But,” said she, “I tell
them at dinner parties the most outrageous things that are said against
their country, and they all roar with laughter.” Undue sensitiveness
to attack betrays a feeling of insecurity.
Typical American humour is not subtle and ironical; it is made up
largely of exaggeration and surprise--Mark Twain was a master of ending
a sentence with something unexpected. “I admire the serene assurance
of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm
confidence of a Christian with four aces.”
Anthony Hope, in his recent book _Memories and Notes_, says that when
Mark made his first dinner speech in London before a distinguished
audience, there was intense curiosity as to what he would say. He began
with an unusually slow drawl. “Homer is dead, Shakespeare is dead--and
I am far from well.”
Another true story (which I took pains to verify) happened during the
early days of his married life, which synchronised with the beginnings
of the telephone. Incredible as it may seem, Mrs. Clemens had not heard
Mark swear, for during the engagement he had managed by superhuman
efforts to refrain from what he called that noble art, and she did
not dream of his oral efficiency. But one day, thinking he was alone,
he started to use the telephone. (The Paris _Figaro_ says that to get
your telephone connexion is not an achievement; it is a career.) Mark,
having difficulties, poured out a torrent of river profanity. He looked
around and there was his wife, frozen with horror.
But she had heard that the way to cure a husband of profanity was for
the wife to swear in his presence. So, in a cold, artificial voice, she
said, “Blankety-Blank-Blank.” Mark cried, “Darling, you know the words,
but you don’t know the tune!”
Mark had a way of combining philosophy and humour. This is the gospel
according to Mark Twain. “Live so that when you die even the undertaker
will be sorry.”
V
A PAIR OF SOCKS
One fine afternoon I was walking along Fifth Avenue, when I remembered
that it was necessary to buy a pair of socks. Why I wished to buy only
one pair is unimportant. I turned into the first sock shop that caught
my eye, and a boy clerk who could not have been more than seventeen
years old came forward. “What can I do for you, sir?” “I wish to buy
a pair of socks.” His eyes glowed. There was a note of passion in his
voice. “Did you know that you had come into the finest place in the
world to buy socks?” I had not been aware of that, as my entrance had
been accidental. “Come with me,” said the boy, ecstatically. I followed
him to the rear of the shop, and he began to haul down from the shelves
box after box, displaying their contents for my delectation.
“Hold on, lad, I am going to buy only one pair!” “I know that,” said
he, “but I want you to see how marvellously beautiful these are.
Aren’t they wonderful!” There was on his face an expression of solemn
and holy rapture, as if he were revealing to me the mysteries of his
religion. I became far more interested in him than in the socks. I
looked at him in amazement. “My friend,” said I, “if you can keep this
up, if this is not merely the enthusiasm that comes from novelty, from
having a new job, if you can keep up this zeal and excitement day after
day, in ten years you will own every sock in the United States.”
* * * * *
My amazement at his pride and joy in salesmanship will be easily
understood by all who read this article. In many shops the customer has
to wait for some one to wait upon him. And when finally some clerk does
deign to notice you, you are made to feel as if you were interrupting
him. Either he is absorbed in profound thought in which he hates to
be disturbed or he is skylarking with a girl clerk and you feel like
apologising for thrusting yourself into such intimacy.
He displays no interest either in you or in the goods he is paid to
sell. Yet possibly that very clerk who is now so apathetic began his
career with hope and enthusiasm. The daily grind was too much for him;
the novelty wore off; his only pleasures were found outside of working
hours. He became a mechanical, not an inspired, salesman. After being
mechanical, he became incompetent; then he saw younger clerks who
had more zest in their work, promoted over him. He became sour and
nourished a grievance. That was the last stage. His usefulness was over.
I have observed this melancholy decline in the lives of so many men in
so many occupations that I have come to the conclusion that the surest
road to failure is to do things mechanically. There is, for example,
no greater literature in the world than the Bible and no more exciting
subject than religion. Yet I have heard many ministers of the gospel
read the Bible in their churches with no interest and no emphasis,
whereas they ought to read it as if they had just received it by
wireless from Almighty God. I have heard hundreds of sermons preached
mechanically, with no more appeal than if the speaker were a parrot.
There are many teachers in schools and colleges who seem duller than
the dullest of their pupils; they go through the motions of teaching,
but they are as impersonal as a telephone.
* * * * *
In reading that remarkable book, _The Americanization of Edward Bok_, I
was impressed by what he said of competition in business. Beginning as
a very young man in a certain occupation, he had expected to encounter
the severest competition. As a matter of fact, he met no competition at
all, and found that success was the easiest thing in the world, if one
provided the conditions necessary for it.
He worked along with a number of other young men in the business. He
was the only one who ever got to the place ahead of time. At the noon
hour at lunch the other youngsters never on a single occasion mentioned
the business in which they were engaged. They talked of their girls, or
of athletic sports, or of various dissipations. He was the only man who
ever remained after business hours, and he was convinced that he was
the only one who ever occupied his mind with the business during his
evenings.
He rose above the others with consummate ease, and for two obvious
reasons: First, he made himself indispensable; second, he found his
chief pleasure in his work, not in the dissipations outside of it.
It is simple enough for any one to be attracted by the novelty of a
new job. The real difficulty is to keep up that initial enthusiasm
every day of one’s life, to go to work every morning with zest and
excitement. I believe that a man should live every day as if that day
were his first and his last day on earth.
Every person needs some relaxation, some recreation; but a man’s
chief happiness should not lie outside his daily work, but in it. The
chief difference between the happiness of childhood and the happiness
of maturity is that the child’s happiness is dependent on something
different from the daily routine--a picnic, an excursion, a break of
some kind. But to the right sort of men and women happiness is found
in the routine itself, not in departures from it. Instead of hoping
for a change, one hopes there will be no change, that one will have
sufficient health to continue in one’s chosen occupation. The child has
pleasures; the man has happiness. But unfortunately some men remain
children all their lives.
VI
AN INSPIRING CEMETERY
Americans should not leave Florence without spending some reflective
hours in the so-called Protestant cemetery. The grave of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning is adorned with a beautiful marble tomb designed by
the famous artist Leighton, and the only inscription thereupon is
“E. B. B. Ob. 1861.”
Not far away lies the famous poet, Walter Savage Landor, who died in
1864 at the age of eighty-nine. His grave is covered with a flat stone.
Here is a poem he wrote about it:
Twenty years hence, though it may hap
That I be called to take a nap
In a cool cell where thunder clap
Was never heard,
There breathe but o’er my arch of grass,
A not too sadly sigh’d “Alas!”
And I shall catch ere you can pass,
That wingéd word.
The last time I was in Florence I bent over his grave and with
deliberate emphasis I whispered “Alas!” I do not know whether he heard
me or not.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning made the poet’s later years as happy as
was possible for one of his temperament; they secured a villa for him,
furnished it, hired servants and did what they could. He was wildly
irascible, and if he did not like a meal that was served, he grabbed
the table-cloth, and twitched all the food and dishes on to the floor.
All his life he was a fighting man, which makes the beautiful Farewell
he wrote somewhat incongruous.
THE LAST FRUIT OF AN OLD TREE
I strove with none; for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life.
It sinks and I am ready to depart.
In order to fit my own feelings, I should have to make some slight
changes in his poem, so that the amended version would read as follows:
I strove with none. I always hated strife.
Nature I loved, and God and Man and Art.
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks--yet I’m not ready to depart.
Landor was sometimes in a more jovial mood, as in his invitation to
Tennyson:
I entreat you, Alfred Tennyson,
Come and share my haunch of venison.
I have too a bin of claret,
Good, but better when you share it.
Tho’ ’tis only a small bin,
There’s a stock of it within.
And as sure as I’m a rhymer,
Half a butt of Rudesheimer.
Come; among the sons of men is one
Welcomer than Alfred Tennyson?
Along the path leading to Mrs. Browning’s tomb is the grave of the
English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (pronounced Cluff), who crossed the
ocean with Thackeray and James Russell Lowell and whose most famous
poem is _Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth_. He died in 1861
the same year as Mrs. Browning, at the early age of 42. He was a
distinguished scholar of Balliol college, Oxford. He expressed in his
poems the doubts and struggles that have afflicted so many honest and
candid minds.
Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away,
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
On sunny noons upon the deck’s smooth face,
Linked arm in arm, how pleasant here to pace;
Or, o’er the stern reclining, watch below
The foaming wake far widening as we go.
On stormy nights when wild northwesters rave,
How proud a thing to fight with wind and wave!
The dripping sailor on the reeling mast,
Exults to bear, and scorns to wish it past.
Where lies the land to which the ship would go?
Far, far ahead, is all her seamen know.
And where the land she travels from? Away.
Far, far behind, is all that they can say.
In addition to the three great English poets who are buried in this
cemetery, two famous Americans lie there, Richard Hildreth and Theodore
Parker. When I was an undergraduate, I asked Prof. W. G. Sumner what
was the best History of the United States that had ever been written;
he answered gruffly and without a word of qualification, “Hildreth’s!”
Accordingly, I read every word of the six volumes. Many years later I
had the unique pleasure of telling Sumner something he had not known;
I told him I had done homage at Hildreth’s grave in Florence, and he
was surprised to learn that the historian was buried there. If any
one believes that the contemporary custom of “debunking” historical
characters is new, he should read Hildreth’s Preface to his History.
“Of centennial sermons and Fourth of July orations, whether
professedly such or in the guise of history, there are more than
enough. It is due to our fathers and ourselves, it is due to truth
and philosophy, to present for once, on the historic stage, the
founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge,
wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of excuses and apology, without
stilts, buskins, tinsel, or bedizenment, in their own proper
persons.”
VII
ANCIENT FOOTBALL
Attacks on the American game of football are often more sensational
than the game itself. Some volley out statistics of injuries, in which
we see the names of persons “crippled for life” whom we know to be
unlike their biographers in that they are both well and cheerful;
others descant wildly on the evils of betting and the drunkenness
attendant upon a great match; others deplore the time and attention
robbed from study; some believe the rivalry of two strong teams causes
prolonged bitterness and hatred; some regard the intense earnestness of
training as both silly and harmful; some assert that the players on the
field behave like ruffians, and some, like the old Puritans, hate the
game not because they really think it wicked but because they secretly
hate to see eighty thousand people out for a holiday.
There is no doubt that football, like every other sport and recreation,
is open to many serious objections. Certain players are every year
killed and wounded, though the mortality is nothing like so great as
that resulting from automobile accidents and week-end celebrations. It
is certainly true that betting and dissipation accompany the game; it
is true that many young men sit on the benches, cheering and singing,
when they might be studying in the seclusion of their rooms.
It is true that the American spirit--always ambitious of success--makes
every member of a university team train with an earnestness that seems
tragi-comic to the nonathletic observer. But the immense advantages
of this most robust of all sports outweigh all its attendant evils.
For football is much more than a contest of animal vigour; in the
language of Professor Stagg, who was a moralist before he was an
athlete, “Football surpasses every other game in its demand for a high
combination of physical, mental and moral qualities.”
This article, however, is not written for the purpose of defending
modern football but rather to show that the game thus far has not only
flourished in spite of attacks but that there has been a tremendous
rise in its respectability since the days of Queen Elizabeth. I cannot
just now remember anything on which the Puritans and the playwrights
were then agreed, except their opinion of football. What Shakespeare
thought of it may be seen in the epithet which Kent applies to one of
the most odious characters in _King Lear_. Tripping up Oswald, he calls
him “you base football player.”
Modern legislators must rejoice at finding that they have plenty of
precedents for legal prohibition of the game. In 1424 we find “The King
forbiddes that na man play fut ball under payne of iiiid.” Sir Thomas
Elyot remarked, in 1531, “Foote balle, wherin is nothing but beastly
furie and exstreme violence.”
If in Elizabethan days the dramatists, who were not noted for their
piety, attacked football, what shall we expect from the Puritans? The
most circumstantial indictment of the game came from a Puritan of
Puritans, Philip Stubbs. In his _Anatomie of Abuses_ (1583) he thus
denounces the sport:
For as concerning football playing, I protest vnto you it may
rather be called a frieendly kinde of fight, then a play of
recreation; A bloody and murthering practise, then a felowly
sporte or pastime. For dooth not euery one lye in waight for his
Aduersarie, seeking to ouerthrowe him & to picke him on his nose,
though it be vppon hard stones? In ditch or dale, in valley or hil,
or what place soeuer it be, hee careth not, so he haue him down.
And he that can serue the most of this fashion, he is counted the
only felow, and who but he? so that by this meanes, sometimes
their necks are broken, sometimes their backs, sometime their
legs, sometime their armes; sometime one part thrust out of ioynt,
sometime another. Sometime the noses gush out with blood, sometime
their eyes start out; and sometimes hurt in one place, sometimes in
another. But whosoeuer scapeth away the best, goeth not scotfree,
but is either sore wounded, craised, and bruiseed so as he dyeth
of it, or else scapeth very hardly, and no meruaile, for they haue
the sleights to meet one betwixt two, to dash him against the hart
with their elbowes, to hit him vnder the short ribbes with their
griped fists, and with their knees to catch him vpon the hip, and
to pick him on his neck, with a hundred such murdering deuices; and
hereof groweth enuie, malice, rancour, cholor, hatred, displeasure,
enemities, and what not els; and sometimes fighting, brawling,
contention, quarrel picking, murther, homicide, and great effusion
of blood, as experience dayely teacheth.
In the attack just quoted the most interesting thing to the modern
reader is that precisely the same objections were made to the game as
we hear today.
In the robust days of Queen Bess football was regarded as low and
vulgar; it received the denunciation of the Church and the more potent
frown of fashionable society. Today at a great university match
prominent clergymen are seen even on the sidelines; the bleachers bloom
with lovely women, and in a conspicuous place stands the President of
the United States.
VIII
RIVERS
On the first of several agreeable visits to Carbondale in southern
Illinois, whither I went to address the best of all audiences--public
school teachers--I enquired of the superintendent, Mr. Black, as to the
precise distance that separated us from the Mississippi river. I told
him I loved all rivers, and this one particularly. I had seen it at St.
Paul, at St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans. I wished to see it far
from the noise, smoke and artificiality of cities. I wished to see it
naked. He informed me that he was the proud owner of an open Ford car,
that the Father of Waters was only eighteen miles away, and that he
would lead me to it that very afternoon.
It was a charming day in early spring. I stood on the bank of the
mighty Mississippi. There was no town, settlement, not even a house in
sight. The glorious old river at this point was one mile wide, fifty
feet deep, and running seven miles an hour. Away up stream on the
Missouri side the trees were in the living green of April; and the
flood came rolling along in silent majesty.
I thought of the old seventeenth century poet, Denham, and what he said
of another river.
Oh, could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.
Every river has a fascination for me, because it is alive. In a green
landscape, or in a rocky gorge, or in the midst of a forest, or
dividing a city, it gives to every scene the element of life. Living
waters flowing through meadows, over sands, between mountains are
always moving, progressing, going somewhere. If one climbs a hill,
and looks off on a vast expanse of fresh woods and pastures new, and
suddenly sees a river, the heart leaps up with recognition.
Looking at a map--the expressive face of the world--I have often wished
to follow the course of various rivers. I should like to go down the
Amazon, the Yukon, and the Yangtze. Each river has a personality. Most
rivers that empty into the ocean are tidal; their current is pushed
backward by the incoming sea. But the Amazon is so mighty that it
overcomes the force of the tide and transforms the ocean into fresh
water. Unless voyagers and novelists are abandoned liars, one can be
off the coast of South America, out of sight of land and dip up fresh
water, so tremendous and far-reaching is the shove of the Amazon. Its
mouth is so wide that one could place in it crosswise, the whole Hudson
river from New York to Albany, without touching either shore.
The personality of the Mississippi is striking. In the greatest of all
Mark Twain’s contributions to literature, the first volume of _Life on
the Mississippi_, he gives us marvellous impressions of the character
and behaviour of the stream. And in one of the foremost novels of our
time, Charles Stewart’s _Partners of Providence_, the peculiar habits
and whims of the Mississippi are set forth. It quite rightly regards
itself as socially superior to the Missouri; so much so, in fact, that
for some time after the entrance of the Missouri into its waters,
the Mississippi positively refuses to have anything to do with the
interloper.
In the old days “before the war” (our war), luxurious passenger
steamers plied from St. Louis to New Orleans; and I understand that,
after the lapse of many years, we are to have similar vessels. This
is as it should be; an immense amount of American literature and
history, from De Soto to Edna Ferber, is associated with this river,
and the opportunity of travelling on it should be given to all
Americans. I have not yet abandoned my youthful dream of travelling on
the Mississippi from St. Paul to St. Louis, and from St. Louis to New
Orleans.
I never miss a good chance for a river voyage. One has the element of
adventure as one rounds the next bend. I have been on the rivers of
southern Florida, I have been on the Savannah river in Georgia, and the
last time I was at Vanderbilt university, in Nashville, friends gave me
a memorable excursion on the Cumberland. One of the most interesting
of all inland voyages in the United States is to take the steamer from
Norfolk to Richmond on the James. From seven in the morning to eight at
night it is a panorama of American history.
The word river occurs many times in the Bible, and think of the part
played in the story of mankind by the Euphrates, the Nile, and the
Jordan! The Bible begins and ends with a river. In the second chapter
of Genesis, we read “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden,”
a lovely spectacle, for Paradise would never have been complete without
a river. In the last chapter of Revelation, we read, “And he showed me
a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the
throne of God and of the Lamb.”
It is curious when the Bible speaks of the River of Life--“on either
side of the river there was the tree of life”--that the idea should
persist of the River of Death. This is a heathen and pagan idea and has
no place in Jewish or Christian thought. Many people speak solemnly of
crossing the river--they get the notion either from Greek mythology
or from Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, or metaphorically, from the
Promised Land lying on the other side of the Jordan.
In reality the Bible tells us that both the earthly and the heavenly
Paradise had a river to refresh and gladden the people.
Without sermonising too grossly, we may say that a river is like a
human life. The source is often obscure and humble, then a tiny stream,
then growing bigger and more important (the widening of influence),
then flowing tranquilly (prosperous, happy days), then getting into
sand flats, hardly moving (serious illness), then roaring tempestuously
in rapids (times of excitement and adventure), yet going on, somehow
and somewhere.
Furthermore, they always arrive ultimately at the same destination--the
mysterious open sea, leaving narrow circumstances for a deeper and
greater existence.
And even those streams that seem to perish without fulfilling their
destiny, are in their subsequent influence like the lives of obscurely
good men. Some travellers in a desert came to a bit of green meadow
where a river once had been.
IX
ONE DAY AT A TIME
On a certain morning in the year 1900 I called on President Eliot at
his office in Harvard University. He was in a gracious mood and we
talked of many things. As I rose to leave I said I hoped I might always
have the privilege of calling on him whenever I came to Cambridge. He
remarked gravely (in every sense of that word): “The next time you come
I may not be here.”
“What’s the matter? Are you going to resign?” “Resign? Certainly not.
But, remember, I am sixty-six years old.” The only answer to that was a
laugh, which I provided spontaneously.
Now if the distinguished president of Harvard had known then that
twenty-five years after this interview, he would be in the full
possession of his physical and mental faculties, even though he had
ceased to possess the Harvard one, he would have wasted not a single
moment on the thought of his approaching death. And if gold rusts, what
shall iron do?
In the eighteenth century, the poet Young was an intimate friend of the
novelist Richardson and their correspondence has a certain mortuary
interest. For Young’s letters are as gloomy as his verses; they are
largely taken up with predicting his own speedy death, which, however,
Richardson awaited in vain, as the aged poet survived him. In his own
last moments Richardson may have felt something akin to resentment at
having wasted his sympathy on one who would attend his funeral.
We look backward too much and we look forward too much. Thus we miss
the passing moment. In our regrets and apprehensions, we miss the only
eternity of which man can be absolutely sure, the eternal Present. For
it is always NOW.
As Browning’s clever Bishop Blougram remarked:
Do you know, I have often had a dream
(Work it up in your next month’s article)
Of man’s poor spirit in its progress, still
Losing true life forever and a day
Through ever trying to be and ever being--
In the evolution of successive spheres--
Before its actual sphere and place of life,
Halfway into the next, which having reached
It shoots with corresponding foolery
Halfway into the next still, on and off!
As when a traveller, bound from North to South,
Scouts fur in Russia; what’s its use in France?
If France spurns flannel; what’s its need in Spain?
If Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers!
Linen goes next, and last the skin itself,
A superfluity in Timbuctoo.
When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?
When Thoreau was questioned as to his beliefs in a life beyond the
grave, he answered impatiently, “Oh, one world at a time.”
I was deeply impressed in reading Dr. Cushing’s admirable biography of
Sir William Osler, to see that the physician and philosopher laid the
greatest stress on living one day at a time. That was his summary of
the art of living, for all those who wished to accomplish as much as
possible, and retain their peace of mind: Live one day at a time.
I remember, when I was twenty years old, I wasted many good hours in
speculating on what I should do after graduation from college, which
event was two years ahead. An old man told me not to give it a moment’s
thought: “You cannot decide what to do till the emergency comes.”
Meanwhile there was the daily work. The best way to prepare for the
future was to do that well, rather than waste one’s energies on idle
worry.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
There are always gloomy prophets who cannot enjoy the present moment,
because they are so sure trouble is coming. The winter of 1917–1918
was the coldest in my recollection; and many said, “Well, the climate
is changing and we must not expect any mild winters.” Then came the
winter of 1918–1919, which was the mildest in my recollection. And
how distinctly I recall conversations like the following. Along about
Christmastide, I would say, “What a beautiful winter!” and in every
instance, without a single exception, I got the reply, “Just wait.
We’ll catch it later.” Then when the weather continued sweet all
through January, I made the same remark to different individuals,
and always got a warning for my pains. But the evil came not at all.
My friends had determined to be miserable. They could not enjoy a
lovely mild season, for in its loveliness they shook with the chill of
apprehension.
The fear of life is the favourite disease of the twentieth century.
Too many people are afraid of tomorrow--their happiness is poisoned
by a phantom. Many are afraid of old age, forgetting that even if
they should lose their bodily vigour, weakness itself may minister to
the development of the mind and spirit. In the words of the aged poet
Waller,
The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Let the scientists worry about our origin--slime, monkeys, what not;
let the prophets worry about our future--“the decline of western
civilisations,” and what not. Some people are alarmed because in nine
thousand billion years the sun’s fuel may give out. Instead of chagrin
over our past, and alarm over our future, suppose we consider our
opportunity.
Listen to Emerson: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best
day in the year. No man has earned anything rightly until he knows that
every day is doomsday. Today is a king in disguise. Today always looks
mean to the thoughtless, in the face of a uniform experience that all
good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank
todays. Let us not be deceived, let us unmask the king as he passes.”
Our Lord, in his daily conversations, was always drawing the attention
of his listeners away from vague speculations, to the present moment
and the present opportunity. To such absurd enquiries as, “Whose wife
shall she be in heaven?” he said, “God is not the God of the dead, but
of the living.” To the man who said that he must postpone action until
he had attended a funeral, the Master replied crisply, “Let the dead
bury the dead and come and follow me.” And after an enumeration of the
various worries about the future with which men and women torment their
minds, he said, “Take no thought for the morrow.” Do not worry about
the future. He added, significantly, that if we are determined to look
for trouble, we can find it today without waiting for tomorrow.
X
CITY AND COUNTRY
It is generally assumed that the country is more romantic, more
poetical than the city; but it would not be so easy to prove this,
if one were put to the test. “God made the country and man made the
town,” said William Cowper, which meant simply that he preferred rural
life. It is rather amusing to consider that in our age, which is so
often called the age of machines, and when many people are afraid that
simplicity and individuality will be lost, country places, mountain
scenery, and the wilderness are more popular than ever before.
Now there are fashions in outdoor nature just as there are fashions
in clothes. Today everyone must profess a love for mountains whether
one really likes them or not; for mountains are very fashionable.
Switzerland is the playground of the world; and the inhabitants make
a larger income off their barren rocks than most communities make off
fertile and productive plains.
But it is only within two hundred years that mountains have been
generally admired. Before that time they were usually regarded as ugly
excrescences, both disagreeable and dangerous; and at the best they
were no more to be regarded as objects of beauty than pimples. English
gentlemen who made the Grand Tour in the seventeenth century thought
the Alps were disgusting; they were a monstrous and abominable barrier
that must be crossed before the traveller could reach the smiling
landscape of Italy.
When Addison wrote home from his travels in 1701, he said that he had
had “a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still giddy
with mountains and precipices; and you can’t imagine how much I am
pleased with the sight of a plain!” Such a remark would injure the
reputation of a modern pilgrim; but Addison made it in perfect good
faith, and with no apology.
Perhaps some of our contemporary love of wild scenery is owing to
the comfortable circumstances in which we behold it; transportation,
tunnels, fine hotels, luxuries of every description enable us to view
mountains in security and serenity; but if we had to pass over them in
acute discomfort and in constant danger, our attitude might be more
like Addison’s. This by no means explains why the once “horrid” has
become fashionable; but it helps to explain the modern love of wild
scenery.
Had Addison been told that two centuries later people would build
hotels on the edge of Alpine precipices, he would have dismissed the
idea as a silly dream; no one would put a roadhouse there. “But, Mr.
Addison, I am not talking of roadhouses. These hotels are not on the
way to something else; they are not a means, they are an end. People
will travel three thousand miles from California to New York, sail
three thousand miles from New York to Europe just to spend the summer
in a mountain hotel, where it costs twenty dollars a day--” he would
have regarded the coming generation as idiotic.
It was Thomas Gray, author of the _Elegy_, who was one of the first
English travellers to see the beauty of the Alps, and it was he
therefore who is originally responsible for making them fashionable.
He and Horace Walpole drove over the mountains in a chaise, and Gray
wrote to his friend West, “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff,
but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that
would awe an atheist into belief.” This was a new note in literature.
It is my belief that mountains and wild scenery are more appreciated
today by citified folk who love them for the change and novelty than
they are by those who are forced to live among them all the time. When
I was young, I walked with three of my college mates from New Haven to
the White Mountains; it was a fine expedition, and took us some three
weeks. I remember toward twilight on a certain day we entered a gorge
and passed through into a place surrounded by austere mountains.
A farmer addressed us: “Where do you boys come from?”
“Connecticut.”
He slowly and solemnly repeated the word CONN-ECT-ICUT--as though he
were saying MESOPOTAMIA, and added, “My, I’d like to see Connecticut.”
We told him it was not so very remarkable.
“We have no such mountains as these in Connecticut.”
He replied, “Oh, damn these mountains! I’m sick of the sight of them.”
And it appeared that he had never been out of that valley.
I spend a quarter of my life in the country, and love it, but if I had
to choose between living all my life in the country or in a large city,
I should choose the city immediately. And I believe this is true of
most people.
A crowd of unemployed some years ago stood in line at the Detroit city
hall. A man came up and offered every one in turn good wages, good
food, a good place to sleep, and plenty of fresh air, if he would take
for the summer a job on a farm. Every one of the men laughed at him.
Some of us more fortunate folks are irritated by this, for in America
everybody thinks that everybody else ought to be a farmer. But the
truth is that man does not live by bread alone. People do not live in
order to live--merely for healthy surroundings and good food. They want
excitement, they want something interesting. Who can blame them? Don’t
you feel that way yourself?
We should all contribute to the Fresh Air Funds, because little
children of the slums ought to have a chance to see unimpaired nature.
But very few of the children would be willing to stay there, and in
some cases after a few days they are homesick for their native filth.
The city is one continuous theatre, admission free; the street is the
best playground in this world. There is a fire, a street fight, the
appearance of policemen, an arrest, an automobile accident--all the day
and all the night, “something doing.”
Thus it is not at all strange that the majority prefer the crowded
conditions of the slums to the fresh air of the country; for other
things being equal, isn’t that about the way we all feel?
XI
AGE BEFORE BEAUTY
This frequently-heard statement is a left-handed compliment; like
many conventional tributes, it carries a smirk rather than a smile.
Underneath the formal and hollow homage paid to the ancient the
preference is of course elsewhere. It is somewhat like the so-called
complimentary vote given to the “favourite son” at a political
convention, which no one takes seriously, not even the son. Nothing
would perhaps more shockingly disconcert the ballot-casters than to
have their candidate receive other than local support.
In the expression Age Before Beauty, it is implied that the two are
incompatible; you cannot have both. Yet upon a little reflexion it will
appear that the vast majority of objects that receive human attention
become more and more beautiful with the accumulation of years. I can
think of only two classes of things that are more beautiful in their
early than in their later existence.
I refer first to all varieties of animal life, including man; second to
all objects whose main purpose is practical usefulness.
It ought to be obvious that kittens, puppies, baby lions, boys and
girls are fairer to look upon than aged cats, rheumatic hounds,
toothless lions, decrepit men, and time-worn harridans--such as
guide you to your seat in the Paris theatres. It is true that the
ecclesiastical poet, Dr. Donne, made a couplet comforting to some whose
youth is only a memory.
Nor Spring nor Summer’s beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
But you will observe he said “one” not many; and he had in mind not
a number of charming old ladies, but just one. No doubt there are a
sufficient number of exceptions to give added stability to the rule.
Browning said the reason why youth is so fair is that it would be
intolerable without it; beauty is youth’s only asset. Nature makes
boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they
acquire some sense. As soon as they are able to pull their weight
in the work of the world and in the intellectual clearing-house of
society, then grace and beauty depart. Thus mature people who have
no brains and no sense are the last word in futility. They are as
ridiculous as old apple-blossoms which for some reason never went into
fruition.
The second class of objects which are beautiful only in youth are
those which are built mainly for use. The purpose of an automobile is
to go. A motor car one year old is better than when ten years old; it
is also more attractive to the eye. I suppose Americans are the only
people in the world who often buy new cars. If an Englishman has a
car that carries him satisfactorily, he keeps it; the American “turns
it in.” There is no more striking evidence of the “prosperity” of the
American people than the twofold fact of the abundance of new cars, and
also--amazing, when you think about it--that the tremendously efficient
T-model Ford was not sufficiently lovely to pay for its continued
manufacture.
When I was a boy, the number of my acquaintances whose fathers owned a
horse and carriage could be counted on the fingers of one hand, like
those who now own a steam yacht; the fact that the old Ford car is not
“good enough” indicates how times have changed. For the proper epitaph
for the T-model we should have to adapt the words of Shakespeare, which
he put into a funeral oration:
But yesterday the Ford T-model might
Have stood against the world; now lies it there,
And none so poor to do it reverence.
Beauty and newness are inseparable in the case of bicycles,
grocery-wagons, machinery, steamboats, factory buildings, flannel
shirts, shoes, typewriters, trousers, socks; with all of these articles
age means ugliness. In mechanical objects there is no charm in the
accumulation of years.
But cathedrals, trees, mountains, castles, manor-houses, college lawns,
violins, with the increase of age take on not only dignity but beauty.
A thirteenth-century cathedral is more lovely than a glossy new church;
an old tree is more beautiful than any sapling; the ancient turf in the
quads of Oxford is fairer to behold than the graded front yard of a new
house in Dakota.
Why do hundreds of thousands of Americans travel gladly in Europe
every summer? Mainly for one thing. It is that their Yankee eyes may
have the sensation of seeing objects which the wear of centuries has
made beautiful. Many of us Americans have had the natural habit of
associating beauty with newness; the new hat, the new clothes, the new
motor car, the new stadium. It is worth while to discover that there
are innumerable objects where age, instead of being a humiliation and
a “depreciation,” is not only an asset, but a thing of beauty whose
loveliness increases.
Boys and girls brought up in the slums naturally regard newness as
essential to beauty and worth; the Fresh Air Fund should, if possible,
take them not only to fresh woods and fields, but illuminate their
minds with the sight of buildings whose age, instead of tarnishing, has
made them surpassingly attractive. Henry James, in one of his novels,
has a boy from the London slums entertained overnight in an English
country house. This is what he saw as he looked out of his window in
the early morning.
“He had never in his life been in the country--the real country, as
he called it, the country which was not the mere ravelled fringe of
London--and there entered through his open casement the breath of
a world enchantingly new and after his feverish hours unspeakably
refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all
strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that consisted
for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were tall quiet
trees near by and afar off and everywhere.... There was something in
the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to
his eyes; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid
infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among
whom old age meant for the most part a grudged and degraded survival.
In the favored resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an
accumulation of dignity and honour.”
XII
CHURCH UNITY
I have in mind a tiny country village containing one large Catholic
church and four small Protestant churches--Baptist, Methodist,
Presbyterian, Episcopal. The Catholic church holds services every
Sunday, every holy day and on many other occasions; these services are
well attended. Although the four Protestant churches are very small
they are not small enough; some of them have long periods when they are
not opened at all, and the others are never crowded.
It is not surprising that there should be many sects and denominations
among Protestants, for the central principle of Protestantism is
individual judgment, which makes uniformity neither possible nor
desirable; and, indeed, in large cities it is a good thing that we have
so many and such a variety of sectarian church services.
For the variety is not in religious faith; they are all following the
same religion. The variety is in the form of worship, what I call
religious etiquette.
There are many people who on account of their parentage and early
associations love an elaborate ritual, with the clergy in uniform, the
vested choir, etc. There are other persons, equally devout, who are
repelled by ritualism; they like to see the minister in mufti and to
have a service as informal and simple as possible. There are those who
would be shocked by the language used by certain soap-box exhorters,
but if they cannot endure these things they might remember that God
has to listen to them, and take them as a compliment. Perhaps that is
what is meant by the Divine Patience. These people feel religiously at
home only in a dignified and elaborate service. But there are others
who in a “high” church feel as if they were at an opera; their senses
may be touched, but their hearts are cold. They are spectators, not
worshippers.
How fortunate it is then that in every city of reasonable size every
Protestant has the power of choice. If one church service or preacher
“gets on his nerves” he can go elsewhere, where his precious nerves
will be soothed rather than ruffled, and he can worship God with an
etiquette to which he is accustomed.
When a young man and woman become engaged to be married it is extremely
probable that during the courtship they will at one time or another
discuss religion; the girl will probably ask the man for his views on
the subject.
During the engagement of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, when
their communications had to be mainly through the post office, she
wrote out her religious views, and he immediately responded in an
unequivocal manner. Four years later he used these two letters as
the basis of his poem _Christmas Eve_. Elizabeth pointed out the
various characteristics of Christian worship, from Roman Catholics to
Unitarians, saying that despite the irritating features in many church
services she could worship in any of them, though she preferred those
of the Dissenters. She was one of those rare persons who combine the
most passionate convictions with the largest tolerance. Too often
religious convictions produce bigoted narrow-mindedness; too often
tolerance is merely a complimentary description of indifference.
There can be, then, genuine church unity without uniformity, and I
repeat that in large cities this is well.
But there are, anyhow, two instances where Protestant churches should
combine and agree on uniformity as well as on unity. These two are
foreign missions and small country towns. The advantage of the former
needs no argument; among the many advantages of the latter is one,
often overlooked. The minister can omit in his public preaching all
nonessential parts of his belief and confine his preaching sermons to
the very heart of the Gospel.
I have the best of reasons for knowing this can be successfully
accomplished, because in the small corner of Michigan where I am now
writing we manage it every Sunday afternoon.
Huron City, on the nail of the “thumb” in Michigan, was in 1865 a very
much larger town than it is today. In the old times of lumbering, when
the vast pine forests came down to the shore of Lake Huron, this Huron
City was a scene of fierce and profitable activity. But after the
terrible forest fires of 1871 and 1881 the whole region passed from a
timber to an agricultural district, not without difficulty. Gradually
the people left and in most cases literally took their houses with
them. Today Huron City has no post office, no railroad, no telegraph.
It is composed of a schoolhouse, a Methodist church, a general store, a
community house, two or three farmers’ dwellings and our summer home. I
love it with all my heart.
Every year the Methodist pastor, who has two churches besides this one
under his charge, yields me the courtesy of his Huron City Methodist
pulpit for the summer, and here we have a service every Sunday
afternoon to which farmers and “resorters” come from many miles around.
The point that I wish to emphasise is that in all isolated communities
like this it is not only desirable but possible for members of widely
different churches and denominations to unite. In order to find out how
many religious sects were represented in the audience we distributed
cards on which the members of the congregation were asked to write
their names, home town and church. Here are the results on the last
three Sundays:
Adventists, 2; Baptists, 57; Roman Catholics, 42; Community churches,
11; Congregational, 39; Episcopalian, 83; Evangelical, 30; Jew,
6; Latter Day Saints, 6; Lutheran, 29; Methodist, 549; Moravian,
1; Presbyterian, 170; German Reform, 13; Christian Scientist, 12;
Swedenborgian, 2; Unitarian, 3; Universalist, 1; United Brethren, 1;
United Church of Canada, 4; members of no church, 8.
XIII
POLITICAL HISTORY
The majority of intelligent men and a considerable number of
intelligent women enjoy reading authoritative and well-written books on
political history. I recommend to them the political history of Great
Britain and Ireland during the last fifty years. I do not know of any
country or period--anyhow, since the French Revolution in 1789--that
affords so much interesting material for serious consideration. And
this for two reasons.
First, I do not believe there has ever been a country or an epoch when
so many distinguished men played so prominent parts in politics.
Second, I do not know of any time or place where we have so much
definite, precise and intimate information supplied with so much detail
by the leading actors themselves.
Consider the following list of statesmen: Gladstone, Disraeli, Bright,
Parnell, Morley, Bryce, Campbell-Bannerman, Chamberlain, Balfour,
Salisbury, Roseberry, Asquith, McCarthy, Healy, O’Connor, Lloyd
George, Haldane, Grey, Birrell, Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill.
Nearly all of these men had a first-class education, were deeply read
in the best literature, and many of them were authorities in some field
of learning outside their profession as statesmen. It is doubtful
if any period of history can show a group of politicians equal in
intellectual culture and in high character to these.
Furthermore, to obtain intimate knowledge of the “inside politics” of
the last fifty years, we have Morley’s monumental life of Gladstone,
Morley’s own _Recollections_ and _Memorandum_, many Lives of Disraeli
and Bright, T. P. O’Connor’s _Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian_,
J. A. Spender’s _Life of Campbell-Bannerman_ and his _The Public
Life_, Asquith’s _Memories and Reflections_, Churchill’s _The World
Crisis_, Swift MacNeill’s _What I Have Seen and Heard_, Haldane’s
_Autobiography_, Memoirs by Tim Healy, Memoirs by Lord Grey, and many
other works.
The history of Charles Stewart Parnell is one of the most thrillingly
dramatic and romantic that can be found in either biography or legend.
His practical ability as a statesman is summed up in a sentence in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_.
“His influence on the course of English and Irish history may be
estimated by the fact that when he entered public life home-rule for
Ireland was viewed by English politicians as a wild impracticable
dream, while within 11 years he had induced a majority of one of the
two great English political parties to treat it as an urgent necessity.”
Without meaning anything derogatory to his character as a public man,
the portraits of Parnell, his attitude of command, and the methods
by which he controlled his party have always brought to my mind the
romantic pirate of melodrama. His bearded impassive face, the greatest
“poker face” political history has ever known, his quiet tones,
his utterly mysterious personality, his glacial manner, his iron
resolution, his rule of his party, every member of which had to sign a
pledge of absolute loyalty before he could be elected to Parliament,
his intolerance of any partner in leadership, all combined to make him
a romantically grim figure, hated and dreaded by his foes, dreaded and
idolised by his followers.
They knew he alone could and would lead them to victory; and then, when
the ten years in which he emerged from obscurity to dazzling eminence
were over, and victory was in his grasp, he and his party went down to
ruin through his infatuation for one woman, and in less than a year he
was in his grave.
For he was drunk with power as well as with love; had he temporarily
withdrawn from leadership, his party would have gone on to triumph, and
within a very short period he would undoubtedly have been called back
to the throne. But the absolute power he had enjoyed for years made him
insensible to the rules of the game of life.
In September 1890, I saw Gladstone. He was eighty years old, full of
confidence and vitality, for his partnership with Parnell, which had
lost the election in 1886, was now the means of triumph, and it was a
certainty that he would soon be in a position to make the dream of Home
Rule a reality. But in November, in less than two months, the divorce
suit brought by Captain O’Shea, in which Parnell was correspondent, and
the terrible scenes in December in Committee Room No. 15 where Parnell
tried in vain to maintain his rule over his party, changed the whole
face of things.
After Gladstone brought in his Home Rule Bill in 1886, politics became
violent. The Grand Old Man was hissed in London drawing-rooms. I
remember talking in 1880 with that most extreme of Tories, Professor
Mahaffy of the University of Dublin. I thought it strange that
differences in political opinion should ruin personal friendship.
“Why,” said Mahaffy excitedly, “Gladstone and I have been intimate
friends for many years. If I met him on the street now, I would cut him
dead.”
Then I asked him about Parnell, and he said contemptuously that
Parnell’s relations with women were scandalous. But I think he was
repeating the mere gossip of hatred; I do not think he knew anything
about Mrs. O’Shea, and that he was as much surprised as anyone else
when the truth came out the very next year.
Parnell was a great man. As the years pass, he will become more
and more a legendary figure, and there will probably be dozens of
biographies written about him. Already St. John Ervine, a man of
Belfast who used to hate Parnell, has written a glowing, adulatory
Life. I think we probably come nearest to the real Parnell in T. P.
O’Connor’s _Memoirs_.
Those were the great days in Parliament. Listen to “T. P.” on Gladstone.
“The most remarkable thing in the appearance of Gladstone was his
extraordinary eyes; they were large, black, and flashing; sometimes
there came into them a look that was almost wild.... The blackness
and the brightness of his eyes were brought into greater relief by
the almost deadly pallor of his complexion.... As he walked up the
floor of the House he seemed to be enveloped by a great solitude, so
unmistakably did he stand out from all the figures around him.
I must add to this description of his extreme physical gifts the
wonderful quality of his voice. It was a powerful voice, but sweet and
melodious, and it was managed as exquisitely and as faithfully as the
song of a great prima donna. If the speech were ringing, it came to
your ears almost soft by that constant change of tone which the voice
displayed; it could whisper, it could thunder.... I have seen many
great figures, but, with all respect to the greatest among them, the
House of Commons without Gladstone seems to me as great a contrast
as a chamber illumined by a farthing dip when the electric light has
failed.”
XIV
A ROOM WITHOUT A VIEW
What is the worst poem ever written by a man of genius? It is
certain that if an anthology should be made of the most terrible
verses of the English bards the results would be both surprising
and appalling. I cannot at this moment think of any worse pair of
lines in English literature than those offered in all seriousness by
the seventeenth-century poet, Richard Crashaw. They occur in a poem
containing many lovely passages. In comparing the tearful eyes of
Mary Magdalene to many different things he perpetrated a couplet more
remarkable for ingenuity than for beauty. Her eyes are
Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans.
Alfred Tennyson, in his second volume of poems, bearing the date 1833,
included the following, though it is only fair to say that he afterward
suppressed it. It aroused the mirth of the critics and still is often
resurrected as a specimen of what Tennyson could do when he was
deserted by both inspiration and taste.
O DARLING ROOM
O darling room, my heart’s delight,
Dear room, the apple of my sight,
With thy two couches soft and white,
There is no room so exquisite,
No little room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.
For I the Nonnenwerth have seen,
And Oberwinter’s vineyards green,
Musical Lurlei; and between
The hills to Bingen have I been,
Bingen in Darmstadt, where the Rhene
Curves toward Mentz, a woody scene.
Yet never did there meet my sight,
In any town, to left or right,
A little room so exquisite,
With two such couches soft and white;
Not any room so warm and bright,
Wherein to read, wherein to write.
Imagine the profanity and laughter this piffle must have aroused among
the book reviewers; some of his severer critics called him “Miss
Alfred,” not knowing that he was a six-footer, with a voice like a sea
captain in a fog.
I have no mind to defend the poem. Apart from the fact that the
reading of it ought to teach Americans the correct accent on the word
“exquisite,” it must be admitted that when Tennyson wrote this stuff
he not only nodded but snored.
But, although it is difficult for me to understand how he could have
written it, have read it in proof and then published it, I perfectly
understand and sympathise with his enthusiasm for the room.
It is often said that polygamous gentlemen are--at any rate, for a
considerable period--monogamous; the Turk may have a long list of
wives, but he will cleave to one, either because he wants to or because
she compels him to. Thus, even in a house that has a variety of sitting
rooms, or living rooms or whatever you choose to call them, the family
will use only one. After the evening meal they will instinctively move
toward this one favourite room.
There is no doubt that even as dogs and cats have their favourite
corner or chair, or favourite cushion of nightly repose, men and women
have favourite rooms. And if this is true of a family in general, it
is especially true of a man or a woman whose professional occupation
is writing; and he becomes so attached to his room that Tennyson’s
sentiments, no matter how silly in expression, accurately represent his
emotion.
Twice a year, once in June and once in September, circumstances force
me to leave a room where I have for a long time spent the larger part
of my waking hours; I always feel the pain of parting, look around the
walls and at the desk and wish the place an affectionate farewell,
hoping to see it again, either in the autumn or in the next summer, as
the case may be. I love that room, as Tennyson loved his room. I love
it not because of the view from the windows, for a working room should
not have too good a view, but for the visions that have there appeared
to the eyes of the mind. It is the place where I have sat in thought,
where such ideas as are possible to my limited range have appeared to
me and where I have endeavoured to express them in words.
And if I can have so strong a passion for a room, with what tremendous
intensity must an inspired poet or novelist love the secluded chamber
where his imagination has found free play!
We know that Hawthorne, after his graduation from college, spent twelve
years in one room in Salem. When he revisited that room as a famous
writer he looked at it with unspeakable affection and declared that if
ever he had a biographer great mention must be made in his memoir of
this chamber, for here his mind and character had been formed and here
the immortal children of his fancy had played around him. He was alone
and not alone. As far as a mortal man may understand the feelings of a
man of genius, I understand the emotion of Hawthorne.
I think nearly every one, if he were able to afford it, would like to
have a room all his own. I believe it to be an important factor in the
development of the average boy or girl if in the family house each
child could have one room sacred to its own personality. When I was a
small boy, although I loved to be with family and friends, I also loved
to escape to my own room and read and meditate in solitude.
The age of machinery is not so adverse to spiritual development as
the age of hotels and apartment houses; there is no opportunity for
solitude, and a certain amount of solitude, serene and secure from
interruption, is almost essential for the growth of the mind. A great
many girls and women could be saved from the curse of “nerves” if there
were a place somewhere in the building where they could be for a time
alone. One of the worst evils of poverty is that there is no solitude;
eating, sleeping, living, all without privacy.
When I was a graduate student in the university I was fortunate enough
to possess for one year exactly the right kind of room. The young
philosopher, George Santayana, came to see me and exclaimed, “What a
perfect room for a scholar! The windows high up, as they should be.”
For if one is to have clear mental vision it is not well that the room
should have a view.
XV
TEA
“Thank God,” said Sydney Smith, “thank God for tea! What would the
world do without tea?--how did it exist? I am glad I was not born
before tea.” Well, I get along very well without tea, though I rejoice
to see that more and more in “big business” houses in American cities
there is a fifteen-minute pause for afternoon tea.
One of the chief differences between the life of Englishmen and of
Americans is tea. Millions of Englishmen take tea three times a day.
Tea is brought to their bedside early in the morning, and thirstily
swallowed while in a horizontal attitude. The first thing an Englishman
thinks of, if he wakes at dawn, is tea. When Arnold Bennett was
travelling in America he took a limited train from New York to Chicago.
Early in the morning he rang for the porter and when that individual
appeared he commanded nonchalantly a cup of tea. He might as well have
asked for a pot of hashish. The porter mechanically remarked that the
“diner” would be put on at such-and-such an hour. This unintelligible
contribution to the conversation was ignored by the famous novelist,
who repeated his demand for tea. He was amazed to find there was no
tea. “And you call this a first-class train!”
Then at breakfast--a substantial meal in British homes, though having
somewhat the air of a cafeteria--tea is drunk copiously. To the average
American tea for breakfast is flat and unprofitable. We are accustomed
to the most inspiring beverage in the world, actual coffee. The coffee
in England is so detestable that when an American tastes it for the
first time he thinks it is a mistake. And he is right. It is. Many
Americans give it up and reluctantly order tea. In my judgment, for
breakfast the worst coffee is better than the best tea.
There are many Americans who have tea served at luncheon. For some
reason this seems to the Englishman sacrilegious. The late Professor
Mahaffy, who is now (I suppose) drinking nectar, was absolutely
horrified to find that in my house he was offered a cup of tea at
lunch. “Tea for lunch!” he screamed, and talked about it for the rest
of the meal.
I was invited by a charming American lady to meet an English author
at her house for luncheon. Tea was served and she said deprecatingly
to the British author, “I don’t suppose you have tea at this time
in England.” “Oh, yes,” said he, “the servants often have it below
stairs.” To my delight, the hostess said, “Now, Mr. ----, aren’t you
really ashamed of offering me an insult like that? Isn’t that remark of
yours exactly the kind of thing you are going to be ashamed of when you
think it over, all by yourself?”
At precisely 4:13 P.M. every day the average Englishman has a thirst
for the astringent taste of tea. He does not care for hot water or
hot lemonade coloured with tea. He likes his tea so strong that to me
it has a hairy flavour. Many years ago the famous Scot William Archer
invited me to his rooms in the Hotel Belmont, New York, for afternoon
tea at 4:15. He had several cups and at five o’clock excused himself,
as he had to go out to an American home for tea. I suggested that he
had already had it. “Oh, that makes no difference.”
There are several good reasons (besides bad coffee) for tea in England.
Breakfast is often at nine (the middle of the morning to me), so that
early tea is desirable. Dinner is often at eight-thirty, so that
afternoon tea is by no means superfluous. Furthermore, of the three
hundred and sixty-five days of the year in England, very, very few are
warm; and afternoon tea is not only cheerful and sociable but in most
British interiors really necessary to start the blood circulating.
There are few more agreeable moments in life than tea in an English
country house in winter. It is dark at four o’clock. The family and
guests come in from the cold air. The curtains are drawn, the open
wood fire is blazing, the people sit down around the table and with a
delightful meal--for the most attractive food in England is served at
afternoon tea--drink of the cheering beverage.
William Cowper, in the eighteenth century, gave an excellent
description:
Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast,
Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
And while the bubbling and loud-hissing urn
Throws up a steamy column, and the cups
That cheer but not inebriate wait on each,
So let us welcome peaceful evening in.
Not long before this poem was written the traveller Jonas Hanway
had the bad luck to publish an essay on tea, “considered as
pernicious to health, obstructing industry, and impoverishing the
nation,” which naturally drew the artillery fire of the great Dr.
Johnson. Sir John Hawkins, in his life of Johnson, comments on this
controversy. He says: “That it is pernicious to health is disputed
by physicians”--where have I heard something like that recently? But
Hawkins continues: “Bishop Burnet, for many years, drank sixteen large
cups of it every morning, and never complained that it did him the
least injury.”
As for Johnson, “he was a lover of tea to an excess hardly credible;
whenever it appeared, he was almost raving, and by his impatience to
be served, his incessant calls for those ingredients which make that
liquor palatable, and the haste with which he swallowed it down, he
seldom failed to make that a fatigue to every one else, which was
intended as a general refreshment.”
In nearly every English novel I find the expression, “I am dying for
my tea!” On a voyage to Alaska, where tea was served on deck every
afternoon, at precisely the same moment an elderly British lady
appeared from below with precisely the same exclamation: “Oh, is there
tea going?” And on her face was a holy look.
Alfred Noyes told me that during the war, when he was writing up
important incidents for the benefit of the public, he was assigned to
interview the sailors immediately after the tremendous naval battle of
Jutland. He found a bluejacket who had been sent aloft and kept there
during the fearful engagement, when shells weighing half a ton came
hurtling through the air and when ships blew up around him. Thinking he
would get a marvellous “story” out of this sailor, Mr. Noyes asked him
to describe his sensations during those frightful hours. All the man
said was, “Well, of course, I had to miss my tea!”
XVI
THE WEATHER
Nearly all the great poetry of the world, ancient and modern, has been
written in Europe. This fact should never be forgotten in reading
literature that alludes to the weather. The reason every one talks
about the weather is not that the average person has nothing else to
say; it is that the weather is usually the most interesting topic
available. It is the first thing we think of in the hour of waking; it
affects our plans, projects and temperament.
When I was a little boy at school there was a song sung in unison
called “Hail, Autumn, Jovial Fellow!” It seemed to me to express
correctly the true character of autumn. It was not until I had reached
maturity in years that I discovered that the song, as judged by the
world’s most famous writers, was a misfit. Instead of autumn’s being
jovial, it was dull, damp, dark, depressing. To be sure, I never
really felt that way about it; the evidence of my eyes was in favour
of the school song, but, as the great poets had given autumn a bad
reputation, I supposed in some way she must have earned it.
Still later I learned that Goethe was right when he said that in order
to understand a poet you must personally visit the country where he
wrote. Literary geography is seldom taught or seriously considered, but
it is impossible to read famous authors intelligently without knowing
their climatic and geographical environment. So keenly did I come to
feel about this that I finally prepared a cardboard map of England,
marking only the literary places, and I required my students to become
familiar with it. One of them subsequently wrote me a magnificent
testimonial, which I have often considered printing on the margin of
the map.
Dear Mr. Phelps--I have been bicycling all over England this
summer, and have found your Literary Map immensely useful. I have
carried it inside my shirt, and I think on several occasions it has
saved me from an attack of pneumonia.
There are millions of boys and girls studying Shakespeare in South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand; the poet’s frequent allusions to the
climate and the weather must seem strange.
That you have such a February face.
February “down under” is midsummer. Southern latitudes give the lie to
Shakespeare’s metaphors.
The reason autumn has so bad a name in the world’s poetry and prose is
that autumn in Northern Europe is a miserable season. In London, Paris,
Berlin, November (and often October) is one of the worst times of the
year. A chronically overcast sky, a continual drizzle, a damp chill
even on mistily rainless days, combine to produce gloom. The first
autumn and winter I spent in Paris revised my notions of those two
seasons. As an American, I had thought of the difference between summer
and winter as a difference only in temperature; I reasonably expected
as much sunshine in autumn and winter as in summer. A typical January
day in New York is cold and cloudless.
Well, in Paris the sun disappeared for weeks at a time, and on the rare
occasions when it shone people ran out in the street to look at it.
One of the worst jokes in the world is the expression, “sunny France.”
The French themselves know better. François Coppée wrote of the “rare
smiles” of the Norman climate, and Anatole France, describing a pretty
girl, wrote “Her eyes were grey; the grey of the Paris sky.”
For the same reason “Italian skies” have been overpraised, because
their eulogists are English or French or German. The Italian sky
is usually so much better than the sky of more northerly European
localities that it seems good by contrast. Now, as a matter of fact
the winter sky over Bridgeport, Conn., is superior in brightness and
blueness to the sky over Florence or Venice.
November, one of the best months of the year in America, is dreaded
by all who live in France, England or Germany. Walking in New Haven
one brilliant (and quite typical) day in mid-November, exhibiting the
university and city to a visiting French professor, I enquired, “What
do you think of our November climate?” He replied, “It is crazy.”
A strange thing is that Bryant, born in the glorious Berkshires of
western Massachusetts, where autumn, instead of being pale and wet as
the European poets have described it, is brilliant and inspiring, all
blue and gold, did not use his eyes; he followed the English poetical
tradition.
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year.
James Whitcomb Riley used the evidence of his senses, and wrote an
autumnal masterpiece.
O it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best....
They’s something kind o’ hearty-like about the atmosphere
When the beat of summer’s over and the coolin’ fall is here--Of
course we miss the flowers, and the blossoms on the trees,
And the mumble of the hummin’-birds and buzzin’ of the bees;
But the air’s so appetizin’; and the landscape through the haze
Of a crisp and sunny morning of the airly autumn days
Is a picture that no painter has the colorin’ to mock--
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock.
One difference between the temperament of the typical Englishman and
the typical American is caused largely by the climate, and foreigners
in writing books about us should not forget the fact. If nearly every
morning the sky were overcast and the air filled with drizzle, we might
not be quite so enthusiastic.
On the other hand, the early spring in England and France is more
inspiring than ours, perhaps by reason of the darkness of winter. It
comes much earlier. Alfred Housman says:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
In our Northern American States a blossoming fruit tree at Eastertide
would be a strange spectacle.
XVII
WAR
War is a sentimental affair; that is why it is so difficult to abolish.
War is opposed to the dictates of common sense, prudence, rationality,
and wisdom. But the sentiments of man and the passions of man are
deeper, more elemental, and more primitive than his intelligence,
knowledge, and reasoning powers. For intelligence and morality belong
to man alone; his instincts he shares with the entire animal creation.
My own plan for getting rid of war would not win a peace prize, because
it would never be adopted. But I believe it strikes at the root of
war--sentiment. My plan would be to spoil the good looks of the
officers and also take away all their drums, fifes, and brass bands.
The uniforms are altogether too handsome, too attractive, too becoming.
It is a familiar saying that every woman is in love with a uniform;
to which I would add that every man is also. The naval officers look
magnificent in their bright blue frock coats, their yellow buttons,
and their shining epaulets. These gorgeous hawks of war are decorated
by the government as lavishly as Nature, the greatest of all tailors,
fits out her birds of prey. A naval officer excels in brilliance the
appearance of a civilian, even as the gay feathers of a sparrowhawk
excel those of a sparrow.
Furthermore, every military and naval officer has a capable man to
look after his wardrobe. Not only are his various uniforms beautiful
in design and ornamentation, they are without spot or blemish. His
trousers are mathematically creased, his coat unwrinkled, his linen
like virgin snow. My suggestion is, that if you really want to get rid
of war, the first thing to do is to compel all professional warriors to
wear ill-fitting hand-me-downs, shabby and unpressed, and without gold
trimmings. The glamour and the glory would vanish with the gold.
Then I would abolish the dance of death. Instead of having perfect
drill, hundreds of men deploying with exactitude, I would make them
look like Coxey’s Army, every man for himself, and the devil take the
hindmost.
But above all, I would silence the drum and fife, and the big brass
band. Although I myself hate war, and should like to see it abolished,
whenever I hear the thrilling roll of the drums and the shrill scream
of the fifes, followed by the sight and sound of marching men, their
bayonets gleaming in the sunshine, I want to cry. A lump comes up in my
throat and I am ready to fight anybody or anything. If you really want
to get rid of war, you must not surround it with pomp and majesty, you
must not give it such a chance at our hearts.
Although wars are never started by warriors, but only by politicians
and tradesmen, for the very last place where a foreign war could begin
would be at Annapolis or West Point; still, there is no doubt that high
officers have a ripping time during a great war, and that the surviving
soldiers love to talk about it (among themselves) at their regular
reunions in later years. Shakespeare, himself no soldier, understood
perfectly how the professional feels. This is the farewell he put in
the mouth of Othello:
Farewell the tranquil mind: farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
Even so: Othello was a sentimentalist. He had more passion than brains.
That is why Iago and not Desdemona made him jealous; that is why,
with the loss of war and women, he lost everything. He was without any
intellectual resources.
The leaders of thought and the leaders of morals have usually been
against war. Although the historical books of the Old Testament and
the emotional Psalms celebrated the glory of war, the contemporary
sober-minded prophets were against it. They prophesied the coming of
universal peace, when the money spent on armaments would be devoted to
agriculture and to education. The appearance of Jesus was the signal
for peace on earth and good will to men.
Jonathan Swift, more than two hundred years ago, said that men were
less intelligent than beasts. A single wild beast would fight for his
food or his mate; but you could never, said Swift, induce a lot of wild
beasts to line up in dress parade, and then fight another set of wild
beasts, whom they did not know.
Benjamin Franklin, the wisest of Americans, immediately after the
Revolutionary War, which he had helped to win, said there had never
been a good war or a bad peace.
But although the wisdom and morality of mankind have been against war,
war goes on; the moment it breaks out in any country, all the forces
of sentimentalism are employed to glorify, yes, even to sanctify its
course. The first great casualty is Reason.
What shall we say of a scholar like the late Sir Walter Raleigh,
Professor of English Literature at Oxford? He continually ridiculed
religion for its sentimentality; but the moment the great war broke
out, no school-girl was more sentimental than he.
Thus the hope for peace lies not in the poets, the literary men, the
preachers and the philanthropists; the hope lies in hardheaded Scotsmen
like Ramsay MacDonald, whose idealism is built on a foundation of
shrewd sense.
XVIII
MAN AND BOY
F. P. A., in his excellent Conning Tower in the _New York World_ for
the Ides of March, pays a fine tribute to E. W. Howe and his paragraphs
long ago in the Atchison _Globe_. He says: “There were two paragraphs
that appeared just about the time we began reading the _Globe_, which
we are willing to bet were written by Ed himself. He was less oracular
in those days. They were something like the following:
‘We have been editing a newspaper for twenty-five years, and have
learned that the only thing a newspaper can safely attack is the
man-eating shark.
‘A boy thinks, “What a fine time a man has!” And a man thinks,
“What a fine time a boy has!” And what a rotten time they both
have!’”
There is a strange reluctance on the part of most people to admit that
they enjoy life. Having the honour of a personal acquaintance with both
F. P. A. and Ed Howe, it is my belief they both had a happy childhood
and that they are now having a good time in this strangest of all
possible worlds. No one can judge another’s inner state of mind, but as
these distinguished humorists are men of unusually high intelligence
I think they find life immensely interesting; and to be constantly
interested is to be happy.
I remember a magnificent reply made by F. P. A. to a remark of that
hirsute Englishman, D. H. Lawrence; the latter, commenting in that
tactless fashion so characteristic of foreign visitors to these shores,
said, “It must be terrible to be funny every day.” “No,” said F. P. A.,
“not so terrible as never to be funny at all.”
I spent an agreeable afternoon in Florida talking with Ed Howe, or
rather in hearing him talk. He told a succession of anecdotes and
stories, and it was clear that he not only enjoyed telling them, which
he did with consummate art, but that he enjoyed having them in his mind.
Why is it so many people are afraid to admit they are happy? I have a
large and intimate acquaintance with farmers; many of them are splendid
men. But how cautious they are in their replies to casual questions! If
everything is going as well as could possibly be expected and you ask
them how they are, they say, “Can’t complain.”
If a man says, “I have had and am having a happy life,” he is regarded
by many as being a shallow and superficial thinker; but if he says,
“My most earnest wish is that I had never been born,” many believe that
he has a profound mind.
With regard to the saying quoted from the Atchison _Globe_ that a boy
thinks a man has a fine time and a man thinks a boy has a fine time and
in reality both have a rotten time--well, the statement, whoever said
it, is shallow and untrue. When I was a boy I had lots of fun, and I
deeply pitied old men of thirty-two because I supposed they had no fun
at all. Then, when I became a man, I realised how enormously richer in
happiness is manhood than boyhood.
The average American boy has a pretty good time. What fun, on emerging
from school on Friday afternoon, to know that tomorrow is Saturday!
What fun to play games, to go on exploring adventures in neighbouring
woods, to have picnics and jollifications, to live a life of active
uselessness! The mere physical health of boyhood makes one feel like a
young dog released from a chain. “Mere living” is good.
I remember seeing a picture of an old man addressing a small boy. “How
old are you?” “Well, if you go by what Mama says, I’m five. But if you
go by the fun I’ve had, I’m most a hundred.”
Joseph Conrad, who was a grave and serious man, said he was neither
an optimist nor a pessimist. He did not think life was perfect, but
pessimism, he said, was intellectual arrogance. He made the point that
no matter what was one’s religion or philosophy, this at all events is
a spectacular universe.
To deny life, to show no appreciation of it, seems to me both
ungrateful and stupid. If you showed a man the Himalaya Mountains,
the ocean in a storm, sunrise in the desert, the Court of Honour in
1893, the Cathedral of Chartres, and he looked at them all with a
lack-lustre eye, we should think him stupid. Well, the universe itself
is tremendously spectacular, and the best shows in it are free. To go
through life in rebellion, disgust or even in petulance, is the sign,
not of a great, but of a dull mind.
How ridiculous it is for a boy to wish he were a man and how much more
ridiculous for a man to wish he were a boy! It is as silly as crying
for the moon. Instead of always longing for something beyond our reach,
why not simply make the best of what we have? This would be a platitude
if it were not that so very few people follow it.
There is certainly enough sorrow in the world, but I sometimes think
we should enjoy life more if we had more of the divine gift of
appreciation, if we were not so unappreciative. When Addison thanked
God for the various pleasures of life, he thanked Him most of all for a
cheerful heart.
More than two hundred years ago he wrote in the _Spectator_:
Ten thousand thousand precious gifts
My daily thanks employ;
Nor is the least a cheerful heart
That tastes these gifts with joy.
XIX
AMBITION
What do we really mean when we say of a man, “He is too good for this
world?” Do we mean exactly that, do we mean he is so far loftier in
character than the average person that he seems almost out of place in
a world like this? Don’t we rather mean that he lacks human sympathy
and understanding, and therefore can be of no real use to anybody?
If you remember the character of Hilda in Hawthorne’s novel, _The
Marble Faun_, you may remember that she used to be held up as an ideal
of the religious life. “Her soul was like a star and dwelt apart.” But
from the selfish sanctity of its seclusion, no real good resulted; no
one was aided or cheered in the struggle of life. No one could confide
in her, for she could not even confide in herself. Her nature may have
had the purity of an angel, but it lacked the purity of a noble woman.
She was no help to sinners; she was their despair. Her purity was like
that of one who hesitates to rescue a drowning man, for fear of soiling
his clothes.
Hilda gave up the world and worldly pleasure; easily enough, for she
abhorred it, and felt ill at ease in society. But though she gave up
many things precious to the average person, she had no conception of
the meaning of the word _self_-denial.
For the true sacrifice, if one wishes to be of real use in this world,
consists not in the giving of things, but in giving oneself. If a man’s
life consists not in the abundance of things which he possesses, so the
sacrificial life consists not in the number of luxuries one surrenders,
but in the devotion of oneself, in the denial of the will. There is a
certain kind of purity which is fundamentally selfish.
This manner of asceticism is not particularly common nowadays, and we
need not fear that it will be too generally practiced. I am calling
attention to it in order to show that selfishness may take on the mask
of purity or of respectability, a selfishness that springs from pure
moral motives and a longing for the elevation of character.
But there is another type of respectable selfishness that is far more
common, possibly more common in America than in any other country. It
is not usually recognised as selfishness, but regarded as one of the
greatest--perhaps the greatest--of the virtues. It is seen chiefly
among earnest and ambitious young men, who assume that life is not a
holiday, but a serious affair, a struggle, a strictly competitive race,
where if you stop a moment, even for reflexion, you are left behind.
We are bound to respect these men. They have at all events found out
half the secret of life. They have set before themselves some goal, in
politics, in business, in literature, and they are determined to reach
it. They are equally determined to gain the prize by no dishonourable
means. Their minds are full of the lessons learned from their
predecessors, men who by the sacrifice of temporary pleasures, by the
refusal to indulge in recreation or relaxation, have surpassed their
competitors and reached the top.
We are constantly told that it is only by intense concentration, by
terrific efforts day and night, and by keeping the end constantly in
view that one can attain success. Surely these young men are to be
admired, surely they are models, examples worthy of emulation?
Well, they are better than criminals, they are better than parasites,
they are better than drones. But their driving motive is selfishness.
Tennyson wrote _The Palace of Art_, Browning wrote _Paracelsus_,
because each of these poets knew that his individual danger was not
what is usually known as “temptation.” They knew that they would never
go to hell by the crowded highway of dissipation, for they were above
the mere call of the blood. Their danger lay in a high and noble
ambition, which has wrecked many first-rate minds.
Modern life tends to encourage this respectable selfishness. The
central law of the so-called science of Economics is selfishness. A
whole science is built on one foundation--that every man in the world
will get all he can for himself. The subject is naturally studied not
from an ethical, but from a scientific standpoint. Life is a race.
Now I believe that Efficiency--mere practical success in the world--is
as false an ideal as asceticism. If the morality of withdrawal is not
good enough, neither is the morality of success. Those deserve the
highest admiration and the most profound respect who have actually
aided their human brethren, who have left the world better than they
found it.
This is by no means a hopeless ideal of character. It is not necessary
to crush a tyrant or to organise a revolution or to reconstruct
society or to be a professional reformer. There are plenty of
professional reformers who have tremendous enthusiasm for humanity and
who have never helped an individual. Those who by unselfish lives and
consideration for others elevate the tone of the community in which
they live and who by their presence make others happier, these are the
salt of the earth. Their daily existence is more eloquent than a sermon.
American young men and women in our High Schools and universities
are not often face to face with the mystery of life. They have no
conception of the amount of suffering in the world. Their own lives are
comparatively free from it, in many cases free even from anxiety. These
boys and girls are for the most part sensible, alert, quick-witted,
and practical; what I should like to see would be a change in their
ideals from mere Success to something nobler. I should like to see them
devoting their intelligence and energy to the alleviation of suffering
and to the elevation of human thought and life.
If one still believes that the highest happiness and satisfaction come
from the attainment of any selfish ambition, no matter how worthy
in itself, it is well to remember the significance of the fact that
Goethe, acknowledged to be one of the wisest of men, made Faust happy
only when he was unselfishly interested in the welfare of others;
and to remember that Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the shrewdest of all
shrewd Americans, found the greatest pleasure of his long life in two
things--public service and individual acts of kindness.
XX
BIRDS AND STATESMEN
When, in the Spring of 1910, Theodore Roosevelt was on his way to
England from his African explorations, he wrote a strange letter to
the British Foreign Office in London. I call it a strange letter,
because it is the kind of epistle one would not expect to be sent by an
ex-executive of one country to the Foreign Office of another. He wrote
that during his stay in England he would like to make an excursion
into the woods, hear the English songbirds and learn their names; in
order that he might do this satisfactorily and intelligently, would the
Foreign Office please select some naturalist who knew the note of every
bird in England and request him to accompany Mr. Roosevelt on this
expedition?
Well, the head of the British Foreign Office was Sir Edward Grey and he
himself knew the note of every singing bird in England--a remarkable
accomplishment for one of the busiest statesmen in the world. He
therefore appointed himself as bird-guide for the ex-President of the
United States.
The two distinguished men stood on a railway platform one day in May
and were surrounded by reporters, who supposed that a new world-problem
of the first magnitude was on the carpet. But the two men told the
reporters that they were going away into the country for two days,
did not wish to be disturbed, and asked the journalists to leave them
alone. Accordingly, it was generally believed that Roosevelt and Grey
were absorbed in the discussion of international affairs, and as the
great war broke out a few years later, some went so far as to believe
then that it had its origin in this sinister interview.
Now, as a matter of fact, the two men did not mention either war or
politics; they went a-walking in the New Forest and every time they
heard the voice of a bird, Grey told Roosevelt the singer’s name.
They both agreed (and so do I) that the English blackbird is the best
soloist in Great Britain.
It is a curious fact that the four most famous birds in English
literature are none of them native in America. The Big Four are the
Nightingale, the Skylark, the Blackbird and the Cuckoo. From Chaucer to
Kipling the British poets have chanted the praise of the Nightingale.
And of all the verses in his honour, it is perhaps the tribute by Keats
that is most worthy of the theme.
Thou was not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oftimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
We never had nightingales in the United States until Edward W. Bok
imported them into his Bird Paradise in Florida. Previous attempts
to bring them over had failed; the birds invariably died. Some
investigators declared that this tragedy was owing to the change of
diet; but of course the real reason for their death was American
poetry. After the nightingales had listened for centuries to Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, etc., the change to the level
of American verse was too much for them, and they died of shock.
The English skylark leaves the grass and soars aloft, singing his heart
out, so that after he has disappeared in the sky, we hear his voice
coming down out of the blue, like a revelation. One of the poets calls
it a “sightless song.”
Shakespeare sends the skylark to the gate of heaven.
And Shelley’s poem on the skylark expresses the ethereal nature of the
soaring voice of this bird:
Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar, and
Soaring ever singest.
American blackbirds do not sing well; the so-called crow-blackbird, so
common in flocks in autumn, makes a noise like tonsillitis, or as if he
had a boy’s voice in process of changing, or as if he were a hinge that
needed oiling. Our redwing blackbird, with his scarlet epaulets, has a
good-natured and perky wheeze, which can hardly be called singing. But
the English and Continental blackbird pours out of his throat the most
heavenly melody. One Winter day in Munich, in the midst of a snowstorm,
I saw a blackbird perched on a tree directly in front of the University
building. He was “hove to,” that is, he had his beak turned directly
into the wind, and as the snowflakes beat against his little face, he
sent straight into the gale the loveliest music. Tennyson has observed
how the voice of the blackbird loses its beauty in the hot Summer days.
A golden bill! the silver tongue,
Cold February loved, is dry:
Plenty corrupts the melody
That made thee famous once, when young;
And in the sultry garden-squares,
Now thy flute-notes are changed to coarse,
I hear thee not at all, or hoarse
As when a hawker hawks his wares.
The nearest we Americans can get to the English cuckoo is the
abominable cuckoo clock. The voice of the English cuckoo sounds exactly
like the clock, only of course you can’t train him to strike right. In
addition to his regular accomplishment, he is a ventriloquist and can
throw his voice a tremendous distance. One day, crossing a field in
Sussex, I heard the loud double note of the cuckoo, apparently directly
behind me. He was in reality a furlong away.
Wordsworth says:
O blithe New-comer! I have heard,
I hear thee and rejoice.
O Cuckoo! shall I call thee Bird,
Or but a wandering Voice?
While I am lying on the grass
Thy twofold shout I hear,
From hill to hill it seems to pass,
At once far off and near.
Concerning the all too common crimes of shooting, snaring, and eating
little singing birds, the English poet, Ralph Hodgson, has expressed
himself in words that ought to be everywhere read:
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in a vision
The worm in the wheat
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat:
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
XXI
RUSSIA BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
The best way to invade Russia is by sea; and I advise those who
plan to visit the Soviet Republic to go via Stockholm. Copenhagen,
Christiania, Stockholm are three interesting cities and should be seen
in that order. Stockholm, the “Venice of the North,” is one of the most
beautiful, most picturesque, and most attractive places in the world.
It is surprising that the short sea voyage from Stockholm to Saint
Petersburg (now Leningrad) is not better known; it is enchantingly
beautiful. We left Stockholm at six o’clock in the evening of a fine
September day, and as our tiny steamer drew away, the sunset light
over the fair city hung a new picture on the walls of my mind. It took
some five hours to reach the Baltic, five hours of constantly changing
scenery, one view melting into another like a succession of dissolving
panoramas. Hundreds of miniature islands dotted with châteaux and
country houses; winking lighthouse towers; “the grey sea and the long
black land.”
An impossible half-moon lent the last touch of glory to the scene. We
stood on the top deck and beheld the spacious firmament on high, thick
inlaid with patines of bright gold; while the long level light of the
crazy moon fell across the darkening water and the myriad islands.
In the middle of the night we crossed the Baltic, and in the whitening
dawn entered the gulf of Finland. The air was nipping and eager, but
the sun rose in a cloudless sky. All day long the steamer nosed her way
through the blue sea, twisting and turning among the countless points
of the earth’s surface that were just able to keep their heads above
water. A few of these were covered with green grass, and supported
white farm buildings where laughing children accompanied by dignified
dogs ran out to see our transit; but for the most part these elevations
were bald, with a tall lighthouse as sole decoration.
At five in the afternoon we reached Helsingfors (still my farthest
north) and stepped ashore to spend six hours in seeing the town, the
boat not proceeding toward Russia until late in the night. The clouded
sky was low and harsh the next morning, and the sea was surly. Toward
noon it cleared, and early in the afternoon we saw the gilded domes and
spires of Holy Russia. After a long delay with passports, we drove
across one of the bridges over the Neva to our hotel at a corner of the
Nevski Prospekt. Although it was only September, the temperature was
under fifty, and seemed colder.
I had a severe cold, which had its origin in a chill I had caught in
rashly touching a piece of toast that a waiter brought me in a London
hotel. But I was right in style. Accustomed as I was to see on the
streets of any American city the healthy, cheerful, well-clad and
well-shod men and women, I was appalled by the faces and the clothes of
the Russians. What they look like today I know not, but a more unhappy
looking crowd than I saw every day on the streets of Russian cities I
have never seen outside of pictures of Hell. Many of the people had
their ears and mouths bandaged and on their feet were (if they could
afford it) enormous knee-boots. All seemed to be suffering from the
foot and mouth disease.
Never shall I forget the boots and overcoats and uniforms on the Nevski
Prospekt. The question of leg-clothes would have interested the author
of _Sartor Resartus_. In Edinburgh all the men and some of the women
wore knickers, with stockings that seemed an inch thick. Compared with
Europeans, Americans are tropically clad. In order to avoid the glare
of publicity, I bought in Scotland a homespun golf suit.
I tried these abbreviated trousers just once on the Nevski Prospekt.
Everybody stopped to stare. Had I worn a flowing purple robe, I should
not have attracted such attention. Military officers gazed at me in
cold amazement, as though I had leprosy; while the more naïve passers
made audible comment, which fortunately I could not translate. Then
I tried the experiment of conventional clothing, but wore low shoes.
Everyone gazed at my feet, some in wonder, some in admiration, some in
terror. I felt as I did many years ago when I wore a striped cap in
Brussels. A stranger looked at me earnestly and then said in an almost
reverent tone, and he said it three times: _Nom de Dieu!_
In America our citizens show much the same interest in strange
clothing. Professor E. B. Wilson, a distinguished mathematician, bought
a suit of clothes in Paris. He wore it only once in America. A citizen
gazed at him steadfastly, and said “J----!”
The faces of the common people in Russian cities were sad to behold,
whether one saw them on the street or in church. Not only was there no
hilarity, such as one sees everywhere in American towns; those faces
indicated a total lack of illuminating intelligence. They were blank,
dull, apathetic, helpless. Gorki said that the people in Russia had so
little to look forward to that they were glad when their own houses
burned down, as it made a break in the dull routine of life.
One afternoon I walked the entire length of the Nevski Prospekt, no
mean achievement in a heavy overcoat. I began at the banks of the
restless, blustering Neva, passed the extraordinary statue of Peter the
Great, came through the garden by the statue of Gogol, and with the
thin gold spire of the Admiralty at my back, entered the long avenue.
I followed the immense extension of the Nevski, clear to the cemetery,
and stood reverently before the tomb of Dostoevski. Here in January,
1881, the body of the great novelist was laid in the grave, in the
presence of forty thousand mourners.
In a corner of the enclosure I found the tomb of the composer
Chaikovski; I gazed on the last resting-place of Glinka, father of
Russian music. On account of the marshy soil, the graves are built
above instead of below the surface of the ground, exactly as they are
in New Orleans. It is in reality a city of the dead, the only place
where a Russian finds peace. I passed out on the other side of the
cemetery, walked through the grounds of the convent, and found myself
abruptly clear from the city, on the edge of a vast plain.
XXII
THE DEVIL
It is rather a pity that the Devil has vanished with Santa Claus
and other delectable myths; the universe is more theatrical with a
“personal devil” roaming at large, seeking whom he may devour. In the
book of Job the Devil played the part of the return of the native,
coming along in the best society in the cosmos to appear before the
Presence. And when he was asked where he came from, he replied in a
devilishly debonair manner, “From going to and fro in the earth, and
from walking up and down in it.”
There are so many things in this world that seem to be the Devil’s
handiwork, and there are so many people who look like the devil, that
it seems as if he could not be extinct. His chief service to the
universal scene was to keep virtue from becoming monotonous; to warn
even saints that they must mind their step; to prove that eternal
vigilance is the price of safety. The Enemy of Mankind never took a
holiday. Homer might nod, but not he. In fact, on human holidays he
was, if possible, unusually efficient. The idleness of man was the
opportunity of Satan.
The principle of evil is so active, so tireless, so penetrating that
the simplest way to account for it is to suppose that men and things
receive constantly the personal attention of the Devil. Weeds, and
not vegetables, grow naturally; illness, not health, is contagious;
children and day-labourers are not instinctively industrious; champagne
tastes better than cocoa.
Throughout the Middle Ages, although every one believed steadfastly
in the reality of the Devil and that he was the most unscrupulous of
all foes, there was a certain friendliness with him, born, I suppose,
of daily intimacy. It was like the way in which hostile sentries will
hobnob with one another, swap tobacco, etc., in the less tense moments
of war. The Devil was always just around the corner and would be glad
of an invitation to drop in.
Thus in the mediæval mystery plays, the forerunners of our modern
theatres, the Devil was always the Clown. He supplied “comic relief”
and was usually the most popular personage in the performance. He
appeared in the conventional makeup, a horrible mask, horns, cloven
hoofs and prehensile tail, with smoke issuing from mouth, ears and
posterior. He did all kinds of acrobatic feats, and his appearance
was greeted with shouts of joy. In front of that part of the stage
representing Hellmouth he was sometimes accompanied with “damned
souls,” persons wearing black tights with yellow stripes. On an
examination at Yale I set the question, “Describe the costume of the
characters in the mystery plays.” One of the students wrote: “The
damned souls wore Princeton colours.”
The modern circus clown comes straight from the Devil. When you see
him stumble and fall all over himself, whirl his cap aloft and catch
it on his head, distract the attention of the spectators away from the
gymnasts to his own antics, he is doing exactly what his ancestor the
Devil did in the mediæval plays.
It is at first thought singular that those audiences, who believed
implicitly in a literal hell of burning flame, should have taken the
Devil as the chief comic character. I suppose the only way to account
for this is to remember how essential a feature of romantic art is the
element of the grotesque, which is a mingling of horror and humour,
like our modern spook plays. If you pretend that you are a hobgoblin
and chase a child, the child will flee in real terror, but the moment
you stop, the child will say, “Do that again.”
There are many legends of compacts with the Devil, where some
individual has sold his soul to gain the whole world. The most famous
of these stories is, of course, _Faust_, but there are innumerable
others. Here is a story I read in an American magazine some fifty years
ago.
A man, threatened with financial ruin, was sitting in his library when
the maid brought in a visiting card and announced that a gentleman
would like to be admitted. On the card was engraved
Mr. Apollo Lyon.
As the man looked at it his eyes blurred, the two words ran together,
so they seemed to form the one word
Apollyon.
The gentleman was shown in; he was exquisitely dressed and was
evidently a suave man of the world. He proposed that the one receiving
him should have prosperity and happiness for twenty years. Then Mr.
Lyon would call again and be asked three questions. If he failed to
answer any of the three the man should keep his wealth and prosperity.
If all three were correctly answered the man must accompany Mr. Lyon.
The terms were accepted; all went well for twenty years. At the
appointed time appeared Mr. Lyon, who had not aged in the least; he was
the same smiling, polished gentleman. He was asked a question that had
floored all the theologians. Mr. Lyon answered it without hesitation.
The second question had stumped all the philosophers, but it had no
difficulties for Mr. Lyon.
Then there was a pause, and the sweat stood out on the questioner’s
face. At that moment his wife came in from shopping. She was rosy and
cheerful. After being introduced to Mr. Lyon she noticed her husband
was nervous. He denied this, but said that he and Mr. Lyon were playing
a little game of three questions and he did not want to lose. She asked
permission to put the third question and in desperation her husband
consented. She held out her new hat and asked: “Mr. Lyon, which is the
front end of this hat?” Mr. Lyon turned it around and around, and then
with a strange exclamation went straight through the ceiling, leaving
behind him a strong smell of sulphur.
XXIII
THE FORSYTE SAGA
It is impossible to say what books of our time will be read at the
close of this century; it is probable that many of the poems and tales
of Kipling, the lyrics of Housman, dramatic narratives by Masefield,
some plays by Shaw and Barrie, will for a long time survive their
authors.
Among the novels, I do not know of any that has or ought to have a
better chance for the future than the books written about the family of
the Forsytes by John Galsworthy. They at present hold about the same
place in contemporary English literature as is held in France by Romain
Rolland’s _Jean Christophe_. Both are works of great length which
reflect with remarkable accuracy the political, social, commercial,
artistic life and activity of the twentieth century, the one in
England, the other on the Continent.
Entirely apart from their appeal as good novels, that is to say, apart
from one’s natural interest in the plot and in the characters, both
are social documents of great value. If the future historian wishes
to know English and Continental society in the first quarter of the
twentieth century, he will do well to give attention and reflexion to
these two works of “fiction.”
John Galsworthy was just under forty when in 1906 he published a novel
called _The Man of Property_. He had produced very little before this,
but it took no especial critical penetration to discover that the new
book was a masterpiece. The family of the Forsytes bore a striking
resemblance to one another in basic traits and ways of thinking, yet
each was sharply individualised. A new group of persons had been added
to British fiction. The word “Property,” as in Tennyson’s _Northern
Farmer_, was the keynote, and before long it began to appear that
one of the most dramatic of contrasts was to be used as the subject.
This is the struggle between the idea of Property and the idea of
Beauty--between the commercial, acquisitive temperament and the more
detached, but equally passionate artistic temperament.
Even in the pursuit of beauty Mr. Soames Forsyte never forgot the idea
of property. He was a first-class business man in the city, but he was
also an expert judge of paintings, which he added to his collection.
Oil and canvas do not completely satisfy any healthy business man; so
Soames added to his collection, as the masterpiece in his gallery, an
exquisitely beautiful woman whom he made his wife.
The philosophy of love comes in here. What is love? Is it exclusively
the idea of possession, which often is no more dignified than the
predatory instinct or is it the unalloyed wish that the object of one’s
love should be as happy and secure as possible? No one can truly and
sincerely love Beauty either in the abstract or in the concrete if
one’s eyes are clouded by predatory desire. One must look at beauty
without the wish to possess it if one is really to appreciate beauty.
A first-class French chef would look into the big front window of a
confectioner’s shop and fully appreciate the art and taste that created
those delectable edibles; but a hungry boy who looked at the same
objects would not appreciate them critically at all.
The wife of Soames finds him odious, so odious that we cannot
altogether acquit her of guilt in marrying him; and Soames, who as a
Man of Property expected her to fulfill her contract, did not make
himself more physically attractive by insisting on his rights. She left
him for a man of exactly the opposite temperament.
When Mr. Galsworthy finished this fine novel, he had no intention of
going on with the history of the family. He wrote many other novels
and some remarkable plays, but nothing made the impression on readers
that had been produced by the Forsyte family. Nearly twenty years later
he returned to the theme, and at once his power as a novelist seemed
to rise; there is something in this family that calls out his highest
powers. When he discovered that he had written five works of fiction
on the Forsytes, three long novels and two short stories, of which the
brief interlude called _Indian Summer of a Forsyte_ is an impeccable
and I hope imperishable work of art, he hit upon the happy idea of
assembling them into one prose epic, and calling the whole thing by the
ironical title of _The Forsyte Saga_. It is my belief that for many
years to come the name of John Galsworthy will be associated with this
work, in what I fervently hope will be its expanded form.
For since the assembling of the five pieces Mr. Galsworthy has
published several other novels dealing with the family--_The White
Monkey_, _The Silver Spoon_ and in 1928 he wrote FINIS with _Swan
Song_. Here he kills Soames, and while he probably does not feel quite
so sad as Thackeray felt when he killed Colonel Newcome, I venture
to say that he does not gaze on the corpse of Soames with indifferent
eyes. For to my mind the most interesting single feature of this whole
mighty epic is the development of the character of this man.
Clyde Fitch used to say something that is no doubt true of many works
of the imagination; he said that he would carefully plan a play, write
his first act, and definitely decide what the leading characters
should say and do in the subsequent portions of the work. Then these
provokingly independent characters seemed to acquire, not only an
independent existence, but a power of will so strong that they insisted
on doing and saying all kinds of things which he tried in vain to
prevent.
In _The Man of Property_ Soames Forsyte is a repulsive character; he
is hated by his wife, by the reader, and by the author. But in these
later books Soames becomes almost an admirable person, and we may say
of him at the end in reviewing his life, that nothing became him like
the leaving of it--for he died nobly. Long before this catastrophe,
however, we have learned to admire, respect, and almost to love Soames.
Is it possible that Mr. Galsworthy had any notion of this spiritual
progress when he wrote _The Man of Property_, or is it that in living
so long with Soames he began to see his good points?
Dickens was a master in this kind of development. When we first
meet Mr. Pickwick, he seems like the president of a service club as
conceived by Sinclair Lewis; he is the butt of the whole company. Later
Mr. Pickwick develops into a noble and magnanimous gentleman, whom
every right-minded person loves. Look at Dick Swiveller--when we first
see him, he is no more than a guttersnipe. He develops into a true
knight.
XXIV
PROFESSION AND PRACTICE
Beautiful lines which show that the man who wrote them had a clear
conception of true religion are these:
Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And even his failings leaned to virtue’s side;
But in his duty prompt at every call,
He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all;
And, as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.
The man who wrote them is thus described by James Boswell: “Those who
were in any way distinguished excited envy in him to so ridiculous an
excess that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying
two beautiful young ladies with their mother on a tour of France, he
was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him.”
Goldsmith wrote of virtue, modesty, sweet unselfishness in the most
convincing manner; his words were more convincing than his behaviour.
He allured to brighter worlds, but did not lead the way.
Schopenhauer, the great philosopher of pessimism, taught that absolute
asceticism was the only true religion and method of escape from the
ills of life; but he never practiced it, and told his disciples to mind
his precepts and not his example. Unfortunately, whenever any one gives
advice in the field of morality or religion, the first person on whom
we test its practical value is the preacher. Emerson remarked, “What
you are thunders so loud I cannot hear what you say.”
No great writer of modern times has written more persuasively of the
Christian way of life than Tolstoi; there is no doubt that his stories
and tracts have had an immense influence on millions of readers and
have inspired them toward unselfishness, kindness and humility. But of
all great Russian writers, Tolstoi himself was the most difficult to
get along with; he could not bear to hear any other writer praised and
was lacking in the grace of appreciation. His rival, Turgenev, who had
no religious belief of any kind, excelled Tolstoi in the virtues of
modesty, unselfishness and consideration for others.
One of the many reasons why the art of bringing up children is the most
difficult of all arts is that it is essential for parents to set a
daily example. All the moral precepts in the world will not seriously
impress children if their parents do not in their daily life come
somewhere near the ideals they hold up. The child will after a fashion
love his parents anyhow, but as he grows older and begins to compare
what he has been taught with what he sees, the child is transformed
into a judge. This partly explains that fear of their own children
which so many parents secretly feel.
If the parents make their small children go to church and stay home
themselves, the children quite naturally regard church-going as one of
the numerous penalties imposed on youth and look forward to maturity as
an escape from this and many other unpleasant compulsions. If parents
impress on their children the necessity of telling the truth, they must
not themselves tell lies; they are being watched by the sharpest eyes
in the world.
Although in a certain sense we are all hypocrites--for no one can live
up to his ideals--we hate any flagrant case of hypocrisy. I suppose one
reason we have a sneaking admiration for pirates is that pirates are
not hypocrites. There is no doubt that professional pirates are more
generally admired than professional politicians. I do not say that
politicians are hypocrites; I say that pirates are not.
It is the personalities of great leaders, much more than their sayings,
that have had a beneficial influence. The sayings of Jesus--every
word that has come down to us--can be read through in three hours.
But from His life and character flows a vital force, tremendously
effective after nineteen centuries. Very few people read the literary
compositions of Sir Philip Sidney, but millions have been influenced by
his life and character. The pure, unselfish life of George Herbert is
more efficacious than his poems; and consider Saint Francis!
The Christian Church has had in every century of its existence able,
honest, determined foes, who have done their best to destroy it; it
is probable that they have done it no injury. Nor have the frank
sensualists and materialists hurt it at all. It has been injured only
by its professed friends.
If a physician opens an office, his most dangerous foes are not his
competitors, that is to say, other doctors; his most dangerous foes are
those of his patients who say, “Well, I took his medicine, and it did
me no good.” The best advertising is done by one’s sincere friends and
admirers; the good word about the new doctor, or the new novel, or the
new play, is passed along.
The Christian religion professes to make those who accept it better and
happier; every one who professes it and exhibits none of its graces is
a powerful argument against its validity. A man’s foes are those of his
own household.
Sometimes I think religion should first of all show itself in good
manners; that is, in true politeness, consideration for others,
kindness and deference without servility. Such persons are those
we love to meet and be with; they are good advertisements of their
religion; they will not have to talk about it because its effects are
so plainly and attractively seen.
XXV
LONDON AS A SUMMER RESORT
I had an interesting conversation with Bernard Shaw last week. The next
day he and Mrs. Shaw were leaving to spend the summer on the Riviera,
which from time immemorial has been regarded as a winter resort. He
gave, as is his custom, an original and diverting explanation of the
fact that many now prefer to visit winter resorts in the summer. It is
a matter of clothes. The Victorians were forced to go to cool places,
or at any rate to avoid warm places; because they were compelled to
wear stuffy clothes, the men being encased in frock coats, thick
waistcoats, collars and swaddling neckcloths. But today, when one
leaves off almost everything, the finest place in the world, according
to G. B. S., is a climate where one can live outdoors in comfort, day
and night.
It is certainly true that many European resorts, where the hotels used
to be open only during a short winter season, now attract visitors the
year round. The converse is also true. I can well remember when the
great hotels of Switzerland--the playground of Europe--were open only
during the summer; and were crowded only during the month of August.
But now they never close and are as much sought after in December
and January as in the good old summertime. The same is true of Lake
Placid in America and of many other places. People in Victorian times
were forced to dress according to the prevailing style, which bore no
reference to climate or common sense; remember how the women used to
look, playing golf and tennis!
Furthermore the old idea that everyone who could afford it must
leave the city during the “heated term” has become obsolete, even in
America. President Harper of the University of Chicago established a
Summer Quarter, and professors who wished to do so could take their
three months’ vacation in the winter, a privilege that many continue
to enjoy. The Country clubs and golf have had much to do with the
contentment of business men who remain in cities during the summer.
As a matter of fact, the city is not at all a bad place, I mean, of
course, for those who can afford to make themselves comfortable.
The city of Munich has for many years been a Mecca for summer
pilgrims. The season of music, arranged for foreign visitors, reaches
its climax in August. Now I wish to urge the millions of Americans who
at one time or another cross the ocean to consider the merits of London
as a summer resort.
For over a hundred years July has been a part of the London “season”;
Parliament is in session, operas and theatres are open, and parties
flourish amain. The twelfth of August, the opening of the grouse
shooting season, is the formal beginning of the vacation; Parliament
always adjourns for it, and London society flies north. But to an
American London is day by day interesting, and there should be no
closing of any season for him.
London has no prolonged hot weather, like St. Louis. It has been said
that the English climate consists of eight months of winter, and four
months of bad weather. This is an exaggeration. Every now and then
there is a year when summer is omitted; but even in such an unfortunate
time, one is better off in London than in the country. In fact, to an
American London, while not the most beautiful city in the world, is
assuredly the most interesting. It is inexhaustible. Every foot of it,
to one well read in English literature, is hallowed ground; I think I
could walk along Fleet street a thousand days in succession, and always
receive a thrill.
I wish that every American journalist, every American book reviewer,
every American drama critic, would spend a month in London and
diligently read the morning newspapers, such as _The Times_, _The
Telegraph_, _The Morning Post_. Every page seems to be written for
intelligent readers. These London journalists review tennis, golf
and cricket matches with more dignity than the average New Yorker
reviews plays and books. One reason that militates steadily against
intellectual progress in America is the fact that apparently we have
no language suitable as a medium for the exchange of ideas. Our book
reviews and our drama criticisms are too often written in a cheap kind
of slang that is intended to be smart. If anyone imagines that the
journalism of London loses in intensity by being written in suitable
English, let him turn to a file of _The London Times_ and read the
story of Tilden playing tennis at Wimbledon.
A remarkable thing about literary society in London is that age has
nothing to do with it. One meets in social gatherings men and women
in the twenties and in the eighties--disparity in years seems to be
forgotten.
One should remember that, owing to the small size of England, one can
use London as a base of operations and take excursions into the country
on the swift English trains, returning to London every evening; many
happy, baggageless days have I spent in this manner.
When G. K. Chesterton was in America, I asked him what difference
between the two countries impressed him most. Instantly he replied,
“Your wooden houses.” I had never thought of them as curiosities,
but one does not see them in England. The thing that to me is most
noticeable on the London streets is the absence of straw hats. There
are many more bare male heads than there are straw hats. It is almost
impossible to attract attention in London, but a straw hat will come
nearest to doing the trick. Some men are exquisitely and others
strangely clad, and nobody cares. I saw a man riding a bicycle. He had
on tan shoes, homespun trousers, a frock coat, and a tall silk hat.
XXVI
WHAT THE MAN WILL WEAR
Men, women, and children are all interested in clothes; there have
been many scholarly works, displaying vast erudition, on the history
of costume; and two literary masterpieces, dealing with the philosophy
of clothes, belong permanently to literature--_A Tale of a Tub_, by
Jonathan Swift, and _Sartor Resartus_, by Thomas Carlyle.
So much attention has recently been paid in the newspapers and by
the public to the clothes of women, that we are forgetting what
revolutionary changes have taken place in the garments of men. Women’s
clothes have decreased in number, weight, and size. Men’s clothes have
gone through a process of _softening_. Hard hats, hard collars, hard
shirts, hard shoes, hard suits, have given way to soft; and, for the
first time in centuries, the carcasses of males are comfortably clad.
One hundred years ago the average gentleman, not satisfied with
covering his body with an accumulation of intolerably thick clothes,
wound an enormous stock around his neck. How stifling they look
in those old family portraits! Robert Louis Stevenson applied an
unexpected but accurate adjective to those collections of oil paintings
of deceased ancestors, with which their descendants adorned walls of
their dining rooms. Stevenson called them “these constipated portraits.”
This is the way my father dressed on practically every morning of his
life; that is, after he left the farm, and entered upon the practice of
his profession. He wore long, heavy flannel underwear, reaching to his
ankles and his wrists. He put on a “hard-boiled,” white, full-bosomed
shirt, stiff as sheet-iron. At the neck he fastened a stiff, upright,
white linen choker collar; at the ends of the sleeves he buttoned on
thick, three-ply linen cuffs. He imprisoned his feet, ankles, and
shins in black, stiff, leather boots, reaching to the knees, but
concealed above the ankles by his trousers. He wore a long-tailed
coat, a waistcoat, and trousers made out of thick, dark-blue or
black broadcloth. The trousers were strapped over his shoulders by
suspenders. For the top of his head there was a tall, heavy, beaver
hat.
Thus, clad in impenetrable armour from head to foot, he set out for the
day’s work.
Fifty years ago was the age of dressing-gown and slippers. Why is it
we never hear slippers mentioned nowadays? I have not owned a pair of
slippers (except bedroom slippers) for more than thirty years. Yet in
Victorian novels we are always reading of how, when the breadwinner
returns to his home in the evening, he finds his slippers ready
for him, warmed on the hearth. My father always took off his great
boots--worn in summer as well as in winter--and put on his slippers
when he came home, having called it a day.
Poets, novelists, and men whose occupation kept them at home, sat down
to their desk in dressing-gown and slippers. The moment a man sat down
in his own house to anything, with no immediate thought of going out,
dressing-gown and slippers were the regulation costume. They were like
knights-at-arms, taking off their suits of mail when they entered the
interior of the castle.
Eventually the knee-boots gave way to high shoes--called boots in
England--which were laced up to the top. In time these were succeeded
by low shoes, which are now worn by millions of Americans the year
round.
The swaddling, stifling, heavy underclothes were scrapped, and their
place taken by sleeveless, shinless undergarments, light in weight, and
more or less open in texture. Best of all, the intolerable stiff shirt,
the bottom edge of which cut into the abdomen, and bellied out above
like a sail in a fair wind, was reserved only for formal evening wear;
shirts were made and worn that had no trace of starch in front, back,
collar or cuff. I have not worn a stiff shirt (except for evening) in
twenty years.
Suspenders (braces) became obsolete; and the pleasant belt came in, the
belt that may be loosened or tightened at will, and which in any case
leaves the shoulders free. In hot weather the waistcoat was discarded;
and the man in his thin, loose clothes moved about almost as easily as
Adam in Paradise.
Various are the names for the round stiff hat, derby, dicer, pot hat,
bowler, billy-cock. Under any name it is just as bad. Some fifteen
or twenty years ago the derby went temporarily out of fashion. Up to
that time, if you looked into a cloak-room by a hotel dining-room, you
saw about two hundred men’s hats looking exactly alike. Now you see a
vast assortment of soft headgear, grey, brown, green, all of pleasing
shape. The thousands of men at a football game now show variety aloft,
instead of the intolerable black monotony of former years. I have
not owned a “derby” since the war. Apart from my own hatred of the
object, I always crushed it getting in or out of an automobile. And one
indentation ruins a derby forever: every wound is mortal.
I am quite aware that the derby is returning. Everyone knows the
nation-wide fame acquired by a certain brown derby. But no stiff hat,
black or brown, will ever adorn my brows again during the hours of
daylight.
The English, owing to their horrible climate and also partly to an
invincible conservatism, still wear heavy clothes, thicksoled high
shoes, braces, waistcoats, etc., even in hot weather. The only reform
they have made is discarding the frock coat for daily wear, which up
to a very few years ago was universal. A common sight in London was to
see clerks going to the “city” on bicycles, arrayed in “Prince Albert”
coats.
The clothes of an American tourist still look funny to an Englishman;
how funny I never realised until I attended a play in London where an
American was the object of good-natured caricature. He came on the
stage with low shoes and silk shoe-laces, bright, thin socks, trousers
held by a belt, no waistcoat, and jacket unbuttoned. The audience
burst into roars of laughter and I laughed too, because he did look
queer by contrast with the other actors. Then I suddenly realised that
I was dressed precisely like the man they were laughing at!
One more reform must be made in men’s dress; and I believe it will
come. In very hot weather, men must be allowed to discard the jacket.
Even a thin jacket, with its collar and shouldercloth, is intolerable.
A clean, attractive shirt, with soft collar and necktie, and belt
around the trousers, looks so sensible in hot weather that it ought to
become the rule rather than the exception.
XXVII
DREAMS
I look upon horrible dreams as one of the assets of humanity, one of
the good things of life; because one feels so elated after waking. I am
convinced that most men and women do not sufficiently appreciate the
advantages they possess. They either exaggerate their sufferings and
drawbacks or, instead of enjoying what they have, they spend their time
in longing for what is beyond their reach.
Just as it takes an illness to make one appreciate the satisfactions
of health, so one needs a calamity to make one realise how good daily
existence really is. It is often said that experience is the best
teacher. This is by no means always or even often true. Experience
charges too much for her lessons.
There is no good in learning how one might have shown sagacity in
business after one is bankrupt; there is no good in discovering how one
ought to have avoided a certain article of diet after one is fatally
poisoned; there is no good in receiving the proof of the danger in
carelessly driving a motor car after one lies dead in the ditch.
Now the best way to discover how cheerful daily life may be is to
be visited by a frightful dream. The horrible wild beast has seized
us, because when we tried to flee, our legs were lead. Just as it is
about to sink its terrible tusks in our shrinking frame, we wake up,
and hear the good old trolley car go by. Hurrah! it was only a dream;
and we are alive on the blessed earth. And we have learned how sweet
plain ordinary life is without the lesson costing us anything but a
transitory sweat.
I think, too, that many who either profess to hate life or at all
events refuse to admit anything good about it, might appreciate it more
if they could be temporarily transferred, not to hell, but to their
own imagined heaven. Wagner in the famous music-drama, _Tannhäuser_,
has given an admirable illustration. This knight, like all his
fellow-creatures, felt the call of the senses; he was transported
from this imperfect earth to the pagan Heaven, where he lived in the
constant society of Venus. But after a time this palled upon him and
eventually became intolerable. He tore himself away, and suddenly
found himself back on the earth. He was in a green pasture in the
springtime, and a shepherd boy was singing--what happiness!
The accomplished German dramatist Ludwig Fulda wrote a play,
_Schlaraffenland_. There was a poor boy, ragged, cold and chronically
hungry. He dreamed he was in a magic land. Remarkable birds flew so
slowly by him that he found he could reach out his hand and grasp
them. He did this, and lo, he had in his hand a broiled chicken! He
ate several with avidity, but could not eat forever. Glancing at his
ragged garments, a wardrobe door flew wide, and he had his choice among
many elegant suits. Thus every desire was instantly and abundantly
gratified. After some time, this palled upon him, and then became so
unendurable that he gave a yell of horror; he woke up. He was cold,
ragged, and hungry; but his heart was singing. He was back on the good
old earth.
Thus, whether we dream of hell or of heaven, it is usually with a sigh
or even a shout of satisfaction that we find ourselves back on this
imperfect globe.
Many persons tell me that they never dream; their sleep is blank. It is
with me quite otherwise; I almost always dream; many of my dreams are
extraordinarily vivid and some are unforgettable.
When I was a child I dreamed three nights in succession of the Devil.
The first night the Devil chased me upstairs. I ran as fast as I
could, but sank down when only half way up. Then the Devil took from
his pocket a shoemaker’s awl and bored it deftly into my right knee.
The second night the Devil was in my front yard. Suddenly he changed
into the form of a dog; and when another dog rushed barking at him the
satanic hound swallowed him as easily as one takes a pill. The third
night I also dreamed of the Devil, but I have forgotten the details.
One of the worst dreams I had in childhood was when I was being
attacked by wild beasts, and suddenly my mother appeared on the
scene. I shrieked to her for help, and she looked at me with calm
indifference. That was the worst dream I ever had, and you may be sure
it went by contraries.
I suppose the only way we can distinguish dreams from what is called
actual life is that in dreams the law of causation is suspended. There
is no order in events, and no principle of sufficient reason to account
for them. Things change in an impossible manner. Apart from this,
dreams are as real as life while they last.
I often have prolonged dreams that are not only fully as real as
waking experiences, but are orderly and sensible, and sometimes
delightful. Many years ago I dreamed that I was walking the streets of
a Russian city with Count Tolstoi. It was one of the most agreeable and
most inspiring days of my life, and I have always regretted it never
happened. We walked together for hours and discussed modern literature.
He said a great many wise and brilliant things, all of which I have,
alas, forgotten. The only feature of that dream unlike reality was that
Tolstoi had shaved off his beard.
Wilkie Collins, in _Armadale_, suggested that every dream we have is a
repetition of an experience that has actually happened to us during the
preceding twenty-four hours. I read that novel in my boyhood and was
impressed by that explanation of dreams, and for several months I wrote
down my dreams and found that every one was suggested by something that
had happened to me during the preceding day.
The only thing I am certain of in dreams is that they do not in any
way forecast the future. When I was a child I dreamed I saw heaven and
Jesus sitting on a cloud. He called to me, “Willie Phelps, come here.”
The next day I told my father and mother about it, and to my surprise
they were exceedingly alarmed.
XXVIII
EATING BREAKFAST
In the daily life of the average person the longest interval between
eating is that between the evening meal and breakfast; the very name
for the morning repast accurately describes its nature. It should
therefore, be taken seriously, which means that there should not only
be enough to eat, but that plenty of time should be allowed to eat it.
I am aware that there are many men of excellent character who eat
almost nothing for breakfast, and that there are some saints who eat
no breakfast at all. In character and personal habits, I have never
met a man more saintly than Henry Ford. I refer both to the asceticism
of his physical life and to the purity of the motives that inspire his
conduct. He eats no breakfast at all, not a morsel of food. He rises
very early, goes outdoors, runs a mile or two and then works with
absolute concentration till one o’clock, when he has the first meal of
the day. I asked him if he never felt any desire for food during so
long a morning; he replied that it was necessary for him in his vast
undertakings to have a mind entirely fresh and clear, and that he found
he could do better work on an empty stomach and with a brain unclouded
by food.
I suppose every man must be a law unto himself. It does not seem to
me that I could live happily without breakfast, yet I am sure that it
is better to omit the meal altogether than to eat it in the hurry and
fever in which many Americans devour it. Far too many prefer to lie
in bed half an hour longer than to use that precious half hour in the
consumption of food.
* * * * *
In the days when they had required morning chapel at Yale a great many
students came to chapel either without any breakfast or with unassorted
junks of it in their stomachs engaged in civil war. One early morning
I was walking up Elm Street in New Haven; the streets ware filled with
undergraduates sprinting to chapel. The lady with me said: “Do look at
those poor boys running to chapel with their tongues hanging out!” I
set her right at once. “Those are not tongues, those are griddle cakes!”
Those young men were accurate calculators. Three minutes for breakfast,
one minute to reach chapel. They hurried the last griddle cake into
their faces as they left the dining hall, and it gradually disappeared
as they ran.
I love to see the whole family assemble at breakfast and eat a good
meal leisurely. In order to accomplish this, every one must get up
early enough to allow for complete preparation in the way of bathing,
shaving, etc., and then leave enough time to consume food in peace of
mind. Of how many families is this true? Of course, there are many
persons who like to eat breakfast in bed, and perhaps, there are some
who can do this neatly, even artistically. I never eat breakfast in bed
unless I am too sick to get up, for I hate to have crumbs all over my
night clothes or inside the bed. Furthermore, in spite of considerable
practice during various illnesses, I have never mastered the fine art
of swallowing food while in a horizontal position. To take coffee in
this manner is an achievement. And what is breakfast without coffee?
Although coffee is not an American product, I have never had a
satisfactory cup of coffee outside of the United States of America.
Americans alone seem to understand the secret of good coffee. The
English meet this problem illegitimately, by substituting tea. Now
tea is all very well in the late afternoon, but in the morning it
is without inspiration. And every man ought to start the day in an
inspired manner.
G. K. Chesterton says that Bernard Shaw is like coffee; he stimulates
but does not inspire. I should amend that, by saying Shaw is like
coffee because he stimulates but does not nourish. For I firmly
believe that both Shaw and coffee are alike in this: they do both
stimulate and inspire, but they do not nourish. I used to wonder what
Chesterton could possibly mean by saying that coffee did not inspire,
when suddenly the true explanation occurred to me. He was thinking of
English coffee.
The newspaper should not be read during the sacred rite of breakfast.
There is no doubt that many divorces have been caused by the man’s
opening and reading the newspaper at breakfast, thereby totally
eclipsing his wife. It is simply a case of bad manners, and bad manners
at food have in thousands of instances extinguished the fires of love.
Nor, although it is a common custom, do I believe that letters should
be opened and read at the breakfast table. One letter may contain
enough worry, disappointment and anger to upset a reader for hours. And
to eat food while one is angry, or worried, or excited is almost as bad
as eating poison. I never read letters at breakfast and I never read
letters in the evening.
For the same reason breakfast should be eaten in a calm and peaceful
state of mind, illuminated by happy family conversation. Many men every
day eat breakfast in feverish haste and then run to catch a trolley car
or a train. That horrible breakfast soon begins to assert itself, and
the man is in an irritable condition all the morning. It simply does
not pay to eat in a hurry. Breakfast should not resemble a delirium.
And at the breakfast table all the members of the party should eat
or leave the room. It is a sad experience to be in a hotel or in a
dining car and have some acquaintance come up briskly and say: “I have
already had my breakfast, but I will sit and talk with you while you
eat yours.” That means he intends to watch you eat, and, just as your
mouth is full of food, he will ask you a question. I have observed many
patient men suffering tortures in this manner. I have even observed an
enormous mass of unchewed food distend their throats as they hastily
bolt it in the endeavor to reply to interrogations. A snake may swallow
a toad, but the snake’s constitution differs from a man’s.
If I could have only one meal a day, it would be breakfast. After a
good American breakfast--orange juice, cereal, coffee, toast, bacon and
eggs--I am ready for everything and anything. If the day begins in the
right manner its progress will be satisfactory. And the best of all
rules of diet is to eat what you like and take the time to do it.
XXIX
THE MOTHER TONGUE
Judges xii:6--“Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said
Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took
him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that
time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.”
If there were forty-two thousand of the sons of Ephraim who could
not speak correctly and distinctly, we may be sure that the sons
and daughters of America are not impeccable. Indeed, we have daily
evidence not only on the street and in railway coaches, but in schools,
churches, colleges and theatres, of linguistic matricide--mortal
attacks on the mother tongue, committed with impunity in the absence
of the axe. In Old Testament times they had, as we see by the text of
this sermon, drastic methods for establishing correct standards of
pronunciation; those who did not speak accurately were eliminated.
Besides the suffering inflicted on sensitive and sympathetic ears,
there is a feeling of shame in the heart of this present evangelist
that the American public school, which ought to be a temple where the
English language is treated with reverence, should actually be a scene
of cynical--since everything careless is cynical--desecration. I am not
condemning colloquial slang, which in its metaphorical picturesqueness
is often the very life of speech, but rather the shoddy mutilation of
words in good and regular standing.
More important than the study of foreign tongues is the unaffectedly
correct pronunciation of that language which is now heard in the
uttermost parts of the earth. Furthermore, the very difficulties
of English pronunciation make the successful surmounting of them a
glorious achievement, one that should appeal to the Spirit of Youth,
which instinctively loves a desperate undertaking.
German is practically a phonetic language; leaving out the matter of
accent, it is easier for an American, with proper instruction, to
speak German words correctly than it is for him to conquer the wild
and lawless army of English syllables. Let us then not minimise the
strength of the foe; let this rather become an inspiration.
Let me say two things to all school and college teachers: No matter
what subject you teach, Greek, chemistry or physics, whenever you hear
one of your pupils mispronounce an English word correct him so that he
and the other members of the class will learn something valuable there
and then. And when you do this, tell the class that if any member of it
hears you mispronounce a word, you will be grateful for immediate and
public correction.
Second, do not allow any pupil to speak better English than that
spoken by you. Our schools and colleges contain a few pupils who
speak the language so well that they beat the teacher; the teacher
should not permit such a thing to continue. Although I was brought up
in a cultivated home, I learned in my boyhood a considerable number
of bad pronunciations; I changed these for better ones because I was
determined that no one of my students should speak more correctly than
I.
Bernard Shaw told me he was on a special committee appointed to
standardise English pronunciation in Great Britain; this committee,
consisting of a very few, tell all the radio broadcasters exactly how
to pronounce a long list of words, in the hope that by this means the
millions “listening in” will learn how to speak their own language.
There is no reason why Americans should imitate the British in the
pronunciation of certain words which the cultivated citizens of
both countries pronounce quite differently--I refer to words like
_schedule_, _clerk_, _capitalist_, _trait_, _fracas_, _lieutenant_ and
the last letter in the alphabet which Shakespeare calls by a bad name.
It is sheer affectation to imitate the British in such special matters,
as it is an affectation to imitate what is called the Oxford accent,
where the word smoke is pronounced as if it were spelled smilk--see
Julian Street’s delightful book _In Need of Change_. Yesterday
afternoon I heard an English actress on the New York stage pronounce No
as if it were spelled NAAO. But after all, England is the home of the
English speech; and I wish that it were possible for the United States,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Capetown and other places to follow
in general the best English spelling and pronunciation. For example,
it is certainly better for Americans to pronounce the word been like
the sacred vegetable of Boston than like the first syllable of the
Christian name of Franklin.
In America the most shamefully treated of our five vowels is U, and
the combination of letters EW, which should resemble U in accuracy, as
it now so often does in sin. There should be a distinct difference
between the sound of U and the double O, actually observable to the
naked ear in such words as Duke, Duty, Tutor, Constitution, Enthusiasm,
Tuesday, News.
The way to make this distinction is to remember that the English
language is the only one where the true sound of U is YU; whereas the
Russians, Italians and Germans pronounce U like OO, and the French
differently from any one of these. Just as the Russians pronounce E as
if it were YE, so Americans, when they practice in secret words like
evolution, should visualize a Y in front of the U; it will help them.
The most popular letter in our alphabet, E, is abominably treated in
such words as cellar, yellow, Philadelphia, where it is so offensively
given the sound of U in “skull”; this is even more common and still
more unpleasant in two useful words, Very and American.
Cultivated English and Americans laugh at the Cockney for leaving the
H silent where it should be heard; but they themselves are equally and
more unpardonably guilty in omitting the H in the combination Wh. There
should be a difference in the pronunciation of _Whine_ and _Wine_; yet
most cultivated people in both countries talk about games of Wist, and
say Wen, Wich and Wy. Let them heal themselves before laughing at the
Cockney.
The dogletter, R, has a curious fate in American mouths; it is either
unduly accented in such words as Here and Dinner (Middle West) or it
is (East) hitched on to the end of words like idea, and saw, where it
is as awkward as a sailor on horseback. Listen to the average Yankee
when he says “I have no idea of it” and you will see that he speaks the
truth.
XXX
OUR SOUTH AS CURE FOR FLU
The chief reason for my present sojourn at Augusta is the flu, which
attacked me in Connecticut some weeks ago. The American use of the
words “flu” and “grip” is both modern and interesting. Epidemics
of influenza, which seem to cross the ocean from Europe to America
without suffering any sea-change, have been more or less common since
the pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Richard Hildreth, in his admirable
_History of the United States_, describes these attacks in the
Massachusetts Colony in the seventeenth century; and it appears from
his realistic accounts that they differed in no respect from recent
nation-wide flu epidemics.
If I remember rightly, the word “grip” was not used currently in
America until the epidemic of 1889–1890, which was both severe and
general; it was the subject of constant discussion in the newspapers,
and it was generally believed to be a French importation, where it was
known as _la grippe_. This in American became the “grip,” except in
certain isolated districts, where it was called “the la grippe.” But
the word, either in its French or English form, was not commonly used
in America until the season of 1889–1890, when France made a Christmas
present of it to the United States.
The word “flu” had been British slang for some time before it
penetrated America; it was one of the numerous unprofitable things that
our country acquired during the war. In a conversation I had with the
novelist, William De Morgan, in London, in 1911, he casually used the
word “flu,” and for a moment I did not guess its meaning. Then I saw
it was an abbreviation. When the disease crossed the ocean in 1918, it
brought with it its British pet name, which, universally current in
America today, was, I believe, not known here till the last year of the
war.
The exact difference between flu and grip I leave to the physician to
determine; both differ from a cold in being invariably accompanied by
fever, and in both the patient feels the worst after he gets well.
But the speed with which the germs travel through the air remains a
mystery. I remember one flu epidemic that hit New York in the morning
and was prevalent in remote country districts in Michigan the following
afternoon. Manifestly, therefore, the accursed thing does not depend
on the comparatively slow method of transmission from one person to
another.
If one can possibly afford the time and money, the best way to rid
oneself of the after effects of the flu is to leave the icy North in
winter time and travel South. There are many coughs in every carload,
but soon after they arrive here they cease.
In fact, if one can afford it, it is a good thing to come South in
winter whether one is sick or well. “See America First” applies
especially to the winter season. Europe should be visited only in the
summer, because no Americans are comfortable in Europe at any other
time. George Ade once tried to spend a winter in Venice and he nearly
froze. He declared that the next winter he would spend in Duluth, where
they have steam heat and he could keep warm.
The intolerable thing about most “winter resorts” in Europe is that
they are so much warmer outdoors than in. The American takes a pleasant
walk in the mild sunshine, and, his body in an agreeable glow, he
enters his hotel room which has the chill of the grave. I know one man
who, whenever he entered his room, put on overcoat, fur hat, gloves,
arctic overshoes and then sat down to be as comfortable as he could.
One impecunious student who spent the winter at a Continental
university in a room where apparently no means of heating had ever
been employed told me that he kept warm the entire winter on only one
stick of wood. In response to my question, he said that his room was on
the fifth story; he would study for ten minutes, then fling the stick
out of the window. He ran down five flights of stairs, picked up the
stick, ran up the stairs and found that this violent exercise kept him
warm for exactly ten minutes, when again he flung the stick out of the
window. That was an original method, but it is practicable only for
those who are young and vigorous. It would be almost useless for an old
lady with angina pectoris.
In the winter season our Southern States, or Arizona, or California are
what I especially prescribe. For those who wish eternal summer with all
its pleasant heat and the delights of sea-bathing, Southern Florida is
the best; for those who are middle-aged and elderly, who wish to play
golf and tennis, in crisp autumn-like weather, Georgia is incomparable.
Here in Augusta the weather is frequently summer-hued; on this blessed
January day, for example, the temperature is 78. But in general, the
January and February weather here is like mild October in New England,
with gentle days and keen nights, good for sleep.
When I was young very few Northerners went South in winter; all who
could afford it went in the summer to the mountains or the sea. But
today, when there are many ways of keeping cool in the cities, and when
the country club is accessible every afternoon and evening, an immense
number of business men stay “on the job” in the summer and take their
vacation in the winter.
A perfect climate in the winter lies only twenty-four hours from New
York. Furthermore, it is an education for Northern men and women who
live in the South for a winter season to become acquainted with our
Southern people, “whom to know is to love.” To me, a down-East Yankee,
it is a delight to meet these charming, gracious men and women of the
South; and it is an especial delight to hear the Southern accent,
especially on the lips of lovely women.
I wish I might live one hundred years from now. Then, thanks to the
men of science, every year there will come a day in November when a
general notice will be given in our New England universities for every
member of the faculty and students to be indoors at a certain hour. At
the prescribed moment, all the dormitories, lecture halls, offices and
laboratories will rise majestically in the air, carrying their human
freight. They will sail calmly South, and in a few hours float gently
down on a meadow in Georgia or Florida, there to remain until the
middle of April.
XXXI
GOING TO CHURCH IN PARIS
There are not many Protestant churches in Paris, because there are
not many Protestants; and of the vast throng of Americans who visit
Paris every summer, I suppose, comparatively speaking, only a few go
to church. The average tourist does not visit Paris with the idea of
entering churches except as a sight-seer. Yet the American Church
of Paris with the Rev. Dr. Joseph Wilson Cochran as pastor, is a
flourishing institution. The auditorium is filled every Sunday morning,
and the whole work of the church in its Sunday school, Boy Scouts,
classes for students, charitable enterprises, etc., is so active and
successful that a new edifice has been found necessary. They are
erecting a fine church in a splendid location on the Quai D’Orsay; the
steel frame is already in place and by another year the building should
be complete. Then there is also the American Cathedral church of the
Holy Trinity, St. Luke’s Chapel, the Catholic church of St. Joseph, the
Methodist Memorial church, the Baptist tabernacle, the First Church of
Christ Scientist, and the Second Church of Christ Scientist.
Now I go to church not reluctantly, because I think I ought to, or from
any sense of duty, still less from the Pharasaical attempt to set an
example to my less godly neighbours. I go to church because I enjoy
going, because I really want to go, because the Christian church is my
spiritual home.
Last Sunday I attended the French Protestant church of the Oratoire, in
the rue St. Honoré. The attitude of the clergy and laity in this church
is very similar to that of the Rev. Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick and his
congregation in New York. Last Sunday the big church was well filled,
and the services, with the single difference that everything was in the
French language, were similar to those of any evangelical Protestant
church in America. There was no ritual. The prayers were extempore,
and among the hymns sung was the familiar one with the familiar tune,
“Lord, I Hear of Showers of Blessing,” which was just as good in French
as in English.
I felt that I was among my own people, the kind with which I grew up,
although there were very few Americans present. The French audience
seemed to be composed of the same sort that one sees in any Methodist
or Baptist church in America. The pastor preached on the parable of
the sower, and explained to the audience the significance of the
evangelical Protestant church, as distinguished from the more formal
and ritualistic Catholic institution. The Catholics provide beautiful
music, a dignified ritual, which is very impressive, he said; “but we
appeal not to the eye and the ear, but to the mind and the heart.” I do
not think he meant to be antagonistic to the Catholics; he was trying
to make his congregation see that there was a good reason for attending
church, even though the service might have little or no appeal to the
senses.
It was peculiarly interesting for me to hear this aspect of religious
worship emphasised, for on the preceding Sunday in London I attended
service in an Anglo-Catholic church, where the preacher was the Rev.
T. P. Fry, the husband of the famous novelist, Sheila Kaye-Smith. His
sermon emphasised only one thing, the Blessed Sacrament. He dwelt on
its supreme importance, on its immense significance, of what it should
mean to every one who partakes of it. The service was beautiful, with
an elaborate ritual, and it was clear that the preacher thought of only
one thing--the Mass.
The English novelist, Compton Mackenzie, has recently written a trilogy
of novels dealing at great length and with much detail with the life
and career of a young English priest. Mr. Mackenzie, like G. K.
Chesterton and Maurice Baring, has entered the Catholic church, and
while these three novels, _The Altar Steps_, _The Parson’s Progress_
and _The Heavenly Ladder_, are frankly Catholic propaganda, I found
them interesting and valuable, because I was brought up in the extreme
Protestant point of view, and it is important for me to hear and if
possible to understand something quite different. Mr. Mackenzie’s young
parson says that he does not care if he never succeeds in preaching a
good sermon. His only interest is to give the congregation the Blessed
Sacrament.
An excellent Catholic lady once said to me, “You do not understand our
religion,” I answered, “You must not say _religion_; your religion is
my religion. We have exactly the same religion. What I do not fully
understand is your form of worship, the significance of the various
parts of your ritual.”
It is a matter of great rejoicing that the old antagonism between
Catholics and Protestants has so largely disappeared. It is unfortunate
that any irritation or misunderstanding should remain. In a world
so full of vice, so full of scepticism, and above all so full of
indifference to religion, there should be not the slightest shade of
hostility between adherents of Christianity. We should not be divided
in the presence of implacable foes.
A magnificent example of the true Christian spirit was given at the
beginning of this century by one of the greatest men of modern times,
Pope Leo XIII. He publicly offered prayer for the restoration to
health of Queen Victoria of England. When one thinks of the historic
antagonism, that was a noble and truly religious act.
Once in the cathedral at Cologne, during Mass, I sat between a devout
German Catholic and an American tourist. The German bowed, knelt,
crossed himself; the American used a pair of opera glasses, as if
he were at a spectacular play. I should like to have given to my
countryman a little pamphlet written by a Catholic priest, called _What
Are They Doing at the Altar?_ so that he might have understood what was
going on, and at least have shown some reverence.
There is one important thing that we Protestants ought to learn from
our Catholic friends. Many Protestants go to church just to hear a
sermon, and if the preacher is in bad form that morning, they feel
disappointed, almost aggrieved, as if they had gone to the movies and
the pictures happened to be poor.
Going to church ought not to be merely passive; to go and see if the
minister can entertain us. It should be a community service, where the
audience participates and where spiritual refreshment and stimulation
may be obtained. If we go to church merely to hear a popular preacher,
then we might as well stay at home and read a popular book. The
feeling of actual participation is the supreme need of the Protestant
church today; not more clever preachers, but a genuine hunger in the
congregation for spiritual nourishment.
XXXII
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM
I am often called an optimist, and so I am; but perhaps not in the
popular meaning of the word. When a worldly wise man calls a person
an optimist, he usually regards him with intellectual contempt, just
as the elaborate courtesy toward women in the age of chivalry thinly
disguised a cynically sensual attitude. Optimism is associated in many
minds either with ignorance of life or mental inferiority; and when
certain persons call others optimists, look out for them!
Thus recent definitions of the optimist illustrate the superior
attitude of the pessimist: “An optimist is a fool unfamiliar with the
facts.” “An optimist is one who falls out of a fourth-story window,
and as he goes by the third story, he says, ‘So far, so good.’” “An
optimist is one who at night makes lemonade out of the lemons that have
been handed to him all day.” “A pessimist is one who lives with an
optimist.”
Now the familiarly unpleasant back-slapping cheerio person, with a
genius for the inopportune, is not necessarily an optimist. He is a
nuisance. He was well known and dreaded like a pestilence among the
ancient Jews. See the Book of Proverbs, 27:14, “He that blesseth his
friend with a loud voice, rising early in the morning, it shall be
counted a curse to him,” and 25:29, “As he that taketh away a garment
in cold weather and as vinegar upon nitre, so is he that singeth songs
to an heavy heart.”
* * * * *
A man who attempts to console another by making light of his troubles
or by pretending that things are otherwise than what they obviously
are will not get very far. One might as well pretend in January that
it is June. You cannot get rid of obstacles by ignoring them any more
than you can solve problems by forgetting them. Nor can you console
sufferers by reminding them of the woes of others or by inopportunely
emphasising other things.
If a man slips on an orange peel that some moron has left on the
pavement and breaks his leg, you will not help him by saying,
“Yesterday a man fell here and broke his _neck_.” If a manifold father
loses one of his sons by a motor accident, you can’t help him by
saying, “Cheer up! You’ve got three sons left.”
“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” These terrible words
were spoken not by a peevish invalid or by a bankrupt, but by the
Light of the World. He always and everywhere recognised the forces of
evil and never pretended that life was all sunshine. Religion does not
pretend that everything is easy and comfortable, for religion is not
meant to fill our minds with illusions but rather with fortitude. Our
Lord came into the world to show us how to bear the burden of life
cheerfully and bravely; life is not easy, but His yoke is.
A true optimist is one who recognises the sorrows, worries, drawbacks,
misfortunes of life, its injustice and inequalities. But while seeing
these things, the optimist believes that no matter how strong error may
be, truth in the long run will triumph, even though it may not be our
truth.
The optimist believes that in the long run virtue has superior staying
power as compared with vice; that goodness will eventually defeat evil;
that life means something; that character counts; that men and women
are of more consequence than sparrows; in short, that this is God’s
world and that the moral law is as unshakable as the law of gravitation.
What, then, is a pessimist? A pessimist is one who believes that
the evolutionary process is the tragedy of the universe or, as Mark
Twain put it, that life is the worst practical joke ever played on
man by destiny. That from one primordial cell should have developed
all complex forms of life through the vegetable kingdom, through the
lower forms of animal existence up to man, is generally regarded as an
advance. The true pessimist regards it as an irremediable disaster, as
the worst of all possible mistakes. According to him, it would have
been better had the evolutionary march stopped with the lower forms of
animal life and never reached self-consciousness.
The fish, for example, is better off than men and women. The fish
functions perfectly. He does exactly what he was meant to do, he has
not the torture of self-conscious thought, no fear of death, and dies
at the appointed time. But man has thoughts and dreams and longings
that seem to belong to eternal life and eternal development, whereas in
reality he dies like the fish; only with all his dreams and longings
unsatisfied and with the constant fear and horror of annihilation in a
universe where, no matter how sublime or far-reaching his thoughts, he
is, in reality, of no more importance than a fish and must in the end
share the same fate.
Taking this stiff definition, are there then any genuine pessimists?
Certainly there are. Thomas Hardy was exactly such a pessimist. He
affirmed in his last volume of poems that man would have been happier
if he could have remained at the stage of lower animal development,
with no power of thought. Alfred Housman, the great lyrical poet, says
we could all be happy, if only we did not think. It is when we think
that we are overwhelmed with gloom.
The custom of congratulating others on their birthdays is really an
acquiescence in optimism. We instinctively (and I believe rightly)
regard life as an asset. But Swift believed that the worst thing that
had ever happened to him was being born. He therefore, like the honest
man he was, kept his birthdays as days of fasting and mourning. He wore
black and refused to eat.
For my part I find daily life not always joyous, but always
interesting. I have some sad days and nights, but none that are dull.
As I advance deeper into the vale of years, I live with constantly
increasing gusto and excitement. I am sure it all means something; in
the last analysis, I am an optimist because I believe in God. Those who
have no faith are quite naturally pessimists and I do not blame them.
XXXIII
TRANSLATIONS
Of course it is best to read every book in the language in which it was
originally written; but no man has ever been able to do that. Elihu
Burritt, “the learned blacksmith,” could, so I have heard, write an
intelligible sentence in fifty languages, but there were many more than
fifty of which he was ignorant. The vast majority of even intelligent
Americans know no language but their own, and that they do not know
any too well. It becomes necessary, therefore, unless one is to cut
oneself off from foreign thought and literature, to have recourse to
translations; a reader of a newspaper does that every day, though he is
not always aware of the fact.
Inasmuch as the greatest works of literature have been translated many
times into English, it is rather important to know which is the best
translation; no one driving a car would take a bad road if a better one
were available.
Great translators are rarer than great creative authors. In order to
achieve the best possible translation, one must in the first place
have an absolute command of two languages, an accomplishment that is
not nearly so common as is often supposed. Indeed, this is too often
supposed erroneously by the translator himself.
* * * * *
In the history of the literature of the world, there are four supremely
great poets; no one can name a fifth who is in their class. Those four,
in chronological order, are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe. Every
reader, every lover of good books, should know something of the work of
these four mighty ones, for there is a perceptible difference between
the best and the second best. Goethe’s masterpiece is _Faust_, and it
so happens that we have an English translation of _Faust_ that is so
much better than all other English translations that no comparison is
possible. This is by the American, Bayard Taylor.
It was the major work of his life; he spent many years of sedulous,
conscientious toil perfecting it. It has three admirable features--the
English style is beautiful; it is as literal as is consistent with
elegance, in this work amazingly literal; it preserves in every
instance the original metres which change so often in the German. If
you wish to know how superior Taylor is to all other translators of
_Faust_, just read aloud the four stanzas of the Dedication in any
other English version and then try the same experiment with Taylor’s.
Those who cannot read German and yet wish to come in contact with
“the most spacious mind since Aristotle” have the satisfaction of
knowing they are very close to the original--both in thought and in
expression--in reading Taylor.
Goethe is not only one of the supreme poets of the world; he has the
distinction of being the author of the best German novel, _Wilhelm
Meister_. The best translation of this was written and published
by Thomas Carlyle more than one hundred years ago. In reading this
translation, therefore, one is reading in the same book the works of
two men of genius. Carlyle had had almost no opportunity to hear spoken
German; he was largely self-taught. But it was characteristic of his
honesty, industry, conscience, as well as of his literary gifts, that
he should have done his difficult work so well that no one has been
able to equal it.
In the course of the novel occurs the exquisite lyric _Know’st thou the
land?_ The best English translation of this song was made about fifteen
years ago by the late James Elroy Flecker.
No absolutely first-rate translation of Dante into English exists. The
best plan is probably to read one in prose and one in verse; the prose
by Charles Eliot Norton, the verse by Cary.
A large number of English writers have had a try at Homer. George
Chapman, whose version inspired Keats, made a thundering Elizabethan
poem. Pope, according to his contemporary, Young, put Achilles into
petticoats, but Pope’s translation has anyhow the merit of being
steadily interesting. Butcher and Lang wrought together an excellent
prose version of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_, while the latter poem was
artistically translated into rhythmic prose by George Herbert Palmer.
There is an English translation of another work that stands with
Taylor’s _Faust_ as being all but impeccable. This is Edward
FitzGerald’s version of the stanzas of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald really
wrote a great English poem; it is only necessary to compare his version
with a literal prose translation, in Nathan Haskell Dole’s admirable
Variorum edition, to see how big is the debt we owe FitzGerald. If Omar
and Edward have met in the other world, I am sure Old Fitz has received
due acknowledgment.
The great Russian novelists, Turgeney, Dostoevski and Chekhov, have
been magnificently translated by Constance Garnett. She has also
Englished some of the novels of Tolstoi and Gogol. She has a positive
genius for translation. In the centenary year--1928--began an entirely
new version of the complete works of Tolstoi, by Aylmer Maude. Mr.
Maude knew Tolstoi intimately and is himself an admirable writer.
XXXIV
MUSIC OF THE SPHERES
When I was a small boy in Hartford, I often used to see Mark Twain
standing in the open air in his shirt-sleeves, the eternal cigar in
his mouth and a billiard cue in his hand. The billiard room was on
the top floor of his house and a tiny balcony projected from one of
the windows; nearly all dwellings built in the seventies had strange
abscesses of that kind. While his opponent was shooting, Mark would
come out on that platform for a breath of air. Billiards was the only
game he cared for; he was by no means fond of exercise. He always said,
“Never stand up when you can sit down; never sit down when you can
lie down.” Many years later, when he was living in New York, he often
attended professional billiard matches and the spectators often looked
away from the table at Mark’s superb leonine head and noble old face.
Another famous contemporary writer also found his only recreation in
billiards--this was Herbert Spencer. Every afternoon he would give
himself and the unknowable a rest and go to the Athenæum Club in London
for a game, where his own cue is still preserved as a memorial. If
none of his cronies was available, he would challenge a stranger. His
philosophy afforded no balm in defeat. On one occasion when he was
beaten badly he put his cue in the rack and remarked testily that to
play billiards well was an accomplishment; to play it too well was the
sign of a misspent life.
It is rather strange, since most of our American games are derived from
the English, that we should have taken billiards from France. Few games
are more uncommon in the United States than English billiards; cricket
is not nearly so unusual a spectacle.
Almost every American boy wants to play billiards. When I was fourteen
one of my schoolmates found a man who wished to sell a small table--it
had rubber tubes for cushions--but the price was prohibitive, twenty
dollars. Our total assets were seventy-five cents. We remembered
that my friend’s sister had received a twenty dollar gold piece as a
birthday present. Of what possible use could it be to her? We persuaded
her to donate it to the good cause, and if any one thinks that our
powers of persuasion were extraordinary, he thinks accurately, for
I subsequently persuaded her to become my wife. We bought the table
and set it up in my house late one Saturday night, too late, alas, to
play. Father would not allow me to touch it on Sunday, and early Monday
morning I had to be off to school. We got out at four o’clock, made
straight for that table and played till eleven at night, not stopping
to eat.
I know of no game at which professional skill has developed more
rapidly than at billiards. It seems incredible, but only fifty years
ago there were four balls on the table and the ordinary friendly game
was 34 points! Almost any professional today could run a thousand
points--indeed he could go on indefinitely.
I regret that the beautiful game of cushion-caroms, so common in the
eighties among the professionals, has become obsolete. In that game
there could be no nursing, because one had to make the cue ball hit
the cushion either before making the carom or after hitting the object
ball. The gentlemen of the green cloth who were most proficient at this
game were Vignaux, the Frenchman, and the Americans, “Jake” Schaefer,
father of the present expert of that name; Slosson, Sexton and Sutton.
In Allyn Hall at Hartford I saw a great match between Vignaux and
Schaefer. M. Vignaux was a large man and very dignified; in his
evening clothes he looked like a prime minister. Mr. Schaefer was so
small that Maurice Daly used to call him the little shaver. They were
formally introduced to the spectators by the referee, who remarked with
immense unction, “Mr. Schaefer has never in his life played with his
coat on; he asks the kind permission of the audience to remove it.”
This privilege was granted with fervent applause. When the game began
to go against him, M. Vignaux also removed his swallowtail.
At that time the highest run that had ever been made at cushion-caroms
was 77, which had been accomplished by Sexton. On this night, by
dazzling open-table play, Schaefer made a run of 70. He was called the
Wizard, because he played with extreme rapidity, exactly the opposite
of Slosson, who was known as the Student.
Now the popular professional game is the balkline, 18.2. A recent
champion is Edouard Horemans of Belgium, who won the title from young
Schaefer in a hair-raising match at San Francisco. Horemans is a
left-handed player and in every respect a worthy champion. His rail
play is phenomenal. I saw him give an exhibition on his first visit to
America in 1920 and it was clear that he was a dangerous competitor.
Who is the greatest player in history? It is hard to say, but I suspect
there never was a greater player than Napoleon Ives. He was one of the
first to use a cue weighing more than twenty ounces and was all but
unbeatable. Schaefer (senior) once beat him with the anchor shot, which
was afterward barred. Unfortunately, tuberculosis cut Ives off in his
prime. The heated room, the chalk dust and the excitement of close
contests were too much for him.
XXXV
DOG BOOKS
The dog, except in very high latitudes, is not so useful as the horse,
the mule, the camel, the donkey; he cannot supply food and drink, like
the cow and the goat; but for all that, he is, among all the lower
animals, man’s best friend. Even here, as in bipeds, we do not prize
our friends for what they can do for us, but for their mental and moral
qualities.
If it were possible to collect in one heap all the books and articles
that men have written in praise of dogs, it would be a sky-scraper.
I cannot tell what the earliest literary allusion to dogs is; but I
think it strange that the Bible is so silent. Those books representing
the social history of the Jews for many centuries, contain the most
beautiful poetry and prose ever written, as well as the most tender and
comforting assurances; but they indicate little interest in animals
as companions or pets. The word dog is repeatedly used as a term of
degradation, and for some unknown reason the Jews were forbidden to
bring into the sanctuary the price of a dog, which was coupled with the
wages of sin. The only allusion I have found to the dog as a companion
is in the Apocrypha, in the eleventh chapter of Tobit: “So they went
their way, and the dog went after them.” Even here the dog apparently
had to force his attentions upon man, which is a way he has when
unappreciated.
The fact that in the New Testament the dogs ate of the crumbs from the
table and that the street dogs licked the sores of Lazarus the beggar,
proves nothing in the way of appreciation; other animals moved freely
about the houses in Palestine, and they were not kept for the charm of
their company.
But in the old Indian books of the East, many centuries before Christ,
the dog’s fidelity and social attractions were prized; as is shown by
the well-known story of the righteous pilgrim coming to the gates of
heaven with his dog. He was told to walk right in. “And my dog?” “Oh,
no dogs allowed.” “All right, then I don’t go in.” This man thought
heaven would not be heaven without dogs, as Siegmund cared naught for
heaven without Sieglinde.
Pope alluded to the Indian love of dogs:
“But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”
The Greeks loved dogs. One of the most affecting incidents in Homer’s
_Odyssey_ is where Ulysses returns after years of wandering, and, being
in rags, no one recognises him. But his dog Argos, who had waited for
his master expectantly all these years, instantly sees and knows him,
and through the beggar’s disguise salutes the king. He wags his tail
and dies of joy.
English literature is filled with dogolatry. Dr. John Brown’s _Rab
and His Friends_ (1858), became a little classic. Tennyson worshipped
dogs, and always had two or three huge dogs in the room while he
composed poetry, which he read aloud to them. His poem _Owd Roa_ (Old
Rover), describes how a dog saved a family when the house was on fire.
Bret Harte made a marvellous sketch of the strange appearance and
characteristics of the dog Boonder. Stevenson wrote a whimsical essay,
_The Character of Dogs_, in which he proves conclusively that many
dogs are snobs. They certainly are; they will fawn on well-dressed
strangers, and try to bite the iceman.
Maeterlinck has declared that the dog is the only conscious being
in the world who knows and is sure of his god; in _The Blue Bird_
he exalted the moral character of the dog, though I find it hard
to forgive him for his slander of the cat. Richard Harding Davis’s
masterpiece--among all his brilliant short stories--is _The Bar
Sinister_, an imaginative study of dogs. Rudyard Kipling has celebrated
the virtues of dogs both in prose and verse.
Vivisection and dogs have called out many poems, of which two of the
most notable are Robert Browning’s _Tray_ and Percy MacKaye’s _The
Heart of a Dog_.
Jack London’s masterpiece is _The Call of the Wild_, where the great
dog reverted to primitive impulses and habits. This is an imperishable
work of literature, and although cast in the form of prose fiction,
has much of the elevation and majesty of poetry. Among contemporary
writers, Albert Payson Terhune has specialised in dogs, and done
admirable work in canine psychoanalysis. The late Senator Vest, when
a young man, made a speech in court on dogs which will outlast his
political orations.
But of all the works in prose or verse, ancient or modern that
celebrates the virtues of the dog, the most admirable is the novel,
_Bob, Son of Battle_, by the late Alfred Ollivant. It was published in
1898, and was his first book, written under peculiar circumstances. Mr.
Ollivant was a young Englishman who had injured his spine in football;
then, having apparently recovered, he received a commission in the
artillery at the age of nineteen. A fall from his horse permanently
injured him, so that he was an invalid for the rest of his life--he
died in 1927. For the first few years he was not able to leave his
bed, and at the age of twenty, in horizontal pain and weakness, began
to write _Bob_. It took him three years to finish the book. In England
it was published under the poor title, _Owd Bob_, and attracted no
attention; but in America the publishers wisely changed the name to the
alliterative _Bob, Son of Battle_, and the book sold by the hundred
thousand. (Those who are interested in the first editions should know
that the first English edition differs in style from the first American
edition; the London publishers delayed publication, and the author
revised the story without injuring it.)
It is a curious fact that this book, written by an Englishman for
Englishmen, and dealing exclusively with English scenes and customs,
should have attracted no attention in the land of its birth, while
selling like the proverbial hot cakes in every city and village in
America. In public lectures in Texas, California, and all over the
middle West and the East, I had only to mention the name of this novel
and a wave of delighted recognition swept over the audience. But
even ten years after its appearance it was practically unheard of in
England. I asked William De Morgan, Henry Arthur Jones, and William
Archer if they had read it; they had never heard of it.
Some years after that, however, a cheap edition was published in Great
Britain, and the book slowly made its way, and is now over there as
here an acknowledged classic. Its popularity was increased by its
being made into a motion picture, and Mr. Ollivant was elected to the
Athenæum.
The two most remarkable dogs I ever met in fiction are both in _Bob,
Son of Battle_--the hero, Bob, the Grey Dog of Kenmuir, and the villain
Red Wull. Their continued rivalry has an epic force and fervour. It
is the eternal strife between the Power of Light and the Power of
Darkness.
XXXVI
GOING TO HONOLULU
Remember to pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with “bone,” not with
“on.” But, above all, remember, when you are there, never to speak of
coming from the United States or from America--you are in the United
States. Call your home “the mainland.” I was once giving a lecture in
California and I thoughtlessly began a sentence this way: “When I get
back to America”--I never finished that sentence. It was owing only to
the sense of humour possessed by the audience that I was able to finish
the lecture.
People who have travelled all over the world say there are only two
places that may accurately be called paradise; they are the Hawaiian
Islands and Ceylon. If the wind is right, you get the spicy perfume
from Ceylon before the island is visible, as it is written in the
missionary hymn. I have never seen Ceylon, but Hawaii will do very well
as an earthly paradise. The most vivid and alluring description of it
came from the pen of Mark Twain and is to be found at the end of that
work of genius, _Roughing It_. In a certain sense, Mark was always
homesick for these islands. He saw them in his youth and he remembered
them in his old age.
In honor of Lord Sandwich, Captain Cook in 1778 named them the Sandwich
Islands. The next year he was killed there and a native chief affirmed
that he had eaten the Captain’s heart. I hope it gave him indigestion.
The islands were conquered by the native king, Kamehameha I, who died
in 1819. He was a great man, a combination of warrior and statesman,
like William the Conqueror.
In 1820 the American missionaries arrived. They found the natives
amiable, like many of the children of the sun, but without religion,
morality or education. Just the most blessed state imaginable, say many
of our modern writers, whose highest ideal for humanity is animalism.
The advantage of such an ideal is that one does not have to struggle to
reach it--hence its popularity.
These missionaries were heroic. They came around Cape Horn in sailing
vessels and they had to send their children back to the mainland for
education by the same route. All ministers of the gospel believe in
education and make sacrifices for it.
King Kalakaua was a picturesque and easy-tempered monarch, who loved
liquor. His trip around the world was an illuminating excursion in
every sense of the word. When he was at the British court, a terrific
question of etiquette arose which puzzled the wise men. Should he,
in going into dinner after Queen Victoria, precede or follow Edward,
Prince of Wales? The matter was settled by the tact and wit of the
Prince. “The man is either a king and should precede me, or he should
go into the dining-room with a napkin over his arm.”
In 1893 Queen Liliuokalani tried to get a new Constitution giving
more power to the throne. An American revolution--the third in our
history--took place, and a republic was established, with the late
Sanford B. Dole as President. In 1898 the republic was annexed to the
United States and in 1900 became the Territory of Hawaii. It will some
day become a State.
The voyage thither from San Francisco usually takes six days. Leaving
the Golden Gate in a cold fog, one sees hump-backed whales, and thirty
miles out the only land, the Farallone Islands, a desolate, melancholy
place for school teachers. But school teachers are used to getting the
worst of it. The weather is cold for two days, then mild, then warm;
plenty of flying fish by day, strange phosphorescence in the sea by
night, and overhead unfamiliar stars. The Southern Cross appears, a
subject for dispute.
The climate is celestial--much too good for this world. Never hot,
never cold in Honolulu. The year round it usually has a minimum of 70,
a maximum of 83. The constant northeast trade winds make the climate
suitable for civilised man, but they also bring frequent showers. The
inhabitants will not admit that these showers are rain--they call them
liquid sunshine. They are indeed liquid. On one elevation the wind
blows so hard that it is difficult to stand upright and on top of one
mountain I saw a waterfall up instead of down, the wind catching it
just as it left the rock. But on the small island Oahu, containing
Honolulu, one can find an immense variety of wind and weather. Those
who dislike showers can live where it practically never rains; other
places have genial, windless heat, and still others have the cooling,
beneficent breeze.
It is an international place and the brethren dwell together in unity.
The streets are filled with Americans, Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese,
Portuguese, English, Germans and other folks, who seem to get along
together very well indeed. Punahou College was founded in 1841 and is
the oldest American college or university west of the Mississippi.
There I saw a remarkable historical pageant, attended by ex-President
Dole and ex-Queen Lil. One of the natives made a long address to the
Queen, which I wish I could have understood. Her face was grave and
impassive and when I was presented to her, I was deeply impressed by
her anachronistic expression. She seemed to be living in the past.
I visited many of the schools. At Kaiulaui School there were among the
pupils fifty-eight varieties of nationalities--I remember the exact
number, as it was one more than the mystic fifty-seven. The United
States flag was brought out; the children sang The Star-Spangled
Banner. Then they recited part of Longfellow’s _Building of the Ship_.
In the primary grade of another school, the teacher was a Japanese
lady. The children seem entirely free from the bigotry of nationalism.
The word “foreigner” is not an epithet and the children exhibit that
rarest of all human things--democracy.
The natural wonders on the biggest island of the group, Hawaii, beggar
description. You must go there yourselves. But I have always been more
interested in human nature than in nature. I have seldom seen the
latter and never the former show to better advantage than in these
delectable oases of the ocean.
XXXVII
HYMNS
The church to which I belong has this very day furnished itself with a
new set of hymn-books; when I enter my accustomed pew tomorrow morning
I shall find there attractive new volumes. Which fact leads me to the
consideration of hymns in general.
The worst verses in the world are to be found among epitaphs and
encomiums of the dead. I remember a certain town in Connecticut where
the local poet hovered over the bedside of the dying, like a vulture
watching a sick horse. Before the corpse was cold, this poetical ghoul
had his poem on the “remains” in the village paper. You had to get up
very early in the morning to die before he beat you to it, as Matthew
Arnold would not say. He added new terrors to death.
Well, probably, in the number of bad verses, hymns rank a good second
to epitaphs. There are so many bad hymns that some scoffers think
there are few good ones. Such a generalisation is wide of the truth.
The literature of hymnology contains many masterpieces; innumerable
hymns of the church are as beautiful in poetic art as they are devout
in aspiration. If we took all the hymns out of English literature, the
loss would be huge.
If a secret ballot could be taken among all classes of people to
discover the choice of the favourite hymn, I think it would appear that
Cardinal Newman’s _Lead, Kindly Light_ had a majority of votes.
I happened to be in London at the time of Newman’s death in 1890,
himself just as old as the nineteenth century. Then were the old bitter
controversies forgotten; Catholics, Protestants and the unclassed
united in tributes to the genius and beauty of the great Cardinal’s
mind and character. And as creeds were for the moment forgotten, so
there came instinctively to every one’s lips the words of Newman’s
creedless hymn, as creedless as the Lord’s Prayer.
The vicissitudes of literary fame are beyond divination. Who, including
first of all Newman, could have dreamed that when the young man
composed that poem, it would outlast his scholarly, controversial,
pietistic and literary prose of eighty years? Yet such is the fact.
On June 16, 1833, while in a calm at sea, on board an orange-boat and
thinking of his doctrinal perplexities, these lines came into Newman’s
mind; as suddenly, as inexplicably, as fortunately as the stanzas
_Crossing the Bar_ came to Tennyson on a ferryboat crossing the Solent.
Newman called the poem, _The Pillar and the Cloud_.
For details concerning its composition and for some interesting
criticisms on the poem itself I will refer readers to Dr. Joseph J.
Reilly’s admirable book, _Newman as a Man of Letters_.
Two of our best American hymn writers are two of our national
poets--Whittier and Holmes. The hymns of Whittier are beautiful in
their simplicity, sincerity, and universal application:
In simple trust like those who heard,
Beside the Syrian sea,
The gracious calling of the Lord,
Let us, like them, without a word,
Rise up and follow Thee.
and the universally known hymn, beginning
We may not climb the heavenly steeps.
The splendid hymn by Oliver Wendell Holmes, commencing
Lord of all being, throned afar,
is sung somewhere every Sunday.
Two hymns by Addison, written more than two hundred years ago, are
familiar to all churchgoers--one, _The spacious firmament on high_,
which was a favourite with Thackeray, and the other, beginning
When all Thy mercies, O my God.
I have always especially liked one stanza of this hymn:
Ten thousand thousand precious gifts
My daily thanks employ;
Nor is the least a cheerful heart
That tastes those gifts with joy.
After enumerating many blessings for which he is grateful to God,
Addison quite rightly includes the gift of a cheerful heart. Those who
are ever fastidious, difficult to please and not grateful for anything
miss much happiness.
The king of hymn-writers is Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Although
churchgoers sing his hymns every Sunday, he has never received due
literary credit for his magnificent sacred poems. _When I Survey the
Wondrous Cross_ is a hymn of tremendous passion. In one of his novels
Arnold Bennett calls it “that amazing hymn.” In other hymns by Watts
there is an austere grandeur.
Frederick William Faber (1814–1863) is another master of the art of
hymn writing. _Hark, Hark, My Soul!_ and _There’s a Wideness in God’s
Mercy_ are known everywhere. No martial song was ever more inspiring
than _Faith of Our Fathers_, with its thrilling second stanza. I often
wonder when people sing that stanza in church, sing it mechanically
with their thoughts elsewhere, what would happen if they took it
literally:
Our fathers, chained in prisons dark,
Were still in heart and conscience free;
And blest would be their children’s fate,
If they, like them, should die for Thee.
Faith of our fathers, holy faith,
We will be true to Thee till death.
One of the greatest of all hymns, _Nearer, My God, to Thee_, was
written by Sarah Flower, a friend of the young poet Robert Browning.
The first time it was ever heard in public was when Sarah and Eliza
Flower sang it as a duet in the Rev. Mr. Fox’s church. Little did those
sisters guess that they had added to the Christian church all over the
world an imperishable song.
Scores of other hymns might be mentioned, hymns that are exalted and
passionate in feeling and aspiration and nobly poetic in expression.
It is a pity that we so seldom hear good congregational singing.
People nowadays let others do their singing for them, as well as their
praying. If one will look at the faces of an audience in church and
notice that although their mouths are open no sound emerges, one will
be reminded of a cat on the back doorstep on a winter morning. You look
at the cat and the animal opens its mouth as if to mew, but has not
sufficient energy to bring the articulate mew to the surface--just an
expression of vague discomfort. So during the singing of hymns I see
people with no animation in their faces and with open, silent mouths,
like the dry mew of the cat.
XXXVIII
OLD-FASHIONED SNOBS
I suppose there never was a time in the history of human society
without snobs--that is, without young men of fashion who wished to be
thought prominent members of the smart set. The slang of various epochs
has called them macaronies, dandies, dudes, toffs, swells--but under
various appellations the creature is the same, with the same habits.
There are certain persons who cultivate superficial elegancies and are
never caught in an informal attitude or off their guard. Lowell said
that if N. P. Willis had lived in the Garden of Eden he would have
attracted attention by the way he wore his skin.
About three centuries ago, in the spacious times of Queen Elizabeth, as
we learn from the plays of Shakespeare and of his contemporaries, and
from a satirical guide-book written by Thomas Dekker, the typical young
snob in London got through an average day in the following manner:
He rose at noon. Late rising has always been an essential feature of
snobbery; because if one gets up early, it proves that one has to earn
one’s living, and to support oneself is incompatible with swelldom.
If any one thinks that the idea of Walter Camp’s setting-up exercise
is new, let me remind him that the Elizabethan dandy, invariably
after rising, took a whole series of gymnastic exercises while stark
naked. The object of this was twofold: he had to keep in fair physical
condition, and these exercises helped to take out of his system the
invariable “hangover.”
He then dressed with the utmost care, and here we must remember an
essential difference between the mental attitude of Elizabethans and
that of young men of today. The late Professor Moulton said that the
chief characteristic of our age was anticonspicuousness. And this is
quite true. Women wear short skirts not to attract attention, but to
avoid it. We follow fashions to escape notoriety. But in Elizabethan
times exactly the contrary was true.
The most democratic garment in the world today is men’s evening dress.
After six o’clock, in any locality in the so-called civilised world, a
man is in style with the black dinner jacket or swallow-tail. Time and
again the tailors have fought this, doing their best to persuade men to
wear something in colour, or at all events something more individual.
But the men thus far have succeeded in preserving economical uniformity.
Now in Elizabethan times the garments of men were as gorgeous as the
feathers of male birds. A group of men talking together was a “riot of
colour.” A man wore soft leather boots, narrow at the ankle, and with
immense, colored flaring tops. His knee breeches were tight-fitting
silk or satin. His jacket was a slashed doublet, brilliant in colour;
at the neck was an enormous white ruff, which must have kept the
laundries busy; imagine eating soup over that ruff! Over the doublet he
wore a short velvet cloak, with a high collar. The hat was as elaborate
in design as the old style woman’s Easter bonnet, very broad, with an
audacious feather. And, of course, he invariably carried a sword, with
jewelled hilt.
In this array our young swell walked at ease in the centre aisle of
St. Paul’s Cathedral, the favourite place for fashionable display. His
tailor sometimes accompanied him like a detective and, in response to
a signal, took notes of some new and particularly splendid costume.
The young man would salute noblemen and aristocrats in a loud voice,
calling them, if he dared, by their first name, so as to give the
impression of intimacy; for it was essential then, as now, to be with
the “right crowd.” In stentorian tones he would make an appointment for
a two o’clock luncheon at an expensive eating house. After luncheon,
the toothpick was prominently displayed while on promenade.
In contrast to the modern soldier, who never speaks of his war
experiences, the young Elizabethan, if he had fought in the Low
Countries or elsewhere, bragged noisily about it in all public places.
If he were a poet, he behaved like a tenth-rate poet in Paris today. He
entered a restaurant with a solemn, preoccupied air, and, in taking his
glove from his pocket, purposely let fall a manuscript. Some one would
pick it up and he would remark that it was only a poem he had dashed
off an hour ago; but he would manage the conversation so that he would
be asked to read it aloud.
Tobacco was “coming in” then, and every young swell must be able to
smoke in public without becoming sick. They had their favourite pipes
and elaborate silver pouches; they talked about the different brands of
tobacco like a professional, and it was a great accomplishment to blow
rings.
All public theatrical performances were in the afternoon. The swell
always entered late, attracting as much attention as possible, and
took a seat on the stage, in full view of the audience. In the midst of
a tragedy, he laughed aloud, to show his immunity to sentiment; at a
funny play he scowled and sometimes noisily left the theatre, clanking
his spurs, and saluting acquaintances as he passed out. Sometimes he
would take a rush from the stage floor and playfully tickle the ear of
one of the actors.
After the play, he went to the tavern, where it was important to call
the waiters by their first names, showing that he was a regular patron;
and when the bill was presented he must never look at the items or add
them up, which might show that he was a family man, or familiar with
current prices; no, he must glance carelessly at the total, and pay
with a big tip.
Then in the night he went to his lodgings. One must remember there were
no paved streets in London and no sidewalks and no lights; if the young
gentleman could afford it, he had a linkboy, carrying a torch, precede
him, for in Dryden’s later phrase, the real swell “sailed behind his
link.” The boy was properly tipped, so that if he met strangers, he
would call out, “My lord, step this way.” Then others gave him place,
and the officers of the law respected his intoxicated condition. And so
to bed.
XXXIX
A FAIR CITY
Almost every writer and thinker has the city of his dreams, his Utopia.
In recent years the novelists W. H. Hudson, H. G. Wells and Alfred
Ollivant have each published a book setting forth a conception of the
ideal community. It is not my purpose to add another Utopia but rather
to call attention to an actual city, which, while it is imperfect like
everything else in this motley world, has nevertheless many advantages
that might well be imitated by American cities. I refer to Munich,
Germany.
Munich is my favourite European town. I had rather live in the United
States of America than in any other country; partly because I was born
here, partly because I like the country anyway, but if I could not live
in the United States I had rather live in Munich than in any other city
in the world.
Munich is nearly as large as Boston and yet as quiet as a country
village. Where the people are I don’t know, but those who are familiar
with Boylston and Tremont Streets in Boston will see nothing like
that in Munich. The streets are calm, the sidewalks uncrowded, the
highway uncongested by traffic; there is no Great White Way; there
are no flaring lights; there is no hurly-burly. You can hear your own
footsteps. An American who arrived at Munich at nine o’clock in the
evening, observing the silence of the streets, asked his taxi driver to
take him somewhere. The driver said, “Isn’t that rather indefinite?”
“You know what I mean--take me where there is a lot of noise and a
lot of people.” The driver answered, “What you want is the railway
station.” And indeed that is the only place in Munich that fulfills
those requirements.
There is everything in Munich to make a cultivated foreigner happy,
cheerful and content with a long stay. I have never seen any town that
has so much to give to the visitor. In the first place, everything
that one wants to see is within easy walking distance. If one rooms
in a boarding house on a side street off the Ludwig Strasse, one can
walk in a few moments to the university, to the public library, to the
concert halls, to the State Opera House, to the State Theatre, to the
Play House, to the art galleries; and the English Garden, an enormous
tract of land, is in the centre of the town and close to all of these
other delectable places. In the English Garden in summer one may take
long walks or one may sit down and hear music as one sips coffee or
beer. In the winter one may skate on the frozen lake. Those who are
fond of winter sports have the mountains close at hand. It is estimated
that on some Sunday mornings in winter 100,000 people take an early
train to the mountains for skiing and other amusements. In the summer
the environs of Munich are beautiful. There is a series of lakes where
one may take excursions in a little steamer or in a rowboat; where one
may visit famous old castles and see the treasures with which they are
filled.
If one is fond of tennis, there are three or four tennis courts in the
heart of the city where one may become a visiting member at a nominal
fee and find plenty of agreeable companions. The golf links are ten
minutes by trolley, and there again the entrance fee is nominal. The
only objection that I have to the golf links is that the magnificent
mountains are so near that one is constantly tempted to lift up one’s
eyes to the hills, and, however valuable it may be for one’s spiritual
development, it is fatal to one’s efficiency in golf.
Every night in Munich there is something interesting to hear at the
opera, at the theatre or at the concert hall. Every morning there is
published a little paper devoted exclusively to theatrical and musical
affairs. This paper gives every event that will take place in the city
in the afternoon and evening, with the exact time of beginning, the
exact time of closing and a complete list of the actors, singers and
performers.
One of the chief attractions of the theatre and the operas in Munich
is the fact that they begin early. The opera begins at six o’clock and
is always over before ten, except in the case of a very long opera.
The plays begin at seven-thirty and in nearly every instance are
over at nine-thirty. In other words, the opera and theatres are run
not for the benefit of members of a leisure class who do not have to
get up the next morning but for the ordinary citizen and his family
who are obliged to rise early and go to work. In New York, in Paris
and in London theatre-going and opera-going are in the nature of a
dissipation. The theatres in Paris do not close until midnight, and
in New York and London one does not usually get to one’s domicile
before that. The result is that one is exhausted, and, according to
Kipling, “There is nothing certain but the morning head.” To go to
the theatre or opera four nights in succession in London, Paris or
New York--unless one is able to rise very late the next day--is an
exhausting ordeal, but in Munich, during a period of seven months, I
averaged five nights a week at the opera and theatre and never felt
fatigue.
There is another advantage about beginning early. Instead of going to
the opera or theatre stuffed with a soggy dinner and made somnolent by
food, one takes tea before going and when the entertainment is over one
goes into a cheerful café and has a hot supper in delightful company
and is in bed before eleven.
What does going to the theatre mean in New York, London and Paris?
It too often means something like this. One attends a dinner party
where half the guests arrive late; one then has a long course dinner,
hurried toward the end; the entire company is hustled into automobiles
and arrives at the theatre or opera a half hour after the performance
has begun and in a condition that precludes the possibility of mental
concentration.
After one has spent two or three months in Munich, one falls in love
with the place, with the temper of the town and with the people. I am
frequently homesick for Munich. In one year, after I had spent four
months there, I went in April to Italy--the land where the lemon trees
bloom. There I lived in sunshine and enjoyed the glory and beauty of
the romantic country. But after a while I became homesick for Munich
and, although on the morning of my return it was raining and the
weather in general was doing its worst, my heart was singing, for I was
home again.
XL
TRADITIONS
Whether we like it or not, we are governed by the past. The books
written by men long dead have the largest influence in shaping our
minds and ruling our conduct; the laws that control our duties and
our privileges as citizens were made by men whose names we cannot
remember; spirit hands guide our footsteps; we think the thoughts of
our ancestors and carry into execution conceptions formed by them. The
muscles of our bodies and the swifter impulses of our minds are set
in motion by thousands of men and women. We have been shaped by our
traditions. We can ourselves add something to these traditions, but
even if we would, we cannot annihilate them. They are as real as we are.
Many Americans have such a militant consciousness of independence that
they cannot endure the thought of having America’s destiny in any way
influenced by hands across the sea. “What! do you mean to say that
foreigners shall tell us what we may and may not do?” Now the truth
is, that not only men in foreign nations have a vital influence on our
present conduct and future acts, but that this is especially true of
those foreigners who have been dead for centuries. The situation is
humiliating. Bad enough to have an absentee ruler alive--how much more
insupportable when he has ceased to exist!
Nothing is more foolish than to despise the past or to attempt to
arrange the future without a sound knowledge of history. The difficulty
with some radical reformers is that they are deficient in historical
knowledge. They do not know that the experiment they have in mind
has been tried so many times without success that some lesson might
possibly be gained by observation of previous results. “Histories make
men wise,” said Bacon; they make us wise, not merely because history
books were written by wise men, but because history itself is the
accumulation of human wisdom gleaned from human folly. To sneer at the
past is to sneer at wisdom. For despite the glib way in which the word
evolution is used, despite the advances made in personal luxuries,
housing and locomotion, despite the broad (rather than deep) diffusion
of culture by which reading and writing have become no more conspicuous
than breathing--there is not one scintilla of evidence to prove that
the individual mind has advanced a single step in the power of thought,
or in the ability to reason, or in the possession of wisdom. The men of
ancient times--as represented by their leaders--were in every respect
as able-minded as the best products of the twentieth century.
Reflexion makes us realise the imponderable worth of traditions; we
know they come only from years. Even if every man had his price, which
is not true, there are things beyond all price. A boy who goes to
Cambridge or Oxford has something in his education beyond the price he
pays for his tuition, or the instruction he receives in lectures, or
the advantages of modern laboratories. The grey walls of the cloisters,
the noble old towers, the enchanting beauty of the quadrangle,
represent not only the best in architecture, but they are hallowed
by thousands of ghosts. Lowell coined the phrase, “God’s passionless
reformers, influences.” These influences, silently but chronically
active, like a deep-flowing river, give something that no recently
founded institution can bring; something that makes the so-called
almighty dollar look impotent. Any well-disposed multi-millionaire
can start a well-equipped university; in time it, too, will have its
traditions; but many centuries give a tone and a stamp that cannot be
bought or sold.
A certain independent humour accompanies those who live in ancient
surroundings--and this humour is frequently the Anglo-Saxon way of
expressing pride. After dining in hall with the dons one evening in a
college at Oxford, we adjourned successively to three rooms. I asked
one of my hosts if that had always been the custom. “No, indeed,” said
he, with a smile; “in fact, it is comparatively recent. We have been
doing this only since the seventeenth century.” He spoke as though it
were a rather startling innovation. A wealthy American was so pleased
with the velvet turf of the Oxford quadrangles that he asked a janitor
how such turf was produced; it appeared that he wished his front lawn
at home to wear a similar aspect. The janitor replied that the matter
was simple; all that was necessary was to wait a thousand years. Age
sometimes really comes before beauty.
When the Englishman Thomas Hardy sat down in his house at Dorchester to
write a poem, he knew that the ground in his garden was filled with the
relics of Roman occupation--pottery, utensils and human bones. Twenty
centuries were in his dooryard. No wonder there is dignity in his
compositions when their roots go so deep.
Tennyson said:
That man’s the best cosmopolite
Who loves his native country best.
I suppose he meant that the man who loved his own country was better
fitted to love all countries and thus become a citizen of the world
than one who, while professing to be swayed only by international
sentiment, should have little affection for any country in particular.
We are familiar with the type of man who is filled with enthusiasm for
humanity, but who never helps an individual; love, like charity, should
begin at home. It is a singular but happy human characteristic that we
love so ardently the scenes of our childhood; even those brought up in
a detestable climate will, when far away in golden sunlight, become
homesick for the fog, the mist, and the rain. Many who have left home
in early manhood will return thither in old age, as though drawn by
invisible but irresistible bonds.
American traditions go back to Colonial days; and those days went back
to the English country and English speech. We ought not to forget
these traditions or be untrue to the best that is in Anglo-Saxon
civilisation. Perhaps no one thing is more necessary to the welfare
and peace of the world today than frank, hearty, sincere friendship and
good will between Great Britain and the United States.
XLI
SPOOKS
There are intelligent and well-educated persons who believe in
ghosts--I mean they believe in the actual reappearance on earth in
visible form of certain individuals who have for some time been dead
and buried. These are the genuine ghosts, not the creations of fear
or fancy, but as the French call them, _revenants_, those who come
back. Hamlet’s father was a true ghost, seen by a number of reliable
witnesses; the bloody Banquo at the dinner table was the painting of
Macbeth’s fear, actually not there at all.
The late William De Morgan was a devout believer in ghosts, was
convinced that he had himself seen a sufficient number for purposes
of verification, and hence did not scruple to introduce them into his
novels.
I have not been so fortunate. I cannot even say as many do, “I do not
believe in ghosts, but I am afraid of them.” I will not say that I do
not believe in them, but I am not afraid of them. I never saw one. I
have never seen or heard anything that could not be explained in some
commonplace fashion. There are many who affirm that they have seen in
broad daylight the face and figure of a friend, and as they have drawn
nearer in order to converse, the appearance became a disappearance,
without any rational explanation. The friend may be living, or he may
have long since died. A great many persons are “seeing things,” and I
rather envy them. Others have distinctly felt a touch on the shoulder,
and on turning, no one was discoverable. I have always, alas, found the
responsible party.
But though I have never seen spooks, I have had a few spooky
experiences, of which I will mention two.
One night, with the exception of the maids on the top floor, I was
alone in the house. I had not been well for many days, and felt
particularly miserable when I went to bed. I had lain uneasily for some
hours, and had finally lapsed into semi-consciousness. At half-past two
I was startled by the loud ringing of the front door bell. Accoutred
as I was, I descended, and opened the door. There was no one. For
a few moments, like the man in Poe’s poem, I stood, deep into the
darkness peering. But the darkness gave no token, and wonderingly
I shut the door. I had not got half-way up the stairs, when once
again the doorbell rang with violence. It is easy enough to tell this
lightly now, but then, alone in the house, and ill, it was worse than
mysterious. I ran to the door, and flung it wide open. Not a soul in
sight, the street silent and deserted. Then I thought it might after
all not have been the doorbell, but the telephone. Accordingly I rang
up Central, only to be informed that no one had called my number. While
I was considering this, the doorbell once more reverberated through the
empty house. Again I opened the door. No one.
I decided that some one with a deficient or perverted sense of humour
was making me a victim. Accordingly I shut the front door, and crouched
directly behind it, with the intention of leaping out and seizing the
humorist as soon as he rang again. In a few moments the bell rang
loudly; I jerked back the door and sprang outside. But there was
absolutely no one, and there was no sound of retreating steps.
I stood outside the door, lost in amazement and fear, for I was
terrified. I gazed wonderingly at the button, half-expecting to see
some spirit-finger push it; when, to my utter dismay, the bell rang
shriller and louder than ever.
If I had really believed in ghosts, that would have been sufficient
evidence. As it is, I shall never forget my distress while the bell
continued ringing and I was looking directly at the only means of
making it ring. I closed the door, and had a bad night.
In the morning I consulted a specialist, not on nerves, but on
doorbells. The explanation was simple. A mouse was enjoying the flavour
of the paraffin in which the wires in the cellar were wrapped, and
every time he gave a particularly fervent bite, the bell rang. I hope
it scared him as much as it did me, but if so, his hunger triumphed
over his fear, for he kept returning to the feast.
On another occasion I was out shooting in a desolate place in Michigan.
I was accompanied by my friend, A. K. Merritt, now Registrar of Yale
College, who will vouch for the truth of the story. Dusk was falling;
there was no wind. We had wandered into a scene of stagnant desolation.
Dead trees had fallen in rotten ruin across the trail, and the swampy
pools were covered with a green mantle of decay. Merritt was walking in
front and I close behind him. The gloom and depression of the scene in
the deepening dusk had affected our spirits, so that we had not spoken
for some time. Suddenly I thought of the scenery of Browning’s poem,
_Childe Roland_. The lines of that masterpiece of horror would well
describe this place, I thought; and I began to repeat them in my mind
without saying a word aloud. Then methought there was only one thing
needed to make the picture complete. That was the horrible horse, which
in the poem stood alone and sinister in the gathering night. If that
horse were here, I said to myself, this would indeed be the veritable
country of Childe Roland. Something impelled me to look behind my back,
and, to my unutterable surprise and horror, I found myself looking
directly into the eyes of a forlorn old horse. I let out a yell of
sheer uncontrollable terror.
Merritt was as startled by the yell as I had been by its cause. I asked
him if the horse was really there. It was bad to have him there, but
worse if he were not. Merritt reassured me on that point.
I suppose the poor old horse had been pensioned off by some farmer, and
had silently followed us on the spongy ground, either because he was
lonesome or because he wanted salt. But he gave me the shock of my life.
I have thought much about it since, and I am unable to determine
whether the appearance of the horse at the precise moment when I was
thinking of him was a coincidence--or was I all the time subconsciously
aware of his presence? That is to say, did the nearness of the
horse, even though I had no conscious knowledge of it, suggest to my
subconscious mind the lines from the poem? I wish I knew.
XLII
TRIAL BY JURY
When I was an undergraduate at Yale, we were fortunate in having as one
of our professors Edward John Phelps, who was unexpectedly appointed
minister to England by Grover Cleveland, and who, after making a fine
impression at the Court of _St. James_--do you know why it is called
that?--returned to his professorship. He was fond of making general
statements, not only concerned with his specialty, the law, but on
anything that rose to the surface of his mind; so that to take his
course was in itself a liberal education.
I well remember his beginning one lecture by saying emphatically,
“Trial by jury is a good thing which has outlived its usefulness.”
I believe that when he made that statement, he spoke the truth. If
it was true then, it is certainly true now; nothing has happened
since to improve the situation, or to make jury trials fairer or
less expensive to the state. In America, we have two pieces of
obsolete machinery--the electoral college and trial by jury. When I
began university teaching, one of my freshman pupils made the only
interesting contribution to the workings of the electoral college
that I have ever seen. I gave out as a theme subject, “The Electoral
College,” and the first theme handed in opened with this sentence--“I
do not believe in the Electoral College.” Well, neither did I, so
thus far I agreed with my pupil; I read the next sentence to get
his reasons; it was the next sentence that contained the original
contribution to the subject, “The trouble is,” wrote the freshman,
“that in the Electoral College everybody chooses snap courses.”
Now the original idea on which the scheme of trial by jury was founded
was as good as human ingenuity could devise. Any person accused of
anything involving legal punishment was to be tried by a jury of his
peers--twelve average, common-sensible, fair-minded men, who, after
hearing all the evidence and the pleas of the lawyers, would bring in
a verdict, which presumably would be in accordance with the facts, and
therefore just. But in the course of time, although human nature has
not changed, circumstances have, and it is difficult to avoid today the
conclusion that the chief qualification for a member of a jury is that
he should not be fit to serve. Unfitness is the only fitness. Anyone
who has an opinion is barred; in order therefore for one to be eligible
he must be one who knows little of the world in which he lives and
who is curiously insensitive to what everybody is talking about. In a
recent editorial in the _New Haven Journal-Courier_, the point is well
made.
An intelligent man even with prejudice would appear to be a better
person to entrust the decision of life or death with, after the
presentation of the evidence and the interpretation of it by
counsel and the judge’s charge, than an ignorant person who knows
too little of current life to form any opinions whatever upon any
subject.
Furthermore, it frequently happens that after a trial lasting for
months the jury disagree, making another trial necessary, and involving
an enormous waste of public money. There ought to be some better way of
reaching a decision.
Then the very fact that the members of a jury are apt to be below
rather than above the average person in intelligence, makes them
particularly susceptible to emotional response when skilfully handled
by a clever criminal lawyer. Only a short time ago a jealous woman
deliberately murdered her husband and the woman she suspected,
although neither then nor at any time were they caught in a
compromising situation; at the trial the evidence certainly looked
black because it was all against the murderess. She was, however, an
attractive physical specimen. Her lawyer stood her up in front of the
jury, put his arm around her, and defiantly asked the jury if they
were going to put to death this beautiful woman whose only offence was
that she was a defender of the ideals of the home, American ideals.
Should she, who stood so nobly and resolutely for family purity, be
slaughtered? The jury acquitted her.
Furthermore, jury verdicts, instead of being in accordance with the
evidence and with the law, are often determined by local sentiment.
I remember two events in America at the same time, only in widely
separated parts of our country. In the first instance, a husband who
had for some time suspected his wife, happened to stumble upon the
unmistakable proof of guilt; in a transport of rage, he killed his man.
He was convicted of murder in the first degree, but the death sentence
was commuted to imprisonment for life. He is in prison now. In the
second instance, a husband hearing that his wife had gone to a hotel
with another man, deliberately armed himself, went thither and killed
both. The local jury instantly acquitted him, and he was a popular hero.
I do not believe in capital punishment, and should like to see it
abolished. But its sole merit, acting as a deterrent to crime, can be
realised only in a country like England, where trials are conducted
with absolute formality, where a decision is speedily reached, and
where the verdict of guilty is speedily followed by execution. In the
United States the murderer is too often a romantic hero, and has a long
career as a great actor, whether or not he is convicted.
It seems to me that the best judges of any case are those who by
education and training are best qualified to judge. It is significant
that in Connecticut the prisoner may now choose to be tried by three
professional judges rather than by twelve incompetent men. In a recent
famous instance the prisoner did make that choice.
Too often a public trial by jury becomes a public scandal; of greater
harm to the community and to the state than the crime of which the
prisoner is accused.
Mark Twain said: “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to
any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty
of finding twelve men every day who don’t know anything and can’t
read.”
XLIII
ATHLETICS
The whole world, with the exception of India, China, Siberia and
a few other countries, has gone wild over athletics. Although new
stadiums and amphitheatres are in process of construction everywhere,
it is impossible to accommodate the crowds. Millions of people have
apparently the money and the time to devote to these spectacular
contests, and many more millions “listen in” on the radio. In England
last June Wimbledon was not half large enough to hold the frantic crowd
that wished to see the tennis matches; the same is true of France.
At a recent wrestling contest in Austria, after all the seats were
taken, the gates were broken down by the mob of spectators who wished
to enter; about 150,000 people saw a prize fight in Chicago and it is
significant of the times that the only vacant seats were the cheapest.
Every newspaper devotes an immense amount of space to sporting news;
and all the leading daily journals employ a highly paid staff of
experts on sports, who keep the public agog with excitement before
every contest and who endeavour to satisfy its curiosity after the
battle is over.
Now there are some pessimistic philosophers who look upon all this
athletic fever as a sign of degeneration, as evidence of the coming
eclipse of civilisation. They point out that during the decay of the
Roman Empire there was a universal excitement over sports, and they
draw the inference that European and American civilisation is headed
toward disaster.
No one can read the future, although innumerable fakers are paid for
doing so. But it is at least possible that the ever-growing interest
in athletics, instead of being a sign of degeneration, is in reality
one more proof of the gradual domination of the world by Anglo-Saxon
language, customs and ideas.
Extreme interest in athletics, though it cannot be defended on strictly
rational grounds, is not necessarily accompanied by a lack or loss of
interest in intellectual matters. If one had to name the place and the
time when civilisation reached its climax, one might well name Athens
in the fifth century before Christ. If one compares Athenian public
interest in the tragedies of Sophocles with New York public interest
in musical comedy, the contrast is not flattering to American pride.
Yet that intellectual fervour in Athens was accompanied by a tremendous
interest in track athletics. Every Greek city was a separate state;
their only bond of union was the track meet held every four years and
called the Olympic Games, to which the flower of youth from every Greek
town contributed; and the winner of each event--a simon-pure amateur,
receiving as prize only a laurel wreath--was a hero for at least four
years.
From the strictly rational point of view it is impossible to defend or
even to explain the universal ardour over athletics, but it is best to
regard it as a fact, and then see what its causes are.
The majority of Anglo-Saxons have always had sporting blood, and the
Latin races are now being infused with it. I well remember a train
journey near Chicago during the darkest days of the World War. We
were all awaiting the newspapers. Suddenly a newsboy entered and we
bought eagerly. The man sitting next to me was a clergyman in Episcopal
uniform. He looked not at the front part of the paper, but turned
feverishly to the sporting page, which he read carefully. When I called
on the Very Reverend Dean of Rochester Cathedral, in England, Dean
Hole, I was shown into a room containing several thousand books. I
glanced over these and all I saw dealt exclusively with sport.
Many excellent men without sporting blood have protested against the
domination of athletics. The famous English novelist, Wilkie Collins,
published a novel, _Man and Wife_, which was a protest against the
British love of sports, in which both athletes and the public were
ridiculed. Why should thousands pay money to see two men run a race?
What difference did it make to civilisation which man won?
Yet, although it is easy to overdo excitement about athletics, the
growing interest in sport which has been so characteristic of France,
Germany and Italy during the last ten years is a good thing for the
youth of these countries and for their national and international
temper.
Years ago, the space occupied in England and in America by fields
devoted to various outdoor sports was in Germany and France used for
public gardens, where people sat and drank liquor while listening to
a band or watching some vaudeville. When I first travelled on the
Continent, I found only one tennis court and that was at Baden-Baden.
Today one finds everywhere in France and Germany tennis courts, golf
links and football fields.
It is surely not a change for the worse that a German student who used
to test his physical endurance by the number of quarts of beer he could
drink at a sitting tests it today in tennis, rowing and football, and
that the French students with silky beards, who used to strain their
eyes looking at women, now, clean-shaven and alert, are looking at the
tennis ball.
It is, of course, irrational to take an eager interest in a prize
fight, but if you have sporting blood you cannot help it. My father was
an orthodox Baptist minister. As I had never heard him mention prize
fighting, I supposed he took no interest in it.
But the day after a famous battle, as I was reading aloud the newspaper
to him, I simply read the headline, “Corbett Defeats Sullivan,” and was
about to pass on to something important when my father leaned forward
and said earnestly, “Read it by rounds.”
XLIV
A PRIVATE LIBRARY ALL YOUR OWN
A borrowed book is like a guest in the house; it must be treated with
punctiliousness, with a certain considerate formality. You must see
that it sustains no damage; it must not suffer while under your roof.
You cannot leave it carelessly, you cannot mark it, you cannot turn
down the pages, you cannot use it familiarly. And then, some day,
although this is seldom done, you really ought to return it.
But your own books belong to you; you treat them with that affectionate
intimacy that annihilates formality. Books are for use, not for show;
you should own no book that you are afraid to mark up, or afraid to
place on the table, wide open and face down. A good reason for marking
favourite passages in books is that this practice enables you to
remember more easily the significant sayings, to refer to them quickly,
and then in later years, it is like visiting a forest where you once
blazed a trail. You have the pleasure of going over the old ground, and
recalling both the intellectual scenery and your own earlier self.
Everyone should begin collecting a private library in youth; the
instinct of private property, which is fundamental in human beings, can
here be cultivated with every advantage and no evils. One should have
one’s own bookshelves, which should not have doors, glass windows, or
keys; they should be free and accessible to the hand as well as to the
eye. The best of mural decorations is books; they are more varied in
colour and appearance than any wall-paper, they are more attractive
in design, and they have the prime advantage of being separate
personalities, so that if you sit alone in the room in the firelight,
you are surrounded with intimate friends. The knowledge that they are
there in plain view is both stimulating and refreshing. You do not have
to read them all. Most of my indoor life is spent in a room containing
six thousand books; and I have a stock answer to the invariable
question that comes from strangers. “Have you read all of these books?”
“Some of them twice.” This reply is both true and unexpected.
There are of course no friends like living, breathing, corporeal men
and women; my devotion to reading has never made me a recluse. How
could it? Books are of the people, by the people, for the people.
Literature is the immortal part of history; it is the best and most
enduring part of personality. But book-friends have this advantage over
living friends; you can enjoy the most truly aristocratic society in
the world whenever you want it. The great dead are beyond our physical
reach, and the great living are usually almost as inaccessible; as for
our personal friends and acquaintances, you cannot always see them.
Perchance they are asleep, or away on a journey. But in a private
library, you can at any moment converse with Socrates or Shakespeare or
Carlyle or Dumas or Dickens or Shaw or Barrie or Galsworthy. And there
is no doubt that in these books you see these men at their best. They
wrote for YOU. They “laid themselves out,” they did their ultimate best
to entertain you, to make a favourable impression. You are necessary to
them as an audience is to an actor; only instead of seeing them masked,
you look into their inmost heart of heart. The “real Charles Dickens”
is in his novels, not in his dressing-room.
Everyone should have a few reference books, carefully selected, and
within reach. I have a few that I can lay my hands on without leaving
my chair; this is not because I am lazy, but because I am busy.
One should own an Authorised Version of the Bible in big type, a good
one-volume dictionary, the one-volume _Index and Epitome_ to the
_Dictionary of National Biography_, a one-volume History of England
and another of the United States, Ryland’s _Chronological Outlines of
English Literature_, Whitcomb’s _Chronological Outlines of American
Literature_, and other works of reference according to one’s special
tastes and pursuits. These reference books should be, so far as
possible, up to date.
The works of poets, dramatists, novelists, essayists, historians,
should be selected with care, and should grow in number in one’s
private library from the dawn of youth to the day of death.
First editions are an expensive luxury, but are more interesting to
the average mind than luxurious bindings. When you hold in your hand
a first edition of the seventeenth century, you are reading that
book in its proper time-setting; you are reading it as the author’s
contemporaries read it; maybe your copy was handled by the author
himself. Furthermore, unless you have paid too much for it, it is
usually a good investment; it increases in value more rapidly than
stocks and shares, and you have the advantage of using it. It is great
fun to search book-catalogues with an eye to bargains; it is exciting
to attend an auction sale.
But of course most of us must be content to buy standard authors,
living and dead, in modern editions. Three qualities are well to bear
in mind. In getting any book, get the complete edition of that book;
not a clipped, or condensed, or improved or paraphrased version.
Second, always get books in black, clear, readable type. When you are
young, you don’t mind; youth has the eyes of eagles. But later, you
refuse to submit to the effort--often amounting to pain--involved
in reading small type, and lines set too close together. Third, get
volumes that are light in weight. It is almost always possible to
secure this inestimable blessing in standard authors. Some books are so
heavy that to read them is primarily a gymnastic, rather than mental
exercise; and if you travel, and wish to carry them in your bag or
trunk, they are an intolerable burden. Refuse to submit to this. There
was a time when I could tell, merely by “hefting” it, whether a book
had been printed in England or in America; but American publishers have
grown in grace, and today many American books are easy to hold.
Some books must be bought in double column; but avoid this wherever
possible, and buy such books only when economy makes it necessary
to have the complete works of the author in one volume. A one-volume
Shakespeare is almost a necessity; but it should be used for reference,
as we use a dictionary, never for reading. Get Shakespeare in separate
volumes, one play at a time. It is better to have some of an author’s
works in attractive form, than to have them complete in a cumbrous or
ugly shape.
Remember that for the price of one ticket to an ephemeral
entertainment, you can secure a book that will give strength and
pleasure to your mind all your life. Thus I close by saying two words
to boys and girls, men and women: BUY BOOKS.
XLV
THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR
Some distinguished novelists are like lofty peaks. Few ascend them
and those who do breathe rarefied air. There are writers whose fame
is apparently secure who have never had many readers, and there are
writers who have an enormous public and no fame. George Meredith and
Henry James were men of genius, and there will always be enough people
of taste to save some of their books from oblivion; but neither of
these authors made much money. Both Meredith and James would have liked
to have a million readers; perhaps it is to their credit that they made
no compromises to increase the sales of their works, perhaps they could
not have succeeded in such an undertaking had they tried.
While in the long run it is popularity that determines a writer’s
fame--not only Shakespeare, but every first rate English poet has today
many thousands of readers--there are also “trashy” books which sell
like gasolene, and there are trashy books which do not sell at all.
It is a comforting thought that the majority of trashy books have a
smaller sale than masterpieces, and that the best book ever written has
had, has, and will have the largest sale of all.
It won’t do to prefer posterity to popularity; posterity is more cruel
to the average writer than are his contemporaries. Shakespeare was the
most popular Elizabethan dramatist; Ben Jonson, the foremost press
agent of his time, said that his friend Shakespeare had surpassed all
the writers of Greece and Rome, which was exactly what John Dryden,
the foremost press agent of his time, said of his contemporary,
Milton. Gray’s _Elegy_, Byron’s _Childe Harold_, Tennyson’s _In
Memoriam_, Kipling’s _Recessional_, were popular two weeks after their
publication, and they are popular now. In the long run the best books
have the largest sales.
In every age, however, there are certain novelists of prodigious vogue,
whose works nevertheless are to readers of good taste negligible.
The common people read them gladly and the Scribes and Pharisees
regard them with scorn. When our high school teachers and junior
college professors wish to relieve their systems of accumulated bile,
they pour out before their sceptical pupils bitter denunciations of
Harold Bell Wright, the late Gene Stratton Porter and Zane Grey.
They try to persuade their flocks that the books by these writers are
not interesting; but the flocks know that they are, and instead of
despising these novelists, they lose confidence in their instructors.
Far be it from me to pretend that Mr. Wright and Mr. Grey are literary
artists, or to enter the lists as a champion of their works. What I
have read of them has not left me with an insatiable appetite for
more. But here is a fact of interest to students of books and of human
nature--of the “works” of Porter and of Wright over nine million copies
have been sold, and as we rate five readers to every copy, each of
these two worthies has an audience of forty-five million readers. What
does this mean? Many will say it means that the public loves trash. I
don’t believe it; the majority of books are trash, and the majority of
books do not sell. Some critics and some unsuccessful writers say that
they could write just the same sort of thing if they would stoop to it;
I don’t believe it. The financial rewards of popularity are so great
that many writers would produce tales of adventure if they were sure of
a million readers.
It is possible that boys and girls read these books because of their
good qualities rather than because of their defects. Why is it that
these authors are Greatest Common Divisors? Why do they make the
largest appeal to the largest number of people?
Well, in the first place they are novelists, and the foremost of
recent novelists, Thomas Hardy, says that the novel should tell a
story. The average school-boy knows that a book by Wright, Porter or
Grey will have a good story. The majority of our novelists either will
not or can not tell a story. All they have is a time-plot, beginning
with the smells the baby had in his cradle, of no interest to any one
except the novelist, going on with his fights and loves at school,
etc., etc. Most people are like the Sultan in the Arabian Nights,
they love a good story; Wright, Porter and Grey furnish it. The lives
of most boys and girls are not romantic or unusual; in the novel
they get an escape from life, a change of air, a vacation; and there
is nothing boys love more than a vacation. Again, however deficient
in conduct boys and girls may be, they instinctively love courage,
honour, truth, beauty, magnanimity; the novels of the Terrible Three
all work for righteousness. In the eternal conflict between good and
evil, these Greatest Common Divisors are on the right side; even if
they do not know much about style, or much about psychology, or much
about subtlety of motive, they do know the difference between right
and wrong, something that some much bepraised novelists seem to have
forgotten or to think unimportant.
I do not believe the majority of supercilious critics and other
cultivated mature readers began in early youth by reading great books
exclusively; I think they read _Jack Harkaway_, and _Old Sleuth_, and
the works of Oliver Optic and Horatio Alger. From these enchanters they
learned a thing of importance--the delight of reading. Once having
learned that having found that a book, easily procurable, is the key to
happy recreation, they obtained a never-failing resource of happiness.
A similar thing is observable in poetry. If a boy learns to love highly
exciting narrative poetry, or pretty sentiments set to easy tunes, it
is more probable that he will later love great poetry than if he never
caught the lilt of words in youth.
Nothing that I have said is at variance with one of my oft-expressed
beliefs--those parents who are not only interested in the welfare of
their children, but are capable of setting them a good example, do
not need to use the Greatest Common Divisor so often. They can by
sympathetic intercourse with their children, and by patience, bring
them up from the start on the Bible, Shakespeare, Bunyan, Swift, Defoe
and other writers of genius; but a large number of boys and girls
come to our schools from uncultivated homes, and from parents who are
stupid, or selfish, or silly; these children must learn the magic
of books, and it is my belief that the makers of exciting stories,
with sentiment laid on thick, with heroes and heroines who are brave,
honourable and virtuous are performing a public service.
XLVI
THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME
Baseball is American in its origin, development and area. It is also
American in its dynamic qualities of speed and force, and in the
shortness of time required to play a full game and reach a decision.
Americans do not love serial games like cricket; in literature they are
better at writing short stories than at novels, and they enjoy games
where a verdict is soon reached.
Looking back over the history of this national pastime, I can remember
when the pitcher was allowed nine balls before losing his man, and one
year in the last century it took four strikes to retire the batsman. I
can also remember when a foul ball caught on the first bound was “out,”
when a foul tip--often successfully imitated by clever catchers--was
“out,” and I played the game many years before an uncaught foul was a
strike. In order to have a wider radius for fouls, the catcher used to
stand far back, moving up behind the bat only after the second strike,
or when bases had the tenancy of opponents. Every advance in the rules
has been in the direction of speed; and at present the game seems
unimprovable.
Nearly every game has some inherent defect; as putting is sixty-five
per cent of golf, so pitching is sixty-five per cent of baseball.
Moral: Be a good putter, and see that your nine has a good pitcher.
Pitching seems to be a greater physical and mental strain than in the
last century, although the box artist does not pitch so many balls
in the average game as he used to. In spite of that fact, Radbourne
of Providence, who was the greatest professional pitcher I ever saw,
won the national championship for his team in 1884 by pitching every
day for a long period. And his team-mate, the late John M. Ward, who
afterwards joined New York, told me that in 1879 he pitched sixty-six
consecutive games! The universal disease of nerves, from which no
twentieth century American is exempt, is probably responsible for the
more careful treatment of pitchers today.
On July 23, 1884, the Providence club, then in the National league,
was crippled for pitchers. Radbourne went into the box from that date
until September 26 when he had won the National league pennant, daily,
except August 2, 18, 20. He pitched thirty-six games during that
period, twenty-two on consecutive days, and winning eighteen. Of the
thirty-six, he won thirty-one, lost four, and tied one.
Tim Keefe in 1888 broke Radbourne’s record for straight games won,
by winning nineteen, and Marquard in 1912 equalled Keefe’s. Next to
Radbourne comes Joe Wood, with sixteen straight, won in 1912.
Radbourne’s total feat for the 1884 season of pitching seventy-seven
games (seventy-four National league championships and three world
series, winning three straight in the world series--no other pitcher
was used) is another record that stands.
The greatest baseball player of all time is Tyrus Raymond Cobb, of
Georgia. He not only holds an unexampled batting record, his speed in
the outfield was so great that he was moved from right to centre, and
in his base-running it is not much to say that he raised the art to
a higher plane. Ordinarily, the best of players was content to steal
second, but if Cobb saw that the ball was not going to beat him to the
second bag, he kept right on to third. The bewildered second baseman,
who naturally had a psychological caesura when the attempted play
failed, had to begin all over again in order to catch his parting guest
at third. And, flustered as he was by the sheer audacity of the thing,
he was apt to be wild. Cobb capitalised his reputation; he knew the
basemen were all “laying for him,” and owing to that curse which has
always afflicted humanity, which makes it more difficult to do a thing
in proportion to one’s desire to do it, they found it more of a task
to retire Cobb than to retire anyone else. If they had not known it
was Cobb, they could have got him. Mr. Cobb told me once that it was
largely a matter of mind reading; he had to out-guess his opponents, he
had to know what they were going to do. Certainly his stealing of bases
has been phenomenal; he would steal first base if he could.
His ambitious, fiery, high-strung disposition, which is largely
responsible for his success, has also caused him to lose his temper
on the field. This is regrettable, and of course, must be punished.
And yet I have some sympathy for these lapses, and do not condemn
them unqualifiedly as some colder judges do. The anxiety to win is
what enrages a player when things go wrong, and I fully understand it
though I recognise its sinfulness. Although I myself was very carefully
brought up by a pious father and mother, and although I had the
unspeakable advantage of being a Yale graduate, I once threw a bat at
an umpire when he called me out on strikes. In order to atone for this
sin, I have often--like Doctor Johnson--stood unprotected in the rain,
when I had no umbrella.
The greatest baseball pitcher in Yale’s history was Amos Alonzo Stagg,
of the class of 1888. He won the championship over both Harvard and
Princeton five successive years, pitching in every championship game.
He headed the batting order, was a fine base-runner, and in minor
games, played behind the bat, on the bases and in the outfield. He knew
baseball thoroughly. He never had great speed, or wide curves; but he
had marvellous control and a memory that was uncanny. If a batsman
faced him once, Stagg never forgot him, and thereafter never gave that
batsman anything he wanted.
Carter, of the class of ’95, was a great pitcher and all-round ball
player, as different in other respects from Stagg as could well be
imagined. Stagg was very short; Carter was six foot four. Carter had
blinding speed with tremendous curves. But if you compare his record
of championships with that of his predecessor, you will see why I rate
him second to Stagg. These two men, are, I think, Yale’s foremost box
heroes.
Baseball is not so spectacular as football, but in one respect it has a
great advantage over its more lusty rival. Everyone sees what happens
in baseball; the spectator sees every play, and he knows instantly
the reason for every success and every failure. In football the ball
is concealed in the line, very few can see exactly what has happened,
and no one knows whether a run or a touchdown is going to count or
not, until the official has given his consent; and if he withholds his
approval, and the ball is brought back, the spectators do not know why.
XLVII
TEN SIXTY-SIX
All persons who speak the English language should never forget the year
1066, for although it bloomed and faded long ago, it was an important
event in our lives. In that year William the Conqueror sailed across
the English Channel, landed on the south coast of England, and his
descendants and those of his party are there yet.
No wonder the British are proud of their naval and military history.
England is separated from the continent by only twenty miles; and yet
since 1066 not a single person has got into England and stayed there
without an invitation. For nearly nine hundred years England has
successfully repelled boarders. Many able and determined foes devoted
all their energies to realise their heart’s desire. The Spanish Armada
was a grandiose war-fleet, but Sir Francis Drake and the surface of
the Channel that has made so many tourists seasick, were too powerful
a combination for the gallant Spaniards. The dream of Napoleon was
to invade and possess England; the nearest he ever got to it was St.
Helena. There is an enormous column at Boulogne which was erected to
“commemorate the intention of Napoleon to invade England.” I knew that
intentions were often used as pavingstones in a certain locality;
but, like Browning’s futile lovers in _The Statue and the Bust_, the
immobility of the commemoration is an ironical commentary. In the World
War, the Central Powers were well-equipped for an expeditionary force
on land, water and air; the best-selling novel in Germany in 1916 was
called _General Hindenburg’s March into London_, but it was a work of
the imagination.
In reading Tennyson’s play _Harold_, it is interesting to see that his
sympathies are all with the Saxon king; and it is well to remember that
William could not have conquered England had not Harold been engaged in
a fatal civil war with his own brother Tostig. Was there ever a more
suicidal folly? When William landed, Harold was fighting away up in the
North in what is now Yorkshire; and he had to bring his army down to
the South coast through incredibly bad roads, and there meet the First
Soldier of Europe.
However and whatever Tennyson may have thought, William’s victory was
the best thing that ever happened to England and to those who now
speak English. The battle of Hastings meant much to Americans. Not only
was William a statesman and law-and-order man, he made English a world
language. By the addition of the Romance languages to Anglo-Saxon, he
doubled the richness of our vocabulary; English is a gorgeous hash of
Teutonic and Latin tongues. But William did far more for us than that.
Anglo-Saxon, the language spoken by Harold in London, is more unlike
the language spoken by King George V than the language of Virgil in
Rome is unlike the language spoken by Mussolini. Anglo-Saxon is a
difficult language, as difficult for a beginner as German; furthermore,
it is inflected. William, although he did not know it, made English the
universal language, the clearing-house of human speech in the twentieth
century. It is easier for an American to learn either French or German
than it is for a German to learn French or a Frenchman to learn German.
Not only are there many words in English which are like French words,
but the most blessed result of this victory in 1066 was the eventual
simplification of English grammar and syntax.
If William had not conquered England, it is probable that today English
speech would have inflexions and grammatical gender. George Moore says
that he dislikes English, it is a lean language, the adjective does not
agree with the noun--I say, thank Heaven for that! With the exception
of pronunciation, the English language is ridiculously simple and easy;
any foreigner can learn to write, read and understand English in a
short time, and he can learn to speak it with fluent inaccuracy. What
a blessed thing for a foreigner who must learn English to know that
when he learns the name of a thing that name does not change. A book is
always a book, no matter what you do with it. Now, if William had not
conquered England, every time you did anything to a book, the accursed
word would change. “The book is mine,” but “I take bookum,” “I go away
booke,” “I tear a page out bookes,” and so on. Then one would have to
discover and remember whether book were masculine, feminine, or neuter,
and every time one used an adjective, like “good book,” that miserable
adjective would have to agree with the book in gender, case and number.
When one sits down to dinner in a German hotel, one must remember that
the knife is neuter, the fork is feminine, and the spoon masculine,
and then one’s troubles have only begun. Remember what Mark Twain said
of German. How simple to have no case-ending, no gender, and almost
no grammar! No wonder English is becoming the world-language; it will
of course never drive out other languages, but it has already taken
the place occupied by Latin in the Middle Ages, and by French in the
eighteenth century. A man can go almost anywhere in the world with
English; and any foreigner who decides to learn one language besides
his own, must choose English. Anyhow they all do.
The only difficulty with our language is its pronunciation. Not only
are we the only people in the world who pronounce the vowels a, e, i,
as we do, there are so many exceptions that this rule does not always
apply. One has to learn the pronunciation of every word. Suppose a
foreigner learns _danger_, what will he do with _anger_? And having
finally learned both anger and danger, what will he do with _hanger_?
I never met but one foreigner who spoke English without a trace of
accent; that was the late Professor Beljame, who taught English at the
Sorbonne. He told me that he had practiced English every day for forty
years, and I afterward discovered that his mother was an Englishwoman.
One day I met a Polish gentleman who spoke English fluently, but with
much accent; he insisted that he spoke it as well as a native. I left
him alone for three hours with this sentence:
“Though the tough cough and hiccough plough me through”; and when I
came to hear him read it, I thought he was going to lose his mind.
XLVIII
GOING ABROAD THE FIRST TIME
There is no thrill like the first thrill. When Wilhelm Meister kissed
the Countess, Goethe said they tasted “the topmost sparkling foam on
the freshly poured cup of love,” and Goethe knew what he was talking
about. I shall always be glad that my first trip to Europe had three
features--I was young; the steamer was small; we landed at Antwerp.
I was twenty-five and in perfect health; my head was stuffed with
literature, descriptions and pictures shrieking for verification; my
mates and I rode bicycles across Europe and over the Alps; we lived
with impunity in cheap inns and on cheap food; we were soaked to the
skin by frequent rains; we were exposed to every inclemency of the air
and to innumerable germs in rooms, food and water; we were never sick.
We stored away memories which have been paying daily dividends.
It is not well to wait until one is old, for an American is, as a
rule, never physically comfortable in Europe. Unless one is reeking
with cash one is almost always chilly or damp or hungry or filled with
the wrong kind of food. But Europe has all the things an intelligent
American wants to see, and it is best to see them when one’s health is
rugged enough to rise above inconveniences.
I am glad I went on a small boat, for I asked a traveller who recently
returned on an enormous ship if the sea was rough: “I have no idea, I
never saw it.” Our little _Waesland_ had only one deck, and that was
sometimes awash. It was not a hotel, it was a ship. Finally, instead
of landing at Cherbourg at some unearthly hour, being transferred
to a squeaky lighter, and then to a train with long hours of travel
before one reached the destination, we steamed up the Scheldt past the
windmills and stepped off the boat right in the midst of one of the
most interesting cities in the world. The transition from America to
Europe was as dramatic as it could possibly be, unshaded by tenders
and trains. Thus I advise first-timers to sail either to London or to
Antwerp; you embark at New York and you disembark at the desired haven.
I love Europe, London, Paris, Munich, Florence, with inexpressible
fervour; but I can never recapture the first careless rapture. I
remember after that fine first afternoon and evening in Antwerp,
when we walked about in ecstasy in the rain, we bicycled to Bonn from
Cologne, and that evening before going to bed in the little Rhenish
inn, I looked out from my bedroom window on the river and on the roofs
of the quaint old town, and I said, “Is it real or is it a dream?”
The next day was a fulfillment; for when my classmate, George Pettee,
and I were sophomores, we were sitting in the top gallery of the
theatre watching a picture of the Rhineland put on the screen by John
L. Stoddard. One of us turned to the other and whispered: “I’ll shake
hands with you on standing on that spot within seven years.” The answer
was, “You’re on!” We had no money and no prospect of getting any; but
in five years, not seven, we stood on that identical spot, and as we
leaned our bicycles up against the road wall, we reminded each other of
the night in the gallery. It is pleasant to dream; but it is pleasanter
to make the dream come true.
The most beautiful country I have ever seen is England. It has not the
majesty of Switzerland, but it has everything else. Almost exactly the
same size as North Carolina or Michigan, it has an amazing variety
of scenery and climate. As one approaches it from the Atlantic, the
cliffs of Cornwall look austere and forbidding; but there the roses
bloom in January. Stand almost anywhere in Devonshire, and you see the
meadows leaning on the sky; they are separated from one another not by
stone fences, or by split-rails or barbed wire, but by hedgerows in
self-conscious bloom; Salisbury Plain is like Western Nebraska, a far
horizon; the misty slopes of the Sussex downs reach dreamily to the
sea. Every few miles in England the topography changes; could anything
be more different than those different counties?
But we do not go to England for natural scenery, though we might well
do so; we go because in England every scene is, in the phrase of Henry
James, “peopled with recognitions.” The things that we have seen in
imagination we see in reality; there they are! The September afternoon
when I bicycled alone to Stoke Poges and saw the churchyard in the
twilight exactly as it was in 1750 when Gray described it, I fell on
my knees. As we looked from the top of the hill down into Canterbury,
the setting sun glorified the Cathedral; as we stood on the most solemn
promontory in England, Land’s End, and gazed into the yeasty waves at
the foot of the cliff, I remembered Tennyson’s lines:
One showed an iron coast and angry waves.
You seemed to hear them climb and fall
And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves,
Beneath the windy wall.
And here one of the Wesley brothers wrote the familiar hymn about the
narrow neck of land and the divided seas.
One day, talking with an Englishman on the train, I raved about
Warwickshire and about Devon. “Ah,” said he, “if you haven’t seen the
valley of the Wye you haven’t seen England.” Accordingly, we went to
the little town of Ross in the West; there we hired a rowboat, and
two stalwart sons of Britain rowed us many miles down the stream.
Occasionally, the river was so shallow they poled us over the pebbly
bottom; sometimes it was so narrow we could almost touch the shores;
then it would widen out nobly, and we saw the white-faced Hereford
cattle feeding in green pastures. “What castle is that?” I asked,
pointing to a ruin on a hill. “That is Goodrich Castle, sir.” And that
is where Wordsworth met the little girl who knew her departed brother
and sister were alive. We moved by Monmouth, sacred to Henry V, the
Roosevelt of kings; we came to Tintern Abbey, and you may be sure we
stopped there; whatever you see, don’t miss the valley of the Wye.
XLIX
SPIRITUAL HEALING
I believe that the average man or woman today needs one thing more than
he needs anything else--spiritual healing. I believe this is truer of
the men and women of our age than of those of any preceding epoch--and
I believe they need it more than they need material luxuries, increase
of mechanical resources, yes, more than they need mental tonics or
emotional inspiration.
The people of the United States are suffering from “nerves.” Now the
casualties in diseases of the nerves are large, because, as is well
known, in cases of nervous prostration everybody dies except the
patient. I shall not say that America won the war, but anyhow America
was on the winning side. We were triumphantly victorious; we are the
only rich and prosperous nation on earth. Americans are the only
people in the world who are physically comfortable in bad weather. But
although there is a steady increase in physical luxuries, I am not sure
of a steady increase in serene happiness, in the calm that comes from
mental contentment, in an approach toward universal peace of mind.
What shall we say of a prosperous and rich nation whose prosperity and
wealth are accompanied by an epidemic of suicide?
We are overwrought, tense, excited; our casual conversations are
pimpled with adjectives; our letters are written in italics, and--a
sure sign of fever--there has been an increase in cursing and swearing.
Many respectable persons show a proficiency in this verbal art that
used to be chiefly characteristic of lumberjacks and longshoremen. We
become colossally excited about trivial things. Sometimes when I find
myself in a state of almost insane irritation over some trifle I seem
to hear the quiet voice of Emerson speaking from the grave--Why so hot,
little man?
In a charming comedy by Clare Kummer, in which that beautiful and
accomplished actress the late Lola Fisher took the leading part, one of
her speeches explained that when she was a child her mother told her
that whenever she felt herself rising to a boiling point she must stop
for a moment and say aloud, “Be calm, Camilla.” That was the name of
the play, “Be Calm, Camilla”--and there are many Camillas who need that
relaxation.
It is characteristic of the American temperament that it needs mental
sedatives more than spurs; and yet thousands of Americans are looking
around all the time for something with a “kick” in it. How often we
hear in casual conversation the phrase, “I got a fearful kick out of
that.” What they need is not a kick, but a poultice; not a prod, but a
cool, healing hand.
Although Americans need healing more than the men and women of any
other nation, there are times when almost any person would profit by
such treatment. The experience of John Stuart Mill is not unusual. He
was carefully brought up by his father without religious training.
When he was twenty-five years old he fell into a state of profound
depression. A cloud of melancholia settled on his mind and heart,
so that he not only lost interest in life but felt that the world
had no meaning. We know that King Saul was relieved from the evil
spirit of nervous melancholy by music; but Mill loved music, and yet
in his crisis music failed him. Fortunately, he turned to the poetry
of Wordsworth. Now of all the great poets Wordsworth is the best
healer, because he drew balm from objects within everybody’s reach.
The “Nature” that Wordsworth writes about does not require a long and
expensive journey, like going South in winter or travelling to distant
mountains. This poet wrote about the simple things in nature--the
things that can be seen from the front door or from the back yard.
The novelist George Gissing, who had been chronically tortured by
two desperate evils, grinding poverty and ill health, was, owing to
a fortunate circumstance, able to live in solitude for a time in the
charming county of Devon, in southwest England. The result of his
meditations appeared in a book, first published in 1903, called _The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_. This is a book of healing, and I
recommend it to everybody, for I do not know any one who could not
profit by it. As Mill had suffered from intellectual depression and
been cured by Wordsworth, so Gissing, who had suffered from poverty and
sickness, cured himself by preserving the fruit of his communion with
nature:
I had stepped into a new life. Between the man I had been and
that which I now became there was a very notable difference. In
a single day I had matured astonishingly; which means, no doubt,
that I suddenly entered into conscious enjoyment of powers and
sensibilities which had been developing unknown to me.
“I had matured astonishingly.” Isn’t that what is really the matter
with us, that we haven’t grown up? We are like children crying for the
moon, when the riches of the earth are within our reach. Our pursuit
of excitement and our resultant sufferings are largely childish. It is
unfortunate to suffer from infantile diseases when we are old.
I have been reading a new novel, a book of healing, which most new
novels are not. It is curious that so many are eagerly reading new
novels and seeing new plays whose only purpose is to stimulate animal
instincts which need no stimulation. Or they are reading new novels
which distress and torment a mind already tumultuously confused. Be
calm, Camilla.
The book I allude to was published in 1927. It is called _Winterwise_
and is written by Zephine Humphrey. It describes a winter spent in
a lonely farmhouse in Vermont, a State not yet famous as a winter
resort--except for those who think only of winter in connexion with
violent athletics. The book is full of deep, tranquil wisdom. It points
out sources of abiding happiness--happiness that no disaster can
permanently remove.
L
SUPERSTITION
The best definition of superstition that I can remember was made by
James Russell Lowell--“Superstition, by which I mean the respecting of
that which we are told to respect rather than that which is respectable
in itself.” Mental slavery is always degrading; and superstition is a
form of slavery, because the mind is subjected to fear. As Notoriety is
the bastard sister of Reputation, so Superstition is the bastard sister
of Religion. The difference between the two can be easily and simply
expressed, but it is literally all the difference in the world. The
most elevating influence known to man is Religion; the least elevating
is Superstition.
The instinctive pessimism of humanity is shown in many careless phrases
such as “It’s too good to be true.” The majority of men and women
believe that hopes are illusory, but fears accurately foretell the
coming event. Yet any sensible old man or old woman will tell us that
nearly all the fears and worries from which they themselves suffered
almost daily during a long life really never materialised. They
suffered for nothing. We learn little from their experience, but go on
our way filled with apprehension and alarm. Shakespeare said the brave
man dies only once, but cowards die a thousand times in fearing death.
I suppose most of us are cowards. Although we are still in good enough
health to carry on, we have already died of cancer, tuberculosis, and
many other diseases.
Many social superstitions were cured by that great turning point in
history, the French Revolution. The world has never been quite the
same since the year 1789. Before that date, people really believed
that those who were born in noble and royal families were superior to
the common herd; after that date the nobility still believed it, but
the common people did not agree. They found they had been respecting
that which they had been told to respect, rather than that which is
respectable in itself. A Frenchman remarked, “The great appear to us
great because we are kneeling--let us rise.” In 1789 everybody stood up.
It is foolish to respect any person or any institution unless it is
respectable.
The religion of many unenlightened people seems to be based largely
on fear, in which case it is of course not religion at all, but rank
superstition. James Whitcomb Riley told me of a remark made by a small
boy to his mother at bedtime. He jumped into bed, and to the question
of his mother, “What, aren’t you going to say your prayers?” the child
answered, “No, I ain’t going to say my prayers tonight, and I ain’t
going to say ’em tomorrow night, nor the next night. And then if
nothing happens, I ain’t ever going to say ’em again.”
This all-too-typical boy looked upon prayer as a means of warding off
danger, and he was sufficiently intelligent and sufficiently brave to
risk its omission. But if he had been brought up to believe that prayer
is neither a charm against peril nor a method of getting what you want,
that prayer was intimate communion with a Divine Friend, he would have
looked upon it from a different point of view. George Meredith told his
son never to ask any material thing from God, but to pray to Him every
day of his life.
Now many men and women have the religious maturity of a small boy,
which is infinitely worse than having the religion of a little child.
They never pray except when they are in danger, or when they think they
are going into danger, or when they have suffered from some calamity.
That is like speaking to a friend only when you want to borrow money.
The profound wisdom of mysticism consists not in making use of God, but
in hoping and believing that God will make some use of us.
The base-born idea that God is against us is accompanied by the idea
that He may be placated or humoured. In Richard Halliburton’s exciting
account of his adventures in southern countries, he tells us how the
pagan priests used to sacrifice thousands of young maidens to their
deity. It would seem, looking back on history, that the more abominable
the religion, the fewer the atheists. Every sensible person in those
countries ought to have been an atheist.
Now although many “enlightened” people today laugh at the terrible
fears and even more terrible remedies of those intellectual slaves,
they themselves are not very much wiser. It is highly probable that the
majority of Americans today would not dare to say “I haven’t had a bad
cold this winter” without touching wood. Some of them might grin as
they touched it, but they would touch it just the same. Such a gesture
is intellectually and morally contemptible.
But many are even poorer in brains. For many would not dare to say that
they had not had a cold this winter, with or without wood in reach.
They believe that if you express anything pleasant, you will soon “get
your come-uppance.” God seems to lie in wait for us, and the moment
we seem satisfied or happy or even prominent, He will teach us who
is running the show. The best thing therefore is never to appear too
happy. For many, who have been foolish enough to say aloud, “I haven’t
had a cold this winter,” wake up the next morning snuffling. “Now you
see what I’ve got! If I’d only had sense enough to keep my mouth shut,
I would have been all right. But of course I had to brag about it!”
The most degrading of all superstitions is the belief that God can be
placated, appeased, or diverted, as we humour a refractory boy or a
drunken man. This abominable idea sometimes takes an extremely tragic
form, as when the Indian mother throws her own baby into the Ganges.
“Now, God, you’ve got to be good to me! I’ve given you the best thing I
had!”
Sometimes it takes a merely silly form, as when one gives up some
pleasant little luxury; not with the great idea of drawing nearer to
God by removing an obstacle, but with the absurd idea of bargaining
with Him.
LI
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE EARTH
Perhaps nothing nowadays is a more common target for ridicule than
the hustler and booster, whether he boosts as an individual or as a
member of a service organisation. The man whose motto is “bigger and
better business,” a bigger town, with a bigger population and bigger
buildings, is laughed at for his enthusiasm and for his perspiring
efforts. Much of this laughter is merely the cynical adverse criticism
of men who have never done anything themselves, never will do
anything, and so pretend to be faintly and superciliously amused by
the optimistic exertions of others. We may dismiss these unproductive
and complacent occupiers of the seats of the scornful, for they are
comparatively few in number and their opinions of no moment. But the
rational basis for laughter at the booster is that the hustler and the
booster often have a false standard of excellence.
When a noisy man roars in your face that the population of his
particular town has doubled in ten years we have a right to enquire,
what of it? Is it a cause for rejoicing? When you climb into a trolley
car on a rainy day you do not rejoice because the population of the
trolley car doubles in three minutes. A mere increase in the number of
persons at a given spot does not necessarily mean that collectively or
individually they are any better off. What we wish to know is something
quite different from the word “more.” Is the community growing in
intelligence? Are there better schools, better theatres, better art
museums, better churches, better orchestras--are the inhabitants of
this locality growing in grace and in the fruits of the spirit?
The last thing I wish to be guilty of is to make cheap remarks against
science or scientific men to whom I, in common with others, owe so
much; but, strangely enough, some of the professional men of science,
who are often the first to laugh at the booster because he applies the
quantitative rather than the qualitative standard of measurement, are
themselves guilty of the same fault on a larger scale. They do not
apply standards of size to a growing business or a growing village;
they apply these standards to the universe.
Now, as is well known, the Ptolemaic system of cosmogony stated that
the earth was the centre of the universe and that around the earth
revolved the sun, the moon and all the innumerable stars. Thus man
regarded himself as of high importance because he was the centre of
everything.
Along came Copernicus, whose book was published in 1543 but not
generally accepted until long after its appearance. Copernicus wrought
a far greater miracle than Joshua. The Old Testament hero made the
sun stand still only for an afternoon; but in the sixteenth century
Copernicus commanded the sun to stand still and (relatively speaking)
it has not budged since. Copernicus was a magician.
Many astronomers have recently been fond of reminding us that our sun
itself is only a tiny star--one out of many billions--and that our
earth is but the tiniest speck. They are fond of drawing diagrams
showing the comparative size of our sun and that of other globes in
the starry skies, and the earth dwindles to a mere point. “Therefore,”
say these scientists, “how unimportant is man and how ridiculous that
he should consider either himself or his earthly abode a matter of any
importance to God or to space or time or gravitation”; the conclusion
following that religion and morals are matters of small consequence
and we need not bother our heads about them.
Now it seems to me that expressions of this kind are as fallacious and
as injurious as any booster’s standard of mere quantity; for what are
these gentlemen trying to say except that as the earth is so tiny in
comparison with other stars it must necessarily follow that man himself
is a very unimportant factor in the universe? On the contrary, I
believe the earth to be the most important spot in the entire creation
and that the most precious thing on the earth is man--men, women and
children.
The ordinary ignoramus looks at the starry vault and exclaims: “There
are all those stars and every one inhabited with life!” As a matter of
fact the latest researches of science show that the rarest thing in the
entire universe is human life. There is not one vestige of evidence to
show that life exists anywhere except on the earth.
The universe is frightfully hot. The fixed stars have a temperature
ranging from nearly two thousand degrees to more than thirty thousand
degrees, which is considerably hotter than the Needles in California.
Furthermore, among all the heavenly bodies _planets_ are the most
scarce, and the only conditions which can produce a planet occur
almost never. Now the planets in our particular little solar system had
the good luck to come into being, and of these planets only the earth
can support human life. The late Percival Lowell, an eminent astronomer
and a gallant gentleman, looking at the sky through the clear air of
Arizona, thought he saw evidence of the intelligent work of beings on
Mars, but he saw it because his telescope was not good enough; “bigger
and better” telescopes destroyed the illusory things he thought he saw.
I advise all those who believe in the insignificance of man because he
lives on a small ball to read the last chapter of Sir James Jeans’s
book _The Universe Around Us_. Sir James does not himself say that man
has a divine destiny, because that is not the subject of his book. But
he does say: “All this suggests that only an infinitesimally small
corner of the universe can be in the least suited to form an abode of
life.”
People used to be flabbergasted by the consideration of the vastness of
the starry heavens while retaining their respect for man and their own
self-respect; but of late years many astronomers, by applying the “big
and little” method of measurement, have tried to convince us that man
is of no importance. Thus astronomy, instead of filling its students
with majestic wonder, fills them with despair. To these scientific
boosters it is the devout and not the undevout astronomer who is mad.
Fear not, little flock. We are no longer the geographical centre of the
universe, but--so far as evidence goes--we are the only part of it that
amounts to anything.
LII
WHAT SHALL I THINK ABOUT?
“What shall I think about when I am dying?” said Turgeney. Well,
if I were dying at this moment, and were fortunate enough to be
conscious--for death is an adventure no one ought to miss--I should
endeavour to compose my mind and prepare it properly for its next
experience. Then, having made whatever arrangements were necessary for
the welfare of those I leave, I might--if there were time--review some
of the events of my days on earth from which I had derived the largest
amount of pleasure.
Omitting religion and family life, the two greatest sources of
happiness that I know, which need no explanation to those familiar
with them, and which no language could possibly explain to those
unacquainted with them, I must honestly say I have found life good.
I would not have missed it for anything. There have of course been
misfortunes, illnesses, periods of mental depression, failures, loss
of friends, and the general sense of frustration that afflicts every
candid mind. But these are shadows, and my life has mainly been passed
in sunshine.
It would of course be very nice to be an immortal poet or an immortal
something-or-other; to feel the steadfast assurance that one had left
on earth some enduring work that would remain as a permanent memorial.
But although one knows, as I do, that everything one has done will be
speedily forgotten, I do not see why that should make one miserable.
Why spend one’s life or even one’s last moments in crying for the moon?
Why not make the best of the good old world?
That daily life is really good one appreciates when one wakes from a
horrible dream, or when one takes the first outing after a sickness.
Why not realise it now?
My life has been divided into four parts--Work, Play, Development,
Social Pleasures. Work is man’s greatest blessing. Whenever it is in
any way possible, every boy and girl should choose as his life work
some occupation which he would like to do anyhow, even if he does not
need the money. It has always been necessary for me to work, but if at
any time during the last twenty years some eccentric person had left
me a million dollars, I should have gone right on working at my chosen
professions, teaching, writing, and public speaking. I enjoy all
three. I enjoy them so much that I have no hesitation in saying that I
enjoy them more than vacations. There are better teachers, there are
better writers, there are better lecturers; but I doubt if any of them
have enjoyed their work more than I.
I have also had an enormous amount of fun out of play. I am a
playboy, and shall never get over it. I like all kinds of games,
except alley-bowling, just as I like all famous music except that
by Meyerbeer. In every game I have never succeeded in rising above
mediocrity; but here again I doubt if the great players--whom I
nevertheless envy--have enjoyed playing football, baseball, hockey,
tennis, golf, billiards, pool, duplicate whist--a better game than
bridge--more than I have. If I were now given the opportunity to spend
every single day for the next five hundred years in an invariable
programme of work all the morning, golf all the afternoon, and social
enjoyment all the evening, I should accept with alacrity, making only
one stipulation--that at the end of the five hundred years I should
have the privilege of renewal. And that’s that.
In cultural development, by which I mean the enrichment of the mind by
Nature and by Art, I have had unspeakable delight. Yet I am neither a
naturalist nor an artist. I don’t know anything about flowers, and very
little about animals. I cannot draw or paint, or make anything with my
hands. The only musical instrument I can play is a typewriter.
But no one loves the scenes of nature more than I. The first sunset
that I remember with enjoyment occurred when I was ten years old; and
how many I have seen since then! On an autumn day in 1903, I saw the
sun sink into the ocean off the coast of Normandy, and, by the miracle
of memory, I can see it again whenever I wish. I thought of Browning’s
lines:
“Than by slow, pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore,
At their sad level gaze o’er the ocean--a sun’s slow decline.”
I have seen the Matterhorn from the Gorner Grat, Mont Blanc from
Chamonix, and the divine flush on the summit of the Jungfrau.
Forty years ago I heard for the first time the Ninth Symphony;
and while I have heard it often since then, the most memorable
occasion was in May 1912 when I heard it at Paris, played by a
magnificent orchestra, conducted by Felix Weingartner; I have heard
_Die Meistersinger_ in Munich, conducted by Arthur Nikisch; I have
heard the Emperor Concerto, with Ossip Gabrilowitsch at the piano; I
have heard _Tod und Verklärung_ with Stokowski and the Philadelphia
Orchestra; I have heard De Pachmann (in his prime) play Chopin’s B flat
minor sonata, Paderewski play Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Josef
Hofmann play Beethoven’s Sonata 111. I have heard _Carmen_ sung by Emma
Calvé, Emma Eames, Jean de Reszké and Lassalle; _Tristan und Isolde_
sung by Jean de Reszké and Lilli Lehmann; _Faust_ sung by Jean and
Edouard de Reszké, Emma Eames, Maurel, and Scalchi; _Mignon_ sung by
Mme. Lucrezia Bori; I have repeatedly heard the three greatest bassos
of modern times, Edouard de Reszké, Pol Plançon, and Chaliapin.
In the theatre I have seen Edwin Booth as Shylock, Mansfield as Richard
III, Irving in _The Lyons Mail_, Possart as Mephistopheles, Sarah
Bernhardt as La Tosca, Duse as Francesca, Salvini as Othello, and twice
have I seen the Passion Play at Oberammergau. All these are memorable
experiences, and for fear I may not be conscious when I am dying, I am
recalling them now. But if I should attempt to recall all the glorious
things I have seen in nature and in art, I should have no time for
fresh experiences that await me.
As for social pleasures, one of the highest enjoyments is agreeable
company and good conversation; and I especially like men, women and
children.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Just for the curious: Chapter XVIII has four references to “F. P. A.”
but doesn’t give the full name. When this book was written, he was a
well-known columnist: Franklin P. Adams.
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