THE LIBRARY OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF

NORTH CAROLINA

4-

i>^;^:^^^

THE COLLECTION OF

NORTH CAROLINIANA

ENDOWED BY

JOHN SPRUNT HILL

CLASS OF 1889 CB

H523f2

UNIVERSITY OF N.C. AT CHAPEL HILL

00032193536

This book must not be taken from the Library building.

Form No. 471

MODERN ESSAYS

SELECTED BY

CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT. I02T, BY HAJICOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, IKCo

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY

QUINN a BODEN COMPANY. INC.

RAHWAY. N. J.

PREFACE

It had been my habit, I am now aware, to speak somewhat hghtly of the labors of anthologists: to insinuate that they led lives of bland sedentary ease. I shall not do so again. When the publisher suggested a collection of representative contemporary essays, I thought it would be the most lenient of tasks. But experience is a fine aperitive to the mind.

Indeed the pangs of the anthologist, if he has con- science, are burdensome. There are so many consid- erations to be tenderly weighed; personal taste must sometimes be set aside in view of the general plan; for every item chosen half a dozen will have been affectionately conned and sifted; and perhaps some favorite pieces will be denied because the authors have reasons for withholding permission. It would be en- joyable (for me, at any rate) to write an essay on the things I have lingered over with intent to include them in this little book, but have finally sacrificed for one reason or another. How many times — twenty at least — I have taken down from my shelf Mr. Chesterton's

-^The Victorian Age in Literature to reconsider whether

Ob in

0«i

iv Preface

his ten pages on Dickens, or his glorious summing-up of Decadents and ^Esthetes, were not absolutely essen- tial. How many times I have palpitated upon certain passages in The Education of Henry Adams and in Mr. Wells's Outline of History, which, I assured my- self, would legitimately stand as essays if shrewdly excerpted.

But I usually concluded that would not be quite fair. I have not been overscrupulous in this matter, for the essay is a mood rather than a form ; the fron- tier between the essay and the short story is as imper- ceptible as is at present the once famous Mason and Dixon line. Indeed, in that pleasant lowland country between the two empires lie (to my way of think- ing) some of the most fertile fields of prose — fiction that expresses feeling and character and setting rather than action and plot; fiction beautifully ripened by the lingering mild sunshine of the essayist*s mood. This is fiction, I might add, extremely unlikely to get into the movies. I think of short stories such as George Gissing's, in that too little known volume The House of Cobwebs, which I read again and again at midnight with unfailing delight; fall asleep over; forget; and again re-read with undiminished satisfaction. They have no brilliance of phrase, no smart surprises, no worked-up 'situations* which have to be taken at high speed to pass without breakdown over their brittle

Preface Y

bridgework of credibility. They have only the mod- est and faintly melancholy savor of life itself.

Yet it is a mere quibble to pretend that the essay does not have easily recognizable manners. It may be severely planned, or it may ramble in ungirdled mood, but it has its own point of view that marks it from the short story proper, or the merely personal memoir. That distinction, easily felt by the sensi- tive reader, is not readily expressible. Perhaps the true meaning of the word essay — an attempt — gives a clue. No matter how personal or trifling the topic may be, there is always a tendency to generalize, to walk round the subject or the experience, and view it from several vantages; instead of (as in the short story) cutting a carefully landscaped path through a chosen tract of human complication. So an essay can never be more than an attempt, for it is an excursion into the endless. Any student of fiction will admit that in the composition of a short story many entertaining and valuable elaborations may rise in the mind of the author which must be strictly rejected because they do not forward the essential motive. But in the essay (of an informal sort) we ask not relevance to plot, but relevance to mood. That is why there are so many essays that are mere marking time. The familiar essay is easier to write than the short story, but it im- poses equal restraints on a scrupulous author. For in

VI Preface

fiction the writer is controlled and limited and swept along by his material; but in the essay, the writer rides his pen. A good story, once clearly conceived, almost writes itself; but essays are written.

There also we find a pitfall of the personal essay — the temptation to become too ostentatiously quaint, too deliberately 'whimsical' (the word which, by loathsome repetition, has become emetic). The fine flavor and genius of the essay — as in Bacon and Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Thackeray, Thoreau; per- haps even in Stevenson — is the rich bouquet of per- sonality. But soliloquy must not fall into monologue. One might put it thus : that the perfection of the familiar essay is a conscious revelation of self done inadvertently.

The art of the anthologist is the art of the host : his tact is exerted in choosing a congenial group ; making them feel comfortable and at ease; keeping the wine and tobacco in circulation; while his eye is tenderly alert down the bright vista of tablecloth, for any lapse in the general cheer. It is well, also, for him to hold himself discreetly in the background, giving his guests the pleasure of clinching the jape, and seeking only, by innocent wiles, to draw each one Into some charac- teristic and felicitous vein. I think T can offer you, In this parliament of philomaths, entertainment of the

Preface vii

most genuine sort; and having said so much, I might well retire and be heard no more.

But I think it is well to state, as even the most bashful host may do, just why this particular company has been called together. My intention is not merely to please the amiable dilettante, though I hope to do that too. I made my choices, first and foremost, with a view to stimulating those who are themselves interested in the arts of writing. I have, to be frank, a secret am- bition that a book of this sort may even be used as a small but useful weapon in the classroom. I wanted to bring it home to the student that as brilliant and sin- cere work is being done to-day in the essay as in any period of our literature. Accordingly the pieces re- printed here are very diverse. There is the grand manner; there is foolery; there is straight foru'ard literary criticism; there is pathos, politics, and the pic- turesque. But every selection is, in its own way, a work of art. And I would call the reader's atten- tion to this: that the greater number of these essays were written not by retired aesthetes, but by practising journalists in the harness of the daily or weekly press. The names of some of the most widely bruited essay- ists of our day are absent from this roster, not by malice, but because I desired to include material less generally known.

viii Preface

I should apologize, I suppose, for the very informal tone of the introductory notes on each author. But I conceived the reader in the role of a friend spending the evening in happy gossip along the shelves. Pulling out one's favorites and talking about them, now and then reading a chosen extract aloud, and ending (some time after midnight) by choosing some special volume for the guest to take to bed with him — in the same spirit I have compiled this collection. Perhaps the edi- torial comments have too much the manner of dress- ing gown and slippers; but what a pleasant book this will be to read in bed!

And perhaps this collection may be regarded as a small contribution to Anglo-American friendliness. Of course when I say Anglo-, I mean Brito-, but that is such a hideous prefix. Journalists on this side are much better acquainted with what their professional colleagues are doing In Britain, than they with our concerns. But surely there should be a congenial fra- ternity of spirit among all who use the English tongue in print. There are some of us who even imagine a day when there may be regular international exchanges of journalists, as there have been of scholars and stu- dents. The contributions to this book are rather evenly divided between British and American hands; and per- haps it is not insignificant that two of the most pleas-

Preface ix

ing items come from Canada, where they often com- bine the virtues of both sides.

It is a pleasant task to thank the authors and pub- lishers who have assented to the reprinting of these pieces. To the authors themselves, and to the follow- ing publishers, I admit my sincere gratitude for the use of material copyrighted by them: — Doubleday Page and Company for the extracts from books by John Macy, Stewart Edward White and Pearsall Smith; Charles Scribner's Sons for Rupert Brooke's Niagara Falls; the New York Sun for Don Marquis's Almost Perfect State; the George H. Doran Company for the essays by Joyce Kilmer and Robert Cortes Holliday; Mr. James B. Pinker for permission to reprint Mr. Conrad's Preface to A Personal Record; Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for the essays by H. M. Tomlinson, A. P. Herbert and Philip Guedalla; Lady Osier for the essay by the late Sir William Osier; Henry Holt and Com- pany for Thomas Burke's The Russian Quarter; E. P. Button and Company for A Word for Autumn, by A. A. Milne; the New York Evening Post for the essays by Stuart P. Sherman and Harry Esty Bounce ; Harper and Brothers for Marian Storm's A Wood- land Valentine; Bodd, Mead and Company for Simeon Strunsky's Nocturne, from his volume Post-Impres- sions; the Macmillan Company for Beer and Cider^

X Preface

from Professor Saintsbury's Notes on a Cellar Book; Longmans Green and Company for Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship, from Mysticism and Logic; Robert M. McBride and Company for the selection from James Branch Cabell; Harcourt, Brace and Company for the essay by Heywood Broun; The Weekly Review for the essays by O. W. Firkins, Harry Morgan Ayres and Robert Palfrey Utter. The pres- ent ownership of the copyright of the essay by Louise Imogen Guiney I have been unable to discover. It was published in Patrins (Copeland and Day, 1897), which has long been out of print. Knowing the purity of my motives I have used this essay, hoping that it might introduce Miss Guiney*s exquisite work to the younger generation that knows her hardly at all.

Christopher Morle\ October, igzi

CONTENTS

Preface

American Literature . , .

Mary White

Niagara Falls

The Almost Perfect State . "The Man o' War's 'Er 'Us-

band"

The Market

Holy Ireland

A Familiar Preface ....

On Drawing

.,X). Henry

The Mowing of a Field. . . The Student Life .... The Decline of the Drama . America and the English

Tradition

The Russian Quarter . . . A Word for Autumn . . . "A Clergyman" . . . . .

Samuel Butler

Bed-Books and Night-Lights . The Precept of Peace . On Lying Awake at Night . A Woodland Valentine . . The Elements of Poetry . .

Nocturne

Beer and Cider

A Free Man's Worship . .

Some Historians

Winter Mist

Trivia

Beyond Life

The Fish Reporter .... Some Nonsense About a Dog . The Fifty-first Dragon . .

t-e

John Macy . William Allen Wh Rupert Brooke . Don Marquis

David W. Bone William McFee Joyce Kilmer . Joseph Conrad . A. P. Herbert . O. W. Firkins . Hilaire Belloc . William Osier . Stephen Leacock

Harry Morgan Ayres Thomas Burke . ; A. A. Milne . . . Max Beerbohm Stuart P. Sherman H. M. Tomlinson . Louise Imogen Guiney Stewart Edward White Marian Storm . George Sanfayana . Simeon Strunsky . George Saintsbury Bertrand Russell . Philip Guedalla Robert Palfrey Utter . Logan Pearsall Smith James Branch Cabell . Robert Cortes Holliday Harry Esty Dounce . Heywood Broun .

MODERN ESSAYS

AMERICAN LITERATURE By John Macy

This vigorous survey of American letters is the first chapter of John Macy's admirable volume The Spirit of American Lit" erature, published in 1913 — a book shrewd, penetrating and salty, which has unfortunctely never reached one-tenth of the many readers who would find it permanently delightful and profitable. Mr. Macy has no skill in vaudeville tricks to call attention to himself: no shafts of limelight have followed him across the stage. But those who have an eye for criticism that is vivacious without bombast, austere without bitterness, keen without malice, know him as one of the truly competent and liberal-minded ob- servers of the literary scene.

Mr. Macy was born in Detroit, 1877 ; graduated from Harvard in 1899; did editorial service on the Youth's Companion and the Boston Herald; and nowadays lives pensively in Greenwich Vil- lage, writing a good deal for The Freeman and The Literary Review. Perhaps, if you were wandering on Fourth Street, east of Sixth Avenue, you might see him treading thoughtfully along, with a wide sombrero hat, and always troubled by an iron-gray forelock that droops over his brow. You would know, as soon as vou saw him, that he is a man greatly lovable. I like to think of him as I first saw him, some years ago, in front of the bright hearth of the charming St. Botolph Club in Boston, where he was usually the center of an animated group of nocturnal philosophers.

The essay was written in 1912, before the very real reawaken- ing of American creative work that began in the 'teens of this century. The reader will find it interesting to consider how far Mr. Macy's remarks might be modified if he were writing to-day.

The Spirit of American Literature has been reissued in an inexpensive edition by Boni and Liveright. It is a book well worth owning.

American literature is a branch of English litera- ture, as truly as are English books written in Scotland or South Africa. Our literature lies almost entirely in the nineteenth century when the ideas and books of

3

4 John Macy

the western world were freely interchanged among the nations and became accessible to an increasing num- ber of readers. In literature nationality is determined by language rather than by blood or geography. M. Maeterlinck, born a subject of King Leopold, belongs to French literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born in Poland, is already an English classic. Geography, much less important in the nineteenth century than before, was never, among modern European nations, so important as we sometimes are asked to believe. Of the ancestors of English literature **Beowulf" is scarcely more significant, and rather less graceful, than our tree-inhabiting forebears with prehensile toes; the true progenitors of English literature are Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and French.

American literature and English literature of the nineteenth century are parallel derivatives from pre- ceding centuries of English literature. Literature is a succession of books from books. Artistic expression springs from life ultimately but not immediately. It may be likened to a river which is swollen throughout its course by new tributaries and by the seepages of its banks; it reflects the life through which it flows, taking color from the shores; the shores modify it, but its power and volume descend from distant head- waters and affluents far up stream. Or it may be likened to the race-life which our food nourishes or

American Literature 5

impoverishes, which our individual circumstances foster or damage, but which flows on through us, strangely impersonal and beyond our power to kill or create.

It is well for a writer to say: "Away with books! I will draw my inspiration from life!'* For we have too many books that are simply better books diluted by John Smith. At the same time, literature is not born spontaneously out of life. Every book has its literary parentage, and students find it so easy to trace genealogies that much criticism reads like an Old Testament chapter of "begats." Every novel was suckled at the breasts of older novels, and great mothers are often prolific of anaemic offspring. The stock falls off and revives, goes a-wandering, and re- turns like a prodigal. The family records get blurred. But of the main fact of descent there is no doubt.

American literature is English literature made in this country. Its nineteenth-century characteristics are evident and can be analyzed and discussed with some degree of certainty. Its "American" character- istics— no critic that I know has ever given a good account of them. You can define certain peculiarities of American politics, American agriculture, Ameri- can public schools, even American religion. But what is uniquely American in American literature? Poe is just as American as Mark Twain; Lanier is just as

6 John Macy

American as Whittier. The American spirit in litera- ture is a myth, hke American valor in war, which is precisely like the valor of Italians and Japanese. The American, deluded by a falsely idealized image which he calls America, can say that the purity of Longfellow represents the purity of American home life. An Irish Englishman, Air. Bernard Shaw, with another falsely idealized image of America, surprised that a face does not fit his image, can ask: ''What is Poe doing in that galley?" There is no answer. You never can tell. Poe could not help it. He was born in Boston, and lived in Richmond, New York, Baltimore, Phila- delphia. Professor van Dyke says that Poe was a maker of "decidedly un-American cameos," but I do not understand what that means. Facts are uncom- fortable consorts of prejudices and emotional gener- alities ; they spoil domestic peace, and when there is a separation they sit solid at home while the other party goes. Irving, a shy, sensitive gentleman, who wrote with fastidious care, said : "It has been a matter of marvel, to European readers, that a man from the wilds of America should express himself in tolerable English." It is a matter of marvel, just as it is a marvel that Blake and Keats flowered in the brutal city of London a hundred years ago.

The literary mind is strengthened and nurtured, is influenced and mastered, by the accumulated riches of

American Literature 7

literature. In the last century the strongest thinkers in our language were Englishmen, and not only the traditional but the contemporary influences on our thinkers and artists were British. This may account for one negative characteristic of American literature — its lack of American quality. True, our records must reflect our life. Our poets, enamored of night- ingales and Persian gardens, have not altogether for- gotten the mocking-bird and the woods of Maine. Fiction, written by inhabitants of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts, does tell us something of the ways of life in those mighty commonwealths, just as Eng- lish fiction written by Lancashire men about Lanca- shire people is saturated with the dialect, the local habits and scenery of that county. But wherever an English-speaking man of imagination may dwell, in Dorset or Calcutta or Indianapolis, he is subject to the strong arm of the empire of English literature; he cannot escape it; it tears him out of his obscure bed and makes a happy slave of him. He is assigned to the department of the service for which his gifts qualify him, and his special education is undertaken by drill-masters and captains who hail from provinces far from his birthplace.

Dickens, who writes of London, influences Bret Harte, who writes of CaHfornia, and Bret Harte in- fluences Kipling, who writes of India. Each is in-

8 John Macy

tensely local in subject matter. The affinity between them is a matter of temperament, manifested, for ex- ample, in the swagger and exaggeration characteristic of all three. California did not "produce'* Bret Harte ; the power of Dickens was greater than that of the Sierras and the Golden Gate. Bret Harte created a California that never existed, and Indian gentlemen, Caucasian and Hindoo, tell us that Kipling invented an army and an empire unknown to geographers and war- offices.

The ideas at work among these English men of let- ters are world-encircling and fly between book and brain. The dominant power is on the British Islands, and the prevailing stream of influence flows west across the Atlantic. Sometimes it turns and runs the other way. Poe influenced Rossetti; Whitman influ- enced Henley. For a century Cooper has been in com- mand of the British literary marine. Literature is reprehensibly unpatriotic, even though its votaries are, as individual citizens, afflicted with local prides and hostilities. It takes only a dramatic interest in the guns of Yorktown. Its philosophy was nobly uttered by Gaston Paris in the College de France in 1870, when the city was beleaguered by the German armies : "Common studies, pursued in the same spirit, in all civilized countries, form, beyond the restrictions of diverse and often hostile nationalities, a great country

American Literature 9

which no war profanes, no conqueror menaces, where souls find that refuge and unity which in former times was offered them by the city of God." The cathoHcity of English language and literature transcends the tem- poral boundaries of states.

What, then, of the "provincialism" of the American province of the empire of British literature? Is it an observable general characteristic, and is it a virtue or a vice ? There is a sense in which American literature is not provincial enough. The most provincial of all literature Is the Greek. The Greeks knew nothing out- side of Greece and needed to know nothing. The Old Testament is tribal in its provinciality; its god is a local god, and its village police and sanitary regulations are erected into eternal laws. If this racial localism is not essential to the greatness of early literatures, it is inseparable from them; we find it there. It is not possible in our cosmopolitan age and there are few traces of it in American books. No American poet has sung of his neighborhood with naive passion, as if it were all the world to him. Whitman is pugnaciously American, but his sympathies are universal, his vision is cosmic ; when he seems to be standing in a city street looking at life, he is in a trance, and his spirit is racing with the winds.

The welcome that we gave Whitman betrays the lack of an admirable kind of provincialism; it shows lis

lO John Macy

defective in local security of judgment. Some of U3 have been so anxiously abashed by high standards of European culture that we could not see a poet in our own back yard until European poets and critics told us he was there. This is queerly contradictory to a disposition found in some Americans to disregard world standards and proclaim a third-rate poet as the Milton of Oshkosh or the Shelley of San Francisco. The passage in Lowell's "Fable for Critics" about *The American Bulwers, Disraelis and Scotts" is a spoonful of salt in the mouth of that sort of gaping village reverence.

Of dignified and self-respecting provincialism, such as Professor Royce so eloquently advocates, there might well be more in American books. Our poets desert the domestic landscape to write pseudo-Eliza- bethan dramas and sonnets about Mont Blanc. They set up an artificial Tennyson park on the banks of the Hudson. Beside the shores of Lake Michigan they croon the love affairs of an Arab in the desert and his noble steed. This is not a very grave offence, for poets live among the stars, and it makes no difference from what point of the earth's surface they set forth on their aerial adventures. A Wisconsin poet may write very beautifully about nightingales, and a New Eng- land Unitarian may write beautifully about cathedrals; if it is beautiful, it is poetry, and all is well.

American Literature II

The novelists are the worst offenders. There have been few of them; they have not been adequate in numbers or in genius to the task of describing the sections of the country, the varied scenes and habits from New Orleans to the Portlands. And yet, small band as they are, with great domestic opportunities and responsibilities, they have devoted volumes to Paris, which has an able native corps of story-makers, and to Italy, where the home talent is first-rate. In this sense American literature is too globe-trotting, it has too little savor of the soil.

Of provincialism of the narrowest type American writers, like other men of imagination, are not guilty to any reprehensible degree. It is a vice sometimes imputed to them by provincial critics who view litera- ture from the office of a London weekly review or from the lecture rooms of American colleges. Some American writers are parochial, for example, Whittier. Others, like Mr. Henry James, are provincial in out- look, but cosmopolitan in experience, and reveal their provinciality by a self-conscious internationalism. Probably English and French writers may be similarly classified as provincial or not. Mr. James says that Poe's collection of critical sketches "is probably the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of men." It is noth- ing like that. It is an example of what happens when

12 John Macy

a hack reviewer's work in local journals is collected into a volume because he turns out to be a genius. The list of Poe's victims is not more remarkable for the number of nonentities it includes than ''The Lives of the Poets" by the great Doctor Johnson, who was hack for a bookseller, and "introduced" all the poets that the taste of the time encouraged the bookseller to print. Poe was cosmopolitan in spirit ; his prejudices were personal and highly original, usually against the prejudices of his moment and milieu. Hawthorne is less provincial, in the derogatory sense, than his charming biographer, Mr. James, as wall become evident if one compares Hawthorne's American notes on England, written in long ago days of national rancor, with Mr. James's British notes on America (''The American Scene"), written in our happy days of spacious vision. Emerson's ensphering universality overspreads Carlyle like the sky above a volcanic island. Indeed Carlyle (who knew more about American life and about what other people ought to do than any other British writer earlier than Mr. Chesterton) justly com- plains that Emerson is not sufficiently local and con- crete; Carlyle longs to see "some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of creation which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized." Longfellow would not stay at home and write more about the excellent village blacksmith ; he made poetical

American Literature 13

tours of Europe and translated songs and legends from several languages for the delight of the villagers who remained behind. Lowell was so heartily cosmopolitan that American newspapers accused him of Anglomania — which proves their provincialism but acquits him. Mr. Howells has written a better book about Venice than about Ohio. Mark Twain lived in every part of America, from Connecticut to California, he wrote about every country under the sun (and about some countries beyond the sun), he is read by all sorts and conditions of men in the English-speaking world, and he is an adopted hero in Vienna. It is difficult to come to any conclusion about provincialism as a char- acteristic of American literature.

American literature is on the whole idealistic, sweet, delicate, nicely finished. There is little of it which might not have appeared in the Youth's Companion. The notable exceptions are our most stalwart men oi genius, Thoreau, Whitman, and Mark Twain. Any child can read American literature, and if it does not make a man of him, it at least will not lead him into forbidden realms. Indeed, American books too seldom come to grips with the problems of life, especially the books cast in artistic forms. The essayists, expounders, and preachers attack life vigorously and wrestle with the meaning of it. The poets are thin, moonshiny, meticulous in technique. Novelists are few and feeble.

14 John Macy

and dramatists are non-existent. These generalities, subject to exceptions, are confirmed by a reading of the first fifteen volumes of the Atlantic Monthly, which are a treasure-house of the richest period of American literary expression. In those volumes one finds a sur- prising number of vigorous, distinguished papers on pohtics, philosophy, science, even on literature and art. Many talented men and women, whose names are not well remembered, are clustered there about the half dozen salient men of genius; and the collection gives one a sense that the New England mind (aided by the outlying contributors) was, in its one Age of Thought, an abundant and diversified power. But the poetry is not memorable, except for some verses by the few standard poets. And the fiction is naive. Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country" is al- most the only story there that one comes on with a thrill either of recognition or of discovery.

It is hard to explain why the American, except in his exhortatory and passionately argumentative moods, has not struck deep into American life, why his stories and verses are, for the most part, only pretty things, nicely unimportant. Anthony Trollope had a theory that the absence of international copyright threw our market open too unrestrictedly to the British product, that the American novel was an unprotected infant industry; we printed Dickens and the rest without paying royalty

American Literature 15

and starved the domestic manufacturer. This theory does not explain. For there were many American novelists, published, read, and probably paid for their work. The trouble is that they lacked genius; they dealt with trivial, slight aspects of life; they did not take the novel seriously in the right sense of the word, though no doubt they were in another sense serious enough about their poor productions. ''Uncle Tom's Cabin" and ''Huckleberry Finn" are colossal exceptions to the prevailing weakness and superficiality of Ameri- can novels.

Why do American writers turn their backs on life, miss its intensities, its significance? The American Civil War was the most tremendous upheaval in the world after the Napoleonic period. The imaginative reaction on it consists of some fine essays, Lincoln's addresses. Whitman's war poetry, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (which came before the war but is part of it), one or two passionate hymns by Whittier, the second series of the "Biglow Papers," Hale's "The Man With- out a Country" — and what else? The novels laid in war-time are either sanguine melodrama or absurd idyls of maidens whose lovers are at the front — a tragic theme if tragically and not sentimentally con- ceived. Perhaps the bullet that killed Theodore Win- throp deprived us of our great novelist of the Civil War, for he was on the right road. In a general

1 6 John Macy

speculation such a might-have-been is not altogether futile; if Milton had died of whooping cough there would not have been any ^'Paradise Lost"; the reverse of this is that some geniuses whose works ought in- evitably to have been produced by this or that national development may have died too soon. This suggestion, however, need not be gravely argued. The fact is that the American literary imagination after the Civil War was almost sterile. If no books had been written, the failure of that conflict to get itself embodied in some masterpieces would be less disconcerting. But thousands of books were written by people who knew the war at first hand and who had literary ambition and some skill, and from all these books none rises to dis- tinction.

An example of what seems to be the American habit of writing about everything except American life, is the work of General Lew Wallace. Wallace was one of the important secondary generals in the Civil War, distinguished at Fort Donelson and at Shiloh. After the war he wrote "Ben-Hur," a doubly abominable book, because it is not badly written and it shows a lively imagination. There is nothing in it so valuable, so dramatically significant as a week in Wallace's war experiences. "Ben-Hur," fit work for a country clergy- man with a pretty literary gift, is a ridiculous inanity to come from a man who has seen the things that

American Literature 17

Wallace saw! It is understandable that the man of experience may not write at all, and, on the other hand^ that the man of secluded life may have the imagination to make a military epic. But for a man crammed with experience of the most dramatic sort and discovering the ability and the ambition to write — for him to make spurious oriental romances which achieve an enormous popularity! The case is too grotesque to be typical, yet it is exceptional in degree rather than in kind. The American literary artist has written about every- thing under the skies except what matters most in his own life. General Grant^s plain autobiography, not art and of course not attempting to be, is better Hterature than most of our books in artistic forms, because of its intellectual integrity and the profound importance of the subject-matter.

Our dreamers have dreamed about many wonderful things, but their faces have been averted from the mightier issues of life. They have been high-minded, fine-grained, eloquent in manner, in odd contrast to the real or reputed vigor and crudeness of the nation. In the hundred years from Irving's first romance to Mr. Howells's latest unromantic novel, most of our books are eminent for just those virtues which Amer- ica is supposed to lack. Their physique is feminine; they are fanciful, dainty, reserved; they are literose, sophisticated in craftsmanship, but innocentlv unaware

1 8 John Macy

of the profound agitations of American life, of life everywhere. Those who strike the deeper notes of reality, Whitman, Thoreau, Mark Twain, Mrs. Stowe in her one great book, Whittier, Lowell and Emerson at their best, are a powerful minority. The rest, beau- tiful and fine in spirit, too seldom show that they are conscious of contemporaneous realities, too seldom vi- brate with a tremendous sense of life.

The Jason of western exploration writes as if he had passed his life in a library. The Ulysses of great rivers and perilous seas is a connoisseur of Japanese prints. The warrior of 'Sixty-one rivals Miss Marie Corelli. The mining engineer carves cherry stones. He who is figured as gaunt, hardy and aggressive, conquering the desert with the steam locomotive, sings of a pretty little rose in a pretty little garden. The judge, haggard with experience, who presides over the most tragi-comic divorce court ever devised by man, writes love stories that would have made Jane Austen smile.

Mr. Arnold Bennett is reported to have said that if Balzac had seen Pittsburgh, he would have cried : ''Give me a pen !" The truth is, the whole country is crying out for those who will record it, satirize it, chant it. As literary material, it is virgin land, ancient as life and fresh as a wilderness. American literature is one occupation which is not over-crowded, in which,

American , Literature 19

indeed, there is all too little competition for the new- comer to meet. There are signs that some earnest young writers are discovering the fertility of a soil that has scarcely been scratched.

American fiction shows all sorts of merit, but the merits are not assembled, concentrated; the fine is weak, and the strong is crude. The stories of Poe, Hawthorne, Howells, James, Aldrich, Bret Harte, are admirable in manner, but they are thin in substance, not of large vitality. On the other hand, some of the stronger American fictions fail in workmanship; for example, ''Uncle Tom's Cabin," which is still vivid and moving long after its tractarian interest has faded : the novels of Frank Norris, a man of great vision and high purpose, who attempted to put national economics into something like an epic of daily bread; and Herman Melville's "Moby Dick," a madly eloquent romance of the sea. A few American novelists have felt the mean- ing of the life they knew and have tried sincerely to set it down, but have for various reasons failed to make first-rate novels ; for example, Edward Eggleston, whose stories of early Indiana have the breath of ac- tuality in them; Mr. E. W. Howe, author of 'The Story of a Country Town"; Harold Frederic, a man of great ability, whose work was growing deeper, more significant when he died; George W. Cable, whose novels are unsteady and sentimental, but who gives a

20 John Macy

genuine impression of having portrayed a city and its people; and Stephen Crane, who, dead at thirty, had given in "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie" the promise of better work. Of good short stories America has been proHfic. Mrs. Wilkins-Freeman, Mrs. Annie Trumbull Slosson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, H. C. Bunner, Edward Everett Hale, Frank Stockton, Joel Chandler Harris, and "O. Henry" are some of those whose short stories are per- fect in their several kinds. But the American novel, which multiplies past counting, remains an inferior production.

On a private shelf of contemporary fiction and drama in the English language are tne works of ten British authors, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. Eden Phillpotts, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Leonard Merrick, Mr. J. C. Snaith, Miss May Sinclair, Mr. William De Morgan, Mr. Maurice Hewlett, Mr. Joseph Conrad, Mr. Bernard Shaw, yes, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling. Beside them I find but two Americans, Mrs. Edith Wharton and Mr. Theo- dore Dreiser. There may be others, for one cannot pretend to know all the living novelists and dramatists. Yet for every American that should be added, I would agree to add four to the British list. However, a con- temporary literature that includes Mrs. Wharton*s "Ethan Frome" and Mr. Dreiser's "Jennie Gerhardt"

American Literature 21

both published last year, is not to be despaired of. In the course of a century a few Americans have said in memorable words what life meant to them. Their performance, put together, is considerable, if not imposing. Any sense of dissatisfaction that one feels in contemplating it is due to the disproportion be- tween a limited expression and the multifarious im- mensity of the country. Our literature, judged by the great literatures contemporaneous with it, is insuffi- cient to the opportunity and the need. The American Spirit may be figured as petitioning the Muses for twelve novelists, ten poets, and eight dramatists, to be delivered at the earliest possible moment.

MARY WHITE By William Allen White

Mary White — ons seems to know her after reading this sketch written by her father on the day she was buried — would surely have laughed unbelievingly if told she would be in a book of this sort, together with Joseph Conrad, one of whose books lay on her table. But the pen, in the honest hand, has always been mightier than the grave.

This is not the sort of thing one wishes to mar with clumsy comment. It was written for the Emporia Gazette, which Wil- liam Allen White has edited since 1895. He is one of the best- known, most public-spirited and most truly loved of Am.erican journalists. He and his fellow-Kansan, E. W. Howe of Atchison, are two characteristic figures in our newspaper world, both masters of that vein of canny, straightforward, humane and humorous simplicity that seems to be a Kansas birthright.

Mr. White was born in Emporia in 1868.

The Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary White's death declared that it came as the result of a fall from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on her and with her — "I'm always trying to hold 'em in my lap," she used to say. But she was proud of few things, and one was that she could ride anything that had four legs and hair. Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a blow on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the parking.

22

Mary White 23

The last hour of her hfe was typical of its happi- ness. She came home from a day's work at school, topped off by a hard grind with the copy on the High School Annual, and felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into her khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt roads for the country air and the radiant green fields of the spring. As she rode through the town on an easy gallop she kept waving at passers-by. She knew everyone in town. For a dec- ade the little figure with the long pig-tail and the red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of Em- poria, and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at her. She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of the Normal Library, and waved at them ; passed another friend a few hundred feet further on, and waved at her. The horse was walking and, as she turned into North Merchant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse swung into a lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her cowboy hat at them, still moving gaily north on Merchant Street. A Gazette carrier passed— a High School boy friend— and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the horse veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-hanging limb faced her, and, while she still looked back waving, the blow came. But she did not fall from the horse; she slipped off, dazed a bit,

24 William Allen White

staggered and fell in a faint. She never quite re- covered consciousness.

But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding fast. A year or so ago she used to go like the wind. But that habit was broken, and she used the horse to get into the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and to work off a certain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a physical outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It was back of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-clad figure on the streets and country roads of this community and built into a strong, muscular body what had been a frail and sickly frame during the first years of her life. But the riding gave her more than a body. It released a gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the world. And she was happy because she was en- larging her horizon. She came to know all sorts and conditions of men; Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one of her best friends. W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom O'Connor, farmer-poli- tician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and police judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her spe- cial friends, and all the girls, black and white, above the track and below the track, in Pepville and String- town, were among her acquaintances. And she brought home riotous stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick ; persiflage was her natural expression at home.

Mary White 25

Her humor was a continual bubble of joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole and metaphor. She was mis- chievous wtihout malice, as full of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary White, but an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five minutes in her life.

With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved books. On her table when she left her room were a book by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, "Creative Chemistry" by E. E. Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark Twain, Dickens and KipHng before she was ten — all of their writings. Wells and Arnold Ben- nett particularly amused and diverted her. She was entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was assis- tant editor of the High School Annual this year, and in line for election to the editorship of the Annual next year. She was a member of the executive com- mittee of the High School Y. W. C. A.

Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by an ambition to draw. She began as most children do by scribbling in her school books, funny pictures. She bought cartoon magazines and took a course — ^ rather casually, naturally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong purposes — and this year she tasted the first fruits of success by having her pictures ac- cepted by the High School Annual. But the thrill of delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the Normal An-

26 William Allen White

nual, asked her to do the cartooning for that book this spring, was too beautiful for words. She fell to her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings were accepted, and her pride — always repressed by a lively sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting — was a really gorgeous thing to see. No suc- cessful artist ever drank a deeper draught of satisfac- tion than she took from the little fame her work was getting among her schoolfellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse — but never her car.

For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social life. She never had a ''party" in all her nearly seventeen years — wouldn't have one; but she never drove a block in the car in her life that she didn't begin to fill the car with pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White — white and black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She liked nothing better than to fill the car full of long-legged High School boys and an occasional girl, and parade the town. She never had a ''date," nor went to a dance, except once with her brother. Bill, and the "boy proposition" didn't interest her — yet. But young people — great spring- breaking, varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door- sagging carloads of "kids" gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But the most fun she ever had in her life was acting as chairman of the committee that got up the big turkey dinner for the poor folkb

Mary White 27

at the county home; scores of pies, gallons of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges and a wilderness of tur- key were loaded in the car and taken to the county home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked her own Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor folks actually got it all. Not that she was a cynic; she just disliked to tempt folks. While there she found a blind colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing but make rag rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags enough to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she tried to make was to take the guests at the county home out for a car ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try to get a rest room for colored girls in the High School. She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there was no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it inflamed her sense of injustice and she became a nagging harpie to those who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had always with her, and was glad of it. She hungered and thirsted for righteousness; and was the most impious creature in the world. She joined the Congregational Church with- out consulting her parents; not particularly for her soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and would have hooted at a ''testimony.'' But even as a little child she felt the church was an agency for helping people to more of life's abundance, and she

28 Will lain Allen White

wanted to help. She never wanted help for herself. Clothes meant little to her. It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but eventually a harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for anything but a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair up; though she was nearly seventeen. "Mother/' she pro- tested, ''you don't know how much I get by with, in my braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up." Above every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow up, to be a child. The tom-boy in her. which was big, seemed to loathe to be put away for- ever in skirts. She was a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.

Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was as she would have wished it ; no singing, no flowers save the big bunch of red roses from her Brother Bill's Harvard classmen — Heavens, how proud that would have made her! and the red roses from the Gazette force — in vases at her head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on *'Love" from the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians, some remarks about her democratic spirit by her friend, John H. J. Rice, pastQ** and police judge, which she would have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down for her by her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow, poignant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which

Mary White 29

she loved, and closing the service a cutting from the joyously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic Symphony, which she liked to hear in certain moods on the phonograph ; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends in the High School.

That was all.

For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen: her Latin teacher — W. L. Holtz ; her High School prin- cipal. Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank Foncannon; her friend, W. W. Finney; her pal at the Gazette office, Walter Hughes; and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had been transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner near the church to direct her friends who came to bid her good-by.

A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn.

NIAGARA FALLS By Rupert Brooke

The poet usually is the best reporter, for he is an observer not merely accurate but imaginative, self-trained to see subtle sug- gestions, relations and similarities. This magnificent bit of de- scription was written by Rupert Brooke as one of the letters sent to the Westminster Gazette describing his trip in the United States and Canada in 1913. It is included in the volume Letters from Aynerica to which Henry James contributed so affectionate and desperately unintelligible a preface— one of the last things James wrote. Brooke's notes on America are well worth read- ing: they are full of delightful and lively comments, though sometimes much (oh, very much!) too condescending. The last paragraph in this essay is interesting in view of subsequent history.

Brooke was born in 1887, son of a master at Rugby School; was at King's College, Cambridge ; died of blood-poisoning in the iEgean, April 23, 1915.

Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a modern traveler could spend his time peacefully admiring the scenery instead of feeling himself bound to dog the simple and grotesque of the world for the sake of their too-human comments. It is his fault if a peasant's naivete has come to outweigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen are more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at observing human nature and drawing social and political deductions from trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-mouthed worship of the wonders of nature. And this is very easy at Niagara. Niagara

JO

Niagara Falls 31

means nothing. It is not leading anywhere. It does not result from anything. It throws no light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Divorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on Canadian character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely a great deal of water falling over some cliffs. But it is very remarkably that. The human race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with every distraction, incon- gruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, powerhouses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-place for all the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating, and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class, refined, gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who intimidate and touts who wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and dilet- tanti, male and female; touts who would photograph you with your arm round a young lady against a faked background of the sublimest cataract, touts who vi^ould bully you into cars, char-a-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a carriage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards, moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crockery, and touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the world, but just purely, simply, merely, incessantly, in-

32 Rupert Brooke

defatigably, and ineffugibly to tout. And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are overpowering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the Canadian and the American.

Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water of the great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion. It descends with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and leaping, breaking into a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful fingers of spray. Sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks, some- times the eye can see nothing but a waste of laughing, springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even seem- ing to stand for an instant erect, but always borne im- petuously forward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it, and you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled, steely, and foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross strands of water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of descry- ing a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is cheated by change. In one place part of the flood plunges over a ledge a few feet high and a quarter of a mile or so long, in a uniform and stable curve. It gives an impression of almost military concerted movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But it is swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment.

Niagara Falls 33

Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white wave that faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-stream, but is really stationary in the headlong charge. But for these signs of reluct- ance, the waters seem to fling themselves on with some foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are preceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in the sunlight, careless, entwining, clam- orously joyful, the waves riot on towards the verge.

But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent, the white and blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian Falls at least, blend and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous green. On the edge of dis- aster the river seems to gather herself, to pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind of violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to white as they fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hidden base of rock, leaps up the whole two hundred feet again in pinnacles and domes of spray. The spray falls back into the lower river once more ; all but a little that fines to foam and white mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it,

34 Rupert Brooke

and wanders out on the wind over the trees and gar- dens and houses, and so vanishes.

The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks of the river above the Falls told me that the center of the riverbed at the Canadian Falls is deep and of a saucer shape. So it may be possible to fill this up to a uniform depth, and divert a lot of water for the power-houses. And this, he said, would supply the need for more power, which will certainly soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara. This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary sight-seers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satis- fied. The real secret of the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height or width, but the feeling of colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of water. If that were taken away, there would be litde visible change, but the heart would be gone.

The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same way as the Canadian. It is because they are less in volume, and because the water does not fall so much into one place. By comparison their beauty is almost delicate and fragile. They are extraordinarily level, one long curtain of lacework and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is on them, they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark against them. With both Falls the color of the

Niagara Falls 35

water is the ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites, melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with the changing sun. Some- times they are as richly diaphanous as a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam be- come opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows. If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a great double rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top to bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the cliff opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls, accom- panies you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies as the mist ends, and awakens again as you reach the Canadian tumult. And the bold traveler who attempts the trip under the American Falls sees, when he dare open his eyes to anything, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in span, leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling beside him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in that place was a complete circle, such as I have never seen before, and so near that I could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying journey, beneath and behind the Falls. The senses are battered and bewildered by the thunder of the water and the assault of wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of falling water, but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if you are

36 Rupert Brooke

close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recog- nize liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully aware that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great curves in front of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the face. Farther away, in the roar and hissing, clouds of spray seem literally tc slide down some invisible plane of air.

Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor of marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum that was foam. It slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two, sullenly exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage green, and hurries more swiftly, smooth and omnious. As the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs, and the waters boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more terrifying than the Falls, because less in- telligible. Close in its bands of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing and leaping as if in- spired by a demon. It is pressed by the straits into a visibly convex form. Great planes of water slide past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of foam higher than a house, or leaps wnth incredible speed from the crest of one vast w^ave to another, along the shining curve between, like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually suggests muscular ac- tion. The power manifest in these rapids moves one wnth a different sense of awe and terror from that of

Niagara Falls oy

the Falls. Here the inhuman life and strength are spontaneous, active, almost resolute; masculine vigor compared with the passive gigantic power, female, help- less and overwhelming, of the Falls. A place of fear. One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the Falls, at every hour, and especially by night, when the cloud of spray becomes an immense visible ghost, straining and wavering high above the river, white and pathetic and translucent. The Victorian lies very close below the surface in every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy thoughts of destiny and the pas- sage of empires drift through the mind; for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that the rainbows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty and goodness, with regard to the stream of life- caused by it, thrown upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct or affect it, and ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise in the heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single current, likens Itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a com- munity. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its citizens, and yet is more than they. In such places, one is aware, with an almost insupportable and yet com- forting certitude, that both men and nations are hur- ried onwards to their ruin or ending as inevitably as

38 Rupert Brooke

this dark flood. Some go down to it unreluctant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that hangs over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying. . . . With some such thoughts does the plati- tudinous heart win from the confusion and thunder of a Niagara peace that the quietest plains or most stable hills can never give.

THE ALMOST PERFECT STATE By Don Marquis

Don Marquis is a real name, not a pseudonym ; it is pronounced Markin'iss, not Markee. I reprint here two of Mr. Marquis's amiable meditations on the "Almost Perfect State," which have appeared in the column {The Sun Dial) conducted by him for ten years in the New York Sun. According to the traditional motto of sun-dials, Mr. Marquis's horologe usually numbers only the serene hours ; but sometimes, when the clear moonlight of his Muse is shining, it casts darker and even more precious shadows of satire and mysticism. His many readers know by this time the depth and reach of his fun and fancy. Marquis is a true philosopher and wit, his humor adorns a rich and mellow gravity. When strongly moved he sometimes utters an epigram that rings like steel leaving the scabbard.

There are many things to be said against American news- papers, but much of the indictment is quashed when one con- siders that every now and then they develop a writer like Don Marquis. The violent haste, pressure and instancy of newspaper routine, purgatorial to some temperaments, is a genuine stimulus to others — particularly if they are able, as in the case of the columnist, to fall back upon outside contributors in their inter- vals of pessimism or sloth.

Mr. Marquis's The Old Soak, a post-prohibition portrait of a genial old tippler, is perhaps the most vital bit of American humor since Mr. Dooley — some say since Mark Twain. His Prefaces and his poems will also be considered by the judicious. He was born in Illinois in 1878, and did newspaper work in Philadelphia and Atlanta before coming to the Sun in 1912.

I

No matter how nearly perfect an Almost Perfect State may be, it is not nearly enough perfect unless the individuals who compose it can, somewhere between death and birth, have a perfectly corking time for a few years. The most wonderful governmental system

39

40 Don Marquis

in the world does not attract us, as a system; we are after a system that scarcely knows it is a system; the great thing is to have the largest number of individuals as happy as may be, for a little while at least, some time before they die.

Infancy is not what it is cracked up to be. The child seems happy all the time to the adult, because the adult knows that the child is untouched by the real problems of life; if the adult were similarly untouched he is sure that he would be happy. But children, not knowing that they are having an easy time, have a good many hard times. Growing and learning and obeying the rules of their elders, or fighting against them, are not easy things to do. Adolescence is cer- tainly far from a uniformly pleasant period. Early manhood might be the most glorious time of all were it not that the sheer excess of life and vigor gets a fellow into continual scrapes. Of middle age the best that can be said is that a middle aged person has likely learned how to have a little fun in spite of his troubles.

It is to old age that we look for reimbursement, the most of us. And most of us look in vain. For the most of us have been wrenched and racked, in one way or another, until old age is the most trying time of all.

In the Almost Perfect State every person shall have at least ten years before he dies of easy, carefree, happy living . . . thing^s will be so arranged economi*

The Almost Perfect State 41

cally that this will be possible for each individual.

Personally we look forward to an old age of dissi- pation and indolence and unreverend disrepute. In fifty years we shall be ninety-two years old. We in- tend to work rather hard during those fifty years and accumulate enough to live on without working any more for the next ten years, for we have determined to die at the age of one hundred and two.

During the last ten years we shall indulge ourself in many things that we have been forced by circum- 'stances to forego. We have always been compelled, and we shall be compelled for many years to come, to be prudent, cautious, staid, sober, conservative, indus- trious, respectful of established institutions, a model citizen. We have not liked it, but we have been unable to escape it. Our mind, our logical faculties, our ob- servation, inform us that the conservatives have the right side of the argument in all human affairs. But the people whom we really prefer as associates, though we do not approve their ideas, are the rebels, the radi- cals, the wastrels, the vicious, the poets, the Bolshevists, the idealists, the nuts, the Lucifers, the agreeable good- for-nothings, the sentimentalists, the prophets, the freaks. We have never dared to know any of them, far less become intimate with them.

Between the years of ninety-two and a hundred and two, however, we shall be the ribald, useless, drunken

42 Don Marquis

outcast person we have always wished to be. We shall have a long white beard and long white hair; we shall not walk at all, but recline in a wheel chair and bellow for alcoholic beverages; in the winter we shall sit be- fore the fire with our feet in a bucket of hot water, with a decanter of corn whiskey near at hand, and write ribald songs against organized society; strapped to one arm of our chair will be a forty-five caliber re- volver, and we shall shoot out the lights when we want to go to sleep, instead of turning them off ; when we want air we shall throw a silver candlestick through the front window and be damned to it; we shall ad- dress public meetings to which we have been invited because of our wisdom in a vein of jocund malice. We shall . . . but we don't wish to make any one envious of the good time that is coming to us . . .we look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonored and disorderly old age.

(In the meantime, of course, you understand, you can't have us pinched and deported for our yearn- ings.)

We shall know that the Almost Perfect State is here when the kind of old age each person wants is possible to him. Of course, all of you may not want the kind we want . . . some of you may prefer prunes and morality to the bitter end. Some of you may be dis- solute now and may look forward to becoming like

The Almost Perfect State 43

one of the nice old fellows in a Wordsworth poem. 'But for our part we have always been a hypocrite and we shall have to continue being a hypocrite for a good many years yet, and we yearn to come out in our true colors at last. The point is, that no matter what you want to be, during those last ten years, that you may be, in the Almost Perfect State.

Any system of government under which the indi- vidual does all the sacrificing for the sake of the gen- eral good, for the sake of the community, the State, gets off on its wrong foot. We don't want things that cost us too much. We don't want too much strain all the time.

The best good that you can possibly achieve is not good enough if you have to strain yourself all the time to reach it. A thing is only worth doing, and doing again and again, if you can do it rather easily, and get some joy out of it.

Do the best you can, without straining yourself toe much and too continuously, and leave the rest to God. If you strain yourself too much you'll have to ask Goc} to patch you up. And for all you know, patching you up may take time that it was planned to use some other way.

BUT . . . overstrain yourself now and then. For this reason : The things you create easily and joyously will not continue to come easily and joyously unless

44 Don Marquis

you yourself are getting bigger all the time. And when you overstrain yourself you are assisting in the creation of a new self — if you get what we mean. And if you should ask us suddenly just what this has to do with the picture of the old guy in the wheel chair we should answer: Hanged if we know, but we seemed to sort o' run into it, somehow.

II

Interplanetary communication is one of the persist- ent dreams of the inhabitants of this oblate spheroid on which we move, breathe and suffer for lack of beer. There seems to be a feeling in many quarters that if we could get speech with the Martians, let us say, we might learn from them something to our advantage. There is a disposition to concede the superiority of the fellows Out There . . . just as some Americans capitulate without a struggle to poets from England, rugs from Constantinople, song and sausage from Ger- many, religious enthusiasts from Hindustan and cheese from Switzerland, although they have not tested the goods offered and really lack the discrimination to de- termine their quality. Almost the only foreign im- portations that were ever sneezed at in this country were Swedish matches and Spanish influenza.

But are the Martians ... if Martians there be . . . any more capable than the persons dwelling be-

The Almost Perfect State 45

tween the Woolworth Building and the Golden Horn, between Shwe Dagon and the First Church, Scientist, in Boston, Mass.? Perhaps the Martians yearn to- ward earth, romantically, poetically, the Romeos swear- ing by its light to the Juliets ; the idealists and philoso- phers fabling that already there exists upon it an ALMOST PERFECT STATE — and now and then a wan prophet lifting his heart to its gleams, as a cup to be filled from Heaven with fresh waters of hope and courage. For this earth, it is also a star.

We know they are wrong about us, the lovers in the far stars, the philosophers, poets, the prophets . . . or are they wrong?

They are both right and wrong, as we are probably both right and wrong about them. If we tumbled into Mars or Arcturus or Sirlus this evening wx should find the people there discussing the shimmy, the jazz, the inconstancy of cooks and the iniquity of retail butchers, no doubt . . . and they would be equally disappointed by the way we flitter, frivol, flutter and flivver.

And yet, that other thing would be there too . . . that thing that made them look at our star as a sym- bol of grace and beauty.

Men could not think of the almost perfect state if they did not have it in them ultimately to create the almost perfect state.

We used sometimes to walk over the Brookl}Ti

46 Don Marquis

Bridge, that song in stone and steel of an engineer who was also a great artist, at dusk, when the tides of shadow flood in from the lower bay to break in a surf of glory and mystery and illusion against the tall towers of Manhattan. Seen from the middle arch of the bridge at twilight. New York with its girdle of shifting waters and its drift of purple cloud and its quick pulsations of unstable light is a miracle of splendor and beauty that lights up the heart like the laughter of a god.

But, descend. Go down into the city. Mingle with the details. The dirty old shed from which the "L" trains and trolleys put out with their jammed and mangled thousands for flattest Flatbush and the un- known bourne of ulterior Brooklyn is still the same dirty old shed; on a hot, damp night the pasty streets stink like a paperhanger's overalls; you are trodden and over-ridden by greasy little profiteers and their hopping victims ; you are encompassed round about by the ugly and the sordid, and the objectionable is ex- uded upon you from a myriad candid pores; your elation and your illusion vanish like ingenuous snow- flakes that have kissed a hot dog sandwich on its fiery brow, and you say: ''Beauty? Aw, h — 11 What's the use?"

And yet you have seen beauty. And beauty that was created by these people and people like these. . . . You

The Almost Perfect State 47

have seen the tall towers of Manhattan, wonderful under the stars. How did it come about that such growths came from such soil — that a breed lawless and sordid and prosaic has written such a mighty hiero- glyphic against the sky? This glamor out of a pigsty . . . how come? How is it that this hideous, half- brute city is also beautiful and a fit habitation for demi-gods? How come?

It comes about because the wise and subtle deities permit nothing worthy to be lost. It was with no thought of beauty that the builders labored; no con- scious thought ; they were masters or slaves in the bitter wars of commerce, and they never saw as a whole what they were making; no one of them did. But each one had had his dream. And the baffled dreams and the broken visions and the ruined hopes and the secret desires of each one labored with him as he labored; the things that were lost and beaten and trampled down went into the stone and steel and gave it soul: the aspiration denied and the hope abandoned and the vision defeated were the things that lived, and not the apparent purpose for which each one of all the millions sweat and toiled or cheated; the hidden things, the silent things, the winged things, so weak they are easily killed, the unacknowledged things, the rejected beauty, the strangled appreciation, the inchoate art, the submerged spirit — these groped and found each other

48 Don Marquis

and gathered themselves together and worked them- selves into the tiles and mortar of the edifice and made a town that is a worthy fellow of the sunrise and the sea winds.

Humanity triumphs over its details.

The individual aspiration is always defeated of its perfect fruition and expression, but it is never lost; it passes into the conglomerate being of the race.

The way to encourage yourself about the human race is to look at it first from a distance; look at the lights on the high spots. Coming closer, you will be profoundly discouraged at the number of low spots, not to say two-spots. Coming still closer, you will become discouraged once more by the reflection that the same stuff that is in the high spots is also in the two-spots.

"THE MAN-O'-WAR'S *ER 'USBAND*^ By David W. Bone

Those who understand something of a sailor's feeling for his ship will appreciate the restraint with which Captain Bone de- scribes the loss of the Cameronia, his command, torpedoed in the Mediterranean during the War. You will notice (forgive us for pointing out these things) how quietly the quoted title pays tribute to the gallantry of the destroyers that stood by the sinking ship; and the heroism of the chief officer's death is not less moving because told in two sentences. This superb picture of a sea tragedy is taken from Merchanfmen-at^Arms, a history of the British Merchants' Service during the War; a book of enthralling power and truth, illustrated by the author's brother, Muirhead Bone, one of the greatest of living etchers.

David William Bone was born in Partick (near Glasgow) in 1873; his father was a well-known Glasgow journalist; his great-grandfather was a boyhood companion of Robert Bums. Bone went to sea as an apprentice in the City of Florence, an old-time square-rigger, at the age of fifteen ; he has been at sea ever since. He is now master of S.S. Columbia of the Anchor Line, a well-known ship in New York Harbor, as she has carried passengers between the Clyde and the Hudson for more than twenty years. Captain Bone's fine sea tale. The Brass- bounder, published in 1910, has become a classic of the square- sail era; his Broken Stozvage (1915) is a collection of shorter sea sketches. In the long roll of great writers who have re- flected the simplicity and severity of sea life, Captain Bone will take a permanent and honorable place.

A SENSE of security is difficult of definition. Largely, It is founded upon habit and association. It is induced and maintained by familiar surroundings. On board ship, in a small world of our own, we seem to be contained by the boundaries of the bulwarks, to be sailing beyond the influences of the land and of other ships. The sea is the same we have known for so

49

50 David W , Bone

long. Every item of our ship fitment — the trim ar- rangement of the decks, the set and rake of mast and funnel, even the furnishings of our cabin? — has the power of impressing a stable feeling of custom, nor- mal ship life, safety. It requires an effort of thought to recall that in their homely presence we are endan- gered. Relating his experiences after having been mined and his ship sunk, a master confided that the point that impressed him most deeply was when he went to his room for the confidential papers and saw the cabin exactly in everyday aspect — his longshore clothes suspended from the hooks, his umbrella stand- ing in a corner as he had placed it on coming aboard.

Soldiers on service are denied this aid to assur- ance. Unlike us, they cannot carry their home with them to the battlefields. All their scenes and sur- roundings are novel; they may only draw a reliance and comfort from the familiar presence of their com- rades. At sea in a ship there is a yet greater incite- ment to their disquiet. The movement, the limitless sea, the distance from the land, cannot be ignored. The atmosphere that is so familiar and comforting to us, is to many of them an environment of dread possibilities.

It is with some small measure of this sense of secu- rity— tempered by our knowledge of enemy activity in these waters — we pace the bridge. .Anxiety is not

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Vsband'' 51

wholly absent. Some hours past, we saw small flot- sam that may have come from the decks of a French mail steamer, torpedoed three days ago. The passing of the derelict fittings aroused some disquiet, but the steady routine of our progress and the constant friendly presence of familiar surroundings has effect in allay- ing immediate fears. The rounds of the bridge go on — the writing of the log, the tapping of the glass, the small measures that mark the passing of our sea-hours. Two days out from Marseilles — and all well! In another two days we should be approaching the Canal, and then — to be clear of 'submarine waters' for a term. Fine weather! A light wind and sea accom- pany us for the present, but the filmy glare of the sun, now low, and a backward movement of the glass fore- tells a break ere long. We are steaming at high speed to make the most of the smooth sea. Ahead, on each bow, our two escorting destroyers conform to the angles of our zigzag — spurring out and swerving with the peculiar ''thrown-around" movement of their class. Look-out is alert and in numbers. Added to the watch of the ship's crew, military signalers are posted; the boats swung outboard have each a party of troops on guard.

An alarmed cry from aloft — a half -uttered order to the steersman — an explosion, low down in the bowels of the ship, that sets her reeling in her stride !

52 David W. Bone

The upthrow comes swiftly on the moment of im- pact. Hatches, coal, a huge column of solid water go skyward in a hurtling mass to fall in torrent on the bridge. Part of a human body strikes the awning spars and hangs — watch-keepers are borne to the deck by the weight of water — the steersman falls limply over the wheel with blood pouring from a gash on his forehead. . . . Then silence for a stunned half-minute, with only the thrust of the engines marking the heart- beats of the stricken ship.

Uproar! Most of our men are young recruits', they have been but two days on the sea. The tor- pedo has gone hard home at the very weakest hour of our calculated drill. The troops are at their even- ing meal when the blow comes, the explosion killing many outright. We had counted on a proportion of the troops being on the deck, a steadying number to balance the sudden rush from below that we foresaw in emergency. Hurrying from the mess-decks as en- joined, the quick movement gathers way and intensity : the decks become jammed by the pressure, the gang- ways and passages are blocked in the struggle. There is the making of a panic — tuned by their outcry, *'God! 0 God! O Christ!" The swelling murmur is neither excited nor agonized — rather the dull, hopeless expres- sion of despair.

The officer commanding troops has come on the

tf

The Man-o'-Wa/s 'Er 'Usband'' 53

bridge at the first alarm. His juniors have oppor- tunity to take their stations before the strugghng mass reaches to the boats. The impossibiHty of getting among the men on the lower decks makes the mili- tary officers' efforts to restore confidence difficult. They are aided from an unexpected quarter. The bridge-boy makes unofficial use of our megaphone. *'Hey! Steady up you men doon therr," he shouts. '^Ye'll no' dae ony guid fur yersels croodin' th' led- ders!"

We could not have done it as well. The lad is plainly in sight to the crowd on the decks. A small boy, undersized. "Steady up doon therr !" The effect is instant. Noise there still is, but the movement is arrested.

The engines are stopped — we are now beyond range of a second torpedo — and steam thunders in exhaust, making our efforts to control movements by voice im- possible. At the moment of the impact the destroyers have swung round and are casting here and there like hounds on the scent: the dull explosion of a depth-charge — then another, rouses a fierce hope that we are not unavenged. The force of the explosion has broken connections to the wireless room, but the aerial still holds and, when a measure of order on the boat- deck allows, we send a message of our peril broadcast There is no doubt in our minds of the outcome. Our

54 David TV, Bone

bows, drooping visibly, tell that we shall not float long. We have nearly three thousand on board. There are boats for sixteen hundred — then rafts. Boats — rafts — and the glass is falling at a rate that shows bad weather over the western horizon !

Our drill, that provided for lowering the boats with only half-complements in them, w^ill not serve. We pass orders to lower away in any condition, however overcrowded. The way is off the ship, and it is with some apprehension we watch the packed boats that drop away from the davit heads. The shrill ring of the block-sheaves indicates a tension that is not far from breaking-point. Many of the life-boats reach the water safely with their heavy burdens, but the strain on the tackles — far beyond their working load — is too great for all to stand to it. Two boats go down by the run. The men in them are thrown vio- lently to the water, where they float in the wash and shattered planking. A third dangles from the after fall, having shot her manning out at parting of the forward tackle. Lowered by the stern, she rights, disengages, and drifts aft with the men clinging to the life-lines. We can make no attempt to reach the men in the water. Their life-belts are sufficient to keep them affoat : the ship is going down rapidly by the head, and there remains the second line of boats to be hoisted and swung over. The chief officer, paus-

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 55

ing in his quick work, looks to the bridge inquiringly, as though to ask, "How long?" The fingers of two hands suffice to mark our estimate.

The decks are now angled to the deepening pitch of the bows. Pumps are utterly inadequate to make impression on the swift inflow. The chief engineer comes to the bridge with a hopeless report. It is only a question of time. How long? Already the water is lapping at a level of the foredeck. Troops massed there and on the forecastle-head are apprehensive: it is indeed a wonder that their officers have held them for so long. The commanding officer sets example by a cool nonchalance that we envy. Posted with us on the bridge, his quick eyes note the flood surging in the pent 'tween-decks below, from which his men have removed the few wounded. The dead are left to the sea.

Help comes as we had expected it would. Leaving Nemesis to steam fast circles round the sinking ship, Rifleman swings in and brings up alongside at the forward end. Even in our fear and anxiety and distress, we cannot but admire the precision of the destroyer captain's manoeuver — the skilful avoid- ance of our crowded life-boats and the men in the water — the sudden stoppage of her way and the cant that brings her to a standstill at the lip of our brim- ming decks. The troops who have stood so well to

56 David W. Bone

orders have their reward in an easy leap to safety. Quickly the foredeck is cleared. Rifleman spurts ahead in a rush that sets the surrounding life-boats to eddy in her wash. She takes up the circling high- speed patrol and allows her sister ship to swing in and embark a -number of our men.

It is when the most of the life-boats are gone we realize fully the gallant service of the destroyers. There remain the rafts, but many of these have been launched over to aid the struggling men in the water. Half an hour has passed since we were struck — thirty min- utes of frantic endeavor to debark our men — yet still the decks are thronged by a packed mass that seems but little reduced. The coming of the destroyers alters the outlook. Rifleman's action has taken over six hundred. A sensible clearance! Nemesis swings in with the precision of an express, and the thud and clatter of the troops jumping to her deck sets up a continuous drumming note of deliverance. Alert and confident, the naval men accept the great risks of their position. The ship*s bows are entered to the water at a steep incline. Every minute the balance is weigh- ing, casting her stern high in the air. The bulkheads are by now taking place of keel and bearing the huge weight of her on the water. At any moment she may go without a warning, to crash into the light hull of the destroyer and bear her down. For all the circling

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 57

watch of her sister ship, the submarine — if still he lives — may get in a shot at the standing target. It is with a deep relief we signal the captain to bear off. Her decks are jammed to the limit. She can carry no more. Nemesis lists heavily under her burdened decks as she goes ahead and clears.

Forty minutes! The zigzag clock in the wheel- house goes on ringing the angles of time and course as though we were yet under helm and speed. For a short term we have noted that the ship appears to have reached a point of arrest in her foundering droop. She remains upright as she has been since righting herself after the first inrush of water. Like the lady she always was, she has added no fearsome list to the sum of our distress. The familiar bridge, on which so many of our safe sea-days have been spent, is canted at an angle that makes foothold un- easy. She cannot remain for long afloat. The end will come swiftly, without warning — a sudden rup- ture of the bulkhead that is sustaining her weight. We are not now many left on board. Striving and wrenching to man-handle the only remaining boat — rendered idle for want of the tackles that have parted on service of its twin — we succeed in pointing her outboard, and await a further deepening of the bows ere launching her. Of the military, the officer com* manding, some few of his juniors, a group of othei

58 David W . Bone

ranks, stand by. The senior officers of the ship, a muster of seamen, a few stewards, are banded with us at the last. We expect no further service of the destroyers. The position of the ship is over-menac- ing to any approach. They have all they can carry. Steaming at a short distance they have the appear- ance of being heavily overloaded; each has a stagger- ing list and Hes low in the water under their deck encumbrance. We have only the hazard of a quick out-throw of the remaining boat and the chances of a grip on floating wreckage to count upon.

On a sudden swift sheer, Rifleman takes the risk. Unheeding our warning hail, she steams across the bows and backs at a high speed: her rounded stern jars on our hull plates, a whaler and the davits catch on a projection and give with the ring of buckling steel — she turns on the throw of the propellers and closes aboard with a resounding impact that sets her living deck-load to stagger.

We lose no time. Scrambling down the life-ropes, our small company endeavors to get foothold on her decks. The destroyer widens off at the rebound, but by clutch of friendly hands the men are dragged aboard. One fails to reach safety. A soldier loses grip and goes to the water. The chief officer follows him. Tired and unstrung as he must be by the de- voted labors of the last half-hour, he is in no con-

''The Man-o'-War's 'Er 'Usband'' 59

dition to effect a rescue. A sudden deep rumble from within the sinking ship warns the destroyer captain to go ahead. We are given no chance to aid our ship- mates : the propellers tear the water in a furious race that sweeps them away, and we draw off swiftly from the side of the ship.

We are little more than clear of the settling fore- end when the last buoyant breath of Cameronia is overcome. Nobly she has held afloat to the debarking of the last man. There is no further life in her. Evenly, steadily, as we had seen her leave the launch- ing ways at Meadowside, she goes down.

THE MARKET By William McFee

William McFee's name is associated with the sea, but in his writing he treats the life of ships and sailors more as a back- ground than as the essential substance of his tale. I have chosen this brief and colorful little sketch to represent his talent be- cause it is diflferent from the work with which most of his readers are familiar, and because it represents a mood very characteristic of him — an imaginative and observant treatment of the workings of commerce. His interest in fruit is intimate, as he has been for some years an engineer in the sea service of the United Fruit Company, with a Mediterranean interim — reflected in much of his recent writing — during the War.

The publication of McFee's Casuals of the Sea in 1916 was something of an event in the world of books, and introduced to the reading world a new writer of unquestionable strength and subtlety. His earlier books. An Ocean Tramp and Aliens (both republished since), had gone almost unnoticed — which, it is safe to say, will not happen again to anything he cares to publish. His later books are Captain Macedoine's Daughter. Harbours of Memory, and An Engineer's Notebook. He was born at sea in ]88i, the son of a sea-captain; grew up in a northern suburb of London, served his apprenticeship in a big engineering shop, and has been in ships most of the time since 1905.

There is a sharp, imperative rap on my outer door; a rap having within its insistent urgency a shadow of delicate diffidence, as though the person responsible were a trifle scared of the performance and on tiptoe to run away. I roll over and regard the clock. Four- forty. One of the dubious by-products of continuous service as a senior assistant at sea is the habit of waking automatically about 4 a. m. This gives one sev- eral hours, when ashore, to meditate upon one*s sins,

60

The Market 6l

frailties, and (more rarely) triumphs and virtues. For a man who gets up at say four-thirty is regarded with aversion ashore. His family express themselves with superfluous vigor. He must lie still and med- itate, or suffer the ignominy of being asked when he is going away again.

Bat this morning, in these old Chambers in an ancient Inn buried in the heart of London City, I have agreed to get up and go out. The reason for this momentous departure from a life of temporary but deliberate indolence is a lady. ''Cherchez la femme," as the French say with the dry animosity of a logical race. Well, she is not far to seek, being on the outside of my heavy oak door, tapping, as al- ready hinted, with a sharp insistent delicacy. To this romantic summons I reply with an articulate growl of acquiescence, and proceed to get ready. To relieve the anxiety of any reader who imagines an impend- ing elopement it may be stated in succinct truthfulness that we are bound on no such desperate venture. Wq are going round the corner a few blocks up the Strand, to Covent Garden Market, to see the arrival of the metropolitan supply of produce.

Having accomplished a hasty toilet, almost as prim- itive as that favored by gentlemen aroused to go on watch, and placating an occasional repetition of the tapping by brief protests and reports of progress, I

62 William McFee

take hat and cane, and drawing the huge antique bolts of my door, discover a young woman standing by the window looking out upon the quadrangle of the old Inn. She is a very decided young woman, who is continually thinking out what she calls "stunts" for articles in the press. That is her profession, or one of her professions — writing articles for the press. The other profession is selling manuscripts, which con- stitutes the tender bond between us. For the usual agent's commission she is selling one of my manu- scripts. Being an unattached and, as it were, unpro- tected male, she plans little excursions about London to keep me instructed and entertained. Here she is attired in the flamboyant finery of a London flower- girl. She is about to get the necessary copy for a special artkle in a morning paper. With the excep- tion of a certain expectant flash of her bright black Irish eyes, she is entirely businesslike. Commenting on the beauty of an early summer morning in town, we descend, and passing out under the ponderous an- cient archway, we make our leisurely progress west- ward down the Strand.

London is always beautiful to those who love and understand that extraordinary microcosm; but at five of a summer morning there is about her an exquisite quality of youthful fragrance and debonair freshness which goes to the heart. The newly-hosed streets are

The Market 63

shining in the sunlight as though paved with "patines of bright gold." Early 'buses rumble by from neigh- boring barns where they have spent the night. And, as we near the new Gaiety Theatre, thrusting forward into the great rivers of traffic soon to pour round its base like some bold Byzantine promontory, we see Waterloo Bridge thronged with wagons, piled high. From all quarters they are coming, past Charing Cross the great wains are arriving from Paddington Ter- minal, from the market-garden section of Middlesex and Surrey. Down Wellington Street come carts laden with vegetables from Brentwood and Cogge- shall, and neat vans packed with crates of watercress which grows in the lush lowlands of Suffolk and Cam- bridgeshire, and behind us are thundering huge four- horse vehicles from the docks, vehicles with peaches from South Africa, potatoes from the Canary Islands, onions from France, apples from California, oranges from the West Indies, pineapples from Central America, grapes from Spain and bananas from Colombia.

We turn in under an archway behind a theatre and adjacent to the stage-door of the Opera House. The booths are rapidly filling with produce. Gentle- men in long alpaca coats and carrying formidable marbled note-books walk about with an important air. A mountain range of pumpkins rises behind a

64 William McFee

hill of cabbages. Festoons of onions are being sus- pended from rails. The heads of barrels are being knocked in, disclosing purple grapes buried in cork- dust. Pears and figs, grown under glass for wealthy patrons, repose in soft tissue-lined boxes. A broken crate of tangerine oranges has spilled its contents in a splash of ruddy gold on the plank runway. A wagon is driven in, a heavy load of beets, and the broad wheels crush through the soft fruit so that the air is heavy with the acrid sweetness.

We pick our way among the booths and stalls until we find the flowers. Here is a crowd of ladies, young, so-so and some quite matronly^ and all dressed in this same flamboyant finery of which I have spoken. They are grouped about an almost overpowering mass of blooms. Roses just now predominate. There is a satisfying solidity about the bunches, a glorious abundance which, in a commodity so easily enjoyed without ownership, is scarcely credible. I feel no desire to own these huge aggregations of odorous beauty. It would be like owning a harem, one imag- ines. Violets, solid patches of vivid blue in round baskets, eglantine in dainty boxes, provide a foil to the majestic blazonry of the roses and the dew- spangled forest of maiden-hair fern near by.

"And what are those things at all?" demands my companion, diverted for a moment from the flowers.

The Market 65

She nods towards a mass of dull-green affairs piled on mats or being lifted from big vans. She is a Cockney and displays surprise when she is told those things are bananas. She shrugs and turns again to the musk-roses, and forgets. But to me, as the harsh, penetrating odor of the green fruit cuts across the heavy perfume of the flowers, comes a picture of the farms in distant Colombia or perhaps Costa Rica. There is nothing like an odor to stir memories. I see the timber pier and the long line of rackety open- slatted cars jangling into the dark shed, pushed by a noisy, squealing locomotive. I see the boys lying asleep between shifts, their enormous straw hats cov- ering their faces as they sprawl. In the distance rise the blue mountains ; behind is the motionless blue sea. I hear the whine of the elevators, the monotonous click of the counters, the harsh cries of irresponsible and argumentative natives. I feel the heat of the tropic day, and see the gleam of the white waves breaking on yellow sands below tall palms. I recall the mysterious impenetrable solitude of the jungle, a solitude alive, if one is equipped with knowledge, with a ceaseless warfare of winged and crawling hosts. And while my companion is busily engaged in getting copy for a special article about the Market, I step nimbly out of the way of a swarthy gentleman from Calabria, who with his two-wheeled barrow is the last

66 William McFee

link in the immense chain of transportation connecting the farmer in the distant tropics and the cockney pedes- trian who halts on the sidewalk and purchases a ban- ana for a couple of pennies.

HOLY IRELAND By Joyce Kilmer

This echo of the A.E.F. is probably the best thing Joyce Kil- mer ever wrote, and shows the vein of real tenderness and insight that lay beneath his lively and versatile career on Grub Street. In him, as in many idealists, the Irish theme had become legendary, it was part of his religion and his dream-life, and he treated it with real affection and humor. You will find it crop- ping out niany times in his verses. The Irish problem as it is reflected in this country is not always clearly understood. Ireland. ^ in the minds of our poets, is a mystical land of green hills, saints and leprechauns, and its political problems are easy.

Joyce Kilmer was born in New Brunswick in 1886; studied at Rutgers College and Columbia University; taught school; worked on the staff of the Standard Dictionary ; passed through phases of socialism and Anglicanism into the Catholic communion, and joined the Sunday staff of the New York Times in 1913. He was killed fighting in France in 1918. This sketch is taken from the second of the three volumes in which Robert Cortes Holliday, his friend and executor, has collected Joyce Kilmer's work.

We had hiked seventeen miles that stormy December day — the third of a four days' journey. The snow was piled high on our packs, our rifles were crusted with ice, the leather of our hob-nailed boots was frozen stiff over our lamed feet. The weary lieutenant led us to the door of a little house in a side street.

"Next twelve men," he said. A dozen of us dropped out of the ranks and dragged ourselves over the threshold. We tracked snow and mud over a spot- less stone floor. Before an open fire stood Madame and the three children — a girl of eight years, a boy of

67

68 Joyce Kilmer

five, a boy of three. They stared with round fright- ened eyes at les soldats Americans, the first they had ever seen. We were too tired to stare back. We ai once cHmbed to the chill attic, our billet, our lodging for the night. First we lifted the packs from one an- other's aching shoulders : then, without spreading our blankets, we lay down on the bare boards.

For ten minutes there was silence, broken by an occasional groan, an oath, the striking of a match. Cigarettes glowed like firefiies in a forest. Then a voice came from the corner :

*'Where is Sergeant Reilly?" it said. We lazily searched. There was no Sergeant Reilly to be found.

"I'll bet the old bum has gone out after a pint," said the voice. And with the curiosity of the Amer- ican and the enthusiasm of the Irish we lumbered downstairs in quest of Sergeant Reilly.

He was sitting on a low bench by the fire. His shoes were ofiF and his bruised feet were in a pail of cold water. He was too good a soldier to expose them to the heat at once. The little girl was on his lap and the little boys stood by and envied him. And in a voice that twenty years of soldierino^ and oceans of whisky had failed to rob of its Celtic sweetness, he was softly singing: "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More." We listened respectfully.

Holy Ireland 69

"They cheer the King and then salute him," said Sergeant Reilly.

''A regular Irishman would shoot him," and we all joined in the chorus, "Ireland Isn't Ireland Any More."

"Ooh, la, la!" exclaimed Madame, and she and all the children began to talk at the top of their voices. What they said Heaven knows, but the tones were friendly, even admiring.

"Gentlemen," said Sergeant Reilly from his post of honor, "the lady who runs this billet is a very nice lady indeed. She says yez can all take off your shoes and dry your socks by the fire. But take turns and don't crowd or I'll turn yez all upstairs."

Now Madame, a woman of some forty years, was a true bourgeoise, with all the thrift of her class. And by the terms of her agreement with the authorities she was required to let the soldiers have for one night the attic of her house to sleep in — nothing more ; no light, no heat. Also, wood is very expensive in France — for reasons that are engraven in letters of blood on the pages of history. Nevertheless —

"Asseyez-vous, s'il vous plait," said Madame. And she brought nearer to the fire all the chairs the estab- lishment possessed and some chests and boxes to be used as seats. And she and the little girl, whose name was Solange, went out into the snow and came back

70 Joyce Kilmer

with heaping armfuls of small logs. The fire blazed merrily — more merrily than it had blazed since Aug- ust, 1914, perhaps. We surrounded it, and soon the air was thick with steam from our drying socks.

Meanwhile Madame and the Sergeant had gener- ously admitted all eleven of us into their conversation. A spirited conversation it was, too, in spite of the fact that she knew no English and the extent of his French was *'du pain," "du vin," "cognac" and "bon jour." Those of us who knew a little more of the language of the country acted as interpreters for the others. We learned the names of the children and their ages. We learned that our hostess was a widow. Her husband had fallen in battle just one month be- fore our arrival in her home. She showed us with simple pride and affection and restrained grief his picture. Then she showed us those of her two brothers — one now fighting at Salonica, the other a prisoner of war — of her mother and father, of herself dressed for First Communion.

This last picture she showed somewhat shyly, as if doubting that we would understand it. But when one of us asked in halting French if Solange, her little daughter, had yet made her First Conimunion, then Madame's face cleared.

"Mais oui!" she exclaimed, "Et vous, ma foi, vous etes Catholiques, n'est-ce pas?"

Holy Ireland 71

At once rosary beads were flourished to prove our right to answer this question affirmatively. Tattered prayer-books and somewhat dingy scapulars were brought to light. Madame and the children chattered their surprise and dehght to each other, and every ex- hibit called for a new outburst.

"Ah, le bon S. Benoit! Ah, voila, le Conception Immacule! Ooh la la, le Sacre Coeurl" (which last exclamation sounded in no wise as irreverent as it looks in print).

Now other treasures, too, were shown — treasures chiefly photographic. There were family groups, there were Coney Island snapshots. And Madame and the children were a gratifyingly appreciative audience. They admired and sympathized; they exclaimed ap- propriately at the beauty of every girl's face, the tender- ness of every pictured mother. We had become the intimates of Madame. She had admitted us into her family and we her into ours.

Soldiers — American soldiers of Irish descent — ^have souls and hearts. These organs (if the soul may be so termed) had been satisfied. But our stomachs re- mained— and that they yearned was evident to us. We had made our hike on a meal of hardtack and "corned willy." Mess call would sound soon. Should we force our wet shoes on again and plod through the snowy streets to the temporary mess-shack? We

72 Joyce Kilmer

knew our supply wagons had not succeeded in climb- ing the last hill into town, and that therefore bread and unsweetened coffee would be our portion. A great depression settled upon us.

But Sergeant Reilly rose to the occasion.

"Boys/' he said, "this here lady has got a good fire going, and I'll bet she can cook. What do you say we get her to fix us up a meal?"

The proposal was received joyously at first. Then some one said :

"But I haven't got any money." "Neither have I — not a damn sou!" said another. And again the spiritual temperature of the room fell.

Again Sergeant Reilly spoke :

"I haven't got any money to speak of, meself," he said. "But let's have a show-down. I guess we've got enough to buy somethin' to eat."

It was long after pay-day, and we were not hopeful of the results of the search. But the wealthy (that is, those who had two francs) made up for the poor (that is, those who had two sous). And among the coins on the table I noticed an American dime, an English half-crown and a Chinese piece with a square hole in the center. In negotiable tender the money came in all to eight francs.

It takes more money than that to feed twelve hungry soldiers these days in France. But there was no harm

Holy Ireland 73

in trying. So an ex-seminarian, an ex-bookkeeper and an ex-street-car conductor aided Sergeant Reilly in explaining in French that had both a brogue and a Yankee twang that we were hungry, that this was all the money we had in the world, and that we wanted her to cook us something to eat.

Now Madame was what they call in New England a "capable" woman. In a jiffy she had the money in Solange's hand and had that admirable child cloaked and wooden-shod for the street, and fully informed as to what she was to buy. What Madame and the children had intended to have for supper I do not know, for there was nothing in the kitchen but the fire, the stove, the table, some shelves of dishes and an enormous bed. Nothing in the way of a food cup- board could be seen. And the only other room of the house was the bare attic.

When Solange came back she carried in a basket bigger than herself these articles: (i) two loaves of war-bread; (2) five bottles of red wine; (3) three cheeses; (4) numerous potatoes; (5) a lump of fat; (6) a bag of coffee. The whole represented, as was afterward demonstrated, exactly the sum of ten francs, fifty centimes.

Well, we all set to work peeling potatoes. Then with a veritable French trench-knife Madame cut the potatoes into long strips. Meanwhile Solange had put

74 Joyce Kilmer

the lump of fat into the big black pot that hung by a chain over the fire. In the boiling grease the potatoes were placed, Madame standing by with a big ladle punched full of holes (I regret that I do not know the technical name for this instrument) and keeping the potato-strips swimming, zealously frustrating any at- tempt on their part to lie lazily at the bottom of the pot.

We forgot all about the hike as we sat at supper that evening. The only absentees were the two little boys, Michael and Paul. And they were really absent only from our board — they were in the room, in the great built-in bed that was later to hold also Madame and Solange. Their little bodies were covered by the three- foot thick mattress-like red silk quilt, but their tousled heads protruded and they watched us unblinkingly all the evening.

But just as we sat down, before Sergeant Reilly began his task of dishing out the potatoes and starting the bottles on their way, Madame stopped her chat- tering and looked at Solange. And Solange stopped her chattering and looked at Madame. And they both looked rather searchingly at us. We didn't know what was the matter, but we felt rather embarrassed.

Then Madame began to talk, slowly and loudly, as one talks to make foreigners understand. And the gist of her remarks was that she was surprised to see

Holy Ireland 75

that American Catholics did not say grace before eating like French Catholics.

We sprang to our feet at once. But it was not Sergeant Reilly who saved the situation. Instead, the ex-seminarian (he is only temporarily an ex-semin- arian; he'll be preaching missions and giving retreats yet if a bit of shrapnel doesn't hasten his journey to Heaven) said, after we had blessed ourselves: "Bene- dicite; nos et quae sumus sumpturi benedicat Deus, Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus. Amen."

Madame and Solange, obviously relieved, joined us in the Amen, and we sat down again to eat.

It was a memorable feast. There was not much conversation — except on the part of Madame and Solange — but there was plenty of good cheer. Also there was enough cheese and bread and wine and potatoes for all of us — half starved as we were when we sat down. Even big Considine, who drains a can of condensed milk at a gulp and has been known to eat an apple pie without stopping to take breath, was satisfied. There were toasts, also, all proposed by Sergeant Reilly — toasts to Madame, and to the chil- dren, and to France, and to the United States, and to the Old Gray Mare (this last toast having an esoteric significance apparent only to illuminati of Sergeant Reilly's circle).

The table cleared and the "agimus tibi gratias" duly

76 Joyce Kilmer

said, we sat before the fire, most of us on the floor. We were warm and happy and full of good food and good wine. I spied a slip of paper on the floor by Solange's foot and unashamedly read it. It was an accounting for the evening's expenditures — ^totaling exactly ten francs and fifty centimes.

Now when soldiers are unhappy — during a long, hard hike, for instance — they sing to keep up their spirits. And when they are happy, as on the even- ing now under consideration, they sing to express their satisfaction with life. We sang "Sweet Rosie O'Grady." We shook the kitchen-bedroom with the echoes of "Take Me Back to New York Town." We informed Madame, Solange, Paul, Michael, in fact, the whole village, that we had never been a wanderer and that we longed for our Indiana home. We grew sentimental over "Mother Machree." And Sergeant Reilly obliged with a reel — in his socks — to an accom- plishment of whistling and handclapping.

Now, it was our hostess's turn to entertain. We intimated as much. She responded, first by much talk, much consultation with Solange, and finally by going to one of the shelves that held the pans and taking down some paper-covered books.

There was more consultation, whispered this time, and much turning of pages. Then, after some pre- liminary coughing and humming, the music began

Holy Ireland 77

' — the woman's rich alto blending with the child's shrill but sweet notes. And what they sang was "Tantum ergo Sacramentum."

Why she should have thought that an appropriate song to offer this company of rough soldiers from a distant land I do not know. And why we found it appropriate it is harder still to say. But it did seem appropriate to all of us — to Sergeant Reilly, to Jim (who used to drive a truck), to Larry (who sold cigars), to Frank (who tended a bar on Fourteenth Street). It seemed, for some reason, eminently fit- ting. Not one of us then or later expressed any sur- prise that this hymn, familiar to most of us since our mothers first led us to the Parish Church down the pavements of New York or across the Irish hills, should be sung to us in this strange land and in these strange circumstances.

Since the gracious Latin of the Church was in order and since the season was appropriate, one of us suggested "Adeste Fideles" for the next item on the evening's program. Madame and Solange and our ex-seminarian knew all the words and the rest of us came in strong with "Venite, adoremus Dominum."

Then, as if to show that piety and mirth may live together, the ladies obliged with "Au Clair de la Lune" and other simple ballads of old France. And after taps had sounded in the street outside our door, and

yS Joyce Kilmer

there was yawning*, and wrist-watches were being scanned, the evening's entertainment ended, by general consent, with patriotic selections. We sang — as best we could — the "Star-Spangled Banner," Solange and her mother humming the air and applauding at the conclusion. Then we attempted "ha, Marseillaise.'* Of course, we did not know the words. Solange came to our rescue with two little pamphlets containing the song, so we looked over each other's shoulders and got to work in earnest. Madame sang with us, and So- lange. But during the final stanza Madame did not sing. She leaned against the great family bedstead and looked at us. She had taken one of the babies from under the red comforter and held him to her breast. One of her red and toil-scarred hands half covered his fat little back. There was a gentle dignity about that plain, hard-working woman, that soldier's widow — we all felt it. And some of us saw the tears in her eyes.

There are mists, faint and beautiful and unchang- ing, that hang over the green slopes of some moun- tains I know. I have seen them on the Irish hills and I have seen them on the hills of France. I think that they are made of the tears of good brave women.

Before I went to sleep that night I exchanged a few words with Sergeant Reilly. We lay side by side on the floor, now piled with straw. Blankets, shelter-

Holy Ireland 79

halves, slickers and overcoats insured warm sleep. Sergeant Reilly's hard old face was wrapped round with his muffler. The final cigarette of the day burned lazily in a comer of his mouth.

"That was a pretty good evening, Sarge," I said. "We sure were in luck when we struck this billet."

He grunted affirmatively, then puffed in silence for a few minutes. Then he deftly spat the cigarette into a strawless portion of the floor, where it glowed for a few seconds before it went out.

"You said it," he remarked. "We were in luck is right. What do you know about that lady, anyway ?"

"Why," I answered, "I thought she treated us pretty white."

"Joe," said Sergeant Reilly, "do you realize how much trouble that woman took to make this bunch of roughnecks comfortable? She didn't make a damn cent on that feed, you know. The kid spent all the money we give her. And she's out about six francs for firewood, too — I wish to God I had the money to pay her. I bet she'll go cold for a week now, and hungry, too.

"And that ain't all," he continued, after a pause broken only by an occasional snore from our blissful neighbors. "Look at the way she cooked them pomme de terres and fixed things up for us and let us sit down there with her like we was her family. And

8o Joyce Kilmer

look at the way she and the Httle Sallie there sung for us.

"I tell you, Joe, it makes me think of old times to hear a woman sing them church hymns to me that way. It's forty years since I heard a hymn sung in a kitchen, and it was my mother, God rest her, that sang them. I sort of realize what weVe fighting for now, and I never did before. It's for women like that and their kids.

"It gave me a turn to see her a-sitting there singing them hymns. I remembered when I was a boy in Shangolden. I wonder if there's many women like that in France now — telling their beads and singing the old hymns and treating poor traveling men the way she's just after treating us. There used to be lots of women like that in the Old Country. And I think that's why it was called 'Holy Ireland.' '*

A FAMILIAR PREFACE By Joseph Conrad

This glorious expression of the credo of all artists, in what- ever form of creation, lastingly enriches the English tongue. It is from the preface to A Personal Record, that fascinating auto- biographical volume in which Conrad tells the curious story of a Polish boy who ran away to sea and began to write in Eng- lish. As a companion piece, those who have the honor of the writer's craft at heart should read Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.

"All arnbitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind." Is it permissible to wonder what some newspaper owners — say Mr. Hearst — would reply to that?

Mr. Conrad's career is too well known to be annotated here. If by any chance the reader is not acquainted with it, it will be to his soul's advantage to go to a public library and look it up.

As a general rule we do not want much encourage- ment to talk about ourselves ; yet this little book * is the result of a friendly suggestion, and even of a little friendly pressure. I defended myself with some spirit; but, with characteristic tenacity, the friendly voice insisted, "You know, you really must."

It was not an argument, but I submitted at once. If one must! . . .

You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argu- ment, but in the right word. The power of sound

* A Personal Record.

6i

82 Joseph Conrad

has always been greater than the power of sense. I don't say this by way of disparagement. It is better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective. Nothing humanely great — great, I mean, as affecting a whole mass of lives — has come from reflection. On the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words; such words as Glory, for instance, or Pity. I won't mention any more. They are not far to seek. Shouted with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction, these two by their sound alone hav^ set whole nations in motion and upheaved the dry, hard ground on which rests our whole social fabric; There's "virtue" for you if you like! ... Of course, the accent must be attended to. The right accent* That's very important. The capacious lung, the thun- dering or the tender vocal chords. Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absent-minded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathemat- ics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right ac- cent and I will move the world.

What a dream for a writer ! Because written words have their accent, too. Yes! Let me only find the right word ! Surely it must be lying somewhere among the wreckage of all the plaints and all the exultations poured out aloud since the first day when hope, the undying, came down on earth. It may be there, close

A Familiar Preface 83

by, disregarded, invisible, quite at hand. But it's no good. I believe there are men who can lay hold of a needle in a pottle of hay at the first try. For my- self, I have never had such luck.

And then there is that accent. Another difficulty. For who is going to tell whether the accent is right or wrong till the word is shouted, and fails to be heard, perhaps, and goes down-wind, leaving the world unmoved ? Once upon a time there lived an emperor who was a sage and something of a literary man. He jotted down on ivory tablets thoughts, maxims, reflec- . tions which chance has preserved for the edification of posterity. Among other sayings — I am quoting from memory — I remember this solemn admonition: "Let all thy words have the accent of heroic truth." The accent of heroic truth! This is very fine, but I am thinking that it is an easy matter for an austere em- peror to jot down grandiose advice. Most of the working truths on this earth are humble, not heroic; and there have been times in the history of mankind when the accents of heroic truth have moved it to nothing but derision.

Nobody will expect to find between the covers of this little book words of extraordinary potency or accents of irresistible heroism. However humiliating for my self-esteem, I must confess that the counsels of Marcus Aurelius are not for me. They are more

84 Joseph Conrad

fit for a moralist than for an artist. Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one's enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one's friends.

"Embroil" is perhaps too strong an expression. I can't imagine among either my enemies or my friends a being so hard up for something to do as to quarrel with me. "To disappoint one's friends" would be nearer the mark. Most, almost all, friendships of the writing period of my life have come to me through my books; and I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there, the only reality in an in- vented world, among imaginary things, happenings, and people. Writing about them, he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains, to a certain extent, a figure behind the veil ; a suspected rather than a seen presence — a move- ment and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. In these personal notes there is no such veil. And I cannot help thinking of a passage in the "Imitation of Christ" where the ascetic author, who knew life so profoundly, says that "there are persons esteemed on their reputation who by showing themselves destroy the opinion one had of them." This is the danger incurred by an author of fiction who sets out to talk about himself without disguise.

A Familiar Preface 85

While these reminiscent pages were appearing seri- ally I was remonstrated with for bad economy; as if such writing were a form of self-indulgence wasting the substance of future volumes. It seems that I am not sufficiently literary. Indeed, a man who never wrote a line for print till he was thirty-six cannot bring himself to look upon his existence and his ex- perience, upon the sum of his thoughts, sensations, and emotions, upon his memories and his regrets, and the whole possession of his past, as only so much material for his hands. Once before, some three years ago, when I published 'The Mirror of the Sea," a volume of impressions and memories, the same remarks were made to me. Practical remarks. But, truth to say, I have never understood the kind of thrift they recom- mend. I wanted to pay my tribute to the sea, its ships and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am. That seemed to me the only shape in which I could offer it to their shades. There could not be a question in my mind of anything else. It is quite possible that I am a bad economist; but it is certain that I am in- corrigible.

Having matured in the surroundings and under the special conditions of sea life, I have a special piety toward that form of my past ; for its impressions were vivid, its appeal direct, its demands such as could be

86 Joseph Conrad

responded to with the natural elation of youth and strength equal to the call. There was nothing in them to perplex a young conscience. Having broken away from my origins under a storm of blame from every quarter which had the merest shadow of right to voice an opinion, removed by great distances from such natural affections as were still left to me, and even estranged, in a measure, from them by the totally unintelligible character of the life which had seduced me so mysteriously from my allegiance, I may safely say that through the blind force of circumstances the sea was to be all my world and the merchant service my only home for a long succession of years. No wonder, then, that in my two exclusively sea books — "The Nigger of the Narcissus," and 'The Mirror of the Sea" (and in the few short sea stories like "Youth" and "Typhoon") — I have tried with an almost filial regard to render the vibration of life in the great world of waters, in the hearts of the simple men who have for ages traversed its solitudes, and also that something sentient which seems to dwell in ships — the creatures of their hands and the objects of their care.

One's literary life must turn frequently for sus- tenance to memories and seek discourse with the shades, unless one has made up one's mind to write only in order to reprove mankind for what it is, or

A Familiar Preface 87

praise it for what it is not, or— generally— to teach it how to behave. Being neither quarrelsome, nor a flatterer, nor a sage, I have done none of these things, and I am prepared to put up serenely with the in- significance which attaches to persons who are not meddlesome in some way or other. But resignation is not indifference. I would not like to be left stand- ing as a mere spectator on the bank of the great stream carrying onward so many lives. I would fain claim for myself the faculty of so much insight as can be expressed in a voice of sympathy and compassion.

It seems to me that in one, at least, authoritative quarter of criticism I am suspected of a certain unemo- tional, grim acceptance of facts— of what the French would call secheresse du coeur. Fifteen years of un- broken silence before praise or blame testify suffi- ciently to my respect for criticism, that fine flower of personal expression in the garden of letters. But this is more of a personal matter, reaching the man behind the work, and therefore it may be alluded to in a volume which is a personal note in the margin of the public page. Not that I feel hurt in the least. The charge— if it amounted to a charge at all— was made in the most considerate terms; in a tone of re- gret.

My answer is that if it be true that every novel con- tains an element of autobiography — and this can hardly

88 Joseph Conrad

be denied, since the creator can only express himself in his creation — then there are some of us to whom an open display of sentiment is repugnant. I would not unduly praise the virtue of restraint. It is often merely temperamental. But it is not always a sign of coldness. It may be pride. There can be nothing more humiliating than to see the shaft of one's emo- tion miss the mark of either laughter or tears. Noth- ing more humiliating! And this for the reason that should the mark be missed, should the open display of emotion fail to move, then it must perish unavoid- ably in disgust or contempt. No artist can be re- proached for shrinking from a risk which only fools run to meet and only genius dare confront with im- punity. In a task which mainly consists in laying one's soul more or less bare to the world, a regard for decency, even at the cost of success, is but the regard for one's own dignity which is inseparably united with the dignity of one's work.

And then — it is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself a face of pain; and some of our griefs (some only, not all, for it is the capacity for suffering which makes man august in the eyes of men) have their source in weaknesses which must be recog- nized with smiling compassion as the common in- heritance of us all. Joy and sorrow in this world

A Familiar Preface 89

pass into each other, mingHng their forms and their murmurs in the twiHght of Hfe as mysterious as an overshadowed ocean, while the dazzhng brightness of supreme hopes lies far off, fascinating and still, on the distant edge of the horizon.

Yes! I, too, would like to hold the magic wand giving that command over laughter and tears which is declared to be the highest achievement of imagina- tive literature. Only, to be a great magician one must surrender oneself to occult and irresponsible powers, either outside or within one's breast. We have all heard of simple men selling their souls for love or power to some grotesque devil. The most ordinary intelligence can perceive without much reflection that anything of the sort is bound to be a fool's bargain. I don't lay claim to particular wisdom because of my dislike and distrust of such transactions. It may be my sea training acting upon a natural disposition to keep good hold on the one thing really mine, but the fact is that I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service. And I have carried my notion of good service from my ear- lier into my later existence. I, who have never sought in the written word anything else but a form of the Beautiful — I have carried over that article of creed from the decks of ships to the more circumscribed

90 Joseph Conrad

space of my desk, and by that act, I suppose, I have become permanently imperfect in the eyes of the in- effable company of pure esthetes.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and by the consistent narrowness of his outlook. But I have never been able to love what was not lovable or hate what was not hateful out of defer- ence for some general principle. Whether there be any courage in making this admission I know not. After the middle turn of life's way we consider dan- gers and joys with a tranquil mind. So I proceed in peace to declare that I have always suspected in the effort to bring into play the extremities of emotions the debasing touch of insincerity. In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sen- sibility— innocently enough, perhaps, and of necessity, like an actor who raises his voice on the stage above the pitch of natural conversation — but still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sin- cerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose — as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion.

A Familiar Preface 91

From laughter and tears the descent is easy to snivel- ling and giggles.

These may seem selfish considerations; but you can't, in sound morals, condemn a man for taking care of his own integrity. It is his clear duty. And least of all can you condemn an artist pursuing, how- ever humbly and imperfectly, a creative aim. In that interior world where his thought and his emotions go seeking for the experience of imagined adventures, there are no policemen, no law, no pressure of cir- cumstance or dread of opinion to keep him within bounds. Who then is going to say Nay to his tempta- tions if not his conscience?

And besides — this, remember, is the place and the moment of perfectly open talk — I think that all ambi- tions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind. All intellec- tual and artistic ambitions are permissible, up to and even beyond the limit of prudent sanity. They can hurt no one. If they are mad, then so much the worse for the artist. Indeed, as virtue is said to be, such ambitions are their own reward. Is it such a very mad presumption to believe in the sovereign power of one's art, to try for other means, for other ways of affirming this belief in the deeper appeal of one's work? To try to go deeper is not to be insensible.

92 Joseph Conrad

A historian of hearts is not a historian of emotions, yet he penetrates further, restrained as he may be, since his aim is to reach the very fount of laughter and tears. The sight of human affairs deserves ad- miration and pity. They are worthy of respect, too. And he is not insensible who pays them the undemon- strative tribute of a sigh which is not a sob, and of a smile which is not a grin. Resignation, not mys- tic, not detached, but resignation open-eyed, conscious, and informed by love, is the only one of our feel- ings for which it is impossible to become a sham.

Not that I think resignation the last word of wis- dom. I am too much the creature of my time for that. But I think that the proper wisdom is to will what the gods will without, perhaps, being certain what their will is — or even if they have a will of their own. And in this matter of life and art it is not the Why that matters so much to our happiness as the How. As the Frenchman said, '7/ y a toujours la maniere/' Very true. Yes. There is the manner. The manner in laughter, in tears, in irony, in indig- nations and enthusiasms, in judgments — and even in love. The manner in which, as in the features and character of a human face, the inner truth is fore- shadowed for those who know how to look at their kind.

Those who read me know my conviction that the

A Familiar Preface 93

world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity. At a time when nothing which is not revolutionary in some way or other can expect to attract much atten- tion I have not been revolutionary in my writings. The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas. Its hard, absolute optimism is repulsive to my mind by the menace of fanaticism and intolerance it con- tains. No doubt one should smile at these things; but, imperfect Esthete, I am no better Philosopher. All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.

ON DRAWING By A. P. Herbert

A. P, Herbert is one of the most brilliant of the younger Eng- lish writers, and has done remarkable work in fields appar- ently incompatible: light verse, humorous drolleries, and a beau- tifully written tragic novel, The Secret Battle. This last was unquestionably one of the most powerful books born of the War, but its sale was tragically small. The House by the River, a later book, was also an amazingly competent and original tale, apparently cast along the lines of the conventional "mystery story," but really a study of selfishness and cowardice done with startling irony and intensity.

Mr. Herbert went to Winchester School and New College, Oxford, where he took his degree in IQ14. He saw military service at the Dardanelles and in France, and is now on the staff of Pimch. There is no young writer in England from whom one may more confidently expect a continuance of fine work. This airy and delicious little absurdity is a perfect ex- ample of what a genuine humorist can do.

H there is still any one in doubt as to the value of the old- fashioned classical training in forming a lusty prose style, let him examine Mr. Herbert's The Secret Battle. This book often sounds oddly like a translation from vigorous Greek — e.g., Herodotus. It is lucid, compact, logical, rich in telling epithet, informal and swift. H these are not the cardinal prose virtues, what are?

It is commonly said that everybody can sing in the bathroom ; and this is true. Singing is very easy. Drawing, though, is much more difficult. I have devoted a good deal of time to Drawing, one way and another; I have to attend a great many committees and public meetings, and at such functions I find that Drawing is almost the only Art one can safis-

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On Drawing 95

factorily pursue during the speeches. One really can- not sing during the speeches; so as a rule I draw. I do not say that I am an expert yet, but after a few more meetings I calculate that I shall know Drawing as well as it can be known.

The first thing, of course, is to get on to a really good committee; and by a good committee I mean a committee that provides decent materials. An ordi- nary departmental committee is no use : generally they only give you a couple of pages of lined foolscap and no white blotting-paper, and very often the pencils are quite soft. White blotting-paper is essential. I know of no material the spoiling of which gives so much artistic pleasure — except perhaps snow. Indeed, if I was asked to choose between making pencil-marks on a sheet of white blotting-paper and making foot- marks on a sheet of white snow I should be in a thing- ummy.

Much the best committees from the point of view of material are committees about business which meet at business premises — shipping offices, for choice. One of the Pacific Lines has the best white blotting-paper I know; and the pencils there are a dream. I am sure the directors of that fimi are Drawers; for they al- ways give you two pencils, one hard for doing noses, and one soft for doing hair.

When you have selected your committee and the

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96 A, P. Herbert

speeches are well away, the Drawing be- gins. Much the best thing to draw is a man. Not the chairman, or Lord Pommery Quint, or any member of the committee, but just A Man. Many novices make the mistake of se- Fig. i lecting a subject for their Art before they begin; usually they select the chairman. And when they find it is more like Mr. Gladstone they are dis- couraged. If they had waited a little it could have been Mr. Gladstone officially.

As a rule I begin with the forehead and work down to the chin (Fig. i).

When I have done the outline I put in the eye. This is one of the most difficult parts of Drawing; one is never quite sure where

^^^- ^ the eye goes. If, however, it is not a good eye, a useful tip is to give the man spectacles; this generally makes him a clergyman, but it helps the eye (Fig. 2).

Now you have to outline the rest of the head, and this is rather a gamble. Personally, I go in ior strong heads (Fig. 3).

I am afraid it is not a strong neck; I expect he is an author, and is not well fed. But that is the worst of strong heads ; they make it so difficult to join up the chin and the back of the neck. ^^^' ^

On Drawing 97

The next thing to do is to put in the ear; and once you have done this the rest is easy. Ears are much more difficult than eyes (Fig. 4),

I hope that is right. It seems to me to be a little too far to the southward. But it is done now. And once you have put in the ear you can't go back; not unless you are on a very good committee which pro- vides india-rubber as well as pencils.

Now I do the hair. Hair may either be very fuzzy or black, or lightish and thin. It de- pends chiefly on what sort of pencils are provided. For myself I prefer black hair, because then the parting shows up bet- ter (Fig. 5). ^ ^ Until one draws hair one never real-

rlG. 4

izes what large heads people have. Doing the hair takes the Whole of a speech, usually, even one of the chairman's speeches.

This is not one of my best men; I am sure the ear is in the wrong place. And I am inclined to think he ought to have spectacles. Only then he would be a clergyman, and I have decided that he is Mr. Philip Gibbs at the age of twenty. So he must carry on with his eye as it is.

I find that all my best men face to the west; it is a curious thing. Sometimes I ' * ^

98 A. P. Herbert

draw two men facing each other, but the one facing east is always a dud.

There, you see (Fig. 6) ? The one on the right is a Bolshevik; he has a low forehead and beetling brows — a most unpleasant man. Yet he has a power- ful face. The one on the left was meant to be an- other Bolshevik, arguing with him. But he has turned

Fig. 6

out to be a lady, so I have had to give her a "bun." She is a lady solicitor ; but I don't know how she came to be talking to the Bolshevik.

When you have learned how to do men, the only other things in Drawing are Perspective and Land* scape.

PERSPECTIVE is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).

I have put in a fence as well.

LANDSCAPE is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most amusing, especially fluffy trees.

Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).

Somehow or other a man has got into this land-

On Drawing 99

scape; and, as luck would have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad landscape.

Fig. 7

But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like this through.

Fig. 8

There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a man front-face. It can't be done.

O. HENRY By O. W. Firkins

Several years ago I turned to Who's Who in America in hope ni finding some information about O. W. Firkins, whose brilhant reviews — chiefly of poetry — were appearing in The Nation. I found no entry, but every few months 1 would again rummage that stout red volume with the same intention, forgetting that I had done so before without success. It seemed hardly credible that a critic so brilliant had been overlooked by the industrious compilers of that work, which includes hundreds of hacks and fourflushers. When gathering the contents of this book I tried Who's Who again, still without result. I wrote to Mr, Firkins pleading for biographical details; modestly, but fi/miy, he de- nied me.

So all I can tell you is this, that Mr. Firkins is to my mind one of the half-dozen most sparkling critics in this country. One sometimes feels that he is carried a little past his destina- tion by the sheer gusto and hilarity of his antitheses and para- doxes. That is not so, however, in this essay about O. Henry, an author who has often been grotesquely mispraised (I did not say overpraised) by people incompetent to appreciate his true greatness. Mr. Robert Cortes Holiiday, in an essay called "The Amazing Failure of O. Henry," said that O. Henry created no memorable characters. Mr. Firkins suggests the obvious but satisfying answer — New York itself is his triumph. The New York of O. Henry, already almost erased physically, remains a personality and an identity.

Mr. Firkins is professor of English at the University of Minnesota, and a contributing editor of The Weekly Retne".i.', in which this essay first appeared in September, 1919. The footnotes are, of course, his own.

There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle class views him as the impersonation of vigor and brilliancy ; part of the higher criticism sees in him little but sensation and persiflage. Between these views there is a natural relation; the gods of the heathens

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O. Henry loi

are ipso facto the demons of Christianity. Unmixed assertions, however, are commonly mixtures of truth and falsehood; there is room to-day for an estimate which shall respect both opinions and adopt neither. There is one literary trait in which I am unable to name any wiiter of tales in any literature who surpasses O. Henry.* It is not primary or even secondary among literary merits; it is less a value per se than the condition or foundation of values. But its utility is manifest, and it is rare among men: Chaucer and Shakespeare prove the possibility of its absence in masters of that very branch of art in which its presence would seem to be imperative. I refer to the designing of stories — not to the primary intuition or to skill in development, in both of which finer phases of invention O. Henry has been largely and frequently surpassed, but to the disposition of

* William Sidney Porter, 1862-1910, son of Algernon Sidney- Porter, physician, was born, bred, and meagerly educated in Greensboro, North Carolina. In Greensboro he was drug clerk; in Texas he was amateur ranchman, land-office clerk, editor, and bank teller. Convicted of misuse of bank funds on insufficient evidence (which he supplemented by the insanity of flight), he passed three years and three months in the Ohio State Peniten- tiary at Columbus. Release^ was the prelude to life in New York, to story-writing, to rapid and wide-spread fame. Latterly, his stories, published in New York journals and in book form, were consumed by the public with an avidity which his prema- ture death, in iqto, scarcely checked. The pen-name, O. Henry, is almost certainly borrowed from a French chemist, Etienne- Ossian Henry, whose abridged name he fell upon in his phar- macal researches. See the interesting "O. Henry Biography" by C. Alphonso Smith.

102 O. W. Firkins

masses, to the blocking-out of plots. That a half« educated American provincial should have been orig- inal in a field in which original men have been copy- ists is enough of itself to make his personality ob- servable.

Illustration, even of conceded truths, is rarely super- fluous. I supply two instances. Two lads, parting in New York, agree to meet ''After Twenty Years" at a specified hour, date, and corner. Both are faithful; but the years in which their relation has slept in mutual silence and ignorance have turned the one into a dashing criminal, the other into a sober officer of the law. Behind the picturesque and captivating rendez- vous lurks a powerful dramatic situation and a moral problem of arresting gravity. This is dealt wath in six pages of the "Four Million." The ''Furnished Room," two stories further on, occupies twelve pages. Through the wilderness of apartments on the lower West Side a man trails a woman. Chance leads him to the very room in which the woman ended her life the week before. Between him and the truth the avarice of a sordid landlady interposes the curtain of a lie. In the bed in which the girl slept and died, the man sleeps and dies, and the entrance of the deadly fumes into his nostrils shuts the sinister and mourn- ful coincidence forever from the knowledge of man- kind. O. Henry gave these tales neither extension nor

O. Henry 103

prominence; so far as I know, they were received without bravos or salvos. The distinction of a body of work in which such specimens are undistinguished hardly requires comment.

A few types among these stories may be specified. There are the Sydney Cartonisms, defined in the name; love-stories in which divided hearts, or simply divided persons, are brought together by the strategy of chance; hoax stories— deft pictures of smiling roguery ; "prince and pauper'' stories, in which wealth and poverty face each other, sometimes enact each other; disguise stories, in which the wrong clothes often draw the wrong bullets; complemental stories, in which Jim sacrifices his beloved watch to buy combs for Delia, who, meanwhile, has sacrificed her beloved hair to buy a chain for Jim.

This imperfect list is eloquent in its way ; it smooths our path to the assertion that O. Henry's specialty is the enlistment of original method in the service of traditional appeals. The ends are the ends of fifty years ago; O. Henry transports us by aeroplane the old homestead.*

*0 Henry's stones have been known to coincide with earlier work in a fashion which dims the novelty of the tale without clouding the originality of the author. I thought the brilliant "Harlem Tragedy" (in the "Trimmed Lamp") unique through sheer audacity, but the other day I found its motive repeated with singular exactness in Montesa.uieu's "Lettres Persanes (Letter LI).

t04 O. W, Firkins

Criticism of O. Henry falls into those superlatives and antitheses in which his own faculty delighted. In mechanical invention he is almost the leader of his race. In a related quality — a defect — his leadership is even more conspicuous. I doubt if the sense of the probable, or, more precisely, of the available in the improbable, ever became equally weakened or dead- ened in a man who made his living by its exercise. The improbable, even the impossible, has its place in art, though that place is relatively low; and it is curious that works such as the ''Arabian Nights" and Grimm's fairy tales, whose stock-in-trade is the in- credible, are the works which give almost no trouble on the score of verisimilitude. The truth is that we reject not what it is impossible to prove, or even what it is possible to disprove, but v^hat it is impossible to imagine. O. Henry asks us to imagine the unimag- inable— that is his crime.

The right and wTong improbabilities may be illus- trated from two burglar stories. "Sixes and Sevens" contains an excellent tale of a burglar and a citizen who fraternize, in a comic midnight interview, on the score of their common sufferings from rheumatism. This feeling in practice would not triumph over fear and greed; but the feeling is natural, and everybody with a grain of nature in him can imagine its triumph. Nature tends towards that impossibility, and art, lift-

O. Henry 105

ing, so to speak, the lid which fact drops upon nature, reveals nature in belying fact. In another story, in 'Whirligigs," a nocturnal interview takes place in which a burglar and a small boy discuss the etiquette of their mutual relation by formulas derived from short stories with which both are amazingly conversant. This is the wrong use of the improbable. Even an imagination inured to the virtues of burglars and the maturity of small boys will have naught to do with this insanity.

But O. Henry can go further yet. There are inven- tions in his tales the very utterance of which — not the mere substance but the utterance — on the part of a man not writing from Bedlam or for Bedlam impresses the reader as incredible. In a *'Comedy in Rubber," two persons become so used to spectatorship at trans- actions in the street that they drift into the part of spectators when the transaction is their own wedding. Can human daring or human folly go further? O. Henry is on the spot to prove that they can. In the "Romance of a Busy Broker,'* a busy and forget' ful man, in a freak of absent-mindedness, offers his hand to the stenographer whom he had married the night before.

The other day, in the journal of the Goncourts, I came upon the following sentence: "Never will the imagination approach the improbabilities and the an*

Io6 O. W. Firkins

titheses of truth" (II, 9). This is dated February 21. 1862. Truth had still the advantage. O. Henry was not born till September of the same year.

Passing on to style, we are still in the land of anti- thesis. The style is gross — and fine. Of the plenitude of its stimulus, there can be no question. In "Sixes and Sevens," a young man sinking under accidental morphia, is kept awake and alive by shouts, kicks, and blows. O. Henry's public seems imaged in that young man. But I draw a sharp distinction between the tone of the style and its pattern. The tone is brazen, or, better perhaps, brassy; its self-advertisement is incor^ rigible; it reeks with that air of performance which \s, opposed to real efficiency. But the pattern is another matter. The South rounds its periods like its vowels; O. Henry has read, not widely, but wisely, in his boy- hood. His sentences are huilt — a rare thing in the best writers of to-day. In conciseness, that Spartan virtue, he was strong, though it must be confessed that the tale-teller was now and then hustled from the rostrum by his rival and enemy, the talker. He can introduce a felicity with a noiselessness that numbers him for a flying second among the sovereigns of English. *'In one of the second-floor front windows Mrs. McCaskey awaited her husband. Supper was cooling on the table. Its heat went into Mrs. McCaskey."

I regret the tomfoolery; I wince at the slang. Yet

O. Henry 107

even for these levities with which his pages are so hberally besprinkled or bedaubed, some half-apology may be circumspectly urged. In nonsense his ease is consummate. A horseman who should dismount to pick up a bauble would be childish; O. Henry picks it up without dismounting. Slang, again, is most pardonable in the man with whom its use is least ex- clusive and least necessary. There are men who, going for a walk, take their dogs with them; there are other men who give a walk to their dogs. Substitute slang for the dog, and the superiority of the first class to the second will exactly illustrate the superiority of O. Henry to the abject traffickers in slang.

In the 'Tendulum" Katy has a new patch in her crazy quilt which the ice man cut from the end of his four-in-hand. In the "Day We Celebrate," thread- ing the mazes of a banana grove is compared to ''pag- ing the palm room of a New York hotel for a man named Smith." O. Henry's is the type of mind to which images like this four-in-hand and this palm room are presented in exhaustless abundance and unflagging continuity. There was hardly an object in the merry- go-round of civilized life that had not offered at least an end or an edge to the avidity of his consuming eyes. Nothing escapes from the besom of his allu- siveness, and the style is streaked and pied, almost to monotony, by the accumulation of lively details.

lo8 O. TV. Firkins

If O. Henry's style was crude, it was also rare; but it is part of the grimness of the bargain that destiny drives with us that the mixture of the crude and the rare should be a crude mixture, as the sons of whites and negroes are numbered with the blacks. In the kingdom of style O. Henry's estates were princely, but, to pay his debts, he must have sold them all.

Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have been offset by extraordinary defects. To lift our author out of the class of brilliant and skilful enter- tainers, more is needed. Is more forthcoming? I should answer, yes. In O. Henry, above the knowl- edge of setting, which is clear and first-hand, but subsidiary, above the order of events, which is, gen- erally speaking, fantastic, above the emotions, which are sound and warm, but almost purely derivative, there is a rather small, but impressive body of first- hand perspicacities and reactions. On these his en- durance may hinge.

I name, first of all, O. Henry's feeling for New York. With the exception of his New Orleans, I care little for his South and West, which are a boyish South and West, and as little, or even less, for his Spanish- American communities. My objection to his opera- bouffe republics is, not that they are inadequate as re- publics (for that we were entirely prepared), but that they are inadequate as opera. He lets us see his show

O. Henry 109

from the coulisses. The pretense lacks standing even among pretenses, and a faith must be induced before its removal can enliven us. But his New York has quality. It is of the family of Dickens's London and Hugo's Paris, though it is plainly a cadet in the fam- ily. Mr. Howells, in his profound and valuable study of the metropolis in a "Hazard of New Fortunes," is penetrating; O. Henry, on the other hand, is pene- trated. His New York is intimate and clinging; it is caught in the mesh of the imagination.

O. Henry had rare but precious insights into human destiny and human nature. In these pictures he is not formally accurate; he could never or seldom set his truth before us in that moderation and proportion which truths acquire in the stringencies of actuality. He was apt to present his insight in a sort of parable or allegory, to upraise it before the eyes of mankind on the mast or flagpole of some vehement exaggera- tion. Epigram shows us truth in the embrace of a He, and tales which are dramatized epigrams are subject to a like constraint. The force, however, is real. I could scarcely name anywhere a more powerful expo- sition of fatality than "Roads of Destiny," the initial story in the volume which appropriates its title. It wanted only the skilled romantic touch of a Gautier or Stevenson to enroll this tale among the master- pieces of its kind in contemporary letters.

no O. W, Firkins

Now and then the ingredient of parable is hardly- perceptible; we draw close to the bare fact. O. Henry, fortunate in plots, is peculiarly fortunate in his re- nunciation of plot. If contrivance is lucrative, it is also costly. There is an admirable little story called the 'Tendulum" (in the ''Trimmed Lamp"), the sim- plicity of whose fable would have satisfied Coppee or Hawthorne. A man in a flat, by force of custom, has come to regard his wife as a piece of furniture. She departs for a few hours, and, by the break in usage, is restored, in his consciousness, to womanhood. She comes back, and relapses into furniture. That is all. O. Henry could not have given us less — or more. Farcical, clownish, if you will, the story re- sembles those clowns who carry daggers under their motley. When John Perkins takes up that inauspicious hat, the reader smiles, and quails. I will mention a few other examples of insights with the proviso that they are not specially commended to the man whose quest in the short story is the electrifying or the cal- orific. They include the ''Social Triangle," the "Mak- ing of a New Yorker," and the "Foreign Policy of Company 99," all in the "Trimmed Lamp," the "Brief Debut of Tildy" in the "Four Million," and the "Com- plete Life of John Hopkins" in the "Voice of the City." I cannot close this summary of good points without a passing reference to the not unsuggestive

O. Henry lit

portrayal of humane and cheerful scoundrels in the ''Gentle Grafter." The picture, if false to species, is faithful to genus.

O. Henry's egregiousness, on the superficial side, both in merits and defects, reminds us of those park benches so characteristic of his tales which are occu- pied by a millionaire at one end and a mendicant at the other. But, to complete the image, we must add as a casual visitor to that bench a seer or a student, who, sitting down between the previous comers and suspending the flamboyancies of their dialogue, should gaze with the pensive eye of Goldsmith or Addison upon the passing crowd.

In O. Henry American journalism and the Victorian tradition meet. His mind, quick to don the guise of modernity, was impervious to its spirit. The specifi- cally modern movements, the scientific awakening, the religious upheaval and subsidence, the socialistic gospel, the enfranchisement of women — these never interfered with his artless and joyous pursuit of the old romantic motives of love, hate, wealth, poverty, gentility, dis- guise, and crime. On two points a moral record which, in his literature, is everywhere sound and stainless, rises almost to nobility. In an age when sexual excite- ment had become available and permissible, this wor- shiper of stimulus never touched with so much as a fingertip that insidious and meretricious fruit. The

112 O. W. Firkins

second point is his feeling for underpaid working-girls. His passionate concern for this wrong derives a peculiar emphasis from the general refusal of his books to bestow countenance or notice on philanthropy in its collective forms. When, in his dream of Heaven, he is asked: "Are you one of the bunch?" (meaning one of the bunch of grasping and grinding employers), the response, through all its slang, is soul-stirring. " 'Not on your immortality,' said I. 'I'm only the fellow that set fire to an orphan asylum and murdered a blind man for his pennies.' " The author of that retort may have some difficulty with the sentries that watch the entrance of Parnassus; he will have none with the gatekeeper of the New Jerusalem.

THE MOWING OF A FIELD

By HiLAiRE Belloc

We have not had in our time a more natural-born essayist, of the scampering sort, than Hilaire Belloc. He is an infectious fellow: if you read him much you will find yourself trying to imitate him; there is no harm in doing so: he himself caught the trick from Rabelais. I do not propose to rehash here the essay I wrote about him in a book called Shandygaff. You can refer to it there, which will be good business all round. I know it is a worthy essay, for much of it was cribbed from an article by Mr. Thomas Seccombe, which an American paper lifted from the English journal which, presumably, paid Mr. Seccombe for it. I wrote it for the Boston Transcript, where I knew the theft would be undetected ; and in shoveling together some stuff for a book (that was in 1917, the cost of living was rising at an angle of forty-five degrees, as so many graphs have shown) I put it in, forgetting (until too late) that some of it was absolute plunder.

Mr. Chesterton once said something like this: "It is a mistake to think that thieves do not respect property. They only wish it to become their property, so that they may more perfectly re- spect it."

And by the way, Alax Beerbohm's parody of Belloc, in A Christmas Garland, is something not to be missed. It is one of the best proofs that Belloc is a really great artist. Beerbohm does not waste his time mimicking the small fry.

Hilaire Belloc — son of a French father and an English mother; his happy junction of both English and French genius in prose is hereditary — was born in France in 1870. He lived in Sussex as a child; served in the French field artillery; was at Balliol College, Oxford, 1893-Q5, and sat four j^ears (1906-10) in the House of Commons. Certainly you must read (among his gath- erings of essays) On Nothing, On Everything, On Something, Hills and the Sea, First and Last; then you can read The Path ta Rome, and The Four Men, and Calibans Guide to Letters and_ The Pyrenees and Marie Antoinette. If you desire the bouillon (or bullion) of his charm, there is A Picked Company, a selection (by Mr. E. V. Lucas) of his most representative work. It is published by Methuen and Company, 36 Essex Street W. C, London.

Having done so, come again: we will go off in a comer and talk about Mr. Belloc.

114 Hi I aire Belloc

There is a valley in South England remote from ambition and from fear, where the passage of strangers is rare and unperceived, and where the scent of the grass in summer is breathed only by those who are native to that unvisited land. The roads to the Channel do not traverse it; they choose upon either side easier passes over the range. One track alon( leads up through it to the hills, and this is changeable ; now green where men have little occasion to go, now a good road where it nears the homesteads and the barns. The woods grow steep above the slopes; they reach sometimes the very summit of the heights, or, when they cannot attain them, fill in and clothe the coombes. And, in between, along the floor of the val- ley, deep pastures and their silence are bordered by lawns of chalky grass and the small yew trees of the Downs.

The clouds that visit its sky reveal themselves beyond the one great rise, and sail, white and enormous, to the other, and sink beyond that other. But the plains above which they have traveled and the Weald to which they go, the people of the valley cannot see and hardly recall. The wind, when it reaches such fields, is no longer a gale from the salt, but fruitful and soft, an inland breeze ; and those whose blood was nourished here feel in that wind the fruitfulness of our orchards and all the life that all things draw from the air.

The Mowing of a Field 115

In this place, when I was a boy, I pushed through a fringe of beeches that made a complete screen between me and the world, and I came to a glade called No Man's Land. I climbed beyond it, and I was surprised and glad, because from the ridge of that glade, I saw the sea. To this place very lately I returned.

The many things that I recovered as I came up the countryside were not less charming than when a dis- tant memory had enshrined them, but much more. Whatever veil is thrown by a longing recollection had not intensified nor even made more mysterious the beauty of that happy ground; not in my very dreams of morning had I, in exile, seen it more beloved or more rare. Much also that I had forgotten now re- turned to me as I approached — a group of elms, a little turn of the parson's wall, a small paddock beyond the graveyard close, cherished by one man, with a low wall of very old stone guarding it all round. And all these things fulfilled and amplified my delight, till even the good vision of the place, which I had kept so many years, left me and was replaced by its better reality. "Here/* I said to myself, "is a symbol of what some say is reserved for the soul : pleasure of a kind which cannot be imagined save in a moment when at last it is attained."

When I came to my own gate and my own field, and had before me the house I knew. I looked around a

Ii6 Hilaire Belloc

little (though it was already evening), and I saw that the grass was standing as it should stand when it is ready for the scythe. For in this, as in everything that a man can do — of those things at least which are very old — there is an exact moment when they are done best. And it has been remarked of whatever rules us that it works blunderingly, seeing that the good things given to a man are not given at the precise mo- nent when they would have filled him with delight. But, whether this be true or false, we can choose the just turn of the seasons in everything we do of our own will, and especially in the making of hay. Many think that hay is best made when the grass is thickest ; and so they delay until it is rank and in flower, and has already heavily pulled the ground. And there is another false reason for delay, which is wet weather. For very few will understand (though it comes year after year) that we have rain always in South Eng- land between the sickle and the scythe, or say just after the weeks of east wind are over. First we have a week of sudden warmth, as though the south had come to see us all; then we have the weeks of east and south- east wind; and then we have more or less of that rain of which I spoke, and which always astonishes the world. Now it is just before, or during, or at the very end of that rain — but not later — that grass should be cut for hay. True, upland grass, which is always

The Mowing of a Field 117

thin, should be cut earlier than the grass in the bot- toms and along the water meadows; but not even the latest, even in the wettest seasons, should be left (as it is) to flower and even to seed. For what we get when we store our grass is not a harvest of something ripe, but a thing just caught in its prime before ma- turity: as witness that our corn and straw are best yellow, but our hay is best green. So also Death should be represented with a scythe and Time with a •sickle ; for Time can take only what is ripe, but Death comes always too soon. In a word, then, it is always much easier to cut grass too late than too early ; and I, under that evening and come back to these pleasant fields, looked at the grass and knew that it was time. June was in full advance ; it was the beginning of that season when the night has already lost her foothold of the earth and hovers over it, never quite descending, but mixing sunset with the dawn.

Next morning, before it was yet broad day, I awoke, and thought of the mowing. The birds were already chattering in the trees beside my window, all except the nightingale, which had left and flown away to the Weald, where he sings all summer by day as well as by night in the oaks and the hazel spinneys, and espe- cially along the little river Adur, one of the rivers of the Weald. The birds and the thought of the mowing had awakened me, and I went down the stairs and

Il8 Hilaire Belloc

along the stone floors to where I could find a scythe; and when I took it from its nail, I remembered how, fourteen years ago, I had last gone out with my scythe, just so, into the fields at morning. In between that day and this were many things, cities and armies, and a confusion of books, mountains and the desert, and horrible great breadths of sea.

When I got out into the long grass the sun was not yet risen, but there were already many colors in the eastern sky, and I made haste to sharpen my scythe, so that I might get to the cutting before the dew should dry. Some say that it is best to wait till all the dew has risen, so as to get the grass quite dry from the very first. But, though it is an advantage to get the grass quite dry, yet it is not worth while to wait till the dew has risen. For, in the first place, you lose many hours of work (and those the coolest), and next — which is more important — you lose that great ease and thickness in cutting which comes of the dew. So I at once began to sharpen my scythe.

There is an art also in the sharpening of the scythe, and it is worth describing carefully. Your blade must be dry, and that is why you will see men rubbing the scythe-blade with grass before they whet it. Then also your rubber must be quite dry, and on this account it is a good thing to lay it on your coat and keep it there during all your day's mowing. The scythe you

The Mowing of a Field II9

stand upright, with the blade pointing away from you, and put your left hand firmly on the back of the blade, grasping it: then you pass the rubber first down one side of the blade-edge and then down the other, begin- ning near the handle and going on to the point and working quickly and hard. When you first do this you will, perhaps, cut your hand; but it is only at first that such an accident will happen to you.

To tell when the scythe is sharp enough this is the rule. First the stone clangs and grinds against the iron harshly ; then it rings musically to one note ; then, at last, it purrs as though the iron and stone were ex- actly suited. When you hear this, your scythe is sharp enough ; and I, when I heard it that June dawn, with everything quite silent except the birds, let down the scythe and bent myself to mow.

When one does anything anew, after so many years, one fears very much for one's trick or habit. But all things once learnt are easily recoverable, and I very soon recovered the swing and power of the mower. Mowing w ell and mowing badly — or rather not mow- ing at all — are separated by very little ; as is also true of writing verse, of playing the fiddle, and of dozens of other things, but of nothing more than of believing. For the bad or young or untaught mower without tradition, the mower Promethean, the mower original and contemptuous of the past, does all these things:

I20 Hilaire Belloc

He leaves great crescents of grass uncut. He digs the point of the scythe hard into the ground with a jerk. He loosens the handles and even the fastening of the blade. He twists the blade with his blunders, he blunts the blade, he chips it, dulls it, or breaks it clean off at the tip. If any one is standing by he cuts him in the ankle. He sweeps up into the air wildly, with nothing to resist his stroke. He drags up earth with the grass, which is like making the meadow bleed. But the good mower who does things just as they should be done and have been for a hundred thousand years, falls into none of these fooleries. He goes forward very steadily, his scythe-blade just barely missing the ground, every grass falling; the swish and rhythm of his mowing are always the same.

So great an art can only be learnt by continual prac- tice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honorably and in a manner that makes it recognize its service. The manner is this. You must regard the scythe as a pendulum that swings, not as a knife that cuts. A good mower puts no more strength into his stroke than into his lifting. Again, stand up to your work. The

The Mowing of a Field 12 £

bad mower, eager and full of pain, leans forward and tries to force the scythe through the grass. The good mower, serene and able, stands as nearly straight as the shape of the scythe will let him, and follows up every stroke closely, moving his left foot forward. Then also let every stroke get well away. Mowing is a thing of ample gestures, like drawing a cartoon. Then, again, get yourself into a mechanical and repeti- tive mood : be thinking of anything at all but your mowing, and be anxious only when there seems some interruption to the monotony of the sound. In this mowing should be like one's prayers — all of a sort and always the same, and so made that you can establish a monotony and work. them, as it were, with half your mind : that happier half, the half that does not bother. In this way, when I had recovered the art after so many years, I went forward over the field, cutting lane after lane through the grass, and bringing out its most secret essences with the sweep of the scythe until the air was full of odors. At the end of every lane I sharpened my scythe and looked back at the work done, and then carried my scythe down again upon my shoulder to begin another. So, long before the bell fang in the chapel above me — ^that is, long before six o'clock, which is the time for the Angelus — I had many swathes already lying in order parallel like soldiery; and the high grass yet standing, making a great con-

122 Hilaire Be Hoc

trast with the shaven part, looked dense and high. As it says in the Ballad of Val-es-Dunes, where — The tall son of the Seven Winds Came riding out of Hither-hythe, and his horse-hoofs (you will remember) trampled into the press and made a gap in it, and his sword (as you know)

was like a scythe In Arcus when the grass is high And all the swathes in order lie, And there's the bailiff standing by A-gathering of the tithe. So I mowed all that morning, till the houses awoke in the valley, and from some of them rose a little fragrant smoke, and men began to be seen.

I stood still and rested on my scythe to watch the awakening of the village, when I saw coming up to my field a man whom I had known in older times, before I had left the Valley.

He was of that dark silent race upon which all the learned quarrel, but which, by whatever meaningless name it may be called — Iberian, or Celtic, or what you will — is the permanent root of all England, and makes England wealthy and preserves it everywhere, except perhaps in the Fens and in a part of Yorkshire. Every- where else you will find it active and strong. These people are intensive; their thoughts and their labors

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turn inward. It is on account of their presence in these islands that our gardens are the richest in the world. They also love low rooms and ample fires and great warm slopes of thatch. They have, as I be- lieve, an older acquaintance with the English air than any other of all the strains that make up England. They hunted in the Weald with stones, and camped in the pines of the green-sand. They lurked under the oaks of the upper rivers, and saw the legionaries go up, up the straight paved road from the sea. They helped the few pirates to destroy the towns, and mixed with those pirates and shared the spoils of the Roman villas, and were glad to see the captains and the priests de- stroyed. They remain; and no admixture of the Frisian pirates, or the Breton, or the Angevin and Norman conquerors, has very much affected their cunning eyes.

To this race, I say, belonged the man who now ap- proached me. And he said to me, "Mowing?" And I answered, "Ar," Then he also said *'Ar," as in duty bound; for so we speak to each other in the Stenes of the Downs.

Next he told me that, as he had nothing to do, he would lend me a hand ; and I thanked him warmly, or, as we say, "kindly.*' For it is a good custom of ours always to treat bargaining as though it were a cour- teous pastime; and though what he was after was

124 Hilaire Belloc

money, and what I wanted was his labor at the least pay, yet we both played the comedy that we were free men, the one granting a grace and the other accepting it. For the dry bones of commerce, avarice and method and need, are odious to the Valley; and we cover them tip with a pretty body of fiction and observances. Thus, when it comes to buying pigs, the buyer does not begin to decry the pig and the vendor to praise it, as is the custom w^ith lesser men; but tradition makes them do business in this fashion: —

First the buyer will go up to the seller when he sees him in his own steading, and, looking at the pig with admiration, the buyer will say that rain may or may not fall, or that we shall have snow or thunder, accord- ing to the time of the year. Then the seller, looking critically at the pig, will agree that the weather is as his friend maintains. There Is no haste at all; great leisure marks the dignity of their exchange. And the next step is, that the buyer says: 'That's a fine pig

you have there, Mr. " (giving the seller's name).

"Ar, powerful fine pig." Then the seller, saying also "Mr." (for twin brothers rocked in one cradle give each other ceremonious observance here), the seller, I say, admits, as though with reluctance, the strength and beauty of the pig, and falls Into deep thought. Then the buyer says, as though moved by a great desire, that he is ready to give so much for the pig,

The Mowing of a Field 125

naming half the proper price, or a Httle less. Then the seller remains in silence for some moments; and at last begins to shake his head slowly, till he says: "I don't be thinking of selling the pig, anyways." He will also add that a party only Wednesday offered him so much for the pig — and he names about double the proper price. Thus all ritual is duly accomplished; and the solemn act is entered upon with reverence and in a spirit of truth. For when the buyer uses this phrase: "I'll tell you what I will do," and offers within half a crown of the pig's value, the seller replies that he can refuse him nothing, and names half a crown above its value; the difference is split, the pig is sold, and in the quiet soul of each runs the peace of something accomplished.

Thus do we buy a pig or land or labor or malt or lime, always with elaboration and set forms; and many a London man has paid double and more for his violence and his greedy haste and very unchivalrous higgling. As happened with the land at Underwal- tham, which the mortgagees had begged and implored the estate to take at twelve hundred and had privately offered to all the world at a thousand, but which a sharp direct man, of the kind that makes great for- tunes, a man in a motor-car, a man in a fur coat, a man of few words, bought for two thousand three hundred before my very eyes, protesting that they

126 Hilaire Belloc

might take his offer or leave it ; and all because he did not begin by praising the land.

Well then, this man I spoke of offered to help me, and he went to get his scythe. But I went into this house and brought out a gallon jar of small ale for him and for me; for the sun was now very warm, and small ale goes well with mowing. When we had drunk some of this ale in mugs called "I see you,*' we took each a swathe, he a little behind me because he was the better mower; and so for many hours we swung, one before the other, mowing and mowing at the tall grass of the field. And the sun rose to noon and we were still at our mowing; and we ate food, but only for a little while, and we took again to our mowing. And at last there was nothing left but a small square of grass, standing like a square of linesmen who keep their formation, tall and unbroken, with all the dead lying around them when the battle is over and done.

Then for some little time I rested after all those hours; and the man and I talked together, and a long way off we heard in another field the musical sharpen- ing of a scythe.

The sunlight slanted powdered and mellow over the breadth of the valley; for day was nearing its end. I went to fetch rakes from the steading; and when I had come back the last of the grass had fallen, and all the field lay fiat and smooth, with the very green

The Mowing of a Field 127

short grass in lanes between the dead and yellow swathes.

These swathes we raked into cocks to keep them from the dew against our return at daybreak ; and we made the cocks as tall and steep as we could, for in that shape they best keep off the dew, and it is easier also to spread them after the sun has risen. Then we raked up every straggling blade, till the whole field was a clean floor for the tedding and the carrying of the hay next morning. The grass we had mown was but a little over two acres ; for that is all the pasture on my little tiny farm.

When we had done all this, there fell upon us the beneficent and deliberate evening ; so that as we sat a little while together near the rakes, we saw the valley more solemn and dim around us, and all the trees and hedgerows quite still, and held by a complete silence. Then I paid my companion his wage, and bade him a good night, till we should meet in the same place before sunrise.

He went off with a slow and steady progress, as all our peasants do, making their walking a part of the easy but continual labor of their lives. But I sat on, watching the light creep around towards the north and change, and the waning moon coming up as though by stealth behind the woods of No Man's Land.

THE STUDENT LIFE By William Osler

Sir William Osier, one of the best-loved and most influential teachers of his time, was born in Canada in 1849. He began his education in Toronto and at McGill University, Montreal, where he served as professor of medicine. 1874-84. Wherever he worked his gifted and unique personality was a center of inspiration — at the University of Pennsylvania, 1884-89; at Johns Hopkins, 1889-1904. In 1904 he went to Oxford as Regius Pro- fessor of Medicine; he died in England in 1919.

Only our medical friends have a right to speak of the great doctor's place in their own world ; but one would like to see his honorable place as a man of letters more generally understood. His generous wisdom and infectious enthusiasm are delightfully expressed in his collected writings. No lover of the essay can afiford to overlook JEquanimitas and Other Addresses, An Ala- bama Student and Other Biographical Essays, Science and Im- mortality and Counsels and Ideals, this last an anthology col- lected from his professional papers by one of his pupils. He stands in the honorable line of those great masters who have found their highest usefulness as kindly counselors of the young. His lucid and exquisite prose, with its extraordinary wealth of quotation from the literature of all ages, and his unfailing humor and tenderness, put him in the first rank of didactic essayists. One could get a liberal education in literature merely by follow- ing up all his quotations and references. He was more deeply versed in the classics than many professors of Greek and Latin ; the whole music of English poetry seemed to be current in his blood. His essay on Keats, taken with Kipling's wonderful story Via Wireless, tells the student more about that poet than many a volume of biography. When was biography more delight- fully written than in his volume An Alabama Student?

Walt Whitman said, when Dr. Osier attended him years ago, "Osier believes in the gospel of encouragement — of putting the best construction on things — the best foot forward. He's a fine fellow and a wise one, I guess." The great doctor's gospel of encouragement is indeed a happy companion for the midnight reader. Rich in every gentle quality that makes life endeared, his books are the most sagacious and helpful of modern writings for the young student. As one who has found them an unfail- ing delight, I venture to hope that our medical confreres may not be the only readers to enjoy their vivacity and charm.

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Except it be a lover, no one is more interesting as an object of study than a student. Shakespeare might have made him a fourth in his immortal group. The lunatic with his fixed idea, the poet with his fine frenzy, the lover with his frantic idolatry, and the student aflame with the desire for knowledge are of "imagination all comjpact." To an absorbing passion, a whole-souled devotion, must be joined an enduring energy, if the student is to become a devotee of the gray-eyed goddess to whose law his services are bound. Like the quest of the Holy Grail, the quest of Minerva is not for all. For the one, the pure life ; for the other, what Milton calls "a strong propensity of nature." Here again the student often resembles the poet — he is born, not made. While the resultant of two molding forces, the accidental, external conditions, and the hidden germinal energies, which produce in each one of us national, family, and individual traits, the true student possesses in some measure a divine spark which sets at naught their laws. Like the Snark, he defies definition, but there are three unmistakable signs by which you may recognize the genuine article from a Boojum — an absorbing desire to know the truth, an unswerving steadfastness in its pursuit, and an open, honest heart, free from suspicion, guile, and jealousy.

At the outset do not be worried about this big ques- tion— Truth. It is a very simple matter if each one of

130 William Osier

you starts with the desire to get as much as possible. No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition. In this un- satisfied quest the attitude of mind, the desire, the thirst — a thirst that from the soul must rise! — the fervent longing, are the be-all and the end-all. What is the student but a lover courting a fickle mistress who ever eludes his grasp? In this very elusiveness is brought out his second great characteristic — steadfast- ness of purpose. Unless from the start the limitations incident to our frail human faculties are frankly ac- cepted, nothing but disappointment awaits you. The truth is the best you can get with your best endeavor, the best that the best men accept — with this you must learn to be satisfied, retaining at the same time with due humility an earnest desire for an ever larger por- tion. Only by keeping the mind plastic and receptive does the student escape perdition. It is not, as Charles Lamb remarks, that some people do not know what to do with truth when it is offered to them, but the tragic fate is to reach, after years of patient search, a condi- tion of mind-blindness in which the truth is not recog- nized, though it stares you in the face. This can never happen to a man who has followed step by step the growth of a truth, and who knows the painful phases

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of its evolution. It is one of the great tragedies of life that every truth has to struggle to acceptance against honest but mind-blind students. Harvey knew his contemporaries well, and for twelve successive years demonstrated the circulation of the blood before daring to pubUsh the facts on which the truth was based.*

Only steadfastness of purpose and humility enable the student to shift his position to meet the new condi- tions in which new truths are born, or old ones modi- fied beyond recognition. And, thirdly, the honest heart will keep him in touch with his fellow students, and furnish that sense of comradeship without which he travels an arid waste alone. I say advisedly an honest heart — the honest head is prone to be cold and stern, given to judgment, not mercy, and not always able to entertain that true charity which, while it thinketh no evil, is anxious to put the best possible interpretation upon the motives of a fellow worker. It will foster, too, an attitude of generous, friendly rivalry untinged by the green peril, jealousy, that is the best preventive of the growth of a bastard scientific spirit, loving seclusion and working in a lock-and-key laboratory, as timorous of light as is a thief.

* "These views, as usual, pleased some more, others less ; some chid and calumniated me, and laid it to me as a crime that I had dared to depart from the precepts and opinions of all Anato* mists." — De Motu Cordis, chap. i.

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You have all become brothers in a great society, not apprentices, since that implies a master, and nothing should be further from the attitude of the teacher than much that is meant in that word, used though it be in another sense, particularly by our French brethren in a most delightful way, signifying a bond of intel- lectual filiation. A fraternal attitude is not easy to cultivate — the chasm between the chair and the bench is difficult to bridge. Two things have helped to put up a cantilever across the gulf. The successful teacher is no longer on a height, pumping knowledge at high pressure into passive receptacles. The new methods have changed all this. He is no longer Sir Oracle, perhaps unconsciously by his very manner antagoniz- ing minds to whose level he cannot possibly descend, but he is a senior student anxious to help his juniors. When a simple, earnest spirit animates a college, there is no appreciable interval between the teacher and the taught — both are in the same class, the one a little more advanced than the other. So animated, the student feels that he has joined a family whose honor is his honor, whose welfare is his own, and whose interests should be his first consideration.

The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is en- gaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years

The Student Life 1 33

under teachers is but a preparation. Whether you will falter and fail in the race or whether you will be faith- ful to the end depends on the training before the start, and on your staying powers, points upon which I need not enlarge. You can all become good students, a few may become great students, and now and again one of you will be found who does easily and well what others cannot do at all, or very badly, which is John Ferriar's excellent definition of a genius.

In the hurry and bustle of a business world, which is the life of this continent, it is not easy to train first- class students. Under present conditions it is hard to get the needful seclusion, on which account it is that our educational market is so full of wayside fruit. I have always been much impressed by the advice of St. Chrysostom: "Depart from the highway and transplant thyself in some enclosed ground, for it is hard for a tree which stands by the wayside to keep her fruit till it be ripe." The dilettante is abroad in the land, the man who is always venturing on tasks for which he is imperfectly equipped, a habit of mind fostered by the multiplicity of subjects in the curricu- lum: and while many things are studied, few are studied thoroughly. Men will not take time to get to the heart of a matter. After all, concentration is the price the modern student pays for success. Thorough- ness is the most difficult habit to acquire, but it is the

134 William Osier

pearl of great price, worth all the worry and trouble of the search. The dilettante lives an easy, butterfly life, knowing nothing of the toil and labor with which the treasures of knowledge are dug out of the past, or wrung by patient research in the laboratories. Take, for example, the early history of this country — how easy for the student of the one type to get a smatter- ing, even a fairly full acquaintance with the events of the French and Spanish settlements. Put an original document before him, and it might as well be Arabic. What we need is the other type, the man who knows the records, who, with a broad outlook and drilled in what may be called the embryology of history, has yet a powerful vision for the minutiae of life. It is these kitchen and backstair men who are to be encouraged, the men who know the subject in hand in all possible relationships. Concentration has its drawbacks. It is possible to become so absorbed in the problem of the "enclitic (Jf," or the structure of the flagella of the Trichomonas, or of the toes of the prehistoric horse, that the student loses the sense of proportion in his work, and even wastes a lifetime in researches which are valueless because not in touch with current knowl- edge. You remember poor Casaubon, in "Middle^ march," whose painful scholarship was lost on this ac- count. The best preventive to this is to get denational- ized early. The true student is a citizen of the world,

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the allegiance of whose soul, at any rate, is too pre- cious to be restricted to a single country. The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmo- politan standpoint. I care not in what subject he may work, the full knowledge cannot be reached without drawing on supplies from lands other than his own — French, English, German, American, Japanese, Rus- sian, Italian — there must be no discrimination by the loyal student who should willingly draw from any and every source with an open mind and a stern resolve to render unto all their dues. I care not on what stream of knowledge he may embark, follow up its course, and the rivulets that feed it flow from many lands. If the work is to be effective he must keep in touch with scholars in other countries. How often has it hap- pened that years of precious time have been given to a problem already solved or shown to be insoluble, be- cause of the ignorance of what had been done else- where. And it is not only book knowledge and jour- nal knowledge, but a knowledge of men that is needed. The student will, if possible, see the men in other lands. Travel not only widens the vision and gives certainties in place of vague surmises, but the personal contact with foreign workers enables him to appreciate better

136 William Osier

the failings or successes in his own line of work, per- haps to look with more charitable eyes on the work of some brother whose limitations and opportunities have been more restricted than his own. Or, in contact with a mastermind, he may take fire, and the glow of the enthusiasm may be the inspiration of his life. Concen- tration must then be associated with large views on the relation of the problem, and a knowledge of its status elsewhere; otherwise it may land him in the slough of a specialism so narrow that it has depth and no breadth, or he may be led to make what he believes to be impor- tant discoveries, but which have long been current coin in other lands. It is sad to think that the day of the great polymathic student is at an end; that we may, perhaps, never again see a Scaliger, a Haller, or a Humboldt — men who took the w^hole field of knowl- edge for their domain and viewed it as from a pinnacle. And yet a great specializing generalist may arise, who can tell? Some twentieth-century Aristotle may be now tugging at his bottle, as little dreaming as are his parents or his friends of a conquest of the mind, beside which the wonderful victories of the Stagirite will look pale. The value of a really great student to the country is equal to half a dozen grain elevators or a new trans- continental railway. He is a commodity singularly fickle and variable, and not to be grown to order. So far as his advent is concerned there is no telling: when

The Student Life 137

or where he may arise. The conditions seem to be present even under the most unHkely externals. Some of the greatest students this country has produced have come from small villages and country places. It is impossible to predict from a study of the environ- ment, which a "strong propensity of nature," to quote Milton^s phrase again, will easily bend or break.

The student must be allowed full freedom in his work, undisturbed by the utilitarian spirit of the Philis- tine, who cries, Cui bono? and distrusts pure science. The present remarkable position in applied science and in industrial trades of all sorts has been made possible by men who did pioneer work in chemistry, in physics, in biology, and in physiology, without a thought in their researches of any practical application. The members of this higher group of productive students are rarely understood by the common spirits, who appreciate as little their unselfish devotion as their unworldly neglect of the practical side of the problems.

Everywhere now the medical student is welcomed as an honored member of the guild. There was a time, I confess, and it is within the memory of some of us, when, like Falstaff, he was given to "taverns and sack and wine and metheglins, and to drinkings and swear- ings and starings, pribbles and prabbles" ; but all that has changed with the curriculum, and the "Meds" no\i*

138 William Osier

roar you as gently as the "Theologs.*' On account of the peculiar character of the subject-matter of your studies, what I have said upon the general life and mental attitude of the student applies with tenfold force to you. Man, with all his mental and bodily anomalies and diseases — the machine in order, the ma- chine in disorder, and the business yours to put it to rights. Through all the phases of its career this most complicated mechanism of this wonderful world will be the subject of our study and of your care — the naked, new-born infant, the artless child, the lad and the lassie just aware of the tree of knowledge over- head, the strong man in the pride of life, the woman with the benediction of maternity on her brow, and the aged, peaceful in the contemplation of the past. Almost everything has been renewed in the science and in the art of medicine, but all through the long centuries there has been no variableness or shadow of change in the essential features of the life which is our con- templation and our care. The sick love-child of Israel's sweet singer, the plague-stricken hopes of the great Athenian statesman, Elpenor, bereft of his beloved Artemidora, and 'Tully's daughter mourned so tenderly," are not of any age or any race — they are here with us to-day, with the Hamlets, the Ophelias, and the Lears. Amid an eternal heritage of sorrow and suffering our work is laid, and this eternal note

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of sadness would be insupportable if the daily