COVSIN NY-AND-I- SO/^E-V IWS-OF'OVRS ^BOVTDIVERS -FOLKS -AND R I OVS -ASPECTS COUSIN ANTHONY AND I COUSIN ANTHONY AND I; SOME VIEWS OF OURS ABOUT DIVERS MATTERS AND VARIOUS ASPECTS OF LIFE BY EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN AUTHOR OF " A LITTLE BROTHER OF THE RICH " AND "WINDFALLS OF OBSERVATION" NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1895 COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW DIRECTORY 1INTINQ AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY NEW YORK INSCRIBED, WITH AFFECTION AND RESPECT, TO THAT ADMIRABLE WOMAN, MY COUSIN ANTHONY'S WIFE CONTENTS PAGE I. Cousin Anthony and His Book .... i II. Readers and Reading 15 III. Work and the Yankee 29 IV. Chores 41 V. Considerations Matrimonial 53 VI. Love, Friendship, and Gossip . . . . 73 VII. Woman Suffrage 89 VIII. The Knowledge of Good and Evil . . .103 IX. Civilization and Culture 119 X. Arcadia and Belgravia 137 XI. Ourselves and Other People 157 XII. Profit and Loss 177 XIII. Certain Assets of Age 193 XIV. The After-Dinner Speech 203 XV. Cousin Anthony's Address to the Trained Nurses 213 * x* Acknowledgment is made of the courtesy of the proprietors of SCRIBNER-S MAGAZINE, HARPERS WEEKLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, and THE SUN for permission to include in this volume articles contributed to those publications. 1 COUSIN ANTHONY AND HIS BOOK COUSIN ANTHONY AND HIS BOOK JY Cousin Anthony was lately speaking of the surprised re- spect he sometimes felt for himself because of certain things he had not said. He went a little into details, and I discovered that nearly all the unutterances that he prided himself upon were things that he had omitted to tell his wife. He felt, he Discreet reticence of said, that not to blurt out matters to the y cousin. general public is no particular credit to a man, but the inducement to tell one's wife everything that would interest her is so strong that to have restrained one's self from the abuse of such a privilege is fair ground for humble self-approbation. There are things that a conscientious man does not feel authorized to admit even to him- self. A fact that is not admitted is more Cousin Anthony and I or less ineffectual. It may have a poten- tiality of mischief about it and still be harmless so long as it is ignored. To know something that is disquieting to one's self to know, and to let it die of neglect, is sane conduct ; and so it is to know some- thing that would worry one's wife and to abstain from imparting it to her because it is wholly unnecessary for her to know it. At least that was the view that my cousin Anthony took. He maintained that to confide absolutely in one's wife was indeed good, but to temper candor on occasion with a wise and affectionate reticence was better still. He by no means advocated deceit or elaborate concealment. He hates a lie as much as anyone, and is as eager as Merlin himself to have vinegar burned when there is a liar to the windward. But mere abstention from inconsiderate admis- sions he admired in himself. I think he is right. Confession may be good for the soul, but a Protestant who em- ploys no professional confessor is bound to consider how his outpourings will affect the ear they enter. Let him steer them into Cousin Anthony and His Book an ear that they are sure to pass through, and not into one where they may stick and rankle. Anthony says that he never descants to his wife about any callow preliminary affair of the heart that he was ever involved in. She had shown, he said, a benevolent will- ingness to hear and sympathize with his experiences of that sort ; but though not to tell her involved the suppression of some of the most interesting tales he knew, some saving grace of marital circumspection had achieved the suppression. What biographi- cal details of that sort came to her from other authorities than himself gave him not the slightest concern. There was a wide distinction, according to his notion, be- tween the information that she took the responsibility of acquiring and that which he took the responsibility of forcing upon her attention. Another class of information that he sys- tematically omits to share with her includes all gossip which comes to his ears that is derogatory to her own family. As he thinks it unwise to tell her things that 5 Cousin Anthony and I might make her think less of him, so he omits information that might make her think less of herself. He told me a tale about his wife's uncle, Philip Hiram, that was really of the liveliest interest even to a stranger. But he said he had never told it to his wife, because it would mortify her to know it, and as no one but himself would dare tell her, the chances were that she would never hear it. Anthony does not think himself a sly dog for not telling everything to Mrs. An- thony. To his mind his reticence shows not his doubts of his wife's discretion or regard, but his sedulous regard for her hap- piness and the high value he places on her affection. Those are things of too much importance to put to hazard by impulsive revelations. He is really exceptionally frank in his ordinary communications, and to know anything that is worth telling and not to tell it is a sort of self-sacrifice that no one who knows him would expect of him. Least of all did he expect it of him- self. He simply found that there were a few things that he was periodically tempted 6 Cousin Anthony and His Book to tell, and didn't tell, and was always surprised afterward that he hadn't. But Anthony is not so marvellously dis- creet about everything. Without being morbid he is one of those introspective creatures who sort out their own blemishes and misdemeanors and repent of them after they are all good and done. He writes as well as talks, and perhaps he has less occa- sion to felicitate himself on what he has left unwritten than on the things he has not said. It happens that way sometimes, that men who are the carefullest and most conti- nent in their talk are subject to extraor- dinary bursts of candor with a pen and ink. But as I said Anthony writes things, and had the felicity, not a great while since, to compose a book which so stirred the be- wrote. nevolence of his friends that he has com- plained to me of the embarrassment their praises have caused him. He declares that if the book were really very much of a book he wouldn't mind its being praised, but being merely such a book as he knows it is, and containing only such things as he managed to get into it, the assurances that 7 Cousin Anthony and I he gets of its merits make him feel like a receiver of stolen goods, and seem to him a design of the. Arch Enemy to bring him low. If he didn't like it, he says, he would be less disturbed ; but there is evidence that his receivership is all too agreeable to him. I have tried to console him as far as I could, pointing out to him that in every enterprise one is bound to take the evil with the good, and that if the book is good enough to praise it may be good enough to sell. Furthermore, I have suggested to him that his excessive aspiration after hu- mility is itself a symptom of spiritual pride, and that it may really be wiser to let his poor head swell and cure itself by natural processes than to worry unduly over it and try to keep it down by artificial means. A good many people, I tell him, have time on their hands in these days, and some one will find leisure presently to read his poor book through, and find out how little, after all, there is in it. The cure in such cases often comes that way. Besides, I have pointed out to him, what he should have 8 Cousin Anthony and His Book known himself, that it is a great mistake to suppose that there is nothing in a book ex- cept what the writer puts there. There is something at Rome, but the more impor- tant part is what you take there ; and what the reader is able to get out of any book depends very considerably, of course, up- on what he brings to it. If one is long of steel it is great luck to run across a bed of flints, but there is no occasion for the steel to assume all the responsibility for the re- sulting sparks. I think I will read cousin Anthony's book myself, presently, and see if there is really any good in it. There may be. The fact that his friends praise it is not proof that there is, but neither is it proof to the con- trary. But, as I told him, even if it is good it is nothing to be so swollen over. If a boy can fly a kite, it is a good sport. Let him practise it and take pleasure in it. But it is the wind that does the work, not he; moreover, it is the kite that flies and not the boy, so that for him to imagine himself afloat, and impart wing-movements to his members, is an absurdity of self-deception. Cousin Anthony and I Let the kite be puffed up, but not the boy. " So let your book," I said, " my cousin, be borne on by any lucky gale of approba- tion that may come its way ; without dis- paragement of which, be you content to hold the string and run with it when nec- essary. That is the business of a writer, not to fly himself, but to send up good kites, and make the wind carry them. If anyone have the faculty to recognize a certain measure of truth and so to work it up that it will go, and that others may know it when they see it, let him do so, for it is a good thing. But as for being per- sonally inflated about it, that is folly, for it is not the writer who is glorious, but the truth, and truth was there before he found it." I WONDER if persons who can write Scotch are sufficiently aware of the great literary The great advantage they have over writers who are l vant'aj e ad ' not born to that ability. It is no credit to them that they can do it. It is a gift of nature dropt in their lap. I never heard of anyone who learned by artificial means to 10 Cousin Anthony and His Book write Scotch. Scotch writers do it, and no one else. It has long been obvious that the proportion of good writers to the whole Scotch population was exceedingly large ; but I do not remember that it has ever been pointed out how much easier it is for a Scotchman to be a good writer than another because of his innate command of the Scotch tongue. There are such delightful words in that language ; words that sing on the printed page wherever their employer happens to drop them in ; words that rustle; words that skirl, and words that clash and thump. It is their gain, I believe, that not many of us who know the sounds of them have an accurate notion of their meanings. Do you know what a brae is ? After thirty years of familiarity with that word I am still a little dubious about it and cannot be sure whether the idea it conveys contains underbrush or is open field, and if the latter, whether there is an implication of heather. Perhaps sheep graze on braes. I could not be sure, and if a well-informed person insisted that Scotch nosegays had ii Cousin Anthony and I braes in them I could not contradict him with much confidence. But for all that Ye banks and braes o 1 Bonny Doon conveys an image as delightful to my mind's eye as to the actual ear, and what uncertainty there may be about the di- mensions and ingredients of the braes in it merely operates to give the imagination greater scope. I can aver that at least one habitual reader of English finds his atten- tion curiously and agreeably quickened by Scotch words and idioms that are familiar enough not to be troublesome, and unfamil- iar enough to give the ear a gentle fillip. A brook sparkles brighter for the moment for being a burn; "gone gyte " makes a prompter conveyance of its significance than ' ' gone crazy ; ' ' brogues and lugs and bairns fit better into many sentences than shoes and ears and children. " A wheen blethers " fills the mouth like a spoonful of oatmeal ; "twine" is a better word than "sepa- rate; " " will can " beats " will be able," and the verb to ken in all its uses is fit to 12 Cousin Anthony and His Book stir the envy of the English writer. A French word dragged into English writing is an offence which is only tolerable when a master-hand commits it and the excuse is adequate, but the Scotch words of Scotch- men vary the tongue that harbors them only to enrich it, and stand among their English cousins with all the confiding as- surance of blood relations. It is to be hoped that the Scotch writers, and especially the story-tellers, appreciate with due humility the advantage they en- joy in having unrestricted use of as much English as they can handle, and in addition a monopoly of their own blessed brogue. There is scant justice in the dispensation that secures them their special privilege. They do not need it, for many of them write just as good English as even the Americans do, and are perfectly at home in that language. There is no true pro- priety in granting them special rights to write Scotch and English with the same pen on the same page ; but on grounds of ex- pediency, and because the mixture makes good reading, they have been suffered to 13 Cousin Anthony and I do so. I am not one of those who would abridge their privilege, for I like its re- sults ; but I do think that in consideration of their advantages Scotch writers should be humble, should make allowances for other scribes, and in all literary competi- tions should be handicapped down to an equality with the writers in whose field they compete. II READERS AND READING READERS AND READING ERSONS who not being, like my cousin Anthony, already in the business of writing are tempted to dabble in it, should consider, among other objec- tions to such a course, the great detriment it may prove to their usefulness, and pos- sibly also to their enjoyment as readers. To be a good reader is a vocation by itself, A disability and one which writers habitually and en- w viously admire. That the business of writ- ing conflicts with it is notorious. When the library of the late Guy de Maupassant came to be examined by his executors it was found that almost all the modern books in it were gifts from the authors of them, and that their leaves were in almost every instance uncut. Writers do read books oc- casionally, and even books by other con- temporary writers, but they usually read 17 Cousin Anthony and I them either for a special purpose, as to make a review, or with the general purpose to keep informed about what is being writ- ten, or with a certain feverish anxiety to make sure that someone else is not doing their kind of work better than they can do it themselves. Find a contemporary writer, if you can, who does not look back with regret to the time when the reading of books was an irresponsible felicity. He read " Ivanhoe" and " The Tale of Two Cities " with simple happiness and no sense of obligation to dissect the authors' art or arrive at his own critical opinions. But nowadays when he reads it is with a bal- ance in one hand, and constant interrup- tions while the actual book goes into one scale and his notion of what it ought to be, or his recollection of some book some- one else has written, into the other. To read books simply for what there is in them, and with no conscious regard for what one's verdict will be when the reading is over, that may be reckoned one of the joys of youth. But it is not strictly a joy that belongs to youth only, for some grown peo- 18 Readers and Reading pie have it too ; but not (or at least very rarely) if they are writers. The spectacle of the blithe maiden in a brand-new ball- dress is a jocund sight, even to a dress- maker. But the dressmaker does not take the same unimpeded delight in it that it brings to the other spectators. Inevitably and unconsciously she counts the stitches, reckons the cost of the fabric, measures off in her mind the yards of lace, and ap- praises the quality of the trimmings ; then she compares it mentally with other fine frocks, and when she has finished she knows far more about the gown than anyone who has seen it except the society reporter. But there is a quality in the pretty show that her scrutiny has missed and an emo- tion she has not gathered because her trained sight saw so much. Everyone who has ever launched a book which has drifted in even a moderate de- gree into the current of public favor must remember how overwhelming a proportion of whatever subsequent satisfaction he got from it was due to that simple, old-fash- ioned, uncritical personage, the gentle read- 19 Cousin Anthony and I er, who reads books for the promotion of his own happiness, and if he likes them knows it and is cheerfully ready to say so. For the faults or shortcomings of a book The gentle the gentle reader doesn't much care if only reader. there is a grace in it somewhere to which his soul responds. If it is verse, it does not concern him that Tennyson wrote better ; if it is a story he does not throw it down be- cause it is not the equal of "Vanity Fair." If it gives him real pleasure, in sufficient quantity to pay for the time he spent in reading it, he declares that it is a good book and is ready to thank the author and buy and read the next book that he sends out. He, or perhaps I should say she, is the reader that the author loves and es- teems and counts upon to quiet his own literary compunctions. But the reader who has himself dabbled much in writing can seldom be a gentle reader afterward. He is always a critic, mistrusting his own pleas- ure and his fellow's art ; hesitating to ex- press his possible favor for fear it will dis- credit his own discrimination, more eager to make a clever comment of his own than to 20 Readers and Reading find a pearl of someone else's thought. He has some knowledge of good and evil which the gentle reader lacks, but it is dearly bought, as perhaps all knowledge must be. To be sure, a good critic is a useful creat- ure in his way, but it is a very good critic indeed in the making of whom it is worth while that a gentle reader should be spoiled. Happily, in spite of the current epi- demic of authorship, the gentle reader still seems to abound and to read books with uncorrupted faculties. A year or two ago a Boston newspaper of high literary respon- sibility chronicled the death of Mrs. So-and- so, "the distinguished author." It gave a sketch of her life and a list of her prin- cipal books. There were a baker's dozen of them, and an ink-bedabbled reader who ran his eye down the list failed to recog- nize a single title that he had ever heard of before. But the gentle reader must have read those books and approved them with his catholic kindness, else so many of them had never lived in print, and the good author had gone with a soul far less re- lieved to her honorable rest. 21 Cousin Anthony and I It is surprising what readers, gentle and otherwise, are expected to accomplish, and do accomplish after a fashion, nowadays. No wonder it should be thought and of- ten remarked that the contemporary reader Bad case of is in pretty deep waters, and that doubts t.'ie con- temporary should be now and then expressed as to his Teader* ability to keep his head above them. A century ago there was a little library of classics that he read at more or less, and if he could lay hands on a weekly newspaper he read that too. Two generations ago he was taking a daily paper, and perhaps an eclectic magazine made up from the British monthlies. The civil war upset his habits and set him to reading all the news- papers he could afiford to buy, and weekly picture -papers and a monthly magazine be- sides. The cheapening of the cost of white paper and the lowering of the price of "news" has confirmed him in the habits he learned then. Such an amount of read- ing is offered him now for two cents that he feels that he cannot afford to take in less than two or three newspapers, and the mag- azines are so cheap and so admirable that 22 Readers and Reading he must read one or two of them every month. And all the time books keep tum- bling out from the presses faster than ever, and, of course, a man who thinks that he has a mind is bound to feed it part of the time on books. No wonder that the con- temporary reader is embarrassed, and com- plains that he cannot keep up, and wants to know what to do about it. There is nothing more serious really the matter than that the conditions under which he is struggling are novel, and that he has not yet adapted himself to their re- quirements. In primitive times when men wandered about in the woods and roosted in trees at night, they ate what they could find wherever and whenever they found it. As food grew more plentiful they only ate when they were hungry, and gradually they got the habit of being hungry at stated in- tervals. Then as the variety of victuals in- creased they developed the civilized prac- tice of using certain kinds of food for particular meals, and came gradually to the sophisticated method of having things served by courses, and varying their diet 2 3 Cousin Anthony and I according to the hour of the day and the state of the market. No civilized New Yorker complains because there are more kinds of fish in Fulton Market than his pal- ate can test or his stomach accommodate. If he has smelts for his breakfast and sal- mon after his soup at dinner, he is thankful and tries not to eat overmuch of either of them. He must teach himself to take his literature in the same enlightened manner, reading according to his appetite and his necessities, as he would eat ; not gorging himself because the market is generous ; not eating a pie for breakfast nor beginning his dinner with coffee, but taking things as they ought to come. And especially, if he is an intelligent man and wants to make the most of his day, he must read his newspapers with intelli- gence, doing it quickly while his mind is fresh, wresting the news out of them like the meat from a nutshell, and discarding the rest. It is easy for him, if he allows himself to do so, to read the newspapers and nothing else, just as it is a simple mat- ter to support life on hog and hominy. 24 Readers and Reading But if he is going to read to the best pur- pose he must have a system about his read- ing analogous to that which regulates his diet. If he reads the newspapers as he ought to read them, and does not spend his eyes on " miscellany ' ' and spun-out gossip, he will have time to get through them and keep the run of the magazines besides. If he reads the best of what is in the maga- zines he will read most of the best new fic- tion before it gets between covers, and will supplement usefully the current informa- tion that he gets from the newspapers. If he reads in the magazines only what appeals to him, he will still have time every day to read something in a book ; and if he makes a point of reading something, however little, every day in a book that is worth reading, his library will be bound to pay him high interest on its value. Above all things the modern must adapt his reading, in bulk and quality, to his personal circumstances and individual wants. The very multitude of new books destroys the obligation to read many of them. There is nothing any longer except 25 Cousin Anthony and I the Bible and Shakespeare that the contem- porary American need blush not to know. If he has intelligence and reasonable culture the presumption will be that if he has not read this it was because he was busy read- ing that, or was more profitably occupied than in reading either. Books are not much of a bugaboo in these days there are too many of them. We look more and more to results and boggle less and less about processes. If so be the mind is alert and discriminating, and can choose what is good, and grasp it wherever he finds it, there is no vain questioning as to the par- ticular books on which it gained its edge. There is a good old saw about judging a man by the company he keeps, and as saws go it is pretty sound doctrine. Judge a man if you will by his companions, taking due notice as to how far he gives himself up to them, and how much they mean to him ; for of course there are men and men, and some men catch the tone of their associates and others give tone to them. Books are companions to many of us men and women, but if you undertake 26 Readers and Reading to judge us by the books we read you will have occasion to use your best discretion. People take their books so differently. Some of us do not exercise our minds enough in our daily toil, and we like when we read to read books substantial enough to sharpen our faculties. Others of us come home with tired wits and want easy books that will rest and amuse us. Two people may read the same novel with equal pleasure, yet if one reads it after breakfast and the other after dinner, the fact that it amused them both does not tell the same story about the quality of their minds. If the book which you read when you are tired is strong enough food for my mind when its energies are fresh, it must mean that your mind and my mind lack a good deal of being mates. And besides, there are people to whom it comes natural to read, and there are others, even in these days of newspapers and schools, to whom reading comes hard. I have seen, as most of us have, so many thoroughly worthless persons who were great readers, that when I meet a thor- 27 Cousin Anthony and I oughly worthy and intelligent person who doesn't read, it fills me with admiration and respect. I do meet such persons now and then. They are apt to be quick and accurate observers, good talkers, people of action. Of course they do read a little something every day, the newspaper if nothing more, but reading is not a neces- sity to them. They don't count on it as an amusement or depend upon it as an exercise of the mind. To the habitual reader, reading becomes as necessary as alcohol to the dram-drinker. It doesn't seem to make any violent amount of differ- ence what he reads, but he must sit in a chair a certain length of time every day and rest his eyes and his mind on a printed page. You can no more judge such a per- son by the book-company he keeps than you can judge a lunatic by the qualities of his keepers. His reading is habit. It never turns to energy ; never influences action. He sleeps better after it ; that is all. 28 Ill WORK AND THE YANKEE WORK AND THE YANKEE ilT is rumored that ammonia has been trained to haul street- cars, and promises to prove strong, docile, and cheap, not afraid of the cars, and able to run up hill without getting out of breath. Even in a decade so prolific of tractorian movements as the present one, this is a development that is not to be sneezed at. I suppose it is another bit of Yankee enter- prise. The Yankee's antipathy to work has never yet been adequately appreciated. He takes to it so effectively that you might think him a Rollo sort of person who does it for his play. But not so. He is in a state of perpetual insurrection against the primal curse. He feels that he was born to sit on the fence and whittle in the sun- shine, and he is against every apparent Cousin Anthony and I necessity that would compel him to forego the serene pleasures of a purely contempla- tive existence. He recognizes, to be sure, that work has got to be done. No one has a more vivid realization of that. But the consciousness of the need of getting things done does not impel him to take his coat off and do them, so much as to contrive some way of accomplishing ends without working. The crudest, simplest way of do- ing that is to get rich enough to hire labor. Accordingly, the Yankee does try to get rich, and does not try in vain. It is not that he loves money so much, and desires to possess it, as that he loves labor so little. But to get rich is only an indirect way of beating the tyrant. The Yankee would rather abolish work than elude it. If he can get it done without human interven- tion at all, he likes that best ; and if he cannot wholly eliminate human interven- tion, he wants to reduce it to its lowest possible limit. When he gets matters fixed so that the work is done with very little in- termeddling, he is willing to sit by and su- pervise the process. He will pull a lever 3 2 Work and the Yankee and turn a cock now and then without much complaint, if so be that he can rumi- nate and whittle between times. It is not that he is lazy. His name is a synonyme for energy and perseverance. But to make things work together for the automatic ac- complishment of labor, and to sit by and see that they work right that is the Yan- kee idea of the mission of man. It is the right idea ; perhaps even the highest idea that there is on the subject. Omnipotence, according to the reverent conception of some of the wisest philoso- phers, is not so much the ability to do all things, as to com pel a spontaneous perform- ance of allotted duties by all creation. So it may fairly be argued that it is not the Yankee's perversity but the divine spark in him that is at the bottom of his desire to make nature toil while he looks on. Of the propensity toward contemplation he has no monopoly. The seers of all times have shared that. It has peopled monasteries and convents, and enthusiastic Buddhists have been used these many centuries to give up all their time to it. But it is the dis- 33 Cousin Anthony and I tinction of the Yankee, admirably illustrated in the case of Lincoln, to combine the con- templative disposition with an acute sense of responsibility for the proper conduct of af- fairs. He insists upon having time to think, but he also insists that the work shall go on while he is thinking. It would not suit him merely to sit under a bo-tree and con- centrate his mind on his own corporeal centre, nor yet to vegetate in a monastery. That would seem to him an evasion of re- sponsibility. What he does do is to build a machine that will do his work while he sits by and watches it. I wonder sometimes that with his inter- mixture of the meditative and the practical he has not made greater progress in devel- oping the possibilities of prayer. Prayer might be loosely defined as one method of getting some things done without actually doing them, and in that aspect of it it might be expected to appeal to the Yankee. No doubt it does appeal to him, but he seems to have made no greater progress with it than his predecessors on earth in other climes and ages. Consider- 34 Work and the Yankee ing how long prayer has been in use in the Som^pos- world and how much human energy it has fr*y*r. engrossed, it seems a remarkable thing that there should continue to be such uncertain- ty about its effects. When a boy throws a ball over a wall, he cannot tell precisely where it is going to land, but he is sure it went over and that it will hit something. When a doctor gives medicine he cannot be certain of its effect until the patient has shown it, and he cannot always be sure then ; nevertheless he knows the medicine was an actual force and that it did some- thing, though other forces may have neutral- ized its action. But when a man of aver- age sentiments prays he is not sure whether or not anything has gone out from him which has had any effect outside of his own range of perception. He is sure that his own mind has worked in a certain manner. If other persons have heard him pray, he may be convinced that his uttered senti- ments have affected their minds, but be- yond that everything is foggy and uncer- tain. That is an unsatisfactory state of things, 35 Cousin Anthony and I with which prayerful persons ought not to be satisfied. If prayer is worth using at all, and great numbers of intelligent peo- ple are convinced that it is, it is worth using with the utmost intelligence and the highest attainable skill. The kind of prayer in which the petitioner asks for everything he can think of, in the hope that some of his supplications may reach the mark, is as much out of date as those doses affected by doctors of the last genera- tion, in which a lot of drugs were mixed, not for their combined effect, but in the hope that the right one might be among them, and might find its way to the right spot in the patient. Perhaps clumsy doc- tors do that way still. Not so the masters of medicine. Their diagnoses make plain to them what they want to do ; then, if they use a drug at all, it is sent to accom- plish that particular purpose. So, in this enlightened generation, the prayers of the great prayer-masters should be rifle-shots sent by an understood force at an ascer- tained mark. Whether they hit or miss should depend upon comprehensible con- 36 Work and the Yankee ditions. If a savage fires at the moon with a rifle, he may be surprised at not hit- ing it ; but a man who understands about rifles is not surprised. He knows what may be expected of them. So it should be possible to understand prayer. There are forces of nature which used to be mysterious, but which the men of our day can use and control, because they have learned how. If there are natural forces which can be reached or directed by pray- er, it is not unimaginable that human in- telligence may gain a more definite use, and some measure of control of them also. Men pray to God, but there is no natural force that the idea of God does not in- clude. The more rational idea of prayer would seem to be not an argument or en- treaty which influences the sentiments of the Deity, but a force which acts directly on some force which is included in God. Of prayer so considered it is as obvious a necessity that the results it seeks should accord with God's will as that the results expected from the control of other natural forces should accord with the laws of 37 Cousin Anthony and I nature. Men do not expect water to run up hill and turn a mill-wheel. They have found out that water runs down hill. But if the use of water was still in the experi- mental stage they might put their mill- wheels at various points to see what results they got. Until they learned the laws of nature as they affect water, water-power would be a mysterious and uncertain force. Prayer is still in the experimental stage. We know that it is of no use as a force, except so far as it conforms to the will of God. Yet many of us believe that it brings things to pass which would not hap- pen without it. Electricity works in ac- cordance with the will of God when it hauls a street car, but it would not haul the car except for the interposition of the will of man. So we constantly use prayer as though it were an objective force, sub- ject to the will of man in accordance with the will of God. We are pretty sure that the will of God, including and regulating all natural forces, is invariable, not sub- ject to whims or argument or entreaty. When we pray, then, we do not hope to 38 Work and the Yankee alter God's will, but rather for the applica- tion to a special case of some force whose existence is suspected rather than under- stood, which is included, as are all natural forces, in God, but which, like other forces, is subject to our will in proportion as we understand the laws that govern it. But we don't seem to know enough about prayer yet to adapt our methods with any certainty to its possibilities. We set up our mill-wheels and wait to see which way the force tends, and whether or not it will turn them. We string our wires, but don't quite know how to get the electricity into them. We cannot gear our wants by prayer to the great central force so as to get our necessities satisfied. When we have more nearly perfected our knowledge of prayer, and of the will of God, we will, perhaps, be able to do that very thing. Then, when we see a comet coming our way we may be able to pray our planet out of its course as easily as we steer a ship out of the course of another and avoid a collision. Then, when we are in such a predicament as often are the passengers of 39 Cousin Anthony and I a disabled steamer, we can count with some certainty upon calm seas and succor from the nearest ship. Man is not the supreme force of the Universe, but he is akin to it. He shares its quality. All things are possible to him if only he can learn how. If he can ever become the reverent master of scientific prayer, we may expect to see the rate of his progress indefinitely accelerated. The incurable will be cured then ; the imprac- ticable will be done ; the secret of perpet- ual motion will be revealed ; the fountain of youth will gush out. The millennium will have come, but only for those who learn to know it. 40 IV CHORES CHORES T is complained of the times that they make too many specialists. The economical division of labor seems to de- mand that workers shall con- fine themselves to a particular detail of a job, which passes out of their hands to be completed. Editors no longer set type and write up local occurrences. Physi- cians, in increasing numbers, confine their ministrations to the eye, or the ear, or the throat, or the vermiform appendix. Among artisans it is the exception when a single tailor completes a coat, or one machinist makes a complete machine. Consequently specialists abound and all-around men are scarce. Now, it is economical and profitable on various accounts to be a specialist, but there are charms, and even a measure of 43 Cousin Anthony and I advantage, about being an all-around man, and means that tend to preserve the capac- ity to deal with things in general, without sacrificing the mastery of something in par- ticular, are worth cultivating in the interest of general development. That must be the developing specialist's justification in cul- tivating the branch of domestic industry known as " chores." It is apparently wasteful for a man who can earn several dollars an hour at the work which is his specialty to spend any of his time in labor which can be better performed for him by the man whose time is worth very much less. If the better paid man lets his chores encroach upon the hours that belong to his special work, he certainly is wasteful, but it does not prove that it is wiser for him to forego chores altogether. In moderation and at proper times they are good for him. As a rule, the better he is paid for the hours he spends on his regular job, the fewer hours he works at it. That is not because he is satisfied with less than he can earn, but because high-priced work is usually exhausting, and cannot be long 44 Chores kept up without loss of quality. So the best-paid men commonly have some leisure, part of which they should devote to culture and various supplementary duties, and part, I maintain, to chores which cannot be left out without appreciable detriment. We are used to being told that it is not enough to give mere money to charity, and that our benefactions, if they are to do the most good to us and to those whom they help, must include personal service. We seem to owe a measure of personal service to domestic life as well as to charity, and if we do not pay it, domestic life does not yield to us all that we might get out of it. The ability to do things depends partly upon our willingness to do them now and then. But the ability to do things is power, and power is very sweet to have and to ex- ercise, and that not only in great things but in small. The man who cannot do the ordinary small tinkering that has to be done from week to week in an ordinary modern house denies himself a conscious- ness of power which is very cheap at the price it costs. Not to be able to put wash- 45 Cousin Anthony and I ers on a leaky water-faucet, to take off or put on gas-burners, and to remedy the sim- pler maladies of plumbing, is to admit one's self to be the mere occupant, but not the master, of the modern house. To put in glass takes too much time, and alto- gether it is not as necessary to the modern as it was to his grandfather that he should know how to be his own glazier. So with most carpenter work. It takes too long to do well any job of consequence ; better have in the adept from his shop. And yet some tools and the ability to use them seem to be indispensable to the householder's self-respect. Not to be able to plane the top of a door or the edge of a drawer when it sticks ; or to drive a nail straight, or send home a screw without splitting the wood, or fit a key, or mend a child's toy, must involve a humiliating consciousness of in- efficiency. Yet there are men who strive to reconcile with self-esteem all these in- competencies, and another more inexcus- able than either of them the inability to run a furnace and raise or lower the tem- perature of one's habitation at will. 46 Chores Tuning pianos and mending dormant clocks are accomplishments, and do not come under the head of ordinary chores. Moreover, they are occupations of elegant leisure, and not for the odd moments of a busy life. But with true chores it is differ- ent. There is a flavor about them which is too valuable to be lost out of life. A householder who has none that he recog- nizes might almost as well live in a hotel. He is the sort of man who rings for a ser- vant when the fire falls down. Poor help- less one, who misses so much of the luxury of doing things for himself ! In my own case I recognize a possibility that I may shortly come to have leisure for all the self-improvement in the way of chores that I care to undertake, for since The profit and loss of my brother Mundanus has become rich haringa famous and famous as the author and autocrat brother. of the Boot-Jack Trust, I have been very strongly tempted to stop working for my- self and arrange with him for my support. It may be that I shall conclude that the habit of drudgery is too firmly fixed on me to be thrown off with impunity, so that 47 Cousin Anthony and I perhaps I shall elect to go on working ; but if I do, it will be in the nature of a self- indulgence, maintained for mere personal ease, against my conviction of what is just and right. For my argument is, and it is conceived on general and impersonal grounds, and founded without prejudice on dispassionate observation, that a com- fortable maintenance without work is a very moderate set-off to any ordinary man for the inconvenience and detriment of having an immoderately successful brother. The reason lies in the incorrigible tendency of so- ciety to measure brothers by the same stand- ard. When they are little, society puts them back to back and observes which is the taller. When they are grown, it piles their achievements or renown or incomes up side by side, and remarks which pile is bigger. Mr. Rockefeller's or Mr. Astor's income may run up into the millions, with- out making anyone think the worse of my capacity ; but ever since it became known that Mundanus was getting fifty thousand a year (largely payable in Boot-Jack stock, as I happen to know, but the public doesn't) 48 Chores it has been imputed to me as a fault, and somewhat of a disgrace, that my in-takings are not so large. It is so well understood as to be beyond argument or dispute, that in children of the same parents quite as much disparity of characteristics and abili- ties obtains as in persons who are not allied by blood. So also some brothers have a better education, or better opportunities, or better luck than others. Nevertheless, however conscientiously a man may have used the talents given him, and whatever honorable progress he may have made in life, if it be his misfortune to have a me- teoric brother, who has sailed conspicuous where he has had to plod, and arrived glori- ous while he has sweated in patient aspira- tion, the slow-gaited man is bound to suf- fer as, I do, by disparaging comparison with his ocupod fellow of the same brood. Lord Nelson had a brother, a clergyman, who might have passed down into a re- spectable obscurity but for a misfortune of birth which has lugged him into history as a person who, in spite of his breed, had no talent for fighting, and not even a reason- 49 Cousin Anthony and I able regard for Lady Hamilton. William Nelson, however, at least inherited his brother Horatio's title and estates, and found in them, it is to be hoped, some compensation for the disparaging compa- rison from which he suffered. George Washington had a brother ; but with the far-seeing consideration characteristic of a patriot -statesman, he buried him long be- fore the Revolution. Lord Tennyson had a brother, who is best known to our time as that brother of the Laureate whose verse was not so good as Alfred's. Analogous examples abound, some of them are so familiar that it would be in- delicate to name them in print. What worthy and delightful men of our own day and nation have been overshadowed by the spreading renown of their brother, the great poet ! What gifted and zealous preachers are best identified to-day as brothers of some supreme genius of the pul- pit ! There are some families, to be sure, as the Washburnes, the Adamses, the Sher- mans, the Fields, or the Potters, in which an inheritance of talent and energy has So Chores been so evenly distributed that the whole brood seemed to climb abreast out of the ruck of common humanity. Such brothers as these are in a fortunate case, and the credit of each one helps up the others. But far more commonly it happens that when high success visits a family at all it comes in a lump upon a single member. How reasonable it would be in such cases if the less fortunate members should lament the success of the lucky one, and lay his re- nown up against him ! To the credit of human nature be it noted that it seems usu- ally not to happen that way. The remark- able law which decrees that he who has shall have more, usually proves its power, and the successful brother, besides the ma- terial advantages that his achievements bring him, commonly enjoys an exagger- ated share of the esteem and admiration of his own kin. My brother Mundanus, by his notorious successes, has impaired my individuality. However hard I try, I can never hope hereafter to be known of men except as a brother of Mundanus of the Boot- Jack Trust. Yet I feel no resentment Cousin Anthony and I toward him. I rejoice in him, I am just as fond of him as ever, and proud of him be- sides. I make no effort to get out of his shadow. Our families still commune to- gether, and it was only this morning that my eldest son suggested that my project of sending him to college was unwise, and that it would be vastly better for him to shelve his books and go down and strike his Uncle Mundanus for a job. I should prefer that Cato should go on with his studies, and shall so counsel him ; but so far as his dis- position to get something out of Mundanus is concerned, I am convinced that that is a sound instinct and based on equity. V CONSIDERATIONS MATRIMONIAL CONSIDERATIONS MATRIMONIAL EOUSIN ANTHONY has been in to tell me of the betrothal of his son Ajax to a young woman of exceptionally vo- luminous financial prospects. My cousin is not himself a man of large means, and his children's fortunes are still to be made ; nevertheless it was not with- a ri out an air of deprecation and symptoms of uneasiness that he told me what Ajax had done. He confided to me the name of the maiden's father, and little as I know about finance I recognized its fiscal potency, and realized the probability that the daughter of such a parent would some day be very rich. I asked Anthony how it happened. He could not tell me much. It had been sudden news to him, and wholly unex- pected. Beyond the fact that it had hap- 55 Cousin Anthony and I pened he knew little. Ajax had asked neither his advice nor his consent. The young woman's natural protectors had ap- parently made no effort to interfere. If she chose to marry Ajax they seemed will- ing that she should do so, and the engage- ment was liable to be announced at any moment on the ticker-tapes, and in the society columns of the daily papers. I congratulated Anthony, of course ; but it was evident that the disparity between his son's fortune and that of his prospective daughter-in-law embarrassed him, and that he had come in not so much to be felici- tated as to be reassured. So I did my best to reassure him. Remarking (not without some private satisfaction in the thought) that Ajax seemed to feel entirely competent to man- age his affairs, and that, anyhow, the busi- ness had already passed the point where interference was possible, I proceeded to dwell at some length on the disadvantages that had to be overcome by a young man of character and ability who married a very rich girl. What such a young man 56 Considerations Matrimonial was after in life was of course to work out what was in him. As long as he was tolerably poor he had the stern incentive of scant means, and if a family became dependent on his efforts, the incentive be- came so much the stronger. In that case he must work hard, take care of his health, grasp every chance, be temperate, thrifty, and far-sighted, since only by the most ear- nest devotion could he hope for such success as would yield him the comforts of life. But to the husband of a woman of fortune this incentive would be almost wholly lost, though the mischief might in some degree be counterbalanced by the opportunities for very advantageous labor which a pow- erful family connection may often control. I went on to point out some of the perils which beset the path of the working hus- band of a rich wife. He may get lazy and is(lrisky stop work. It will be easy for him to do venturf ' so, since if anything happens to check his labors the strain will be immediately re- laxed, and someone will stand ready to undertake any task he may choose to lay down. Instead of having his endurance 57 Cousin Anthony and I strengthened by moderate hardship, he will be pampered. If he needs a week's rest, he will be urged to take a month ; if he needs a month, he will be advised to go abroad and spend the summer. He will probably be over-fed and very possibly he will develop gout. He will drink cham- pagne when he should be drinking claret, and claret when he should not be drinking at all. He will be liable to be called upon to waste much time aboard yachts ; he will be exposed to many perils from horses ; he will be liable to travel at short notice to the remotest places for the benefit of his health, or his wife's health, or the health of his children ; he must run the risk of being oppressed by a multiplicity of servants, and of having his energies frittered away in detail by the cares of large establishments. He will be nagged by promoters who will offer him opportu- nities to invest his wife's surplus income. It will be very hard for him to stick to busi- ness. Small matters will not be worth his attention, and the direction of large con- cerns is not to be learned without prelim- 58 Considerations Matrimonial inary training in affairs of less importance. Then there will be his children. Pie will have to see that his boys are not ruined by luxury, and that adventurers do not steal his daughters. But, of course, I went on to say, seeing Anthony growing solemn, somebody must marry the rich girls. There might be enough rich young men to pair off with them if all the rich bachelors were avail- able ; but as long as a large percentage of the rich bachelors insist on marrying poor girls there is no choice but for some rich girls to marry poor men or none. And, after all, if a girl is truly a nice girl, it would be a shame to avoid her because of ccari her fortune. When I was young, I told 2t him, if I had really loved a girl, and she had loved me, and had been of age or an orphan, I would have married her if she had owned all New York between Canal Street and Central Park. Dreadful as it would have been to be burdened with such a load I would have felt that a true affec- tion might make it tolerable. I think I was a comfort to cousin An- 59 Cousin Anthony and I thony. He went away looking a good deal less dejected than when he came in. What a happiness it is, to be sure, when one gets a chance to benefit a fellow - creature's spirits by changing his point of view ! I did no violence to my conscience either in speaking to him as I did, for really there is no insuperable objection to marrying a very rich woman and even living on her money. Most men prefer wives with incomes, all other things being equal, if they are to be had. It is true that prudent husbands pre- fer some measure of financial independence, and are loath to rest their entire mainte- nance on a wife's provision ; but that is a matter of detail, and it is not necessarily discreditable to even an able-bodied man that he should live on his wife's money. If there is money enough it may be more con- venient for both of them and all concerned that it should be used in that way. Good husbands are worth all rich women can afford to give. It accords very definitely, however, with public opinion that dependent husbands of rich women should be good husbands. 60 Considerations Matrimonial Rightly or wrongly, there is more patience with the failures of men who are casually married than with those with whom do- mestic life is a profession. If the depend- ent husband of a rich wife earns his main- tenance no man is better entitled to the respect of the community. If, he can keep his wife's respect, cultivate her intelligence, keep her mind in a progressive state, and make her reasonably happy and do equally well by himself, he is performing a difficult part in a creditable and workman-like man- ner, and has no occasion to fret about where his money comes from. He cannot justly be held answerable for results, because his most conscientious efforts may not be successful. If he cannot make his wife af- firmatively happy he should try to keep her from becoming aggressively discontented, and even though he fails in that, he should still endeavor to keep her respectable. If he ceases to be her lover, he should still be her protector. Married or otherwise, it is an achievement to be respectable and a considerable feat to maintain a tolerable continuity of happiness. 61 Cousin Anthony and I I was saying the other day to that stately lady, Mrs. Damocles, that I had such a high opinion of Winship, partly because of his exceptionally enlivening personal qualities and partly for his marvellous discrimination in the choice of a wife. And I added that I had the very highest opinion of Mrs. Winship because of her sense and her love- liness, and especially because of her success in living with Winship and being his wife. Now Winship is a good man and delightful company. He is pretty to look at and very good indeed to go ; but he has a prodigious enjoyment of life and such an unbroken eagerness to taste everything that is good, and be in everything that is moving, that I felt that I cast no reflection upon him when I said that for a woman to live with him, as Mrs. Winship did, was a great feat. "It is a great feat," remarked Mrs. Damocles, with a certain air of giving her mind relief, " for any woman to live with any man, or any man to live with any woman." " Well, if it comes to that," said I, " I presume it is, and it is a feat exceedingly 62 Considerations Matrimonial well worth accomplishing. I find I have more and more respect the older I grow for people who hit it off gracefully and suc- cessfully." That was true. I do have such a senti- ment for such people, and I dare say it is a sentiment as common as it is well founded. It is a considerable feat for a grown man and a grown woman to live together happily, and the people who ac- complish it in any high degree of perfec- tion must either be very nice people or must try very hard. I respect them either way, whether their success is due to natu- ral sweetness or to sustained effort. Peo- ple who are capable of sustained effort to maintain the harmony of their domes- tic relations are very good sort of people. They must have fidelity, that king-pin among the virtues, and divers other strong ingredients that go to make up what we call " good stuff." I am not sure but that we should respect them even more than folks who are simply born sweet and reasonable, and who love each other and get on with- out trying. 63 Cousin Anthony and I It is matter of record that in patri- archal and scriptural times it was held a thing particularly good and pleasant to behold brethren dwell together in unity. That man and wife should dwell in that way seems not to have been thought so affecting a spectacle. Perhaps it was held that if a patriarch could not live harmo- niously with one wife, he could with an- other, or perhaps the sentiment of the times favored hammering a disorderly wife with a tent-pin until she became tractable, so that domestic tranquillity was taken for granted. It is not surprising that with changed conditions and the new woman we moderns should have assumed a different point of view. Where we look on it is pleasant to be sure to see brethren brotherly, but it is no great matter if they differ, for the world is big enough for them all. But the world is not big enough for the successful disagreement of man and wife. They may part, but it is not suc- cess ; it is failure. Both must carry away the marks of it, and whatever may hap- pen neither is quite as good as before. In 64 Considerations Matrimonial spite of divorce laws and all easements of that sort, we have contrived to make a deeply serious business of marriage. We ought to applaud those who succeed in it, because success is so indispensably neces- sary. It would be a little different if folks were really free to marry or not as they chose, with no fierce bugaboo behind the alterna- tive. But the fact is the majority of us are not quite free, for there is a bugaboo behind. We are taught and believe that, ... . . , and their if we don t marry, a worse thing may happen claim to us, for we will grow old without either the discipline or the companionship of a mate, without children to bring youth back into our lives; indeed, without the ele- ments of a home. We see people in this predicament, and though there are plenty of encouraging exceptions, on the whole celibacy seems so very second-rate to most of us that we don't bargain for it except under stress of strong necessity. Marriage in most cases seems so preponderately ex- pedient that we would feel that we ought to marry even if we didn't want to, and as 65 Cousin Anthony and I usually we do want to, marriage becomes, practically, a necessity. I declare that I am personally grateful to married people who get on conspicu- ously well. They are a reassuring spec- tacle in society, and as part of society I take comfort in knowing them, and am obliged to them for existing. And, of course, I am especially obliged to the women like Winship's wife, who are par- ticularly good wives. You should see that lady, how she holds that hare-brained creat- ure, not with too tight a lariat or too loose ; neither nagging nor neglectful ; not so de- pendent on him as to shackle him, nor so independent as to leave him too free. Of course, she couldn't do it it unless she was a woman of brains, and unless Winship was a good fellow a fellow, that is, with some gaps in his selfishness. She is too good a wife for him, but I am glad he has got her, and so, unmistakably, is he. The most effectual argument in favor of marriage is the average bachelor of forty- five. That is as it should be. There are bachelors of mature years who are of such 66 Considerations Matrimonial use to society as to justify their condition, but the average old bachelor is a warning, as he ought to be. He is a shirk, and I have not much patience with him. For the average spinster I have much more re- spect. Her habits are almost always a great deal better than the bachelor's, and she commonly differs from him in being able, not only to take care of herself, but of other people. Provided she does not exist in excessive numbers, her existence is rather an advantage than a detriment to her fellows. I like to see her get every- thing that ought to be coming to her, in- cluding her full share of liberty, and as much happiness as she is able to divert to her own use. It is a question how far liberty is conducive to happiness, but if the ratio between the two is direct, the con- temporary American spinster ought to be happier than spinsters have ever been in time past, for never spinster had her own way to the same extent as she. In a dis- course about middle age, contributed some time ago to the North American Review, Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells said: " Middle 67 Cousin Anthony and I life for an unmarried daughter is often very hard, for she may have no real liberty. A girl at forty ought to have her own choices just as much as if she were married." For a woman writer, a married woman writer, to say " her own choices just as much as if she were married," is an im- pressive bit of unsolicited testimony to the freedom of married women in America, and their habit of doing just as they please. It is true, moreover, that unmarried daugh- ters of reasonably mature years should have just as much freedom as their characters and circumstances will permit. If they are not to have the natural career that is de- sired for womankind, they should be free to make some other kind of career for themselves, if they are able. It is an exceptional married woman who will find it possible to "have her own The con- choices " in anything like the same degree temporary . spinster, as the coming spinster of forty, who finds herself released from parental constraint and free to get out of the world as much as she can. The earth is to be hers and the fulness thereof. It is opening to her, and 68 Considerations Matrimonial she is advancing upon it with flying feet. She promises to be one of the freest of mortal creatures, and one of the most co- ercive and competent. Clubs are growing up in great cities for her convenience ; big buildings are planned for her to live in; charities are looking to her for manage- ment ; dependent relatives are to owe theii support to the results of her intelligent herf>rhl{ _ exertions. There was a time when the leges and ideal condition coveted by women who craved unlimited freedom was that of a widow with one child. Widowhood grows yearly less necessary, and though the single child is as desirable as ever, it is because a child is a pleasure, and not because one is needed as a protection. There is very little left in the way of the spinster who has enlightened parents, and the enlightenment of parents is making such progress that in the course of another generation we may expect to see it customary to provide for the inclination of unmarried women for an independent existence. The independence of married women is secured by law, and is definitely ascertained. 69 Cousin Anthony and I The independence of unmarried women of mature years, which naturally follows and was bound to follow, depends not on statu- tory enactment, but on social custom and notions of propriety. Of course it takes longer to change the views of proper people upon propriety than it does to make a new statute ; but the change is coming. How many spinsters does each of us know who have summer cottages on their own hook, where, for part of the year at least, they are a law unto themselves? How many who support themselves ? How many who travel where they will without any other than financial limitations? There is a good deal of solace for the spinster in these days, and there is abundant reason to be glad of it. The spinster is a great boon to indi- viduals, though perhaps the State has good reasons for not approving of her. Likewise to families. In a land where men have her great ^ tt ^ e ^ e ' sure to visit, and where the habits usefulness. o f married women and children are in- fluenced, if not absolutely regulated, by the habits of men, the spinster can make 70 Considerations Matrimonial visits, thereby keeping up old friendships and bringing new atmospheres into homes that have need of wholesome variation. The spinsters form the nearest approach to a leisure class in America. A vast work is done by them all the time. A vaster work awaits them. All social philosophers who know anything will hail with approval all indications that promise increased lib- erty and thereby increased usefulness to spinsters. VI LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND GOSSIP LOVE, FRIENDSHIP, AND GOSSIP HOUSIN ANTHONY tells me that he has been taken regu- larly to task by two dames of his acquaintance because he does not dwell oftener in his literary deliverances upon the incident of love. Love, they told him and he said they were both matrons who had lived long enough in the world to know was the best thing in life, and there was nothing that people liked better to read about. They insisted that it was a professional blunder on his part not to write love-stories and not to work more of the tender passion 7 into his business generally. Anthony said books - that he promised to amend, but he admit- ted that he had small hopes of doing so, for he never had been able to make love- literature, and it was late in life for him to 75 Cousin Anthony and I begin. He insisted that the love that was of real value in the world wasn't interest- ing, and that the love that was interesting wasn't always admirable. Love that hap- pened to a person like the measles or fits, and was really no particular credit to itself or its victims, was the sort that got most into books and was made much of; where- as the kind that was attained to by the en- deavor of true souls, and that had wear in it, and that made things go right instead of tangling them up, was too much like duty to make satisfactory reading for people of sentiment. If he ever did write a love- story he believed he would have no wom- en in it at all, unless, possibly, just one to make the necessary trouble. Not but that women did their full share of all the loving that was done, and did it to admiration, but because to portray a man's love for a man would give the sentiment of love, he thought, in its simplest and most lucid form, uncomplicated by the incident of sex. When a man loved a man you knew what you had ; but when he was in love with a woman the diagnosis was full of 76 Love, Friendship, and Gossip perplexities, and how much of his seizure was passion, how much hysteria, and how much sincere affection, were subtleties too fine for mere laymen to struggle with. I do not think that Anthony will ever write acceptably on love, and it is probably a wise instinct that steers him clear of that department of literature. Indeed, I do not think he fully understands the subject. And yet there is something to be said for his suggestion that the more admirable species of love and the worthiest to dwell upon, is not that which one falls into willy- nilly, but which is resolutely given out of the heart. The love into which volition enters is true love, quite as genuine as the involuntary emotion which figures in love at first sight. Faithfulness is surely about the best quality that love can possess, and the very idea of faithfulness implies voli- tion. The popular mind recognizes the element of volition in love. It expects people to love persons whom they ought to love or whom they have undertaken to love. If a man has a lovable wife and does not love her, it does not pity him as an 77 Cousin Antbony and I unfortunate ; it blames him as a poor stick. It is right. If the man is in love with his wife, he is in luck to be sure, and he ought to be thankful ; but if not, it is no excuse for his not loving her. He ought to be able to love her if he chooses, and if she will let him he ought to choose. That is the vox popidi in the matter, but perhaps in this case it is not divine, for certainly the love-story writers are not out of breath with trying to echo it. They are almost too prone to treat the master-passion as a wind that bloweth where it listeth and no- where else, and some of them have even been known to coddle married persons in their stories who run up against extra- parietal affinities and are wrecked in the resulting tumult. But, of course, the exi- gencies of story -making are imperative, and the demand for stories with love in them being urgent and steady, the people who supply it must be suffered to write them as they can, even though it may revolt some thrifty souls to see misery misbuilt out of the materials of happiness. Platonic love seems not to be of much use 78 Love, Friendship, and Gossip to the story-makers unless it is always on the verge of some unplatonic excess. Perhaps it is due to the artificers of romance and their disparagement of it as a thing not useful to them in their business that our opinion of its instability is so decided. Of course they are not all against it. One of them, Sir Walter Besant, has been discuss- ing platonic friendships, and whether or not they can really be made to work. He thinks they may, but not between two per- sons both of whom are young. It is well that someone should take thought about platonic friendships, for Nature, who superintends most things, does not seem to care very much about them. It makes no difference to her, apparently, whether they work or not. No great natu- ral law governs them. The principle of natural selection shirks responsibility for them, and no one dares to assume that the fittest of them will survive. They cannot be left to take care of themselves, but, if they exist at all, must be constantly under supervision, and subjects of argument and special pleas. 79 Cousin Anthony and I Consider what the essentials of a platonic friendship are ! Are they not that the par- ties to it shall be of different sexes, and that there shall be a considerable degree of exclusiveness about their intimacy ? Does anyone doubt that exclusiveness is essen- tial ? Intimacy cannot be intimacy unless it is more or less exclusive. We can only live one life at a time, and if we share a good part of that with any one person, there is so much the less for the rest. If a friendship is not intimate enough to be noticeably exclusive, does anyone ever find it necessary to explain that it is pla- tonic ? Love between women and men was not invented for the entertainment of philoso- phers, but largely for domestic purposes; and if platonic love is to have anything better than a hazardous and unstable exist- ence, the conditions of it must be such that it may prosper without conflict with Nature's more important ends. Thus we see why platonic friendships between young people who might marry do not endure. Such couples get married, and their friend- So Love, Friendship, and Gossip ship merges into a more durable sentiment, or else one of them marries someone else, and their and then it lapses. At least it should lapse, for if it does not, it not only militates against peace in a family, but it tends to keep the unmarried platonist from going about his business and finding himself a mate, according to Nature's design. It is true that there are women, and young women at that, who can contrive for a time to maintain a husband and a simul- taneous platonic intimate. But in such cases one of three things happens : either the wife makes her husband happy and her platonic admirer miserable, or she makes her friend happy and her husband miser- able, or she makes them both miserable. If by any chance or miracle of talent she seems to make them both happy, she makes society miserable, because it cannot see how she does it. And when society is miserable it talks; until finally it breaks up the arrangement. She is bound to fail, and the reason does not lie in any defect in her, but in the fact that her purpose is contrary to the economy of Nature, which Si Cousin Anthony and I has provided barely men enough to go around, and does not permit a woman who has a man of her own to monopolize other men with impunity. Every marriageable man besides her husband that any woman absorbs involves the waste of some other woman's opportunities, and Nature abhors waste with a proverbial antipathy. As for the platonic friendships of young married men, they are hardly worth dis- cussing. The measure of them is simply the wife's capacity to control her feelings. It becomes clear, therefore, that the only platonic friendships that can be trusted are those that do not interfere with Nature's plans. Young lads, "hobbledehoys," if they are not too rich, may cultivate with impunity transitory friendships with women somewhat older than themselves. Such as- sociations are instructive to the lad and amuse the lady, without interfering in any way with her more serious plans. So also there are adult men, who, by reason of special circumstances or exceptional per- sonal qualities, gain special privileges of platonic attachment. It is part of the rec- 82 Love, Friendship, and Gossip ord of the Chevalier Bayard that he loved clearly and without concealment another gentleman's wife, but he was irreproach- able and was not a marrying man, and what was even more important, he was al- most always absent on warlike adventures, so that no one grudged him the occasional solace he found in the lady's society. A considerable measure of platonic affection can be tolerated in almost any case, if it is only tempered by an adequate provision of absence. Society's weapon, as I have said, against an excess of platonic friendship is talk. It is the sort of talk known as gossip. It is rather an ugly weapon at the best, and there is always more or less doubt among kind and conscientious people as to wheth- er its use is justifiable or is a mere indul- gence of their baser dispositions. What does the present reader think about it her- self? Is there a justification for it ? Does it serve any purpose useful enough to war- rant its existence ? Does a person who re- fuses to take part in it show himself superior to his fellows, or does he shirk an obligation 83 Cousin Anthony and I that he owes to society ? When Jack Hare- Excusesfor brain's attentions to young Mrs. McFliget gossip. become audaciously conspicuous, and the whole community sits around and discusses them, is the community engaged in a val- uable work that demands to be done, or is it merely giving evidence of its mali- cious disposition and the emptiness of its mind? There are offences against society which it is the duty of the district-attorney, when he learns of them, to bring to the notice of the grand jury, to the end that their perpetrator may account to the law for his actions. There are also doings which so- ciety regards as offensive to itself of which the district-attorney can take no notice, and which are not of sufficient turpitude to engage the grand jury's attention. But in every household there are self-constituted grand jurors who sit on malfeasances of this sort when the gossips bring the news of them. Yet the gossips, instead of being commended for their vigilance, are pretty generally execrated, and most of us, when we share their labors, do it at some cost to 84 Love, Friendship, and Gossip our own self-respect, and very likely exe- crate ourselves. Now, it is possible that in the loftiness of our conceptions we condemn ourselves overmuch, and restrain a propensity that has been cultivated in us for good. Gossip that pries into hidden proceedings, that suggests worse motives than appear, that carries tales and makes defamatory sugges- tions, is one thing. Gossip that discusses facts that are patent is another. If we should see Jake Hardman running away with Charles McFliget's pocket-book we should think ill of ourselves if we did not cry "Stop thief!" and join in the chase after the rascal. But suppose we think we see Jack Harebrain in the act of robbing McFliget of the affections of his wife. Are we really entitled to think bet- ter of ourselves for holding our tongues and overlooking this apparent larceny, than if we expressed our sentiments freely one to another? If there is enough talk, Flora McFliget's ears will be close stopped in- deed if some of it does not find its way into them. Is it a kindness to her or to 85 Cousin Anthony and I Jack to let their behavior pass unnoticed ? When there is a bridge down on the rail- road and a train is coming, it may be disconcerting to the engineer to halloo and wave a red flag at him, but after all it is kinder to jar his nerves a little while there is still time to pull up, than out of an ex- treme politeness to let him go to destruc- tion. Besides, have we not ourselves and our own morals to consider, and how it may affect our own standards of behavior, to look on without remonstrance at such doings as Jack's and Flora's ? If we ignore that sort of impropriety when it is done in plain sight, we may come presently to think there is nothing amiss in it, and even to take a turn at it ourselves. It seems possible that because gossip is disagreeable it does not get even the mod- erate amount of credit that is its due. It is conceded to be lively talk, but it is felt to be unamiable, and even mean. But if it were wholly bad, decent people of strong convictions about right and wrong would not countenance it, whereas such people do 86 Lore, Friendship, and Gossip at times countenance and even take part in it, and not without occasional good results. People do not abstain from crimes for fear of being talked about, but they do oftentimes check themselves in indiscre- tions out of regard for us gossips, and what we may say about them. Newspapers take pretty complete charge of society nowadays, and with some slight help from the courts see that human conduct is regulated before it gets intolerable. But the newspapers cannot take cognizance of everything, and some things which they are compelled to overlook it may be our province as gossips to see to. If Jack Harebrain and Mrs. McFliget actually elope, the newspapers will attend to their case down to its remotest details ; but so long as their dispositions are susceptible of cure, a worse thing may happen than for the gossip's court to take note of their case and try to laugh them back to good behavior. VII WOMAN SUFFRAGE WOMAN SUFFRAGE |Y son Nicodemus is a tractable little boy and pleasant com- pany. I like to have him along when I take my walks abroad, and he likes to go. But of late his mother has devised objec- tions and insinuated impediments when I have wished him to accompany me, and several times I have found myself shuffling reluctantly off without him, and yet without any tangible reason for leaving him behind. But I have since discovered the reason, recurren ........ . r disfarage- whicn is, that his mother sees so much fault went of ... i man. found with man m the current newspapers and magazines that she fears its effect upon my impressionable nature, and has forebod- ings of a day when I shall come home alone, and tell her that I have felt compelled, on humanitarian grounds, to drop little Nico- demus into the river. Cousin Anthony and I I trust her misgivings are not well-found- ed, but I cannot blame her for entertaining them ; for certainly, if we are to believe Madame Sarah Grand and some other prophets of the magazines, to raise a man- child in these days is to do humanity some- thing very like a grievous wrong. " What is man," exclaims the Psalmist, " that thou art mindful of him ! ' ' Madame Grand and her sisters could have told him. Man, as they are mindful of him, is an unlucky after-thought of the Creator, who, for lack of discipline and due subjection, has de- veloped into a gross being drunken with a sense of his own importance, the oppressor of womankind, the blot upon Nature's face that messes her perfections. There is no use in pretending to question the accuracy of this description, or in deny- ing that there would be no trouble in the world worth mentioning if it were not for man. He is a poor creature, and always has been ; and ever since the human exper- iment began it has been one long uphill struggle to try to make a good thing out of him, and make him do right. No sane 92 Woman Suffrage person has ever blamed woman for man's shortcomings. In spite of the story of Eve and the serpent, man has had to bear the blame for himself, and so far as there was any blame to bear on woman's account he has had to stagger under that too. That has been because he has been re- garded as the stronger and more sensible of the two, and justly responsible for the con- dition of the human family. But there is a new theory now, set forth in serious books, and based on statistics and researches and scientific analogies, that woman is the bet- ter creature, and the one that knows more and is the better worth rearing. If this theory is correct, it involves a certain shifting of responsibility which the critics of man ought to recognize. If woman is more of a man than man is, it is she who is to blame for his degradation, and not he for hers. She should never have permitted him to sink into those unutterable depths in which she sees him now. During all these years in which she has had him, she should have managed to hoist him up on to a decent plane, and make a respect- 93 Cousin Anthony and I able creature of him. If, on the other hand, he is a superior creature, the lord of crea- tion, and responsible for his guilty self and for the woman besides, he should have due credit for what he has done well, as well as blame for his misdemeanors. It is notori- ous that the present progressiveness of wom- en is unparalleled in human history. Shall he have no share of praise for that ? If some women have climbed down on the ladder he has held, is no account to be taken of the multitude who have climbed up ? Is it to be no mitigation of the discipline which he has maintained in the human family that womankind has thrived so amazingly under it ? Man, the poor old thing, is not getting justice. If he has governed the world all these years, the immense advance of women under his rule does him credit. But if he doesn't govern it, and never has been fit to govern it, woman ought to be ashamed to have neglected him as she has. For, ac- cording to the latest theories, he is simply what she has permitted him to become. I have talked with Cousin Anthony 94 Woman Suffrage about Man, and also about Woman. He tells me that if woman suffrage comes to a vote in New York State he expects to vote against it. Such, he says, are the instruc- tions that Mrs. Anthony has given him, and as his vote in the matter concerns her more than himself, he thinks himself even more than usually bound to execute her wishes. I found him quite fixed in the opinion Mrs. Anthony's opinion that * *% f the suffrage would do the New York women ^. a ^ ure no good. The favorite representation of ** suffrage. the reformers, that everyone is allowed to vote except aliens, minors, idiots, and women, seemed to have had no effect on Mrs. Anthony. She had no sort of doubt, of course (nobody has), that wise women were better qualified to vote than foolish men. She would not argue at all whether women were inferior to men or not. She could not see its bearing on the case. Her point of view was familiar enough, being simply that the suffrage was not a privilege but an obligation, and one which it did not seem to her the duty of our women at this time to assume. If the obligation to 95 Cousin Anthony and I vote were laid with any discrimination upon individuals who had proved their ca- pacity to exercise it, Mrs. Anthony thought the case would be different. She would not shrink from a duty that society by any reasonable process of selection seemed to have chosen her to bear. But when all the men could vote it was certainly no special honor to women to let all the women vote too. Nature had suggested in a large way the division of labor between men and women, and though the details of assign- ment varied from age to age, and Mrs. An- thony hoped that she was well up to the times in her estimate of the contemporary dimensions of woman's sphere, she did still believe in the division of labor, and she had not been able to learn of any mitiga- tion of women's present duties by which it was proposed to offset the new task which threatened her. Mrs. Anthony declared, my cousin said, that so far as she under- stood her business in life she tried hard to do it. What she undertook she tried to undertake with her eyes open and with a definite intention of performing it as well 96 Woman Suffrage as she could. If she was called to help manage a public charity and found herself able to respond, she went to the meetings of her colleagues and took her duties seri- ously. If children were born to her she tried industriously to raise them, to keep them clothed and healthy, and to bring them up, as far as she could, to be toler- ably wise and good people. With her chil- dren, and her household, and her social duties, and her labors in the charities with which she was connected, Mrs. Anthony declared that her hands and her mind were full, and that the proposal to compel her to keep up with politics, to go to primaries and vote intelligently at elections was an imposition against which she rebelled. Men were willing enough nowadays to do for women almost anything that women really wanted done. They were particularly will- ing to let women do new kinds of work, especially ill-paid, vexatious work which they were inclined to shirk themselves. But what women really wanted was not so much the privilege of doing the men's work for them as to have the men do their own 97 Cousin Anthony and I work and do it properly. There was noth- ing which women could gain by having the suffrage which they could not gain at far less expense by having men vote conscien- tiously. If there was fighting which it was indispensable to have done, Mrs. Anthony declared that she did not aspire to do it herself. She wanted her men to do it for her. She wanted her men to do her vot- ing also. She demanded protection, secu- rity, and a reasonable amount of peace for the better furtherance of her duties already in hand, which were far too important and too engrossing to share her attention with practical politics. The suffrage once im- posed upon women, they could never get quit of it, and it would be imposed, she feared, unless the mass of women, who don't want it and feel no obligation to under- take it, speak their minds and proclaim how they feel about it and why. Such, Anthony said, were his wife's sentiments. They are emphatic enough, certainly, and justify his intentions about his vote. How widely they are shared by intelligent women in New York State is hard to find out, be- 98 Woman Suffrage cause most of the women who think they want to vote sign petitions, and most of the women who don't, do nothing. But the particular thing that voting men in New York will want to know before they pass upon the woman suffrage question at the polls is, how large a proportion of the in- telligent women in the State feel as Mrs. Anthony does, and prefer to have their vot- ing done by their representative males. It is remarkable with what unanimity, in appearance at least, the question has been left to women to settle. In all the talk about it there has been scarcely any inquiry as to whether it would cost men anything to give women the right to vote. The whole discussion has turned upon the prob- able effect of the ballot upon women, and has prevailed almost exclusively between those who have held that it would pay her to have a vote and those who have held that it would not. However men in general may have pondered in their secret hearts, they have had almost nothing to say as to whether it would pay them to let women vote. Representatives of some "few special 99 Cousin Anthony and I interests have had convictions about it, and have allowed them to come out. The liquor-dealers, for example, are generally understood to feel that woman-suffrage would be detrimental to their business in- terests ; but they are alone among mer- chants, so far as I have noticed, in admit- ting that they could not afford to meet women at t h e polls. The milliners are not concerned as milliners ; they do not fear that suffrage will affect the feminine taste in bonnets. The dry-goods men show no uneasiness. The manufacturers of infants' foods neither fear nor hope. Makers of bicycles are not especially hot for suffrage, nor are side-saddle manufacturers especial- ly opposed to it. The average New York man does not seem to feel that anything unprecedented will happen whether woman- suffrage comes or not. It does not appear that he apprehends that his vote will be worth any the less to him because he shares it with a woman, or that his liberties will be restricted, or that the woman will be any less a woman because she shares his vote- Outwardly at least he has posed as 100 Woman Suffrage a spectator, interested indeed, but bland, courteous, and sympathetic even in his doubts. His behavior has been a credit to him. He has shown scarcely a sign of dis- position to admit the existence or possibil- ity of any antagonism between the inter- ests of women and of men. He has not been over-ready to believe that it would be advantageous to women to vote, but his attitude has been that if it would be advan- tageous to them he will not stand in their way ; and while he has not bound himself to accept their opinion as to the benefits of suffrage he has certainly shown an unaf- fected desire to know what their opinion is, and decided symptoms of a willingness to be guided by it. Appearances are not absolutely to be trusted, but so far as they may guide one's judgment, man in New York really does not care very much, so far as he himself is concerned, whether woman votes or not. Certainly his attitude is admirable. It is intelligent and affectionate and respectful ; and yet man never assumed an attitude that showed more conclusively his confidence in 101 Cousin Anthony and I the authenticity of his commission as Lord of Creation. Even those exceptionally ve- hement suffragists who denounce him as the Tyrant do not scare him. He is not dismayed at any possible hosts of skirted voters that those ladies may array against him. He knows that the ballot is but an instrument and the voters are but the keys, and he seems content that whoever can shall play what tune they may. The pos- sibility of more keys does not worry him, though he has not yet conceded its advisa- bility, for he knows that be they many or few, they will all yield their most effectual music to the hands that are best adapted to touch them. The tune, man thinks, will be about the same as heretofore, and there will be no sweeping shiftings of performers ; but if more notes will give fuller or more harmonious music, for his part he seems ready to have them. Such, and so confident, is his attitude. The only wonder is that it has not occurred to any observant woman to satirize it in a gentle essay on "A Certain Condescension in Males." 102 VIII THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL |T is prodigious what an amount of energy is sunk in the un- successful exercise of that in- alienable right, the pursuit of happiness. One reason for the waste is that people are governed too much by the opinions of others as to what is pleas- ure, and neglect to get information that would fit them by analyzing their own ex- periences. Thousands and tens of thou- sands of people do things day after day with the purpose of enjoyment, which they never have enjoyed, and never will, but which they have learned to regard as in- trinsically pleasant. They ride horses, they drive, hunt, dress, dance, or what- ever it is, not because they get personal enjoyment out of those occupations, but because other people have enjoyed them. Cousin Anthony and I Of course, happiness is a state of mind ; and it is the mind, or the soul, that we want to get at. We know this well enough theoretically, but fail to act with reasonable intelligence upon our knowledge. To a certain extent, the mind is dependent for its states upon the conditions of the body, and we are rightly taught that a degree of attention must be paid to physical means if we are to get intellectual or spiritual re- sults. But even with the enjoyment of a healthy body a very important share of the pleasure is quasi-intellectual. When he has well eaten or well drunken a man feels pleasantly disposed toward the world. His feelings warm, his sympathies are aroused, and he is happy in consequence. The exhilaration of the racer or the huntsman, of the oarsman or the football player, any high degree of muscular activ- ity in a healthy man, is perhaps the nearest to a purely physical pleasure ; but even here it is a higher enjoyment when it is com- petitive activity, for competition itself is a notable and legitimate delight. " Rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race," the Script- 106 The Knowledge of Good and Evil ure saith, and knows its business as usual ; for trying to win involves a chance to lose, and that there is not much fun where there is not some hazard has been the rule since Eve acquired knowledge of evil at the same bite with good. Of those purely intellectual joys that are analogous to the physical joys, not all are healthy. It is fun to develop and exer- cise the mind, just as it is to exercise the mus- cles ; but there are joys of the intellectual glutton and the intellectual sot, joys that are not nearly as disreputable as they ought to be. Minds are clogged with over-feed- ing and racked by over-stimulation, just as stomachs are. The joys of acquisition are not to be despised. Making money is mighty pleasant ; to have things is an un- questionable source of satisfaction ; to col- lect rare commodities, orchids, race-horses, railroad-bonds is a kind of sport that thou- sands of people follow with lively enthusi- asm. It is fun to have and to hold, to add to and complete, and it has been since who knows how many centuries before Ahab longed for Naboth's vineyard. But avarice 107 Cousin Anthony and I in all its forms, old-fashioned and venerable as it is, is only a second-rate sport, since it lacks the element that the greatest pleasures must have, the element of love. Not passion. Passion is one of your sec- ond-rate, quasi - physical pleasures, which are half pain, and cannot be depended upon. But love is quite a different matter, and so detached from all that is bodily about us, as to breed the hope that it will still be a pleasure to us when we have taken our bodies off. When we have loved the most, and with the least passion and the least selfishness, was it not then that we attained most nearly to the state of mind which is the great prize of life ? We cultivate the muscles because it is fun to use them, and because it brings us the happiness that comes of health. For like reasons we make a business of the cultiva- tion of our minds. How simple it is of us to neglect to the extent that most of us do the systematic cultivation of our hearts ! Now and then someone discovers that to love one's neighbor with enthusiasm is the best fun there is, and makes a business of 108 The Knowledge of Good and Evil doing it; and then the rest of us lean on our muck-rakes and gape at him, and won- der how he can spare so much time for such an object. Analogous to the frequent inability of the human mind to recognize the attrac- tiveness of what is really pleasant is the inaccuracy of its estimate of the repulsive- ness of what is bad. It was said the other day of a man noted for his charitable esti- mate of his fellow-creatures that he would find something to admire in Satan himself. %$'% The remark was told him, and he said, Sata *- " Yes, I always did admire the devil for his persistence." If he adopted the popu- lar notion of Satan he might have found easily enough other grounds for admiring him ; for while it is commonly held that the devil is not so black as he is painted, the better opinion seems to me to be that nowadays he is not painted anything like so black as he is, and that owing to the unfaithfulness with which his likeness is set forth he is very much more generally ad- mired and respected than his qualities and 109 Cousin Anthony and 1 true character deserve. The popular con- temporary conception of Satan is of a highly successful man of the world. It is admitted that there are shady spots in his past history, that he has done some things that he should regret, that he is a hazard- ous associate and an unsafe person to have transactions with. But conversely it is realized that he is rich, powerful, and at- tractive, and intimately concerned and in- terested in promoting the material prosper- ity of the human race. He is known to be full of enterprise and public spirit, disposed to make things pleasant, and powerful in carrying the enterprises with which he is concerned to a profitable issue. It is true that he is understood to be unscrupulous, but it is felt that success excuses very much, and that when an individual has attained a position which enables him to be useful to the public it is a mistake to be over-nice about rejecting his good offices because in early life, when his necessities were more pressing, his methods or affiliations were not always such as a conscientious person could approve. Then, thanks to the mis- no The Knowledge of Good and Evil directed zeal of a multitude of worthy per- sons who assume to abhor Satan and all his works, he gets credit for a host of things with which he really had very little to do. Lots of clergymen and others are sure that he invented all kinds of dances and laid the corner-stones of all the theatres. He gets immense credit all the time in certain quarters as the loosener of restrictions as to the use of the Sabbath, so that in some parts of the country folks can hardly walk in the fields on a Sunday afternoon with- out a sense of obligation to him for his share in the enlargement of their liberties. Inasmuch as he is earnestly and continu- ously denounced by hordes of good and zealous people as the discoverer and pro- moter of all exhilarating beverages, people who like beverages of that sort and feel safe in consuming them in moderate quantities cannot help a certain kindliness of feeling toward him on that account. The upshot of all this perversion is that the enemies of the Adversary have unwit- tingly carved him out a great reputation as the champion of personal liberty, and in Cousin Anthony and I the purveyor of manifold terrestrial de- lights which are not necessarily hurtful to those who realize them with discretion, and which are undeniably in favor with the natural man. Consequently it is easy for him to masquerade as a public bene- factor, and folks, without admitting even to themselves how well they think of him, grow to feel that perhaps he has come to be good-natured in his old age, and that, nowadays, anyhow, his behavior seems pretty square, and that, maybe, the stories of his depravity do him an injustice. To give the devil his due is proverbially proper, but to make such a hero of him is not only inexpedient but very bad morals. John Milton is partly to blame for it, for he first made Satan grand and semi -respect- able, but the work has made great progress since his day. The pleasantest and most reassuring line in the prayer-book is that which describes the service of God as per- fect freedom. If that idea of God's service could be more generally disseminated, with due supplementary inculcation of the truth that all the salutary and truly pleasant 112 The Knowledge of Good and Evil things in life are the gifts of God, and not devices of the Evil One, Satan would come much nearer to getting his due than he usually does come nowadays, or is likely to come perhaps until the final reckoning. My young friend McAllo seems to be a victim of this familiar confusion of ideas as to what constitutes freedom and what does not. The last time he dined at our house, he shocked me a good deal by declaring that the chief object of his activities for some time past had been to rid himself of the weight of "Puritanism" which he had incurred from several generations of iii T j r i'P atifnce straight - laced ancestors. I inquired QiofhisPurt- McAllo what his descent was, and discov- ered that it was almost purely Scotch Pres- byterian, and that what small admixture of other stock there was, was French Hugue- not. McAllo complained that such a derivation as that was a hindrance to sport, and admitted that he had been busy for months past with horses, cocktails, cigar- ettes, and most of the reasonable appliances of generous living, trying to modify the "3 Cousin Anthony and I tendencies that his forebears had imposed upon him. His conscience, he said, was too exacting, and he felt it to be desirable to mitigate its tyranny. I was affected by McAllo's remarks very much as if he had said that his grandfathers, by industry and thrift, had been able to hand him down a material property, and that finding it inconvenient to draw the interest, he was doing what he could to relieve himself by using his principal to back his luck at cards. There was a good deal of "bluff" in his allegations, and I need not have disturbed myself so much about them ; but there was also an element of misapprehension which it seemed the Christian duty of any adult listener to cor- rect. I don't know that he meant it so, but when he said "Puritanism," to my mind he meant the power of self-restraint and the ability to get along on the minimum of amusement. If McAllo has got these things in his blood, perhaps it is natural enough that, having never felt the lack of them, he should undervalue them, and wish to let a little of them out. But with you 114 71}e Knowledge of Good and Evil and me, who haven't got them by nature, perhaps, and have to secrete by personal, moral thrift all that we use, it is different. The tyranny of Puritan tendencies has no terrors for us. What worries us is the costly and unremitting obligation to keep ourselves amused, under penalty of dissatis- faction with life whenever we don't succeed. It seems as if a man with such forebears as McAllo's had nothing to do but to go out into the world with his sickle and reap. The hard work is beating one's recalcitrant self into a useful creature, responsive to one's higher aspirations and promptly obe- dient to the will. For this poor, admirable McAllo, the chief part of that has been done. The lad likes by nature to learn, to work his brains, to live cleanly. He can have more fun with Homer and a student's lamp than a coarser-fibred lad can have with a bottle of champagne and a pool -table. Vulgar or vicious associates seem simply dull to him, and he can think more agreeable thoughts on milk and oatmeal than the average club man can on Pommery and terrapin. That "5 Cousin Anthony and I is what a line of plain-living, high-thinking Scotchmen, now deceased, have done for him, and the poor ignorant boy knows no better than to grumble about his Puritan tendencies ! If only they were marketable commodities, what a price he could get for them from some sad-hearted millionaire, who needs a new moral endowment for his son ! If they were marketable he would learn quickly enough what they were worth. In these days, when there is so much talk of heredity, we ought to recognize, as usually we do not, our obligations to the decent men and women from whom we have the good fortune to be derived. The ancestor who hands us down money gets recognition. He has done something that we can understand, and we name our children after him and try to keep his name before the world. But the saints in our family records the men and women who have made a stand for us against sensuality and laziness we do not half appreciate. It is a pity we are so dull. The wise king was as sagacious as usual when he said that 116 The Knowledge of Good and Evil a good name is rather to be chosen than great riches ; but he was indisputably and obviously sagacious if, when he said "a good name ' ' he meant good blood. 117 IX CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE JY friend Felix has been holding forth to me upon the im- portance of substituting, in thought and speech, the word "civilization" for the word "culture." " Culture," Felix says, is not so much what we need in this new country as "civilization." By civilization, as I understand him, he means something more ors/or" than that we should eat with forks instead tfan'" and of knives. He means, I take it, that we $%%?* should learn to be better worth talking to, better worth eating with, better worth liv- ing and associating with generally, and more worthy of being alive. Perhaps he feels as others have felt, that we lack dis- tinction, and would have us get it, but whatever our need is, as he sees it, he doesn't think that " culture " expresses the 121 Cousin Anthony and I means by which we may supply it. It is true that " culture " suggests somewhat ex- clusively the cultivation of the intellectuals, the reading of books, the study of lan- guages, the hearing of hard music, and the inspection of difficult pictures. Felix does not deny that " culture," so understood, may help on the civilization that he cries out for, but he maintains that people may be civilized without being especially intel- lectual, and without attaining to any very notable flights of culture. To his sort of civilization, to know good books is a help, but hardly as much so as to know good people. Religion is a great power in pro- moting it. The arts and travel help it much; the sciences and trade not so di- rectly. Yet people may be ever so learned, ever so pious, and travelled, and picture- wise, and yet not be civilized ; so that to square with his ideal is no play-day under- taking. And yet it is a useful ideal and worth taking some thought about. The people who are the most civilized may or may not be the worthiest people, but they are the 122 Civilisation and Culture pleasantest, and the ones who seem to get the most out of life. The French are un- doubtedly better civilized than the Amer- icans, and given the same apparatus, they are able to have more fun with it. In that particular they are ahead of the Americans ; yet that they are worthier than the Amer- icans is what even their hardiest admirer would hesitate to aver, and what no good American would admit for a moment. Their capacity for legitimate enjoyment seems to be greater than ours for illegit- imate enjoyment, too, it may be, but that we do not envy them. If they get more pleasure than we do out of talk, out of eating and drinking, out of art and music and the theatre, out of family life and their social relations generally, in respect to those matters their civilization is better than ours, and they are fit examples for our em- ulation. While " culture," according to the com- mon acceptance of it, is largely the culti- vation of the mind, civilization, as Felix understands it, would seem to be the cul- tivation of the sympathies, the tastes, and 123 Cousin Anthony and I the capacity for giving and receiving sound pleasures. The most civilized man is the man with the most catholic appreciation, the man who can be the most things to the most people, the man, to put it briefly, who knows best how to live. The man who is civilized can use all the culture he can get, but he can get on and still be civ- ilized with a very moderate outfit of it. But the man who has culture and has not civilization is very badly handicapped. He may get a certain satisfaction out of liv- ing, but he will contribute only very mod- erately to the satisfaction of others. He may be respected, but he will hardly be cherished. Provided he has books enough and is of an intellectual turn, a man may get culture all by himself, but he will hardly get a high degree of civilization except by rubbing against other persons. That is one reason why the most important of all civilizing agencies is the family. What libraries and picture-galleries are to culture, rightly reg- ulated homes are to civilization. What a strong and thoroughly civilized family, 124 Civilisation and Culture that knows its business and improves its opportunity, can do toward the civilization of a raw American city, can only be ap- preciated after long residence in cities where such families do not exist. It should be an encouragement to Felix and a source of satisfaction to all of us that so sane an observer as Dr. Eliot, of Harvard, states as one of the chief bases of his hopes for the duration of our Republic, that " a bet- ter family life prevails among our people than was known to any of the republics that have perished, or, indeed, to any ear- lier century." I believe that my cherished coeval Hoban Anson would find comfort in Felix and his theories about civilization. Hoban wants something very badly and his quest after it is earnest and continuous, but I don't think he knows exactly what it is, and if Felix could once explain to him that it was civilization I believe Hoban would believe him. I think he recognizes already that culture is not quite the thing he is after, but unless I mistake he is a little afraid still 125 Cousin Anthony and I that it ought to be. He spends his sum- mers far down in Maine, and has told me of the pleasure he finds there in the observa- tion of the Yankee character, and in partic- ular of the pursuit of culture under difficult- ies by some of the Yankee women. Hoban what HO- does not, do his observing in any meagre ban A nson finds in fortnight, or even month, wrung from the Maine. , . exactions of business, but devotes whole summers to it summers that begin late in the spring and merge liberally into autumn. The Maine village which he affects he de- scribes as a place curiously, and, he thinks, providentially shielded from the contamina- tion of the modern spirit by its geographical location. It had a vigorous marine life of its own before railroads were invented, and is so placed that, though a railroad might come to it, it could not advantageously pass through it. So the life has not run out of it, as it has out of many once prosperous New England villages, and it has kept much of its old Yankee stock in something like its old Yankee vigor. Hoban says for one thing that the Yankee voice, as he hears it there, has not the nasal tones that are com- 126 Civilisation and Culture monly credited to it, but is clear and agree- able, but still Yankee in its inflections, and perhaps in its drawl. Besides that, he finds Yankee humor and Yankee independ- ence very sturdy in quality, but qualified with a philosophical spirit and a patient, thrifty unwillingness to allow sentimental considerations to stand overmuch in the way of lawful gain. But what interests him as much as anything is the survival of the old Puritan conscientiousness, modified in its manifestations and transmogrified in its aims, but still persistent and effectual. As usual it is more obvious in the women than in the men, and it compels them rather to intellectual than spiritual flights. He complains that in their passion for self- improvement they set themselves awful tasks of reading, and labor through long, hard books with very much of the dreary per- sistence with which their forebears sat in cold meeting-houses under interminable discourses. Hoban is a product of Boston, and has come to middle life without any very protracted evasions of the atmosphere of his nativity. I have known him to read 127 Cousin Anthony and I long books himself, but it seems to distress him that these Yankee women should de- vote to such tasks so much time and toil that, he thinks, might be more profitably employed. He told me that one of them said to him: "Oh, Mr. Anson, I do so envy you the opportunities for intellectual society that Boston must afford," whereat he had the grace to blush, remembering that almost the only overt indication of intellectuality that he gave at home was a constant and outspoken dissatisfaction with Boston newspapers, and a greedy preference for those of New York. He does not con- demn this Yankee eagerness for culture nor deny that it bears some good fruit, but he seems to feel that in some degree it is a misdirected zeal, and that the fruits of it are not as filling at the price as they ought to be. One civilizing agency which, I dare say, is operative in that Maine village where Hoban goes, but which is getting all too scarce in regions where culture is on top, Hymns. is hymns. Your experience may be differ- ent, but the social circle in which I move 128 Civilisation and Culture is self-contained and unemotional to a de- gree that seems to preclude hymns, and I rarely hear them any more, except when I go to church. Then they are not sung, but ' ' rendered ' ' by surpliced specialists, into whose harmonies my ear may venture but not my voice. We are superior to a good many things in our set, and to hymns among others. Are hymns out of fashion, do you know, among the best people? When I was young we had them at home as regularly as bread and butter ; but then we had family prayers too, and observed other ceremonies which now seem to be growing obsolete. I don't visit in any fam- ily where they sing hymns, except, to be sure, the family where I first heard them. I confess that I visit comparatively few fam- ilies, and those comparatively worldly ; but I often go out to supper on Sunday night with people who have been to church during the day, and I hear no hymns. The impression I gather is that there is more beer and champagne in the world than there was twenty-five years ago, and not so much devotional music ; but one has al- 129 Cousin Anthony and I ways to be on his guard not to confuse per- sonal changes with terrestrial movement, and especially not to mistake the signs of one's own individual degeneration for marks of the world's progress. I do not especi- ally deprecate the beer, but I miss the hymns. They echo very pleasantly in the memory, and if the habit of singing them still holds in Maine that should be reckoned as one of the advantages of the aspiring Yankees who still lead simple lives there. I think we are quite as pious in this gen- eration as our forebears were, but our man- ifestations, though not less sincere than theirs, seem to be less overt. Most of us go to church, but we do not seem to attach the same importance to it as they did, nor to go quite so conscientiously. It is more of a habit with us and less of a duty, and if we find what seems a better occupation for a particular Sunday morning, our con- sciences do not smite us as sharply as con- sciences did thirty years ago. We are more apt than our fathers were to think that we know more about religion than the preacher does; and it may be that our im- 130 Civilization and Culture pressions in that regard have foundation, for the latest news about matters of faith comes to us just as promptly as it does to him, and if it recommends itself to our belief there is less to retard our acceptance of it. But if we are less sure than our parents were of getting our hymns in church, we ought to be less willing to forego them at home. It is painful to think of one's chil- dren growing up without hymns or hymn tunes in their heads, but that very thing may happen to them unless fit measures are taken betimes. The words of many modern popular hymns are absurd, and do violence to any reasonable person's intelligence ; but the great hymns are sound poetry set to sound music, and though the sentiments of some of them do not altogether accord with the religious convictions of this enlightened generation, the greater number are as avail- able now as they ever were, and the sanest singer need not mumble the words or make mental reservations as he sings them. I believe that Felix, with his convictions of the need of civilization, and Hoban, Cousin Anthony and I with his misgivings about culture, would both agree with those informants who tell me that one of the most reassuring spec- tacles to be seen in New England last spring was my old friend and coeval, Robin Ab- ner, out on his lawn of an afternoon, in- RobinAb- structing and exercising his son Charles in his son the art of pitching a baseball. Fame and wealth crown the successful pitcher now, but there is no sordid taint about Robin's ambition for his son. His purpose is that Charles shall be a civilizing agency in the shape of an unsalaried pitcher on the Har- vard nine, and I daresay that Charles will realizeit. Robin, in his day, had aspirations of that sort for himself. I remember him twenty odd years ago on the ball-ground at Exover. The day I got my first sight of him, he was playing right field on the junior nine. He was long and strong and had yellow hair practically yellow (he has none now practically none) and if his father had begun early and taken pains with him, as he is doing with Charles, I have no doubt that he would have made a great baseball player, and possibly a pitcher for 132 Civilisation and Culture the Harvard nine. As it was he was a fair player, but never eminent, for it was war- time when he was growing up, and his father, a great patriot and leader of men, was too busy prodding Massachusetts on to Richmond to give Robin's athletic educa- tion the attention it deserved. It made no vital difference, for Robin came out strong as it was. You remember the story of how Chiron the Centaur had the raising of Jason, and of the pains he took to make him shoot straight with the bow and arrow. I dare say that the antediluvians who lounged in Chiron's back-yard on afternoons when he and Jason had their target up, were conscious of very much such sensations of reassurance as I get from the reports of Robin and Charles. When a serious -minded, burden - bearing man of business like Robin quits work to teach his son to pitch a ball, it makes me feel as if things were going to continue and progress, and as if the next generation might be good for something, and able to have some fun in spite of the growth of cities, and the spread of trolley-cars, and socialism '33 Cousin Anthony and I and realism, and the new woman, and the concentration of wealth, and the multipli- cation of walking delegates, and all the varieties of devilment that solemnize the world's prospects. It makes it easier for me to hope that the learned gentleman named Nordau, who argues with so much plausibility about the demoralization and decadence of all of us folks, is needlessly alarmed. If Robin were teaching Charles modern football, I should have my doubts about Robin's views of the future, and whether he thought it best that Charles should live to grow up. But baseball, a safe and stable and patriotic sport, is different, and the prospect that excellence in it is to become hereditary in the Abner family helps me to believe in the transmission of all sorts of sturdy virtues, and the development of many a good inheritance of strength. If the world wasn't a good world, and wasn't go- ing to keep on being habitable, Robinwould not care whether Charles learned baseball or not. Yet there he is with his coat off catch- ing Charles's deliveries off of imaginary bats, 134 Civilisation ami Culture and chiding him energetically when the ball goes wild. I hope Robin will make a good thing, athletically, out of Charles. My son Nico- demus is growing up also, and though he is of a contemplative nature, and seems to prefer sitting down to more active exercises, I allow myself to hope that when Charles Abner stands in the pitcher's box on the Soldier's Field my Nicodemus will be there, and will be making a good report on the benches. X ARCADIA AND BEL- GRAVIA ARCADIA AND BEL- GRAVIA CONTEMPORARY story-tell- er, who lays the scene of his narrative in Newport, reminds the reader that it was the Newport of departed days, ' ' not the para- dise of cottages and curricles, but of big hotels and balls, of Southern planters, of Jullien's orchestras and hotel hops. ' ' New- port had not become Belgravia then, but was something like Arcadia still. I daresay that Belgravian Newport is amply satisfactory to its denizens as it is; Beigravia . . . . . ... encroach- but there is that in the coloring of the menton story which reminds one to lament not only the loss of the Arcadian Newport, but the general and inevitable tendency of all the more charming summer Arcadias to take on the Belgravian characteristics. Arcadia is ever unstable. It begins by being sylvan. The shepherds wear flan- 139 Cousin Anthony and I nel shirts, and the shepherdesses go about in big hats and tennis shoes, and wear the same dress all day long, and scarcely venture to tie a ribbon to their crooks. Quickly Arcadia gets the fame of being a pleasant place. People are so friendly there ; manners are so easy and so good. Chaperons are scarce and high, and no one cares, for such Eden-like simplicity prevails that chaperons are not needed. Before long the people who have been overdosed with conventionalities and are tired of fine raiment hear of it. Word gets around that some of the nicest people go to Arcadia, and that there is no place where the girls have more fun, or where the youth are more eligible, or from which everybody brings home a finer color or better spirits in the fall. But what is money for if not to enable its owners to enjoy the newest delights ? So soon as Arcadia's charms begin to be noised abroad the place begins to be the fashion. New-comers create new needs, and soon, far too soon, the shep- herdesses are getting their gowns from Watteau and changing the ribbons on their 140 Arcadia and Be/gravia crooks four times a day. The hotel quad- ruples in size, and is crammed full of Syb- arites. Gradually the original Arcadians realize that society has grown too miscel- laneous, and begin to put up separate huts and withdraw to them. Then the Syba- rites discover that the hotel is primitive and countrified, and straightway build them- selves cottages with rooms for many ser- vants and stables for troops of quadrupeds. Then comes the short-tailed horse, and the British groom multiplies in the landscape. Champagne and chaperons surge in, hand in hand. Simplicity goes elsewhere and sells her abandoned tenement to Style, who pulls it down and puts up a palace on its site. And so Arcadia fades away and the sign " Belgravia" looms up in large letters at the railroad station. And what becomes of all the true Ar- cadians who were happy once together ? Some build fine houses on their property and rent them to Belgravians and go away themselves for the summer. Some put their sheep in charge of a hireling and supply the cottagers with spring lamb. Some hang 141 Cousin Anthony and I up their crooks and go into the real-estate business, but many, perhaps most of them, are corrupted and turn Belgravians them- selves. For Belgravian existence has an intoxicating quality about it that is able to upset the discretion of people who ought to know better. Even for the rich it is fairly debatable whether Belgravia is so happy a land as Arcadia, and for the poor there is no question at all about Arcadia's superi- ority. Yet it is constantly happening to the worthy poor whose choice has been Ar- cadia, to have the Belgravian current turn their way and sweep them off their legs. Belgravia is so insinuating. For what it lacks of being picturesque it makes up in being fine. Its standards are mere arbi- trary conventions, and yet once one gives in at all to them they quickly come to have the force of natural laws. Inch by inch, substituting elegance for mere comfort and show for simple use, it lures the would-be Arcadian into a competition wherein it is a weariness to engage and an embarrass- ment to succeed. There are certain kinds of nuisances against which the promoters of 142 Arcadia and Belgrcrda Arcadias take pains beforehand to provide, selling land only for uses and under con- ditions which they deem compatible with their general purposes. But they never provide against the chances of a Belgravian degeneration. They stipulate that no hut of less than a certain value shall be built upon the lots that they sell, but they never limit the prospective builder the other way. His edifice must come up to the prevailing standard, but nothing hinders him from so far surpassing it as to make all his neighbors feel that the conditions of their existence are squalid. Arcadias have been spoiled as Arcadias without ever reaching the full measure of Belgravian development. Pro- moters must know that, but they never guard against it. If the current sets Bel- gravi award they take the chances of arrival, lamenting nothing, and seeming to feel, in business-like obtuseness, that simplicity has achieved its highest end if it has paved the way for fashion. In the summer and autumn landscape of the passing hour one finds two compara- Cousin Anthony and I lively new features, in the appreciation of which Belgravians and Arcadians have come closer together than has been their wont. TWO new Neither feature is brand new. One has been S<&tu growing more and more familiar for a whole landscape. Decade until now it is everywhere. That is the all-conquering bicycle, which goes per- sistently on its gainful course, holding its adherents, and daily gaining new victims. The bicycle's advance has been so grad- ual, so noiseless, and so easy that it is doubtful if American society appreciates what it is about or what are its possibilities. Starting as a toy, and continuing on a dem- ocratic basis as a means of transportation for the comparatively poor, it has worked its way steadily on and up. Sportsmen have scoffed at it ; horsemen have flouted it ; high dignitaries of the church have de- nounced it to their women adherents ; solid citizens have held it to be a nuisance on the highway ; timid people have deprecated its presence on the sidewalk, but it has rolled along practically unhindered, increasing in numbers, growing in popularity, until now it disputes with the horse for the patronage 144 Arcadia and Belgravia of fashion. It is time to take the bicycle seriously, as a thing, like the cotton-gin, the steam-engine, the telegraph, and the sewing-machine, that is to have an effect upon society. As an annihilator of space it is the able coadjutor of the railroad. It deals with details, covering the distances which are too far to walk, and the ground which the steam-engine sweeps one past before he knows it. The ground one goes over on a bicycle he does know, hence it promises to bring back to human acquaintance the numberless nooks and corners of the civil- ized earth that the locomotive rushes by, and which have sunk out of ken since steam travel became universal. It is still a toy in some hands, but it is also a great vehicle, giving every performer (where the roads are good) an available door-yard at least ten miles square, and making fresh air and exercise more easily obtainable. At the same time it amuses the rider, and every- body knows how important it is that with one's air and exercise a share of amusement should be thrown in. Cousin Anthony and I But the most startling tendency of the bicycle is its effect upon woman. As sure as taxes, or the destruction of the peach crop, or anything that is inevitable, it is about to emancipate that suffering creature from the dominion of skirts. No woman of sense will ever discard skirts altogether. They are far too seemly and becoming for that. But woman has marked the bicycle for her own, and no woman can ride on a bicycle without discovering that skirts have their place and their uses, and that there are times and situations where they are in the way. The habit of sea-bathing has done much to break down the tyranny of women's clothes. Bicycles will do the rest. Already the divided skirt is used by women on horseback without exciting the behold- er's dismay, but that is not a fashion that gives assurance of extensive growth. But that the woman who rides bicycles will wear knickerbockers is a bit of concluded destiny ; that once having found them ac- ceptable for one form of exercise she may find them convenient for divers others is very possible, and yet not appalling, since 146 Arcadia and Belgravia knickerbockers do not look ill. That she will dance in them, or dine in them, is not likely enough to give anyone valid grounds for anxiety, but once she has learned how, she will wear them without compunction on fit occasions where skirts too much restrain, as when she plays golf. For the other new feature of the land- scape is golf. Golf has been threatening to cross the seas these last five years. It came unobtrusively, and this year has fairly taken root and spread itself. All the coun- try clubs have it. Veteran tennis-players have cast aside their bats and taken up with " drivers " and " putting-irons," and, more extraordinary still, horsemen of ma- ture convictions are found tramping around golf-links day after day and spending the solid evening hours bragging of the strokes they made, and raising futile lamentations over scores spoiled by wanton misses. One does not fully realize the fascination of golf until he has heard it talked by confirmed horsemen in times when they might be talking horse. It commends itself as a se- rious sport, fit to engage the well-preserved 147 Cousin Anthony ami I but not too boisterous energies of the mid- dle-aged, suitable for stout men to apply to the correction of obese tendencies, and yet not too violent for the spare frames of the thin. It is neither dangerous nor costly, and yet the philosophical mind finds satis- faction in it, while the sportsman admits that it possesses the indispensable qualities of a true game. There can be little doubt that it will possess all America as tennis has. It has the best literature of any known game, which is due possibly to its Scotch origin, and the instruments with which it is cultivated are of so fascinating an aspect that the palm instinctively itches to clutch them and see how they work. Once seen, golf cannot be forgotten ; once experienced, it will not be neglected. It has fairly got us now, and it may be trusted to keep us. The element of companionship enters seriously into golf. It enters considerably into most games, so that the majority of us care more whom we play with than what we play. But one could play tennis with any player whose skill approximated to his own without much thought of his 148 Arcadia and Belgra-via personal idiosyncrasies, for the net yawns and stretches between tennis-players, keep- ing them apart ; and while they are play- ing the action is too lively to permit the communication of anything but the ball. But a fit person to play tennis with is one thing and a thoroughly satisfactory person to play golf with is another. Ivan Putter, in whose society I had the good fortune to be thrown last summer, was such a person. This summer I did not have the advantage of his company, and at many holes I have grieved over our separation with wistful appreciation of his qualities as a golfer. It is true that he was no very great shakes with his clubs. I could drive farther than he could and put about as well, and though I did not win more than my share of games from him, I had always the solace of being persuaded that he was not really in my class at golf, and that any day when I was really myself and playing my game I could beat him. Somehow I was seldom myself and rarely played my game, where- as his game, such as it was, he was usually able to put up, so that the disparity be- 149 Cousin Anthony and I tween my estimate of his skill and my opinion of my own was not a real hin- drance to our rivalry. But irrespective of his abilities with drivers and mashies he had traits of surprising value. For one thing he is an excessively lazy man, and always arranged beforehand for a good supply of caddies both for himself and me, and he trained his caddies which were casual boys picked up haphazard so well that they were an example to mine, and the standard of efficiency of the whole squad was high. Then he usually spent the even- ing in reading the golf rules and in making himself an authority on points of etiquette and play, with the result that my head was as little troubled with knowing the rules as it was with knowing the caddies. He took his game seriously, never trifling with a stroke, exulting when he made a good one, grieving when he didn't, and working hard all the time. And when he wasn't attending to his own game he was paying close attention to mine. That was perhaps his greatest charm. When it was my drive he waved out the fore caddies, 150 Arcadia and Belgra-via advised me as to my tee, and stood over the stroke. If it was a good one it was doubly glorious. If it was a miss or a foozle he helped me swear. His interest kept mine always warm, so that I held almost as much of my breath over his strokes as he over mine. He insisted on perfect order in turns, and indeed on every propriety the rules suggested ; and when there was a ball lost he abandoned it with the same reluctance when it was mine as when it was his. A railroad crosses the links where Ivan Putter habitually plays. Mindful of his de- liberation, I have dreaded all summer to hear that he had been run over by the cars between the cow-pasture and the home hole. But I hope he may be spared, for since I played with him I have played with other men, men who scurry helter- skelter across the fields, chasing their balls like terriers after tom-cats, men who know few rules and respect not those, men who pay little attention to their own play and none to mine, triflers, scorners of etiquette, ignorant and without a standard. They Cousin Anthony and I mean well enough, poor gentlemen, but how I wish they might be apprenticed for a time to Ivan Putter and learn to temper their methods with some of the graces of his admirable spirit. Not the simplicity of Arcadia, nor the luxury of Belgravian Newport or Belgra- vian Lenox, not the attractiveness of new and sylvan bicycle paths, nor the superla- tive merits of a seashore golf links can avail for more than one or two short months to delude the summer vacationer from the city about the intensity of his own gregari- ous instincts. Any doubts he may have had about it are apt to be rudely dis- pelled, when, after his month by the sea or in the country, he first strikes a con- When the . . , , Arcadian siderable town. It need not be such a f." c * very big town, but only a city with the or- dinary appliances of city life, with hotels that are real hotels, not summer hotels; with shops, newspapers, and people. It is really pitiable to see the poor creature's satisfaction in finding the commonest ap- purtenances of urban existence within his 152 Arcadia and Belgravia reach. The most ordinary sights bear a friendly aspect to him. The members of the Salvation Army that he sees in the streets seem to him like old acquaintances. The cigar -store Indians are his long-lost brothers. The conventional ornaments of the drug-stores, the soda-water fountains, and awful instruments, and sponges, and patent-medicine boxes that garnish those repositories, seem cheerful and alluring to him, and the familiar drug-store smell rises in his nostrils like the very breath of life. There are barber shops he can have his locks trimmed ; there are saloons he can quench his thirst ; there are bookstores he can learn what progress literature has made during his absence from the world, and can look at the outsides of the newest books and supply himself with all the latest magazines. It rejoices him, as he dodges a trolley-car, to find his instinct of self- preservation still unimpaired. A bicycler grazes him as he whizzes by, and he swears more in glee than in irritation. Poor de- generate creature, after viewing God's crea- tion for a month man's poor appliances 153 Cousin Anthony and I possess a new charm for him. The visions he had in June of the delights of a life- long communion with nature have faded out, and he rejoices that his lot has been cast in the haunts of men. Even his work, that he had come so to despise, has charms for him again, and he thinks with relief, and even with enthusiasm, of hav- ing a desk to return to every morning, and of the set task which is to occupy his active .hours and relieve him of the obli- gation to choose between rival forms of laborious amusement. Bless the man ! Don't imagine that the merits and blisses and attractions which he sees in cities really exist. Don't suppose that the sight of the blue sea or the blue hills is not intrinsically better than any sights he will find in town. It is just a case of cesium new animum, that's all. He is a bundle of habits like all of us, and it is because he is getting back to his habits that he rejoices. He is a machine, and however it may benefit him now and then to stop for a time and repair his several parts, he is happiest on the whole when he 154 Arcadia and Belgravia is running, and he runs easiest and most profitably in the place that he has learned to fit. He may pose for a few weeks every year as a human creature, but the truth is that he is a mere appliance, and best off, as his own instincts tell him, in the place where he can best be applied. 155 XI OURSELVES AND OTHER PEOPLE OURSELVES AND OTHER PEOPLE WRITER in a contemporary American magazine who com- pares English and American home life says that the most striking difference is that the chief end of an English home is the com- fort of the man, but the chief end of an English American home is the comfort of the worn- xrfe an. That accords with American tradi- ho '""- tion about the manners and customs of the English, and probably it is as nearly true as epi grammatical statements are wont to be. Still one may wonder whether it would not be almost as illuminating to suggest that the chief end of English homes is the com- fort of the proprietors, while the ruling consideration in American homes is the propitiation of servants. Unless current information upon the subject is misleading, 159 Cousin Anthony and I both master and mistress in an English home can buy much more domestic com- fort than the same expenditure could gain for them in America ; and that mainly for the trite reason that English servants are better trained, more easily procured, and cheaper than in America. The French Government lately proposed to raise an an- nual revenue of twenty-five million francs by a tax on domestic servants, to be paid by their employers. The tax is reported to be extremely unpopular among the ser- vants, who say that they will have to pay it in the end ; and the assertion that there are forty thousand of them out of employ- ment in Paris indicates such a condition of the domestic labor market as seems to give a substantial basis to their fears. Americans would smile at the idea of be- ing taxed for their servants. A bounty on each one would better suit the senti- ments of the average American house- keeper. Not that life in the homes of well-to-do Americans is such a savage ex- perience, or that servants are not indis- pensable in such homes, or that the 1 60 Ourselves and Other People house-keeper blames them for what neither she nor they can help at present, or that she undervalues their work; but merely because they are hard to get, hard to man- age, and hard to keep, and expensive, and she wishes she did not have to have them. The Englishman's idea of domestic com- fort may be an establishment with a dozen servants, but the average American wom- an's ideal is very few servants and good, and no more of an establishment than they are willing to take care of for her. The English way of having comfort with servants is to have plenty of them, assign them definite tasks and not more than they can do well, feed them cheaply, and pay them low wages. The American way is to have fewer, feed them more expensively, pay them much higher wages, and expect a greater and less definite amount of ser- vice. The Englishman is satisfied with his method, provided he can gather income enough to carry it out. But the American is not satisfied, and a tolerably ample pro- vision of funds does not cure his dissatis- faction. He does not think he gets his 161 Cousin Antbony and I money's worth of comfort, and it is quite possible that he is right. There will be a cure presently for this predicament, but it will not come on any considerable scale through a closer approx- imation of his domestic methods to those of the English. It will have to be a cure that will be quite as popular with the ser- vants as with the masters. The grand- children of this generation will get more domestic comfort for less money than their grandparents did, and one reason why will be that they will have a much more accu- rate notion of what they want and what they are entitled to. Standards of living will be much more definite in America two generations hence. Servants' rights, duties, privileges, and wages will all be better de- fined. House-keepers will know much more exactly and without need of personal ex- perience what scale of living their incomes can support. Rents will be lower, and there will be a better notion than now as to what household luxuries and conveni- ences are really luxuries and conveniences, and what are mere showy impediments to 162 Ourselves and Other People domestic comfort. With a great and grow- ing body of intelligent people anxious to work, and an increasing number anxious to have certain work done for them, the ad- justment of the supply of labor to the de- mand is bound to be perfected. And yet it will be an American adjustment, with somewhat less servility in it than in the English method, and characterized, as all other American labor is, by the superior efficiency of the persons employed. Among other vexed questions relating to personal service which we may hope to see settled in that glad coming time when everybody will know more than anyone knows now is the matter of " tips." It needs settling, for it is a good deal discussed and opinion is divided upon it. Not long ago a contemporary scribe in discussing the employment of college students as waiters in summer hotels complained of " the avidity with which they accept money from people who are their intellectual and social in- feriors." It was this writer's conviction that " no person of refined sensibilities will 163 Cousin Anthony and I accept a ' tip.' ' Now, to be over-eager for fees is not consistent either with self-re- spect or with good service, but there seem to be good reasons to differ from the opin- ion that to accept gratuities offered in rec- ognition of personal services is necessarily inconsistent with a serviceable degree of refinement. As between a self-respecting guest and a The ethics self-respecting servant, a fee is not a bribe, of tips.' 1 b u t an expression of appreciation. It is a tangible way of saying Thank you ! When a gentleman has been a guest in another gentleman's house, and his comfort has been a special charge of certain of his host's servants, the fees he may choose to give those servants when he goes away simply say that he appreciates their care of him, and is grateful. Such fees are not alms, nor are they bribes ; they discharge an obliga- tion which, whether it actually exists or not, is recognized as equitable by the departing guest. Fees of that sort, freely and cor- dially given, and expressive of good-will, are a source of satisfaction to the giver, and it is not apparent why they should not be a 164 Ourselves ami Other People perfectly legitimate source of satisfaction to the receiver also. It is true that when the departing guest comes to say good-by to his host he does not tip him. He thanks him for his hospitality, and very likely expresses the hope that he may soon be able to return it in kind. He has toward his host a feeling of obligation analogous to what he has toward his host's servants. He knows that first or last he will get even with his host by showing him some courtesy or doing him some ser- vice, but the chances are that unless he discharges the obligation he feels to the servant by a material gift on the spot no other opportunity to requite him will offer. The " tip " given to a servant by an ap- preciative guest is given to the office rather than to the individual. It is not charity, and to accept it need not necessarily offend the self-respect of the most self-reliant per- son. There is no lack of other vocations besides " service " in which fees, more or less gratuitous, are given without the slight- est loss of self-respect on either side. The 165 Cousin Anthony and I clergyman who marries a couple gets a fee, and is entitled to it, but whether it is five dollars or five hundred depends entirely on the feelings and pecuniary abilities of the groom. To perform the marriage cere- mony, even when it includes the salutation of the bride, isn't very hard work, and it would be reasonable to say that anything over twenty-five dollars, or perhaps less, that the clergyman gets is in the nature of a gratuity. But whether his fee is fifty dol- lars or a hundred, he never feels obliged to send any part of it back. It is given to his office rather than to himself, and his office enables him to accept it without remorse or impropriety. To stickle for a large fee would be decidedly improper. A well-be- haved clergyman does not permit his mind to dwell unduly on his marriage fees one way or the other, and he is ready to marry folks as securely and reverently without money or price as he would for the most lavish remuneration. But what fees come to him unsolicited he puts into his pocket cheerfully and without a qualm, conscious that the laborer is worthy not only of his 166 Ourselves and Other People hire, but of any casual pecuniary barnacles that happen to stick to it. And so with the office of servant. It is called a humble office, but it is as capable as any other of being adorned in the man- ner of its discharge. The best servant is the one who is most successful in promot- ing the comfort of the people he serves. If he appreciates the possibilities of his office and lives up to them, there is no reason why the casual emoluments of it should burn his fingers. If he spends him- self generously in his work, he has no more valid reason to feel humiliated by the offer of a fee than the clergyman is when the best man hands him an envelope. If his sensibilities are too refined to permit him to accept fees, that is not a merit, but a defect, and he is that much less fit for the place that he holds. A servant who de- mands fees or whose usefulness is measured by the acuteness of his expectations is a nuisance and an imposition, but a servant to whom a considerate guest cannot express a sense of gratitude has a defective concep- tion of his job. 167 Cousin Anthony and I manners. If a man or a woman doesn't want to serve for money, and can find means of avoiding it, by all means let them. But if any one, even a person of the most refined sensibilities, undertakes to be a servant, it is better for such a one to try to be the best servant possible, accepting the casual emol- uments of the office with the same good- will with which he undertakes his duties. No doubt the Japanese, whose example in so many particulars is nowadays so freely held up for our emulation, have considered the question of tipping and come to some conclusion about it which it might be ad- vantageous for us to know. We hear very much of the Japanese, and most of what we hear is greatly to their credit. They have many nice qualities and a fair share of g reat ones. They are clean, they are polite, and apparently they are very gentle and very brave. They are said to be exceed- ingly neat, too, and to be bountifully en- dowed with that sense of propriety, a de- fective development of which accounts for much of the rubbish on American streets 168 Ourselves and Other People and most of the disagreeableness of Ameri- can street-car travel. They certainly beat us in a good many things. Intelligent foreign- ers who have observed us closely have de- clared that we are the rudest and the kind- est people in the world. Of course it is a pity that we are not more universally cour- teous ; that our children are not demure and orderly like the Japanese children ; that we throw papers into the street and drop peanut-shells and orange-peel on the floors of our public conveyances. Of course it is a pity that we are not more like the Japanese in many particulars ; but, for my part, I make bold to confess that American manners, with all their defects, are better suited to my American taste than Japanese manners with all their gentle perfections. When Nature finds bark necessary for the protection of her growths it may be noticed that she always applies it to the outside. Our manners are to a certain extent our bark, and though it is by no means necessary that it should be disagree- ably rough or scraggy, it seems not a thing to be altogether deplored that what we 169 Cousin Anthony and I have of it we should choose to wear as the trees do, externally and in sight. When Nature leaves the bark thin she is apt to provide thorns, and if one must make a choice between the two means of protec- tion, it may be excusable to prefer the bark which one can recognize afar off, to the thorn which draws blood without warning. We are quite accustomed to the tradi- tional disparagement of the French as a people in whom a superficial politeness is developed at some cost of more indispen- sable merits, but the politeness of the Japanese being a trait of comparatively recent observation, seems to be accepted without much consideration of its cost. It is worth much, but it does cost some- thing. For one thing, travellers tell us that it takes a prodigious amount of time. Japanese etiquette takes no note of the hands of the clock, or the rising or the setting of the sun. Japanese business seems not to be very much prompter. Time in Japan is estimated at its Eastern value. We are told, too, that Japanese courtesy con- 170 Ourselves and Other People demns even such a reasonable candor as would permit one in polite conversation to acknowledge that he held an opinion dif- ferent from one his friend had expressed, and that letters are not punctuated in Ja- pan because it would seem to imply igno- rance in the recipient. There can scarce- ly be such an extreme softness of con- duct without some sacrifice of downright honesty. American manners are not nearly as good as they should be, not nearly as good as one may hope they may become, but that Japanning would profit them is not so certain as it looks at first sight, even if it did not involve a much greater amount of self-repression or self-obliteration (doubtless more apparent than actual) than the Amer- ican temperament could endure or has any desire to attain to. The amelioration of our national demeanor must rather be sought in an increased and enlightened self-control joined to a strengthened self- respect. If we ever do become civilized, it will be first at the heart and afterward at the rind. 171 Cousin Anthony and I If we had been imitative enough to learn manners by observation, we might have profited more by what we have seen of the French, but an obstacle to that has Reputed l n g existed in the shape of a vulgar senti- *iraif* h merit about the French people, held main- ly by Englishmen and Americans under the shadow of English thought, which was tersely though somewhat crudely expressed by the man who became dissatisfied with the conduct of a French waiter in a res- taurant and noted the ever-recurring solace he found in the belief that all Frenchmen when they died would go to hell. The author of "French Traits" has been at pains to make it clear that this conception of the destination of the French is prob- ably erroneous, and is based on ignorance of French character. He boldly main- tains that the French are not wicked in all the particulars in which they differ from the English, but in some are merely dif- ferent. Especially, he points out, the Frenchman has the social instinct in a degree that the Anglo-Saxon can neither aspire to nor easily comprehend, and many 172 Ourselves and Other People details of conduct which we attribute to the defects in his character are really due to the exceptional development of his solidarity. Thus, if he is somewhat quer- ulous and unduly prone to vociferation, that is not because he is really more quar- relsome than his Anglo - Saxon neighbor, but that, thanks to his dependence on his fellow, his wrath evaporates in language, whereas British individualism comes to blows. And if his moral sense, and even his moral conduct, digresses from the British ideal, that is due, if not directly to his solidarity, at least to the same causes that have made him the social creature that he is. It is a great comfort to a humane mind of Anglo - Saxon perversions, to find out these peculiarities of the French, and learn to regard their future, whether in this world or the next, with hopefuller an- ticipations. So much relief comes to a benevolent intelligence from a comprehen- sion of the reasons that exist for believing that a great contemporary people are not so wholly abandoned as they seem, that it 173 Cousin Anthony and I naturally occurs to try the same prescrip- tion for the cure of what seem to be anal- ogous cases. And in particular there are the Irish. Some of us Americans and many of our British cousins are worried about the Irish. We Americans especially are liable to forebodings that they are too quar- relsome, or too improvident, or too im- perfectly veracious, or too something else to make up into American citizens of the proper standard. How immensely reas- suring it would be to all of us who want to hold the best opinion that is tenable of our fellow-countrymen, if some one, tak- ing a leaf out of " French Traits," would take the pains to demonstrate that the Irish have got solidarity, too, and that there is nothing really the matter with them, but only something different. To say that the French are all going to the bow-wows, and the Irish are in some re- spects very like them, is one thing. But to say that the French have the eminently precious and respectable quality called sol- idarity in a condition of exalted develop- ment, and the Irish have it also, is quite a Ourselves and Other People different sentiment. As fast as we learn to feel like that about it we are rilled with an increasing eagerness to take the Celt to our bosoms, and enjoy the benefits of solidarity at his expense. If the Irishman had not some qualities that were exceptionally worth investiga- tion, we Americans would not have him so much on our minds. His political im- portance in this country would not be so disproportionate to his numbers and his wealth, unless there were some points in which he had the advantage of the rest of the population. Is it not really his solid- arity, nursed and developed by the same Catholic Church that has helped the same development in France, that enables him to carry the ward, and prove himself The very pulse of the machine, while his Yankee brother, wrapt in his in- dividualism, looks on somewhat jealously, and wonders how it is done ! 175 XII PROFIT AND LOSS PROFIT AND LOSS JUR vigilant newspapers keep close track of the great sales of pictures and bric-a-brac which occur from time to time in Europe, and give daily reports of the more important articles bought, and the prices paid for them. It might seem as if such reports were of inter- est only to collectors, and very rich col- lectors at that, for the total sum realized at such sales often runs up into the mil- lions, and the average price of single pieces often approaches a thousand dollars. Nev- ertheless, it is edifying for a philosopher of moderate income to follow them, because of the important testimony they give of the vast number of expensive things that peo- ple who cannot afford to buy them can get along just as comfortably without. The caMdowith- assurance that millions of dollars can easily ""*' 179 Cousin Antbony and I be spent for things, no one of which is in- dispensable, or even highly important, to human happiness, is always fit to make the citizen Avhose circumstances are merely moderate less restless in the circumscribed limits of his earthly lot. To have all the Spit- zer treasures sold, and not to have bought even one of them, and still to find life re- munerative and satisfactory, is a gainful ex- perience, and one worth some newspaper reading to acquire. An experience of the same sort was pos- sible at the Chicago fair. There one saw thousands of beautiful and costly objects fit to delight the eye and stimulate the imagi- nation. To see all and to buy nothing, and still to come home justified and con- tent, richer for what one's mind could carry away and very little poorer in one's pocket, was a possibility which was within every fair -goer's reach, and which the great majority realized. And it was worth realizing, if only for its use in helping them to recognize the agreeable truth that the material things that are essential to satis- factory existence are comparatively few 180 Profit and Loss and comparatively cheap. The capacity to recognize that, vividly and practically, is an acquirement fairly comparable in value with accumulations in the bank. Moreover, it is a feasible acquirement. It can be taught. There is no certain pos- sibility of making a phenomenal money- getter out of even an exceptionally intelli- gent boy, but it is fairly within the province of education so to train a lad that he can get more pleasure and far more profit out of a little 'money than another of inferior training can out of much. To be "passing rich on fifty pounds a year " is an accom- plishment not readily attainable in the present state of money values ; but to be richer on five thousand dollars a year than another man is on fifty thousand may not be as easy as lying, but it is easy enough. The necessaries of life are food, shelter, and raiment; the more important luxuries are cleanliness, books, society, good clothes, and a reasonable amount of leisure. In order to live his best, man wants time to think and plenty to think about. A mod- erate amount of travel is a luxury that en- 181 Cousin Anthony and I livens the intellectual processes and is favorable to health. All the necessaries are easily procurable in these days, and none of the reasonable luxuries are very dear. The things that cost much money are chiefly those that delight the eye, and gratify not so much by use as by mere pos- session. One does not have to own rich things to enjoy them. The very best of them are in public collections, and abun- dance of others, in private hands, are not hard to get a sight of. It is more or less the same with that other grade of superflu- ities to which belong horses and yachts, truffles, pate de foie gras, terrapin, canvas- back ducks, champagne, English grooms, valets, and everything that contributes to make idleness palatable. There is un- doubtedly some fun to be had with these objects, which do possess a certain sort of intrinsic value ; but it is true of some of them, as it is of vases and pictures, that you can get the usufruct of them without owning them, since if a man drives two grooms and four horses it costs you nothing to see him go by. For the rest it may be 182 Profit and Loss said that there is just as much enjoyment of a different sort to be had without these things, and whether the cheaper or the more expensive pleasures are really prefer- able is simply a matter of education and taste. Consideration of the ease with which the five- thousand -a-year man can go without every one of the luxuries for which his neighbor, who has fifty thousand a year, spends four-fifths of his income, is fit to give the reflecting observer some useful ideas. The life of a family on two hundred dollars a year is immensely superior to ex- istence on one hundred. Life on five hun- dred is a vast improvement on life on two hundred. Life on a thousand a year is much easier and more satisfactory than life on five hundred. Life on five thousand is still simple enough, and offers more oppor- tunities and better ones than life on one thousand, and brings more leisure and seems more desirable on many grounds. But then the consumption of superfluous luxuries has already begun, and possibly the point has already been passed that was coveted by the ancient who desired neither 183 Cousin Anthony and I The cost o/ poverty nor riches. It would be a duller world if no one could spend more than five thousand a year, and far be such a condi- tion from obtaining. Still, having even no more than that, there is no general cer- tainty that increased expenditures will buy the money's worth ; that they will make life more wholesome or more satisfying to the expenders ; that they will promote health or the development of character, or cause love and peace any more to abound. Enough may not be as good as a feast. Indeed, it isn't. But, even if it consists merely of oatmeal and boiled eggs, it may easily be immensely better than a steady diet of feasting. Somewhere between a hundred dollars a year and unlimited means, money ceases to be a means of buy- ing what is good for you and becomes an opportunity, which grows more and more difficult to improve as its size increases, un- til, if worse comes to worst, it may assume the proportions of an impossible task. But, of course, there are always multi- tudes of us who are not only willing to un- 184 Profit and Loss dertake that task, but are constantly on the lookout for chances, the shrewd improve- ment of which may possibly advance us to- ward a position where we may test its haz- ards and drawbacks. Few people hope to get rich by the slow process of earning and saving, but there are multitudes of us whose imaginations are equal to the feat of fore- casting the amplification of our resources by judicious investment. There is a great deal that is queer about investors. They have peculiar characteristics, or, perhaps, it would be nearer right to say that the occu- pation they follow has peculiar character- istics which they illustrate. There have been many good men since Colonel New- come's time who have been bad investors, and many bad men who have been good investors. I suppose there have also been, and are, many good men who are good in- vestors, and whose investments have not involved them in conduct at variance with the rules of ethics that ordinarily govern good conduct. Very astute men they must be, or very lucky, or both. A person who had been invited to invest 185 Cousin Anthony and I a sum of money in a project which prom- ised gratifying returns, was disposed to do so, but bethought him to advise first with an investor of large experience. The in- vestor's advice was adverse, partly because he learned that his inquirer had no money in hand and convenient to lose, and partly because the project did not altogether please him. One of his objections that impressed the inquirer was this. He said: "It is not listed stock, and not easily marketable. If it starts to go wrong, you can't get rid of it. Now, if it were something that you could dump on the market when it began to weaken, you could get back part of your money at least." investors Now, the adviser was a man in whose in- anei their .,..,, morals. tegrity the inquirer had very great confi- dence, for he knew him to be a church- warden, as well as president of a bank. He noted, therefore, as a fit thing to be re- marked, that a man of whom more than ordinary scrupulousness was to be expected, took it as a matter of course that an inves- tor whose investment seemed likely to prove disastrous should get out from under it with 186 Profit and Loss the least possible delay, and try to let the loss fall on someone else. He didn't mind this sentiment in the bank president, but in the church-warden it seemed a misfit, as being contrary to the Golden Rule. Yet he was perfectly aware that it was a senti- ment of all but universal prevalence, and that it was exceedingly unbusinesslike to cavil at it. So he went his way and event- ually took two-thirds of his friend's advice, in that he only invested in the project that he was considering a third of what he orig- inally hoped to put in. It happened just as the bank president said, that when the bottom fell out of the project (which hap- pened cruelly soon) there was no getting rid of that stock at any price. But, so far as that went, the investor averred to himself that he was glad of it, and he really got a good deal of solace out of the feeling that, whatever was the size of his financial mis- conception, at least he was going to pay the whole cost of it himself. It is a very common thing for people to lament that they did not get rid of this or that property before its value depreciated. 187 Cousin Anthony and I Of course, what they are really sorry for is that they could not have contrived to sad- dle their loss on someone else. It is a sign of the imperfection of contemporary benev- olence that good people should have such feelings and should regard them as matters of course. They are humorously unchris- tian. The utmost the average investor- moralist enjoins is that a man shall not ' ' unload ' ' upon his friends. He cannot so much as imagine a scruple about selling out cadescent stocks in open market. It will not be so when the millennium comes. Property will continue then, as now, to fluctuate in value, but the prospect of a depression will no longer strike the owner as a good reason for selling out. His superior moral sense will then, as now, be sometimes profitable to his estate, since property doesn't always depreciate as much as is expected, and often in the end it re- covers more than it lost. But the great advantage from a business point of view of the perfected altruism will be the emanci- pation of the altruist from panic and all its consequences, since the man who is more 1 88 Profit ami Loss ready to accept his loss than to pass it on is not to be scared into a foolish sacrifice by the shadow of it beforehand. What the investor would choose is to put his money into some enterprise which shall cause two blades of grass to grow where one grew before, or several gold dollars to come out of the ground in place of one that goes in. Tradition and experience agree that a man who does that is a benefactor of his fellows and is entitled to enjoy both the profits of his enterprise and the pleasant emotions which are automatically incident to benevolent acts. But the average in- vestor is not unduly exacting, and if he can have his profits, he is usually able to worry along without the consciousness of benevolence. If he cannot have his wish and make two blades of grass grow in place of one, he will be apt to consider, if he happens to possess broad meadows, that the next best scheme for him to promote is a contrivance through which it may come about that three blades of grass shall be needed to do the work of two. There is a vast field for investment in the work of 189 Cousin Anthony and I supplying necessities that already exist, but another very pretty line of business is that which concerns itself with the invention of new necessities and the gratification of their demands. It was in this latter sphere of endeavor that that clever and successful artist, the late Charles Frederick Worth, made a great reputation and a fortune for himself, and contributed more or less directly to the provision of profitable investments for very many others. Worth was pre-eminent The expen- among all his contemporaries as a design- "fashion. ^ er f fashions in women's clothes. In so far as he devised beautiful gowns which adorned and beautified the women who wore them he did well. But the beautifi- cation of women is only a small part of the business of the inventor of fashions. What he relies upon for his pecuniary success is the artful cultivation of the human, and es- pecially the feminine, passion for change. If women were allowed to wear their clothes as long as they were wearable, as men and snakes do, thrift would have a much bet- ter chance to develop and do its work, 190 Profit and Loss than is consistent with the pecuniary in- terests of trade. The condition of servi- tude to which the arbiters of fashion have reduced womankind throughout nearly all of Christendom is a thing that it mortifies the spirit to remark. My Cousin Anthony was speaking of it not long ago. He said he was riding in a street-car one cold night in March with Mrs. Anthony, when he ob- served that her outside garment seemed in- adequately warm. " For the first time it occurred to me," he said, " that I did not remember to have seen my wife in a fur coat since the winter began. But I knew that she had such coats in some variety, so I questioned her about it. Do you believe that she told me that none of her fur coats had either sleeve-room enough to admit the sleeves of her present dresses, or skirts of sufficient length to meet the requirements of the reigning mode ? So she had been com- pelled to put away all of her furs in camphor, to lie until the fashions should come around, and meanwhile she went clad in such an inexpensive and insufficient top-garment as hard times permitted her to provide." 191 Cousin Anthony and I Mrs. Anthony is a very sensible woman who would not discard a warm and hand- some jacket because of any mere whim. The force that constrains her to leave her furs in the attic and go out on a cold day in a cloth coat must be a force of com- pelling quality, and effectual to regulate the behavior of a lamentably large per- centage of the Christian women of the time. If only fashion had died with Worth we might mourn for him with a better -spared- a-better-man resignation ; but his accom- plices have survived him. Fashion will tyrannize over sorrowing households as ab- solutely as ever; shivering matrons will continue to leave their last year's fur coats at home, the march of the modes will go triumphantly forward, and shrewd inven- tors will continue to profit by it even though penury and disease may straggle in its wake. 192 XIII CERTAIN ASSETS OF AGE CERTAIN ASSETS OF AGE RECENT writer, discoursing "On Growing Old," took what seems to be a needlessly disparaging view of that in- evitable process. He quoted Cicero's deliverances on the subject, but quoted them chiefly to scoff at what he af- Some aj- c j , vantages of fected to regard as the Roman essayist s growing faint praise of an indefensible condition. Cicero was thankful to old age because it diminished his appetite for food and drink, and aggravated his eagerness for rational conversation ; but this contemporary pessi- mist declared his belief that there was not an old man of his acquaintance who would not prefer roast fowl and champagne with the appetite and digestion of youth to the chance of conversing at length with the wisest person in the vicinity. Cicero con- 195 Cousin Anthony and I sidered emancipation from physical appe- tites and passions as the best gift of old age, and this critic admitted that advantage, and added to it the felicity of escaping from " a certain tyranny of the intellect " and the privilege of having " no final con- victions." But with all its compensations conceded, the decline of life seemed to him a poor thing, and fit chiefly to bring one to a penitential realization that life is a dis- appointment and vanity, and the mortal coil an integument chiefly blessed in the shuffling. Now it was an amusing circumstance that this discourse should have come out in print sandwiched between some Reminiscences of Emerson, by Dr. Furness, of Philadelphia, and certain recollections of his college days by Dr. Edward Everett Hale. It appeared, from reference to Dr. Furness' s article, that his experience of life covered at that time no fewer years than ninety-one. Dr. Hale's admissions made him out only a little over seventy, which is not old age, to be sure, but constitutes a reasonable maturity. Yet it was impossible to detect in the pa- 196 Certain Assets of Age pers of either of these reverend and ex- perienced gentlemen one venerable and the other mature any hint or sugges- tion that, so far as either of them had gone, he found any serious defect in life. This is not conclusive evidence, of course, but it is suggestive. It is partic- ularly suggestive of one asset of old age which the essayist I have been talking about has omitted to specify. Everyone knows what the tontine system of life in- surance is. A number of people pay equal sums of money into a pool ; the amount is put out at interest and the surviving sub- scriber takes the accumulated sum. Simi- larly, every man of letters gradually comes to be joint owner with other persons of a mass of valuable literary material which cannot be used by any of the joint owners so long as the others survive. But if he outlives the rest it all becomes his, and he can do what he will with it, without fear of hurting anyone's feelings or disclosing any- thing that would work injury to the living or to the memory of the dead. Who is there that writes and is still under fifty who 197 Cousin Anthony and I will not admit that the stories he knows the best, and that are the best worth telling, are those that he cannot tell, because of the score of people still on earth who would strip the disguises from his characters and read as biography what he designed to have pass as fiction ? Which of us does not think he might do a magnum opus if there were no lives in being to hinder ! And another great advantage of getting decently old is the acquisition of the privi- lege of loafing without compunctions. In these days, provided a man has fairly filled his granary during the heat and labor of his day of strength, old age is the time for him to travel, to own a farm, to collect books and china-images, to read many novels and frivolous books, to have a yacht if his ac- cumulations will stand it, and to work just so much as will increase his contentment, and no more. He ought to have income enough to play with, and life enough left to play. If he hasn't, it is not the fault of old age, but of himself ; or possibly it is his misfortune. Certainly old men abound who, having lived wisely and well, lack 198 Certain Assets of Age neither the means nor the disposition to find continued felicity in life. Anyone can recall a dozen such veterans at thought, and it would be easy to mention one or two whom everyone knows about, who in the ripeness of their intellectual and the hale- ness of their physical powers, seem to have more fun in a few minutes than many dull youths with good appetites have in a year. The last years of Dr. Holmes seemed so notable for their felicities as to make them a shining instance of what the closing period of life ought to be. Dr. Holmes was not one of those men of whom one feels that they should have lived to read their own obituaries, so as to have the satisfaction of knowing how greatly they were esteemed. He has been so widely and cordially appreciated for so many decades, Dr. Holmes 1/11 ana Boston. that all the columns of matter the newspa- pers printed about him could scarcely have told him anything he did not know before. Whether poets find a personal pleasure in the appreciation of remote posterity is some- what uncertain ; but there is no doubt that 199 Cousin Anthony and I the clamor of palm smiting palm is one of the most agreeable sounds that can fall upon a poet's living ear. Dr. Holmes was one of the most intelligently applauded poets that ever lived. If his poems of occasion are unmatched in felicity, it is largely because they had the great good fortune to be addressed in almost every instance to audiences of most exceptional ability to detect a hit. Boston has lost the dearest and most loyal of her old friends. Give her credit for what she did for him. She was loyal as well as he. What he had the wit to write and to say she had the dis- cernment to appreciate. If Boston had not been Boston, Holmes could not have been Holmes. A Milton blind and solitary could write " Paradise Lost " and find the rapture of his own imagination a sufficient incentive. An Edwards in a rural village scarcely emerged from the primeval woods could meditate upon the nature and pur- poses of the Creator, and find the nature of his theme sustain his efforts. But a poet who writes to please must have an audience that is worth pleasing. Dr. Holmes was a 200 Certain Assets of Age poet of that sort, and it was one of his greatest felicities that from early youth he never had to seek for fit and friendly hearers. His thoughts never went un- uttered for want of ears that invited their disclosure. He never had a good thought but that there was a good man within reach to share it with. It is a matter of accepted tradition that poets are born, not made ; but not all the born poets are developed. Holmes beyond question was a born poet, but Boston may fairly be said to have raised him. He grew up under her wing. He was educated at her door. His first fame was won by verses first published in a Boston newspaper. He left her for a little while in early manhood, but she hastened to call him back, and pro- vided him with a congenial task that suited his own needs as well as hers and kept him by her ever afterward. It is not surprising that he loved her or that she loved him. They were admirably mated. She made him happy and he made her famous, and incidentally made himself famous at the same time. Her occasions were his oppor- 201 Cousin Anthony and I tunities, and he met them with a continuing flow of felicitous response such as no poet of modern times has rivalled. Wherever Holmes is known Boston is known too. Her debt to him is fit to be compared to Scotland's debt to Walter Scott. If the long walk in her Common and the gilded dome of her State House are landmarks in literature it is because he made them so. No other American city ever had such a laureate ; even Boston herself is not likely to have such another. The material for laureates is scarce nowadays ; the inspira- tions are scarcer still, and Boston is not a family of New Englanders any more. She has outgrown that phase of her existence and is a great American city, too big and rich and overgrown and spread out, and with too miscellaneous a population to in- spire again the sort of affection that old Boston stirred in Dr. Holmes. But she is entitled to the comfort of remembering that she recognized the laureate she did have, and that if his constancy never wavered, neither did her appreciation ever wane. 202 XIV THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH THE AFTER-DINNER SPEECH CONTEMPORARY who dis- courses from day to day with zest, and often with wisdom, on all topics under the sun, said something the other day about the after-dinner speech. He pointed out how it must not be wholly facetious, nor frivolous, nor silly, nor too long-wind- ed, nor highly exciting, nor over-heavy, nor ultra-argumentative, nor entirely statis- tical, nor in the least rancorous, but that it may contain some essential thoughts, some strokes of humor, some scraps of knowl- edge, some bits of fancy, some sound rea- sons, some good whims, some green dress- ing, and a little fat. He guessed that as many as five thousand after-dinner speeches had been made in New York during the season then closed, and recorded that one 205 Cousin Anthony and I man had made ten in a single week and three in one evening. He said he had heard a few tip-top after-dinner speeches, but they must have been a few out of many, for he spoke of hearing a considerable vari- ety of others that for stated reasons were not tip-top. He remarked that a good many men had won renown by making clever after-dinner speeches, and mentioned four distinguished New Yorkers among whom the palm for after-dinner discourse was thought to lie. There is no doubt that the after-dinner speech has grown to be an institution of serious magnitude. Its requisites are rec- ognized to be such as the contemporary quoted has set forth. There are certain particular things that ought to go into it, and a lot of others that ought to be kept out. To combine the requisite ingredients so as to produce the proper flavor, and to serve the whole with felicity and grace, is a matter of such profound dexterity, and so few people ever attain it, that there seem to be reasonable grounds for the belief that the after-dinner speech, unqualified by a 206 The After-Dinner Speech special purpose, is, for sober-minded and responsible citizens, little better than a trap. Indeed, there be those who hold that as an institution it is a fetish to which our sacrifices are altogether out of propor- tion to the returns. For a dinner with a special purpose some premeditated after- dinner talk is doubtless excusable. If we dine in the interests of politics, it is a legit- imate part of the plan that some one should talk politics to us, and that we should sit under it. If we dine for charity, some one has a right to talk charity ; and so analo- gously if we dine in the interests of educa- tion or trade. But if we merely dine for fun, why should we sit under any one ? It would seem to be a needless disparagement of the inward working of any company of gentlemen, that after they had eaten their food it should be necessary to have persons especially deputized to think their thoughts for them. Why do they eat ? Why do they drink ? Is it merely to fatten them ? Is it not that pleasant emotions shall be stirred inside of them, and that their indi- vidual tongues shall wag and their souls 207 Cousin Anthony and I flow? But whose tongue can wag while Jones or Robinson is standing on his legs making oratory for the company, or whose soul can flow while Smith's psychological expansion is taking up all the space? It is admitted that when there is really something to be said after dinner it is ex- cusable to say it, but there is no lack of evidence that stated oratory, merely and exclusively for the promotion of digestion, is perilous alike to the gentlemen who un- dertake it, and to the object which it is intended to effect. For, as to the speakers, not every ordinary after-dinner talker un- derstands that his function is to say noth- ing, but merely to talk. Some say some- thing because they know no better ; some because they have not the gift of utterance without communication ; some from malice prepense because the devil prompts them ; and some because they are carried away by the allurements of the opportunity. There is a story about a man in Philadelphia, a physician, who got up at a friendly dinner to talk digestively about nothing at all, when unexpectedly, not being enough on 208 The After-Dinner Speech his guard, he let slip an idea. Once it was loose, he could not break away from it. It took possession of him. In a minute or t\vo he was standing on his chair. In a couple of minutes more he was standing on the table, with all the after-dinner sleepers wakened up, and all the company silenced and fixed upon him with their eyes. He made a great speech, the memory of which still survives, but as an after-dinner speech it was a failure, for it stopped digestion short in over forty Philadelphia stomachs, and a dozen worthy gentlemen went to bed that night with dyspepsia. And besides the risk of saying some- thing, there is always the hazard of saying the wrong kind of nothing. That is a peril to which serious-minded men are particu- larly exposed, and is the one to which, a year or two ago, Justice Brewer and Justice Brown, of the United States Supreme Court, fell victims. Justice Brewer, it seems, went to a Yale dinner somewhere during the Christmas holidays, and appreciating, per- haps, the propriety of suiting his discourse to his auditors, he said things, the condem- 209 Cousin Anthony and I nation of which greatly abounded in the newspapers for some time afterward. So with Justice Brown, who was charged with sacrificing to his after - dinner necessities the sacred dignity of the very bench on which he sat, and with making allusions to his brother judges fraught with reprehen- sible gayety. It was not really the fault of these worthy and learned men that they got into such a scrape. The blame belonged to an undiscriminating institution which ex- acts intellectual skirt-dancing from elephan- tine intelligences. Of the personal distress which after-din- ner oratory brings on the unaccustomed after-dinner orator, it is hardly necessary to speak. Most of us know too much about that from personal experience. Between the necessity of saying something and the obligation to say nothing in particular ; be- tween the need of drinking enough to be fluent and the importance of not drinking enough to be incoherent ; between the ob- ligation to be entertaining and the hazard of being indigestible, it is not surprising that broken rest and an uneaten dinner 210 The After-Dinner Speed) should be the raw orator's lot. When he has become thoroughly hardened he doesn't mind. But think of the cost of hardening him ! It is another case of the hatful of spoiled eyes which bought the oculist his experience. For all the sorrowful hours which the contemporary American has spent or may live to spend sitting under after-dinner or- ators who know not what to say nor when to stop, he has himself to blame. The Constitution guarantees him a fair chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness. But ' ' who would be free Themselves must strike the blow." If he insists upon thrusting his neck under the yoke, he must drag the load. If he in- sists upon toughening the natural tender- ness of the budding orator till it is callous to his squirming, he must sit under him to the bitter end. If he begins by sitting courteously under the considerate Smith, if he sits submissively under the judicious Jones, if he sits cheerfully and with mani- 211 Cousin Anthony and I fest approbation under the witty Robinson, he has forged his own gyves, and in due time, victim of an artificial duty, must sit and sit, without remonstrance or revolt, un- der the inexorable Jenkins, who never has anything to say, and never knows when to sit down. Slavery was not only bad for the slave, but demoralizing for the slave- holder. It is so in some degree with after- dinner speaking. It is a serious responsi- bility that each of us takes when he sits consentingly under an after-dinner speaker, since we not only weaken our own powers of resistance, but we help on the abnormal toughening of his. Our safety and his lie in the strength of our resolution to nip him in the bud. We should sit on him, not un- der him. We must crush him while he is still young and tender, that in his age his prolixity may not overwhelm us, nor his ill-advised levity bring reproaches upon himself. 212 XV COUSIN ANTHONY'S AD- DRESS TO THE TRAINED NURSES COUSIN ANTHONY'S AD- DRESS TO THE TRAINED NURSES. you care to read what Cousin Anthony said to the trained nurses ? How he came to be permitted to address them I do not know, nor yet how he ventured to undertake such an office; but he did do it, for a newspaper said so, and reported his deliverance at such length and with such an appearance of accuracy, that I cut the report out. Everybody is interested in trained nurses, and everybody likes them, and there may be some readers who have followed Cousin Anthony's meditations on other subjects, who will care to trace the divagations of his intellectuals under the stimulus of an unusual inspiration. So here is his address as the newspaper gave it : - 215 Cousin Anthony and I " One of the managers* of St. Hippo- crates Hospital, to whom I divulged my intention of speaking to you to - night, tried hard to turn me from that pur- pose, reminding me of what, of course, I knew, that there was no information or in- struction which it was in my power to give, which could be edifying to so accom- plished a band of women as a class of trained nurses about to graduate, or in any way useful to them in their business. But that, while of course it is indisputably obvious, seemed to me to have only this bearing upon the case, that it was a particularly graceful compliment to pay to the class of trained nurses whom I have the honor to address, that a person totally unequipped with technical information should have been permitted to address them. In other years, if I have been rightly informed, it has been the custom to provide such vale- dictory remarks to the graduating nurses as should tend to impress upon their mem- ories the lessons which they had been taught, and perhaps add some valuable new * I suspect it was Mrs. Anthony. 216 Cousin Anthony to Trained Nurses ideas to their professional equipment. But with this class it seems to be different. It is conceded that they have learned the busi- ness of nursing the sick so thoroughly that no useful last words about it are necessary. No one needs to remind them for the last time not to set the baby on the stove while they are heating the milk, not to confuse quinine with morphine, and not to hold the cork between their teeth while they are pouring the medicine out of the bottle. Very little remains to be done here for the members of this class. To felicitate them upon their calling, to convey to them the expression of a sympathetic admiration for their fortitude and their accomplishments that is all, except finally to wish them good luck. ' ' Such last messages as these almost speak themselves. The approval of trained nurses is emphatic, spontaneous, and unan- imous. Eli Whitney I believe it was Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, and society thinks well of him. Watt in- vented the steam locomotive, and Fulton the steamboat, and Morse the telegraph, 217 Cousin Anthony and I and Bell the telephone, and society is grate- ful to them all. Who invented the trained nurse I have never heard, but society's gratitude to that person is intensified by an enthusiasm which none of those other in- ventors could excite. Doctors have their merits, but you know how it is about doc- tors. In the first place there are doctors and doctors, and the conditions of doctor- ing are such that implicit faith in any one of them necessarily implies profound dis- trust of ninety per cent, of the others. There are different schools of doctors, the primary tenet of each of which is that all the doctors of all the other schools are no good and ought to be abolished by law. It is impossible to secure any unanimity of opinion about doctors even among them- selves. A good many people who happen to be enjoying good health go so far as to adopt it as a general principle that it is safest not to have dealings with doctors at all, but to use on occasion such medicines as can be bought ready-made and are rec- ommended in " the columns of some un- biassed and reliable newspaper. Indeed, 218 Cousin Anthony to Trained Nurses there is such diversity of opinion about doctors, that if there is any ground upon which trained nurses would seem to most people to be best entitled to respectful com- miseration, it is because more than half the time they are directly under some doctor's orders, and constrained by the most per- emptory obligations to do exactly what he tells them. It used to be the patient who had to do as the doctor said, but nowa- days it is the trained nurse, and I am not sure that there is any particular service of hers which is more gratefully esteemed than that which she renders in her capaci- ty of buffer between the doctor and his pa- tient. " Yes, the doctor is oftentimes disap- pointing. The community is not quite satisfied with him, and I do not know that it ever will be, for it expects him to know very nearly as much as God, and to exer- cise very much the same sort of unerring omnipotence ; and, after all, that is a good deal to expect of even a carefully educated physician. " But about the trained nurse there is 219 Cousin Anthony and I really no difference of opinion at all. If a family nowadays has something the matter with it, it sends for the doctor, for doctors will do for an ordinary case. But if its difficulties really become serious it sends for a trained nurse, and then if they don't mend, for another, and if the case is des- perate it often gets as many as three; so that it is common practice to measure the dimensions of the pickle which a modern family may happen to be in by the number of trained nurses it takes to get them out of it. " I wish there was anything about nurs- ing I could hope to tell you, that you do not know already, though that, as I have explained, is the particular thing that I was selected not to do. There is one point that is best gathered from the outside, which it is just possible may have escaped you. When you are walking along the street if you happen to notice a glass jar of milk and a tin cup on a second story window- sill of a house, you need not be surprised to learn, if you inquire, that a new citizen has come to live in that street and that that 220 Cousin Anthony to Trained Nurses is the particular house where he is putting up. But inferences based upon such obser- vations as this are not even measurably reliable unless the house looks as if it had one family in it, and a cellar under it ; for if it is an apartment - house or a lodging- house, such an appearance as I have not- ed may signify nothing more than some bachelor's housekeeping. " I think I should neglect an obvious duty if I omitted to improve such an oc- casion as this by making a few deprecat- ive suggestions to you relative to the mat- ter of marriage. Of course a good many of you, most of you, no doubt (for all that you know better), will marry sooner or later, and the choice being limited, will marry a man. Now, it is so well under- stood and so practically recognized in these times that women are the superior beings and know a lot more than men about everything, that for any man to marry any woman has come to be a serious business for him, and one that he under- takes with misgivings and immense trepida- tion. But if it is fit to scare a man out of Cousin Anthony and I all conceit with himself to marry a woman of ordinary accomplishments, just think what it must be to marry a woman with the education of a trained nurse ! You must contrive somehow that your excep- tional knowledge and experience shall give you exceptional forbearance. Of course you have seen the folly of men in general. Your daily experience with doctors alone, both heretofore and in prospect, will have taught you to appreciate the inevitable disparity between what men think they know and what they really do know. You cannot reasonably expect that the particular men whom you may marry will be materially different from the great mass of their brethren. You must consider, therefore, what it will be for them to spend their lives in daily companionship with an intelligence superior to theirs not only by the accident of sex, but by long discipline and cultivation besides. Be very patient with those men. Their doom is enviable in all the important particulars, and their felicity is almost sure to be great, but while I do not counsel you to make really 222 Cousin Anthony to Trained Nurses important concessions to their ignorance, their lot will be all the sunnier if you deal gently with their errors and humor their mistakes. If you make the most of your superiority you may be more instructive, but if you make the least of it they and you both will probably have more fun. " Among tolerably wise and decent peo- ple everywhere I hear one very common complaint. It is that they are too much taken up with their own concerns and do not do enough for other people. The com- plaint is not merely sentimental, but is the expression of their conviction, that they are missing something that they ought to have. Human happiness is geared to such condi- tions that if we are to have any considerable share of it we have got to get it at second hand. We cannot often reach out ourselves and grab a great hunk of it. We have to get it through someone else. We may get ready ever so costly and elaborate an appar- atus, and expect it to make to order for us all the happiness we can use, but the odds are that the machine won't work. There is no royal road to happiness, any more 223 Cousin Anthony and I than there is to learning. The conditions are pretty much alike for all applicants, and each of us must lay in his own store by what means he can. But the nearest thing to a general rule for getting happiness is to help other people. I suppose the reason is that the most important of the things which are at the bottom of happiness is love, and that when we help our fellows we give them, for the time at least, a certain measure of love out of our hearts. I take it to be a great felicity of your vocation that the prac- tice of it is one long exercise of helpfulness, direct, immediate, efficacious. Good works form good characters just as evil deeds form bad. Good works grow on the doer of them, and become habitual just as bad ones do. It seems to me impossible that men or women should do for suffering human creatures what you have learned to do and will do daily, without learning to love hu- manity and without tasting the happiness that springs from such love and forming the sort of character that grows on such food. There is a great charm to me about the hu- man arm, straight, strong, flexible, ridged 224 Cousin Anthony to Trained Nurses with ready muscles and with that wonder- fully shifty contrivance, the human hand, at the end of it. And I think the human arm is never so handsome and so admirable as when it comes between the sufferer and the blow, or reaches down, bare and com- petent, to drag up some downcast creature out of the mire into which he has fallen. The trained nurse is one of the strong arms of our modern society. The very proper- ties of her calling are to sustain the help- less, to draw up the suffering out of their mire of disease. There is no calling more honorable, and there are very few more honored. " The trained nurse is a brick. We are all her friends, all her admirers, all her debtors. All of us, as we see her here to- night, say God bless her and send her every happiness and success. ' ' 225 |N Mr. E. S. Martin's essays [" Windfalls of Observation." I2mo, $1.25] there is hardly anywhere a thought of learning that comes not out of his individual experience. His humor reads like that of a man to whom things happened just as they seem to in his comments ; and sympathy rises as one reads because one feels the memory or the antici- pation of similar things. There is, of course, some exaggeration. Horses are not really such quadru- pedal embodiments of perversity as Mr. Martin would have us believe. But there are moments even in ... . the life of the most de- , voted horseman when New York , . , . . , .. , Tribune ?> e % ht } ake c deh ? ht in the words of a writer who doubtless has a preference for solid ground. "A Poet and Not Ashamed " may be deemed an eccentric essay. Nevertheless, it is a wise as well as a witty study on the outward aspect of a great poet. The individual, the personal equation these are the whole se- cret of Mr. Martin's skill as an essayist. He may be learned, but he does not need to be. He does what has not been done before. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. REft'D URL H967 SEP 13 1967 m L9-Series 444 PLEA C E DO NOT REMOVE THIS BOOK CARD ! i: 5 D University Research Library I 3